Fiend Without a Face (1958)

directed by Arthur Crabtree

UK

74 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This movie belongs solidly to the mid-20th-century "nuclear paranoia" subgenre, which is one of my areas of interest not only as it pertains to genre cinema but in general. Although many non-genre films were made that deal with anxiety over a nuclear future, it must be said that combining that with the concept of some awful mutated creature makes for great cinema. I think I was mostly watching this because I had some vague notion that it would be similar to Toho's The H-Man - with some radiation-mutated human as the killer - but it turns out it's more like Secret of the Telegian instead. More on that later (with spoilers for a 64-year-old movie).

Like many horror films you've undoubtedly seen, Fiend Without A Face starts off when a military base gets a little too comfortable doing nuclear-power tests in a small, rural community. The locals try to bring up the damage being done to their livestock from the noise and their suspicions that more may be going on, but are mostly dismissed, and anyway, at the same time, people are turning up dead in the woods with bizarre wounds that no one can explain. Their brains and spinal cords appear to have been sucked out through a small puncture wound in the base of the skull, leading one scientist to coin the term "mental vampire". Later, we the viewers witness some of the attacks that leave these mutilated bodies behind, but we don't yet see the killer - it's invisible! We watch a poor farming couple get sucked dry by some unknown force, helpless before a terror they (and we) cannot see! I am surprised at how unsettling this movie manages to be even before it explicitly shows us its titular creature. It should be mentioned that this is in the Criterion Collection, which I found to be a bit strange, but Criterion is nothing if not known for occasionally throwing out titles that make at least some subset of film fans think "well, that's a bit strange".

At 74 minutes, I do struggle a bit to come up with things to talk about, and the movie itself seems to struggle a bit to even reach that running time. There is a romance inserted between who we might call the "main" military character and a local woman whose brother was killed by the "fiend", and to me it felt awkward, with a very stiffly-acted scene where he walks in on her fresh out of the shower serving as our signal that something's going on between these two. I can't criticize romances too much even though I generally find them to feel very shoehorned-in most of the time, because on the other hand the characters would feel pretty inhuman and shallow without something like that. I guess a silly, trite pairing like this one is better than everybody acting like robots, and it also is a good showcase for tropes of the time. Nothing is ever shown, all modesty is preserved, but it's remarkable how the context of the film and the time period it was released in somehow makes seeing a woman totally covered up in a towel feel more scandalous than if she had been partially or fully nude.

I'm pulling out the L-word (Lovecraftian) to describe this film, because I feel like the story itself ticks some of the boxes: Creatures that are incomprehensible to the human mind and drive witnesses insane, latent mental powers running wild, things with tentacles, etc. A distinction should be made here that when the creatures drive a person insane, they do so in a purely physical manner (I.E. removing the brain stem and turning a person into what really is an awful spectacle that is fairly offensive and probably wouldn't be filmed today), not via some inherent quality of their appearance as is typical for Lovecraft. They are very goofy-looking on their own, and without background would be pretty laughable, but the concept behind their creation is layered with so many individually disturbing elements that it still works. After quite some time has passed, the force behind the mysterious deaths is found not to directly be the military's experiments but the experiments of a lone scientist working to enhance his own brain power, who accidentally unleashed a physical entity (an armada of them, actually) that fed off of the nearby radiation. Or at least that's what I got out of it, anyway. There's one big exposition dump that provides most of the backstory and then everything after that is just assumed. I have to say, though, even on their own without any backstory I still do love the fiends. There's something about how often the image of an ambulatory brain with spinal cord attached pops up that I really love - it's strangely endearing to me that humans have looked at our own anatomy and thought "I bet if a brain could move, the spinal cord would be like a little tail" not just once but multiple times.

I think where this movie excels is in its marriage of giving backstory on the creature with showing the creature on screen. It does the right thing in immediately showing us how gruesome the killings are, establishing that first before we fully know what's going on, and then giving us some explanation for it more slowly. This way we're hooked, and the movie has more freedom to kind of do whatever it wants because, wow, we've already seen an invisible force suck some folks' brains out. Like the confused, terrified farmers, we'll pretty much accept any explanation for that after we've seen it happen a couple times. And although this all is rooted in what we would now call bunko science, it reflects fears of the time. I do not in any way want to laugh at or minimize horror films that arose from fears of as-of-yet difficult to understand concepts like nuclear energy. The military acts towards the locals the way I think a lot of people would act towards this film today - "we're not dropping atom bombs on them, it's just tests for clean energy, why are they so worried?" Movies like this are important because we have to remember the actual dangers of these kinds of things; we can't get complacent just because we think we're at the top of our game with regards to scientific understanding of nuclear power.

I can't really tell what tack the movie itself is taking on that front, to be honest - the military are presented as at least somewhat responsible, but the way they lament the public always blaming everything on them seems a little too "poor, pitiful trillion-dollar superpower" to be fully serious. In any case, the final explanation shifts the blame mostly onto a single individual, whose actions, granted, wouldn't have been possible without the nuclear tests going on nearby, but the end message seems to be that none of the actors involved really knew what would transpire.

This is getting longer than I intended and so I'll stop here, but this is overall an interesting movie. Maybe not the best thing if you're looking for something truly macabre for your Halloween parties, but there's still a sense of dread to it that lingers. It isn't terribly deep, and the science isn't up-to-date if that's something that bothers you; it even just invents a field of study - "sibonetics" - whole cloth. I still enjoyed it and its fiends. They make a sound that is very horrible and I would love to know how it was achieved. To me it sounds exactly like a person undergoing liposuction, but that was not invented until a couple of decades later, so I assume it's some other medical procedure or possibly just something getting sucked up through a tube. We care about the important stuff here at the film review depot.

Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995)

directed by Shusuke Kaneko

Japan

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I've been watching the Gamera movies in chronological order, which I have heard for some reason is not the ideal way to go about doing that. But I continue anyway, which means this is the first of the Heisei Gamera movies I've seen, and the first after the lackluster Gamera: Super Monster. Maybe I answered my own question there - maybe the reason why it's not great to watch these chronologically is because it makes certain movies look great by comparison to others. But, frankly, this is a good movie any way you choose to watch it.

There's something so special about franchise films that arrive many years after the last installment and take a fresh approach to their subject matter. It had been 15 years since a Gamera movie, if you can even count Super Monster as "a Gamera movie", so people that were children when they watched their last giant turtle adventure were now young adults. It is definitely palpable that the intended audience for Gamera had shifted during that absence, as Guardian of the Universe doesn't have any really young kids in it the way all the previous entries had. But youth is still presented as something important and unspoiled, a vital source of input in a country full of adults too concerned with bureaucracy and self-defense to stop for a minute and look at what's in front of them, and realize the whole planet doesn't just belong to them.

We start off watching a ship hauling plutonium run aground on a mysterious floating atoll, which piques the interest of (of all people) an insurance representative, who begins an investigation and thus kicks off the whole film. We're also quickly introduced to the film's main antagonist, in glimpses: It's Gyaos, and not just one but a whole clutch of them, much smaller than Gamera but making up for it with their numbers and sheer viciousness. Gamera's perennial enemy is given some very interesting characterization here, and I especially enjoyed the ambiguity of them as a species that comes into play later; the way they're sometimes referred to as birds for simplicity's sake, but also that it's made very clear that they're not birds. They're something much worse.

There is a real sense of adventure to the beginning of this and actually to the whole of the film from start to finish, and I think that makes it appealing to people of all age ranges. By shifting up in maturity a little, it doesn't exclude any of the feeling of wonder that the previous entries had. This is a timeline where no one knows what Gamera is, and it's interesting to observe how different it is from the very first Gamera film released, in which none of the characters knew what Gamera was, but neither did the viewers. The first Gamera was quite bleak despite ultimately being a story of a creature who was confused, scared, and too big for its own good; possibly this owes a little to the stark black-and-white it was filmed in, so Guardian of the Universe being in color inherently makes it feel different, but I also think it just reflects the ongoing march of kaiju cinema and the growing familiarity of the filmgoing public with giant monsters that the initial reaction to Gamera in this film feels so much different.

As usual, the human characters are not too important compared to the kaiju. Some may find it hard to suspend their disbelief or find the whole "inexplicable psychic teenager" plot a bit wishy-washy, but it's a good representation of the need to learn about and explore the things you don't understand instead of rejecting them. The plot concerning an ancient civilization and a predestined battle between Gamera and the Gyaos legions is somewhat unoriginal but still, I felt, really engaging somehow, with its message about science run amok and doom that can be learned from. The human characters that are there are very good - it's especially nice to see a scientist who is a young woman be taken seriously throughout the whole film, and that she has basically the second-most important role behind another very young woman who happens to be psychically connected to Gamera. Having both a scientist and a psychic here feels like it represents the marriage of an intuitive and a rational viewpoint on nature, and the way that it doesn't always have to be one over the other.

I was surprised at how much this film tackles the same kind of bureaucratic running around in circles that is done in response to a national catastrophe that Shin Godzilla did. I particularly liked when a newscaster reports to the terrified public that a bill has been introduced to designate Gamera as a threat to the nation and assures them that "it will be debated with utmost importance". I can think of no less comforting words to hear during a disaster than "your government is thinking it over". The military response in kaiju films is usually misinformed at best and malicious at worst, but they really make you think the JSDF are jerks here. Gamera is quickly decided to be the enemy and all hell is unleashed upon it while it's trying to help us in our hour of need. The strike on Gamera in front of Mt. Fuji is deeply upsetting because of the truly wounded cry it lets out when fired upon, and there really is no more succinct image of helplessness than a turtle flipped over on its back. This is what we do to our savior in our ignorance and ineptitude: Even an 80-meter (that's 262 feet) creature trying to help us momentarily gets knocked back by human weaponry. Having that one point where humans actually manage to hurt Gamera felt like a crucial inclusion to the film because it shows that despite being small creatures, singularly, humans can come together as a powerfully destructive force if we go down the wrong path.

I have to talk about the suit design. Of course. I don't know much about Gamera and have been deliberately keeping it that way so I can be surprised by these movies as I watch them, and as such I'm really only familiar with the Showa-era Gamera suit. The updated design is very nice indeed. They have abandoned all pretense of making Gamera look even slightly like it could be quadrupedal - something achieved perhaps not on purpose thanks to how the suit actors bend and struggle under the weight of the shell, looking like at any minute Gamera could drop back down to all fours - but honestly the suit does an incredible job of hiding any trace of the human form inside it. I was not focused on where the actor's head might be the way I unconsciously am during other kaiju media. Gamera really looks like a creature here as opposed to a fabricated object. And Gyaos, my god, they really made them into disgusting little things. Covered in slime and brainlessly violent, replicating at speed, and did I mention slimy? Some of the smaller ones are puppets, but the Super Gyaos that Gamera fights at the end is played by Yumi Kameyama, who was the first (known) woman to play a kaiju*.

This really is everything you could want out of a kaiju movie. The pacing is good, a lot better even than many Godzilla films, and there's a satisfying balance between plot and pure action. I kept feeling like this movie was way longer than 95 minutes because so much goes on during it that it just feels like something you would sit and watch for 2+-hours, and I mean that in a very good way. The franchise may have stumbled a bit after Super Monster, but I don't think I can say it was fully a bad thing that it took such a long hiatus (due in part to Daiei's bankruptcy) because this is a breath of fresh air. I can only imagine watching this with a distance of 15 years between it and the last Gamera film, as opposed to just a few days the way it's been for me.

*technically, Jennie Kaplan as Pigmon (!) in Ultraman Powered was the first woman to play a kaiju, but as a non-Powered fan that fact makes me mad and I don't like to acknowledge it.

Kojiro (1967)

directed by Hiroshi Inagaki

Japan

151 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I wanted to see this so badly and for so long that I bought it on DVD. Massive, massive shoutout to Merlin David at samuraidvd.com for actually getting it in specially for me. His website is an amazing resource not only for the preservation of some very obscure films but also for just finding that one movie you have a burning desire to see. And not only samurai films! Some of Toho's excellent crime movies of the late '50s to mid '60s are there as well, and highly recommended.

As usual, I'm going to give my disclaimer that I do not know much about this particular era of history. I'm mostly reviewing this because the only other review of it I can find simply says "It's an Inagaki movie, so it's just vaguely dull". I have, however, seen Inagaki's masterful Samurai trilogy, in which Sasaki Kojiro plays a small but integral part, so I am familiar with him in that context. This film is fully about him, beginning when he leaves his unsatisfying life in a town too small to fulfill his ambitions as a swordsman. He has ties to his old life, particularly a woman, Tone, who wants and intends to follow him, but is kidnapped along the way. This is pretty much the "Everybody Hates Kojiro" show - except women, who seem quite fond of him - which is interesting, because we as viewers know that Kojiro's boasts have merit, and so to us a certain measure of his arrogance is forgivable, but to everyone around him, he's just this upstart from nowhere who shirks established methods of swordfighting for his own personal style. Typically we like to see arrogant young men get their comeuppance; in this case Kojiro's bravado is a part of his personality. He is presented as being too good for everyone around him and that's what makes them all hate him - again, this is not unusual for a protagonist, blessed by the light of the almighty Plot shining upon them, but typically they are unaware of their ability. Kojiro knows he's good and is determined to show it off.

I do take some issue with calling this movie dull, even though as a pretty big Inagaki fan I can do nothing but agree that frequently his movies are quite dull. But there's enough intrigue in Kojiro wandering from place to place, getting invested in something only to have his heart broken time and again, and eventually walk away with a renewed determination to literally live by the sword. Crucially, I found the characters in this to be far more interesting than in many of the other films from this director that I have seen. Kikunosuke Onoe does an excellent job playing Kojiro; he has a very youthful appearance, but the way he talks gives the impression that he can back up his boasts of swordfighting prowess. The people around him are individually interesting as well and Inagaki is very deliberate in establishing how everyone Kojiro brushes up against leaves a mark on his life, no matter how small.

I thought it was particularly interesting how many of the people Kojiro learns from are women. He himself is an orphan, from a lower place in society than the typical swordsman, and so shares something of the same station with women in that time period - this, I think, was why he associated with them and was able to relate to them more. Possibly my favorite character in this whole thing was a Ryukyuan princess who Kojiro briefly strikes up a romance (?) with. It's extremely rare to see anybody but mainland Japanese people in films like this, and even though the princess' portrayal is well within the lines of what was considered acceptable at the time (I.E. I'm not saying this is some triumph of decolonialism; the princess is still fairly a stereotype), I very much enjoyed seeing a woman who is in full control of her own destiny. She teaches Kojiro something about fighting vs. protecting oneself - before her, he didn't even seem to have considered that you can practice martial arts for any reason other than person-to-person combat. The princess's mastery of personal self-defense surprises him, as does her confident and outgoing manner. She has her own life, though, and eventually the two part.

He also ends up living with a dancer for a while, who is somewhat similar to him in that she leaves an unfulfilling life and strict teacher, but still holds onto a passion, in this case for dance. It should be noted that even though there are more women in this film and they have more to say and do than probably 99% of samurai films I've seen, they are still largely just stepping stones for the hero, and their fates have less to do with themselves than with motivating Kojiro in some way. To be fair, though, that's the way it is with most everyone else in the film, not just women. The dancer is there and provides comfort and support for him right up until it makes for more drama for her to accidentally kill herself. I do genuinely think the way this movie treats women is interesting and I could say more about it but I should probably end this diversion here before I go on for too long.

As a two-and-a-half-hour film, it does lag a bit in the middle, but is still supported by good characters and a variety of backdrops for Kojiro to do his soul-searching in. Eventually he encounters Miyamoto Musashi, his much more famous opponent, who is played in this case by Tatsuya Nakadai. Now, we of course know that Kojiro loses their duel. This is explored in the Samurai trilogy and to far, far better effect - but this is Kojiro's story, not the story of Musashi or of the duel between the two. That being said, though, I can't stop thinking about the ending of this movie and how strange of a thing it is. We know where it's going the whole time if we know anything at all about this story, and so the end is one of the least important parts of the film as it simply represents a dramatic conclusion to the life we have just watched a two-plus hour chronicle of. But it's just so... it's so weird. In the trilogy, their duel is presented (if I recall correctly) as a kind of inevitability and almost a one-sided thing, where Musashi knows he will easily win, and Kojiro seems to understand that it will be his own doom, but both of them enter into the fight anyway out of a sense of duty. It is incredibly compelling, faceted, and tragic, and is why the trilogy are some of my favorite films. The sunset duel is iconic, it can't be replicated, even by the same director. None of that establishing atmosphere is present here because the fight is so laconic. If you don't know any background, it could even be extremely funny, because this guy shows up out of nowhere in the last 20 minutes of the film and absolutely ethers the character we've spent this whole time being told is an expert swordsman. Without the background on Musashi as a person here, I almost feel like Nakadai plays him too aggressively.

The established history of Musashi and all his surrounding characters allows for an ending - the defeat and death of the protagonist - that would otherwise not be written into an original film, as it is, honestly, unsatisfying and abrupt. Figuring out how to show us that ending at the conclusion of a movie that is all about the losing party in question presents a fascinating problem.

I know that this is not the type of movie everybody is going to be interested in, and it takes a very specific area of interest and movie-watching stamina to want to see it at all. But my god, the costuming. The sets. Outfitting such a spectacular number of actors and extras must have kept Japan's textile industry going for a couple years. And of course the swordfighting is wonderful to watch, something I always enjoy in historical films like this. It's a shame that the Samurai trilogy is fairly easy to get hold of, with even a Criterion release (not that it doesn't deserve it!) while this perfectly good companion piece is less accessible even than Inagaki's 1950 telling of the same story. As an aside, I do wish I could see Tadao Nakamaru as anything other than the Telegian, but I guess once you've been the Telegian, you are always the Telegian.

When I Consume You (2021)

directed by Perry Blackshear

USA

92 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I somehow missed that Perry Blackshear, who directed the absolutely wonderful They Look Like People and then the perfectly decent The Siren, had a new movie out. It took me a minute to get around to watching it, but after having done so I'm going to go ahead and say that he's made not just one of the best films of the year but an incredibly original, almost Gnostic genre-bender of a horror movie. I don't remember the last time I've given out a five-star rating, but I feel comfortable giving one to this film.

A lot of what I remember from They Look Like People returns in When I Consume You, but it's married with a far more cerebral plot and a depth to the two central characters that I wasn't expecting. The character who we follow for much of the film is Wilson, a thirty-something that the film presents as subsisting in the margins of life with one bright light that keeps his head above water - his sister, Daphne. The two of them are the only lifeline each other has, after an implied horrible childhood and through various struggles with drugs, alcohol, and underemployment. The film is much more about Wilson, but it doesn't shirk Daphne's role, because the two siblings are written to be inseparable parts of each other. There's a constant exchange, sometimes unspoken, between the two of them where neither ever lets the other down; when Wilson is in crisis, Daphne is there, and next time when it's Daphne who's in trouble, Wilson takes what he has learned from her of how to support another human being and gives it to her.

I loved the way these two were written, and I wanted to take a moment to talk about the script in general, because I felt like this was one of those films where the dialogue is ever so slightly poetic, but never unrealistic. In one scene where Daphne is talking about the life she wishes she could have had, she says that she wanted to have many children "that I would have treated like they were the Sun". Something about that is sticking with me, "like they were the Sun" - the lyricism of that line but also the truth of it, the way such simple words can dissect the powerful love between an (in this case adoptive) parent and their children so much more than just "I love them". The villain's monologues are similarly no more wordy or grandiose than they need to be, but still effective, which is a tough thing in horror and I guess in any movie where an evil character is present and verbose. Blackshear also wrote the script, and it feels like something personal born of areas of interest and expertise specific to him as a person, but also something that I could heavily relate to.

I've gotten this far without actually talking about this as a horror movie. This is a prime example of horror-as-metaphor, but it's also horror as... well, horror. The constant state of insecurity that the siblings are in is the result of a bad childhood having followed them all through life, which when you think about it is its own kind of stalker, its own It Follows demon that is constantly one step behind you. The weight of having A History™ behind you follows you your whole life, it confronts you when you try to get away from it, it drags you back down to dark places, it doesn't want you to have anything good or be anything other than a person with A History™. This is taken into literality in When I Consume You. The monster is physically present and it beats you down, bruises you, breaks your teeth. The past is ironically not elaborated upon specifically here - apart from one disturbing anecdote about being forced to kill a pet turtle, we never learn exactly what happened to the siblings as children that deprived them of the kind of "life skills" that people with a normal upbringing might have. But the past is also in every frame of the film, and the horror of it is that overcoming it may be impossible, and the only option sometimes is to face it and move on, even when it won't move on from you. There are ways to live with suffering and to rise above it - another angle I don't frequently see explored in media, because we want an easy resolution wherein all trace of hardship is erased. Not much thought is given to the possibility of transcending suffering through mental change, and I appreciate that it is accepted as an option here.

But like I just said, along with the metaphor for echoing childhood trauma, there is also a literal, actual horror in this film. And it is created along lines that I so seldom see done in horror and certainly never outside of indie film. This is a little bit reminiscent (but not quite) of The Empty Man if you shaved off an hour and change from the running time and just focused on some of its philosophical implications. It is in its way a subversion of the idea of a "good vs. evil" story - or maybe not a subversion of the fundamental concept but of the process and the outcome. I'm thinking about how Wilson very clearly does not defeat the demon in the end - how he still sees it, every day, how it is an indelible part of his life but instead of cowering in fear from it he looks it in the eye and recognizes something of himself in it. That's why the creature in this movie is so terrifying, not because of looks or even its sinister declaration of intent to consume and consume and consume, but because of its permanence, its inherence. This movie feels like being inside a nightmare that you keep thinking you've woken up from only to realize you're still asleep. I don't want to say too much specifically about the creature because the movie is very deliberate in not establishing too many details on it, revealing little by little until it's given us as much as it's going to give us and leaving the rest in our heads. There is a clear framework behind it (and I loved that framework) but it's also a little bit open to interpretation.

I honestly can't think of anything I disliked about this movie. Evan Dumouchel does such an amazing job portraying a grieving brother that it's hard to look at at times. This feels conceptually brand new and edited to perfection, with nothing there that made it feel a minute shorter or longer than it was supposed to be. I'm glad I can still be surprised and captured by horror films made today. I am a little confused at where the negative reaction to this is coming from; granted I tend to be really fond of stuff that nobody else likes, but it seems like people are jaded from having disliked an Ari Aster movie or something and conflating any slow, methodical horror movie with whatever they disliked in another one.