Sayonara Jupiter (1984)

directed by Sakyo Komatsu, Koji Hashimoto

Japan

130 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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(A note: This is an older review, and in the time since writing it I've become inexplicably very fond of this movie. Although I'm a bit harsh on it here, my feelings towards it since then have softened considerably. It is not a good movie, but it's one that I kind of love.)

So this was apparently intended to compete with the upcoming sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001 - which itself was no smash hit - and oh boy... it's not great. What Sayonara Jupiter feels like more than anything is Toho writing a love letter to itself, and I don't really have a problem with that because I love Toho too. The characters watch a Godzilla movie at one point, and also one of Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai trilogy (the third film, if I'm not mistaken), which is a personal favorite of mine. Maybe the slightly self-congratulatory tone should have bothered me more, but it didn't. What bothered me instead was that this movie falls victim to the trap of taking itself 110% seriously at all times.

The plot is a mishmash of random New Age nonsense thrown together with little care: Dolphins, Nazca lines, zero-G lovemaking, bad folk music, vague environmental activism in space!, et cetera. The general idea is that because of the growing size of the human population and its expansion into the further Solar System, Jupiter must be turned into a second sun to provide resources for those living too far from the original sun to thrive. Which is, uh, not a super great idea if you think about it for more than two seconds. But before the Jupiter Solarization Project can be completed, a rogue black hole enters the scene, sucking and warping its way towards the Solar System on a collision course with Earth. It is quickly discovered that if the plan to turn Jupiter into a second sun is abandoned and instead Jupiter is just blown to smithereens, the energy will knock the black hole off its course and humanity will be saved. Again, if you know anything whatsoever about physics, this is a bunch of hooey. But we're not here for a physics lecture, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect that from a movie like this. The goofy plot and hand-wavy physics were, again, things that should have bothered me more, but didn't. It's all part and parcel of this movie as a whole.

The science fiction elements of the film are actually fantastic, and for about the first twenty minutes this fooled me into thinking it would be some kind of unfairly maligned hidden gem, because it has all the hallmarks of entertaining, not-too-sophisticated '80s sci-fi. I've never seen a movie more proud of its greebles. Toho has always had tricks up its sleeve for making spaceships look cool, and it pulls them all out for this one. The looming ships coasting through space, the detailed, '80s-era-futuristic interiors of the labs and meeting rooms, all of it screams "cult classic". Turn off the dialogue, cut out the weird hippie singing-and-crying scenes, and this is a passable film. But unfortunately everything else is so much of a mess that it's hard to find that passable film within all the fluff. There's something so off about the tone here - very early on, two characters deactivate the gravity in their room and turn on something called "love gas", and what follows is an achingly lengthy scene of two nude people floating through a green-screened background of the cosmos. It is of its time, and one should try to take it at face value, because that's how it's intended, but that's the problem - it's just too hard to take imagery like that seriously, and this movie is, at every turn, practically begging you to take its weird and outlandish ideas seriously.

(The one thing I did find interesting was the parallel between those two lovebirds at the beginning, floating around care-free and half out of their minds on love gas, and the same two characters at the end, barely clinging to life and each other, covered in blood. That felt like a strong parallel to the film's overall theme of humanity moving from adolescence into harsh adulthood, and maybe if I were to watch this again I could have gotten more out of that, but I'm not watching this again any time soon.)

I don't want to make it out like I'm deriding this movie's general peace-and-harmony message, because as hackneyed as it is about conveying said message, it's still a good thing to hope for. I tend towards sympathy for movies like this that are so caught up in their hippie mindset that they forget to actually be a good movie, because honestly, I vastly prefer that to something that's beautiful but vapid and devoid of politics. There's issues with the very tame, UN-itized future that Sayonara Jupiter presents; it's not a perfect vision of a perfect world - but it's got hope, and it feels wrong to make too much fun of that. There is a lot to make fun of here in general, though.

And this movie also feels every minute of its 130. It kind of has to be that long, that's just the type of movie it is. You couldn't make an 80-minute movie and launch it out there to compete against something set in the 2001-verse. Part of me really does love this because there's so much care put into it, like everything Toho puts out. I can like movies and acknowledge that they're bad. But one must be warned: this is, like, genuinely not a good movie. If you're not a fan of anything this movie involves - practical effects, science fiction, space, dolphins, etc - and aren't willing to turn your brain, if not off, then just down a little, you won't have much fun at all. I should mention for fairness that this probably was intended to be much better than the final product; behind-the-scenes there were a lot of last-minute changes that resulted in storylines being dropped abruptly, which is heavily reflected in... well, all the storylines in this film that are dropped abruptly. It was also in production for some time and there was a lot of waiting for the right technology to become available to make it. In an alternate universe, we probably got a perfect version of this film, but in this universe, this is what we're stuck with, and maybe that isn't so bad.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974)

directed by Jorge Grau

Italy, Spain

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I recently finished reading a book about the history of nuclear disasters that touched on the Windscale fire. It's difficult to imagine that this film wasn't directly inspired by the fear of major accidents involving radioactivity such as that. There's been some talk recently about how horror is generational - the most prevalent subjects of horror films in any given generation reflect the fears of society as a whole at that point in time. The Windscale fire occurred in 1957, but the adults who were making horror films in the 1970s were the children who grew up hearing about things like fallout and contaminated milk; if not from Windscale, then from politicians' talk and attitude about nuclear energy in general as it gradually shifted from touting it as a miracle towards looking at it with heightened suspicion. Although this is an Italian/Spanish film trying desperately to look British, the fear of a nuclear incident happening right at your doorstep is relevant to all locales even remotely close to a nuclear reactor.

This is actually one of the most somber and serious Italian horror films I've ever seen. I'm so used to giallo, I'm so used to the lurid colors and the bad dubbing and the women in little to no clothing, that all of that was what I anticipated from The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue, not being familiar with it and not knowing what to expect. Instead I got this incredibly restrained and terrifying zombie picture. This film explicitly has the dead return to life, or at least some horrible imitation of life, dragged back from peaceful death to a state of empty-minded, instinct-driven animation that renders them into plodding abominations. That first time we see a zombie is when I knew this would be something different from the giallo I had assumed it would be. In large part the striking difference between this and other zombie films is in the masterful sound design: When we see zombies, there's no dramatic music, the only noise is a distorted rushing wind mixed with a pulse almost like a heartbeat, as well as the tortured breathing of the zombies themselves. I can't say enough about how much I appreciated this depiction of zombies as wholly devoid of anything resembling humanity; just empty vessels having air forced through lungs that should never have worked again. There's no malice, no hatred. Just a primal directive to feed.

The world this film takes place in is one that feels remarkably like the present in that it is increasingly divided: One slice of the populace is so set in their ways that they refuse to notice the changing world around them, while the other half participates in that change and continues to move with the times. The opening credits play over a scene set in busy metropolitan London where a woman strips totally nude and streaks across lanes of traffic, holding up a peace sign - but no one even glances her way, they just have on the same blank expressions as they did before her. People in this film don't want to move on, they don't want to coexist with those of a newer generation who have ideas different from theirs. They don't bother with specifics when men from the government come and say they're trying a new method of pest control, they just assume everything will be as it has always been, that the government would never do them wrong. This stubborn mindset plays a large part in the eventual disastrous ending and specifically in the fate of the main character, who is targeted for his long hair and leather clothing by the local police chief. The police are not necessarily incompetent here but are operating under an idea of competence that relies on ignorance and outright bullying, and this ultimately leads to the worst possible outcome.

The two main characters in this have a strange dynamic where they truly do feel like two people pushed together by circumstance and never really develop that awkward, forced romance that a lot of man-woman duos in horror do. They meet when the woman backs into the man's motorcycle on accident and she agrees to drive him the rest of the way to his destination as recompense. He is unfailingly rude to her beyond what is understandable in the situation, but nevertheless sticks close to her for the rest of the entire film. For her part she doesn't have much personality but does have a weird backstory involving a heroin-addicted sister being held captive by her boyfriend/husband in an attempt to get her to detox. Thankfully this does not take up much of the running time, because other than introducing some new blood to the cast of characters, I couldn't see what all it had to do with anything. But I did like the dynamic between the main two because of their lack of chemistry. They're realistic as two strangers. We're not expected to believe they develop some unspoken romance for the ages, but they obviously do become close.

You can feel the fear and suspicion that went into making this, and although it would be pushing it to truly call it folk horror, it definitely has those vibes. The sinister government men coming into the countryside with new technology that they promise will eliminate pests and benefit everyone by encouraging better food growth - you can just tell they're doing something, they've got some nebulous motive. It's never made explicit whether or not the zombies are an unintended side effect of the radioactive devices introduced by the Ministry of Agriculture or if something like the outcome of the film was their goal the entire time, but I'm leaning towards the latter explanation. It almost reminds me of Quatermass and the Pit in the contrast between normal country folk and the invading presence of sinister, unknown new technology. I really was not expecting such nuance from this movie and I'm glad to be hearing about a recent re-release of it with better mastering. This is one of my new favorite zombie films of all time, I think.

Mad God (2021)

directed by Phil Tippett

USA

83 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I had to think a while about whether or not I wanted to even approach talking about this movie because it's the kind of thing where I can't possibly describe the scale and scope of it with words. I was lucky enough to see it on a big screen in an actual theater, which enhances the experience tenfold. Usually I'm not a puritan about what size the screen you're watching movies on is, but with this it's just basic logistics: Bigger screen means you get to absorb more of those precious details that fill up every centimeter of every frame. (It is also a very dark film, so seeing it in a theater means you don't have to stare at your grubby reflection in the iPad screen.)

Also, just a note: I'm aware that this was partially released as several separate shorts in the past, but I'm going to be talking about the movie as it was presented to me when I saw it, as one cohesive piece. I will reference the segments because you can definitely tell where the line between them is, but I feel like it was meant to be watched in the order that the full, 83-minute film is assembled in.

The first part of this film is unlike anything I've ever seen before. The whole thing is that way, really, but the beginning does not even try to ease us in; it's the most high-octane the film gets, and it sustains this pace for what must be a good half-hour or more. I was going to talk about the skilled worldbuilding here, but that's not the right word for it at all. This world is built. Everything is already here and we're in it now whether we like it or not. There is such a distinct story behind literally every object in this film that I'm surprised Phil Tippett's head didn't explode from the pressure of keeping all those narratives together. I have no doubt you could pause Mad God at any moment and extrapolate some deep and upsetting backstory from whatever is onscreen at the time. Not all of the bizarre entities inhabiting the world of Mad God play a role in the main storyline, but the storyline would be a void without them. The sights that the Assassin - as much of a "main character" as this can be said to have - walks past without giving them a further glance all help to cement the environment the film takes place in. I took a peek at some other reviews and found that there is some debate over whether or not this movie has a "narrative" - I don't believe it's necessary for a movie to have a narrative, but this one definitely does, even if the meaning of it is largely up to you to decide. And the narrative is shaped not by one overarching story belonging to one single character but by the mosaic of incredibly tiny individual pieces brought to the table by every weird and wild thing in every corner of this film.

We begin with the Assassin descending in a capsule through layers of strata composed of, again, individual objects that each tell a story even if they're on screen for half a second. Horned skulls, alien skulls, the bones of enormous beasts, discarded statues of holy figures and icons, and layers upon layers of other debris surround the capsule as it goes further and further down until it touches the floor. Very early on we see that life ("life" is a word with extremely blurry boundaries in the world of this film, but I don't feel like getting into that right now) takes all shapes and sizes, and one of the first things the Assassin does is step unthinkingly on a couple of gnomes no bigger than a fingertip who were apparently arguing over a Santa Claus carcass (it's that kind of movie). Soon we also see the Assassin walk past incomprehensibly large humanoid figures in a never-ending state of being shocked by electric chairs, and the Assassin is as dwarfed by these as the gnomes were by the Assassin's boot. This sets up what I feel is one of the main themes of the film: That there is always something bigger waiting to come step on you, that there's always a creature who either sees you as an ant or is too large or preoccupied to even see you at all. This is a backbone of many Lovecraftian works, and for that reason I at least partially classified this in my own brain as cosmic horror.

As I said, I run up against the limitations of language when thinking of ways to describe all that the Assassin encounters on their journey. Everything they see is a newly invented mechanism of suffering. A lot of the first part of the film takes place in a seemingly borderless "factory" where drones molded out of what looks like cat hair and given life produce large slabs of some material, which is obviously an incredibly dangerous job given that the drones seem to be dying by accident (or by design) by the hundreds, if not more. The disposability of life and the pointlessness of it all is what makes this environment feel like true hell. The drones toil for apparently no reason other than to produce more circumstances in which to toil. This is what everything and every being in Mad God is saying, really: Everything here is alive for no reason. There is no point. No end goal. An individual life is wholly valueless other than as a tool to maintain the circumstances in which life can continue, and it must continue in a state of pain and drudgery until the end of time. Again: Hell.

One of the most interesting revelations in this is that the Assassin is not necessarily an autonomous being but is themself a drone, sent down through some membrane into the world that they spend the film exploring by what at least outwardly looks like a human. This is, I feel, an extension of the "always something bigger to step on you" thing, and I'm fascinated by the idea of the person who was sending all these explorers down into this hell-world. It's made pretty clear that he's been sending them for ages, that enough of them have failed at whatever their mission was that there's now piles and piles of the suitcases they were equipped with just laying on the ground as waste. From the Assassin's name and the fact that they carry a bomb in said suitcase, we can infer their purpose, but - assassinate what? There is no ruler of this underworld, or at least we never get to see any. Personally one theory I came up with is that the human sending the drones is himself the "mad god" that the title refers to, and he's plumbing the depths to see if there's any other gods out there so that he can kill them and remain the sole capital-G God. This is entirely speculation, but is supported by the mishmash of religious objects seen throughout the film - Tippett does a very good job of presenting sacred items as nothing more than slabs of stone, and any sense of ritual or holiness is invented by the devout with no influence from the divine.

I'm also fascinated by the ending. As the film goes on, it approaches a point where it is, at least visually, at its least dank and crushingly hopeless. A figure with the face of a plague doctor delivers a squalling bundle, recently excavated from the chest cavity of who I think was implied to be the Assassin after being captured and failing their mission, to a smithy who pulverizes it and turns it into a fine gold dust. This dust stands out as being one of the only beautiful things in the film, though it comes from the body of a being that was entirely helpless and arguably innocent, at least in Mad God terms. The plague doctor figure uses this dust as a kind of method of divination that launches a colorful trip sequence where we see things that one could tentatively call optimism: A city is built, and through the windows of the buildings we can see not horrific acts of murder and depravity as we saw through windows earlier in the film but what look like normal things - bookshelves, people standing around. In time this city is demolished by youths spray-painting anarchy symbols on walls - not necessarily a bad outcome, but possibly the reckoning of a diseased and overgrown urban sprawl, which could give rise to better living conditions in its downfall. The visions produced by huffing dead baby dust (again, it's that kind of movie) are the only point at which things look slightly less than existentially horrific. But what is the meaning of this? How can ruthlessly killing and commodifying the remains of the film's only innocent creature produce visions of a brighter future? There's implications there that would take many, many paragraphs to unpack - and I'm going to wrap up this review here, although there is far more I could say.

The story of this film's creation is well-known: Phil Tippett along with a rotating crew of interns worked on it as a side-project to his larger film contributions (which are many) for 30 years, adding bits and pieces to it continuously to, from what I've heard, the detriment of his own mental health. Watching something like this where you know the monumental effort and time that went into making it is such a unique experience - I could not stop thinking about how the baby that supplied the doomed creature's cries could be nearing 30 years old by now. The aesthetic of the film is unashamedly lowbrow, and I love how it's not afraid to be powerfully, blasphemously disgusting. Rivers of feces and creatures that look to be composed entirely of hanging testicles are not uncommon sights in Mad God. This is not the kind of movie that everyone will appreciate thematically or visually, but as an object it's a deeply interesting reminder of the timelessness of art and a showcase of fervent dedication to one concept.

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

directed by Joseph Green

USA

82 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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A note - there apparently is an "uncut" version of this that differs from the more readily available release only in the inclusion of a single scene, and I'm not sure whether the version I watched was cut or uncut. Either way, a single non-plot-relevant scene cut only for gore doesn't really change the impression the whole film makes, and while I always go out of my way to ensure completeness when I watch something, in this case I don't think it was too big of a deal.

So this is a bit of a cult classic that's typically associated with the ranks of cheesy sci-fi/horror films from the 1950s and '60s, but it has a weird stoicism to it that made it feel a little different from the lurid, bombastic titles of the era. Every character seems to practically be sleepwalking through the story, and for some reason that feels vaguely unsettling. The plot concerns a pioneering and super morally gross doctor who manages to save his wife Jan's head - and only her head - after a would-be fatal car wreck. It's most likely the fault of a mixture of bad acting with a sub-par script that we don't get a real picture of the doctor's personality, so he's not developed in a way that would make us feel sympathy or even revulsion towards him. He never shows any emotional depth, he's just always 100% committed to doing whatever he plans to do with no show of actually desiring or not desiring to do it. Obviously he's driven by a motive - getting his wife a new hot bod - but it just doesn't feel like he is. Him, and everyone around him, carry out their lot in life as if there never existed any other thing to do. This is why the movie has some very slightly off vibe to it.

It also feels somehow very sleazy and very tame at the same time. The main character doesn't just want a new body for his wife's severed head - he wants the best one, which seems to him to mean the sexiest one. Despite this, as a character he feels deeply sexless and disinterested. He attends strip clubs and stalks women who pose in lingerie for photographers, but does so with neither desire nor disdain. This all comes off as arrogance, really; in addition to the sheer hubris that he demonstrates by messing around with the touted "natural order of things", his assumption that he can go out and shop for women like picking up and squeezing avocados in a supermarket, and then manipulate them into coming back to his lab and detaching their heads from their bodies, speaks to a deep and somewhat terrifying center-of-the-universe mindset. Another review pointed out that Jan is absolutely caked in makeup, which Dr. Cortner would have had to apply himself - this is of course explained in reality by nothing more than the filmmakers abhorring the possibility of a woman onscreen with no makeup, but in-universe, it's a great example of how Cortner's real focus is on making sure his wife's appearance is preserved for him.

Far and away the best thing about The Brain That Wouldn't Die is the brain that wouldn't die. When you think about it, it should really be the head that wouldn't die, as said brain remains inside its native skull for the whole film. (But then, when you think about it, all any of us are is a brain.) This is my favorite part of the movie because this is where a kind of cosmic horror comes in that is only there because the film seems wholly unconcerned with explaining literally anything. For reasons never elaborated upon, detaching Jan's head from her body and hooking it up to various burbling test tubes and liquids grants her inhuman powers. Separated from her body, and in spite of a lack of appendages or even the ability to turn around on her own, Jan is able to communicate telepathically with the film's second horror, a mangled, barely-living failed experiment that got shoved in a closet because what else do you do with science experiments that are both A. horrible failures, and B. equipped with the ability to rend you apart. They share a common interest, which is a strong wish for revenge on the scientists who caused them to remain alive after they should have died. The idea that a brain untethered from a body could have some kind of latent, super-powerful psychic ability is downright Lovecraftian; a "forbidden knowledge" kind of concept that I really love despite it residing in a sub-par movie such as this.

I think medical horror surrounding the removal of one's agency against one's will is inherently more real and uncomfortable than a lot of other horror because it is a reality for a lot of people. Anybody who's ever had to go to a doctor is left without a choice other than to put your whole life in the hands of someone who is, at the end of the day, just some guy. We hope they'll be upstanding people with a genuine desire to help you, but often they have their own ideas of how your body should work that don't fit with your own lived experiences. Nobody's ever gotten their head cut off and reanimated for hubris reasons by a shady doctor in real life, but movies like this are only a slight fantasy - an extension of a valid and palpable real-life fear.