The words ‘made for television’ are likely to send a chill through the heart of the dedicated horror fan. After all, for every TV horror gem like Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot or Nigel Kneale’s ground-breaking Quatermass franchise, there’s a wealth of cheap ‘haunted house’ movies and several faithful but entirely toothless Stephen King adaptations. Ironically enough, one of the more noteworthy King-produced mini-series of the 2000s was Kingdom Hospital, an English-language reworking of the 1994 Danish TV series The Kingdom (a.k.a. Riget), which is finally getting a UK DVD release this month. Supervised by writer/director Lars von Trier, The Kingdom was intended to be shown in three separate mini-series, but the third and final instalment was never made. Since several key characters have now died, it seems unlikely the series will ever be completed.

Set in Denmark’s largest hospital, The Kingdom is perhaps best described as the mutated offspring of a hospital-based reality TV show and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, but even that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Shot on multiple hand-held cameras, the footage has been heavily processed until only a grainy, yellow sepia-like tone remains, providing an entirely false note of cinéma vérité. Several central characters are introduced, including Krogshoj, an unambitious junior registrar with a knack for diverting hospital supplies into other avenues; the intolerable Stig Helmer, a megalomaniac Swedish doctor trying to avoid a malpractice suit; the elderly Mrs Drusse, a medium who believes the hospital is being haunted by the ghost of a young girl who died there 80 years before, and many others. Naturally, these characters provide endless material for comedy: Mrs Drusse tries to fake any number of illnesses so she can get re-admitted and continue looking for the ghost, while Stig Helmer ends each episode by standing on the hospital roof, looking across the sea towards Sweden and hurling abuse at the idiotic Danes.

However, it would be a mistake to categorise The Kingdom as a comedy. From the very first scene - an obsolete ambulance briefly appears outside the hospital in the middle of the night, with no driver visible - it is obvious that there is something very wrong here. A pregnant doctor’s unborn baby grows at an incredible rate; a child’s cries can be heard in the elevator shaft; blood begins to run down the walls, and the buildings themselves seem on the verge of collapse. In the hospital kitchen two teenagers with Down syndrome handle the washing up, and also serve as a Greek chorus, keeping the viewer up to date on the various developments. As the series progresses the horrific begins to take centre stage, although there are always humorous elements present. The Kingdom‘s horror might seem tame to viewers of Saw and Hostel, but von Trier manages to establish - and increase - a surprising level of tension and atmosphere, something that suits the work much better than explicit violence and gore. It might not be to everyone’s taste, but The Kingdom is absolutely essential viewing for lovers of horror or fantasy, as well as anyone with a passion for the weird.

Originally broadcast in two seasons of four episodes each, the first season was edited into a single movie for a British VHS release in 1998, but this is the first time that both seasons have been available in this country. Thankfully, the new release includes all the supplementary material found on the Danish box-set, so we have scene-specific commentaries, trailers/TV spots, background details and some of director Lars von Trier’s more memorable commercials.

Jim Harper

The events of Shôhei Imamura’s cruelly entertaining Pigs and Battleships take place during the transitional period for Japanese society when the once-proud nation was still reeling economically and spiritually from defeat in the Second World War while being occupied by the American military due to the renewal of the American-Japan Security Treaty. In the port town of Yokosuka, young couple Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato) and Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) are reaching a crossroads in their relationship; Kinta associates with a low-level yakuza crew, aiming to become a ‘big shot’, while Haruko wants to leave town and encourages Kinta to take a stable, if low-paid, factory position in a neighbouring community. Kinta and Haruko may have different ideas about how to ensure a better future, but both are reacting to their surrounding environment, which is essentially a red light district populated by pimps, prostitutes and petty criminals, with the local economy being propped up by the after-hours activities of the American Navy shipmen stationed there. The mutual and individual choices of the central couple are also informed by their respective familial circumstances, as Kinta has seen his hard-working father struggle to make ends meet, while Haruko’s parents want her to follow in her sister’s footsteps by entering into an arranged marriage with an American soldier. Despite protestations from the down-to-earth Haruko, the naí¯ve Kinta believes that he can become a prominent underworld player if he takes the fall for a hit that he did not commit and help with a scheme to start a pig farm. Imamura surrounds Kinta and Haruko with a motley assortment of acquaintances, most of whom are swindlers on some level, thereby showing a morally polluted cross-section of post-war Japanese society.

In narrative terms, Pigs and Battleships is rather ramshackle, but more rooted in genre than such subsequent Imamura works as The Pornographers (1966) and Profound Desires of the Gods (1968), meaning that this is arguably one of his most accessible films. Still, the director certainly orchestrates a collision of styles, with black comedy, crime drama and social-political critique jostling for tonal supremacy, making Pigs and Battleships a typically ‘messy’ film by modern cinema’s foremost cultural anthropologist. The opening scenes serve to set up Imamura’s social investigation, with his camera initially focusing on the brand new buildings adorned with the American flag that have been constructed on higher ground, before panning across the town, then down to the slum where sailors wander the otherwise empty streets. From this omniscient daytime view of Yokosuka, the director cuts to a street-level excursion around the red light district after the sun has gone down and sailors are sufficiently drunk to open up their wallets for sexual services. Amid the squalor, Imamura skilfully introduces Kinta and Haruko when the former steals the cap of a sailor as a means of leading the American to a back-street brothel, while the latter is seen working as a waitress in the adjoining bar. With the rocky relationship between the young couple and the machinations of the local mobsters providing narrative foundation, Imamura allows his stylistic impulses to run riot: restless tracking shots, ‘Scope photography, and the celebrated use of a spinning camera to capture the violation of Haruko by a trio of sailors are examples of Imamura’s then-emerging virtuosity. Yet, he often returns to the plight of Haruko in order to keep his energetic crime caper on the rails.

Due to her strong-willed individuality, Haruko is the only character for whom Imamura seems to hold out any hope; she is seeking escape not only from the temptations of Westernisation, but also from the trappings of familial traditionalism, eventually resulting in a breakdown in relations with both Kinta and her parents. Haruko is not perfect as she makes errors in judgment and remains loyal to Kinta when she should just cut and run, but Imamura often portrayed women as survivors, and the progressive Haruko is no exception. Everyone else is either corrupted by the lure of easy money, or simply incompetent, hence Imamura’s mockery. Dark humour abounds, especially when a corpse washes up after being dumped at sea and then fed to the pigs, only for the bones and false teeth to turn up in a pork lunch, while the climax - with blazing machine guns and pigs running wild in the streets - is pure farce. Pigs and Battleships caused such controversy on release in 1961 that Imamura was suspended from filmmaking for two years by studio Nikkatsu. He used the time to develop screenplays as contractual conditions prevented him from seeking directorial work elsewhere, and returned from the wilderness with The Insect Woman (1963), a powerful portrayal of rural poverty. However, it is possible that his suspension had less to do with his cynical depiction of American-Japanese relations - Nikkatsu was known for chasing trouble in order to boost box office takings - than it did with angering studio executives by going over budget on the action scenes. A vivid indictment of a nation struggling with a serious identity crisis, Pigs and Battleships is a biting social satire by a truly brilliant filmmaker.

John Berra