Ted Danson’s review published on Letterboxd:
What. A. Film.
It's all over in it's desperately short 79 minute run time, but what a trip from start to finish!
I loved the premise of rail passengers in the furthest depths of the Japanese countryside, stranded due to a landslide late at night. Their only way out is to take a rickety old bus through the night. Travelling the countryside, across the mountain paths and down to the train station to get back to Tokyo.
However there is a problem, and a pretty big one at that. A gang has just robbed a nearby bank of 20 million Yen and are on the run, hiding out in the mountains.
The bus will need to journey through the night and hope to avoid a confrontation with the gang...
I watched another film by Seijun Suzuki recently called Take Aim At The Police Van. Made a few years after this film, it loosely follows a similar sort of premise. The thing is though, Eight Hours Of Terror was made in 1957!
Think about that for a moment.
1957. Merely a decade and a bit post-WWII and Japan goes and produces a film of this magnitude. While it does lack in the acting department in a couple of areas, it delivers everything else by the bucket load.
There are some political themes at work here as well as some truly terrifying sequences involving a mother and child (it's actually crazy to think in 1957 there are scenes featuring a newborn baby with a gun pointed at it's head) and also an unfortunate incident involving an overly-amorous passenger and a bear trap.
Eight Hours Of Terror is a mish-mash of a lot of things and you sometimes feel like the film doesn't really know what it wants to be. When you distill it down and look at all the components individually, and factor that alongside the time this film was made, it begins to make more sense.
I have professed before that I am a keen fan of the works of Seijun Suzuki and here he excels yet again, even at such an early stage in his career. There is some great use of camera angles, different early matting techniques and some great use of dramatic music at the right moments. You also end up with a slight sense of bonding with the characters as each one is introduced through the film. Some you couldn't care less for, others you feel you want to will them on and hope they get out of the predicament alive.
Eight Hours Of Terror is a resounding success and a film I am really pleased to have viewed.
This one is going on my favourites list for sure.