Gamera vs. Jiger (1970)

directed by Noriaki Yuasa

Japan

83 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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The Showa Gamera movies, to me, have felt futuristic in a way that's different from what I'm used to in the Showa Godzilla films. It feels more appropriate to say that they feel future-leaning, that they're hoping to act as a showcase - much like Expo '70, during which much of this movie takes place - for the way things could be in the future. Godzilla movies that are set in the future take a more matter-of-fact approach, dropping us in a time where any kind of wacky technology can be explained away as "it's the future, duh". Gamera thus far seems to like to usher us in gently to an even spacier space age. A time when leaps and bounds in technology have already been made, sure, but where the most wonderful and hopeful of new inventions are still yet to come, thanks to the secondary stars of the show - the children.

I'm gonna be honest here, most of the reason why I'm reviewing this at all is so I have a chance to talk about the Jiger suit. The movie itself is pretty good, but I am so in love with that suit that it eclipses everything else. The first thing one notices if one has seen many monster movies before is that Jiger is walking on all fours, not on her hands and knees the way the majority of quadrupedal kaiju do. This is a tremendously difficult position to achieve, which is why it's so notable to me when I see it. I think the best and one of the only examples I can think of is Rie Ota as the GMK Baragon, achieving that stance through an impressive combination of extensions inside the suit and presumably just being buff as hell. It's not at all easy to walk like that inside a suit, much less with that incredibly massive head that Jiger has. I was also enamored with her because of the way, in her first appearance, when she trundles along to take a drink from an in-comparison-pea-sized lake, the footage is reversed so that it looks like water spilling from her mouth is actually being sucked up. This is a small detail, and pretty easy to do, but it shows that the crew were paying attention to those tiny things. Even Gamera looks lumpen and monochrome compared to how much detail is in Jiger.

These movies are also incredibly violent even compared to what I'm used to with Godzilla. Gamera is constantly gushing blood, getting stabbed, having bits torn off it, and in turn tearing chunks out of other kaiju - those tusks ain't just for show. I like this surprisingly physical side of kaiju cinema, but it is jarring how much monster meat is in these movies. It makes sense, though. Kids love seeing stuff get ripped up, even if their parents don't love them seeing that.

In general, watching tokusatsu in Blu-Ray quality is a vastly different experience to watching it in even slightly poorer resolution, because you can instantly tell where everything is a set. Some things you do just have to laugh at - for example this movie features some of the worst green-screen fake driving scenes ever - but most of the time, I'm not laughing, even if everything looks obviously fake and miniature, I'm just admiring the level of work that went into it.

Unfortunately, like the first and second installments in this series and a huge amount of other toku besides, Jiger's origins are rooted in the idea of other cultures (specifically African cultures) as mystical and superstitious. As with the first movie, though, non-Africans are made to look pretty ignorant when they disregard native peoples trying desperately to warn them of some danger that gets dismissed as an uncivilized people being scared of myths and legends. So that's something. But I still don't like the way Africa as a whole is shorthand for weird stuff that no one understands. At least they do have an actual black person in this one, though, not just somebody in blackface. And I do enjoy the made-up "Wester Island" - this is its real name within the film, not the subtitles having a go.

Anyway, this movie gets absolutely wild in terms of just, like, what has to happen for the story to progress. It's like someone was sitting there thinking "How can I get Gamera into the weirdest trouble I can imagine?" For starters, this is, canonically, the one where Gamera gets pregnant, thanks to Jiger's ovipositor (is it ridiculous to imagine a mammal having an ovipositor? Yes! Is it still cool as hell and a fun example of speculative biology? Very yes!). This gives Gamera cancer (?) and makes it become anemic, parts of its skin turning translucent as it returns to water to recuperate. The only option to fix all of this, of course, is to send a submarine into Gamera's internals and physically cut out the parasitic Jiger larvae. The submarine must, obviously, be piloted by children, because kids in these movies really gotta do everything themselves.

While I don't advocate for letting children do dangerous things, such as roam around the inside of a huge turtle with jet propulsion, I do wholeheartedly advocate for just letting children believe they're capable. For so many children, all they hear all day is "You can't do that, you're just a child". While for many things that's true, and while it usually comes from a place of wanting to protect them from danger, it can wear on a child and when taken too far it can really make them feel like second-class citizens, useless and without appreciable skills. A lot of society seems to think a child's job is just to sit there and grow up. Not Gamera! The thing I love about these movies is that they acknowledge children as a vital part of society, and that us adults need the perspective of children, unclouded and unconventional, to solve the problems that we may be too stuck in our ways to puzzle out. Gamera is for the kids, and that's why I love it.

Pee Mak (2013)

directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun

Thailand

111 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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I wanted to see this because I had read somewhere that it was Thailand's highest-grossing film, has won a whole host of awards, and been nominated for many more. I'm not sure if that's still true at the time of writing, but it's interesting to me when a country's top film is a horror movie, because in the U.S., where I am, there's still enough bias against horror that horror films have very little chance of getting any kind of recognition in awards shows, much less netting enough to break the records of non-genre titles. That a horror movie has gotten this popular may point to an overall different feeling towards horror in Thailand - or maybe people just really, really like this one movie. This director is single-handedly responsible for pretty much every famous Thai horror movie of the last two decades, so there's that to consider as well.

The movie takes place in the mid-19th century, so this is still Siam. Specifically, it is supposed to be during the reign of King Mongkut, which would put it somewhere between 1851 and 1868. It does not seem like the film is making any solid attempts at historical accuracy whatsoever, although I can't speak about that too much because whoever subtitled it was doing their damnedest to translate things that were specific to Thai culture into something recognizable to English-speakers (there is a particular pun made during a charades game where the effort of making it understandable in English is truly commendable), but to me nothing about this felt antique. However, while probably not the most accurate, the ambiance is really fun anyway. Everything looks deliberately constructed to appear rural and sometimes ramshackle, and it may not pass for a genuine village circa the mid-1800s, but it looks cool. I wanted to walk through the sets like I was going through a little museum exhibit. There's something to be said for the value of making something look believable versus the value of making something look aesthetically pleasing.

Our cast of characters is five goof-off soldiers with variously complicated hairstyles, and the first few minutes of the film are spent with them looking like they're on death's door in the middle of a losing battle during the war that was happening at the time (there were many). At the last minute, the film cuts to them all more or less recovered from the most grievous of their wounds and back home to visit the titular character Mak's wife, Nak, and their infant son Dang. No explanation is immediately given for how they could all be looking doomed one minute and fine the next, but the villagers sure seem terrified of them and Nak...

It should be said that this is not a straight horror movie, it's also a comedy, and unfortunately the style of humor is a kind that I personally find exhausting and unfunny. Nothing can be serious for more than a minute or two, after that there has to be some obligatory gag from the peanut gallery to break up the tension. None of the humor is really offensive; there's a poop joke here and there, somebody makes a crack about Nak's period, and one of them ends up dressed like a woman at some point, but nothing that's actively mean, just groan-worthy. And too frequent. Having this constant need for one of the five guys to display that they're dumb or want to flirt with Mak's wife every couple of minutes takes away from feeling like you're immersed in the story. These are just my sensibilities, though - I know from this director's other horror works that there does tend to be a lot of humor injected in at weird times. Even in Shutter, which is otherwise a serious and extremely tense film, I recall a really oddly-placed "guy in drag" joke.

Really the big problem with this movie is that it drags and drags in getting to the point. This is based off of a folktale which has a fairly simple idea behind it, so there's not too much in the way of "point" anyway, and you can tell that stretching out an idea to an hour and fifty-one minutes is why there's so much faffing about in haunted houses and dancing around things. The whole reason why this movie is so long is because Mak's friends are all too nice (or very possibly too scared) to tell him that his wife is a ghost, and Mak is too in love with her to realize. Later it becomes "Mak's friends are all too nice/scared to tell Mak he's a ghost", and then eventually "Mak's friends are all too nice/scared to admit that they might all be ghosts". It's a complicated thing, dying during wartime. So everybody basically continues to get into overly convoluted scenarios due to their avoidance of either Nak herself or out of a lack of the brain cells required to figure out how to tell Mak that he's surrounded by ghosts.

Mak and Nak are also genuinely cute together. When the humor comes from a guy loving his wife too much to realize that she might be dead, and ultimately not caring that much if she really is, it's hard to get mad at it. Mario Maurer just has such an honest face and does so well cast as the most innocent and normal of the five buddies that it's a reprieve from everybody else going to slapstick town constantly.

Because this is in the hands of somebody with a proven horror track record, the scant creepy bits hit all the right notes, even though there's much less of that than there is bad jokes. There's this one scene where one of the gang is trying to get up the rickety wooden stairs to Nak's house after already having had a bad dream involving him doing that very thing, and he just blows out all the steps, fully smashes through them so he has to hoist himself up bodily to get to the top, and his reward when he does is seeing Nak's arm reach down to pick up a fruit off the ground - while the rest of Nak should be on the second floor of the house. This genuinely felt like a nightmare. The specific feeling of not being able to climb stairs is something that is common in nightmares - spatial dimensions no longer working the way they should and places either being too big or your body being too small is a signature of unsettling dreams. The effect of Nak's inhumanly long limbs is done really well, and even still looks good when we see it full-frontally, requiring the use of practical effects. I just wish there was more of that and less Scooby Doo business. This was fun, though, I enjoyed experiencing it as somebody unfamiliar with the story behind it and the historical setting in general.

Umma (2022)

directed by Iris K. Shim

USA

88 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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I'd been waiting very patiently for this to come out ever since I heard of it - so patiently, in fact, that I missed when it was put on Netflix. Unfortunately, though, it ended up being the latest in a long string of new 2022 horror films that I've gotten my hopes up for only to be let down.

I want to start off by saying that it's entirely possible that I'm just not in the target audience for this, because I don't have any ties to the experience of having an immigrant parent or to Korean culture in general, which are the two central tenets of the film. I was going to start off by saying that this really doesn't feel like it has anything specifically to do with either of those things, and instead it's just a recycled plot with some Korean culture added in, but on second thought I don't think that's the right mindset to have. One of the most important steps in moving towards truly diverse media is that there has to be a lot of media featuring marginalized people that just kind of sucks, not because it's offensive, but because it's mediocre in every way. I don't think people were excited about To All The Boys I've Loved Before because they wanted to see another young adult-oriented rom-com. They were excited because they wanted to see a Vietnamese-American lead in a subgenre that otherwise is saturated with white people. Not every movie with an underrepresented community featured in it has to be a masterpiece, and believing that they should be ultimately holds back progress on actually diversifying cinema.

With that all out of the way, yeah, this was a disappointment. I'm not sure exactly when I realized that the script was really bad, but after I did, it became all I could focus on. Sandra Oh sticks out like a sore thumb (or some equivalent of that expression with more positive connotations) because she appears to be the only person here capable of delivering such a bland and poorly-written script with any kind of feeling. Even Dermot Mulroney does a pretty woeful job. Oh's character's daughter is the worst of them, constantly moping and giving out patented Difficult Teen™ classics such as calling her mom a "psycho bitch"/"crazy psycho" with as little emotion as possible. I think a lot of the film's problems boil down to what seems to be a fairly inexperienced director, but that's just about the best problem a movie like this could have, because it means that the good parts of it - and there were still some of those - will probably be what gets carried over into the director's next film, rather than the low points.

For such a short and simple film, it also has a surprising amount of plot holes. The biggest issue I had in that respect was trying to figure out what Oh's protagonist's supposed aversion to electricity had to do with anything and why it was even part of the film at all. It's not necessarily the most important thing, but it's kind of the crux of the film in that it is the whole reason why her and her daughter live on an isolated chunk of land in the middle of nowhere with no electricity and only the flimsiest of links to the outside world. It's difficult to articulate just how unimportant the protagonist's electricity thing ends up being; her daughter of course eventually finds out that none of it was true, but the film doesn't even seem to place enough importance in that aspect of the plot to explain why she was living like that in the first place. Given her childhood trauma relating to electricity, it could have been a coping mechanism that she came up with a more medically valid excuse for in order to sound less "crazy psycho", as her daughter calls her. But I was under the impression that she herself had been told she had to stay away from electricity, and genuinely believed it would cause her physical, rather than psychological, harm. Are either of these explanations the case? Was there some other explanation? We never find out, because the movie relies on that plot point and then drops it like a hot potato for seemingly no reason.

Any kind of personal growth or message that we could take away from Umma is also hampered by its refusal to explore much beyond the surface level. The main character's inner journey throughout the film is one of realizing that her consuming fear of turning into her mother is leading her to turn into her mother anyway, and by the end, after she's realized that, she can finally break the cycle of generational trauma and become a better person. But... how? The film doesn't show us the process of casting off that trauma or any of the real depth of that struggle. A few other people have brought up the point that this would have been better off just not trying to be a horror movie at all, and I agree with that specifically because it feels like it relies on actual visual depictions of being grabbed, chased, and haunted to stand in for doing the work of unlearning negative habits and shedding family trauma. Instead of showing us a character growing in ways that are not visible, Umma chooses to show us a character escaping a ghost. There's metaphor and then there's using one thing as a flat, uncreative stand-in to cover up an inability to portray another thing.

I know I'm being really harsh on this, and it's because it was so promising and occasionally showed glimpses of a better movie. It is so frustrating when something has so much opportunity to be good but never quite gets there. Sandra Oh is a knockout in this, as always; any other lead actor and it would have basically been nothing. I am looking forward to seeing if Iris Shim goes further with this concept - Korean-tinged horror coming from America could be interesting. I'm very familiar with Korean horror from Korea, but a side of that incorporating the immigrant experience is relatively unexplored territory.

Incantation (2022)

directed by Kevin Ko

Taiwan

111 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I was looking forward to this one for a while based on the strength of the reactions to it that I'd been seeing. I've been having trouble motivating myself to watch new films lately, so to see one that not only didn't disappoint but well exceeded my expectations was very satisfying. There are ways in which this movie resembles a lot of things I've seen before, but the end product that it delivers is on the whole much different from all other things that share similar themes.

Incantation opens with some breakage of the third wall as the main character introduces her situation - or what she wants us to believe her situation is - on camera. The point she's trying to make is that human will can, to some degree, literally influence the material world; the way you think you see things or want to see things can alter the way they actually look. As an example she puts up on screen two optical illusions similar to the very popular "rotating ballerina" one where, depending on how you perceive it, a spinning wheel can either be going left or right, or a train can either be oncoming or leaving. I found this a very interesting thing to include in a fictional narrative. We're used to films immediately reaching for special effects to show us breaks in reality, so the fact that this film utilizes the actual brain of the viewer in all of its uncanniness really adds a layer of discomfort. It would have been easy to doctor some footage to make us believe we were influencing the onscreen images with our minds, but that doesn't happen. Instead, we see the real thing.

This is at least partially supposed to be about a cursed video, which is mostly why I wanted to watch it at all, since horror movies about cursed videos are possibly my favorite kind of horror movies. But this doesn't end up really being one of the central points of the film as a whole - yes, there is a video and there is a curse, but the fact that the curse is captured on video is secondary to what everything is about. I have few criticisms of this movie, but this is one slight one; it feels like the concept of the video being able to physically affect people is brought up early and then very quickly dropped. We see police officers commit suicide after being shown it, and we see people getting into a car crash after presumably seeing it, but the viral nature of the footage is never emphasized beyond that. I did not mind this too much, because the small, intimate scale of the cast who are involved in the story made it a better film, but I felt like the suicides and other related deaths had me geared up for this to pan out differently than it did.

The reason why I said that this was not an unfamiliar premise to me is because I've seen a lot of horror movies coming from southeast Asia (and some really terrible ones from America and the like) where the source of horror is the ostensibly Buddhist practices of some small, backwater community. I'm not usually a fan of these kinds of things because it feels like at heart all they're saying is that smaller, often syncretic religions practiced in rural areas are frightening and not to be trusted, in contrast with organized religion, which is supposedly fine. But the visual language Incantation uses to present its concept - though said concept may basically be the same "remote village with a freaky patron god" thing - is far different from the trite, sometimes elitist views I've gotten used to.

This movie is really dedicated to making the shrines, relics, and general locale look authentic and believable as a part of Buddhism. Very, very little here feels like it's deliberately scary. No upside-down crosses (or equivalent) or twigs Blair Witched together into idols that everyone bows to. The lushness and vibrant color of Buddhist reliquaries and murals are depicted here in full glory, and aside from the final reveal in the statue room it doesn't look like anything you wouldn't actually see in a mural depicting scenes from Buddhist literature. I think that this plays into what I feel is the stance from which the film approaches religion. In showing us imagery that is not altered to be more frightening than it would be in real life, Incantation is not creating a sect of evil worshippers but instead making the point that the way a devotee interprets their religion changes its entire meaning. And at one point the main character does attempt to consult the "good" side of Buddhism as a desperate attempt to save herself and her daughter, but the things the master says she has to go through for a shot at redemption are so difficult that the difference between "normal" worship and the warped practices of the cursed village seem very similar.

There is a question I kept coming up with that can also extend beyond this and into other religious horror films as well: Is it more frightening to be worshipping the wrong thing, or to not be worshipping the right thing hard enough? To that end, in this film, where did the instructions for how to pray, how to devote, how to decorate the shrines and set up the icons come from? Were they cobbled together by the people in an attempt to pacify and please a deity they're all afraid of, or were they handed down from some external force with the promise of prosperity attached? Were the people promised salvation and blessings if they just continued to keep the faith, at any cost? Or are they searching for those blessings themselves? The line between what we would consider "acceptable" religion and something dark and sinister is thin and often permeable. That is the fear at the heart of Incantation - that all worship has the potential to go bad, not just worship of a specific and identifiably evil deity.

The one other issue I had with this that didn't occur to me until I was trying to fall asleep afterwards is that the monk in Yunnan who the main character's friend seeks out to translate the sutras could have essentially saved everyone's life but instead is just used as this monk ex machina, serving only to explain, not to influence. I guess that's pretty monkish of him, but this one guy or his younger interpreter could have raised more of a fuss upon being approached by an exhausted-looking man from very far away who asks him to translate a bunch of evil-sounding words and maybe not as many people would have died.

Aside from that, though, and a little disappointment that they went full-frontal in revealing the statue at the end, it's pretty rare for me to have so few actual complaints about a film. The human side of things felt almost uncomfortably real, and instead of detracting from the scary bits, I was compelled by the underlying story about a struggling single mother trying her damnedest to recover from what she was wrapped up in so that she could be the best parent for her daughter, who she clearly loved. Even the inclusion of the daughter's carer from the foster home she was brought to after the state took her and his deep, genuine love for her felt real. This is a movie that's equal on all sides, establishing characters who you care about and a terrifying horror story. The visual scares are equally as disconcerting as your growing awareness that everybody you're watching, no matter how much you want them to pull through, is doomed. There's something really interesting and fresh here, and I hope that this director will continue to come out with horror films that feel this original instead of recycling tropes.

Saga of the Vagabonds (1959)

directed by Toshio Sugie

Japan

115 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I might be a little biased in rating this movie relatively high, because I wanted to see it so bad I spent almost $30 on a DVD of it, but I also genuinely do feel like this is much better than people (the scant few others who have seen it, anyway) are giving it credit for. I think it's a crapshoot which samurai films are easy to find and which ones are either lost or nearly out-of-print, because I've seen much worse stuff that you can find with a single Google search, and then really great movies like this that have fallen into obscurity. I can't even imagine what else must be lost or just not available at all outside of Japan.

Most of the reason this has any notoriety is because the screenplay was written by Akira Kurosawa. You can definitely tell that it's a cut above in that respect, and it has some of the themes of human nature and reliability that he often tends to use in his films, but it's not quite at the level of quality of his other stuff (obviously, due to being directed by someone else). The opening of the film introduces us to a group of brigands, who half of the storyline is concerned with; they've looted a long gun from somewhere and are now trying to figure out how it works. This is a really interesting way of grounding the movie in a specific time and place, because it shows that the events taking place are happening at a time when warfare and fighting in general is changing because of the increasing spread of firearms. The most gun-savvy of the group declares, when asked, that a gun is specifically for killing people, nothing else. While weapons most commonly used at the time, such as swords and bows and arrows, are also arguably made for killing people, the impersonal nature of the gun compared to something that one can train at and make into a skill, if not an art - like a sword - renders it into a paradigm-changing object as soon as it is introduced into the scene.

There are essentially two levels of society that Saga of the Vagabonds follows, and I'd argue that the main point of the film is to show that there are not many differences between the two. Toshiro Mifune plays the accidental ringleader of a large group of thieves and general outcasts into which Koji Tsuruta's character, Taro, a young lord from a respectable family, integrates himself after having been ambushed, robbed, and left for dead while delivering some gold. To save face, his family back home throws him under the bus by making up a story where he steals the gold himself and goes into hiding. Taro bridges the gap between the higher strata and the less-than-"common folk", and in doing so exposes that the world he comes from is as full of lying and thievery as the band of brigands that eventually morphs into something of a vigilante justice squad. Although this group is not operating out of purely "good" intentions, Taro casts his lot with them because he sees that they have more potential for improving the lives of the general populace than his family, who are largely concerned with themselves.

Tsuruta's young lord is betrayed by his brother who is in turn betrayed by a vassal who was waiting in the wings, playing everyone, so that he could eventually get his own chance at a title. The other point of this film that is equally if not more important than its focus on the corruption and backstabbing that pervades every level of society is that most if not all efforts at organization fail because people are inherently out for themselves. This is where we see Kurosawa's writing at its most familiar, somewhat reminiscent of the doubt at the heart of Rashomon. The cycle of greed that tears apart the royal family eventually tears itself apart, because a couple of people who are each individually plotting ways to get over on each other can't rely on each other, even just to use one another for their own gains. Even the band of criminals that Tsuruta and Mifune lead, stealing from the rich and giving back to the poor, falls apart because one or two among them are too focused on using their newfound strength in numbers to dominate others - in this case, to claim women for themselves like they're objects. This is an "absolute power corrupts absolutely" type of story. Even a little bit of power, even shared among multiple people, is an unstable thing, and the tides can turn in a heartbeat because humans are inherently unpredictable and, this film seems to argue, selfish.

There is a little bit of a romance angle, but women are mostly used as, again, objects; they don't have much agency in the script outside of how their actions are going to affect whatever man is trying to ingratiate himself to them. This was not terribly important to me and although the general lack of women in chanbara is something I'm used to, that doesn't make it any less disappointing.

I'm not sure why one review I've seen says that the plot takes a backseat for most of the film because to me this was nothing but plot. I was deliberately concentrating on keeping it all straight in my head because this was a story I was very interested in. I guess a lot of it is action; there's certainly a lot of horse stuff, and the typical chanbara scenery with fights and rowdy drinking songs and whatnot, but I didn't feel like there was an uneven balance between that and the plot. It's beautifully made, mostly taking place outdoors, and everyone you know and love is in it (including, apparently, Haruo Nakajima - who I missed). I don't know, it might just be that spending money on it made me more determined to like this, but I really thought it was superior to a lot of the other movies I've been watching lately. I don't review them because I don't feel like I can talk intelligently enough about them, but I watch a LOT of samurai films, it is an area of interest of mine.