December 21 2025, 18:58
Mermaid Legend
Director: Toshiharu Ikeda
Release year: 1984
On the Japanese coast, a newly married couple bicker on their fishing boat. Migiwa dives for shellfish, and Saeki minds the rope to pull her up. One night, Saeki sees a fellow fisherman killed on the water by a passing speedboat, and when he takes Migiwa to investigate, he is harpooned in the chest. Migiwa survives and goes into hiding, but as she begins to understand what’s going on in the village, she is driven to revenge.
Migiwa can hold her breath for several minutes in her foraging on the sea floor and is like a mermaid. Every day she prays to Buddha for luck and guidance. When Saeki is killed, the police try to pin his death on her, and his oldest friend Kaisuke steps in to help, but the best he can do is try to hide her on an island populated only by women. The details of this world are fascinating. The people living in these villages have simple lives, praying to Buddha and trying to stay out of trouble in the economic aftermath of the Second World War.
Migiwa is a spirited heroine, grieving her husband, wrestling with her limited options, and putting herself in harms way to understand why her husband was killed. When it becomes clear it was to do with a corrupt business deal and a contract for a new nuclear power plant, she asks Buddha for guidance one last time. With seemingly supernatural powers, she goes on a murderous rampage at the nuclear plant’s opening ceremony.
The final twenty minutes are the reason I saw this film on Shudder. It’s a choreographed stabbing spree in a variety of constricted spaces. Nobody can hold her or disarm her as she avenges both Saeki’s death and all the suffering she has been put through. The blood sprays red everywhere. It’s cartoonish in places, and while it is amusing to see her slay the businessmen and Yakuza gangsters, there are disturbing echoes of modern day multiple stabbings in shopping centres and cars driven into busy markets. Revenge is in the eye of the beholder.
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