directed by Zak Penn
Scotland, USA
94 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----
Everything about this is inherently funny. The fact that the poster art gives none of the real details away and makes it out to look like a cheap direct-to-video monster movie is great, because imagine all the people who watched this with no idea that it was a meta-mockumentary about Werner Herzog. Let me try to suss out how many layers this movie (and it is a fictional movie, so there's the added layer of the film itself on top of everything) has: Werner Herzog is making a documentary about the Loch Ness Monster, but Zak Penn is making a movie about Werner Herzog, while at the same time Zak Penn might be making a movie about himself making a movie about Werner Herzog.
Every single person in this movie seems to believe that they're the star (except maybe for Herzog), so the experience of watching it is basically of a large group of people who absolutely will not compromise their personal creative vision trying to work together to make a movie for wildly differing reasons. People kept walking into this movie that I had no idea were going to be in it because, like I said, this movie is just not advertised for what it is. Jeff Goldblum is there. Do you know how weird it is to see Jeff Goldblum in something you had no idea he'd be in? It's very weird, I can tell you that. But I don't want to make it sound like this is only accessible to fans of Werner Herzog or people who don't typically watch the kinds of movies Incident at Loch Ness was promoted as being like (direct-to-video trash, I mean) because even with only a cursory knowledge of the people involved, this is genuinely funny, like a long X-Files episode but the guest stars are more obscure.
The fact that this was made in 2004 but could easily have been released at any point between the early 2000s and now shows that it holds up well as long as the people in it are still alive. I wouldn't recommend watching it if you're truly looking for a monster movie, because although Nessie does eventually, bafflingly, show up, that's not really the point of the movie. Some part of me does hate to see Herzog made fun of, though, because I feel like a lot of people would criticize the things he says as being "pretentious" which is a word that has a tendency to arrest creativity in its tracks. If you have new ideas about philosophy, if you're trying to do something you personally have a passion for, like explore the meeting point of truth and fiction in peoples' experiences with a large cryptid living in a loch in Scotland, there's always going to be finger-pointers who decide that, because your ideas are so far out of the mainstream, you must be some lofty weirdo trying to flex on everyone with your huge brain. I feel like somewhere along the line we lost the ability to experience things genuinely and instead everything has to be a matter of "oh but is this person really enthusiastic about this idea or do they just want to look smart".
But all in all the ability of everyone involved, including Zak Penn, to make fun of themselves and make themselves look like jerks sometimes is the reason why this movie is good at all. I can't believe it's not more popular. Its whole existence feels like a weird fanfiction.
Monday, April 27, 2020
Friday, April 24, 2020
The Borderlands (2013)
directed by Elliot Goldner
89 minutes
UK
3.5 stars out of 5
----
This is actually a re-watch because I saw it about five years ago and almost immediately forgot everything about it, but I see people recommend it all the time and it made me wonder what I had missed out on.
The thing that kept tripping me up about this movie was that there wasn't much to it thematically- this isn't really a bad thing, but I kept expecting it to delve further into reasoning or backstory or metaphor or something like that, and that never happened. It isn't a movie about religion or demons or anything in particular, honestly. The beginning and end of it is that something horrible and unearthly has taken up residence in a church and we're not really gonna look too much further into it than that. It's a faceless intensity, a forceful violence separated from context; The Borderlands tries as hard to put a solid explanation behind its supernatural events as I'd try to explain why water is wet. The elaboration on the religious themes introduced in the film that I kept waiting for never came. It's all just a backdrop to a series of terrifying events.
Where fairly little effort is put into creating a reason for the haunting, a whole lot of effort is put into making it super creepy. Someday I'm going to do a longer piece about this aspect of found-footage in general, but The Borderlands uses the found-footage trope to create a kind of third presence existing somewhere above the two main characters that's really hard to explain. Possibly this is something I only got a sense of because I watch way too many found-footage movies, but from minute one I felt like I was not only watching the movie, but also watching something else watch the characters in the movie. I don't know exactly what this was, but I know that the physical act of setting up cameras and keeping them on their person at all times created a kind of voyeurism that the characters were unwittingly setting themselves up for, and that voyeurism allowed for a deeply sinister presence to enter the frame even when nothing outwardly supernatural was going on.
It isn't showy or aesthetically pleasing. I would have liked to see a lot more of that beautiful British West Country, but the characters are the ones dictating what we see and they aren't concerned with taking nature walks. What happens in this movie happens with the feeling of a natural disaster, the suffering and pain audible and visible on camera like a senseless unstoppable force. While I was watching this, I got the feeling that it was made by somebody who really, really cared that their movie came out scary, even at the expense of aesthetics or backstory or anything else a typical horror film might have, and it turns out that that feeling was based in fact, because the director, Elliot Goldner, appears to have dedicated his career entirely to making non-fiction paranormal television docuseries and shorts. That explains basically everything about The Borderlands. It's filmed like an episode of Paranormal Witness or something but with even less embellishment. It's funny that this movie vanished so wholly from my memory, too, because the ending is genuinely upsetting.
89 minutes
UK
3.5 stars out of 5
----
This is actually a re-watch because I saw it about five years ago and almost immediately forgot everything about it, but I see people recommend it all the time and it made me wonder what I had missed out on.
The thing that kept tripping me up about this movie was that there wasn't much to it thematically- this isn't really a bad thing, but I kept expecting it to delve further into reasoning or backstory or metaphor or something like that, and that never happened. It isn't a movie about religion or demons or anything in particular, honestly. The beginning and end of it is that something horrible and unearthly has taken up residence in a church and we're not really gonna look too much further into it than that. It's a faceless intensity, a forceful violence separated from context; The Borderlands tries as hard to put a solid explanation behind its supernatural events as I'd try to explain why water is wet. The elaboration on the religious themes introduced in the film that I kept waiting for never came. It's all just a backdrop to a series of terrifying events.
Where fairly little effort is put into creating a reason for the haunting, a whole lot of effort is put into making it super creepy. Someday I'm going to do a longer piece about this aspect of found-footage in general, but The Borderlands uses the found-footage trope to create a kind of third presence existing somewhere above the two main characters that's really hard to explain. Possibly this is something I only got a sense of because I watch way too many found-footage movies, but from minute one I felt like I was not only watching the movie, but also watching something else watch the characters in the movie. I don't know exactly what this was, but I know that the physical act of setting up cameras and keeping them on their person at all times created a kind of voyeurism that the characters were unwittingly setting themselves up for, and that voyeurism allowed for a deeply sinister presence to enter the frame even when nothing outwardly supernatural was going on.
It isn't showy or aesthetically pleasing. I would have liked to see a lot more of that beautiful British West Country, but the characters are the ones dictating what we see and they aren't concerned with taking nature walks. What happens in this movie happens with the feeling of a natural disaster, the suffering and pain audible and visible on camera like a senseless unstoppable force. While I was watching this, I got the feeling that it was made by somebody who really, really cared that their movie came out scary, even at the expense of aesthetics or backstory or anything else a typical horror film might have, and it turns out that that feeling was based in fact, because the director, Elliot Goldner, appears to have dedicated his career entirely to making non-fiction paranormal television docuseries and shorts. That explains basically everything about The Borderlands. It's filmed like an episode of Paranormal Witness or something but with even less embellishment. It's funny that this movie vanished so wholly from my memory, too, because the ending is genuinely upsetting.
Monday, April 20, 2020
Keep an Eye Out (aka Au poste!) (2018)
directed by Quentin Dupieux
Belgium, France
73 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----
This is a difficult movie to talk about, and I'll get to why that is later, but first let's talk about what Keep an Eye Out presents itself to be at first glance. Because like almost all Quentin Dupieux movies, it contains multitudes; nothing about it is straightforward.
The film opens with a man in a red Speedo conducting an orchestra in a park and then almost immediately being detained by the police. This is never revisited. After that, most of the movie takes place in a stuffy room at a police station where a man who found a dead body is being interviewed by the police chief. Midway through the interview, another officer accidentally gets stabbed through the eye and dies, so the suspect hides the body and cleans up, which is successful, for the most part. The majority of the dialogue is just the police chief sort of being lightly but nonsensically condescending to the suspect, who may be the most "realistic" person in the whole film, although even that is a stretch. For a long time the humor is mostly in mundanity- everything is so constructed and fake that somehow every line that's said has this weird air of formality to it, nobody feels relaxed, it's so jarring and unusual that it can't be anything but humorous because otherwise it'd be creepy. Set design has a lot to do with why this is such a good movie- the whole thing feels just slightly off somehow, like the proportions of everything are wrong; I genuinely couldn't tell if the actor playing the suspect was abnormally tall or if they somehow constructed nearly every door in the film to be just a couple of inches too short.
So the thing about Keep an Eye Out is that none of the things I just talked about really have anything to do with each other. The dead body is an afterthought, we never find out who it is or who killed them. The whole deal with the guy accidentally dying and being stuffed in a locker just sort of goes away after a while. Stuff happens and then stops happening and nobody brings it up again. This isn't even the most bizarre Dupieux film- far from it. But like I said, it's hard to talk about because- and I'm directly talking about the ending here, so look away now if you don't want to be spoiled- I'm not really sure how to talk about a movie that acknowledges what's wrong with itself.
At the end of the film, the stage lights go up, the audience is revealed, and everything is shown to have been a play. The only person not in on it is the man being interviewed about finding the body. Everyone bows, all the actors proceed off-stage and go get some food together afterward. One of them pulls up a review of the play (the film itself) on her phone and the review basically talks about the biggest problem I had with the film, which is that the first half is boring. Acknowledging that eliminates my ability to talk about it as a problem, because is it really a problem if the movie does it deliberately? At no point does the suspect understand what's going on and honestly neither do we, the viewers- was it truly a play? Was it some strange dream? Was it an elaborate construction meant to entrap the suspect and force him to confess to a murder he did not commit?
This movie has the exact structure of a dream, to the extent that I'm really impressed Dupieux was able to capture that feeling on film so thoroughly and accurately. It is exactly like in dreams when you're in one place, but the place is also another place at the same time. Events layer and happen simultaneously without contradicting each other. At one point a character is given an oyster and he eats it whole, and it's one of the most jarring moments of the whole film. This isn't as good as Wrong or Wrong Cops but it doesn't lack one bit of that true absurdity that Quentin Dupieux does so casually.
Belgium, France
73 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----
This is a difficult movie to talk about, and I'll get to why that is later, but first let's talk about what Keep an Eye Out presents itself to be at first glance. Because like almost all Quentin Dupieux movies, it contains multitudes; nothing about it is straightforward.
The film opens with a man in a red Speedo conducting an orchestra in a park and then almost immediately being detained by the police. This is never revisited. After that, most of the movie takes place in a stuffy room at a police station where a man who found a dead body is being interviewed by the police chief. Midway through the interview, another officer accidentally gets stabbed through the eye and dies, so the suspect hides the body and cleans up, which is successful, for the most part. The majority of the dialogue is just the police chief sort of being lightly but nonsensically condescending to the suspect, who may be the most "realistic" person in the whole film, although even that is a stretch. For a long time the humor is mostly in mundanity- everything is so constructed and fake that somehow every line that's said has this weird air of formality to it, nobody feels relaxed, it's so jarring and unusual that it can't be anything but humorous because otherwise it'd be creepy. Set design has a lot to do with why this is such a good movie- the whole thing feels just slightly off somehow, like the proportions of everything are wrong; I genuinely couldn't tell if the actor playing the suspect was abnormally tall or if they somehow constructed nearly every door in the film to be just a couple of inches too short.
So the thing about Keep an Eye Out is that none of the things I just talked about really have anything to do with each other. The dead body is an afterthought, we never find out who it is or who killed them. The whole deal with the guy accidentally dying and being stuffed in a locker just sort of goes away after a while. Stuff happens and then stops happening and nobody brings it up again. This isn't even the most bizarre Dupieux film- far from it. But like I said, it's hard to talk about because- and I'm directly talking about the ending here, so look away now if you don't want to be spoiled- I'm not really sure how to talk about a movie that acknowledges what's wrong with itself.
At the end of the film, the stage lights go up, the audience is revealed, and everything is shown to have been a play. The only person not in on it is the man being interviewed about finding the body. Everyone bows, all the actors proceed off-stage and go get some food together afterward. One of them pulls up a review of the play (the film itself) on her phone and the review basically talks about the biggest problem I had with the film, which is that the first half is boring. Acknowledging that eliminates my ability to talk about it as a problem, because is it really a problem if the movie does it deliberately? At no point does the suspect understand what's going on and honestly neither do we, the viewers- was it truly a play? Was it some strange dream? Was it an elaborate construction meant to entrap the suspect and force him to confess to a murder he did not commit?
This movie has the exact structure of a dream, to the extent that I'm really impressed Dupieux was able to capture that feeling on film so thoroughly and accurately. It is exactly like in dreams when you're in one place, but the place is also another place at the same time. Events layer and happen simultaneously without contradicting each other. At one point a character is given an oyster and he eats it whole, and it's one of the most jarring moments of the whole film. This isn't as good as Wrong or Wrong Cops but it doesn't lack one bit of that true absurdity that Quentin Dupieux does so casually.
Friday, April 17, 2020
The Other Lamb (2019)
directed by Małgorzata Szumowska
Belgium/Ireland/USA
97 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----
Well this was a weird thing to watch on Easter. It's been a minute since I've seen anything that isn't a kaiju movie, it was nice to get back into the swing of modern cinema.
There's nothing supernatural in The Other Lamb, but I don't think there's anything scarier than seeing a group of vulnerable women taken advantage of, and that's why it works so well as a horror movie. Without mention of any of the members of the flock's backstory, we still get a distinct sense that this is a mishmash of girls and women from a wide range of circumstances who all shared one thing in common: a lack of confidence, either in themselves or in their surroundings, and a lack of support that led to them being drawn in by a cult leader who promised them acceptance and grace. There's a scene early on in the film of what seems to be a frequent ritual in which the women all stand around the "shepherd" in a circle, confess their deepest feelings to him, and just... become overwhelmed, some of them going into trances, almost all of them screaming and crying for no reason other than that they're allowed to speak in the presence of this man who says he's their savior. It's a really unsettling portrayal of totally imbalanced loyalty to one figurehead with no reciprocation (or at least no healthy reciprocation).
I am kind of uncomfortable with the use of period blood as a representation of womanhood and unfortunately that's a motif that I find often in works meant to be feminist or, at the very least, contain a message about coming-of-age as a woman. Tying the idea of being a woman so inseparably to getting your period does nothing but alienate a lot of women while appeasing other women who can't conceive of a woman who doesn't have a period, or of anybody having a period who isn't a woman. In The Other Lamb this isn't overt, though, so it didn't really bother me too much that the main character getting her first period was such a heavily-used theme. It felt more like the point being pushed was that this girl was so strongly alienated from her body and herself that a break in normalcy- like menstruating for the first time- was enough to totally shatter her worldview. The blood was something she had that the "shepherd" could not have, and that was why it was intolerable to him and made her unclean in his eyes.
The whole movie just teeters on the edge of realism, positioned so that you can imagine the flock from their own viewpoint while also seeing it from an outsider's perspective. The narrative is slightly dreamlike, literally- most of the main character's feelings about her situation are conveyed through dream sequences because she can't speak up to anybody around her. I believe this was shot in Ireland, which was absolutely perfect for creating the sense of almost surreal beauty and brutality intertwined that brought this beyond a simple film about a cult. Rarely cathartic and instead bleak almost to the very end, The Other Lamb is a movie about abuse and repression that doesn't romanticize anything, but still manages to use an aesthetic, rather than direct dialogue and imagery, to convey its tone. Extremely triggering so view with caution.
Belgium/Ireland/USA
97 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----
Well this was a weird thing to watch on Easter. It's been a minute since I've seen anything that isn't a kaiju movie, it was nice to get back into the swing of modern cinema.
There's nothing supernatural in The Other Lamb, but I don't think there's anything scarier than seeing a group of vulnerable women taken advantage of, and that's why it works so well as a horror movie. Without mention of any of the members of the flock's backstory, we still get a distinct sense that this is a mishmash of girls and women from a wide range of circumstances who all shared one thing in common: a lack of confidence, either in themselves or in their surroundings, and a lack of support that led to them being drawn in by a cult leader who promised them acceptance and grace. There's a scene early on in the film of what seems to be a frequent ritual in which the women all stand around the "shepherd" in a circle, confess their deepest feelings to him, and just... become overwhelmed, some of them going into trances, almost all of them screaming and crying for no reason other than that they're allowed to speak in the presence of this man who says he's their savior. It's a really unsettling portrayal of totally imbalanced loyalty to one figurehead with no reciprocation (or at least no healthy reciprocation).
I am kind of uncomfortable with the use of period blood as a representation of womanhood and unfortunately that's a motif that I find often in works meant to be feminist or, at the very least, contain a message about coming-of-age as a woman. Tying the idea of being a woman so inseparably to getting your period does nothing but alienate a lot of women while appeasing other women who can't conceive of a woman who doesn't have a period, or of anybody having a period who isn't a woman. In The Other Lamb this isn't overt, though, so it didn't really bother me too much that the main character getting her first period was such a heavily-used theme. It felt more like the point being pushed was that this girl was so strongly alienated from her body and herself that a break in normalcy- like menstruating for the first time- was enough to totally shatter her worldview. The blood was something she had that the "shepherd" could not have, and that was why it was intolerable to him and made her unclean in his eyes.
The whole movie just teeters on the edge of realism, positioned so that you can imagine the flock from their own viewpoint while also seeing it from an outsider's perspective. The narrative is slightly dreamlike, literally- most of the main character's feelings about her situation are conveyed through dream sequences because she can't speak up to anybody around her. I believe this was shot in Ireland, which was absolutely perfect for creating the sense of almost surreal beauty and brutality intertwined that brought this beyond a simple film about a cult. Rarely cathartic and instead bleak almost to the very end, The Other Lamb is a movie about abuse and repression that doesn't romanticize anything, but still manages to use an aesthetic, rather than direct dialogue and imagery, to convey its tone. Extremely triggering so view with caution.
Monday, April 13, 2020
Daimajin (1966)
directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda
Japan
84 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----
I've been watching Godzilla movies for the past week and a half and I think it's because of that that I expected this to be more on the cheesy side. To my surprise, this feels nothing like a typical kaiju movie at all and is actually more of a period drama. The advertised giant stone statue that comes to life and stomps over some bad guys isn't shown until there's just about fifteen minutes left in the film, but what a payoff!
This is such a well-made movie that it kept me from thinking too hard about the fact that its simple plot was nothing new: the ruler of a village that had been peaceful for a while is overthrown and replaced with a cruel and despotic warlord; forced into exile with two children, he spends ten years living with a priestess in the mountains and plotting his revenge. His small band of outcasts lives in the shadow of a giant stone majin, a god who lives in the mountain. Back in the village we see scenes that are almost comically descriptive of poverty and the rule of a tyrant- the villagers, their hair matted and dirty and their clothes torn, are made to lug by hand a caravan of giant boulders for no visible reason. It's total misery all around. There's no shortage of strife and pain and that's why the payoff is so satisfying when the stone god finally comes to life.
Once I did start thinking about the plot it occurred to me that my complaints about it being unoriginal really don't have any relevance, because I was applying too narrow a framework to this film. Not every movie requires the same amount of character backstory. Sometimes it's enough for something like this to tell a story of exile, oppression, and vengeance taking place over the course of a long and unjust rule, it doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. The characters have no real unique traits because they don't need them- they represent archetypes more than personalities, it's enough that they have their moment of contributing to the plot and move on. I've gotten so used to watching things that try so hard to be unconventional that I forget that great movies are often made with the traits of a stage play rather than a long-running television series.
The special effects are really enjoyable and genuinely great for their time. It feels historically accurate as well and I really liked that the priestess' teeth were even painted black- that was an admirable level of detail. I actually thought the priestess really added a ton to this movie; like I said, I've been watching Godzilla movies for a while now, and one of the things that irks me about that franchise is that (at least in the older ones I've been watching) no women have any real power, so it was refreshing to watch something with a woman character who is powerful, respected, influential, and just generally an extremely solid presence where lesser films may have written her as helpless. The effect when the majin comes to life is one of immense power, too: this is a physical, non-speculative god; this is the god you've prayed to, coming down off his mountain to put down evil by force, still struck through with the stake they tried to kill him with. An angry, destructive god whose presence alone makes humanity feel ashamed for invoking him. There are two sequels to this film all released in 1966 as well, but I don't think I'd watch them unless I knew they held the same weight as this one.
Japan
84 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----
I've been watching Godzilla movies for the past week and a half and I think it's because of that that I expected this to be more on the cheesy side. To my surprise, this feels nothing like a typical kaiju movie at all and is actually more of a period drama. The advertised giant stone statue that comes to life and stomps over some bad guys isn't shown until there's just about fifteen minutes left in the film, but what a payoff!
This is such a well-made movie that it kept me from thinking too hard about the fact that its simple plot was nothing new: the ruler of a village that had been peaceful for a while is overthrown and replaced with a cruel and despotic warlord; forced into exile with two children, he spends ten years living with a priestess in the mountains and plotting his revenge. His small band of outcasts lives in the shadow of a giant stone majin, a god who lives in the mountain. Back in the village we see scenes that are almost comically descriptive of poverty and the rule of a tyrant- the villagers, their hair matted and dirty and their clothes torn, are made to lug by hand a caravan of giant boulders for no visible reason. It's total misery all around. There's no shortage of strife and pain and that's why the payoff is so satisfying when the stone god finally comes to life.
Once I did start thinking about the plot it occurred to me that my complaints about it being unoriginal really don't have any relevance, because I was applying too narrow a framework to this film. Not every movie requires the same amount of character backstory. Sometimes it's enough for something like this to tell a story of exile, oppression, and vengeance taking place over the course of a long and unjust rule, it doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. The characters have no real unique traits because they don't need them- they represent archetypes more than personalities, it's enough that they have their moment of contributing to the plot and move on. I've gotten so used to watching things that try so hard to be unconventional that I forget that great movies are often made with the traits of a stage play rather than a long-running television series.
The special effects are really enjoyable and genuinely great for their time. It feels historically accurate as well and I really liked that the priestess' teeth were even painted black- that was an admirable level of detail. I actually thought the priestess really added a ton to this movie; like I said, I've been watching Godzilla movies for a while now, and one of the things that irks me about that franchise is that (at least in the older ones I've been watching) no women have any real power, so it was refreshing to watch something with a woman character who is powerful, respected, influential, and just generally an extremely solid presence where lesser films may have written her as helpless. The effect when the majin comes to life is one of immense power, too: this is a physical, non-speculative god; this is the god you've prayed to, coming down off his mountain to put down evil by force, still struck through with the stake they tried to kill him with. An angry, destructive god whose presence alone makes humanity feel ashamed for invoking him. There are two sequels to this film all released in 1966 as well, but I don't think I'd watch them unless I knew they held the same weight as this one.
Friday, April 10, 2020
Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)
directed by Jun Fukuda
Japan
87 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----
Ebirah seems to be one of the less popular kaiju who have appeared in the Godzilla franchise because he lacks an interesting or unique design like the others. I suppose just being a giant lobster is less cool than being a three-headed dragon. But he has gravitas all the same during his scenes, and to me there's something a little... unsavory about lobsters. I don't trust any creature that doesn't die of old age and has to be killed by something else. You ever look into those beady little eyes? Lobsters are hiding arcane knowledge, I know this.
But anyway. Ebirah is a fun movie, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense and a lot of the plot progression relies on either coincidences or the characters doing things that no reasonable person would do, but that's par for the course here. The plot begins when a ragtag group of three young men and the somewhat older man whose boat they broke into find themselves washed up on a mysterious island where an evil quasi-military organization has taken groups of somewhat racist-looking "natives" (you've never seen so much fake tan!) into captivity and are using them as slave labor to produce a yellow pigment, harvested from fruit, that will ward off the giant lobster who happens to live in the water around the island. Godzilla takes a long time to show up but eventually he does make an appearance to throw big rocks at Ebirah. People are still wary of him at this point, they're using him as fire to fight fire rather than relying on him as a savior. He's also very sleepy in this one.
Like in Son of Godzilla, a native girl accompanies the guys on their accidental rescue mission of both the missing brother of one of their number and also the rest of the natives. These are the people who live on Infant Island and worship Mothra, and I'm really not fond of the whole manufactured island native aesthetic that's employed here- I know it was different times, but I just find it pretty nervy for several Godzilla films to be based around the idea of a native people being persecuted and shunned by mainland Japanese when that's, like, literally what mainland Japan has been doing to indigenous people of the island chain for a long time.
I don't really understand why this one is looked down upon in comparison to others of the franchise, because it's got a real charm to it and honestly, even though it's very difficult for me to distinguish "actually good" from things I like personally when it comes to Godzilla movies, Ebirah has the feeling of a genuinely good movie. The production value seems fairly high (they must have been proud of this footage, seeing as they recycled it a lot in future movies) and there's a good balance between ridiculousness and believability. Logically I know that the majority of everything in this was a miniature, but when you watch it without pausing to scrutinize every two seconds, your brain kind of puts everything together in a way that makes it feel like you're just watching regular stuff. Also, apparently there's a cigarette butt stuck to the side of Mothra's head in one shot, which I missed, but I wish I hadn't.
Japan
87 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----
Ebirah seems to be one of the less popular kaiju who have appeared in the Godzilla franchise because he lacks an interesting or unique design like the others. I suppose just being a giant lobster is less cool than being a three-headed dragon. But he has gravitas all the same during his scenes, and to me there's something a little... unsavory about lobsters. I don't trust any creature that doesn't die of old age and has to be killed by something else. You ever look into those beady little eyes? Lobsters are hiding arcane knowledge, I know this.
But anyway. Ebirah is a fun movie, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense and a lot of the plot progression relies on either coincidences or the characters doing things that no reasonable person would do, but that's par for the course here. The plot begins when a ragtag group of three young men and the somewhat older man whose boat they broke into find themselves washed up on a mysterious island where an evil quasi-military organization has taken groups of somewhat racist-looking "natives" (you've never seen so much fake tan!) into captivity and are using them as slave labor to produce a yellow pigment, harvested from fruit, that will ward off the giant lobster who happens to live in the water around the island. Godzilla takes a long time to show up but eventually he does make an appearance to throw big rocks at Ebirah. People are still wary of him at this point, they're using him as fire to fight fire rather than relying on him as a savior. He's also very sleepy in this one.
Like in Son of Godzilla, a native girl accompanies the guys on their accidental rescue mission of both the missing brother of one of their number and also the rest of the natives. These are the people who live on Infant Island and worship Mothra, and I'm really not fond of the whole manufactured island native aesthetic that's employed here- I know it was different times, but I just find it pretty nervy for several Godzilla films to be based around the idea of a native people being persecuted and shunned by mainland Japanese when that's, like, literally what mainland Japan has been doing to indigenous people of the island chain for a long time.
I don't really understand why this one is looked down upon in comparison to others of the franchise, because it's got a real charm to it and honestly, even though it's very difficult for me to distinguish "actually good" from things I like personally when it comes to Godzilla movies, Ebirah has the feeling of a genuinely good movie. The production value seems fairly high (they must have been proud of this footage, seeing as they recycled it a lot in future movies) and there's a good balance between ridiculousness and believability. Logically I know that the majority of everything in this was a miniature, but when you watch it without pausing to scrutinize every two seconds, your brain kind of puts everything together in a way that makes it feel like you're just watching regular stuff. Also, apparently there's a cigarette butt stuck to the side of Mothra's head in one shot, which I missed, but I wish I hadn't.
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