Io (2019)

directed by Jonathan Helpert
USA
96 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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Because it looks like this director works more in the fantasy genre than in sci-fi, I chose to view this as a fantasy film. Thinking of it as fantasy helped with some suspension of disbelief since this is sort of an unusual end-of-the-world scenario. It's implied that pollution is essentially to blame for everything, but the change that makes life on Earth untenable is the atmosphere itself rapidly switching composition to something that can't be breathed by any form of life. Space travel is also remarkably more advanced than in real life, leading to interstellar missions for the remnants of humanity able to get aboard a ship.

The main character of the film is Sam, a scientist working alone in one of the last remaining pockets of good air to find a way to re-start life on Earth or adapt to the new conditions. Along comes Micah, eventually, who's of the opposite mindset, and Sam takes very little convincing before she realizes she should leave for the space colony as well. A big complaint that a lot of reviewers seem to have is blandness, which is valid. There's a lot of wandering, a lot of talking, a lot of pretty images with little to nothing behind them- the last of these three things also being one of the ways in which this felt more like a fantasy film. Imagery like the hot air balloon approaching as Sam watches from a distance, little details like the oxygen suits having that red light right over the heart, and many other things seemed to be far more aesthetic choices than practical ones. I enjoyed this looser approach to science fiction, one that depends on our assumptions that it's the future and such things must make sense, but not everybody will. However it has to be said that this movie is very pleasing to the eye, even if not so much for the brain.

One particular choice had me questioning it, though: Sam's long, long, long, long-distance boyfriend on the Io colony is named Elon. A guy who escaped Earth to go colonize another world is named after a real-life key player in the space travel industry. That isn't a coincidence. On the one hand, it might add some element of lore- maybe fictional Elon's parents named him that because in the future Elon Musk is remembered as a "great inventor"*, like the way two parents who are artists might name their child Leonardo (which is kind of cheesy, but I get the sentiment). On the other hand it feels absurdly hero-worshipping.

I also do not get the ending of this at all. There's always a chance that the final shot was a dying hallucination, or a hopeful dream of Micah's, or something else unreal, but if taken at face value... Sam achieved her goal, so why wouldn't Micah just stay with her? But even so, I'm put off by how typical that was, the whole "I'm a woman so it's my duty to repopulate the Earth" mentality. I wish Sam could have been written to be a bit more autonomous instead of feeling like a slightly futuristic mashup of themes that recur every time a man writes a role for a woman.

*I am not fond of Elon Musk.

The Ship of Monsters (1960)

directed by Rogelio A. González
Mexico
81 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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So this is a movie about women from Venus who come to Earth to abduct healthy breeding men and take them back to their planet because they ran out. "How do you 'run out' of men?" you ask. You destroy them in some kind of nuclear catastrophe is how. This movie absolutely echoes the gender roles of its time and has its fair share of exploitative elements, but I was happy to see women have power, for once. Women piloting their own ship, ruling their own planet, doing science on their own, and having roles that ranged from good to evil. 

Notably, at the beginning, when the Earthman does the old song-and-dance routine (literally) of explaining love and marriage to the Venusians, there is no mention of gender whatsoever. I doubt that this was on purpose, but I kept waiting for somebody to say "well, when a man and a woman blah blah blah" and no one ever did. The explanation was simply that marriage was when two people meet and fall in love. I never thought I'd find support for marriage equality in a trashy singing cowboy movie about hot girls from Venus. The singing cowboy doesn't even seem to have a real problem with poly relationships- he just thinks that's kind of something people do in other places. Same with being together but never marrying; it's not necessarily bad, just not something people generally do around his locale.

I kind of fell asleep during the latter half of this film so I don't know exactly where the plot went, but somewhere along the way one of the Venusians turns out to be an evil vampire or something and releases all the other men from other planets that the girls had been keeping in their cargo hold. This was something I really loved: alien men! Sure, mapping the concept of gender onto beings from other planets is ridiculous and I don't advocate for it at all. But I love seeing multiple aliens! One of them was a Martian with a big gross brain, one was a big spider, one was a stereotypical unga bunga dude named Uk, and one was an animate skeleton. Of all of them I wanted to know more about the skeleton the most. He mentions that his race lost their physical form somehow, and I don't know if that simply meant they lost all their flesh (cool concept) or if they lost their bodies entirely and their incorporeal souls inhabited the skeletons of whatever was lying around (way cool concept).

This is what I do, I watch old sci-fi movies where nobody put much thought into the aliens and I put my own thoughts into them. I'll climb over fifty horrible movies about hot alien women to get to one passing mention of an alien who is a disembodied soul who inhabits random skeletons. As for this film itself as a whole, it's not very original and it's not very well-made, but you could do worse.

This Island Earth (1955)

directed by Joseph M. Newman
USA
87 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I've never been a fan of that instantly recognizable '50s American sci-fi look; it's just not an aesthetic that I'm fond of, which is odd considering my deep love for cardboard-and-tin-foil spacecraft. I think it has more to do with the politics and gender roles of the era than the aesthetic, though- '50s-era anything is generally really awful at depicting men and women equally, or at the very least depicting women outside of the household. This Island Earth is notable for including a woman who is a doctor (it's so refreshing to hear people address her and another doctor who's a man as "Dr.s" instead of "Dr. and Ms."), but occasional quips and the eventual positioning of her in situations where men have to rescue her is par for the course. However I still think this is a better than average film. 

For a while at the beginning it focuses mainly on two guys building a strange device as per mysterious instructions and some parts they ordered out of a weird catalogue. A theme throughout this whole thing, up until the last quarter when it's quite obvious the antagonist is an alien, is that it's at least somewhat deniable that aliens are present. The aliens don't go out of their way to say that they're not aliens, but neither do they up and admit to it. Presumably everyone is too polite to comment on the fact that they all have inhumanly gigantic foreheads. But for a while, the vibe is more of a "mysterious secret society" one than an "obvious alien invasion" one, and I liked that subtle difference.

As the film moves on, it gets closer to stereotypical '50s sci-fi, with big goofy bug-monsters menacing women, elaborate painted backdrops, hilariously primitive explosion effects, and so on. The effects really are very good in this, though, and I wanted to make sure I mention that, because somewhere along the line this got tagged as a B-movie when in reality it's just a movie from a time when the best possible special effects were far behind what we're used to.

It's also kind of interesting because it doesn't really have a Message™ at the end. You know, how a lot of mid-20th-century sci-fi was very moralizing, and either had vaguely hidden commentary on the Cold War or on romance or some other end note that could be construed. I didn't come away from This Island Earth feeling like I'd been taught to love my neighbor or anything like that. The aliens conduct their business in such secrecy that there's no chance for the sympathy they may have gotten had they revealed their plight to the public, and this might have been the most major cause of their downfall. So the message at the end is basically "Well, we tried to save ourselves, but we lied and hid stuff along the way and because of that we failed and now we're all dead".

The Ranger (2018)

directed by Jenn Wexler
USA
77 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I held off for a long time on watching this because I guess I had some preconceived notion that it wouldn't take itself seriously. Now I wish I had watched it sooner because it would have been one of my favorites of 2018. As it is I'm considering amending my year-end list to make a late inclusion of this one.

Its subject might be punk rock, but its production value is anything but. This is a sophisticated punk, a punk that does indeed worry about color scheme and cohesive aesthetic. The overall fabric of the film itself is made up of a distinctive palette with recurring motifs throughout, but it also contains characters who are messy-looking, and it makes them fit into the overall aesthetic so well that we barely notice their anti-establishmentarian attempts to clash. Every director does neon these days, but The Ranger takes notes from the best of them and creates something that really does look original as opposed to just trend-following.

In particular, I liked the detail of the pink powder called Echo: unnaturally-colored fictional drugs are really interesting because it's like it cements the bright colors into an element of the plot itself instead of simply having them be a showcase for the plot. I'm specifically thinking here about the fictional, bright-blue substance in the TV show "Legion", but I know there are other instances of this trope.

The reason why this is so good is because it has a central character to hold everything together. The main character is like the babysitter and her presence brings perspective, showing that the situation is serious, even if everyone else is oblivious to it. Everybody here does a great job of acting, but Chloe Levine as Chelsea was the backbone of the film. I remembered her as being the best part of the questionable vampire film The Transfiguration and I knew she was really good. I should probably mention Jeremy Holm being creepy as the Ranger himself, too.

In the end, this movie has a message about trauma that I really didn't expect. Realizing that it was directed by a woman made everything fall into place because I don't think anybody else could make something that understands this deeply the way trauma influences your life. There's an incredibly cathartic scene at the end that made me realize just how much I had gotten invested in this film, and some may view the end as saying that the main character had stooped down to the level of the bad guy, but I think the message is somewhat the opposite: what the Ranger was saying was true, she was a wolf, she did have something of the same spirit as him. But it's up to her, and up to everybody, what they choose to do with that. I think the takeaway was that she was better than he could have ever been because, although her and the Ranger harbored the same energy, hers was never directed outward.

Alien 2: On Earth (1980)

directed by Ciro Ippolito, Biagio Proietti
Italy
92 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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One of the funniest things about 70s/80s Italian horror and sci-fi films is that people would just declare their movie to be the sequel to some other movie that wasn't made by them. These unofficial sequels generally have absolutely nothing to do with the originals. Maybe it's a cash grab, but it also has a feeling of genuine admiration to it, like naming your baby after your favorite film character.

Alien 2, as the title says, doesn't even take place in space. About half of it is super boring, nothing much happens other than the characters wandering around, driving, giving talk-show interviews about spelunking, possibly having psychic visions- you know, your average daily activities. In the background we occasionally hear other characters referencing a mysterious event pertaining to some astronauts who apparently went missing inside their capsule; what this had to do with the main characters, I really didn't know. Presumably the culprit was the same being that eventually menaces the lead cast. One of the girls is psychic and this is just something everybody accepts and talks about as if they're discussing the fact that she can play drums or something. It's more common for giallo films to have a random psychic girl than for them not to.

Being a huge cave fan, the parts that took place underground were infinitely more entertaining to me than the setting of beaches and daytime TV sets previously shown. The cave is where we first encounter the ooey-gooey antagonist of the film, and even though it was probably a mix of budget restrictions and a lack of realistic practical effects that made its appearances so scanty, I really liked the way we never saw it as a whole. All we see is tendrils and tentacles, pulsating lumps of what look like animal lungs, red slime, living rocks, and other goodies. It's like the creature is embedded into the fabric of the cave itself. The largest living organism on Earth is a mushroom colony that spans almost three and a half square miles, a lot of it underground. That's what this reminded me of.

I also enjoyed the ending. Its bleakness and finality reminded me of another giallo, The Beyond. I get the feeling that, again, they made the decisions they did due to a lack of budget, and it does have an air of "oh shoot, I didn't write an ending for this movie, let's just make something up", but whatever the reason, it was good. It leaves you with a lot of questions- did the organism devour everybody in the world? Did it devour the Final Girl, and these are her dying hallucinations? Is she un-devoured and simply hallucinating just because? Did she never leave the cave? Has Ridley Scott ever seen this movie?

Joyû-rei (1996)

directed by Hideo Nakata
Japan
75 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Joyû-rei has some slight thematic similarities to The Ring in that they both involve something supernatural being recorded on film that has the power to curse or otherwise affect those who watch it. This is the reason why I was so excited to see it- I'll watch anything related to lost, cursed, or haunted film.

I can't claim that "Japanese horror" is a single, monolithic genre, but there are certain things about horror films made in Japan that tend to be similar: the physical appearance of the ghosts, for instance, is generally always the same. Joyû-rei keeps some of the trademarks of horror from the region, like the ghost, but for the most part its aesthetic is unconventional. I could believe that this was literally shot during the making of another film, because the plethora of actors are mostly in the background doing whatever it is a film crew does. There's virtually no main character, and the shots of everybody as a group doing their jobs far outnumber shots of single people. Everyone who isn't playing the part of an actor is dressed extremely casually at all times, and it seems like the camera- the actual camera, the one we don't see- is almost an afterthought. 

Stories about haunted films intrigue me because they clash with the invisible barrier that exists when you watch a movie. I'm not talking about the societal, pop-cultural impact of a film here, I'm talking about the events of a fictional narrative. Nothing that happens inside the plot of a film can impact anything outside the film, which is why the idea of things like this or like The Ring is such a scary concept to me- we can all turn on our TVs and see shows where people go ghost hunting, but capturing footage of a "ghost" (regardless of whether you think those shows are authentic or not) that replays in the exact same way every time is different from what's presented in these films. The ghosts that haunt films like The Ring are living, animate things, able to influence the world outside the letterbox. This is where that barrier comes in: a ghost that can transcend the boundaries of fiction and reality says unsettling things about reality itself.

I think that the idea of Joyû-rei might be more disturbing than the actual film itself, however. I truly admired the way it was made and I got absorbed into it fairly quickly, but it also felt like the depths of its implications are never explored to the extent they could have been. But media like this that examines the nature of ghosts is something I always enjoy seeing.

Nightshift (2018)

directed by Stephen Hall
Ireland
81 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This movie was great, but it has a pacing problem in that the actual plot doesn't kick in until there's literally thirty minutes left. I didn't mind this, because I was enjoying it even before it showed what it was made of, but after it ended I just thought "That could have been amazing if they had managed to stretch the important bits out to the entire running time".

So essentially this is about an American girl living in Ireland who takes a job as a night shift receptionist at a hotel with a weird past. The weird past, of course, becomes the weird present, and a little bit of vice versa. That long stretch of time before the interesting parts come in is spent getting to know the main character and her surroundings, as well as setting up quite a few different characters who we meet in further detail later on. I didn't mind spending time seeing generic creepy nighttime hotel stuff while waiting for more exciting creepy nighttime hotel stuff because Nightshift is good about getting the viewer involved with what they're seeing. Because the main character is visibly jumpy and scared, we start to get a little jumpy and scared along with her. I wouldn't say this is too scary a film, but it's the kind where, if it went just a little bit further, it would begin to be one.

The synopsis of this does give away the fact that there's some time-bendy elements that come up in the latter parts of the film, but I'm going to talk about these in more detail from here on, so it's up to you whether reading more than the simple fact that there's a time loop is too big of a spoiler or not. This is, obviously, the hook/gimmick of the whole film- a killer is afoot, but not just a "normal" killer; one who has either managed to create or take advantage of pre-existing conditions where the entire hotel is transformed into a replay of gruesome murders occurring around a decade prior. The identity of the killer is kind of obvious from the start if you've watched any horror movies before, but it's... not as simple as it seems.

The thing that I found most fascinating about this is that, even though we see him kill people and talk about killing people and the whole nine yards... we don't technically know who the killer is. We know whose hands he uses, but we don't know him. Both the killer himself and the people who are involved in the time loop make it clear that he's capable of jumping bodies, but nobody ever talks about who he was before he took his current body. Maybe it's just me, but I find this infinitely more interesting than a simple time-loop subplot: the fact that this guy has been doing this for years, and we don't know who he was originally. A lot of slashers try to imbue their villains with near-supernatural fearsomeness, but I haven't seen many get as close to actually achieving that as Nightshift. This is someone you genuinely feel could win. Could beat out the protagonist and envelop her in the time loop. I was excited and surprised to see a horror movie this new and original. Why in the world are there multiple reviews on Letterboxd declaring it trash?

Whistle And I'll Come To You (2010)

directed by Andy De Emmony
UK
52 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I watched this on a whim, knowing it could never be as scary or have the impact that the original has, and it doesn't, but these are two separate films. They're connected by name and source material only, and should be thought of that way, because they approach the concept of ghosts and haunting in different- although similarly unconventional- ways. I would be lying if I said my surprising affection for this one doesn't feel like cheating on the original, which is one of my favorite pieces of horror media of all time, though.

This film from 2010 sets up a backstory for its main character, whereas the 1968 original gives him no further traits than making us wish he would shut up for one moment. This is because he's played by John Hurt, and it's illegal to give John Hurt a poor role. He's a man deeply troubled by something that happened to his wife, whom he adores, leaving her essentially catatonic, and instead of a whistle on the beach, he finds a ring with that tell-tale inscription. He's haunted in a myriad of ways even before he finds the ring, though; his wife is almost like a ghost in flesh and blood. But she has her own opinion about that, as it turns out. I think one of the subtler horrors of this is the fear that we might be mentally categorizing the ones we love in the wrong ways, that we might be entirely wrong about them.

It's difficult to warm up to this because it so obviously lacks the elements that defined the '68 version- the whistle, of course; the ambiguity of the sheet ghost; the second bed with the mussed sheets; the distorted, pounding noises. But nonetheless, this remake is packed with a foreboding melancholy that feels like any second something incomprehensible could appear. The difference is that, where the '68 version locates its incomprehensible terrors in a dimension so outside our understanding that one glimpse could wreck us utterly, the 2010 one ties them solidly to our experience of love and of loneliness. The terror here comes from somewhere we know too well and are terrified to acknowledge. Loss and longing. "I'm still here". Living ghosts.