The Third Eye (2007)

directed by Leah Walker

Canada

91 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I'm not even sure why I'm reviewing this because it's probably only of interest to me and like five other people, but I was so surprised to actually like it after it almost lost me in the first few minutes that I just want to talk about it. This might be the first review of it online, but admittedly I've barely done any digging to find other reviews.

So there's really no good way to describe this movie because anything I say about it is going to make it sound way more bonkers than it actually is. And I guess it is kind of bonkers, but the concept of it and the way it's executed are very different from each other. Basically, this is about a woman struggling to come to terms with her brother's death, which many around her are blaming on either an overdose or a suicide, which for all intents and purposes it appears to have been. But that explanation leaves her with questions, and here is where this movie gets bizarre - she finds out that her brother was interested in self-trepanation, and that he may have been involved with people who could have helped him with it. This movie is about trepanation. Like, as in cutting a hole in your skull. And somehow, I don't know how, it manages to deal with the topic as if trepanation - referred to by some of the characters as if it's a hot new street drug called "Sight" - is the newest fad among those hip and in-the-know. On paper everything about this sounds ridiculous, but it's laid out in a reasonable and believable manner, and again, I really don't know exactly how Third Eye manages to pull this off.

The reason it almost lost me as soon as I started watching was because this entire movie is so solidly caked in an aesthetic very specific to the early-to-mid-2000s that I initially assumed it was going to be a try-hard, shallow affair. I am also not sure how to describe this aesthetic other than to say that if you're familiar with it, you know it. Leather wristlets, spiked hair, dark clothing, combat boots, fingerless gloves (at one point the main character wears fingerless gloves over regular gloves), and anybody of any gender wearing heavy eyeliner. It's not quite punk but it's also not not punk. The music they listen to isn't harsh or crusty enough to be punk; it's more like industrial, but for the most part I think these people can best be described as emo. This pervades everything about this movie, and if you're not willing to humor something so stuck in 2007, it'll chip away at your ability to enjoy the film.

But there is something that feels so genuine and unapologetic about this that as soon as I recovered from the shock of seeing so many low-rise cuffed jeans and unnecessary vests being worn over long-sleeved shirts I realized that this didn't have the vibe of something that was just for looks, it felt like an extension of the people who had made the film. Being as this is clearly a low-budget project that was written by a brother and sister, I feel like it's more likely that this is just what the filmmakers were personally into, and they had the freedom to make this movie look exactly how they wanted it to look without the influence of major studios who they had to acquiesce to because they were getting funding from them. It doesn't feel like it's appropriating an aesthetic. It just is that aesthetic. Something about it made me feel deeply nostalgia, which is weird because I'm 23 and too young to have been emo.

Getting over the look of it also let me realize that the writing and the plot is not half bad. It takes itself seriously enough that it made me take it seriously too. I liked the main character a lot: She felt like a genuine, complex, flawed person, with her own agenda that motivated her and a refusal to cave to either the viewer's expectations or the expectations of other characters. She was a rare well-written woman character in and amongst a bunch of really badly-written women characters I've been watching lately. The situation she's in is also dealt with well, and nothing feels soppily sentimental - it all feels real enough. And fortunately, there's not too much stigma put onto drug users and addicts, as there can often be in any movie that concerns an overdose. It doesn't really talk a lot about drugs in general, even though they're always there. This is a movie about trepanation, first and foremost.

The last thing I'll say is that this seems to be getting lumped into a lot of lists of horror movies, mostly, I'm guessing, by people who haven't actually seen it. It sounds like it should be a horror movie, and I was kind of expecting it to be one too, but it's really not. I would just call this a drama - no genre elements here. The fact that it involves drilling holes in your skull (and your buddies' skulls, if they want it bad enough) is pulled off as naturally as the subculture it's set in.

Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974)

directed by Toshio Masuda

Japan

114 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I wasn't happy about having no other option than to watch this in such poor quality that I could barely make out any of the actors' faces, but apparently Toho pulled this and doesn't want to acknowledge it due to its depiction of mutated humans. I'm not sure what about mutated humans is so bad to warrant banning a film entirely, but that's how it goes.

So this is a movie that came out at a time when environmental concerns were becoming more mainstream, and it was also clearly made by somebody who felt passionate about the looming possibility of full-scale societal destruction due to a number of mounting factors. And I mean really, really passionate about that. It is a little bit weird that the prophecies of Nostradamus are the vehicle used for conveying this environmentalism message, instead of, like, science, but hey whatever. There's science here, don't get me wrong, but it always falls back on "oh man, Nostradamus warned us about this" like it really believes in what he was writing.

The film also takes certain stances that... I'm not really going to criticize, because like I said, this is very of its time and also of its place; it's specific to Japan and it doesn't make sense to map my American feelings about the government onto it. However, it seems to have this weird idea that the people and the government need to work in tandem, and that a significant portion of the blame for global catastrophe could or should be shouldered by regular citizens, which is pleasantly optimistic (at least the first half is) but untrue of any government and any citizenry. It's a weird concept to imagine people and government bolstering each other and each benefiting from the other, because government is inherently unequal. As long as people are elected to the top, there will be people who have financial, personal, or moral investment in keeping other people at the bottom. And the easiest way to do that is to let their houses rot around them and their families be poisoned by toxic air and water.

There's also this sense of naïveté that I see in a lot of mid-to-late-20th century environmentalism where the underlying theme, after all possible solutions are trotted out and the danger of ignoring them is proven, is "oh, but also we have time, we'll turn back before it's too late". It's easy to judge this when you look back from the hell year 2022, and maybe in 1974 it did genuinely look like a brighter future was inevitable once we came to our senses, but... the fact that people ever believed we would come to our senses seems absurd and misguided at best. I really do see this a ton in media from the 70s; people really thought that eventually we would wake up, that it was a given that with a little work we'd someday help all the people to see how our treatment of the planet was wrong and that we need to change, and a change would then be implemented that would set us back on track. Obviously that has never happened and probably will never happen unless we abolish capitalism, classism, and wipe our brains of the fixation with money and power that we've had for centuries.

Weird as it is, though, this is also a Toho film, with their signature practical effects excellence. So there's a ton in here that would feel more at home in a Godzilla movie than whatever the hell this is. It's a dead serious film and I really do respect what it has to say, even if it doesn't necessarily hold up in certain areas, but I also respect the giant slugs and vastly more silly-looking giant bats. I do not respect its depiction of deranged, cannibalistic natives; as I've brought up before, Toho films have a problem with that. It reaches for some low-hanging fruit at times especially with its constant barrage of images of real-life human suffering and its repeated mantra of "how terrible would that be if it happened to US?". Plus there's an attempt to jam in more human drama just so the whole thing isn't one never-ending downslide into death and destruction, and boy, is it boring.

I don't know if I could actually recommend this to anyone unless you have very specific taste, but it's a curiosity that I wish were more widely available. I've heard secondhand that it's the kind of thing that people of a certain age had the joy of accidentally catching on late-night television and were scarred for life from it, forever stuck with bizarre memories of this bizarre movie and unable to satisfy them due to the movie all but vanishing. Once it devolves into showing nothing but massive frenzies of looting and rioting it gets extremely boring for a stretch, but in the end it does wrap back around into something genuinely heartfelt and real. There is a core of urgency to this even if it's hokey and dated.

Ironfinger (1965)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

101 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I've been watching a lot of movies that I truly enjoy without reviewing them for various reasons, so I wanted to at least do a quick review of this, which has been the most elusive film on my watchlist for quite some time. It's in the Criterion Collection, but I'm constantly surprised that, apart from being streamable on their subscription-only channel, you can't access it more readily. 

Jun Fukuda is perhaps better known for his Godzilla films, but I think I might actually like his work outside of the sci-fi genre better. He directs a lot of spy and spy-parody-type stuff, and his work always has a liveliness to it that makes it magnetically engrossing for even me, somebody who really doesn't care about spy movies. He's quite obviously a huge fan of James Bond, and Ironfinger is directly making fun of/paying tribute to Bond films, but the thing that makes is such an achievement is that it never feels like "just" a Bond parody - it's a movie all of its own that works even if, again, you've never seen and don't care about James Bond.

The most surprising thing about this, to me, was Akira Takarada's performance in the lead role. I guess I'd been watching too many yakuza films that featured him as this kind of stoic, inexpressive, usually doomed character to realize that he can play extremely dynamic roles like this one as well - and hit them out of the park. His character never stops moving and is generally always one step ahead of his pursuers, somehow. He isn't necessarily cunning or wily, but the universe of the film seems to bend towards getting him out of danger in the end - this didn't bother me, because literally everything is so larger than life and absurd in Ironfinger that the fact that the protagonist continually slips out of the grasp of danger despite limited resources at times didn't feel like a stretch. Your view of this might vary, and the ability of one guy to keep avoiding getting killed by, like, a dozen guys, who actually do capture him several times, might be too hard to accept for some. But you gotta roll with it. Anyway, Takarada is extremely funny without feeling forced, and brings depth and personality to his riff on a classic character who, to me as an outsider anyway, seems to have little personality as a rule. He also switches between three languages effortlessly the whole time, which was entertaining to watch.

The shortfalls here are largely the same as with any spy movie of the time: mostly misogyny. Mie Hama plays a girl well-versed in explosives who allies herself with all sides but is ultimately in the service of herself, and her role is also as fun and nutty as Takarada's lead, but she's written with less dimensionality and seems defined mostly by just being a girl. I don't want to repeat the mistakes of how her character was written by further reducing her, because she is integral to the plot, but she definitely is cut from the template of women characters who are there less for their abilities and more for the occasional half-nude scene. Although, to be fair, Takarada spends a great deal of time in nothing but boxers and socks, but I guess the difference is that he gets to do stuff in his skivvies, while Hama's bomb expert is pretty much stalled more the less clothing she has on.

I want to get back to what I said about this being more than just a Bond parody, because Fukuda's specific vibe is something that really takes effort to get right, and a lot of people don't. Everything that happens in this movie is so outlandish that it comes off, on paper, sounding like a bunch of silly fluff, while in practice, it's genuinely good. It's not something that made me feel like I had to suspend my disbelief, it just had me going along with it unquestioned because the way it's directed and put together is so spot-on that it never feels like it's stretching itself too far. It's got a loose, no-rules feeling, but to be able to establish that feeling and not tip the film over the edge into being inane is a feat.

I'm kind of astonished that anybody could call this "forgettable" and reduce it to simply being something shot between Godzilla films using recycled actors. It's just so much fun and is well-made too. If you had no idea that Toho still utilized their on-call practical effects wizards in things that don't involve Godzilla, this can be your introduction. I especially love the ending, where it looks like for all intents and purposes the effect of a bunch of guys getting creamed by oil drums was achieved by actually creaming a bunch of guys with oil drums. This is a movie that can't be pigeonholed, and I would recommend it if you can get your hands on it.

The Night House (2020)

directed by David Bruckner

USA

107 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Being "about grief" has of late become somewhat of a buzzword in horror; such-and-such film being "about grief" is usually a way that people describe something when they want to make it clear that it's not like those other horror films, the supposedly brainless ones that don't contemplate anything or have any deeper meaning. It's almost like the term "elevated horror": branding something as "about grief" makes it okay for us to enjoy it as Serious Film Watchers. I'm not here to argue about whether any specific movie itself is about grief, because that can be personal on the part of both the filmmaker and those who choose to view a film through that lens. I'm specifically talking about the act of applying a label to a horror movie that is intended to separate it from the rest of the genre as if the genre is shameful to be part of.

With that out of the way, The Night House is about grief. It's explicitly about grief in every inch of itself - every inch that isn't about self-loathing of the kind that gets into your brain and convinces you that nothing matters. This is a very subtle movie that doesn't seem like much until you've sat with it for a minute, and it's certainly not something that a lot of people are going to be willing to accept as a horror movie. But the horror genre, to me at least, has always been about catharsis, and catharsis is what The Night House feels like, in the end.

"House horror" is one of the most prevalent subcategories of the genre, so much so that I feel a little silly even calling it A Thing when it's so widespread and hard to pin down. But by "house horror" I mean movies that involve the house as a character or an integral part of the plot, not just movies that start out when Becky and her five kids move into a huge new-construction house that turns out to have a ghoul in the basement. The house is literally a character in The Night House - or possibly there's a character in the house. Part of what made this movie so enthralling to me is that I've never really seen any film deal with the feeling of seeing yourself from the outside: the feeling of "That's my house, but I'm not home." These feelings aren't the central story, but are used as kind of a motif and are incredibly important to the bigger picture. The construction of a house and then a house to mirror that house, and then taking that further - a person to mirror a person - are acts carried out as sacrifice to maybe the most nebulous concept I've ever seen a movie try to personify. While this film is subtle, it's also extremely ambitious. It has the air of something that a writer or filmmaker would have had dwelling on their mind for years, a pet obsession, something they were personally interested in. The very light touches of the occult speak more of somebody who's done research and cares about the subject - it didn't feel like that side of the film was so scarce because of inexperience, it felt like a deliberate choice to only scratch the surface and leave the viewer feeling haunted.

I apologize if I'm being vague, but I knew nothing whatsoever about this movie before going into it, and I think that's far and away the best way to experience it. The only drawback to that is that you might get tricked by the film's subdued tone and what, at first, seems like a fairly routine set-up for a horror movie: Grieving woman remains in a house filled with memories of her deceased partner, begins experiencing bizarre supernatural events. Like I said, you have to kind of let this one ride out and not try to guess too hard where it's going, because you most likely won't be able to if you've kept yourself away from spoilers. Its masterful storytelling is almost the best part of it, how it starts at such a familiar and easy jumping-off point but evolves and branches out into strange directions until the end result is something so singular that it feels entirely different from where it began.

Without saying too much, I want to bring up the ending, because it hit me out of nowhere and has been staying with me since I saw the film. Up until then I was invested in it as an outsider, finding it riveting and conceptually fascinating as well as aesthetically pleasing, but something about that ending was personal. Something about that hit me in a deep place. Like I said, this is about grief, but not just for someone else. It's about carrying a burden within you that tells you you don't matter, and what that can do to you if you've had it your whole life. You're used to the focus being solely on the main character's wish to be reunited with their dead partner in movies like this, and that's why it's surprising when The Night House, somewhat unexpectedly, turns a mirror on the protagonist's own unaddressed self-image. The main character in that boat at the end being confronted with the seductive voice of her own apathy, being told that nothing has any meaning - or that nothing is the only meaning there is - and then making the conscious decision not to listen... that felt really real. I don't know how a movie with a relatively simple premise such as this one managed to transform itself into something resonant. There's a lot to unpack from this seemingly straightforward film.

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

directed by Roy Ward Baker / Chang Cheh

UK/Hong Kong

83 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I don't know how I made it so long without being aware that there existed a Hammer/Shaw Brothers co-production. Of course my immediate thought upon finding this out was "in what universe could that not be fantastic?" I was warned by other reviewers, however, that 7 Golden Vampires couldn't possibly live up to your expectations of it as a fan of either of those two studios, but I had to check it out anyway, and honestly? This kind of is fantastic. It's just also a little bit bad.

There's something that I genuinely love about the concept of this, and it's really a shame that Hammer never did anything else in this vein and that this movie seems to largely have been shelved and only known about by people who actively seek it out. Having familiar characters venture into other countries isn't uncommon ground for horror franchises that hit critical sequel mass - there'll sometimes be hokey films or episodes in which our heroes find themselves dealing with another culture's horror icons, but typically those installments are dealt with with less input from whatever locale they're visiting than is the case with 7 Golden Vampires. Not that this one isn't hokey as well, but the balance between Hammer and Shaw Brothers feels equal, and even breaks some stereotypes. Usually it's China who gets shoehorned into being the place with mythology and legend woven deep into its culture, and its people are assumed to be overly superstitious and mystical, but when Van Helsing tries to convince a room full of students that a vampire legend exists in their midst, the students' reaction is pretty uniformly "get the hell out of here with your European nonsense".

Fortunately, though, one guy has insider knowledge of this whole vampire business. David Chiang plays our lead from the Shaw Brothers side, and good thing he has a whole shedload of brothers (and one sister) who happen to know martial arts and are willing to defend Van Helsing, his boring-ass son, and some random rich lady as they investigate the vampires plaguing the brothers' hometown. I genuinely liked Chiang - apparently quite famous in wuxia and other movies from Hong Kong and China, there's just something about him that made him pleasant to watch even when he was not fighting, which is somewhat of a rarity; you don't usually find an actor who can do both. I just thought he had a lovely accent, I liked listening to him talk. But anyway, the rest of his brothers don't have a lot of impact on the plot other than as a magnet to attract big fight scenes to the main cast of characters were there otherwise might be none. They get to the town and it's predictably absolutely lousy with vampires, headed up by Kah, who is possessed by the evil spirit of the OG European Dracula.

This movie is noticeably more gory and contains more nudity than a lot of Hammer films; at least the earlier ones, anyway, they were getting pretty randy in the '70s. But the one big difference between this and the core Dracula series that spawned it is that there are a great many vampires in 7 Golden Vampires, whereas in Dracula, you just have the one head honcho and maybe a couple of young women he's turned, who generally always get killed along the way. 7 Golden Vampires is swarming with them, just crawling with vamps, rendering the concept of a vampire into something more similar to what the West might term a zombie. Each of them has some pretty gnarly makeup on, looking as gross and rotten as is possible, and they really just don't stop coming - the title references a select group of seven, obviously, but the fighting brothers' town is overwhelmed by their servants as well. I enjoyed seeing more gore and practical effects makeup than Hammer usually has on offer, even if it wasn't that great by technical standards. I'm specifically a big fan of that effect you see a lot in vampire movies where the vampire gets staked and they do a time-lapse shot of their body crumbling into dust, and there's a whole lot of that in this movie. When the head vamp finally gets served, we see the spear used to do the deed fall over and crack open his skull once he reaches the stage of crumbliness where the spear is no longer kept upright by being lodged in his flesh. I liked that. It's the little things.

So, yeah, I don't know what most people were expecting from this, but personally I was pretty satisfied because I went into it knowing it wasn't going to be a """genuinely""" good film. When you think about it, Hammer and Shaw Brothers are both studios where, after watching a certain amount of films from them, you know just about where to set your expectations: Hammer consistently gives out movies with much the same tone, especially the early ones; you learn to anticipate that kind of cheesy fake sound-stage Bavaria and historical inaccuracy, and with Shaw Brothers you know you can't expect knockout acting and intense, heartstring-tugging drama. So as long as you have some familiarity with everyone involved, I don't see why one can't enjoy The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires as much as one might expect to. It's certainly never boring.