Message From Space (1978)

directed by Kinji Fukasaku

Japan

105 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I have to admit that I'm one of the four remaining people on Earth who have never seen a Star Wars movie. I am, however, a tokusatsu devotee, and while I'm not nearly as familiar with Toei as I am with Tsuburaya and Toho (my two beloveds), I appreciated Message From Space first and foremost for the way it looked more than anything else about it, including the fact that it very obviously lifts heavily from Star Wars at almost every turn. This will be a pretty shallow review for that reason. Also, I generally don't have much to say about this. So I'll be talking first about the aesthetics of it, because that was what mostly caught my eye here, and then I'll get into stuff beyond the surface level as best I can.

Toei has churned out an incredibly extensive back catalogue of television series and films over the years (and continues to do so), but they are not as well-known for their miniatures as Toho or Tsupro; this is largely (I think - as I said, I'm not that familiar with their output) because they tend to lean more into sentai series than stuff with kaiju in it. That being said, the miniature work was the best thing about Message From Space, and really just the set design in general was what elevated it beyond what it could have otherwise been. Obviously Star Wars is known for its pioneering effects work too, and I wouldn't say that this movie surpasses it, but the shots from below of the big ominous starship gliding overhead with all of its detail and its jets glowing blue could easily have been taken right out of the original Star Wars films. Some of the special effects are seriously lacking due to technical limitations of the time, but it's the primitive computer effects that are bad, not the practical - I only cringed once, when the main characters were supposed to be floating around in space (in basically civilian clothes? Wearing just gas masks that half-covered their faces?). You can't really blame anybody for this, though, because they really couldn't have done any better at the time. That's just where the technology was at. It's more like something you look back at and laugh about, like dated elementary school portraits.

Where the design of this film really shines is the interior sets of the Galactic Empire stand-in's aforementioned ominous starship. They pulled out all the stops designing the throne room, and it's unfortunate that that single room is basically all we see, but the sheer opulence of it is satisfying enough. You get the sense that these aliens are not just evil but also arrogant, that their passion for aesthetics and visual markers of wealth drives them hand-in-hand with a desire to subjugate and murder; some evildoers in science fiction have their territory marked by dankness and pervasive shadows, but these guys belong to the class of nefarious aliens whose sinister intentions are highlighted in the obscene extravagance of their ship. On the outside, it looks like a hunk of various vacuum cleaner parts glued together, but inside there's a weirdly almost Art Deco feel with a tremendous amount of detail, mostly in gold and red. It's echoed in the costuming, as well: no Stormtrooper ripoffs here, at least not visually. The silver-painted bad guys wear uniforms as colorful and ornate as the inside of their ship, and even the background grunts are kitted out reasonably well.

With all of that, the thing I'm really mad about is that the aliens who are under siege by the bad guys don't get half or even a quarter as much care given to their appearance and environment. While the big scary evil empire flies around looking like a futuristic opera hall ruled by fascists, the good guys are just people in robes with laurel wreaths who seem to primarily live outside. It seriously irked me that all the design nuance was used up for the baddies.

As far as the story goes... about the most I can say about it is that it's dissimilar enough from Star Wars (at least what I know if it) to feel original, but also not very interesting. The brunt of it revolves around a cast of eight disparate characters (one of whom is a very young Hiroyuki Sanada) who were chosen by eight mystical seeds sent out by the desperate victims of the faux-Galactic Empire, and who will apparently cause some miracle to happen once they're all united. So for a lot of the running time, the eight are just trying to stick together and search out other recipients of the seeds. I actually liked this and thought it was interesting because it kind of removes the typical bravado and personal responsibility that an action-packed sci-fi film would typically imbue its heroes with: Instead of daring, lone-wolf rescue missions, the eight characters are explicitly required to do nothing but attempt to present a literal united front, and their own individual ability to fight (which they do, there is a lot of fighting, don't get me wrong) is secondary to their ability to follow directions. It's not like everybody sits around all the time, and the goal is also to defeat the bad guys, not just show up to the party on time, but the motivation comes from outside. I wish there were more sci-fi movies where the premise was that several people receive basically an intergalactic RSVP and have to hustle somewhere together within a certain period of time.

I feel like giving this three stars is being unkind to the aesthetic heights it reaches, but on the whole it's just not that great as an actual movie. If you could freeze-frame shots from this and set them up as an art exhibit (much less hunt down the actual props and put them in an art exhibit), it would probably be better than the movie itself. Everybody puts in a good and believable performance (it is always weird to see Vic Morrow in stuff) and you most likely won't get bored if you're a fan of anything I mentioned in this review, but there's also a reason why this isn't constantly brought up as a viable alternative to Star Wars. Also, this is one of those cases where you watch this and then look up what else the director has done and it absolutely blindsides you.

Offseason (2022)

directed by Mickey Keating

USA

83 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Mickey Keating is one of those rare directors whose new films I always look forward to because of his track record. Each film of his feels different and has a unique and fresh premise. Offseason wears its influences on its sleeve, largely the oft-forgotten gem Messiah of Evil (which I'm just delighted is getting some love), and having those more obscure influences in a modern film means this is something that feels altogether new.

I want to talk about locale for a second, because Offseason is a horror film that roots itself in its location. There are typical backdrops in horror that we're all used to seeing: The crumbling, haunted mansion; the spirit-ridden forest; the backpacking trip gone wrong; even the open ocean has many films dedicated to the terror of it. But one of my absolute favorite types of horror is the regional horror film, the film that's set in a specific place, usually where the filmmaker(s) hail from, and that is immediately recognizable to other locals of the area. In this particular case, the setting is something I see far less often than the other horror locations I just named: haunted Florida.

It is hard to describe in words how good this movie is at establishing atmosphere, because you can never really talk about the way something looks and feels to anyone who hasn't seen or felt it. And as hard as it is for me to try to do that for you, here, in this review, Offseason faces a bit of the same problem: There are people in the world who haven't been to Florida. I'm one of them, even though I live in its more conservative hat, Georgia. How do you impart the feeling of a place to someone who's never been? It's a difficult thing, but watching this movie, I felt like I was there, and I felt like the potential for horrific Florida-based media is sorely underused and perhaps overshadowed by fiction making fun of the state for its wacky criminals instead of embracing that, like all places, it has an ecosystem all its own with traits that make it rife with the possibility of unique horror.

Offseason takes place, as the title would imply, in a resort town during the off-season. Florida is known for its severe weather, and that's the backdrop of the main character's visit to the town on short notice. Called back by a mysterious letter informing her that her mother's grave has been vandalized, she arrives in her mother's small, clandestine hometown to find that the town is about to draw up its bridge and close to outsiders for the season. The weather is taking a turn for the worse and the whole town is in a seeming state of perpetual semi-twilight, heavy clouds shrouding the sky and a humidity that is practically visible on film. I'm so impressed by how this is captured; the whole thing takes place right on the edge of a thunderstorm, and though I've never experienced a Florida-specific storm, I think everyone is familiar with that liminal state where you can tell the weather's about to break and are just waiting for the first peals of thunder or the sky to open up. The downside of this is that there are a scant handful of exterior shots where the main character kind of looks like she's walking through a green screen, which I'm assuming is just due to adjusting the color palette in post-production. But 99.9% of this film is completely believable, and again, draws very strongly from Messiah of Evil for its atmosphere. I basically never see this kind of environment in a horror movie - it seems like the "edge of storm" feeling is neglected unless the movie is directly about a storm, a la Storm Warning or Alexandre Aja's surprisingly good Crawl, or relegated to a few scenes, not the entirety of the running time.

And it wouldn't be right for me not to outright say that this is also an extremely creepy movie. I don't focus my horror reviews on the scare factor because it's not the most important thing in a horror movie to me, but this one is so lastingly eerie and in such a specific way that in this case the horror is central to the plot. We all know the "town with a secret" trope, but Offseason really makes you feel the main character's sense of being somewhere she's not supposed to be, and it does this in two ways. The first is that it feels like she's not supposed to be there because she's not welcome, the whole town is in on some truth that she's not and they don't respect or give time to outsiders. The second is that it feels like she's physically not supposed to be there, that she's entered a real-life "out of bounds" area, a place that's closed off and unattended. The town is a place set up for people to entertain themselves, but when it's closed, where do all the people and things that cater to tourists go? Essentially, what happens to a place with a specific purpose when that purpose is (temporarily) removed? It feels like being in an art museum after hours, and there is in fact an extremely scary scene where the protagonist wanders into a museum of history that, like everything else in the town, is closed and empty of people. There's just something so unsettling about being alone in a place that isn't meant for you.

There is a concept behind this other than just the general unfriendly vibe it gives off - a creature to this feature, if you will. Marrying a specific and established backstory to something as vague and nebulous as the secretive, isolated island town this film takes place in is a dangerous game - horror movies very often fall victim to over-explaining, and if you show the monster or even talk too much about how the monster works, they risk their viewer becoming used to the horror. But thanks to restraint and good writing, the darkness at the core of Offseason stays creepy no matter if you think about it a little or a lot. It's just... I really think the greatest horror films keep their focus small. The possibility that in this one place something truly incomprehensible can be happening. A small-scale horror that infects person by person, that you can brush up against and escape from without knowing. "These people are my fingers, this island is the palm of my hand." I don't see stuff like this these days. I'm so glad people haven't forgotten how to make things this way.

Zëiram 2 (1994)

directed by Keita Amemiya

Japan

107 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Sequels get a bad rap generally, but this one, made by the same director with the same cast, easily stacks up to the first. While the story is more meandering, everything I fawned over in the first film is still there, and the care put into constructing this movie in all of its analog glory shines through once again.

We can wave our hands and excuse the parts of the story created solely to explain this movie's existence; presuming that Iria is indiscriminate in the jobs she takes, a second mission to Earth feels somewhat unlikely. But she just so happens to end up in Japan again, tracking down a small but very powerful statue made of a unique material that many thieves would kill to obtain. She meets up with the two hapless electronics-parts-store workers from the first film, one of them now about to be married with a baby on the way, and of course they get drawn into the chaos unwillingly once again. If I sound flippant about this, it's not on purpose - it just didn't matter that much to me how the film was set up. Once it got going, all I cared about was seeing Iria do her job and rescue everyone from a constantly moving display of practical effects work so beautiful it belongs in a museum (although to stick it on a shelf in drab lighting would be to rob it of the dynamic motion it had while being worn by a suit actor).

Now that we're familiar with the characters from the first film - and you really do have to be familiar with them for this movie to have its full effect - they seem to slip easier into a rhythm, or at least Iria does. One of two things that bothered me about this movie was that the fight choreography seemed lacking to me, almost like watching a "how to fight" training video where everyone is deliberately moving in slow motion to demonstrate techniques so that an uninitiated viewer doesn't miss anything. But now, thinking it through, the unflashy fight scenes are a point in this film's favor. It's not that they're not over-the-top: At one point Iria and Zëiram, locked together in a sort of death-hug, fall from a height that would kill them both (well, just her, really), but at the last minute, in mid-air, Iria stabs Zëiram through the forehead with a big sword, thus anchoring it to a (solid concrete) wall and allowing her to dangle from a more manageable height instead of plunging to the ground. That's pretty ridiculous, if you ask me. But there's no high kicks, no punching through walls, no absurdly unrealistic fight skills; just efficiency. And I think this fits Iria better because we do get the sense that, especially in her suit, she's much, much stronger than the normal human she looks like. So what appeared as a half-hearted punch to us could have in reality been packing tons of force behind it.

If anything, I just like her character even more now. She has a lowkey manner, not putting on airs either of a too-cool-for-it assumed capability or an aw-shucks fake-surprise that a pretty girl could be an intergalactic bounty hunter extraordinaire. She has an authentically unworried attitude because she knows that she's got it. She doesn't have to show off when she fights because she knows how to fight to achieve her goal, not to wow spectators.

There are some other bounty hunters who are visually implied to be part of her culture as well, and I'm still not totally clear on whether Iria is actually a biological human who somehow landed a really wild job or if she's something else assuming the shape of a human to fit in better, but even her counterparts who don't get cool suits or weapons like her are still kitted out in clothing and accessories that spell "alien". There's one scene where the bad guys summon what has to be 50 fighters from a whole host of unmentioned otherworlds to take on our lone Iria, and every single one of them looks distinct, like they have a backstory, even if they never get focused on and just stand in the foreground before getting messily killed. That attention to detail is what this movie packs into every frame and it's kind of amazing.

Bob is still looking good, too, especially for getting shot in the face-equivalent at one point. Even though he's the biggest digital component of a movie that is basically a celebration of practical effects, he doesn't feel out of place and is as much a character as any of the flesh-and-blood ones. I still think it's amazing how he (or his avatar) completely lacks any anthropomorphic qualities, but he still manages to have "expressions" and convey emotion.

Zëiram itself, which as far as I can tell is supposed to be some kind of second generation or possibly a rebuilt version of the one from the first movie, looks much the same as the first time around, with the addition of some jackal ears. I'm glad of this, because you can't improve upon perfection. It still boggles my mind how they managed to construct the face-worm that lives in its chest (which I think is actually Zëiram "itself", the rest is kind of a shell it pilots around) because, while some shots of it were clearly a puppet, at other times it was indistinguishable from a living person's face. I feel like you would have to not only be a pro at practical effects but also have studied the internal structure and anatomy of the human face for many hours in order to rig it so that the individual muscle twitches in the brow and cheeks looked real (and god, they did). I remain in awe of everything this movie achieves.

Having re-evaluated my big issue (the lackluster physical fighting), my only remaining problem with this is that dog-monster. Zëiram devours an innocent shiba inu and uses its parts to create a slavering, awful doglike minion for itself, and although I feel bad for saying this because the suit is as much a work of art as anything else in the film, it just doesn't fit. It probably has less than a minute of total screen time and it's incredibly intricate and detailed, and in any other movie it could be the star of the show, but it's almost wholly inconsequential here, and its slime-dripping maw (while as beautifully articulated as the face-worm) just felt too explicitly "horror" for this particular film.

I can't think of anything else I was dissatisfied with, though. The plot is stringy and weak at times and basically hinges on us accepting that Zëiram decided to go ballistic after allegedly having been put under control simply because It Did, but I really didn't care. This and the first film are absolute masterpieces of tokusatsu that could not be made today because of their reliance on clunky outdated technology to depict a futuristic, galaxy-trotting network of bounty hunters. They are both just so good.

Fever Dream (2021)

directed by Claudia Llosa

Chile, Peru

93 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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If I had to name one book that I considered to be "unfilmable", it would probably be Samanta Schweblin's aptly-titled Fever Dream. I don't recommend watching this movie without some context - whether that's reading the book or just familiarizing yourself with the plot, if you lack context, this movie will come off weird. The original book took me and many others by surprise because its style of narration is so thoroughly opaque that in the process of telling its story it reveals almost nothing, and how do you get that to work in a movie? Not through visual symbolism, in this case, and thankfully not by unraveling the book's plot so bluntly as to ruin all of its ominous vagueness. But in the end, while the book's plot is handled well, I'm still not so sure it works on film.

So the reason why I think this movie will make no sense to anyone who hasn't read the book is because it doesn't feel like it's attempting to do anything other than be exactly like the book, which is good for me because that's what I wanted to see, but not good for casual watching with no foreknowledge. The synopsis you can find online makes claims about the characters' motivations that simply are not there: "A powerful, haunting story of obsessive jealousy, an invisible danger, and the power of a mother’s love for her child" is just not what this movie is. The bizarre nature of the book overshadows anything about the individual characters, and without that incredibly strange narrative style, all you have is a movie where no one aspect is ever given enough weight to feel balanced. It struggles to mesh the human aspects mentioned in the synopsis with the tricky task of staying close to the book's style. But the good thing is that the film does still include a lot of that original weirdness: the narration, a conversation between the main character and her neighbor's son, is still there, and is taken almost word-for-word from the book, so you get the fullness of the original intended effect. It was when the film tried to insert anything that wasn't present in the book that it started to feel forced.

I'm going to lay out a very bare-bones summary of the plot just so I don't sound like a big weirdo, so if you've seen or read neither book nor movie, skip this paragraph and the next. Fever Dream is, I believe, an environmental horror story at its roots, or at least a horror story in which the environment plays a big role. The book is narrated, like I said, by the main character conversing with her neighbor's son, both of whom have been affected mentally and physically by a toxic chemical used on the plants around their houses. The main character is delirious, possibly dying, and in fear for her own child, and her neighbor's son, who became sick from the chemical some years earlier, is attempting to guide her through a haze of physical/mental pain to make her realize what happened to her. Or, quite possibly, the son is not really there, and is a production of the main character's mind to get her to come to terms with things. Fever Dream is an uncomfortable book because all of the horror comes from the very realistically rendered sensation of not being able to trust your own mind, or even really to operate your own mind. It's the terror of losing all function, and then to make things worse, your child is also at risk and you are no longer in control of your body enough to help them.

I have to say that the movie actually gets a leg up on the book in my opinion by making more explicit, or at least giving more attention to, the possibility of supernatural events playing into the story. The book teased me with this and in fact the only reason I read it was because I understood it to be more of a traditional horror story, when in actuality it can be best described as a horrific story masquerading as a horror story. But the movie heavily involves the possibility of a strange spiritual dislocation and that combines well with the biological sickness that is definitely there.

Thankfully, the movie understands the importance of how the book tells its story, and preserves that as best it can. You do not realize or understand about the connection between the main character's state and the chemicals in the water and in the grass until as late as possible. In the book you may not get it at all on the first reading. There are some things that made me uncomfortable regarding the way disability was portrayed, like a scene where a disabled girl is focused on that seemed to imply nothing but a fear of somebody who is physically different (or fear of becoming like that). This isn't a random, isolated scene of bashing disabled people, it is relevant to the plot in that it tells you something about the danger inherent in the environment where the characters are, but... in the end it still kind of feels like a poorly-handled message about disability being terrifying. The book does not present it that way, but focuses more, like I said, on the awfulness of being unable to help your child, with no real emphasis on disability being the result or cause of that.

It's actually weird that people seem to be very bothered by the film withholding its conclusion, because that's kind of the whole point of this. It's vague and unsettling because the feeling of not knowing what's happening to you or your body is vague and unsettling. If we knew right off the bat what was going on, we couldn't feel that way. Maybe it's a fault on the film's part that people aren't getting that and are just being frustrated by its refusal to serve up the story in simpler terms. But ultimately, aside from the exposition dump in the last twenty minutes when it veers off from the source material, I think this is probably the best adaptation of Schweblin's downright unfilmable book we're going to get. Would love to know the author's thoughts on this.