Gappa, the Triphibian Monster (1967)

directed by Haruyasu Noguchi

Japan

84 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

----

Here we have Fake Godzilla. I guess I shouldn't say that, because despite the proliferation of studios trying to capitalize on the giant monster trend post-1954, not all of them are deliberately ripping off Godzilla. I don't think you can reasonably call a definite, established, long-running trend the same thing as ripping something off. But boy, does this feel like Fake Godzilla.

Like a remarkable amount of kaiju movies, Gappa begins with the kidnapping of an infant monster by a group of rich capitalists solely interested in the money they can make by charging people to see something unusual. Before too long, mommy and daddy Gappa come looking for their stolen child and wreck everything in their path in the process. Gappa is a half-bird, half-reptile creature who, as the title suggests, can survive in air, on the ground, or underwater, and is worshipped in connection with an active volcano by the indigenous inhabitants of the island his species is also native to. I find it really rich that a message about not exploiting a living being for profit is delivered in this, a movie that is nauseatingly exploitative of the popular idea of Pacific Islander life and culture. Practically every kaiju movie I watch from this era has some fixation on a made-up island in the Pacific where the bootblack-smeared inhabitants dance and shimmy with spears and bongos, and it never gets any less uncomfortable or any more excusable. It's so hard to believe that the filmmakers of Gappa could tout respect for their monster while also instructing a horde of people in blackface to pretend to speak gibberish and calling them cannibals as a joke.

One of the fun things about watching old horror and monster movies on YouTube is that there's usually at least one person who leaves a comment that says something like "Thank you for uploading this, I saw it when I was a kid and it scared the boogers out of me". Whatever creature frightened the commenter is invariably hilarious and ridiculous-looking to adult sensibilities. I can kind of see what they're talking about with Gappa, though- there's something about these guys that's nestled a little too deep in the uncanny valley. I don't ever get scared of any kaiju because the ones intended to be scary are so obviously intended to be scary that they have about all the lasting impact of a devil emoji. When a kaiju is meant to be evil, they're given such obvious hallmarks of badness that they become a caricature of malice instead of the real thing. But there's something about the Gappas' goggling, furtive eyes; their high-pitched shrieks. It's freaky. As a kid, this probably would have weirded me out too. But as an adult, I can relate much more easily to the fear of having my whole life ruined just because some stubborn businessmen in their distant skyscrapers refuse to do the right thing and instead content themselves with sitting back and watching everyone else suffer so they don't lose money.

This movie is just so boring, though. And offensive. I mentioned the racism, but there's a woman reporter whose entire story arc is basically realizing that she belongs in the kitchen or something. The guy who seems like he might become her love interest from the start makes some joke about how if roughing it on a tropical island is too much for her, she should give up and marry a rich guy and just be a housewife. I thought this would be a one-off quip in poor taste, but at the very end of the film she herself announces that she's quitting reporting and is going to go find some nice man to marry instead. I kept waiting for an awkward attempt at cuteness to be the punchline to this, like maybe she'd say "I'll find a nice man to marry... like you!" but that never happens. She gives up on her dreams to do what's expected of her and doesn't even get a cute husband out of it.

I had fun here and there, but Gappa is probably best relegated to the ranks of non-Toho kaiju movies that never made it. I will always champion the labor involved in creating even sub-par examples of these kinds of movies, though, and I enjoy seeing the craft that goes into them even if everything else about them is terrible. I enjoy the concept of Gappa as well, they're fun monsters and they look... memorable. But the poor pacing and flat characters and odious racism and misogyny prevents this from being anything but a one-and-done film for me.

Oxygène (2021)

directed by Alexandre Aja

France

100 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

I had quite a few reservations before watching this, but I chose to anyway based off of the strong positive response it seems to be getting. None of my reservations were bigger than the fact that Alexandre Aja has just never directed a movie I've liked. Crawl was pretty good, Horns had its moments, but I've always thought of him as a director who largely relies on cheap thrills even if they're in an expensive movie. So maybe it's because he didn't write Oxygène, or maybe I just have to suck it up and say he finally got one right, but I gotta admit: I really, really liked this Alexandre Aja film.

It feels weird to say that this premise is overused, because there's not a ton of movies that take place entirely while the character is confined to a box not much bigger than their body, but the fact that there's more than one movie like that already feels like an oversaturation. There's only so many places you can go with an idea like that. But Oxygène hits it out of the park and wrings the concept for all it's worth, but more importantly it doesn't limit itself to that concept and the constraints it comes with. It never feels like this is a gimmick, or worse, that it's done to hide an insufficiency in the budget, or that it's molded around said insufficient budget. I loved this because the world it takes place in feels expansive despite the physical confinement of the main character. It introduces us to concepts, events, technology, and timelines that are foreign and obviously the territory of science fiction, but none of it feels out-of-place. I don't want to sound too enthusiastic about this because it's still not the absolute best thing I've seen all year, but the way it was executed did give me shades of that feeling of being excited for all that is new and possible with cinema in the current moment. It's not terribly original but it is new and fresh, and it even has time to put in some concepts about identity that are slightly upsetting to think about, even if it doesn't expound on them much.

I say "current moment" here simply as shorthand for any time when there are new and interesting films coming out, but there is also something that makes this movie and this scenario fit our literal current moment. It feels deeply relatable to watch someone confined alone, cut off from the rest of the world with only dim memories of having to be isolated for some reason relating to their medical safety. The main character is scared, hooked up to weird machines, unable to find out if anything is wrong with her or if she was exposed to the deadly virus she only has vague memories of. And also, this whole thing is possibly the most apt metaphor I can think of for human life more generally. We wake up, we struggle with the enormity of our existence, and then we must go back to sleep.

So it's Mélanie Laurent, with amnesia, in a box with an AI, for 100 minutes. Talking about the plot any more than that runs the risk of spoiling a movie that is full of twists and turns, but suffice it to say this does not go where you think it's going. There are lies and things that are concealed from the main character initially that make it difficult for the viewer to trust anything that happens all throughout the movie, but I felt like the point of this wasn't to mess with your head overmuch, and that's another reason why I liked it. The whole 100 minutes of this thing is a series of events being revealed to us in pretty much chronological order, instead of a bunch of cards being laid out and then yanked away again as falsehoods and tricks are disclosed. In short: it never made me feel stupid. It didn't even make me feel like I was being lied to as a viewer. I'm not trying to imply that a movie being obtuse or complicated is a bad thing; I don't need to have my hand held and be prohibited from thinking for myself. There's a lot of thinking and figuring that you have to do during Oxygène. I'm just trying to explain a very difficult to conceptualize feeling I got during this that it was being very earnest the entire time and not trying to make you doubt every little thing that happened.

I'm afraid but also pretty certain that this is going to be pigeonholed into being a Concept Movie because I guess it kind of is a Concept Movie. It's going to be a case of "hey have you seen that movie where the lady is stuck in a box" and not "hey have you seen that movie where the lady is stuck in a box during [gratuitous plot spoilers] and then it turns out she's [gratuitous plot spoilers]" because the main idea is actually the only thing you can say about it without giving the rest away. But this was so good that I don't want to see it become sensationalized, it's good even if you don't like sci-fi or are turned off by what sounds like a wacky idea. It's just good.

We once again interrupt this broadcast but for a less serious reason

Almost 650 reviews and zero followers or interaction and I feel like I'm screaming into the void more than ever. I'm going to scale back to one review a week every Monday until I figure out what I'm doing wrong and how to get more people to see this blog. I enjoy doing this and maybe here and there somebody does stumble upon it and enjoy it too, but unless it makes more of an impact, I struggle to see the point of keeping up the 2-a-week schedule.

Peace.

Rodan (1956)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

72 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

Rodan is not my favorite of the innumerable Toho kaiju, just because there's nothing really spectacular about his design, but I do appreciate him anyway, especially after this. This film, containing his origin story, goes well beyond what can be boxed into the simple and easy definition of a monster movie, as is typical for Ishirō Honda. Just looking at the taglines from its international releases make it obvious how hard other audiences are missing the point. "The Super-Sonic Hell-Creature No Weapon Could Destroy!" Okay then.

1956's Rodan has a sinister tone to it that feels more akin to a horror film than even the original Godzilla did two years before it. For some reason I kept thinking about the original The Thing From Another World; I don't know why, there's not too many similarities other than characters threatened by a mystery creature, and Rodan isn't even a mystery for long. But for some time, though, the threat isn't clear and it is a mystery: it's just a series of people getting maimed by some unknown force down in a mine, and for audiences in the 50s, this must have been terrifying. The addition of giant grubs instantly takes away some of the menace to my American sensibilities because I've been conditioned to associate monsters = less seriousness, but things were different in the context of the time this film was released, and monsters didn't necessarily change the way people looked at a film. (Or at least some people, anyway.) Before the grubs come in, though, it's genuinely really eerie to see people come up against something they have absolutely no idea about. Men just keep going down into the mine and being taken and sometimes killed by... something. The ones that come back are struck mute by the horror of what they've seen. Nobody knows if it will stop or if it can be stopped, or what it means for the rest of the world.

The first person to actually see Rodan has such a look of terror on his face that it rivals any reaction to any conventional ghost in modern horror cinema. Rodan is really just a giant dinosaur, but the reactions from everybody who encounters him are acted out with such seriousness that I automatically gave Rodan more gravity than I had before. It might be ridiculous to imagine a real dinosaur flying around our world, but in the imagined scenario that this film takes place in, it's not ridiculous at all to see the destruction and strife visited upon the people affected by Rodan's arrival.

You usually feel some degree of sympathy for the kaiju in Ishirō Honda's films, but Rodan feels like a special case even for Honda. There is nothing that makes him stand out aside from being larger than usual. He has no powers that are separate from his large size; he can't shoot fire or atomic breath in this first appearance, all he does is exist in a space that is unprepared and unfit for him. He doesn't even fight, actually. He doesn't intentionally harm anything or anyone at all. The force of his body displaces enough air that his presence in a city is akin to a devastating tornado, and there's nowhere for him to touch down that won't destroy buildings and people. Rodan is yet another being who never asked to be brought into existence and is now stuck living as a lumbering, too-big presence that humans revile and seek to destroy for their own safety and survival, though Rodan has done nothing wrong. There are two of them in this first film and it is implied that they're mates, which of course makes everything even more tragic because they're so bonded to each other but are doomed because of their intrusion into the human sphere.

From a technical standpoint, this movie is almost as impressive as the original Godzilla, and maybe even surpasses it at points because it's in color and the quality of the background paintings can be seen clearly without the characteristic muddiness of the black-and-white Godzilla. The miniature sets still hold up and rival anything produced today. Although it's a long time before we actually get to see Rodan, it never feels boring, and instead maintains tension by, as I said earlier, creating a deep sense of menace while we only get the human side of things, just watching people be throttled by unknown creatures and never seeing them. The end is overwhelmingly sad and- a rarity- depicts humans as being in the wrong; the aggressors against a creature who was never trying to do anything but live. As the rockets rain down on Rodan and it becomes clear that we're shooting ourselves in the foot too when the volcano begins to erupt, the audience is made to feel for Rodan as a fellow creature in a way that not every character in this movie did. The international releases do not get this. They only see the survival of humanity and society as necessary no matter what the price, paying little to no heed to what suffers and is lost as a consequence.

Premonition (2004)

directed by Norio Tsuruta

Japan

95 minutes

3 stars out of 5

----

I didn't expect much going into this due to the director never having made any movies I could describe more fondly than "lukewarm", but it had also been on my watchlist for so long without getting booted off even after I read some mediocre reviews that I figured there was probably a reason for that. I came away from this film with questions, not necessarily about the plot but about whether a movie can be not very good in some areas (and how many?) but still be, on the whole, good despite itself.

The opening of Premonition took me off guard, to say the least, because it is harrowing. Here I was expecting something corny, and instead I got a deeply upsetting depiction of parents losing their five-year-old daughter in a perfect storm of small events that lead up to a devastating auto crash. It's all well-acted and hits the right spot where everybody reacts realistically enough that you feel a little sick. Genuinely hair-raising. After the first ten minutes or so, I figured that even if the rest of the movie was garbage, I had to at least give it credit for an opening that was seriously unsettling. It's like when Gage dies in Pet Sematary, only stretched out over minutes and revisited several times over the course of the film.

I was also surprised at how strongly this film wears its Kiyoshi Kurosawa influence on its sleeve. I feel confident in saying that director Norio Tsuruta was doing this deliberately, because... come on. It feels so obvious. It's not just a matter of a dingy, dank atmosphere, it's the specific details of it: People move through a homogenous landscape while disastrous events just happen to them over and over, as they appear to be at the mercy of a cruel and unfeeling universe that manipulates them using forces beyond their imagining. Everyone speaks quietly when they're not shrieking in mortal terror and heartbreak. Most everything about this movie is quiet in some way, like everybody is stuck in a well of despair that dampens all sound. It's nihilistic as well as personally affecting.

Hiroshi Makami is really good in the lead role. He looks like if Brad Dourif were Japanese. His character is very emotional, and he plays it really well, does a good job of imparting a sense of actual instability to the protagonist that goes beyond what a lot of other movies with a main character who never overcame some past grief typically do. He doesn't feel okay. He doesn't even feel like he's hiding not being okay very well. And it's not in a fashionably disheveled way, it's not cute or hip. This guy just really seems to not be doing good and it's central to his identity.

It's somewhat difficult to reconcile the dead serious tone with the premise of this movie, which is a little wacky. I think maybe the premise goes at things too literally, and that works to its detriment, while the atmosphere hits it dead on. The title says just about everything you need to know, but the protagonist receives his premonitions of impending doom in the form of a physical newspaper that seems to manifest some kind of evil force, leering at him with grunts and groans and waving around as if animated from the inside. Honestly, from a subjective standpoint, I didn't mind this and even kind of liked it- there's something fun about it, the scary evil newspaper: it jives with the ultimate absurdity of the world this film takes place in. The protagonist seems to have stumbled upon some hidden compelling force of darkness, and why should that not manifest in a newspaper that lunges at his hands? Does what form fate takes really matter if we're forever just a pawn to it?

There's a lingering uncertainty to this that has uncomfortable real-world parallels if you do want to think deeper about it. Every one of us can experience burnout when we get too invested in the fact that every second of every day plays host to a new miniature catastrophe for somebody, somewhere in the world. The scale of suffering that unfolds unknown to us, only occasionally seeping through as a headline on a newspaper, is overwhelming. I think that's the dual message of this film, side-by-side with the personal tragedy of the main character: That becoming too obsessed with the ongoing devastation of human life will lead to you giving your whole self over to it and leaving nothing behind. The main character's final act when he becomes entirely unmoored and drifts through time might be a final instance of poking his head above the surface before he is made a casualty of the dark forces present throughout this film. I think the perfect word to describe this is spooky- the combo of a genuinely chilling atmosphere, but also something like that newspaper that's just a little bit silly, creates an effect that's only as frightening as you want to be frightened by it.

Sadako vs. Kayako (2016)

directed by Kôji Shiraishi

Japan

98 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

This is a movie that seems like it couldn't possibly be scary due to its premise, which at face value is inherently just really funny. What if we took two ghosts from two separate long-running film franchises and made them physically fight each other? Maybe it's funnier because of the nature of Sadako and Kayako themselves: they're not fighting ghosts, they're cursing ghosts. It's like if Bigfoot was spotted with an assault rifle. It's just not their style. The idea of them doing actual battle as opposed to their typical mode of attack, which is a slow, lingering, painful death, is hilarious. But somehow, despite the intrinsic humor of this concept, Sadako vs. Kayako still finds time to be genuinely eerie. I think that's all thanks to Kôji Shiraishi, one of my favorite Japanese horror directors, as he has only two modes: semi-unintentional comedy, and the scariest thing you've ever seen in your life.

So right off the bat I think this is really interesting in how it handles a version of the Ringu curse that's carried over into the modern day. I said in my review of the original Ringu that there's some inherent quality to it that forces it to remain stuck in the past, because no matter how much you change up the video format, the physical aspect of recording a tape, copying the tape, renting the tape, etc- it's all lost to time now that VHS is largely a dead medium. In Sadako vs. Kayako, the curse is widely known as an urban legend, and it's kind of tossed around frivolously because, again, nobody really uses VHS anymore- until the two main characters want to digitize a wedding tape. The dredging up of a filthy old tape deck, the chance discovery of the cursed tape inside it, and the novelty and innocence of the two friends' decision to watch it for fun, all of these things integrate seamlessly into the present-day setting with no need to mess around with internet lingo that could have made this age poorly. The internet is part of how the curse becomes distributed eventually, but it feels like a natural evolution instead of a shoehorning "hey we all use the internet now so we're obligated to have the characters be obnoxious tech-addicted teens". I dunno. I just think every separate element of this worked really well in tandem.

I may be biased because I'm a much bigger fan of the Ring franchise than Ju-on, but it did feel like Sadako had a bigger part in this than Kayako (and Toshio, as they're a package deal). The VHS tape feels more like something you interact with, but the house with the grudge curse attached is... somewhere you go or don't go. You can avoid the grudge house by just staying clear of the creepy old place that everybody tells you a bunch of people died in, but if you watch the tape you're done for. You can't exit the tape like you can exit the house.

(They also use a "new" video instead of the original seen in the first movie, which brings up a REALLY interesting concept: what if the video on the tape is different to every single person who watches it?)

But both ghosts do show up a fair amount, and again, it is done surprisingly well. Each individual appearance is creepier than the final battle, but even the showdown at the end is good. I was laughing when Toshio got sucked into the television, but somehow there's still a creep factor there. I think the way each ghost looked was crucial to this, because it seems like as the Ring and Ju-on series goes on, especially in the cheaper films, the ghosts can start to look kind of... shoddy. It's the small things that add up to this: their dresses can look too new, too artificially soiled and torn; the actresses might not be made up to look genuinely grubby enough so they'll just look like cute girls with some black makeup around their eyes; or (god forbid) they can be entirely CGI. But here, they all look convincingly creepy. Kayako in particular is as visually upsetting as she was the first time we ever saw her, and Sadako moves with an unnatural gait that drives home her status as something so dead and full of hate that she's barely human anymore. The curse victims are also acted and written well, and the element of tragedy that I feel is important to these films is there: it's always so accidental the way they get into these things, and that makes it so much worse. Nobody expected to get cursed but now they're all doomed forever.

I'm not saying I loved every single thing about this movie (my man Shiraishi still can't end a film to save his life, although in this particular situation it works in the film's favor) but it was loads better than I'd expected just by thinking of the pure absurdity of it. I just want to say one more time how deeply funny I find this concept. I've (obviously) been watching a ton of Godzilla movies lately and the final fight feels like nothing if not a kaiju battle. It has the same theme of two immensely powerful beings duking it out while humans are unable to do anything but watch, cowering, and hope that they don't become collateral damage. If they make a sequel to this I will watch it immediately. If they make ten sequels I will watch them all.

We interrupt this broadcast

Probably less than no point in posting this since no one reads this blog, but I wanted to make it quite clear that I stand with Palestine; always have, always will. Every settler state across the world should be dismantled. 

In the Earth (2021)

directed by Ben Wheatley

UK

106 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

I hesitate to even mention that this film is set during the current pandemic, because I don't want it to get pigeonholed as a "pandemic movie" when it's so much more than that. It is, however, the first movie I've seen thus far that is set in the here and now not as a deliberate theme but just as a fact of the film's reality. I think what Ben Wheatley does by never explicitly mentioning the name of the virus or anything that could identify this as being our current reality is very clever and sets In the Earth up to be something that continues to feel fresh even long after we're out of this mess. The presence of heightened safety measures and mentions of deaths and lockdowns that are not attributed to anything specific gives the whole film a surreal, not-quite-right atmosphere that could be read as meaning anything, not necessarily what we're going through in real life.

This was by far my most anticipated film of the year and I have to say that it did not disappoint. Wheatley at times seems to be moving further away from the psychedelia of A Field in England and towards more traditional narrative films (we won't talk about Rebecca, but... it exists), but In the Earth is a (chemical) marriage of the two. It begins, as I said, grounded in a recognizable reality, but as it goes on, it strays further and further into something revelatory and strange, a telluric nightmare. I was preparing myself to be a little let down if the film had stayed where it was once the main characters meet who you think is going to be the primary antagonist, because the introduction of some nutcase who espoused what seemed to me to be the themes of the film itself confuses things for me: Is this a movie about nature as persona and how to communicate with that persona, or is this a movie about a crazy guy who thinks he can communicate with nature as persona? But not pigeonholing may be the biggest lesson to take away from this, because like the way Kill List was so boring until its incredibly chaotic last act that it still remains wildly divisive, there is a pervasive feeling throughout this whole film that it's withholding something from you and snickering behind your back at the knowledge it keeps close to its vest.

A beautiful film visually as well as fascinating conceptually, the use of strong single-color lighting to backdrop many scenes in the forest makes this stand out (I mean that literally as well as a figure of speech) from other movies that use a forest as their setting. I was struck by how unnatural the signs of human habitation within the forest looked, the way they were shot- the sun shining through Zach's tent and giving everything a bright red glow, the strobing of Dr. Olivia's experimental light-and-sound methods- but how it still really felt like I was there inside it. This is another shortfall I've noticed in in-the-woods movies: watching a forest on film usually does little to nothing to convey its expansiveness; that can only be experienced standing in the middle of it. But I felt that expansiveness when I was watching In the Earth. The sense of the forest is palpable, it's like physically being there on a wet and muggy and chilly night, clothes soaked through. Excellent cinematography that combines the natural and constructed in ways that are not only good to look at but also relevant to the film's message.

During the scene where Alma (played very, very well by Ellora Torchia as if she hadn't already had a bad enough time with nature in Midsommar) experiences the full brunt of the forest's consciousness, I kept thinking of a specific line from the last episode of True Detective's first season that has stuck with me over the years since I watched the show. "You're in Carcosa now", said to the main character not to indicate a physical passage but a crossing into a mental state. Carcosa as synonym for trouble, you're in trouble now, now you're somewhere that you can't come back from. I think the title of this film fits perfectly into what that line represents. You're in the Earth now. No coming back.

Ben Wheatley really does not do traditional horror, though he has made many films that I would call horror, and this is another example of that. This movie breaks down the elements of folk horror into something more avant-garde, something that isn't guided by tropes so much as it is by an overall atmosphere. But if you're going into this expecting something classically creepy, you're probably looking in the wrong place. The horror of this comes from the unknown and unknowable, and again I am going to borrow a line, this time from the film adaptation of Annihilation and possibly the only unique and interesting thing that film had to contribute: It's not like us. It's un-like us. That's what the mind at the center of In the Earth is: unlike us. The full horror- if you can even call it horror, but what Alma experiences certainly looked pretty horrific to an outsider- is in the enmeshment of a mind entirely foreign to human senses with our own minds. I think that this could do with multiple watches before I feel like I've gotten all of it.

Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999)

directed by Takao Okawara

Japan

107 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

This film marked the beginning of the Millennium era for the Godzilla franchise, and it seems as eager as possible to bring the series into the modern age. I wonder if there's going to eventually be a term coined for movies from the early 00s who were this overzealous in their application of what was, at the time, the height of technology, like the way we recognize certain design trends from the 19th century as "mid-century modern" today. Millennial Maximalism? Fin de siécle-Nouveau? Whatever it is, it ages like milk.

But anyway. This movie introduces us to a new and slightly updated version of Godzilla; so do all of the others, in their way, but this time some of the changes that we would come to recognize in the current iteration of his design were seen for the first time. In the opening scenes when he makes landfall, he does it with an uncharacteristic silence that I think was a very deliberate move. I think that was the most obvious way they could have gone about letting on that we're in a new era now: here's Godzilla not doing his roar. They withhold that signature moment for a bit, showing that the things that have become hallmarks of the series are not immune to change. It is all still there, of course- the roar, the atomic breath, the overall vibe- but made newer and shinier. Godzilla himself is spikier than ever, oddly slope-shouldered and quite green. He feels more calculating in this one, too. He seems to strategize and look at things from every angle before deciding on a plan of action, even being visibly weirded out at one point when the thing he's fighting pulls out the transformation sequence. I can't say much about the quality of the CGI surrounding him, but the suit looks great as usual, at least.

About that CGI... yeah, it's rough. Technical limitations of the time period and all that, I know; it's just not possible for something made in the early 2000s to look as good as something made today, but... it's not great. For maybe the first time, they have Godzilla stomp through actual Japan in some scenes instead of intricately constructed miniatures. One would think superimposing him against a real-life photographic backdrop would make it feel like he was really there, but it's the exact opposite. It just feels even more unreal. Miniatures are still used for a lot of it, but when they're not, it's almost laughably bad. The big kaiju battle is, thankfully, two guys in suits knocking each other about the way it's meant to be, but before that is a manta-ray-related CGI morph scene that is so deeply bizarre I felt like I was hallucinating it. There's just a lot of weird choices made about how to integrate the CGI with everything else and it ends up feeling like a shirt being worn inside out for how obvious the seams are. The primary antagonist is really interesting even if its manta ray form is incredibly strange, though, and I liked the new restraint the film shows in keeping the enemy faceless for so long.

There's also something really off about the sound design here that I can't quite put my finger on. They do use the themes that we all know and love, but a lot of the time, I'd say even more often than not, there's just... nothing? It's totally silent, no music, no sounds of explosions and stomping. It's really jarring and it felt like a conspicuous absence instead of a purposeful choice.

I really appreciated the human characters a lot in this one, even though there's not so much an intricate individual story for any of them as there is a creation of a new overall perspective towards Godzilla preparedness. The human characters we spend the most time with are not members of the military or scientists, but a father and daughter who, along with some other scattered individuals across the country, make up a stormchaser-like network that tracks Godzilla and alerts the populated areas in his path so that they can have the most possible time to evacuate. The goal of this is to find a way of living with Godzilla, like adapting to life in an area prone to natural disasters. I was greatly thankful for this new outlook that wasn't from the perspective of the military, as that plot was getting a little long in the tooth from being hammered in practically every film. The military is there, but the focus is on smaller-scale attempts at finding a better solution than shooting Godzilla with masers and throwing fighter jets at him.

As is often the case, the most interesting thing about this is what it says about Godzilla from a philosophical standpoint. I once brought up Frankenstein in one of my Godzilla reviews because I felt like it was the closest Western equivalent- a creature who is not just a creature, but who stands for something more, who has a depth of feeling to them outside of their physical appearance. With some ideas that this movie introduces, that comparison seems to be more apt than I may have originally thought. In Frankenstein, the monster's creator is horrified by his creation and rejects him, leaving the monster in a state of anguish and ennui as he doesn't fit in with civilization, but is still a thinking, feeling being. Is this not similar to Godzilla's own creation? Did we not bring him about ourselves, only to immediately begin searching for ways to destroy him? They ask at the end of the film: even though he always brings such destruction, why does Godzilla end up protecting us in the end? The answer to this is almost at the level of parody- "Maybe there's a bit of Godzilla inside each and every one of us", yes, somebody literally says that- but I think I realized for maybe the first time that even if Godzilla has no respect whatsoever for human civilization, he does seem to do things that ultimately serve to protect human life as a whole, despite massive casualties in the process. Godzilla seems to have a distinct motive in this film and I think it's fascinating to watch him operate towards a specific end like this.

Shopping Tour (2012)

directed by Mikhail Brashinsky

Russia, Finland

70 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

This is a really good movie that for some reason I had never paid any attention to until last night. I think it's because I would see that poster of a little girl with blood smeared around her mouth and the ugly font and go "ugh, another zombie movie". If only I knew before how wrong that was. It's best to go into this blind, though, so beware.

So the main characters are a boy in his early teens and his mom taking a shopping trip to Finland along with a bus full of other Russian tourists. The relationship between the two of them is very strained due to the implied recent death of the boy's father, and the overall fact of how hard it is to be a teen and the parent of a teen. Once they get to Finland they end up in the middle of a nationwide celebration of cannibalism and violence in a hyper-real version of every international traveler's nightmare scenario: You go through the draconian ordeal of border crossing and then suddenly no one will help you and everyone is antagonistic, except now it's worse because they also want to eat you.

I suppose this could also be unpopular because it's found-footage, a subgenre which still invites knee-jerk negativity amongst a lot of viewers. Most of the footage is supposed to have been filmed on the boy's camera phone, although they do use some cuts and fade(s)-to-black that betray the "purity" of the found-footage aesthetic. But this movie has a unique perspective. I can't think offhand of any other movies intended for adults where the main characters are a teen and his mom. You would think it would get annoying quickly and not be suitable fodder for an entire film, but Shopping Tour goes all in on this concept and is essentially a character study of the two before it introduces its main premise. There's something deeply genuine about the way they're depicted constantly bickering, constantly thinking the other one is wrong and they're right, that they know more than each other. It's a realistic and realistically flawed relationship where you can tell that it's two people who love each other but are currently inhabiting the worst period of each other's life. This isn't the kind of relationship you typically see depicted on film, and if you do, it usually doesn't introduce cannibals at any point.

Once the whole cannibal thing started getting going, this started to feel much more like A Movie™. I was hoping the stark realism would carry over into that part of the film and we would get some uniquely harrowing scenes handled with the same degree of naked tragedy and emotion as the rest of it, but all in all it's not that original. Which is fine, I still had fun. It's original enough that the parts where it dials it in don't matter as much. When the first person dies there's no solid divide between that moment and the rest of the movie, and I thought that was really great- no build-up, no prior warning, and the format prevents it from using any overwrought musical sting. You just see somebody get brutally killed all of a sudden and then all hell breaks loose. The sound design leaves something to be desired big time (there is a Wilhelm scream) but aesthetically the violence was on point.

The first death also signals a really sharp turn into comedy that did clash a little with its previous seriousness, but somehow it works well. This is all super blatant anti-Finnish propaganda but it is honestly very funny, and I'm hoping it's all in jest, as a person with Finnish ancestry. I mean, it purports that every Finn is some kind of cannibal pagan who practices a midsummer ritual involving a total free-for-all of murder and people-eating. It is not kind to the Finnish at all, but it is very funny about it.

And the question of what exactly these people are is something I'm thinking about even after the movie has ended. We get an explanation of the fake cannibal festival that is surprisingly in-depth considering the small scope of the film, but there's something weird and trope-defying about the method to the Finns' madness. They don't act like typical Texas Chainsaw cannibals who lure you in with hospitality and then kill you and eat you for dinner, they're more akin to the classic zombie in that they just bite and eat people in the streets, but they're also in full possession of their faculties, and cannot spread their flesh-eating tendencies via a bite. (This is proven by an unfortunate Pakistani guy who married a Finnish woman, knowing of her nature and reaching an agreement with her, but finds that all bets are off once she dies.) I think movies like this that are based around an old idea but manage to execute it with a huge amount of innovation and also an engaging and emotionally stirring human element are extremely impressive. I can't say this was perfect from all angles but I laughed at it, I felt moved by the main characters, and I was interested in the lore behind it. There's something inherently amusing about a movie where the monsters are just Finnish people gone rogue.