Please read my essay.

Or don't, it's up to you. But I'd like it if you read at least some of it.

Here.

Hosts (2020)

directed by Richard Oakes, Adam Leader

UK

89 minutes

4 stars out of 5

____

Note: This is an old review that I've dug up from my archives and reworked for quality. I do not have my shit together enough to do a new review again this week.

When winter rolls around and I turn my eyes towards the crop of new holiday horror movies, I do not expect them to be good; if I can get a laugh out of them, that's great, but more likely they're just more slop on the pile and that's that. This is where I was coming from when I started to watch Hosts, and I got completely blindsided by a movie that was genuinely disturbing: a gut-punch in various ways. If this was not set at Christmastime, I would still have thought it was a brilliant movie, but Christmas provides some context for the events of the film that is important in two ways, one of which I'll get into now and one I'll talk about later.

So one of the many things this film is good at is creating characters who you really don't want to see die (and then killing them, of course). It is extremely heavy on the familial love, and some romantic love as well, and if you're particularly jaded about that it could feel cloying, but to me the performances were authentic enough that it didn't bother me how hard the film emphasizes the bonds between its characters. We don't spend a lot of time with the couple who eventually become the antagonists, but they come off like a young couple genuinely in love and then something happens very suddenly that I won't spoil, but that made me realize I was in for something better than the cut-rate holiday slasher with some possibly demonic twists that I expected. If you've seen this, I think you know what scene I'm talking about. I did not expect the possession to look like that. I've never seen possession look like that.

Another interesting thing this movie does is tell us that the things happening here are happening everywhere else too, outside of the scope of the film. Await Further Instructions, a movie I recently rewatched that cemented my opinion on it being one of my favorite horror movies of the past decade, also does this. The hints we see on the news that suggest our characters are only a random couple of victims in something that's turning into a country-wide phenomenon makes everything feel much more hopeless.

There are other elements that are used in the development of the film's villains that make them both interesting and genuinely terrifying, and this is the other thing I mentioned earlier that hinges on this being a Christmas movie. A really common theme in Christmas horror is for the villain or villains to kind of represent an anti-consumerist mindset - maybe it'll be somebody who's traumatized by Santa and fed up with the empty commercialization of the holiday, or maybe it'll be Krampus, who, uprooted from his origins, has become a symbol for those disillusioned with Christianity. But each time, when something like that is used, there's always a sort of wink-nudge to the viewer that we're supposed to, on some metaphorical level, sympathize with the villain - after all, the commercialization of Christmas is bad, and everyone is tired of having Christmas music shoved down our gullets. We're not expected to excuse murder in the name of being tired of Salvation Army bell-ringers, but the sentiment is something we can agree with: aren't you just exhausted by all of this? Aren't you tired of people faking charity and togetherness?

However, what Hosts does is use that basic premise (and this is done extremely artfully, only hinted at, never exposition-dumped on us) to construct a backstory for its villains - but it does not make them sympathetic. The implication that the entities that possess the first couple were/are something that existed pre-Christianity, and that they were duped into thinking there would be a place for them within Christianity, only to be driven out and painted as sacrilegious, is something that, in this case, is not presented as a sympathetic backstory. In this case, it makes them bitter, enraged, and vengeful. It's not funny and ironic when they return, fueled by hatred for the Christian holidays that subsumed their own worship; it's terrifying, because their power is coupled with an intense desire for revenge that's as illogical and self-absorbed as the fae, gods, and various other entities of old always are. And humans always end up at their mercy.

It's a latecomer, but this is definitely high up on my favorites list of the year. I would happily (well, maybe that's not the right word, as it is quite brutal and violent) watch this any time, not just around the holidays. There is something to be said about real-life stigmatization of pagan worship and the way this movie plays into the idea that it's a negative, dangerous thing, but... that's a whole other discussion.

Mickey 17 (2025)

directed by Bong Joon-Ho

USA, UK

137 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

I read Edward Ashton's Mickey7 and its sequel Antimatter Blues not necessarily because I enjoyed his writing style but because the idea was interesting. I personally found his brand of humor to be too similar to what I've heard referred to as "Avengers humor": snarky, snappy one-liners that often feel inappropriately placed and never allow the work to give any weight to its subject. I didn't hate the writing style, but I sure didn't like it. Which is why I think sometimes it's okay if a film adapted from a book bears very little resemblance to its source material.

The main important plot points that are carried over from the book to the movie (if I'm remembering it right, it has been a while since I read Mickey7) were the basic idea of Mickey Barnes as an "expendable", a guy who signed up to have his consciousness uploaded into a brick and downloaded into an artificially-manufactured body reprinted on spec so that people could throw him at every possible dangerous situation and not get their hands dirty; the Niflheim colony, an inhospitable, icy human settlement on a distant planet; and Mickey's much-cooler-than-him girlfriend Nasha. And, of course, the fact that there are, for a time, two Mickeys, which is against some vaguely-defined international law that was enacted because one guy always ruins the fun for the rest of us. Or three guys ruin it. I don't know. That's kind of the point.

Robert Pattinson as Mickey brings something to the character that was entirely absent in the book. There, Mickey was a kind of short, schlubby, insecure dude who overcompensated for his perceived flaws with faked bravado and constant jokes. Pattinson instead plays Mickey as that one coworker you have who always tells you slightly disturbing stories about his personal life without being prompted. He's totally earnest, just trying to get through his life - lives - with a minimum of trouble. When Pattinson is playing both Mickeys, he manages to convey the differences in their personality with nothing but posture: 17 is more round-shouldered and timid, but 18 stands with confidence. They do feel like completely different people, even though they're supposed to be clones.

I was surprised by how much the plot of this movie feels like it's drifting along aimlessly. Maybe it's because I was expecting it to hit all (or most) of the same beats that the book did, but there's a real sense of "Oh, I guess we're focusing on this now?" that left me unable to predict what the movie would choose to make an important plot point and when. Again, it's nothing like the image I had in my head as I read the book, and again, that's good!

One thing I did really appreciate was all the small detail that went into this. It is obviously meant to be a satire on Trump's America, and it excels at that, but it also feels like a world of its own, which is crucial in making it feel like science fiction rather than a parody film. I particularly enjoyed the random guy in the pigeon suit. I don't know if that was a reference to something in real life that I was missing, but I hope it wasn't; I hope the pigeon was intended to be recognizable only to the characters in the film. Too much of it can get weird, but I love those kinds of things, little references to things that everyone acts like they're familiar with while we the viewers aren't in on the joke.

There's not a ton more I can say about this. It's a very satisfying movie. It's cutting and clear about who it's making fun of without being heavy-handed (though as someone who occasionally enjoys their movies with a heavy hand, I was mostly ambivalent about this). Everybody in the cast puts in a stellar performance. For a movie as long as it is, I'm not sure why it occasionally felt rushed - I guess that's just what happens when you condense the dozens-of-hours-long experience of reading a book into a 137-minute-long movie. But it's quite good. And it is one of only three new movies I managed to watch in 2025, so by default it's one of my favorites of the year.

Japan's No. 1 Playboy (1963)

directed by Kengo Furusawa

Japan

93 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

____

Full disclosure: I did proofreading and QC for this movie's English subtitles. I'll be going into full spoilers below.

The Japan's No. 1 [....] series was a vehicle for the inimitable Hitoshi Ueki, one of the main faces of the jazz band/performance troupe Crazy Cats, who themselves had their own long-running series of films. I do prefer films where the Cats work as an ensemble (each of them does have a role in this film, but they're pretty perfunctory; it's Ueki's world, we all just live in it) but you absolutely cannot deny the magnetic energy Ueki has, which is the driving force behind this movie. But there's a little more to it than just that, and that's why I found this one so interesting.

Ueki plays Hitoshi Hikaru (most Crazy Cats-affiliated movies have them playing characters whose names are based off of their own), a music teacher who gets fired for being too funky. Immediately afterwards, he starts a new career path: smarming his way into a door-to-door salesman gig that he uses to shake down wealthy women (and their sugar daddies) and earn himself as much money in commission as possible. As the title implies, the film itself frames Hikaru as a ladies' man, irresistible whether he wants to be or not. But, again, there's more to it than just that.

This movie does something really clever by stringing you along and making you think that Hikaru's ladies'-man act is 100% genuine. When he sings laments about how women just can't stop throwing themselves at him wherever he goes, and bemoans his status as a helplessly attractive guy, we think "yeah, yeah, he's just full of himself". But then in the last five minutes or so we realize that he was actually, literally telling the truth the entire time: he really, really did not want to be such a ladies' man.

At the climax of the film, Hikaru assembles all of his women together in one hotel room and admits to them that he's been lying to them. He has a fiancée who he deeply loves, who developed a brain tumor and had to go to America for treatment. Everything he's been doing up to then has been in service of paying off her medical debt. At no point did he actually intend to be a playboy - he was never doing any of it for his own gain. Like in every other No. 1 movie, Ueki plays Hikaru with a kind of reckless, roll-with-the-punches attitude, so we don't get to see any of what he might have been feeling inside. But the movie places hints about Hikaru's backstory right under our noses without us realizing: throughout the film, we see Hikaru pulling something out of his inner jacket pocket, but we never see what it is until the end of the film, when it's revealed that it's a picture of his fiancée.

I love a movie like this that can trick its viewers into believing one thing is happening when it's actually something else, not by explicitly lying to us, but by laying all of its cards out and making us think we're seeing something that we're not. We have all the puzzle pieces the entire time, we just don't recognize them. Everything is right there: he does not want to be a ladies' man. He just needs money. But we don't believe him, because Ueki is so charming, it's impossible to think there might be anything else there. The very last shot of the film is Hikaru crying alone in his dingy apartment with women literally beating down his door - his fiancée left him and married her surgeon - and it's hilarious, or at least it was to me, but granted I had been working on subtitles for 11 hours straight by then. (Behind-the-scenes: at one point I ate a fruit bar one-handed at my laptop so I didn't have to stop working for breakfast.)

There are some dips in quality along the way with these No. 1/Crazy Cats movies, but ones like this that are not only funny and full of talented comic actors, but also surprisingly layered - those make me want to watch every single one of the rest.

Guinea Pig 4: Devil Doctor Woman (1986)

directed by Hajime Tabe

Japan

48 minutes

4 stars out of 5

____

I have to say I think this might be my favorite Guinea Pig movie I've seen so far. All of them have had their own unique, individual (disgusting) charms, and in terms of impressive practical effects, Devil Doctor Woman isn't the best of them, but it's such a genuinely fun movie that I ended up really loving it.

We're introduced to the film by the "devil doctor" herself, an underground doctor and surgeon who takes care of patients with unusual illnesses. What does "unusual" mean in this context? That's what we find out over the ensuing 45 minutes, after the good doctor is thoroughly coated in blood and has gotten us as ready as we'll ever be for what we're about to see. The film is presented as an assembled series of "kartes" (basically just means "tapes") of individual cases, with the doctor usually stepping in or narrating to explain what's going on - like with He Never Dies, it's not quite found-footage, but it's also not not found-footage.

The "illnesses" in Devil Doctor Woman are things like an entire family stricken with a disease that makes their heads explode if they get upset, a guy with a human-face-shaped growth on his stomach that has a personality of its own, a guy who's slowly turning into a zombie, a guy whose tattoo has begun roaming around his body, etc.; but then there are also things shown on the kartes that aren't really illnesses per se but just records of random things happening. For instance: a human flesh buffet and a very short story about an unidentified internal organ that's just running loose on the streets. The doctor knows what to do in all these cases, although most of the time her "cure" is as unconventional as the illness.

And honestly I love her. The doctor (I do wish she had an actual name) knows her reputation, knows she's operating without a license outside of the purview of dry academic propriety, and embraces it. Yeah, maybe she's kinda killing people sometimes, but most of the time the illness would have been fatal anyway. She's just so unperturbed and has so much know-how no matter the situation; I think I might want to be her when I grow up.

As much fun as the actual movie itself is, watching the entire thing is almost worth it just to get to the end credits, which are a montage of nearly every person who worked on and performed in the movie getting hit in the face with a pie made of fake nails and blood. It's really obvious that everyone involved in this had a good time, and that's reflected in the genuinely funny absurdist humor running through the film. The Guinea Pig series has a reputation for being ultra-gory, but once you actually start watching them you find that a lot of them are seriously funny, too. I wish we could have seen the doctor return for several more V-Cin follow-ups to this, but if we want to see her actor again, at least we can watch, uh, [checks notes] Akira Kurosawa's Ran? That can't be right.

Guzoo: The Thing Forsaken by God (1986)

directed by Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu

Japan

40 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

(This is a review “from the vaults”, so it might not be up to my current quality standards. Forgive me, but I’m too busy to write anything new again this week.)

This movie is a little short to get an entire review, but the myriad of excellent splatter films from Japan that came out in the 80s and 90s deserve recognition despite very few of them ever reaching close to an hour of run time. I don't think anybody is watching these things for the plot, and more often than not, the plot is simply a ticking clock counting down to the tentacle stuff, but in this case the monster's backstory is genuinely interesting, and even quasi-Lovecraftian. If we suppose that in this context there is a God who created all life, imagine a creature that evolved outside of God's purview, that God turned his/her/its/their back from: this is Guzoo, our unholy tentacle monster du jour. And it lives inside a summer house guarded by a mad scientist who keeps it at bay by playing a special song on a flute.

The creature design here is just miles above what I expected. This is the very definition of a typical Lovecraftian shambling monstrosity. It has very few defined parts - no resemblance to an Earth life-form, no discernible eyes or nose or a countable number of limbs, just snapping amorphous jaws at one end of a large, sticky, fleshy-looking body covered in unsettling protrusions and whipping tentacles. The size is perfect: it's not big enough to dwarf the humans, but it's not tiny enough to be silly. It’s just about the size where, if a dog that big came at you, you'd be really terrified. 

There's a specific frame towards the end of the film where two surviving girls are running through the house, trying to escape Guzoo, and for a second we see the girls and then Guzoo peeking through the doorway in the background, and I don't know why, but the way the whole sequence is shot is just beautiful to me- Guzoo feels so present, so there.

This isn't even a direct Lovecraft adaptation and it gets the whole "squirming tentacle monster" thing down in a way that makes said monster feel far more directly threatening than they typically are. For a splatter film, this veers far more towards dread than the gross-out effect most of its contemporaries go for. It doesn't feel like the intent here was just to make us lose our lunch. There's a distinct ominousness to Guzoo. Its appearance isn't just scary because it looks gross. There's something about Guzoo that conveys a sense of it not being right.

Everything just kind of fizzles out at the end, Guzoo turns into a harmless turtle (?) and the remaining girls limp off into the mist.  People got eaten, property was destroyed, wounds were dealt. But we'll never forget Guzoo, and we'll never stop hoping that maybe, just maybe, 39 years later, somebody with practical effects experience and a love of shot-on-video splatter movies will take up the Guzoo torch and bring the world a very belated sequel.

Guinea Pig 3: He Never Dies (1986)

directed by Masayuki Kusumi

Japan

40 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

Trigger warning for suicide and self-harm.

After watching Frankenstein's Love, I was in the mood for more V-Cin. I didn't mean it this way, but this installment of the Guinea Pig series actually has a tenuous connection to Frankenstein's Love in that the main character is unable to die, much like Frankenstein's monster. I don't really know where I'm going with that, I just thought I'd bring it up.

He Never Dies follows Hideshi, a disaffected salaryman who, unhappy in his job and with no real purpose in life, wants to die. He cuts his wrist with seemingly no real thought behind it - it's just another thing he does aimlessly, listlessly, nothing better to do. But the bleeding and pain both stop very quickly, and Hideshi realizes that something is wrong with his body: no matter what kind of injury he inflicts on himself, he never dies. He doesn't heal - the stuff he does to himself "takes", and whatever damage he does is permanent, but it never brings him any closer to dying. We see Hideshi experiment with how far he can take this before he has the idea to invite one of his coworkers over and harass him with his newfound immortality.

I should mention at this point that this movie is arguably a comedy. I don't know if "comedy" is really the right word here, but I don't know what else to call a movie where you've got a guy with a plastic ruler sticking out of his head zombie-walking towards another guy who is wearing an Elvis mask and scaring the absolute daylights out of him. There's also something weirdly philosophical about all of this: it's only at the very end of the movie, when Hideshi has whittled himself down to just a head sitting on a table, that he seems like he's getting something out of life and having positive interactions with the people around him. Like he had to go through some kind of violent catharsis before he could realize that he wanted to live.

The main reason to watch this is the incredible gore effects. I think the last Guinea Pig movie I watched was Mermaid in a Manhole, and I distinctly remember thinking, at multiple points during the movie, "How in the world are they doing this?" It could be that the fuzz of 40-year-old film hides some of the rough edges, but to me, there was virtually nothing in He Never Dies that looked visibly fake (up until Hideshi was a disembodied head). The wrist-cutting scenes were uncomfortably realistic. There's a part where Hideshi cuts his stomach open and throws his guts at his coworker until we see his spinal column through his empty torso. It's extremely creative and a credit to the FX team that a "lowbrow" movie like this looks better than even a lot of horror movies shot today.

The only part about this I couldn't figure out was that for some reason it's presented in quasi-Unexplained Mysteries style by a white guy who, with classic "bad paranormal docudrama" panache, introduces the story of the man who couldn't die as one of a number of inexplicable phenomena (that are actually completely explicable). The white guy talks about the story as if it's a videotape that's been found and edited, but the movie itself is shot like a normal, professional film, not found-footage style at all, so it really doesn't make any sense. But then again, not much about this movie does.