Battle Heater: Kotatsu [1990]

A Japanese addition to the slender sub-genre of possessed appliance cinema [De Lift, The Refrigerator, The Mangler], this film from director-writer George Ishii features a Kotatsu – a type of electric fire in the form of an occasional table – inhabited by an evil spirit which eats the odd person but mostly manifests its evil by flexing its power around an apartment building and overloading the circuits. The hapless youth [Pappara Kawai] who takes the heater home from the dump and breaks its seal, loosing the evil, is the butt of abuse from all manner of people, especially the obnoxious rock group [Bakufu-Slump] who live next door and punch through his walls. Also mixed up in the mess are an adulterous couple who are laboriously disposing of a murdered husband [whose legless torso sits in a washing-up bowl], an apparently suicidal old couple and a horde of weeping schoolgirls who turn up at the group's big concert by mistake. It relies too much on knockabout violence and shouting, but has a genuinely weird streak – the killers shove the dead husband into the monster's mouth while pretending they're trying to rescue him – and the occasional quieter moment.

First published in this form here.

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