Godzilla Against MechaGodzilla (2002)

directed by Masaaki Tezuka

Japan

88 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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As I may have mentioned, I am not a huge fan of Mechagodzilla despite the many films he's appeared in. I'm just not a giant mecha person, and Mechagodzilla usually signals that the main conflict will be humans vs. Godzilla, instead of Godzilla vs. another kaiju. However, this movie made me renege on almost all of my opinions. Maybe I didn't like those things before because I'd just never seen them done this well.

Despite the maximalist turn that the Godzilla franchise was taking in the 2000s, culminating in Ryūhei Kitamura's absurdly garish and chaotic Godzilla: Final Wars, Godzilla Against MechaGodzilla is a remarkably serious and measured approach to the franchise that feels far more like a smart, restrained disaster movie than anything else. It's another scenario where humanity had been enjoying a Godzilla-less 45 years, all of the previous films never having happened and Godzilla remaining a pile of bones at the bottom of the ocean as far as everyone was concerned- until now. This is the closest I personally think the series has gotten since 1954 in depicting Godzilla in his original ideal form as a force of nature, not a malevolent being looking to intentionally hurt and destroy, but a living natural disaster like a tsunami or earthquake.

And even though the human element of this is what it focuses on the most, the portrayal of Godzilla in this one is fascinating. Never has he felt more like an animal, moving inexorably through the human slurry of buildings and civilization with his head high, no regard whatsoever for anything he crushes underfoot. There is a deep sense of danger coming off of him that feels the same way it feels to look at a tiger or bear or another wild animal. You get the feeling that he is a creature that knows what he's doing- but because it's Godzilla, and we know from other films that he reasons at or even slightly above a human level, there's that added element of the unknowable. I would argue that this stretches the limit of characterizing him as a monster and takes it up a notch into something else. This movie reminds you that Godzilla can be genuinely fearsome after you may have been lulled into seeing him on just a surface level, as a large monster that stomps around. This Godzilla is something we can't control or understand.

As I said, this film is mostly concerned with the human aspect of the events taking place, and although most of the time it's extremely boring when a Godzilla movie tries to have a main character with their own storyline instead of focusing on the efforts of a faction or group against Godzilla or another kaiju, in this case the stories of the individuals are impactful and make the film better instead of worse. The main character is the kind of Ellen Ripley-type personality where I could easily imagine that her role had simply been written genderless until a suitable actor of any gender came along. I really, really appreciated this story about a single woman with no attachments who spent the film working on herself instead of falling into unnecessary romantic sideplots. This is a very on-the-ground approach to a Godzilla movie, and we spend some time looking at the aftereffects of his invading Japan and what that means for the people displaced by the destruction, instead of the obligatory shots of people running in an indistinguishable mass. I think this was quite purposeful, as demonstrated by a scene where we literally do see one man look back and exclaim "My house!" I think showing that everybody is personally, individually losing something was a deliberate choice, reinforcing the idea of Godzilla as natural disaster.

And again, there is just something so titanic about the way he treads through Japan in this one. When I was a kid I used to have anxiety dreams where giant robots were invading the world and I could not hide or take cover for long. As silly as it sounds to an adult mind, I still remember the fear and panic of being exposed and knowing that something unfathomably large was roaming and destroying everything that used to be safe. That's what this movie feels like. True to the original concept, that kind of fear of everything you know being taken away is also strongly reminiscent of what could happen during a bombing raid.

The balance that this movie strikes between being serious and still being massively fun to watch is what impressed me. There is a dignity to it that made it age better than probably 90% of other Godzilla movies, although in fairness to the others, that could be due to the fact that it really just isn't that old yet. I don't feel great about the heavy use of CGI, especially not when it comes to Godzilla himself, and his overall appearance was not what I in my snobbery prefer my Godzilla to look like, but it works, as does the rest of his characterization, to make him feel more unfamiliar and threatening. To that end, he also makes animalistic growling sounds that he's never made before, and again on some level I just didn't like this at all- he's not supposed to make those noises! he goes skreeonk and skreeonk only!!!!- but this is a new and different Godzilla, a speculative take that intentionally doesn't fit in with the rest of canon, and it works really well.

Boys from County Hell (2021)

directed by Chris Baugh

Ireland

90 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I was looking forward to this for a long time because I just think the title is so funny. The director, Chris Baugh, previously made Bad Day For The Cut, a solid, non-vampire-related revenge movie that felt like an instant classic for the genre. But I am not talking about a revenge movie here, I'm talking about a good old-fashioned vampire film. And I do mean "old-fashioned": Nothing about this resembles the classic vampire tale you've come to know from pop culture, its roots are in something far deeper.

The attitude that the characters in Boys from County Hell take towards the legend that eventually becomes their problem is interesting. It avoids falling into the standard trap of having some old-timer come onto the scene and bestow their knowledge on the youngins, who ignore it and stumble into danger (it's certainly got the youngins stumbling into danger, but the knowledge is all in their heads already). We're introduced to the vampire legend through the main character and his buddies taking the piss at the expense of some Canadian tourists, and it's clear that even though they kind of laugh it off, they do know the ins and outs of it and at least have some regard for it, if not as a literal true story then at least for its place in local history. It's sort of this halfway point between belief and disbelief, like, yeah, they say there's a vampire buried under here, how silly is that? But also we give this place a wide berth for a reason.

The characters are what made this stand out for me personally, and I think maybe the writer/director having experience with giving people that kind of short but effective backstory that comes up often in revenge films helped a lot. No one monologues about their life or their dead relatives for too long, but they also say enough to make them feel like real people with real pasts, and that's a hard balance to find. I always reference The Room when I talk about this, how that one character just comes out with "By the way, I have breast cancer" right before she's killed, in an attempt to do the very barest minimum to make us feel bad for her so we'll be sadder when she dies. That's speedrunning character development, it's cheap and it's always super obvious. Boys from County Hell gives pretty much every one of its characters time to reveal an emotional wound or two but it doesn't pace it in such a way that it feels like they're quickly dispensing with the traumas so they can get on to the blood and guts.

Another great thing about this movie is that it has a serious knack for inventive gore. It's not just "let's stick a stake through this guy's heart, let's have this guy get his throat ripped out". There's a level of care taken here. The kills- and even things that don't kill people, just these really unique moments that make you stop and go "whoa!"- are things that somebody had to deliberately come up with. The cold open is what won me over, because it established not only that we were dealing with a non-traditional vampire in a brilliant way that I've never seen done before, but it also set the stage for those little moments of "how did they come up with that?" that were so good. One scene where a guy gets a pole to the chest and it literally rips his heart out through his back in one piece made my jaw drop. Yeah, it's unrealistic, but the way it looked. Iconic.

Also, speaking of the way things look: What a great vampire. No extra ornamentation, no ostentatiousness, just a guy who's been buried in the ground for god only knows how long. I got such a sense of malevolence from this creature because instead of having bells and whistles they took three of the most inherently terrifying things to humans and smashed them together: A dash of "person who wants to murder you", a smidge of "who can't die", and a heaped tablespoon of "and who looks like he's rotting".

All this and it's really funny too. I appreciate the emotional range of this movie so much because it is so funny. The characters go through such authentic-feeling grief at the death of like half their friend group, and the trouble of being youngish and still feeling cut up about the loss of a parent while also struggling to make something of your life- and then there's this stupid vampire, and you have to fight it with all your buddies and your da, and none of you know how to fight a vampire, and the whole town is gonna die but the vampire isn't like the ones in books and oh god, it doesn't even die when you chop its head off! The response to this is an absurd, frustrated humor that gives the movie a great tone. I could have given this four stars if it hadn't dragged a little bit in the middle- like a lot of movies do- but as it is, it's a whole lot of fun without ever feeling like a movie that's trying to goad you into having a good time.

Mothra (1961)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

101 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This must have been absolutely wild to see in 1961, because it's still pretty wild even now, 60 years later. I can easily tell that they use miniature vehicles and buildings for almost all of the action scenes, and you can see the roughness of the cuts between when they use human actors for the Shobijin and when they use dolls, but there's still something that feels so genuinely new and revolutionary about the way it's all blended together that has made this movie age like a fine wine. Maybe it doesn't matter if you can see the edges to the green screen or make out the driverless front seat of the little cars as they get crushed, maybe it only matters how confidently this film blazes ahead despite its limitations.

One tagline of this movie makes some claims that would be hard for anyone to live up to: "A GRUESOME MARVEL! FROM GIANT EGG TO GIANT MOTH, ATTACKING THE WHOLE WORLD WITH FURY!" Well, we'll just see about that. I'm not sure if that was from the American re-release of the film or if it was translated directly from the Japanese, and I won't pretend we're the only country that operates such a massive hype machine when it comes to movies, but that reeks to me of the Western art of overselling. Mothra as an entity is much like Godzilla in that the motivation behind the destruction she causes is more inscrutable than anything so simple as "fury". Mothra is summoned after her priestesses get kidnapped, operating on an ancient instinct and a deep, inexplicable connection to the two tiny women referred to in English dubs as "fairies". Rage or personal vendetta has nothing to do with it- Mothra is a goddess, and if her worshippers are under threat, there'll be hell to pay. Having an aspect of worship and holiness instantly makes her a fascinating new spin on a kaiju, and I'm surprised more kaiju films don't do this. I don't know why Mothra isn't regarded in pop culture as an iconic savior of women, because she has such potential to be symbolic like that and yet I've never seen her specifically associated with feminism.

The event that spurs on Mothra's awakening actually surprised me a little with how disgusting it feels. I had a more visceral, personal reaction to the kidnapping of the Shobijin than I feel like I was supposed to. There's just something so deeply upsetting about seeing men grab and carry the two miniature women, jeering, cackling, their minds instantly on profit from the minute they lay eyes on them. They don't see the Shobijin as anything but pretty little trinkets to be paraded around, and their small size makes it impossible for them to fight back, which the men see as a free pass to do whatever they want with them. Mothra is the hand of justice meted out towards these men. Mothra is the rescuer of trapped women, of exploited women. If you hurt women, if you take advantage of them or treat them as objects you can control, Mothra will come for you and destroy your entire country without looking back. The Shobijin know this and express their regret to the nice humans who try to rescue them that their country will be destroyed, but again, it's an inevitability. Mothra is coming.

Unfortunately, something stinks about this movie. It stinks like a whoooole lot of people in blackface. Yeah, yeah, it was a different time, nothing about this would fly today and that's a really good thing, but even for its time it's uncomfortable to watch a bunch of people who look like they got dirt rubbed all over them play pretend at being "natives". Mothra's whole backstory depends on this, too, and later films do seem to have found ways to deal with it, if not respectfully, then at least without using blackface. There's no excusing it and it just sits there lingering in the middle of this movie as a reminder of how colonial society thinks about indigenous people and always has.

I also can't lie and say it's not a tiny bit disappointing to me, in a weirdly childish way like my parents took me to Wendy's and they were out of Frostys, that we only see Mothra in her larval stage for like 80% of the movie. It makes it more epic when she does finally emerge from her cocoon, and actually the practical effects on her larval form are absolutely beautiful and a treat to watch, but still! We want to see the huge moth! It was impressive to see her trundle through fictional countries leaving a snail-trail of death in her wake, but when she takes to the sky, a beacon of the divine feminine dealing out retribution to those who harm women, it's the best look she has. This is my first time watching this movie, and I'm looking forward to watching the rest of Mothra's filmography.

Jakob's Wife (2021)

directed by Travis Stevens

USA

98 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Last night I had a dream that I was watching a vampire movie, so I woke up and found myself a vampire movie. This was not my first choice, but I couldn't resist the pull of Barbara Crampton and Larry Fessenden acting opposite each other. Perceptive viewers might also spot Bonnie Aarons not being a nun for a change.

So the basic idea at the beginning of this is fairly standard, and quite old as far as vampire narratives go: The passive wife of a minister encounters a powerful vampire and is converted to vampirism herself, and through her new identity as a vampire she discovers for the first time how to be independent. Vampirism is used as a metaphor for empowerment, as Anne finally gains the power to speak up and get what she wants. I expected this movie to be a lot trashier than it was judging by people's reactions to it, and it does have some moments where the dialogue is a little suspect, but Barbara Crampton is the queen of that stuff- she has a way of putting herself so firmly inside the character that she almost seems ignorant of how ridiculous what she's saying is, but you know she's not, because it always works so well. The effect of that in this particular instance is that the semi-trashy stuff she says conveys more about her character's personality than it does about the quality of the script.

There's a shift, or a transition, or just a slight change in tone, that happens midway through this film that signals it's on a different trajectory than the one you expect from this kind of premise. When Jakob finds out that his wife is a vampire, he does not react with the utter revulsion that you typically see in vampire movies. Any other movie would have him get eaten almost instantly, years of pent-up rage and subservience overwhelming Anne's humanity and causing her to turn on him first. Instead you get these deeply funny moments where he reacts to his wife's changed state with at first a willingness to help that is very endearing (the matter-of-fact way he's like "ok I'm gonna go kill this guy and then change you back") and then with begrudging, but total, acceptance, like how a narrow-minded but loving husband might react to his wife coming home with a nose ring. Not fear and hatred but an honest attempt to understand. "You could freak out and turn into a bat or something, I don't know." Even from the start, the film doesn't ever write him as totally awful, but I was still expecting him to become the antagonist, and instead he turns into an unlikely ally.

From when Anne comes clean with Jakob, this movie turns into something much bigger and more important than just a vampire film. The core of it becomes these two people's ability to reconcile and heal their marriage. Not in a corny way, because this typically is not seen in a movie you expect to just be about a lady who turns into a vampire. And it's not framed as if the empowerment that Anne experiences is worthless at best and dangerous at worst- actually the opposite. The fact that she's able to experience the kind of life she wants to live and realize what she wants for herself is what lets her come back to her marriage able to demand space for herself, and contrary to what you would expect, her husband respects that space and realizes a lot of her unhappiness was his fault. And is willing to work to make a better life for both of them. It's also incredibly refreshing and rare to see a movie with two middle-aged leads where they're not presented as dry and lifeless but have opportunities to be intimate and sensual. Older bodies are not the punchline of a joke but are shown with all the wants and thoughts of everyone, everywhere. "Wholesome" is a word too often trotted out when a work of fiction wants to ignore nuance and create something blandly pleasant, but I would feel okay calling this movie wholesome for its depiction of a happy (and only a little gory... okay, maybe a lot gory) resolution to marital problems.

I'm not saying that this is the best movie I've ever seen, but it goes places that I really rarely ever see. That kind of mutual appreciation and realizing how to communicate and foster a relationship where both people are equals is a genuine scarcity on film. Relationships are usually depicted as black-and-white; communication is not really required as it's expected that both parties should be mind-readers and if one fails to meet the other's needs they should leave immediately without attempting to convey what they want. I have a lot of feelings about this movie that are separate from its overall quality as a movie, which was average. The vampire stuff was really just a sidenote.

The Astrologer (1975)

directed by Craig Denney

77 minutes

USA

3 stars out of 5

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There are two movies from 1975 called "The Astrologer", and like a lot of people, I watched the wrong one first. I did not review it because even though it was pretty wacky in and of itself, it was also incredibly boring. This movie, presumed lost for a long time and hard to find up until recently, made by a writer/director/actor who fell off the face of the Earth immediately afterwards because he probably financed it with mob money, is the cult favorite I wanted to see.

It's fairly obvious that this is something of a vanity project (although "vanity project" typically describes media created by already-famous people, which this guy is... not) because the entire thing centers around Craig Alexander, real name Craig Denney, and how the world is persecuting him for his life of crime. He goes through the movie not really expecting to ever have anything bad happen to him, and this is the attitude of the narrative itself: Even though he's a con man and is ostensibly presented as a criminal, everybody around him seems to encourage his shady acts (unless they're villains, openly plotting against him) and when they finally catch up to him for the petty crime of, oh, you know, killing a guy, the mood is more like "why is everyone leaving me? what did I ever do?" than "look at him getting his just desserts". There are a lot of crime movies where we're meant to root for the criminal, but usually this is done by making the criminal sympathetic or making the people coming after the criminal even worse than they are, and The Astrologer does neither of these things.

This is also one of those movies where every actor seems to think they're in a different movie. Everybody in this who isn't Craig Denney approaches their role from an entirely different place, but none of them are that consequential in relation to the main character, and this actually produces a fairly interesting result, which is that everyone in this somehow seems like somebody you know. Like, these could be your parents' friends or people you see all the time at work or something. Each character seems to have a separate and distinct personality with their own hidden motivations that don't ever come out to us, the viewers, but are still present in their demeanor and actions. A lot of low-budget movies from the 1970s feature extremely wooden and stiff acting, but not this one. It barely feels like anybody in this is acting, except for Craig Denney, who has the vibe of Tom Cruise if he had never gotten famous and fell in with the mafia instead.

I guess this also has a plot. Again, it's actually pretty interesting, but the way it's handled by this guy versus how it would be handled by literally anybody else is what makes it remarkable. The main character, as stated, is a con man, but he also seems to possess actual abilities, which makes it a little confusing exactly how he's a con man. It's like "con man" is just a career choice he made, the way somebody might decide to go into manufacturing, or look for a job in the nonprofit sector. He's presented as the world's greatest astrologer and has invented an entirely new form of astrology that becomes the dominant method and earns him hundreds of millions of dollars. Unfortunately he flies too close to the sun- or in this case, the illegal diamond smuggling operation in Kenya- and it leads to his downfall. Well, really, the whole killing a guy thing is what leads to his downfall. Don't worry too much about the plot. It really doesn't matter much to the overall experience of this movie. At one point the fictional Craig creates and releases a movie titled "The Astrologer", which has the same plot as the real-life The Astrologer, and it's an enormous hit that earns him even more millions of dollars. So this movie exists within itself. It's like that.

You can also tell that Denney thinks far more of his directorial skills than is warranted. Several times, you can practically see him behind the camera or on the editing floor going "ah yes... this scene is pure cinema... this is a thing of such beauty, this is my greatest work" but in reality what's going on is, like, a dinner scene set to a 60s love ballad where everyone is muted and you can't lip-read because it's in slow-motion. Denney has a talent for creating sweeping moments of emotion and narrative intensity that only feel that way to him. It's hard to rate this movie because it really is not very good, but it's also so enigmatic and alien-feeling that it's worthwhile just for the fact that there's nothing else like it. People really don't make movies like they did in the 70s and sometimes that's a good thing. Also, I've deliberately mentioned Craig Denney's name so much here to make very clear which movie I'm talking about, so you don't accidentally watch the other The Astrologer, which is about a guy who knows his girlfriend is going to give birth to Jesus, but he doesn't know when, and he has to prevent her from being seduced by the Antichrist, who has been reborn as a charismatic Indian suicide cult leader.

The Power (2021)

directed by Corinna Faith

UK

92 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I had really been looking forward to this since I saw it was coming out soon, and it didn't disappoint. The cinematography is so stylish and everything else about it so well-executed to boot that it makes me appreciate Shudder so much for what it's doing for horror. I just love that we have a dedicated streaming service for horror that regularly introduces incredibly solid original horror films like this one. For a genre that gets maligned in the popular eye so often, having a small corner of the film streaming market specifically for creating and distributing horror movies that stack up to the best of them is very important.

Set in the dismal, industrialized background of mid-70s Britain during the widespread power cuts that posed a challenge for many hospitals, The Power follows a rookie young nurse on her first harrowing night on the job in a spooky pediatrics ward. A little bit of this reminded me of Saint Maud if Maud had not been somewhat of a nutcase: the nurse has some personal trauma that her work doesn't allow her to forget. The comparisons between those two films ends there, though, and probably I should not even have brought it up. But anyway, for a long time this all seems pretty bog-standard; I love a good "long dark night of the soul, literally" type of film where a character or cast of characters are trapped in a dank shadowy place and have to survive the night, and this one is done really well. The hospital feels labyrinthine even though we only get to see a few rooms of it, just because we see the map that shows all of its corridors laid out like a spider's web and because once the set is outside the illuminating glow of a character's lantern or torchlight, it might as well be a bottomless cavern. This is definitely one for those scared of the dark- or maybe not, depending on how much you enjoy being creeped out.

So like I said, it proceeds along those lines for a while and everything gradually gets worse and worse for our poor protagonist. It becomes clear she has no one to trust at this new job and is as much in danger of getting eaten alive by her judgmental coworkers as by whatever is haunting the hospital (and her). But there's a change, eventually, that is precipitated by lead actress Rose Williams revealing that she has acting chops far, far beyond just the timid, naïve nurse we first believe her character to be. She has a possession scene partway through the movie where she just throws her all into it in the tradition of Isabelle Adjani and any woman who has ever writhed in the throes of ennui onscreen. Williams' performance as first a terrified young woman alone, then someone reckoning with the scars of the past, and eventually the marriage of the two is probably one of the best things about this movie. I don't believe she's ever been in horror before but she definitely has a talent for it.

The scares themselves are also paced really well and spread apart so that you're always on edge, never anticipating where the next thing will pop out at you from. It does stoop to using jump scares pretty often, and a lot of the creepy things are of that type where some weird image is just thrust in your face all of a sudden with a big scare chord accompanying it- not my favorite kind of thing from a technical standpoint, because I think startling the audience is a lot different from actually scaring them, but I am also somewhat of a jump scare apologist because, for all the arguments against them and their cheapness, it is really, really fun to scream out loud in a movie theater. Horror that's only present in the implication of a backstory won't do that for you.

And the most important thing about this movie is that it does have backstory. It has a meaning that resonated with me really strongly. I feel like there is a long tradition, possibly made most recognizable by Fairuza Balk in The Craft, of scenes in horror films where a woman's frustration at being continually sidelined and robbed of power manifests in her physically levitating off the ground. That small trope (if we can even call it a trope) is done very well here. Without the element of catharsis, this would have still been a good movie; it's got the style and the lasting creepiness to stand on alone, but there's a deeper message here about the disease that is poverty and the silencing of women in favor of an unbreakable status quo held sacred by men. It is not in-your-face about these things (though there is nothing wrong with being in-your-face about such a vital message) but it doesn't just throw them in as a weak attempt to be "woke" without elaborating on them either. It uses them as part and parcel of the horror. I was more than satisfied with this and I'm eager to see this director do more in the genre. Plus a deeply menacing soundtrack by Gazelle Twin to complete the ambiance.

Ilya Muromets/The Sword and the Dragon (1956)

directed by Aleksandr Ptushko

USSR

93 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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This got Roger Cormanized and re-released for TV as The Sword and the Dragon in 1960, and then eventually got the MST3K treatment as well, but before all of that it was Ilya Muromets, and the original Russian version is the one I'm going to be talking about here. Just because it's the original doesn't mean it's an untouchable classic, though. Old isn't always better, especially in this case.

Ilya Muromets is one of my favorite Russian folktales/hero stories/fairy tales/what-have-you, because to me it's always felt just a little more bonkers than usual, even for Russian legends. His outrageous escapades and temper make him feel more unpredictable than many hero protagonists, and a lot of the time he's depicted as an old guy instead of a brawny youth the way most heroes are. None of that is present in Alexsandr Ptushko's Ilya. This hero is a typical savior with an unstoppable drive to defend his homeland, having just enough of the wild in him to reject the materialistic, corrupt influence of the Prince and his court and champion justice over the accumulation of wealth, but never being so boisterous or contrarian as to become arrogant. Amusingly, the film repeatedly refers to him as a "youth" despite the actor playing him being obviously like 50 years old, disregarding any mention of his advanced age in the source material. Above all, Ilya is a hero of the Rus. Any nuance is stripped of him and his entire being exists solely to serve that purpose.

I know a lot of Soviet-era fairy tale adaptations are propaganda, but... some are more obvious than others, and boy, is Ilya Muromets obvious. It is also just appallingly racist, which, again, is not an infrequent theme in films like this, but even for the genre this movie is quite bold about it. The purity of the Rus is at stake and under attack from vicious, barbaric pagan Tatars, the bright and shining white faces of the beautiful Rus villagers stricken with worry as the raiders on their horses advance on them. The only people worth saving are the Rus, and the Rus are everything- all others must be struck down. The depravity of the invaders knows no bounds and they must be expelled from the motherland before they can pillage and steal innocent women. Again, no nuance to this whatsoever, just simple us-vs.-them racism. I noticed that a lot of the actors playing the Tatars seemed to be very obviously dubbed; their mouths don't sync up with their lines. This all reminds me of old Hollywood Westerns when Native actors would be told to speak their language and then the filmmakers would just write in whatever they wanted for the subtitles, because the white audience didn't know or care about Native languages. Identities other than the pure white ideal don't matter here. They are transformed into one homogenous mass of invaders.

The American re-release of this film placed a lot of emphasis on the fact that it uses a ridiculous amount of extras, even claiming it to have the largest cast of any film (which may not be accurate as of the present day). The sheer amount of people they manage to cram into this movie is very impressive, but again, that doesn't always equal better. There were some scenes during the climactic battle between all of Rus and the Tatar army that honestly just looked horrible. Huge, wide-angle shots of a featureless, unbelievably huge crowd of people trundling across a flat green field. It didn't move me, it didn't inspire awe or wonder, it just looked like a massive crowd shuffling around a football field. No trees, no foliage, just this landscape that looked like it had been razed, no characteristics, no nothing. Maybe that's what was intended: a scene purged of all that was not Rus, filled to the brim with countrymen and good cheer, all outside influence exterminated until the only thing that remained was the glory of the race.

I'm usually a fan of Ptushko, but only when I can kind of pretend he's just telling me a fairytale instead of trying to convince me of a political message. Coming from an American (as I enjoy doing, I shall link to the wikipedia article for "Military-entertainment complex" here) that's a little hypocritical, I know. Propaganda can sometimes just be fun to watch as long as you know it's propaganda. But stuff like this where it's not only propaganda but also vile and racist, aimed at wiping out a specific people and with those real-life people basically playing themselves, is very hard to enjoy or see value in at all.

The Empty Man (2020)

directed by David Prior

USA, France

137 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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Okay. I need to talk about this movie. It had its theatrical release while many theaters were still shuttered and suffered from the general loss of exposure that all movies released during the pandemic did, and then it took a further hit when everybody immediately hated it and started talking about how terrible it is, only for a different crowd to find it a few months later and begin a spate of YouTube videos and reviews about why this is actually a fantastic film. And I have to say- I'm not usually one to buy into hype like that, and I always try to approach movies that have such a wildly mixed response with skepticism, but all of the reviews claiming that The Empty Man is something far, far better than the first impression it made on people are one thousand percent right. This movie is on another level.

So the opening scene is just some of the best horror I've ever seen. There's about twenty minutes before the title card comes on, and for that time, I was sucked in, fascinated, and utterly won over by the creeping dread that I wish I could say set the tone for what came right after it. After the title card hits, the film unfortunately becomes something very similar to a lot of the really bad "teen horror" movies that have come out in the past couple of years, like The Bye Bye Man, and this is where I can see a lot of people beginning to lose hope- and I can't say I blame them, who wants to watch a two-and-a-half-hour version of The Bye Bye Man?- but you have to be aware that pretty much everything this movie does to disguise itself as a generic teen horror movie is elaborate subterfuge. It is really convincing at this for a while. It gives the protagonist his requisite "dead family" backstory and inserts a bunch of incredibly shallow, blank-faced teens doing some ritual they found on the internet or something. But for the most part all of the stuff that comes off as cliche and unoriginal is there to distract you from the completely horrifying core of what is honestly one of the best cosmic horror stories I've seen. I knew I was hooked from the moment I saw that thing at the beginning and recognized it as a visual reference to Beksinski's "Trumpeter".

The thing that sucks about this is that I can't talk about what this movie really is without ruining some of the fun. It's always a little bit of a delight to go into a movie that is widely hated and realize that it's actually great. But if I elaborate on the themes of The Empty Man, I'll start spoiling it. So consider this a checkpoint: Everything I've said thus far should serve as proof enough that there's way more to this than meets the eye, and if you haven't already seen it, you should probably stop here for maximum enjoyment.

But carrying on- I am absolutely floored that 20th Century Fox released a movie with ideas like this behind it. I can definitely see why it was a commercial failure. It's packaged like something you could catch in a theater (if you were not worried about catching something else in theaters) that would be mindless and very similar to all the other really boring horror movies with a bunch of teens doing stupid stuff the 2010s had to offer. If you don't want to see that kind of thing, you will hate large chunks of this movie until you realize it was intentionally misleading you. If you do go in for movies like that, the excessive running time and wacky philosophical ideas are just going to piss you off. This is a movie that can please very few people, and I'm amazed any studio, nevermind possibly THE largest studio in the Western world, dared its bucks on putting it out there. I wish I had looked up the director before watching this, because if I had I would have been psyched about it from the minute I heard of it: David Prior directed one of my favorite short films and pieces of Lovecraftian horror, AM1200, and seeing him branch out into full (and I really do mean full)-length horror is incredibly exciting, especially because he seems to be keeping the hard Lovecraftian themes maxed out at all times. That also explains why the first 20 minutes of this seem like a knockout short film: it's made by someone who has experience with knockout short films.

To call this Lovecraftian is to erase a lot of the nuance of it, which is why I want to acknowledge that in many ways it is a Lovecraftian story (cults dimly glimpsing cosmic beings vaster than humanity is able to comprehend), but it also goes way, way deeper than that into the territory of, like, severe philosophical horror that will give you a serious crisis if you think about it too hard. This isn't just Lovecraftian in the sense of big tentacle monsters that make you go crazy. This is cosmic, a question of identity and the fundamental inability of us as a species to perceive everything that exists- or even a fraction of what might exist- in the universe. I thought the whole cult angle was going to be part of the boring teen subplot, but it's actually crucial. "Cult" is just a half-fitting name for this group of people tapped into a deep and incredibly unsettling truth of existence. And again- 20th Century Fox released this. You could have walked into a theater and bought a ticket for this and sat next to somebody who just likes going to the movies and has never heard of H.P. Lovecraft in their life. There's something that I really love and encourage about that, because I am all for a halt being put to gatekeeping in the horror genre, but it's hard to imagine that anybody thought this would be marketable to a wider audience in any way whatsoever.

I really don't know what else to say about this or how to describe its particular brand of existential horror. It's just all done so unbelievably well, even the parts where it's misleading you into thinking it's something that it's not. The only reason I gave this four and a half stars instead of five was because the Empty Man is the worst part of The Empty Man. The creature design reads like something that was inserted hastily by somebody who thought horror only works if it has a physical face (in the form of a monster) that the viewer can be afraid of. Every instance in this movie where the figure of the "Empty Man" himself was would have been far better off with a void, a hole, an absence. The real horror of this exists somewhere well beyond the visual, and slapping on a raggedy black shadowman just felt like adding an unneeded element of familiarity to something where the unfamiliar is all there is. But a handful of appearances from a generic monster that probably amounted to five total minutes out of, and I will say this one more time, an ungodly long film (but not in a bad way!) is not something I have a huge problem with. The overall vibe of this is absolutely on point and is what I love to see when I watch horror. I'm praying that David Prior returns with a follow-up that matches the conceptual intensity of this one and maybe shrugs off the mantle of appealing to a big studio audience. I will be thinking about this movie for months.

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991)

directed by Kazuki Ōmori

Japan

103 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I think King Ghidorah might be my favorite of all the enemies Godzilla has fought over the years, at least in terms of creature design. Yes, having no arms makes him look very silly, and it also significantly restricts his actual modes of attack to basically just biting and strangling with his snakelike necks, but the first time I saw him I was totally transfixed. The graceful motion of his three heads swirling in tandem is something I can't help but describe as beautiful. There's just something so naturalistic about it, the way it looks random but smooth and coordinated at the same time. You can't do that with CGI. That grace and range of motion is only achieved by pulling physical strings.

So this movie does a lot with the lore and attempts to explain many things that had gone mostly unexplained until now about Godzilla's backstory, to mixed results. Personally I think that it's crucial that Godzilla's origin remains largely a mystery, but like I said in another recent Godzilla review, the level of variation between each individual film in terms of what lore they choose to keep and which to disregard is something that I honestly love about the series. So if this explanation doesn't suit your idea of Godzilla you can just throw it away. His role in this movie is a little unusual because for a lot of the film's length Godzilla as we know him isn't there- it's his untainted form, before he got nuked and mutated into the big boy we all know and love. Which feels genuinely weird to see. It's pre-transition Godzilla, if you will. As is typical he serves as a warrior against imperialism and a savior of Japan, but in the true spirit of the series he also comes as a double-edged sword; not quite the kid-friendly rescuer of the 60s and 70s but also nowhere near the demonic force of perverted nature he is in Shin Godzilla and Godzilla, Mothra & King Ghidorah.

I'm not a huge fan of when human factions get too involved in this series, including the Xilliens; they're always just less interesting than giant monsters duking it out no matter how much shiny futuristic backstory they get. The main villains in this film are some time travelers from the future who ostensibly deliver the grave news that Godzilla must be destroyed in order to save Japan, but really they have ulterior motives behind their veneer of kindness and concern. Most of the future people are white, which probably serves as a more immediately visible red flag to Japanese audiences than I would be able to apprehend as a white person. When people show up from the future claiming that they come from a time where Japan no longer exists, and all of them are white, you have to wonder... who's responsible for that?

The vibe of this movie is overwhelmingly reminiscent of a not-particularly-good Star Trek: TnG episode. It spends, in my opinion, way too much time on the weird futuristic technology, and it doesn't have the green screen skills to back it up. The kaiju themselves don't suffer from this, as they always look their best when they're people in suits, but the computer-enhanced scenes with humans in them are just hysterically funny at times. It feels like a local public broadcast station trying to re-enact Terminator. Apparently part of the reason behind this is because Godzilla vs. Biollante didn't do great with kids, so they wanted to inject a little more lightheartedness into this film. I was kind of surprised to see this movie ranked in so many top-tens for the franchise, but this series really has a great many different definitions of "good": You have stuff that is genuinely serious and emotional and packs a punch, and then you also have a ton of movies that are just so goofy, but with such passion and craft behind them that you can't help but enjoy them. This is definitely on the goofier side, and felt a little overlong at almost 105 minutes, but it's enjoyable anyway.

Mainly I just wish both of the big lads would have been in it a little bit more. I guess the concept of Godzilla before he was Godzilla is vaguely interesting, but that's not the origin story I like for my personal interpretation of him. Even King Ghidorah felt slightly underused. Around this time was when Back to the Future II was coming out and there was supposedly some thought that the Godzilla films being released at the time were competing with it, hence the time travel subplot that ended up taking the focus away from what I feel is most important. But this is a really fun movie, as almost all of them are. The effects are great. A guy commits suicide by Godzilla which is possibly a first for the franchise. And the English dialogue is so bad it's full of memorable one-liners. "Take that you dinosaur!" indeed.