Beyond the Rising Moon (1988)

directed by Philip J. Cook
USA
84 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I'm not sure what made me want to watch this, maybe it was the promise of a lady cyborg as its protagonist since I enjoy seeing cyborgs, robots, androids, and other constructed humanoid beings in main roles. This movie has a slightly different overall vibe from a lot of other 80s sci-fi, and I think that's because it takes itself seriously. Somehow it feels much more "grown-up" and level-headed than a lot of other sci-fi of that era, even if it deals with the same subject matter.

The practical effects are charming in how clunky they are. The spaceships look like you order them from the back of a magazine and have to glue them together. But they also genuinely look good in context, even if it's obvious that they're tiny versions of the ships they're supposed to represent, and all in all the aesthetic of this is helped, not harmed, by the unique nature of its effects. 

Another thing that makes this stand out among others of its time and genre that haven't aged as well is that its aesthetic reads today as a kind of unintentional retrofuturism. Even though it's set in the early 2050s, much of the small-scale technology isn't different from what people really had in 1988. I mean, they have tape players and payphones. There is something inherently likable about a movie where humans can be synthetically created, faster-than-light travel is our hottest new discovery, and everyone and their mother seems to own a starship, but if you want to call somebody and you're not at home, you still have to stick money into a payphone.

The things I didn't like about this movie all had to do with the fact that the acting is uniformly terrible. Everyone is stiff as a board, and I don't understand why the whole thing looks like it was dubbed really poorly. Like the actors could have been putting in decent performances at first, but then somebody went and dubbed over all their lines with much worse actors. At one point the main character says "We're all alone in this universe. Once you've established that, nothing hurts." That line is so profound compared to all the other mostly monotonous dialogue that I had to stop a minute and be like "...what?" because it was so out-of-place. It doesn't make much sense considering that the backbone of the plot is several corporations fighting for possession of an alien artifact, so we're not alone in this particular universe, but it sounds good.

This might very well be a case where, because I expected the movie to be bad and it wasn't, I have a higher opinion of it than it deserves. Compared to other things, it's certainly not that great, especially not with all the bad acting hindering it. But I enjoyed it and I thought it was a neatly-constructed, interesting film.

Seoul Station (2016)

directed by Yeon Sang-ho
South Korea
92 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I really enjoyed 2016's emotional, high-energy Train to Busan, but it somehow eluded me that there was an unofficial animated prequel to it made by the same director. The number of animated zombie movies is so small that any well-done addition to that niche is appreciated, especially this, which actually does manage to have some pretty nice zombies considering that all their gore is 2D.

I don't know if this was rotoscoped or what, but something about the animation struck me as a little off, especially the recurring motion blur. I try not to criticize animated films because animation, even ugly animation, takes ages. And really, this isn't so much a criticism as it is me not liking this particular style, so take that or leave it, it's just my opinion. I admire the voice acting very much, though, because a lot of time in this movie is spent on characters having full-out cryfests for one reason or another, and sitting in a recording booth pretending to cry your eyes out seems like it would be difficult to sustain convincingly for a long time.

There's also an enjoyable amount of subtle social critique in this. The source of the zombie virus is never made clear, but as someone in my book club said once, it's not really necessary to give justification for something if it's looked at as a parable. If we consider Seoul Station to be more of a metaphor for classism than a true zombie movie, it becomes less important to have an origin for the zombie plague. Privileged people blame it on the homeless, identifying them and only them as the ones who have "gone crazy", without realizing that there is always an external source causing homeless peoples' problems that the homeless themselves don't have the ability to do anything about.

I think the strongest criticism of government comes in some of the in-fighting amongst ordinary people: One guy stands up and declares that he shouldn't be there, that he's a hard-working man who gives his all to his country so he deserves better, and then a homeless man stands up against him and says that he worked hard too, and still ended up homeless. The machinery of government doesn't care about either of them, it's not going to help out if their circumstances turn against them, it offers no sympathy if you work your whole life away.

I'm not sure what was up with this film's whopper of a downer ending, I guess it served to drive home that the real horror is human beings, but it still kind of struck me as coming out of nowhere and being unnecessary. I guess I shouldn't complain about where the ending chose to go, considering that my favorite thing about this was its social element, but I just... didn't like it.

TerrorVision (1986)

directed by Ted Nicolaou
USA
83 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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So this is a movie that wears its status as trash with pride. Even though some of the subcultures made fun of in TerrorVision might not be relevant anymore, its humor still stands up. I was looking at the dad character and after a while I was like "hold up, is that BEEF?" and it was! It's Beef from Phantom of the Paradise.

It's about a large, slimy alien creature who's accidentally beamed to Earth and is able to manifest physically from a TV screen. It ends up in the home of a typical all-American family with a brand-new satellite dish. We've got the Cyndi Lauper-ish daughter and her boyfriend who's some kind of cross between a surfer bro and a poser metal fan, the grandpa is a paranoid vet who's preparing for the end of the world, and the parents are swingers. Obviously don't watch this if you don't like things that are really silly- which I understand; this kind of humor will read as stupid to a lot of people no matter if I found it to be a good time.

At one point the kids are alone in the house because all the adults have been eaten, but they momentarily forget all of their more pressing problems because they realize that the alien monster is actually a Good Boy. Despite how corny and slimy it is, in my opinion this monster is a genuinely good example of a multifaceted horror creature. Its large stature and permanent grin make it difficult if not impossible for it to be posed into any real facial expressions or outward signs of emotion, but it still manages to have a personality nonetheless. It's basically a household pet for the aliens who created it except sometimes it gets space rabies. And that means it eats everything and anything in sight until the whole planet is destroyed. So when that happens they beam it into the furthest reaches of the galaxy and figure it's not their problem anymore (ah, such a human method of getting rid of trash). But it's cute! I don't know how, but they made this gross alien creature really cute.

Suffice it to say, I love this movie! It's dumb and it's wonderful! There's something uncomfortably realistic about the idea of humans bungling first contact so badly that they not only doom their whole species but kill the alien sent to rescue them in the process.

Cosmic Journey (1936)

directed by Vasili Zhuravlyov
Russia (Soviet Union at the time)
70 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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There seems to be a wide variety of English titles for this movie, and if I want to be as accurate as possible I should probably just call it Космический рейс and skip translations altogether, but because I'm dumb and can't read Cyrillic I'm just going to call it Cosmic Journey from now on. Take a back seat, America, because those enterprising Soviets were going to the moon as early as 1936.

I'm fascinated with movies about going to the moon that were made before anybody had actually gone to the moon in real life. The scientists in this are very reluctant to admit with certainty that going to the moon is possible: they send some small animals up first, but their hearts give out due to the strain, so having an actual human make the trip is a bit of a controversy. There's a prominent scientist character who has to be physically blocked off from interfering with the rocket launch (by a mob of children, no less). But in classic Soviet film fashion, the three cosmonauts demonstrate bravery and courage in the face of both naysayers and possible bodily harm to claim this most lofty of goals for their homeland.

The scenes that take place on the moon are also kind of funny because they show wide valleys, strange cliffs, and other geological features that are totally absent from the real-life moon. It's almost sad to see the fantastical landscape of this imagined moon versus the real moon, which is a giant boring ball of gray dust. Obviously the special effects were limited to what was available at the time, which means that most of the more complicated scenes are made of small figurines shot like they're life-sized. They really did a fine job on all of this, and the stop-motion humans, while still obviously stop-motion, have very fluid gestures and movements. It's delightful to watch, and like any stop-motion work, I like imagining teams of people hard at work posing tiny little landscapes.

Even though it has tinges of propaganda, there's an optimism to this film that made me feel good. I like that its cosmonauts are so casual. There's an attitude that anybody can go to space without any particular special training required- a false outlook, but it would be fun if you could pick any random people out of a crowd to go to the moon. A lot of people would probably find this movie boring because of its outdated ideas about space travel, but even though it drags along sometimes it remains an interesting artifact of the pre-Apollo era. 

Verónica (2017)

directed by Paco Plaza
Spain
105 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This movie has gotten a reputation for supposedly being terrifying, and Netflix claims people have stopped watching it en masse because they were too freaked out to continue, so I had to see what all the fuss was about.

It's not a bad movie at all, but I really don't get how this can be a frightening experience for anybody if it has literally the exact same tropes and cliches in it that every single other ouija/possession-themed movie has. I was honestly surprised at how unoriginal this was, considering its reputation. I guess to somebody who hasn't seen a lot of these types of movies, it might be scary, but if you've seen even one other movie where a teen girl accidentally summons a demon, you know how Verónica is going to play out.

I'm not invoking the idea that a horror movie has to be scary to be good, because this movie is extremely well-made, excellently edited and shot, and the lead actress is very, very good, but... why do it all again? Especially with a 105-minute runtime? If you're going to make a movie that looks this good and is this atmospheric, why not use an idea that's actually original instead of rehashing a possession plot that's predictable from minute one?

Now I feel bad, so let me focus on what I did like about this movie. Which is a lot- in fact I don't think I can say there was anything that I actively disliked about it; it's just not anything new and that was disappointing. But there's a darkness to it that might leave you thinking about the "spirit world" for a while, an automatic assurance that such things as ghosts and demons do exist and are relatively easy to contact, and I love to see that in horror films. I love that the main character's mother seems to instantly know that something otherworldly came into their house as soon as the main character mentions having used a ouija board. Skipping the messy process of getting characters to believe in ghosts always makes for a smoother film and I don't know why all horror films don't have their characters believe in the paranormal from the get-go, unless it's thematically important.

I also enjoyed this film's nostalgic element. I can't personally relate to it because I wasn't born yet at the time it takes place, nor have I ever lived in Spain, but I can tell that it feels like a throwback- there's a lot of ad jingles and TV shows in the background that I think I would have recognized, had I grown up at that time and place. There's definitely "watch value" in this and were you to decide to watch a ouija movie, you'd be much better off watching this than anything else. But ultimately there's not an abundance of difference between this and anything else, other than the fact that it isn't a trash fire.

The Changeover (2017)

directed by Stuart McKenzie & Miranda Harcourt
New Zealand
95 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I didn't know anything about this prior to watching it, but I generally trust movies from New Zealand to be good.

The Changeover is the kind of coming-of-age/urban fantasy story that I normally don't go anywhere near, with a plot centering around a teen girl who discovers she's a witch. It's based on a young adult book and boy does it show. There are a lot of problems in this, most notably the way the characters just know what they need to do and how to do it at the exact moment when it's important for them to know such things. Or if one character doesn't know, another character will mysteriously appear at the right time and be able to tell them. They are also all inherently capable of doing these things right, no matter how much it's emphasized that some of the forces the protagonist and the other witchy people around her are up against are Very Bad and Powerful. For what it's worth, though, the characters being largely impervious to harm lends this all an appropriate tinge of magical realism that I felt was fitting for the subject matter.

But I think I gave this movie a lot more slack than it may have deserved, because even though it isn't the deepest and the challenges it throws at its character are overly simple, something about it feels so authentic that it hit those parts of myself that deeply miss my own childhood. I don't know if this was aimed at an adolescent or pre-adolescent audience or at adults, but it basically captures everything I wished I could grow up to be when I hit the age the protagonist is: powerful and independent with a strong sense of righteousness, able to fight off threats to the people I loved and wield supernatural powers because I was an inherently special person. So much of this expresses that adolescent desire to be special, to have some big important destiny, to be the Chosen One.

I would love to see Erana James in other things because she really nails her lead role in this, and she was responsible for how seriously I was able to take an otherwise kind of silly premise. She has moments where she literally stands up and proclaims "I am a witch" and does the whole "by the powers of light and darkness blah blah blah" spell-casting mumbo-jumbo, and that should be ridiculous but she makes it work. It doesn't come off as silly when she says those things. This is maybe the best and most serious movie about a teen witch I've seen because it balances the external tragedy of the protagonist's material life with the escapism of her life as a secret witch. Also makes me want to go to New Zealand but every movie set in New Zealand does that.

Cold Skin (2017)

directed by Xavier Gens
France/Spain
108 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I wasn't very excited to see this movie, despite recently having finished the book and mostly enjoyed it. But to be honest- and I know this is a very unpopular and almost sacrilegious opinion- the movie might be a little bit better than the book this time.

I know, I was surprised too. Especially since Xavier Gens' last movie The Crucifixion was such a trash fire. But Cold Skin the movie is immersive, with a slight touch of the fantastic yet not too much so that it feels childish, and the characters have depth and feel like people you can humanize rather than the broken, distant people in the book. In another surprising reversal of my expectations, the film is much more gentle, and I appreciated that greatly. In the book, the non-human character gets beat on not only by the "bad guy", Gruner, but also quite a bit by the narrator, who frequently describes in detail how much he hates her, but in the film, the main character is kind to her from the start. I guess the movie takes away a lot of cynicism that pervaded the book, which, depending on how much you liked that element of it, could be a good or bad thing.

The one thing I was very unhappy about in the movie is the fact that the protagonist names Aneris (also known as "the toad" or "the mascot"), whereas in the book, that's HER name that she had before anybody ever came to the island. This may seem comparatively small, but the protagonist naming her like a pet really removes any chance at autonomy that she had. 

I think having the main character in the film be non-violent by nature despite everything he's seen was a good move, because in the book he's honestly not that different from Gruner except that he's clean and he likes to think he's different from Gruner. They both wail on Aneris, and though they might do it for different reasons, motive really doesn't matter when it comes to abusing somebody. This difference in their characters doesn't change the overall cyclical outcome of the story, which I thought was a high point in both book and film, it just means that I could feel something more than disdain for them at every step of their development.

So yeah that wasn't what I expected. It's still not the best film, but it's altogether a much more positive experience than I thought it would be. And like I said, if you enjoyed the pessimism and the darkness of the book, the film will probably seem too sugary and simplified to you. But I personally enjoyed this less nihilistic version of the story.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

directed by Brian De Palma
USA
92 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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As I may have mentioned before, as a rule I just do not watch musicals. They make me uncomfortable and I appreciate how much talent goes into them but even the best ones give me such secondhand embarrassment that I can't handle it. That being said, I've seen a lot of gifs from Phantom of the Paradise around tumblr, and it looked like such a unique and aesthetically interesting film that over time I got too curious about it to pass it up.

I was somewhat surprised when I saw that this was in fact released in the 1970s because it just feels so much like somebody's fever dream of what the 70s were like. It's obvious that it's got a big comedy component to it, but I don't know which parts a 70s audience would have seen as parody and which they would have received as genuinely good music and performing (whereas I see the whole thing as being 100% goofy). But in a way, that weird, almost dreamlike sense of faking its time and place has allowed it to best the "ravages of time", as Swan would say, because there's no way you could ever remake this and have it be a cornier send-up of the 70s than it already is.

There is, somewhere, buried deep under all the corniness, an element of genuine horror in this. I think a lot of it might come from the inherently cruel nature of work under capitalism. If we view the original entity that Swan sells his soul to as a metaphor for him buying into capitalism in order to gain more and more power, then everything after that- the big rip-off of Leach's music, the machine of Death Records finding talent, chewing it up, and spitting it out- becomes a clear analogy for capitalism finding things that give people joy, like music, and commodifying them. Strangling the life out of them. Taking something you've put your hopes, dreams, and heart into and making it into a product that can be sold to the highest bidder.

I wasn't thinking about this interpretation of the film while I was in the middle of watching it, however. I wasn't thinking about much of anything other than that what I was watching was the most bonkers show I'd seen in a very long time. It is a genuine spectacle. It really hits its stride whenever there's a concert scene. The weirdness doesn't just go away when nobody is singing, but scenes like Beef getting electrocuted onstage and Jessica Harper's truly great audition made me feel like this movie was a cut above the rest. If ever there were a movie that had to be seen to be believed... this would certainly be it. Also, nice surprise to hear Rod Serling doing the narration at the beginning.

Sylvio (2017)

directed by Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley
USA
80 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I had been anticipating this for a while because I wanted to see something new from Albert Birney after I liked The Beast Pageant so much. And of course the presence of Kentucker Audley in the co-director's chair doesn't hurt at all. 

Sylvio is a small-town gorilla who finds himself breaking into stardom with a segment on a local television show called "What's The Ape Gonna Break?" that snowballs wildly into a phenomenon with a cult following. But Sylvio himself is not much for fame, he has his own desires and hobbies, but unfortunately those hobbies don't sell in front of a studio audience. So the question is a classic, and one that I also found shades of in The Beast Pageant: which is more important, becoming successful in your career, or going through life doing what you truly want to do, even if it's unprofitable?

This movie was absolutely brilliant aesthetically, which is something I had expected from Birney's side of the picture (I'm not familiar enough with Kentucker Audley to know if he has a trademark "look"), but it's significantly more restrained in its weirdness than Beast Pageant. It uses bright colors and minimalistic design peppered with unusual objects that could have been gleaned from thrift stores to create an environment that looks like the whole world is one continuous very hip interior design project. I think I've talked before about how movies that create a one-time-use fictional town (as opposed to either using a preexisting fictional town or using a real one) with little to no detail make me feel uneasy because of the unreality of them, but this is a situation sort of like that where the unrealistic appearance of the world is a source of fascination rather than alienation. Basically, it looks like a fake world, but it looks like a nice and cool one that I would like to live in.

I didn't expect this to be such an emotional watching experience even though the message about doing what makes you happy and being true to yourself isn't a rare sentiment to encounter. I am at a point in my life where pressure to conspicuously perform roles that society assigns to me is causing me tremendous anxiety and depression. Reminders like Sylvio that my own personal interests are not stupid, are worth pursuing, and should be celebrated no matter if I (or more realistically a CEO with overstuffed pockets) can make a dollar off of them are important to me. I loved this movie. I know it had its start in a Vine account but I don't care. It's very pure and heartfelt, but also goofy and light at the same time.