Blood Reign: Curse of the Yoma (1989)

directed by Takashi Anno
Japan
80 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This has nothing to do with BloodRayne. It's an anime set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where a lone warrior searches for the man who was once his companion, but also tried to kill him as well. There are horrible creatures called Yoma wandering around and occasionally some ninjas. That's the best I can do for a synopsis, because this thing is really confusing and I couldn't tell what the plot was doing most of the time. I think this had to have been a manga adaptation because it feels very strongly like it was trying to pack 10 books' worth of plot into 80 minutes.

Since this is so plotless, you're basically watching it for the cool monsters and fun body horror animation. Maybe if you pay closer attention, you could get something more out of it, but I didn't find it to have many redeeming qualities outside of super neat-looking gore and ridiculous fight scenes and creatures, which often come entirely out of left field. At one point a giant flaming horse emerges from the ocean and tramples a girl and I was just like "Okay. Sure." There's a scene where the bad guy rides said horse and then transforms into a pile of brown goop, which then transforms into a werewolf centaur. His upper half is a werewolf and his bottom half is a furry horse. That's one of the best monster designs I've ever seen.

As is often the case with Japanese sci-fi about war and destruction, there are implicit echoes of real life in this: when the main character is able to briefly talk to one of the Yoma, it tells him how the villagers it's preying on are broken, hopeless, lost people who are going nowhere in life, so what's the big tragedy in eating them? That sounds like the rhetoric used often to justify the machinery of war, that casualties taking place in some rundown poverty-stricken village with no electricity or technology are somehow either sad but inevitable, or just not too devastating in the first place.

It was also fun seeing a world reverted to a kind of feudal ruling system, with people wearing clothes and doing things that harken back to "traditional" rural Japanese lifestyles, because the whole Wild West Apocalypse trope is a big thing in American post-apoc movies and it's nice to see another country doing their take on it. I doubt the resources to have actual bands of roving samurai and ninja would exist in a world with this much scarcity, but let's not get into criticizing the realism of a movie with a werewolf centaur.

The characters are all exceptionally bland, even the protagonist and his desire to reunite with his childhood friend even if the friend is well past redeemability, but like I said, it's much easier to watch this for the cool animation style than because you're looking for something with emotional depth. I personally enjoy a lot of this specific kind of anime from the 80s and 90s where the goal was to be as over-the-top as physically possible with your monster designs and not care too much about the story. I don't want to make it out like this has no story, but it's just not the most important thing about it. It's basically a fluff piece with lots of good aesthetics.

Kashchey the Immortal (1944)

directed by Aleksandr Rou
Russia (Soviet Union at the time)
73 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This is pretty much a propaganda film that co-opts the narrative of an old folktale, except it's not even really co-opting so much as it is jamming nationalism into every nook and cranny. It isn't subtle about these nationalistic leanings, featuring many extremely dramatic and overacted songs about the beauty and splendor of Russian land that are often sung while wandering about on horseback or staring wistfully out a window and releasing doves into the air (where did these girls get doves from and why were they keeping them captive, anyway?). If you're more into the folktale side of this story, your enjoyment of this will depend largely on how much propaganda you like in your movies.

This film isn't even that great at retelling the story, or maybe I'm just too fond of the version told in Catherynne M. Valente's "Deathless" and I've been spoiled by a narrative where Maryna Morevna is not a helpless damsel in distress who must be saved from eternal slumber. This film seems to be more of a culture hero story, with very black-and-white notions of good/evil. It's very pretty, the sets are extensive and well-made and the actors certainly sing well, but it's just not the kind of thing that you can watch casually without smirking a little. It's not the factor of Russian pride that's silly here, there's nothing inherently wrong with that at all. It's just that this is all so outdated and whitewashed.

I do love the way they designed Kashchei, though. "Why won't you marry me? Check out this cool sword!" I love the look of him as a petulant old man who seems to have enjoyed power for too long. There's always been something different about him in the original tale, different from other villains who are either riotously inhuman or appear identical to the heroes but with darker coloring. This Kashchei looks like a sort of in-between. He reminds me of some villains from slightly earlier during the silent era. The addition of premium 1940s practical effects gives him a little bit of stop-motion uncanniness that adds to his charm (?).

This movie's age is extremely obvious from practically every aspect of it, especially the scenes in a poorly disguised caricature of a Middle Eastern country with people in various shades of brownface and various sizes of prosthetic nose; depicted as kooky, nonsensical religious zealots who bow a lot and eat rice all the time. I do lament that this wasn't filmed in color considering Russian Fantastika's long-standing reputation of being an absolute visual treat, but as far as black and white goes, things could have been worse. I think its racism is too blatant to make it anything more than a silly curiosity, but it's decent watching if you're curious about it in the first place and are prepared to disregard everything it implies about race.

They Were Eleven (1986)

directed by Satoshi Dezaki, Tseuneo Tominaga
Japan
91 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I was feeling under the weather last night and I wanted to watch something that wouldn't make me think too hard (not that there's no anime that make you think, just that this isn't one), and it had been a long time since I watched any anime, so this was my pick. In a few words it's a fun, whimsical, inconsequential 90 minutes of light sci-fi where you know everything will turn out fine.

The basic set-up is that a group of space cadets discover that, although there should only be ten of them, there is a mysterious eleventh person and no one can figure out who it is. The identity of the eleventh person genuinely evades you all throughout the film, although towards the end a few people confess to it but turn out to not be the real eleventh person, which is weird and is never brought up again. This film is no stranger to the occasional red herring. The plot progression in general is not the greatest, and the film as a whole seems to get distracted often (there's a food fight scene in the middle of everything), but it all ties up neatly at the end.

The animation style is kind of silly and there's a lot of randomly fluctuating proportions, but it's all pretty much par for the course for most anime. The backgrounds are particularly gorgeous even if the human characters aren't my personal favorite style. Since it's set in a kind of Starfleet-like training academy in a future where humanity exists among the stars alongside various alien races, there's some characters who aren't human, so there's some decent variety in character design and some great made-up names, which Japan has always been better at than us.

Surprisingly, there's also a lot of gender stuff in this. One of the characters looks like a stereotypical anime girl but gets really, really angry at anyone who calls them a girl. Later, it's revealed that in their society, everyone is born without sexual characteristics, and socio-cultural factors later in life determine whether they become either a man or a woman through hormone therapy. I found this really interesting- a functioning example of non-human gender roles! But when it came to how the people around this character perceived them, problems arose. Which I found to be very realistic: the character has no trouble understanding their own gender, and the only time there's a problem is when ignorant outsiders try to comprehend them.

This character is of course very poorly handled and ends up becoming a woman at the end even though they literally say they'd rather die than be a woman. I got very sad about this for multiple reasons, mostly the total betrayal of the nonbinary character's values, but also the fact that it shows that when humanity expanded outward to the stars and made peace with other civilizations, they remained so homophobic that marriage cannot happen if both parties are of the same gender, and not even same-gender casual dating is possible. I just feel like science fiction as a genre has no space for that kind of closed-mindedness.

Star Crystal (1986)

directed by Lance Lindsay
USA
93 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This is a good movie to use for an argument about the importance of re-contextualizing movies, because at face value it's a really bad Alien ripoff with truly horrendous acting, but when I take it in a more personal direction and focus on my experience of watching this rather than the way the film is as an object, it gains a new identity. It seems more productive sometimes to focus on how a movie makes the viewer feel, rather than what was objectively wrong with it. We all like Star Wars because of what it means to us, not what it means to George Lucas.

Star Crystal is a small step above cardboard cut-out space consoles and styrofoam planets. A lot of the set design doesn't make practical sense. The tunnels on the spaceship are about four feet tall. The consoles are constantly blinking on and off at regular intervals, which doesn't seem like it could possibly serve any purpose to the operation of the ship other than looking cool. The whole space station actually stops spinning when the power goes out, but they still have gravity all the time. The beeps and boops and miscellaneous electronic sounds the various components around the ship make for no reason are positively delightful; they sound like something that would come from a toy space shuttle or something. I love the cobbled-together, analog feel of everything in this movie. I love the imperfections and obvious silliness. I know I've been over this before, but there's just something inherently comforting about seeing adults pretend to be astronauts in a set like this that's so obviously hand-made. 

I will say though, I spent most of the runtime hoping for more goop and more alien action. The alien spends a lot of time incubating, just pulsating, molting, and making weird baby noises that made me uncomfortable. Occasionally looking stuff up in the ship's computer, messing with the controls, or, y'know, killing people. Later on, it becomes more of a major character- but this is all later, once a lot of boring, alien-less time has elapsed. But this guy (who is apparently called "Gar") is a real character once he does come into play. In a few lines of dialogue he goes from a killing machine to a docile, helpful, even playful companion the size and shape of a medium-sized dog. His redemption arc is very easy to make fun of, because he kills like three or four people and then the last remaining members of the crew forgive him because he knew not what he did, but when you get right down to it, I'm sure us humans would want to be spared despite the unfathomable amount of killing that goes on on a daily basis down here on Earth.

There's also some weird religious undertones. Gar grows a conscience after researching Christianity, which he selects specifically out of a list of multiple other religions (including, uh, "Judisum"?). The ship's computer also seems to have a section that implies humans either live or lived on Antarctica, so there's a couple weird things about that computer. I can't claim this is a good movie in any technical sense but it's a comfort-food movie, a gentle movie, one for those of us who like to indulge in some slimy death scenes but also like to think we have some morals and capacity for forgiveness.

The Thing From Another World (1951)

directed by Christian Nyby
USA
87 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This is the predecessor to the better-known (and generally better, in my opinion) The Thing. Both are based on "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, but the two films have so many dissimilarities that I could see virtually nothing The Thing had in common with its earlier cousin other than a shared ancestor in the book.

I did inevitably end up comparing the two films, although I made an effort to look at The Thing From Another World on its own merits. It's pretty much in line with what I expect from 50s horror/sci-fi: a shambling humanoid monster, little in the way of practical effects, many mentions of dames, many mentions of American ingenuity and heroics, many mentions of Russian secrets, etc. In particular the lack of practical effects was disappointing- this could have been used to build a powerful sense of foreboding by stopping just short of revealing the true and truly terrifying image of the monster, but since the ultimate reveal is that the monster is just a lumbering guy made of vegetables, it seems more like a budget constraint than a stylistic choice.

The most amusing thing about this movie is just how many people are in it. I mean, The Thing had a lot of people too, but they got picked off gradually. I don't think anyone dies in this one. The cast of characters is made up of literally every single person at the research base plus a visiting journalist, and they're all together in almost every scene. I counted fifteen people in just one frame. There's no one-on-one heroism, no tense scenes where one man gets cornered. The characters travel in roving packs and never split up.

I do think that what this lacks in terms of having an alien that looks even half as cool as everything in The Thing, it somewhat makes up for in the alien's backstory. It's been a while since I've seen the later Thing, but I don't recall as much detail about the composition of the lifeform as is established in this. It veers fairly close to typical 50s bad science malarkey, but the idea of a being that is composed of vegetable matter, as opposed to meat and water the way Earth mammals are, is interesting to think about. It's just unfortunate that they took the Star Trek approach of making the alien look like a human. The shapeshifting properties that made The Thing so nerve-wracking are absent from this.

All in all I can't fault this for being a product of its time, it was just a bit dry for my personal tastes. It doesn't seem to want to show the humans in real peril at any point, even though there are fight scenes and the occasional injury. It's a film where you know pretty much from the get-go that the humans will emerge triumphant, and that can be boring. This is good, but I would still recommend John Carpenter's The Thing before this one.

The Cleanse (2016)

directed by Bobby Miller
USA
81 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Like a lot of people, I only know Johnny Galecki from The Big Bang Theory, and I only knew the director of The Cleanse because he made a short film about a guy who gets his bathtub pregnant. That isn't a combination that exactly inspires confidence. But I kept an open mind about this film and fortunately it exceeded my expectations, low as they were.

There's a degree of cartoonishness necessary at the beginning to set up The Cleanse, and the majority of events in it wouldn't have happened if the main character had thought things through, but for a movie with "fantasy" as one of its main genres, a lot about this is surprisingly relatable. Personally I felt that Galecki's character's backstory was a little lacking, but I guess in the end it just mattered that he had a backstory, not what it was or how deeply it was explored. But the grasping at straws feeling, the willingness to do anything to remove some perceived impurity of your character, buying into weird "wellness retreats"... I mean, they wouldn't be making money if people didn't do them, right? That's at least one realistic thing about The Cleanse.

This movie really is a wild ride because on the one hand, like I said, it has a lot of heart, but on the other hand, you have to stare down the ridiculousness of the film's little monster dudes while the characters have their heart-to-hearts. It's a constant battle to suspend your disbelief with this one. Do you focus on the two people trying to reach out to each other, or do you focus on the cooing, slimy (adorable) goblin things? And I have to mention that the creature effects in this are genuinely some of the best I've seen in ages- this is the first movie in a long time where I've really been blown away by how far creature effects have come and what can be done to create things that aren't real but that look like living beings. I couldn't tell how much of it was practical and how much was CGI, and sometimes I like that feeling. But just looking at the creatures (most of the time, with a few exceptions) was a trip, especially when they were small- their little fingers! Gosh! They looked like little salamander fingers! I was so in love with these things I may have been overlooking some of the inherent silliness of their presence.

I was ready to give this four stars because excellent body horror combined with a subtle and slightly absurd sense of humor is something I'm generally always down for, but the ending to this was baffling. The big problem is that it seems to be advocating quackery- the retreat is set up as this thing that's kinda goofy, like, who would go to this, they make you drink gross stuff and then you puke a bunch, but the reveal that everything about the cleanse ultimately worked felt... out of character. As did the finale, which seemed like the opposite of everything the film had made us feel about the creatures. It also ends extremely abruptly, although that could have just been my perception because the end credits turned out to be 9 minutes long, so I was expecting the movie to go on longer. But all in all this is a really fun body horror-type film with a decent message about figuring yourself out, if somewhat underdeveloped.

The Witches Cave (1989)

directed by Yuriy Moroz
Czechia/Russia
81 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I initially thought the English title was a mistranslation but nope, it's not a witch's cave, it's a cave inhabited by multiple witches. They're pretty cool witches too, even though they don't get any lines. They turn out to be androids and if any other movie features android witches I have yet to find it (but I want to).

Anyway. This movie is only fun if you don't take it seriously, but unfortunately it may fool you into taking it seriously, because at the beginning it frames itself as a serious ethnographic inquiry into another planet on which humans have mysteriously shown up. The whole premise is that this planet hosts not only humans but also prehistoric flora and fauna from every age of life on Earth, and Earth scientists are interested because the humans have swords and weaponry that exceed their level of technology, so where are they getting them from? I don't want to turn anyone off from watching this because it is great fun, but neither this question nor any others ever get answered properly.

I have to point out also that this movie makes a fundamental mistake in presenting humans living hunter-gatherer lifestyles in tribal societies with little to no technology as "less evolved". The concept of evolution is the backbone of this film- the planet is named "Ev-fur", short for Evolutionary Furor, so this presentation is explicitly what the film intends to do. Framing one society as more or less involved than another is a fatal error.

So after a while the whole ethnography thing goes a bit off the rails as the dominant warlord and his lackeys attempt to wage war on the landing party of Earthlings. The remaining member is forced to go on the run with a charismatic warrior woman who spends the entire movie in very scanty fur "clothing". 

Aside from the whole idea of a tribal society as an earlier stage of human evolution, this also invokes a somewhat uncomfortable "going native" trope when the protagonist exchanges his khaki uniform for (surprise, surprise) a loincloth and goes toe-to-toe with animals and aggressive warriors alongside the natives of the planet. The Earthlings sent to Ev-fur don't seem to be on any mission to colonize it, but that notion that all it takes to become A Native™ is throwing on the local garb and proving your mettle is a pervasive and colonialist one all the same.

The production value in this is really spectacular, the set design is an absolute treat to look at, and the majority of Big Huge Things (spaceships, interiors, large animals, etc) are actually detailed in a way that a lot of Soviet-era sci-fi will skip if the budget is too constraining. Although there aren't many shots of them, the ships are not just hunks of plastic with spray paint on them, they appear to have girding, piping, and intricate detail that makes them look like... well, a large, constructed object that isn't made out of plastic. The pterosaurs and other big animals look a little patchier, but again, the patching is good; I think I like something cobbled together out of a lot of parts better than an awkward dummy that looks like a handpuppet. Also there's a Bigfoot for some reason.

The Cat (1992)

directed by Lam Ngai-Choi
Hong Kong
84 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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While watching this, it's important to remember that it was directed by the same guy who directed Riki-oh: Story of Ricky. The fact that I can say with confidence that The Cat- a movie about a girl and a cat from outer space fighting evil slime beings- is a thousand times more down-to-earth than Riki-oh really says something about Riki-oh. But on to the review of the film at hand.

It's... it's something. The English subtitles on the version I was watching were not good enough for me to get an idea of the script's quality, and everything about it is so over-the-top that "good acting" is not a measure that can be applied to it, so that doesn't leave me with much to criticize. So instead I want to talk about slime. This movie does for slime what Gone With the Wind did for color cinema. Actually, that might be a misrepresentation, because Gone With the Wind innovated color cinema and brought it to the masses while The Cat does wonderful, incredible things with slime yet languishes in relative obscurity because not enough people in the U.S. bother with old movies from Hong Kong. But if you are a slime fan, like myself, I encourage you to seek this out, because to my knowledge you can't find an alien cat battling building-consuming towers of slime and ick and eck and ooze anywhere else in cinema.

This movie also refuses to submit to the dog/cat divide, which I appreciated. Before some of the human characters realize the aliens are on their side, they employ a large and very intimidating dog named Lao Pu to assassinate the cat, and what follows is perhaps the best (and only) dog vs. cat junkyard fight/chase scene ever put to film. It ends with the cat (who is named "the General", by the way) getting its tail ripped off and Lao Pu being electrocuted, but both make a swift recovery and Lao Pu is never seen again, presumably because him and the General made up for having been forced by clueless humans to fight needlessly and he went back to live with his other dog friends.

I think there was also some cultural subtext to this that I may have missed. The year 1997 was brought up more than once, and I had no idea what the significance of that year was, so I looked it up and apparently 1997 was the year Hong Kong was transferred to China from the British. So there was clearly some anxiety regarding that upcoming event and it's reflected even in silly genre movies like this one. With its themes of helpful and hostile Others, invading forces, and travel to other worlds, it's not unlikely that at least some of the weird ideas it presents had roots in real-life thoughts and feelings.

Despite the atrocious video quality of the version I saw, the cityscape of Hong Kong is strangely beautiful in this weird little gem. We don't see much of it because a lot of the film consists of action scenes inside buildings, so there's not much traveling around to different locales. But occasionally the wider world can pop up in the background as a flush of giant buildings surrounded by greenery, or architecture that fits the landscape like it grew there organically. Whether you watch it for the plot or for the amazing practical effects, this is a movie that I urge people to put aside their notions of "genuinely good" vs. "so bad it's good" for and just enjoy.