Rex: A Dinosaur's Story (1993)

directed by Haruki Kadokawa

Japan

106 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I probably shouldn't be reviewing this immediately after having watched it, because this feels like a movie that I have to sit with for a while. Which is a little ridiculous to say of a children's film with a baby dinosaur who gets a friendship bracelet as a reward for its first poop, but I'm seeing a lot of four- and five-star reviews, and it's making me second-guess my own, kind of lukewarm feelings about it. But I did like this! I liked it a lot. Let's talk about it a little more.

Chie (played by Yumi Adachi) is a young girl whose paleontologist father (I've only ever seen Tsunehiko Watase in yakuza movies, so it's weird to see him in loafers and a grandpa sweater) takes her into a mysterious cave, where their party - mostly by accident - crashes into a chamber deep underground. There they discover a dinosaur egg being held in stasis by some kind of severely '90s glowing energy triangle. Unable to resist, Chie's father and his partners take the egg back to their lab and try to hatch it. More specifically, Chie's mother, Naomi, apparently a world-famous embryologist (played by the lovely Shinobu Otake), arrives on the scene to try to hatch it. The family dynamic is very strained between Chie, her father, and her mother, Naomi having left at some point when Chie was even younger to pursue dreams of being a scientist that raising a child did not allow time for. There's a strong and implicit parallel between Chie becoming Rex's foster mother, stepping up to raise a baby with no one else to care for it, and what the film sees as Naomi's need to realize her role as Chie's mother.

It's... really kind of weird and uncomfortable, the way this movie deals with motherhood and femininity; it's not a huge enough problem to have completely ruined everything for me, but I kept thinking about it throughout the film and being like "ugh". The way the movie treats Naomi is kind of harsh, honestly. I can't even imagine how many more women scientists we would have had throughout history if society didn't force this idea of choosing either to do the "right" thing by staying home and being a good mother or continuing your career. Yeah, it does suck to abandon your child, but it also sucks that there's this double-standard where Chie's father does science and stuff while still actively parenting her, and there's no problem there, but for some reason Chie's mother can't be shown doing the same thing.

But anyway. A goofy little dude hatches out of the dinosaur egg, despite all odds, and very quickly they've got it doing microwave dinner and topical painkiller commercials. The Rex puppet is one of the best things about this whole movie for me, because I am a tokusatsu freak and if there's a guy in a suit or a puppet involved I want to examine it closely and reverently. Rex goes through different stages of growth, which is always really interesting to see depicted onscreen, from a newborn to a bipedal adolescent played by somebody whose back probably really really hurt. The articulation is pretty spectacular, allowing for very realistic movement, but you can tell in a lot of scenes where they were hiding the person puppeting Rex - not a problem to me, but it makes Rex's appearance less seamless. Rex is adorable, though, there's no denying that. It's a Minilla type of cuteness, but its constantly wagging tail and facial expressions make Rex more personable than kind of gross-looking Minilla.

The third act of the movie is where I felt like it began to fizzle out a little. Chie objects to having Rex do television commercials over and over, but we see from the Rex plushies in the background and the billboards and museum exhibits that Rex is still immensely profitable, and the people who are profiting off of it do not take kindly to any interruption of their cash flow. The main villain is a guy trying to argue that he has full rights to Rex in perpetuity, and his goons (Dinosaur Sentai Koseidon fans rejoice, it's our man Morii Mori), who are hindered by a children's choir throwing snowballs at them and a lengthy snowmobile chase. It felt like the constant activity after Chie decides to take a break from her parents was the result of somebody going "this movie needs more chase scenes". Maybe I'm just boring but I enjoyed seeing Chie and Rex's one-on-one interactions more than that type of thing.

The other thing I had a problem with was this movie's mixture of esoteric, New Age mysticism and real-life Ainu culture. This is really something I don't know a lot about, so I can't speak to how Ainu people feel about seeing themselves depicted onscreen like this, but I can say that if this were set in the U.S., and the Ainu character in this movie was substituted with a Native American character - who would then be played by a non-Native actor - people would have an obvious and justified problem with that.

Aesthetically, this is a great movie. It's got that big-budget feel with small-budget toku sensibilities. I love the aerial shots of gorges and forests and the inside of the cave, especially the ice slide, which looked really fun. This is one of those movies that is packed wall-to-wall with stuff, and all the set decorating feels authentic; every residential house looks lived-in, every lab looks utile and real, it all just feels like it takes place in the physical world - with a dinosaur, of course. I love the escapism of this, the way it challenges you to pretend that a little girl really could wake up a baby dinosaur by playing the ocarina for it. Even though Christmas isn's the main focus, it's a good Christmas movie because of its themes of togetherness and mutual care. I just wish some of that didn't feel vaguely misogynistic, but I'm a stick in the mud about that. Maybe next year I'll rewatch this and try to get out of my own head a little more, and then I'll enjoy it better. Until then, merry something, may we all get dinosaurs this year.

(edit: I forgot about Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds. I guess that means this is part of the Tsunehiko Watase Doing Stuff With Dinosaurs Cinematic Universe.)

Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995)

directed by Takao Okawara

Japan

103 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I really wish I wasn't posting this review. I'd been sitting on it for a while because I felt like I was posting too many Godzilla reviews (as if such a thing exists), but with the news of Kenpachirō Satsuma's death this past weekend, I felt like it was an appropriate time to post it. Satsuma gives an excellent performance as Godzilla in this film, finding a balance between the aggressiveness he'd brought to the character and the tragedy of Godzilla watching his son die. He was an incredibly dynamic suit actor and will be missed by many, many fans, including myself.

I rewatch every Godzilla movie fairly often, but this is the one that I don't really touch, because honestly Burning Godzilla and the fate of Godzilla Junior is just too much for me to handle, emotionally. But I decided it was finally time to revisit this, which I think was one of the only Godzilla films I rated five stars upon first watching it (I was a bit of a pleb when I was first watching the series and only grew to appreciate it properly somewhat later). It's really, really hard for me to talk about this and do it justice because even though this might not be my overall favorite of the Heisei era, it's one of the most special and impactful.

One thing I said in my earlier review of this film was that it's different from every other Godzilla movie in that it introduces us to a Godzilla who is mortal from the start. A Godzilla who is actively, visibly, and very destructively dying. Prior to the events of the film, something triggers the first stages of a total meltdown in Godzilla and starts a chain reaction that, throughout vs. Destoroyah, characters can accurately track and predict. Once he reaches a certain temperature, Godzilla will go critical and destroy not only himself but possibly the entire world - one projection shows him essentially opening up a black hole by tunneling through to the center of the Earth - and he is literally a ticking time bomb. It alters the playing field a little bit when everybody knows that Godzilla is, at some point, going to die; the effort of the JSDF and various scientists in this film is therefore not to outright kill Godzilla, but to try to mitigate the utter cataclysm that is going to happen when he does die. But nobody has much chance of doing that, really.

So the film begins with the discovery that Godzilla Junior's former home, Birth Island, has been destroyed in an unspecified incident (it really bothers me that we never know exactly what happened; I think it's implied to be some kind of unsanctioned nuclear test, but we never find out), and Junior is now roaming towards another island, Adonoa. At the same time, Godzilla emerges from the sea looking noticeably different, and analyses find that something has gone wrong in the reactor of his heart and his temperature is rapidly rising. At the same time, a life form is found to have emerged from the area where the Oxygen Destroyer was used to kill the first Godzilla back in 1954.

I have seen many instances of Destoroyah being referred to as things like a "stupid overrated crab that everyone treats like a god but is actually just a dumbass lobster", and my personal favorite, a "Satanic Pre-Cambrian life form", but what it represents in the context of this film is actually one of the most interesting and powerful ideas in the whole franchise. Although Dr. Serizawa burned his plans and took himself - the only person who would have been able to produce a second Oxygen Destroyer - with Godzilla when he used his superweapon, the implication here is that because that was done once, even though every possible effort was taken to make sure it could not ever be done again, now that the idea is out there, it's inevitable that other weapons are going to continue to be constructed in a cycle that's probably never going to end. It's really, really grim. And I love the idea of introducing a kaiju that is the physical embodiment of the Oxygen Destroyer because one of the absolute most key points of this whole series is the idea that the use of a superweapon is not just a "one and done" thing, it's something that comes back to haunt humanity over and over. Destoroyah takes that concept and applies it to the very thing that seemed to have once saved humanity. Nothing, no matter how carefully handled, is ever safe when you're dealing with weapons at this scale. Becoming complacent is the deadliest thing we can do.

Another thing I said in my original review is that this is such a potent movie because Godzilla suffers like a human. In the Showa era when Godzilla was beginning to shift towards being a child-friendly character, he very frequently had human-like mannerisms and emotions, but the Heisei era introduced us to a Godzilla who was unknowable and distant. I will again mention one of my favorite moments in the whole series, which is in Godzilla vs Biollante, when everybody's favorite psychic Miki Saegusa attempts to connect with Godzilla telepathically and is overwhelmed by his consciousness. That's the kind of Godzilla we deal with, for the most part, in the Heisei series: a creature who has not lost his sympathetic nature, but who is established as being on an entirely different, unapproachable level, apart from humanity. So for us to see him suffer so much in vs. Destoroyah brings a new tone to this era.

I also just really, really hate the humans in this one. Even my homegirl Saegusa missteps a bit. The plan to use Junior as a decoy to lure Godzilla over to Destoroyah's location so the two can fight it out feels so, so immeasurably cruel. Saegusa and her younger psychic co-worker do have significant doubts, and Saegusa outright refuses at first, but eventually they see no other choice than to use Junior as bait - hoping, of course, for a good outcome, but they are literally chucking a baby at, to borrow a phrase, a Satanic Pre-Cambrian life form. While said baby's father is actively dying, in constant pain, moving slowly and tortuously towards where he can sense his son is, only to arrive and find him already dead. That kills me every time I see it. I refer to Junior as Godzilla's son, but when you think about it, there's something much deeper there: we have absolutely no evidence to prove that Junior is physically the offspring of Godzilla, and most likely he is not, so not only is he Godzilla's adopted son, he's also the only other living member of Godzilla's species. Godzilla is alone, brought unwillingly into a world hostile to and unfit for him, and we throw his only companion to the wolves while he's in the process of dying. Despite our intentions, and despite the fact that this course of action was done in an attempt to stop what would have been a catastrophic destruction event, that remains possibly the single most awful thing humans have ever done to Godzilla. A lot is made of Destoroyah being one of the most genuinely evil of Godzilla's enemies, and how he attacks Junior with active foreknowledge that it will hurt Godzilla emotionally, but, like, we did that. Junior wouldn't have died if humans hadn't been willing to sacrifice him.

And now I must talk about Destoroyah itself. I am quite fond of it. I have a little inch-tall figure of it I'm looking at right now. I like it not only for what it represents but also for the way it goes through multiple stages, somewhat like Hedorah; emerging first as a microscopic crustacean but soon growing into a multitude of large and extremely destructive organisms that can fuse into one enormous being. Destoroyah's power is further established by the monumental score. This movie has some of the most effective usage of Akira Ifukube's music that I've heard outside of the 1954 film, and there's two moments in particular that really gave me goosebumps: the big drums when Destoroyah bites Junior, and when we see Destoroyah silhouetted against mist for the first time, wings unfurled, in full power, and it almost sounds like something out of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. There's an episode of Ultraman Gaia where the kaiju of the week is a revived extinct organism from the Earth's distant past who is fueled by rage at not being "chosen" by the Earth to survive, and Destoroyah kind of makes me think of that. This is a very ephemeral factoid, but apparently a theater program hints that Destoroyah's Perfect Form was not its final stage of evolution, which is an absolutely fascinating thread that I wish were explored further. Also, a second ephemeral factoid is that according to an interview with Akira Ifukube, Godzilla went to heaven when he died. I think about that a lot.

I'm glad I rewatched this even though it is somewhat painful because I just really love and appreciate this film. It is such a good continuation of what the original Godzilla started, and such a loving tribute to everything and everyone who was part of it. I love seeing Momoko Kôchi again. This movie was intended to be the final Godzilla film of the 20th century, but fortunately - and partly thanks to the poor reception of Tristar's Godzilla - we did end up getting Godzilla 2000 in 1999, which I am essentially alone in considering one of my favorite Godzilla movies.

Warrior Of Love Rainbowman Special

Today is the birthday of my favorite actor, Akihiko Hirata. You almost definitely know him from Godzilla (1954), but he had a 31-year career, during which he was in a great many¹ films and television series that run the gamut from science fiction, to war films, to comedies, to epic historical dramas, to hardboiled crime flicks, to corporate propaganda for Toshiba²... to... a stage production of The Sound of Music, apparently. One of my personal favorite roles of his was the villainous but extremely suave Mr. K, from Toho's 1972 television series Warrior of Love Rainbowman.

I've recently acquired a mook (magazine + book) dedicated to Rainbowman. This was released in May of this year as part of a series highlighting Toho's tokusatsu productions. For about a week, I spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time every day working to translate the whole thing into English. I think the part of my brain that goes "OK I'm tired of this now, let's do something else" is broken.

As we all know, Hirata never had any leading roles, and the mook doesn't have that much in the way of Mr. K Content™, all things considered, but I decided to translate the entire thing anyway, because... in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess? Rainbowman hasn't been subtitled³, so there's not much English-language info on it out there. There are some interesting things in here, like a very sweet interview with Yu Mizushima, who sang the theme song, and a profile of Sadamasa Arikawa, who's well-known for his work in tokusatsu.

A BIG DISCLAIMER: I used Google Lens for this. Although I understand a tiny, tiny bit of Japanese, and can fully read katakana and muddle my way through a few words of hiragana sometimes, I can't read more than probably like 10 kanji. What I did was clean up the machine translation to be more coherent, fixing things like pronouns, sentence order, and past/present tense as best I could. I've also watched the entire series, some episodes two or three times, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with anything in the mook. I am not claiming that this is in any way a perfect translation, or even a very good one, but considering the dearth of English Rainbowman content, it is, at the very least, something.

If anybody is seeing this who can actually read Japanese and wants to help correct or even replace this text wholesale, please get in touch with me through the contact form at the bottom of my blog. I would be more than happy to take care of the typesetting to produce the best and most accurate version of this scanlation. (I would of course give you the main credit because I'm not a jerk.)

I also typed up supplemental notes for each page, which give context to terms and phrases, background on the various other television series and movies mentioned throughout, and my own silly running commentary. I would appreciate if you took a look at them; I spent almost as much time on them as I did on the pages themselves. Here they are. If nothing else, you'll want to read them just to find out what Google Lens tried to call L-Banda.

Blogger is inevitably going to squash these images down, and the text is quite small, so I would recommend either saving them to your device and zooming in on them, or opening them in a separate tab on your browser to zoom in. But anyway, here it all is.

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¹ I'm not sure of the exact number. I don't know if anybody is. I don't tend to trust IMDb so much for non-English media.

² Young Challengers, 1968, dir. Yasuki Chiba.

³ It aired in Hawaii with subtitles in the mid-70s, but those tapes have never resurfaced.

King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Last time I watched this movie was the first night I came down with covid and I felt like a ghost that had been hit by a car. Back then I didn't want to wait a billion hours for the super-duper HD 4K restoration to download, but I had the time last night and am currently covidless, so I finally watched it in far and away the best quality I've ever seen a Godzilla movie in. I would highly, highly recommend getting your hands on that restoration by any means possible.

This is my third rewatch and I'm finally appreciating this movie for what it is. It was one of the last Godzilla films I got around to, due to an irrational prejudice I have against King Kong. (I just think he's silly. What pathos has a giant ape? Mechani-Kong, on the other hand, is a whole different story.) But anyway. This is only the third Godzilla movie to have been made. Prior to this, the tone of Godzilla was grim and monochrome; Godzilla Raids Again was a bit middle-of-the-road, but it still retained at least something of the pessimistic, dread-filled tone of the first movie. And then, seven years later, King Kong vs. Godzilla comes out the gate swinging, the first Godzilla movie in color, and by god what colors they are.

I think there's undoubtedly a self-referential quality to the storyline in this film. Helmed by Ishirō Honda, who was famously disappointed with Godzilla's evolution into a children's hero, it's hard not to see a statement being made in the fact that the driving force behind the film's plot is Godzilla and Kong being used as pure spectacle to make money. But it does not at all feel like it's talking down to the audience or doing anything that it doesn't want to do: this movie is saying "You want a good time? Fine, we'll show you a good time", and it absolutely delivers.

We're probably all familiar with the plot, but to recap: the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, frustrated at lack of sales, catches wind of a legendary beast living on an island somewhere in the South Pacific and orders his employees to go catch it so that he can use it to drum up publicity for his company. This is of course King Kong, who is towed back to Japan on a big raft (or that's the plan, at least; the Japanese government itself catches wind of this and is like "We don't want that thing over here"). At the same time, mysterious lights are spotted coming from an iceberg - Godzilla, hibernating in ice since the end of Raids Again, has woken up and his first act is to sink a ship that was unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity. So we've now got two monsters on the playing field, and when Kong gets unruly and escapes his raft, they make their way inexorably towards each other. Which is great! Stage a fight between the two, sponsored by the pharmaceutical company, and it'll make money hand over fist. But despite the CEO trying his damndest to worm his way in, Godzilla and King Kong resist commercialization, making them perhaps the real heroes and the humans the villains once again.

The blackface in this one is really egregious and takes me out of the movie every time I watch it. Personally I don't think Honda had any lack of respect for indigenous peoples, because he repeatedly uses them in his films as a way to convey the message that modern civilization is making us blind and ignorant to mysteries and miracles that still exist in "untouched" places, and doesn't ever cast them as stupid or silly. This is a movie of its time and I doubt anybody had any problem with the depiction of the Faro natives when it came out. But in 2023 I can say with confidence that it sucks and I hate it. I understand where it's coming from, but it still sucks. I'll leave it at that.

Watching this in such incredibly clear quality allowed me to appreciate the suits and miniatures even more than I already did. The problem with talking about the practical effects in this movie is that they're so good I occasionally missed them. Almost every time there's a miniature vehicle shown on screen, the care is taken to put tiny little fake people inside it. It is noticeable, but only if you're really focusing on it. A lot of the green-screening and optical printing is extremely rough, with some figures becoming transparent or having a thick border around them showing where they were overlayed with the background image, but considering when this movie came out, I'd say putting that stuff in at all was extremely ambitious. I think it's also deliberate that one of the main characters' invention of super-strong, super-thin, invisible wire ends up being an important plot point - I don't think tokusatsu as a medium would be the same if not for super-strong invisible wire.

The Godzilla suit in this - referred to as the KingGoji suit - is my favorite of all time. I watched this series out of chronological order, so it's easy for me to forget that before this film, the Godzilla suit looked like this (jumpscare warning). I absolutely adore the early Godzilla suits, they are very special and beautiful and I wouldn't change a single minuscule thing about them, but the KingGoji suit was the first time that awkward puppet-like motion of the first two suits was absent. KingGoji looks like an animal. Again, that invisible string plays a large part in this: I love the way his tail twitches, it's very naturalistic. 

I guess people don't like this Kong suit because the proportions are weird or whatever. Personally that doesn't bother me; no, it doesn't look like an ape, but it looks like a King Kong and that's good enough for me. Shoichi Hirose is in the King Kong suit and he puts some real character into it. I love when Kong picks that woman out of the train, he's got such a look of "Huh. What should I do with this thing?" Both Kong and Godzilla in this film have a really interesting characterization: they're neutral, not good or bad, just large animals fighting each other. Godzilla steps on a train and it's not even a big dramatic stomp, he's just walking, but his size means everywhere he goes gets destroyed. I'm a big fan of the darker narrative within the Godzilla franchise, but this turn away from the nihilism of the first two movies allowed for a lot more experimentation with writing kaiju as characters.

So I can finally say that I really do love this one. It's colorful and crowd-pleasing but aware of itself in a way that only Honda can pull off. The cast is super fun, the plot is silly but not too silly as to feel fantastical, and the practical effects are gorgeous. It's great. Don't sleep on it, if you currently are.

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

directed by Roger Corman

USA/UK

90 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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(This review was written in late summer of 2021.)

When I was a kid, I had a book with a few illustrated and abridged versions of popular Edgar Allan Poe stories. Unfortunately I don't remember the publisher or the illustrator, but what has stuck with me all these years is its version of Masque of the Red Death. I was probably too young to be reading something like that, or at least too young to be giving it as much thought as I did, but the climax of the story was rendered as horrendously macabre in the book's art style, and I still remember the masked figure in red stalking through the halls trailing an actual, physical red wake. I remember the clock chiming midnight, the figures of the revelers twisted and diseased, the slow progression through each colored room. I remember a feeling of weighty silence even though it was only images on a page. I probably like that artwork better than I like Poe's original story, and because of it, Red Death has remained my favorite of his.

This movie is, of course, not that. My apologies for going on, but I wanted to mention that to give an idea of the impression that Masque of the Red Death made on me at a very young age. I wish I didn't have to ever say this, but the story itself is extremely relevant right now: a cruel, uncaring ruler holed up in his castle with a select few of the super-rich while the poor die in droves right outside the gates. It's the perfect pandemic movie, and I doubt anybody involved in its production could ever have imagined it would be so relevant. I think almost all of the top reviews of it on Letterboxd right now are covid jokes. That says something about where peoples' minds are when they watch a movie about rich people hoarding power in the middle of a pandemic. Of course, the idea of the rich isolating themselves from the poor is not new, but the combination of it and a contagious disease (even if said disease is more metaphor than anything) hits particularly hard right now.

Vincent Price as Prince Prospero is the obvious centerpiece of this whole film, and even his signature slight hamminess can't hide the fact that the character he plays is just a hideous human being with no redeeming qualities. His cruelty is almost cartoonish, but almost is the key word there - neither the script nor Price's performance ever tip the scales so much that he becomes entirely unbelievable as a villain. Maybe this is an effect of the film's aforementioned current relevance, but even though he does ridiculous things, like command people to crawl around on the ground doing various animal impressions, Prospero is never more funny than he is despicable. And it's also fairly harrowing to watch Francesca's slow descent into acceptance of her fate, being dragged along like a plaything with no possible chance of escape until she doesn't even want to escape anymore. A lot of the acting is not up to today's standards, and seeing everyone pull off these performances while dressed in dollar store medieval chic takes a little away from it, but Francesca's abduction and captivity remain upsetting nevertheless.

Something I'm really interested in that has no real relevance to the actual quality of this film is the ending, when figures implied to be personifications of different plagues show up, but they are also, curiously, coded to the colors of Prospero's indulgent colored rooms that he has for no reason other than to show off his wealth. (It would of course be a little harder and more expensive to assemble such rooms when colors and dyes weren't as easy to come by as going to Home Depot with some paint swatches.) There's something I find compelling about that. When Prospero constructed the rooms, was he driven, unknowingly, by the invisible hand of each specter of disease? Was something - fate, or possibly God - guiding him to create physical reminders of his own mortality? And would he have been able to recognize that reminder of his mortality if he were not fooled by his own riches and power into believing he was functionally immortal? Those rooms always gave me an uneasy feeling, even when I was reading the book as a kid, and I've never been able to figure out why.

I don't have much else to say about this. It's not the best movie I've ever seen, but the performances and the symbolism and everything else about it, especially the camerawork by Nicolas Roeg of all people, make it shine brighter. I just can't stop thinking about how this is a movie that doesn't feel like it should be this depressing or leave me as reflective about real life as it does. It's too gothic and has too much grandeur for that. Plus, it's too cheesy - Vincent Price shouldn't give me a sense of ennui, and yet. This should remain a grotesque but fictional story, and instead we're all living in it and we don't even get to wear cool masks.

Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 05: The Most Terrifying Movie In History (2014)

directed by Koji Shiraishi

Japan

80 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Oh boy. 

I'm watching these out of order because they can be a bit hard to find and continuity doesn't seem to be too much of an issue. I'm not exactly sure how many there are, but I can't imagine there'd be a lot more of them after this one, because of... well, the way that it is. I tried to avoid spoilers in my review of Shivering Ghost, but I'm going to make no such effort here. It's just too complicated to dance around everything that happens. Depending on translation, the full title of this movie is something like "Terribly Scary and Weird Files: The Most Terrifying Movie in the World". You can't lose with a name like that.

So the setup is the same as the past films: a documentary crew producing a show where they investigate the weirdest, creepiest videos they can find is sent a new video, this time from a fan who goes into a notoriously haunted village specifically to shoot something to send the crew. His girlfriend disappears, and when the crew tracks him down, he attempts to kill himself in front of them and then disappears as well. The crew ventures into the village themselves, and from then on it goes in so many different directions that I can't sum it all up in one paragraph.

Right off the bat I was not as enthused with the supernatural stuff here as I have been with the previous two Senritsu Kaiki films I've seen. Compared to everything else, the wispy ghost hands erupting from people's mouths and grabbing their heads just feels a little wishy-washy. The thing I've come to expect from Koji Shiraishi is imagery that's jarring and unfamiliar; the ghost hands feel like something I've seen before. Even the investigation into the village is kind of boring, with the exception that somebody claims it to be the birthplace of the writer of Yotsuya Kaidan, who they allege was also a black magician and is somehow involved with the current extremely haunted state of the village. But it's all very routine: pixelated footage of what we're supposed to believe are severed animal heads and bloody body parts, people screaming, getting possessed, that kind of thing. I should note that there's a real-life idol in this film, who shows off her actual gravure books and whatnot that you can actually buy. I have no idea why she's there and neither does she. She mentions that the film crew paid her specifically to go along with them but that she thought she was doing some kind of variety show. No concrete explanation for her presence is ever provided. Along with her, they have an exorcist from a previous film, and a scientist who is clearly not buying any of the crew's nonsense. Kudo, his cohost Ichikawa, and their three guests each apply their own unique method of investigation to the haunted village.

And then this movie loses its entire mind. I'd started running out of patience for what had been a sparse depiction of silly possessions and bad CGI ghost hands when The Most Terrifying Movie in History took its first hard turn into the bizarre and then took about thirty more. We find out that Kudo, the host of the investigation show, is connected to the village via his parents, who were scientists working there on a project to create enormous, demonic super-soldiers during WWII. (For some reason these soldiers must be girls, hence why Kudo himself didn't get turned into one. Also they're naked.) Kudo brought along another weird talisman, which ended up merging with his body and eventually causing him to get sucked into the worm dimension (second Shiraishi film I've seen that involves somebody getting sucked into the worm dimension) where he witnesses his cohost being decapitated and is transported to the past. He meets his parents and his child self, and after failing to convince his parents to stop their research, he murders both of them. This doesn't seem to do anything to stop the giant ghosts of the super-soldiers from escaping the village, which leads to one of the most memorable final shots I've seen from a filmmaker whose most recognizable signature is memorable final shots. All that is only a quick rundown of what happens in this film.

It's pretty clear now that the backbone of this series is Kudo. He's unhinged in a way that is hard to describe. The completely deadpan way he's played by Shigeo Ôsako makes him feel real-life unhinged, not movie-unhinged. He does seem to have real human feelings - he attempts to stop a guy from cutting his own throat, and appears concerned when the exorcist disappears - but he also just straight-up kills at least three people. He might be self-aware, at least a little: someone asks him if he's an idiot and he says "maybe". Kudo's kind of terrifying because there's no trigger when he goes sicko mode. He's just constantly ready to punch people and beat them with aluminum baseball bats at a moment's notice with no preparation. His film crew are visibly scared of him but for some reason keep going along with whatever he does. I think they're afraid to leave him alone for fear of what else he might do. There are very few characters who feel as bonkers as Kudo. He also becomes a kyodai hero by the end of the movie, so yeah. Ultraman Kudo.

I really don't know what to make of this one. It devolves into chaos harder and in more directions simultaneously than maybe any other Shiraishi film I've seen. I would say that the actual paranormal stuff feels somewhat subdued, but "subdued" is not quite the right word - it feels different because it's taken to the macro scale. This is where the weirdness breaches containment, and now there's a bunch of giants roaming around the country, and all the characters are trapped in the worm dimension. It's no longer just a haunting, it's everyone's problem, and that makes it feel a little less personal and a little less creepy. But for sheer insanity factor, for the Kudo Method taken to its (il)logical extreme, you can't beat this. Unless you can. I still haven't seen all of these movies. And there's something to be said about how the restraints of budget do not keep Shiraishi from crafting something with as much impact and complexity as anything else. It shows that if you're dedicated enough, the medium of film can be used in pretty much limitless ways.

Apologies if this review is not quite up to snuff. I'm working on something.

Godzilla: Minus One (2023)

directed by Takeshi Yamazaki

Japan

125 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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👉BIG OL SPOILERS BELOW. DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM.👈

It is taking a gargantuan amount of self-restraint for me not to type this review in all-caps. Like I did with Shin Ultraman, I'm not even considering this a "review" in any meaningful sense of the word. I just got back from this movie and I need to yell incoherently about it for a minute. I already knew this was gonna body me as my first new Godzilla movie since I became a fan, but now I've experienced heaven and it's sitting in a theater with a sound system so powerful Akira Ifukube's theme music vibrates your sternum.

I took a lot of care to remain un-spoiled going into this. I didn't want to know anything about it. I stopped watching trailers after the first one. One of the only things I saw that gave anything away at all was an interview with the director that described his approach to the film as "scary". That was in my mind when I sat down in the theater, not knowing what to expect, and it's still in my mind now, because yeah, Minus One is fucking scary. This is the most nightmarish Godzilla you've ever seen. This movie does absolutely everything in its power to make you terrified of Godzilla, and it's successful. You get to see him remarkably early on and that first encounter on Odo Island is just a total fever dream: It's nighttime, our main character was supposed to be dead and already has that guilt on his shoulders, he's surrounded by a general sense of defeat, he just wants to go home along with everyone else around him, and then there's this thing. This boogeyman, this creature out of a bad dream that the villagers call "Gojira". It's horrific, it's monstrous. Those night shots of Godzilla just picking people up and flinging them around have such staying power. I've reiterated this in multiple previous reviews, but I feel that any time Godzilla bites something, it's a powerful moment because it's pure rage. Godzilla doesn't eat people, or anything else for that matter. But the Godzilla violence in this is really personal; even though he's not eating anybody, this is probably the first time we've ever seen him target individual people. Except for maybe that one poor girl in the hospital that time. Or Hiroshi Abe. Or Yoshio Tsuchiya. Alright, maybe that happens more often than I realized, but it's never any less of an intense thing to watch.

This is the angriest Godzilla I've ever seen, barring maybe GMK, and that's a very strong "maybe". Godzilla is not a too-large animal stuck in the midst of a civilized area, causing destruction simply due to his size rather than intentional malice. This Godzilla is some kind of vengeance demon. This is the #1 thing the movie imparted to me. Godzilla is a wretched living ghost, dragging itself around fueled by pain and rage. You can feel how much he's hurting. It's visible in everything he does. That is staying with me.

One of the stills that was released before the movie came out was Godzilla looking on at what appeared to be a mushroom cloud, and I remember the speculation online that that was the military deciding to nuke Tokyo to try to get rid of Godzilla - nope, turns out that WAS Godzilla. That first atomic breath attack was just... jaw-dropping. The sheer scale of destruction in this movie is unlike anything seen in the franchise thus far and it really, really hits. I could go on and on and on about single scenes I adored in this, but another favorite was when the Takao shows up and Godzilla just obliterates it instantly, taking gunfire straight to the face and not even blinking. Also, seeing and being able to recognize all the ships was great because it made me feel better about having spent this past summer watching a bunch of WWII movies.

The human story was something I was looking forward to, because the days when viewers could be (mostly) satisfied by a movie where the human characters dial it in, knowing the monsters are what everybody wants to see, are over. When it was first announced that this movie would take place after WWII, I saw a lot of people have this kind of knee-jerk negative reaction, assuming that it was going to be some kind of apologia just based on the fact that it was set during that time. But in reality this movie is staunchly anti-war, and that stance is at the center of the storyline. The government won't help you, in fact the government is actively trying to harm you; it's using the "little people" to shift the blame off of itself: We lost the war? Obviously, it's because YOU didn't kill yourself bombing the enemy. The only hope that exists in this movie comes from people turning away from the thought that a centralized government is going to protect them and realizing that if there's anything worth fighting for, it's sure as hell not the idea of a nation, it's you and the people who you love, and who love you. I think that statement is perfectly captured by the fact that the only time warships and bomber planes are shown being used, it's outside of wartime, commandeered by civilians working basically under their own aegis. Shades of the Gotengo, there, at least to me.

Ryunosuke Kamiki does a remarkably job conveying emotion in his character. He's really good at that kind of messy uncontrollable crying that you rarely see pulled off well in cinema. I was honestly kind of surprised at how believable his performance was because I guess I'm just not used to seeing that in kaiju film. Everybody else is great as well - these are people you genuinely care for, and the movie makes it very clear that none of their lives is guaranteed. There's a dozen moments where you think everybody onscreen is going to die. I loved when it seems like the big plan failed and Godzilla is charging his atomic breath and the camera cuts from person to person and lands on this kid who looks like he's about 15 - I was just thinking, oh my god, I'm really gonna see all of these guys die. I thought that was actually going to happen. It's rare for a movie to make me feel so uncertain of the ultimate outcome.

The pacing of this thing is also really interesting because it has these scenes that are unbelievably brutal, like, "they gave this a PG-13?" brutal, but they're spaced out seemingly at random. What I would argue is the most horrific and visceral shot in the entire film and possibly in the entire Godzilla franchise (that shot of Godzilla's face blistering as he gets nuked for the first time) is immediately followed by, and I'm not exaggerating this at all, a peppy, light-hearted montage of Koichi having fun with his buddies on a boat. The transitions aren't all as jarring, but the whole film is like that, to an extent: not necessarily high highs, but some very, VERY low lows between the mellower bits.

The soundtrack is immaculate as well. Like I said, the Ifukube theme is the absolute clincher and hearing it made me tear up, but the original music composed for the film is also extremely effective. During the most tense scenes there's often nothing but high, airy, unearthly strings, or even just a single ascending tone that makes you break out in an instant sweat. The music is otherworldly at times, deeply haunting like the Shin Godzilla OST and used perfectly to make an already unbelievably good movie even more gripping. Also I actually just rewatched King Kong vs. Godzilla last night and I almost screamed when they started playing the theme from it in Minus One.

I don't know how to end this. I don't really want to end this. I didn't want the movie itself to end. In classic Godzilla fashion, things are left somewhat open-ended, and good god I hope we don't have to wait another seven years for a follow-up. There was practically nobody in the theater with me, which was disappointing, but I think this'll make good returns because I've heard elsewhere that theaters were practically sold out. I love, love, love to be alive in this era where we're still getting new Godzilla movies. I was blown away by this. I've never seen anything like it.

The Cult (A Seita) (2015)

directed by André Antônio

Brazil

70 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This was a pick from my project where I use a list randomizer to get a random movie off of my giant watchlist and watch it, no matter what it is. Thus far this project has been all hits and literally no misses, and The Cult continues that trend.

This is a very low-key sci-fi movie where most elements of the "fi" half are introduced via the protagonist's voice-over narration, rather than portrayed through visuals. I say "most" because the exception to this is a sort of holographic image gallery the main character flicks through that requires no screen or visible input, but even that will probably be reality at some point. Our protagonist (I will alternatingly refer to him as the narrator and the protagonist, because he is both) is telling us the story of the year 2040, which he says was an important year for him for two reasons: The first is that it was the year he moved back to Recife.

The narrator is from something called the "space colonies", which he addresses repeatedly but without context, as if the audience for his recollection are peers of his that would immediately know what he's referring to. It's pretty self-explanatory, though it's not clear if the colonies belong to Brazil or to any one specific country. We infer that it's a much more wealthy society than that of those still living on Earth, which is not surprising considering that that's already the way space colonization seems to be heading. Because his currency is more valuable in Recife than in the colonies, the protagonist is able to move back into his old house and furnish it lavishly, living a life of what looks like ease and luxury. Despite the near-vacant streets and aging buildings, there's a real sense that the people in Recife post-"exodus" don't view their lives as anything other than the best they can be - but there's also a feeling that the lens through which we see life in Recife may be tainted by the protagonist's personal views. Another of the fictional elements is that at some point between now and when the film takes place, a mandatory vaccine was introduced that eliminated the need for humans to sleep. However, Recife is a holdout where dreamers still live, a small hamlet where people are still able to fall asleep. This becomes very important later.

Because there's little dialogue, most of what The Cult accomplishes as a film is conveyed through aesthetics. This is an absolutely gorgeous movie and it feels like in spite of minimal visual effects it manages to establish a sense of being in a place of the future, a place similar to, but ultimately different in its evolution away from, the Earth we're familiar with. Again, what we might look at and describe as "run-down" in Recife is anything but to its residents, and especially to the protagonist and narrator who has returned to it as his beloved home. It is - at least during the day - a haven for him. He walks the streets alongside men who dress like him. It should be mentioned that the protagonist is very openly and overtly gay, and all the people he interacts with are also men who love men, whether gay, bi, or anything else. Recife seems to be a kind of locus for safe, easy, even joyful cruising, and the protagonist spends much of the first half of the film doing nothing but lounging in beautiful clothing (or no clothing) in his beautiful house in bed with another beautiful man, in the beautiful weather of a city that feels like it's shed its aspersions and finally belongs to its people.

The second reason why 2040 is important to the narrator is because that's the year that he found the Cult. Midway through the film, one of the protagonist's partners calls him out for what he sees as his "fetishism" of Recife, chiding him for ignoring police brutality and fantasizing about the Recife he remembers from his rose-tinted childhood memories rather than the Recife that really is. Whether or not this is objectively true, it does seem to send the protagonist into introspection, and the next major plot development after this is his discovery of an underground cult (really more like a big recurring party) in the city. Instead of addressing his place in the city and his perception of it, the protagonist - and the narrative - draws further away from reality and towards fantasy. We're also told during the first half of the film that despite being what looks like a paradise during the day, Recife isn't safe to walk around at night in. However, I feel like the reveal of the cult and their aims may alter the legitimacy of this claim somewhat. While the cult is not doing anything that is technically harmful to anybody, stories of their presence may have been disseminated to create a general sense of danger that was not entirely accurate.

I was entranced by this movie. The atmosphere of languor, of carefree living, drew me in. The way the protagonist moves through the world surrounded by beautiful objects and beautiful people without the need to work for money or do anything other than desire something and achieve it was intoxicating. But it may be that we're experiencing Recife circa 2040 through a very narrow scope - even if misinterpretations of the cult led to most of the warnings about not going out at night, there's still apparently a heavy police presence. Recife may be an oasis - for gay men, for aesthetes, for anybody who wants to live in beauty atop the corpse of capitalism - but outside the oasis is always a harsh desert. The scope that The Cult encompasses despite being only 70 minutes long is impressive, and as an art object it looks flawless, a perfectly executed vision. I've spoken before about horror as a genre being large enough to contain films as lo-fi and sparse as this one as well as major classics, but the science fiction genre can be that inclusive as well. This is a brilliant movie, and it also makes excellent use of "Melody Day" by Caribou, one of my favorite songs.

Cyclops (1987)

directed by George Iida

Japan

52 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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George (sometimes spelled Jôji) Iida is such an underrated horror director, having made two stand-out films (Spiral, Battle Heater) that only make the scarcity of his others all the more irritating. He's also a screenwriter, television director, and novelist, but none of his work in those fields is any more well-known than his films. Cyclops is something that had been on my radar for a long time, but was unavailable to watch with anything better than auto-generated English subs, so finally finding it with good subs in what I must say is some of the clearest, crispest quality I've ever seen a pre-2000s film in was a delight.

The main concept of the film, as explained through on-screen text at the beginning, is that some time in the past a scientist was doing research towards proof of his hypothesis that babies born with severe deformities (like cyclopia, hence the title) are not medical anomalies but actually a new stage in human evolution, equipped to handle increasing pollution and adverse circumstances. This is kind of ridiculous, but when you consider that one of the main causes of birth defects is environmental pollution or chemical side-effects, it's an interesting idea. This specific scientist is offscreen for the whole of the film, but a ragtag team of weird guys is continuing his research.

There's not much in the way of humor in this, but what of it that is there comes from the mismatched group of bad guys. There's an identifiable leader and an identifiable "heavy", but then there's a couple of henchmen who pop in and out of the story and seem to have defined identities, even though those identities don't ever get fleshed out. I think one of the best things you can do if you're going to have a large cast who don't get much spotlight time is give them mannerisms that immediately distinguish them as an individual - like the one guy repeatedly glancing towards his subject as she's laying nude on an operating table, or the other guy feverishly praying (?) aloud.

This movie is known mostly as a splattery, gory type of thing, but it's actually a really slow burn. The cinematography is top-notch for something this compact and definitely speaks to Iida's proficiency in mainstream, feature-length films, unlike most splatterpunk directors, who cut their teeth on weird indie shorts, and it shows if they ever produce anything more formal. This is basically a normal movie for about 40-45 minutes, with some really artful framing and lighting - even a character brushing their teeth is shot in a remarkably thoughtful, deliberate way - and then the stuff we're all waiting for happens.

I appreciated the unusual clarity of the video file I was watching very, very much when it got to the finale, because it meant I got to see the practical effects in all their slimy glory the way they were meant to be seen. This is a movie with mutation at its heart. Because it takes so long to get to the payoff, I won't spoil it by describing it too much, but there's a lot of really beautiful fleshy blobs and sticky, gooey transformation sequences. I particularly liked the sequence in the elevator because I think having an action scene take place in an elevator is inherently an interesting way to set something up on film: the time it takes for the action to unfold is limited by how long it takes for the elevator to get where it's going, so you have a guaranteed payoff whenever the door opens, and cutting away to another character watching once the elevator gets to its floor adds a sense of anticipation. Again, this movie is really artful and shows a definite mastery of scene and framing that is a rare addition to something this yucky.

I wonder why shot-on-video films of less than an hour's running time never became a thing in the West. There are some, but they don't really achieve even cult status the way Japanese splatterpunk movies like this one do. It seems like the phenomenon of a short movie that gets everything done within less than an hour is just not something that ever became part of Western filmmaking tradition. 

Weirdly, Kai Ato, the actor playing the head bad guy who gets super-mutated, was in nothing but very serious, well-regarded films, such as Station, Lady Snowblood, Ballad of Orin, and Kagemusha, of all things. I think this is the only time I've seen an actor who's been in a Kurosawa movie also be in a movie where he has an arm burst out of his stomach and strangle someone.

Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (1988)

directed by Teruyoshi Ishii

Japan

49 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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My excitement about seeing this was disproportionate to its short running time. It sounded like something that ticked all of my boxes, and it was. There was this brief moment in the 1980s and '90s where a lot of movies were coming out that explored how old traditions of ghosts and hauntings might be integrated into a world that was rapidly becoming more technologically advanced, and some real bangers came out of that question - I'm thinking Prince of Darkness - but now the subgenre of "digital haunting" seems to have become saturated by a thousand iterations of "what if there was an evil app and a ghost came out of it".

Psychic Vision: Jaganrei purports to have been intended as a documentary about an idol revamping her image and debuting as a more mature singer with a new single. It's not any kind of incisive deep-dive into the idol industry, which is horror fodder unto itself, but pretty soon a few odd things start cropping up as the crew follows the process of writing, producing, and recording the song. I love how this movie segues into the supernatural because it's so innocuous at first. When it becomes clear that the original writer of the idol's new song is unknown, it doesn't feel that strange, because songs are so often ghostwritten or lifted from magazine contest submissions that it's entirely possibly the true authorship could just get forgotten. But as the film goes on, the identity of the writer becomes a crucial element to its plot. This film is so short that it would be easy to spoil it, so I'm going to keep my review brief and try not to give away too much.

There's a moment where the movie palpably ramps up from being a fairly tame mystery to showing its teeth a little, and I'm not going to say what it is, but if you've seen this, you probably know. It involves a car. That's what I'm talking about when I say that this movie knows how to segue: Abruptly, when it has to get your attention, but also, at the same time, slowly, over the course of the entire film, to keep that attention. It's got a big vibe for such a short movie, and covers lot of themes that I'm personally really fascinated with - the transfer of energy into a digital format, basically a "grudge"; this is revisited in Ringu when it's revealed that Sadako is making films using pure psychic energy. If I have any complaints about this at all, it's that the backstory of the weird psychic attacks is made too cut-and-dry - I liked it better when it was an onslaught of bizarre, unstoppable terror with no apparent explanation, but that's a personal preference.

I have no doubt whatsoever that the song being titled "Love Craft" was just a random choice. H.P. Lovecraft absolutely has a following in Japan, and this director also helmed several episodes of Ultraman Tiga and Ultraman Gaia - the spookier episodes, of course - and both of those series notably took story elements from Lovecraft's work. He also directed for Ultraman Cosmos, Choseishin Gransazer, and unfortunately not a whole lot else. The actress who played the idol, Emi Satô, is just credited as "self", so I'm not sure if that means that she's an idol in real life or not, but a quick glance at her filmography doesn't make it look that way. It's too bad that this is so obscure, and that everything else by the director - popular television series excepted - is obscure as well, because there's some really interesting stuff in Psychic Vision: Jaganrei, and I kind of wish this was a full-length film.

Cloverfield (2008)

directed by Matt Reeves

USA

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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It's been a long time since I've revisited Cloverfield. Being as cemented in pop culture as it is now (which isn't very, but it does have something approaching cult status), it's hard to imagine watching it with no knowledge of what was going to happen. I was growing up when this came out and I remember people acting almost personally offended by the shakycam filming style - somewhat understandable, since this was, as far as I can remember, the first really mainstream found-footage movie, at least since The Blair Witch Project. The sequels have gone in... weird directions, but at the time it was released, Cloverfield was a kind of excellent little slice of sci-fi/horror presented in a relatively new format.

As far as I'm concerned, Cloverfield joins the ranks of classic kaiju films not because it has a giant monster in it but because it has a human story that feels forced and boring. The film begins innocuously and obnoxiously as we're taken along for the ride while an increasingly drunk and annoying cameraman films "testimonials" at his friend's going-away party. We (and everybody else at the party) find out about his friend's affair, things become awkward, and the cameraman will not stop bugging this random girl (Lizzy Caplan) who doesn't even really want to be there. I sound like I'm ragging on it, but I don't mind the party segment of this film - it feels real enough to occupy the viewer's time while they wait for the action to kick in, and the music and the clothing styles can give you some "fun" whiplash if you, like me, can't comprehend something from 2008 looking so dated. Personally, I don't need a human story in a giant-monster movie; it can be interesting if it's done well, but I don't feel like I need somebody to relate to in every single movie I watch. I also dislike Clover's parasites for this same reason: They feel like they're only there so the human characters have something more in their own scale to interact with. But the going-away party only lasts for so long before it's interrupted.

At first everybody thinks it's a terrorist attack, of course, because the only thing anyone can see or hear from their place in the city is loud noises and lots of smoke. Even when the party spills out into the streets, there's so much confusion that nobody can tell what's going on. Fairly early, there's a somewhat iconic shot that I've always had a love-hate (okay, it's mostly hate-hate) relationship with: That scene where the Statue of Liberty's head comes flying out of the sky and lands in front of the main characters. Firstly, I would think a projectile of that mass launched at that speed from that height would make something of a giant crater rather than just kind of gently coming to rest in the street. Secondly, it's too convenient - the very first thing Clover smashes is America's most iconic monument? One could possibly argue that Clover thought it was another giant lifeform, and therefore a challenge, but Clover would really have no reason to recognize the Statue of Liberty as a lifeform any more than it would recognize an apartment building as a lifeform. What it feels like is a money shot; the creative team knowing they have the thing that's going to go on posters, blog articles, DVD covers, etc. And it encapsulates the tone of the film as a whole: A very, very well-done imitation of roughness, of spontaneity, of amateur filmmaking, but one that cost $25,000,000 to make.

There haven't been a lot of "on the ground" perspectives in a giant monster movie, which is why Cloverfield feels so fresh within the genre. The reactions of the main characters and the people around them make this movie hit home. But it's not consistent - the less said about T.J. Miller, the better, and Odette Annable as Beth is not the best actress I've ever seen - but sometimes it's really striking. Lizzy Caplan's character Marlena in utter shock as the only person in the main party who actually got a good look at Clover while everybody else was still confused and unaware is maybe one of my favorite parts of the first half of the film. Her delivery when she says "It was eating people", so blank and matter-of-fact, is way more effective than hysteria. It's also unusually tragic when Rob gets a call from his mother during a lull in the action and has to tell her his brother died. I think this movie does have a good handle on emotion, but only part of the time.

But let's talk about Clover. Oh ho ho ho. "Clover" is a nickname for the giant creature who really has a problem with Manhattan. Its official designation is "Large-Scale Aggressor", but you must stop me if you see me starting to go off about that, because I could talk for several more paragraphs about how referring to a lost, scared baby as an "Aggressor" cheeses me off. Clover is destructive not out of aggression, but due to being dropped in the middle of arguably the most bewildering civilized area in the country. Imagine you get lost in the middle of a maze, and you've never seen a maze before in your life, and you're also a baby. You are going to run into some walls. Unfortunately in Clover's case those walls are buildings with people in them. That Clover apparently eats humans (but finds T.J. Miller as unappetizing as the rest of his species does) isn't as big of a deal as I think this movie wants it to be, because again, this is a baby, and we all know how hard it is to keep babies from putting random things lying around on the ground into their mouth.

This movie feels like a video game. The way it progresses is like going through a series of challenges, some of which you fail: Try to keep all of your party alive while juking and dodging your way through a devastated city, with CGI rubble here and there and a creature or two on the loose. The film certainly has a video-game-like idea of what kind of damage a person can take - my "favorite" is Beth being apparently impaled through the shoulder and staked to her apartment floor, but then being able to run around as soon as she's freed and, inexplicably, move that arm, as if the piece of shrapnel just happened to conveniently bypass the muscles and bones in its way.

I guess I am being a little harsh on something that I rated four stars, but none of the things I've been pointing out actually bring me out of the movie. It wouldn't be as much of a thrill ride if there were more deaths or debilitating injuries to break up the flow of the story. This is a good movie; it got famous because it's really fun to watch and it's done in a (for the time) unusual style. The CGI still holds up for the most part, and although Clover never gets as much of the spotlight as I wish it would, this is still a very interesting version of the humans-vs-giant-monster story.