Zëiram (1991)

directed by Keita Amemiya

Japan

92 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is one of those movies that comes right out the gates swinging, with a pre-credits scene introducing not our heroes, but our fearsome alien antagonist. It's black-and-white and almost avant-garde, with deep chanting accompanying the first glimpse we get of the alien fugitive's incredible might and heavy footfalls as he seemingly wipes out an entire army of attackers just by walking in their midst. And if his design looks good in grainy monochrome, you're in for a real treat once the light hits it. Although the plot is mildly interesting, this film is memorable for one thing over all others: aesthetics.

To sum up the plot quickly: An alien bounty hunter, Iria, and her formless AI friend Bob come to Earth in pursuit of the aforementioned overpowered fugitive. In the opening it's mentioned that they beat out several others for the contract, which gives us a tantalizing glimpse of alien bounty hunter procedure that I wish was expanded upon. In order to capture Zëiram they construct a virtual arena comprised of a slice of the town of Mikasa, digitally walled off and turned into an isolated playing field so that the bounty hunters can do their thing without inevitably turning the whole surrounding area into collateral damage. Of course, two bumbling employees of an electronics-parts distributor accidentally end up trapped in the simulation as well, with their unbelievably hip pastel work uniforms. Surprisingly, having two inept guys in the way doesn't take anything away from how cool the action is. I understand this is an unpopular opinion from reading other reviews, but the comic relief only served to enhance the rest of everything for me, personally.

Everything about this movie is heavily tied to cybernetics and speculative tech. It's very Neal Stephenson, very analog-having-a-Franz-Kafka-dream-that-it-is-digital. Technology just doesn't look like this anymore - but in this case, that's why this movie is so utterly perfect. Electronics were entering what was really the last great era for bulkiness; silhouettes were beginning to slim down and become more streamlined, to evolve into the obsession with creating something as thin as possible, often at the expense of a way to vent waste heat. But for the moment, actual physical circuitboards bigger than an ant were thriving. Everything still has to be plugged in, thick bundles of cables descend from the walls, and the film's bounty-hunter protagonist's DIY home base, while not the size of the multi-ton abominations of early computing, still takes up the better part of a whole room between its various components. How accustomed are we to seeing the high-tech protagonist of our sci-fi films dial up a hologram on her smart watch that handles anything her heart desires? It's lamentable that with the introduction of things like that, we've lost things like Zëiram, deliciously chunky slices of technological perfection where you were still in control as a user.

To continue this tangent for just another second, I really think that's the crux of why nothing feels like Zëiram does anymore: At this point in time, concepts like virtual reality were still fairly new, and the flood of sci-fi literature and film speculating about how it might integrate into our lives shows a view that in hindsight is vastly more optimistic than what we ended up getting. We see stories where we can manipulate our surroundings to enhance our own lives, where we can make art and expand ourselves into a second frontier by mastering new technology as a medium for old ideas. But what actually happened was that, as is always the case, the wrong people got ahold of it. We were taken out of our fantasies of a new world to explore, and we were instead made into a commodity. Instead of being able to mold and shape technology with the skill of an artist, we got roped into being surveilled and monetized. Zëiram is a glimpse into a possible future that never came to pass because, under capitalism, the distribution of its futuristic technology could never have been so egalitarian as it dreams it might have been.

The creature design wizardry is used mostly on the alien-looking alien, but it doesn't neglect our humanoid alien either - it's never made clear if Iria just looks like that or if she was able to choose a human body to fit in with Earthlings, but even though she stays looking humanly for the whole film, she still looks cool too. She gets utilitarian power armor and a neat cloak and culturally important hair accessories. Bob the AI is also neat, for his part: he isn't a digital watch face or spunky robot companion but instead is depicted as a strange geometric shape spinning on a CRT monitor. Maybe that's what Iria's people really look like as well? Maybe Iria's civilization is a post-singularity one, and she's just made herself flesh enough to catch Zëiram and then be done with it.

As you might be able to tell, I'm totally in love with every inch of this movie. It might be dated, but people knew what the hell they were doing in 1991. It holds up. It looks better than almost anything produced now. When the alien throws off his clothing and reveals the amalgamation that his body is, the weird, unknowable, gooey horror of him shoved into a vaguely humanoid form, it's just so good. The implication that the core of him is actually very small and the rest is just organisms he's absorbed and molded to fit his environment. So good. And it's good because this is pretty much what Keita Amemiya does - his whole filmography is made of things exactly like this one. It's a movie where you can feel that all of what you're seeing is what the filmmakers intended for you to see. I wish I could describe everything about it but it's really something you need to see for yourself. Even the soundtrack is perfect.

Chompy & The Girls (2021)

directed by Skye Braband

USA

89 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Every so often a movie comes along that's so completely bonkers and has a premise so unconventional that it makes you rejoice for the indie film industry, because no one in their right mind would endorse a film like this if it meant giving it any huge amount of money. The people who watch a thing like this already know who they are and what they like; they're not leisurely theater-goers who will be happy with watching anything as long as they get to sit in an air-conditioned room with some popcorn. The poster, the tagline, especially the synopsis - "A troubled woman meets her father for the first time and their encounter goes from awkward to alarming when they witness a man swallow a little girl whole." That's all you need to know what you're getting into.

So what is this? It is what it says it is. I can't really spoil it per se, because it's pretty up-front about the whole mouth guy thing, but I almost don't want to mention my favorite part of the movie, which is when the main character and her dad first encounter Chompy, because it's so pitch-perfect you have to see it for yourself. It would be virtually impossible to create a good segue between the tired family drama of a girl with personal issues reaching out to her straight-laced yet also personally unsatisfied father and the totally nuts scenario of watching a dude eat a child, so the film doesn't try. When the main character and her dad first witness the event that kicks off the plot of the film, they don't even react. They don't look at each other and say "WTF?". They just leg it. Both of them, instinctively, know that what they're seeing is something so absurd and impossible, so ridiculous, that their brains don't know how to react other than to just get the hell out of there. No waffling about, no "did you see that?" because they both know it's real since the other one just saw it too. There's nothing you can say when you're confronted by somebody swallowing another human whole.

Trust me, no matter how weird you're imagining this is, it's weirder. That's why I don't feel too bad discussing the events of the film. I can describe them to you, but I can't describe how bizarre it is to watch this for the first time.

I'm calling this a horror movie because I don't know what else it is, and also because honestly I just hate the mouth man. I hate the way he looks so much. He's supposed to be goofy-looking and kind of funny but that moment when the pair first see him and he starts walking wordlessly towards them is so genuinely unexpected that it has almost the same effect, sans cultural commentary, as the now-minorly-iconic "running straight at you without stopping" scene in Get Out. But you must get over your biases here, and I must restrain myself from spoiling anything further than that, because there's more to Chompy than meets the eye, or... mouth.

You might wonder if such a crazy idea can sustain itself over the course of a 90-minute film, and personally I feel that the answer is a resounding yes. The plot itself keeps revealing new snags and complications as it gets further in, eventually involving a pocket dimension, parasitic spirits, cloning, having one foot be the normal size and one be a little tiny baby foot, and other stuff that gets rolled up along the way like the movie is a katamari of weirdness. The tone is hard to describe and I may be putting some people off just by describing how wild it all is, but hey, it's not my job to sell this movie to you. That being said, though, this isn't the vapid "just shouting stupid stuff" humor of, say, Fred, or the Annoying Orange. There are rules and guidelines that govern how the universe of Chompy & The Girls works. The human characters do make decisions that at times make no sense at all, but as far as the mechanics of spiritual possession and mouth warriors fighting evil forces goes, the film is solid. I also appreciated that you can hear Chompy breathing since, as logic would dictate, his enormous, torso-sized mouth means his breathing sounds would be much louder than normal. That was a thoughtful detail to include.

Honestly, what this reminds me of more than anything is Dave Made A Maze, if anybody remembers that one, even though the two have totally different concepts. The DIY spirit of Dave Made A Maze and the way the characters were constantly reacting almost unscripted to having various things thrown at them is the only thing I can really think to compare Chompy & The Girls to. And as wacky as it is, there is a heart to this film as well, and it involves one of my favorite and truest messages: Oh my god, get a divorce if you're just gonna make each other miserable. It's legal for a reason, people. Without getting soppy, the main character's backstory is fleshed out and eventually wrapped up at the end in a way that felt genuine and did hit me in the heart just a little. Finding a way to involve a human element in a premise this strange can't be easy, and if this is the director's debut, I'm very excited to see what else is hiding in their brain. Also a little terrified, I'm that too.

Meander (2020)

directed by Mathieu Turi

France

91 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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There's something inherently sinister and disgusting about being trapped in a pipe compared to, say, a cage, or a small room even if it's purpose-built for torturing you. Pipes aren't generally meant to be seen; they ferry liquids (often waste or other noxious substances) from place to place and don't get maintained as frequently as they should. The thought of being stuck in a pipe is more upsetting to me than being stuck anywhere else. I don't know if Meander was directly inspired by Saw or the more recent Oxygène, but it one-ups both films by adding in sci-fi and horror elements that make it vastly more interesting and unique than anything else in the "trapped in a place" subgenre, as well as forcing its main character into a system of pipes that is not only gross by virtue of being pipes but because of... more organic presences in it.

I do not want to compare this to Saw overmuch, or to Oxygène, because Meander is really a thing all of its own. In mentioning how much it improves on the model set out by previous similar films, I don't want to tie it back too much to those other films. But it really does do a lot of new, unique things. We're teased at the beginning credits with a snippet of a news broadcast about corpses showing up with horrific injuries and reports of strange lights in the sky, and from then on things are introduced that make us realize bit by bit that the pipeworks the main character is trapped in are the construction of something much different than we're used to. If anything, this is way more Cube than Saw. Hell, it's more "Hellraiser pain dimension ruled over by an incomprehensible being" than Saw. The big problem I have with the "trapped" niche of the torture-porn subgenre is that it feels like a slasher with steps taken out (I.E., the killer already found their victim/s and now has them captive to do whatever with them). Meander takes that concept and turns it on its head to give us something thoroughly more bizarre and, in the process, more satisfying.

There is also something personal about this and the way it deals with bodily transformation that I wanted to mention, because the director made another film called Hostile before this one that similarly does things with notions of alienness and transformation. The main character in Meander has heavy trauma in her past relating to the death of her young daughter, and this memory metaphorically as well as literally haunts her on her way through the pipes. Vestiges of human-ness surround her, but they're an idea of humanity as seen through the lens of something inhuman. From the recreation of her memories, served to her in curated snippets, to the actual appearance of her daughter - but of course not her real, living daughter, just a facsimile - to her pursuit through the pipes by something that, while broiled to a crisp and driven insane by hatred, is recognizably human if you look at it for long enough. All of these things speak of an edited humanity, a stretching of the boundary line between human and human-as-worn-like-a-hand-puppet. Weirdly, the film somehow manages to emphasize that there is still some form of kindness to be found here: One of the most benevolent and helpful presences is a rotting human jawbone attached to some kind of cybernetic arm. I should not have found it so cute the way it kept gently donking into the main character like a baby goat practicing headbutts. The uncanny is definitely a strong force at play in making Meander feel original and fresh.

But is it fun to watch? A lot of these trap movies can feel like they drag on at the beginning because generally there's a warm-up period where the protagonist is just pissed-off and groggy and doesn't know what's going on, and the challenges aren't too hard, but the protag's reactions are over-the-top because of course they've never been stuck in a Hate Tube™ before and don't know how bad it'll get. The situation in this case kind of takes care of that because, thanks to the hints at more extraterrestrial strangeness going on than meets the eye, it feels more like there's something to discover right from the very start. No characters here have much of a "wow" factor; the protagonist doesn't have many compelling traits, she's just a classic case of "wrong place, wrong time, now you're stuck in a weird tube that's trying to kill you". I think it's pretty boring that the only backstory she was given was that she has a dead child, because that's heavily overused by now (especially for women, who don't seem in fiction to ever get to have trauma except for that of having or not having children) but I don't feel like the main character's backstory was make-or-break in a scenario this bizarre.

Matango (1963)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

89 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I decided it was high time I gave this one a second look, because the first time I saw it, although I knew what people were telling me the film's message was, I don't think I quite got it or that it sunk in enough for me to fully appreciate it. A large part of that is probably down to me not having seen Gojira 1954 yet, or anything else Ishirō Honda had done for that matter, and maybe having some inherent prejudices against the idea that a "monster movie" could ever contain social commentary.

Tacking on "Attack of the Mushroom People" as an alternate title for this film's international release does it such a huge disservice that I'm reluctant to even mention it. Yes, there are technically mushroom people in the movie, but I hesitate to call what they do "attacking". Semantics aside, hearing that title out of context automatically paints a certain picture: You expect something cheesy, mushroom people? How can that be serious? But to go back to the semantics for a minute, I think the line between "mushroom" and "person" is a big point in the film itself, and for the alternate title to stick a moniker on the transformed, half-organic humans and try to pull in audiences with the promise of some freakish creatures is inconsiderate and ruins the film's image for anyone unfamiliar with it.

Rant over. So what am I talking about here? I'm talking about a movie absolutely rife with the existential dread of becoming aware of your place in a rapidly industrialized, sprawling city; becoming aware that some part of yourself is dying or being killed every time you wake up and participate in the city's existence. Becoming aware of the incompatibility of the human soul with its surroundings.

Our main cast of characters is a group of people, not really friends, aboard a small recreational boat that hits rough waters and ends up on a mysterious, uninhabited island. Nobody in this is particularly likable, with Akira Kubo being the slight exception, and Miki Yashiro playing the one girl who you sympathize with the most because she doesn't even want to be there. Even the people who don't constantly squabble and try to shove everybody else out of the way in the name of self-preservation never do much speaking up - this isn't a "good guy takes the helm and steers everybody back on the path or righteousness" type of thing. Personal virtue or morals doesn't really matter on the island. Your presence alone is enough to have the island start trying to snake its tentacles into you, enough to corrupt you, no matter who you were before arriving. Actually, I should put that another way: The island only amplifies whatever you were before arriving.

Before long the "crew" start to find things on and about the island that are unsettling: Evidence that people had been there before, but no bodies or anything to tell the story of what happened to them. Man-made objects on the island, like the derelict boat, appear to be completely coated in some kind of mold or fungus spores. There's a diary that's found with entries about how the mushrooms growing rampant on the island are poisonous, but nobody seems to take it very seriously, especially when the food starts running out. Six people eat up the small resources they can scrounge pretty quickly, and before too long they start turning to those mushrooms, despite all warnings. Nigh on everything about this movie can be taken metaphorically, and the rapid consumption and personal hoarding of the scant supply of canned foods on the abandoned boat that eventually leads to the crew plundering the island's natural resources is a pretty clear reference to humans stripping the land of everything we can make money from or consume before turning to whatever other uncorrupted, untouched wilds we can get our hands on.

The atmosphere in this is so heavy. You really feel the fungal dampness, the rich moist decay. Even though a lot of the runtime takes place inside the derelict boat (itself rotting and decaying) it almost feels like the characters have no refuge, that the island takes over everything. There's something deeply sinister going on at all times during Matango even though - and this is one of the points that turned me off the first time I watched it - it can occasionally drag a bit, preoccupied with personal issues and petty arguments. But the island is not, I would argue, a malevolent force. Nor is it benevolent for that matter: The island just exists, and it's the nature of the people who venture into its wilderness that results in their being subsumed by it. As with Godzilla, it is just a force of nature. Its appearance reflects back on us, not on it.

If this bored you or you got tired of seeing people be cruel to one another and not work together, the final fifteen minutes should at least leave an impression on you. It's one of the most genuinely chilling and discomfiting things I've seen on film in recent memory - the surreal, nightmarish forest of swelling mushrooms and things that used to be people, enticing us to just eat of their flesh, just do that one thing and you can be so happy. If the meaning of this wasn't clear enough, the expression of pure bliss as one of the crewmates eats his first mushroom and flashes back to everything about Tokyo that gave him pleasure before - the bright lights, the dancing women - should reinforce it. There's no difference between becoming a mushroom and becoming a member of the weird collective being that is a megalopolis. As soon as you've tasted how delightful it can be, you are now of it. The horror of Matango is not about turning into a mushroom, it's about becoming consumed, not realizing until it's too late that you've lost all sense of humanity. There's no way to fight it and the only way to stay alive is to conform. I don't mean to evangelize, but please watch a subtitled version instead of a dub if you can find it. It's crucial that your viewing of this is as close to how it was originally intended to be as possible.