This cool poster is for the Japanese roman porno flick Bakeneko Toruko furo, aka A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse, a movie you should think of as an off-the-program addition to the website today, as it is not playing at Noir City. Obviously, the poster reveals that this is a ghost cat movie, and the title does too—a bakeneko is a cat that has changed into a yōkai, or supernatural creature. They made plenty of these ghost cat flicks in Japan, including Kaidan nobori ryu, aka Black Cat’s Revenge, which we talked about a while back.
This one stars Naomi Tani, Misa Ohara, Yumiko Tateno, and the luscious Terumi Azuma. Tani is whipped to death, no thanks to her husband, and comes back to haunt her killers as an avenging cat spirit. If you’re a cat person, you might be thinking you’d love this. But the thing about these movies is the cats are basically just thrown into shots from off camera by production assistants, or sometimes suspended from wires, and there’s no doubt their treatment was not very kind. It’s good they have nine lives, because to us it looks like they need all of them to get through these movie shoots.
Below you see two more posters for the same film, alternate versions that are completely different from the one above. All three pieces are visible around the internet, but the red ones have never before been shared at this size or clarity. Watch the movie if you can. You’ll find it interesting, especially the bathhouse elements (hint, hint). Whether you can watch it or not, please be kind to cats—they’re a little evil in normal form anyway, but as bakeneko they’re just plain lethal. Bakeneko Toruko furo premiered in Japan today in 1975.
