Ork (2022)

directed by Shoma Muto

Japan

45 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I found out about this short film and immediately decided to watch it, influenced partly by the "limited time only" disclaimer in the film's official YouTube release (here, but it may be taken down by the time you're reading this). Ork is a brand-spanking-new crowdfunded tokusatsu short shot entirely on an iPhone with what sounds like a real revolving-door crew. I mention this because in an interview with the crew, the role of director seems very de-emphasized (there is no mention of Shoma Muto in the description box on YouTube*), and instead the interviewer is speaking to the crew as a whole. They're not sure how many of them there were, "at least thirty" is the number whoever is being interviewed gives, but some people apparently only worked on a few things and then left. This style of filmmaking is really, really interesting to me and I like the idea of a film being worked on as more of a casual collaboration rather than rigidly conforming to studio conventions. I would love to see what this crew does in the future. Above everything you can definitely sense the love they have for what they made.

Unfortunately the English subtitles were somewhat lacking (it seems like subtitling was done very quickly) so I had a bit of trouble following the story. I will probably be talking more about design choices and filming techniques than the plot. There are two central characters, one a lecturer at a university and the other a student of his, who gain the ability, through stones with strange powers, to transform into Ork and Gum. I can't really describe what exactly Ork and Gum are, because in the way of most tokusatsu creatures and henshin heroes, they're wholly original beings that don't look like anything else. There is a theme of trying to change the future and also trying to change the past as well; one of the characters is hell-bent on bringing back his deceased wife and the other is using his newfound power to transform into Ork to fight against a future he was shown in which Gum kills his childhood friend.

All the stuff that makes a really great tokusatsu experience is here: Good suits, really good choreography, and a strong story-to-action balance. What this feels like is the pilot episode of something. It felt like we were being introduced to characters whose abilities we would eventually get to see used in other battles. The transformations and Ork and Gum's powers are really matter-of-fact, which is something I liked a lot. The whole thing is set in extremely dreary, mundane urban environments - courtyards outside buildings where it looks like it just rained, random woods, rooftops, just these incongruous locations that create a very visually striking effect when combined with the slightly whimsical design of the two fighters. The fact that Ork and Gum's design is not over-the-top is also crucial here. I love how their costumes are simple but also fantastical at the same time. There's a perfect level of fantasy mixed in with reality throughout this whole film - not just with the two main characters, but also with their various attacks and the witch/her familiar who controls the stones. It doesn't feel jarring against the background of everyday city life. It gives you that clandestine, exciting feeling like you've stepped just a little to the left of reality and found something hidden and new. 

All in all this is just a really great tokusatsu film. I have a review of The Great Buddha Arrival that I may or may not ever post publicly where I talk a little bit about how exciting it is to see new tokusatsu being made, because the genre is aging and the fact that people are still incredibly invested in it is very heartening. Ork is what I mean when I say things like that. I almost put this in with the next Indie Kaiju Roundup post I'm planning, but decided that in spite of its short running time, it deserves its own post. Forgive me if I've gotten any facts wrong about it too, here; I can't find much information on it in English.

*edit: I've just found out Shoma Muto is responsible for the designs of the Trigger Dark Giants in Ultraman Trigger, as well as some storyboarding for more recent Kamen Rider, so that is very neat!

Daigoro vs. Goliath (1972)

directed by Toshihiro Iijima

Japan

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched this ages and ages ago before I knew anything whatsoever about Tsuburaya and kaiju in general (embarrassingly, I assumed it was a Toho movie) and was wrongly convinced for a long time that it was not worth rewatching or paying any more mind to. Friends, I must do something to dispel the reputation this movie has for being unbearably goofy, throwaway, bargain bin kaiju eiga. Yes, it kind of is those things, but it is also, genuinely, honestly, a really good movie.

Daigoro vs. Goliath is just a weird movie on principle if you know anything about it at all. It was created for Tsuburaya Productions' 10th anniversary as a studio, which they celebrated with many other things that were wildly more successful than this*. Despite that, it has absolutely nobody in it that you would recognize from Tsupro's more popular series - with the notable exception of Akiji Kobayashi, who really gets to ham it up here, I love him. It was directed by someone who is not one of Tsupro's more well-known directors, but had directed several episodes from the Ultra franchise as well as Operation: Mystery.** It also contains no kaiju that audiences had come to associate with Tsuburaya, although the suits for Daigoro and Goliath are very clearly cobbled together from recognizable Ultra kaiju. Really, this is such a weird movie for a studio to make. It would have been far weirder if they had not also released more memorable and beloved media alongside it, but still. It's just strange for a studio that had become known almost exclusively for a specific couple of franchises to go "Why not make a monster movie that's entirely stand-alone and doesn't reference back to a single other thing we've done?" I assume they chose to do this because they had hopes of turning Daigoro into a new star - hopes that fizzled out somewhere. But I am glad that they decided to do that, because now we have Daigoro vs. Goliath.

So Daigoro is a giant, cuddly baby monster who just kind of hangs out on a beach. In appearance he's somewhere between a capybara, a cat, and a hippopotamus. His backstory is genuinely harrowing: When an atomic submarine exploded, Daigoro's mother was awakened from the ocean floor (yeah) and began rampaging into citified areas, so the Japanese military summarily destroyed her, only to discover that she had left behind an at-the-time tiny infant, helpless and vulnerable. Out of some sense of guilt, the military adopts this baby, christens it Daigoro, builds it a giant port-a-potty, and sticks it on a beach. The national feeling towards Daigoro seems to for the most part be adoration, especially among children, but the further you get upwards into the government, the more the attitude changes towards viewing Daigoro as a drain on resources. Daigoro is still growing, and the cost of feeding him rapidly becomes (as the government deems it) untenable, but it's implied that there's changes that could be made to national spending habits that would let Daigoro eat without too much harm to the nation. A one-off line from one of the film's handful of sorta-protagonists surprised me, about how if the military would decline to buy one single fighter jet, Daigoro wouldn't go hungry. Criticizing military spending in American film these days tends to not be too popular a stance, so I am not used to hearing stuff like that.

Even though all of the people who the film spends most of its time focusing on are sympathetic towards Daigoro, strings are pulled from above and an anti-growth serum is added to his food to keep him from getting any bigger. This is played up for high tragedy: Many children in the audience (and today) had probably experienced wanting a pet, but being told by their parents that they just couldn't afford to feed one. And how would you feel if you were an innocent, growing child and were told by the people who were ostensibly taking care of you that you could at times only drink water instead of eating because they had to spend all their money on fighter jets instead?

I really love this movie for the world it creates, which, while separate from any other Tsuburaya canon (both Ultraman and its competing non-Tsupro show Kamen Rider are implied to exist, but as fiction), is still well-developed and immersive. It gets deep into the scenario it creates, where Japan is not a nation oft-visited by monsters but instead the unexpected haven of one pretty needy one. This is a deeply funny movie and I love it the way I love Son of Godzilla: For being so bombastic and unafraid, giving 100% of everything, everything turned up as high as it can go and everybody seeming like they put their whole heart behind it. I think the key to why this movie is so good is because while it is extremely silly and the humor is slapstick and absurd, nobody at any point feels like they lack even one shred of belief in their role. And it also tackles the topic of governments acting really stupid in a way that is so distilled to its most basic points that even children can instinctually understand it.

And I guess there's another kaiju in here, too. Goliath is extremely generic, gets almost no backstory or traits, and just exists as a "whoops" moment where Daigoro gets to prove his worth to a government that, like most if not all governments, only sees the value in something if it can be weaponized. In that way, the ending is kind of a double-edged sword: Daigoro gets to live because he finally showed that he could be useful... but Daigoro only gets to live because he finally showed that he could be useful. That's one of those things you're really better off not thinking too hard about. All in all, I honestly was surprised that I ended up loving this movie upon second viewing. I think it might be something where you need to be used to this style of filmmaking to fully appreciate it. It's a shame that this is such a well-made movie and doesn't get even a sliver of the recognition of Tsupro's other 10th-anniversary projects.

*please watch Fireman.

**please watch Operation: Mystery.

Slaxx (2020)

directed by Elza Kephart

Canada

77 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I kept meaning to watch this, but wasn't in the right mood for it, which... I don't know what kind of mood you need to be in to watch a movie about a possessed pair of jeans that kills people, but I know I wasn't in it. But really, this isn't a mood movie at all; it's short, you don't have to prepare for it, and it's just good fun. Mostly.

Like most slashers, this isn't a very character-driven movie. It does have a decently-sized cast of distinct personalities, but their main purpose is to eventually get pantsed at some time or another, so you won't get too attached to them. Insofar as there is a main character, it's Libby, a new and very young employee at what we're told is a hugely popular clothing chain store. She has the misfortune of her first day falling on the night before "Monday Madness" - a big sale where the chain is about to unveil their revolutionary new product, and also have a popular influencer in to spread the word about it. Said product is a line of jeans that are supposed to use cutting-edge "thermal technology" to mold perfectly to your unique body shape, therefore being all-size and -gender inclusive. Because we know we're watching a movie about evil killer jeans, we of course know to be suspicious of this new product, but none of the characters do, leading to denim-fueled mayhem after hours.

I worked at Old Navy as my very first job when I was around the same age as the protagonist in this movie, so a lot of this was... nostalgic? Let's say nostalgic. The store is obviously not real, but the set decorators did such a great job of capturing that aesthetic via basically inventing it wholecloth that it might as well have been. It's a very immersive set, with color-coordinated marketing, posters, and even an invented terminology: I've never heard any retailer refer to each employee's specific work zone as their "ecosystem", but it sounds like the kind of positivity jargon a store manager would use. The attitudes of the employees range from Libby, bright-eyed and genuinely buying into the head of the chain's reputation for humanitarianism, to the awful wannabe regional manager, to Shruti, who has absolutely no time for any corporate spiel at all. Everybody else plays an important part in fleshing out the film, certainly, but they've pretty much got timers counting down to when they get killed.

The thing that makes this movie good is that is plays itself so incredibly straight. There is no sense that the people who made this were thinking "haha we're making a funny bad movie". This could so easily have gone the route of other "killer object" films in which there's either a deliberate attempt at goofiness or just a lack of caring about whether or not things came off as goofy, but it doesn't do any of that. In fact, it almost feels like it's trying its best not to be goofy. Slaxx wants you to take murderous denim seriously. I think this works so well in large part because of the kills, which are as gory and bloody as you'd expect them to be, but stop at the perfect point where the gore isn't gratuitous or out-of-place.

I also really appreciate the way the killer jeans are achieved onscreen. Everything else aside, if that had failed, this movie would have been nothing. From what I could tell, the jeans were operated with practical effects whenever possible. This is crucial because I feel like we all know by now that fabric is one of the most difficult things to get right with CGI, and in fact if you're looking at a particularly good CGI character, the thing that can immediately give it away as being fake is the clothing. So for the most part I think this was genuinely just jeans and wires, and it looks incredible. There's some shots, like a pair of the jeans scooting down an empty hallway lapping up a trail of blood, that are so unique I found myself lauding the sheer creativity of that, and the fact that cinema has never seen the likes of a pair of jeans scooting down a hallway lapping up blood and may never see it again. There's also a level of anthropomorphism here, though again, like most other things, Slaxx never takes this too far. The pockets look a little like eyes, and the waistband of course makes a gaping mouth, and it's perfect, but it's not used so often that your eyes immediately zero in on the jeans' "face" in every shot. If the face were too obvious, I think it would remove a little bit of the sense of danger and just become cute.

This movie's biggest shortfall, I think, is that it does actually try to play certain things a little too straight. I don't really have a place talking about this, because I'm a white American who has undoubtedly worn clothing produced in sweatshops and with child labor (though I do shop secondhand almost exclusively), but there's something about the way Slaxx tries to tackle those topics that doesn't feel quite right. Spoilers here, if a movie about killer jeans is something you're desperate to keep your mind untainted for. I'm just going to say it the way it is and you can decide how it sounds to you: The jeans are possessed by the spirit of a 13-year-old Indian girl, killed in a thresher accident while picking cotton on one of the clothing company's subcontracted farms. Close to the climax of the film, the jeans obtain a mannequin torso and attach it to itself (herself?) for increased mobility, and the first thing it does is daub a bindi on the mannequin's forehead with blood. Also, the first tipoff that the spirit in the jeans is in fact a former human is when the characters discover it has a soft spot for Bollywood songs. Now... like most other things in this movie, none of that is framed in a way that's obviously intended to be a joke. It is not making fun of Indian people, child labor, Bollywood music, or any of the other topics it covers. But at the same time, having that kind of thing in a comedy movie and covering it the way it's covered just feels... I don't know. If anything, I feel like it fails to deliver the impact of what it's trying to say. I don't need to be shown cruelty happening to know that it's happening, but the image that the film provides - a girl working in what look to be fairly nice conditions, who, through pretty much a total accident, ends up killed - feels like, if such a thing is possible, a deeply rose-tinted vision of child labor. 

And I really don't know what to make of the ending other than that a 13-year-old girl whose death was covered up by the people who were ultimately responsible for her safety is set up as a bad and hateful person who does the wrong thing. The army of jeans unleashes denim fury on a crowd of hapless customers, and the main character fails in convincing the girl's spirit to relent. I mean, in fairness, if the spirit had been appeased by sweet words and empty corporate promises, the film would have felt entirely toothless. But I feel like there could have been some middle ground, another way to conclude this story than casting an innocent girl as an obvious wrongdoer. So this is a pretty good movie and, as I said, lots of fun, it just feels like it stumbles a little in (what was almost definitely a well-intentioned) attempt to draw attention to real-world issues.

A Chinese Ghost Story (1987)

directed by Tony Ching Siu-Tung

Hong Kong

98 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I love Hong Kong horror movies, but I always come up at a loss when I try to review them because usually the "complexity of plot" to "comprehensibility of subtitles" ratio is so imbalanced that I have no idea what's going on. But as it turns out (and as I probably should have known from the start), this is really a very different animal from the type of movie I was thinking of. It's absolutely nothing like your average Shaw Bros outing; with far higher production value and a more mature humor, this is more along the lines of a historical romance than a goofy schlocky horror movie*.

Our main character (played by Leslie Cheung!) is a tax collector who's very poor, with no worldly possessions except the pack he carries around for much of the movie. In classic horror movie fashion, when he asks around for a place he can stay the night with no money involved, he gets the old "Well... there's that weird old temple that's supposed to be horrifically haunted..." and, having no real choice, ends up staying at said temple. This is a gross oversimplification of a movie that already has a surprisingly simple plot. Most of the appeal comes from how well an old story is executed, visually. The cinematography is beautiful and much more relaxed and subtle than I was expecting - for example, I liked the visual tricks employed to make the protagonist stick out of the faceless crowds that he is often in, like how even with no knowledge of the film we would be able to tell immediately who the main character was just from the fact that he's carrying around that huge bindle all the time. The running joke where everyone talks about him behind his back and shuts up as soon as he turns around to look at them was very funny. He also ends up shoved against a shop display selling hell money and gets the ink, and the inscriptions, smeared all over his back, which later is our first tip-off that the girl he falls for might not be entirely human. This is another example of the subtle visual clues this movie is good at deploying.

Once he gets to the temple, the protagonist - whose name I have not been using because I've seen it Romanized in many ways and I don't know which one is the right one - finds that the rumors of it being haunted are true, but the nature of the haunting is more faceted than the townspeople seem to think, and hey, who's this really pretty but kind of weird girl who lives at the temple, who's very pale and freezing cold all the time?

The character who I am tentatively calling Nieh Hsiao-Tsing (and please forgive me if this is a mangled spelling) was a bit of a surprise to me because, honestly, I'm sorry that I keep comparing this to movies that it has nothing to do with, but I've been watching a lot of Shaw Bros lately and I'm used to women having a status lower than furniture in these films. Generally a woman in a bad HK horror movie is not allowed to have desire except as a joke; bawdy old women and prostitutes are typically the only time a woman is seem expressing her own wants and needs. But the first time we see Nieh Hsiao-Tsing, she's falling all over our protagonist, begging for him, oblivious, to warm her up. It is clearly in line with her character as a lonely being who hasn't felt normal human touch for a long time, but to me it was notable to see a woman who so clearly knows what she wants and in fact makes the first move. He doesn't have to woo her, or convince her of anything. The romance is two-sided and entirely consensual.

Another character who stood out to me was Hsiao-Tsing's captor, who the subtitles called "The Old Dame". From what I could tell, she was a kind of ancient, malevolent tree spirit who fed off of energy from living humans. What I liked about this character was that she (I'm relying on mangled subtitles here - the other characters could very well have been avoiding pronouns altogether when talking about the Old Dame) has aspects of male and female and this is not presented entirely as a joke. Crossdressing is another thing I run into frequently in HK horror and it is always strictly for a cheap laugh, some guy in garish makeup and women's dress acting lewd and we're all supposed to think it's the funniest thing ever. This character is a man in makeup, but she is not treated as inherently funny. Her voice is dubbed to very interesting effect where at random it switches between a higher and deeper register. This character's gender is never explicitly brought up, but I understand there are many beings in Chinese mythology who have aspects of more than one gender or do not have a gender at all. It's just not very often that I see that depicted in what is almost approaching a respectful manner.

Moving on. Like I said, this is primarily a love story, but it's one done in a way that feels genuine, not rushed, and has that element of star-crossed love that does usually get to me regardless of my pretensions. It's not that original - I think most people could name, or at least are familiar with, a story or two where a couple is in love but one is unaware that the other is a ghost. That A Chinese Ghost Story takes place in a Daoist setting makes this more complicated and, in my opinion, more tragic, because it means that the kindest act our protagonist can do for the girl he's fallen in love with is make sure her remains are properly interred so that she can finally reincarnate - whereupon he'll never see her again, because her soul will now be in the body of someone who could be anywhere in the world. It's a twist on the typical ending to these stories of just having to accept that you can't be with someone, and I don't know if it's comforting or even more sad.

There are still action scenes in this, and some zombie skeletons and various ghouls, you know, that kind of thing, and they're all great. Most of the comedy relief not delivered by our protagonist himself being so good-hearted and innocent comes from a somewhat rowdy monk who also hangs out at the temple. Midway through the movie he bursts into what I can only describe as a hip-hop song and dance number about Daoism for no apparent reason. Also, whenever he does some epic action move, the transformation sound effect from the original 1966 Ultraman would play, which was driving me absolutely crazy. I think my favorite thing about this film was the cinematography, but it's got everything, rolled into one: A good love story, a little spookiness here and there, awesome practical effects, nice soundtrack, and humor that never feels like it's hitting you over the head. I wonder if the sequels manage to maintain this level of quality.

*please note that I deeply love goofy, schlocky Shaw Bros movies as well.

Shin Ultraman (2023)

directed by Shinji Higuchi

Japan

118 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I am going to apologize up front because I wrote this on Wednesday night, as soon as I got back from seeing this movie, and my thoughts about it were (and still are) in nothing even remotely resembling a coherent order. I usually do try to have a framework to my reviews, to make one paragraph segue into another, to relate topics to each other, etc. I can't do that right now. So I'm just going to talk about a lot of separate things that hit me in this very, very, very good movie.

There is something about the first time Ultraman ("Ripiah", here) does his now-very-famous Specium Beam pose that is sticking with me. It's showy, it's deliberate. He does it slowly like he wants everyone watching to see exactly what he's doing. He never performs the beam this way in the original series. While a concrete explanation for why he does it this way in the movie may not exist - beyond simply that the director knew the audience would eat it up - a couple of possibilities stuck in my mind. The first is what I believe to be the most likely, and it's that Ultraman is doing this for the first time. He just arrived on Earth basically seconds ago and we don't know where he's been before this, we don't know if he's been in combat at all, if he's ever used this specific attack. He could be trying out an entirely new skill. The second explanation is that he's doing it so slowly because he knows his next host is out there somewhere; he knows someone important is watching so he's demonstrating what that someone is going to eventually do alongside him. Seeing as Kaminaga's partnering with Ultraman was an accident that neither of them foresaw, I don't think this is particularly likely, but I do enjoy thinking about it. Either way, that first beam attack is an incredible moment. I love it.

This is not an especially kaiju-heavy film; mostly it focuses on alien intrusions and meddling with humankind. It stuffs two entirely separate alien invasion plans (three, if you count what Zōffy was doing) into one movie. These alien plots brought something into Shin Ultraman that I was not expecting, and that's the kind of shamelessly fun espionage-and-intrigue subplots that the original Ultra series so often had. I kept myself deliberately in the dark about as much of this movie as I possibly could, so I had no idea what to expect, but I had in mind something a little bit more serious and dark, and while this movie is serious and dark, Zarab's and Mefilas' attempts at overtaking the Earth are... they're goofy. Zarab wears a trenchcoat and a fedora, like in the original. Mefilas is so smarmy and ingratiates himself so easily with humanity's elites that it's amusing how hatable he is. These are fun, funny things. The original series was very, very fond of random spy stuff and weird INTERPOL doings, that kind of thing was always popping up, but I didn't expect to see it here. I absolutely love the mixture of humor into moments of crisis.

I just... I can't pack everything I want to say into this! This series means so much to me and I just watched a movie that honors what it means in such a deep way.

While in the '66 Ultraman we saw much more of Hayata's perspective as a human, this movie flips it the other way. Ultraman himself is a much stronger presence than his human side - in fact, his human side has essentially been killed, and while, as always, as always, he is both, human and Ultra, is is Ripiah piloting the body. Ripiah is who everyone is talking to when they talk to Kaminaga's body. Takumi Saitoh puts in such a good performance here, fleshing out this role and conveying a sense of outsiderness but also of deep care - the way he is initially cold to the people around him because he just doesn't know what being a human is, but also the way, immediately after that awkward interaction with his new coworkers, he goes to the library and reads up on human nature. He cares about us from day one. He puts in the effort to learn about us. The "buddy"s are genuine, once he learns how to use them.

I think, personally, the backbone of the Ultra series has always been persistence. This is the core of why Ultraman fights for humanity in this movie. In the end he isn't even really fighting aliens or kaiju - he dispatches all of them easily enough (when he sliced Zarab in half somebody in the back of the theater hooted). In the end he's fighting his own kind. He's fighting Zōffy. Zōffy isn't malicious towards humanity but he doesn't see the value in it like Ripiah does - but he can be made to, and this is another important point: There always has to be somebody to say wait a minute, somebody to stay their hand and stand up. The Ultra series isn't even about a fight in terms of two opponents, on even ground, who desire destruction for the same reasons. It's about the reasons why each side fights, the thought process behind it, and how that thought process might be changed, how peace might be achieved through understanding. I mean, most of the time. Sometimes peace is achieved through slicing stuff into little pieces, but you know what I mean. I also think that the fact that Zōffy was able to be swayed is a mark of how the Land of Light is a more advanced civilization than ours.

And there's something really, really interesting that this movie does that the series never explicitly comes out and does. This is, I'm guessing, only possible because it's a stand-alone movie and not a series that has to worry about how to go on after doing something that could functionally wreck the need for a continuing storyline. This is when Ultraman gives humanity the secrets behind Beta Capsule technology. The relationship between Ultras and humanity - specifically, how Ultras can protect humanity and involve themselves with us without "interfering" - is something that a lot of spinoff media (ask me about Mystery of Ultraseven and how much I hated the first issue when you have two hours to spare) fails to capture, but this movie captures it pretty much perfectly. Ultraman has always wanted humanity to grow into its own; he wants to see us learn how to fend for ourselves, but again, because of the nature of a series he was never really able to say "here is a superweapon please be careful with it". There is in fact so much crammed into this movie that I feel like it could be an entire series. Not a 51-episode thing like they used to be, but just a short miniseries that could tastefully expand upon the themes of the original without having to worry about length. Anyway, like I keep saying, I haven't digested the whole plot into my brain yet. I just know that the way Ultraman interacts with humanity as a whole here is a big part of why I was so into this film.

I actually love the way CG was used here. I of course am a dedicated suit acting fan but the design that went into each individual kaiju (again, there's not as many as you think!) drew my attention. I love the fact that Shin Gomess is made to look like Shin Godzilla as a tribute to the way the Gomess suit in the series was a reused Godzilla suit. I thought Neronga was absolutely beautiful, I loved how there were so many individual parts to him that moved and shivered when he did. Gabora was great too, and again, has facial similarities to Neronga as a tribute to them being the same suit. And my god, Zarab! You can't tell from still images, but he's hollow inside, like the rotating mask illusion! While I do love the original Zarab suit (and the overall design, apart from being hollow, is remarkably unchanged), this is something that could probably only be achieved through CGI. And I remember as soon as I saw posters and trailers for this film I thought that the design of Ultraman himself was really something else. It feels true to the original design both in terms of Tohl Narita's sketch for it and in terms of how the suit actually ended up looking. When Asami sees him for the first time she calls him beautiful and I have to say I was thinking the exact same thing too.

And oh. My. God. Zetton. I'm dedicating an entire paragraph to Shin Zetton because I thought everything about it was just incredible. The way it assembles itself outwards from a central point, the unsettling symmetry of it, how alien it looked but how you can instantly still tell it's Zetton from the antenna. The sheer, unbelievable scale of it when Ultraman flies right up to it and you can see how tiny he is in comparison. And back on Earth, those shots of it just barely visible in the sky, cruciform, hanging over the world like the ticking time bomb it was. I love everything about Shin Zetton conceptually and in terms of aesthetic.

I might come back and add more to this review plotwise once I've lived with it a little because at the moment I'm not thinking too deeply about the plot in specific (besides just "IT WAS INCREDIBLE I LOVED IT") but I want to express that this movie is FUN. I felt like I could barely take in everything at once. I would urge you all to see it on the big screen, but unfortunately it was only in theaters for two nights, so I'll urge you instead to wait until you can get a Blu-Ray or DVD and watch it on the biggest screen available to you. The battles are just incredibly good, pure sci-fi madness, everything is pitch-perfect. I have nothing whatsoever against the use of CGI for a traditionally suit-acted role because I know that care was still put into bringing this Ultraman to the screen, just like always. The fact that they brought Bin Furuya back for the mo-cap should dispel any doubts about that. But overall this was just such a pure good experience. If the rumors about a Shin Jack and Shin Seven are true, I will be in the theater for them too, should they grace our shores.

Indie Kaiju Film Roundup, part I

Today I thought I would do something different and gather together short reviews of a few independent(-ish) kaiju films. I'm keeping this exclusively to films under an hour in length, since anything longer would just get reviewed in a normal post. This is the first part in what I'm hoping will become a series.

Day of the Kaiju (2014), dir. Kazuhiro Nakagawa

Japan

30 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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As far as I can tell, this was sort of a calling card for its director, who went on to direct not many things thus far but very, very good things. He has directed two episodes of Ultraman Decker as well as the stellar Godzilla Day 2021 short Godzilla vs. Hedorah, and also received an assistant director credit on Shin Godzilla, which is the film with the strongest thematic similarities to this short. Nothing, I don't think, quite matches the feeling of Day of the Kaiju itself, which is why we desperately need to get this guy a film to serve as a solo vehicle for his own ideas.

This is a great one if you're into kaiju bureaucracy. It has a very similar vibe to Shin Godzilla in that a threat appears and immediately the people who have the most ability to do something about it (with their money, influence, etc) don't do anything about it, because they're too wrapped up in paperwork and planning and generally dealing with the idea of the threat rather than the reality of it. A kaiju washes up on the shore of a small town, which now has to deal with all the fallout from that, both economically and in terms of just not knowing what biological effect the creature could have, since such beings are so rare that there's not really established science around them yet. To this end, a marine biologist and another scientist are called in to establish that the creature is, for certain, dead, but the mayor and other officials don't care about if it actually is dead or not, they just want to be able to say it is so they can brush everything off and put the money where it needs to go. There's a great scene where one of them gets right up in the main character's face and goes on this paranoid rant where he basically claims that if they can't take care of the kaiju, then that means this will happen, and then that will happen, and then foreign powers will invade us!!!! Any artifice of caring about actual people is dropped in that moment and it becomes crystal clear that the appearance of strength and competence is more important than human lives.

This is not a great one if you're into actual kaiju. It's mostly a melancholy, slow-burning (as slow as a thirty-minute short can be) and very moody "what would happen" piece. But it hits that tone so perfectly, and is so introspective without ever getting pointlessly glum. There's even moments of humor here and there: At one point everyone crowds around a single tiny monitor to read the stats on the kaiju, and someone says "Should I get the bigger TV from the lobby?" but is shot down for no reason. I know that people are really eager to see films about the on-the-ground aftermath of a kaiju incursion, and seeing this expanded into a feature-length movie would satisfy those people really well.

Geharha, the Dark and Long-Haired Monster (2009), directed by Kiyotaka Taguchi

Japan

20 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This one is why I almost didn't call this an "indie" kaiju film roundup. It was made for television and aired on an NHK program, and many of the people who worked on it are names in the industry in some measure, working on Godzilla, Ultraman, Kamen Rider, Gamera, etc. There are also actors in this that you will definitely recognize if you watch tokusatsu. (I'm actually wondering if the director is related to Tomorô Taguchi, who is in this film, but it could be a total coincidence that they share a name.) But my aim with this post is mostly to highlight films that don't belong to the mainstream franchises, that people may not have seen, and this is that.

At only 20 minutes long, this film feels chaotic, but it does manage to get in a "the monster is us" monologue or two, and surprisingly, despite being referred to as a comedy, it actually felt pretty serious to me. But the high point is undoubtedly the monster itself: Although I could not see it that clearly because the film is not readily available in perfect quality (also, like the title says, it's dark), Geharha is an absolutely beautiful monster, combining the silhouette of a classic bipedal dinosaur-like kaiju with the relatively new idea of being absolutely covered in hair. The suit is gorgeous, easily the quality of something that would appear in an Ultra series. The sense of scale is also conveyed incredibly well, and in general this feels, more so than many other things I've seen, closest to what a typical Showa-era kaiju film would be like if it were made with modern resources but the same general aesthetic. Geharha has weird powers that make it more mysterious than your classic destruction beast du jour, releasing some kind of weird gas from its long hair and also seemingly able to literally wig-snatch any bystanders not otherwise killed by it. I would love, love, more Geharha lore, but sadly, 2009 was a long time ago, and development in that area seems fairly dead.

There's a preview at the end for a sequel that never got released and so serves almost as a separate short film itself, and we see from it that the sequel was going to get much more explicitly comedic. There are even more obvious references to Godzilla and Ultraman and in general it looked like it was going to be super campy and fun, and I'm sad that we never got to see it.

Yagon the Water Monster (2019), directed by Koyo Sugita

Japan

44 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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...And this is probably the most truly "indie" of all the films reviewed today. This was the director's student film at Musashino University and it shows in every single area of production. It's got a laundry list of problems: Incredibly visible green-screen, annoying public domain music, bad acting, jerky claymation, location shots where they clearly didn't have access to those parts of the campus so they just kind of hung around outside it, and more things I'm probably forgetting. But the thing is that I love it. I genuinely do. Not ironically. I think this is a great film. It's one of those things where you can visibly see the idea the director had for it even though they did not have the resources to flesh that idea out into a film that is what most would consider polished and perfect. It has something more important than polish and perfection. It has love, and it has enthusiasm. And it has a scientist with an eyepatch named Dr. Ashizawa. Hmmmm.

Basically this is about GMO gone wrong, where experiments in developing hardier and more bug-resistant rice crops accidentally create a mutant superbug that keeps growing and growing and becoming more murderous as well. A cast of probably university students and the one guy over the age of 25 who they could find to be in their film is summoned and equipped with generic fake guns and armor (actually, the body armor looks cool) to rout out the mutant water bug and destroy it, which proves far more difficult than it might seem. Because of the budget, presumably, Yagon is rendered with clay and wires rather than a suit, which does make it look pretty silly, and just in terms of design I'm not even that crazy about it (bug kaiju tend to not do much for me). However, the amount of screentime it gets makes me feel like the crew was very determined to show us their creature, where they could have easily hidden it behind lens flares and fake explosions, and I have to appreciate that.

I just feel like this film shows such creativity in how it is a fully realized story from start to finish that's assembled using less-than-ideal pieces. If this crew had a studio and more money at their disposal, they could make something awesome. 

The Phantom Carriage (1921)

directed by Victor Sjöström

Sweden

107 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched this as my pick for a New Year's Eve-appropriate horror movie (you can only watch New Year's Evil so many times), but I would encourage anybody to watch this at any time of year. I highly recommend tracking down the Criterion edition for the cleanest picture quality possible and also watching it with the accompanying contemporary soundtrack by Matti Bye - this is the version I watched, upon general internet consensus that it was the most appropriate to the film, even though as a Sunn O))) fan I would have gravitated towards the KTL soundtrack. You could arguably watch this with no soundtrack at all, in silence, but I would advise against that since, even though this is a silent film, even at its earliest showings it would have been presented with some kind of soundtrack.

The film opens with a woman, a worker at a Christian charity for the poor and homeless, lying sick in bed while her mother and a fellow charity worker attend to her. Through intertitles we're told that she doesn't have much time left. She knows this herself and begins desperately calling for someone named David Holm, which obviously upsets the people with her, although we don't yet know why. The sister at her bedside leaves to search for Holm, but with no luck, though she does find his wife, herself destitute and in rags. After a little while we are then presented with a group of three drunk men sitting in a graveyard together, waiting for the clock to strike midnight. One of them tells the others a story that will become the basis for the rest of the film and the meaning behind the title.

The man recounts how he used to have a friend, somewhat older than him and the rest of his peer group, who was educated at Uppsala and therefore regarded as a kind of authority on various things and a more mature presence among him and his friends; a generally upbeat and jovial personality who, every year, underwent a total change on New Year's Eve. Witnessing a careless bar brawl between our narrator and some other friends, he breaks up the fight and entreats them to be more careful, since according to him, whoever dies at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve becomes Death for the rest of the year, forced to drive his carriage and see to the reaping of freshly deceased souls. In a cinematic twist, we're told that this man's fears came true the year before, and he has been carrying out Death's duties ever since.

The film then goes into a sequence of showing us Death going about his work which is singularly one of the most striking things I've seen from the silent era. Death and his carriage are filmed using the double-exposure technique, so they float over the screen, half-transparent and ghostly. Incorporeal, they are able to tread over water and walk under the sea to retrieve the soul of one who has died by drowning. Death's first visit is to an unnamed man who commits suicide; I was very surprised by this because, while nothing remotely bloody is shown, I did not expect to see a film this early show someone committing suicide by handgun. It just feels incongruous with the time period - not suicide itself, but that specific method. As we'll see, this is an incredibly dark and somber film that does not at all shy away from topics of suicide, murder, addiction, sickness, and, of course, the master of them all, death. It's worth noting that this film was immediately banned by the Swedish film board at the time, but left intact and uncensored for reasons I'm not entirely clear on, but am thankful for.

Back in the present day, a police officer encounters the group of men in the graveyard and we find out that the teller of this story is none other than the David Holm the sick woman has been asking for. He refuses to move, which leads to another pointless scuffle that ultimately ends with Holm's death - right at the stroke of midnight. His soul separates from his body, and soon who else comes to collect him but his old friend, in robes, carrying a scythe. At first he believes himself to simply by injured and begs his friend to take him to the hospital in his carriage, but his friend cannot. "You know very well I am no longer among the living," he says. There's something interesting here about the portrayal of recently-deceased souls, that double-exposure technique used again to show them lifting out of their earthly bodies and becoming inhabitants of an in-between space. Still themselves, with all of their memories, but now lacking a physical form. From here on this film becomes a Christmas Carol-esque exploration of exactly where and how Holm's life went down a dark path that led to him, drunk and alone on New Year's, dying a sad death after a life of regret.

Now, I watched this as a horror movie, but the tone and message of this film would have been entirely different at the time of its debut. One of the things I enjoy most about watching silent films is that the people are in general not different at all from modern people. Their makeup is heavier as necessitated by the filming techniques of the time, their dress is different, but in mannerism and expression humans have generally always been humans. That being said, while I was able to watch David Holm's journey through his deepest regrets and miseries from a purely human standpoint, feeling sympathy for him just from the perspective of a person feeling bad for another person, the message this film intends to give is a pretty strong warning against drunkenness and a plea to turn to God and Jesus for your salvation. I do not in any way want to imply that this makes it less relatable. The personal turmoil shown onscreen and the moments of darkness resonate down the years regardless of their origin. But The Phantom Carriage comes from a time when the motive behind showing a story like Holm's would have been to encourage temperance and faith in God, and to show us what can happen when you become hopeless and faithless and neglect your responsibilities to family and society. That doesn't mean it can't still strike an emotional chord.

Oddly, it also seems like the film casts blame on Holm's wife for leaving him with their children, implying that standing by her husband is in some way more important than looking after hers and her children's safety, and that her leaving him is almost entirely responsible for him being in the state he's in, rather than his own actions. David Holm really is kind of a deadbeat when you think about it, but this film implores you to not think about it and instead view him as a person, not inherently good or bad, who has in him the ability to find his way back up from the depths of self-pity and depression (through God).

It's also interesting to watch this in a time of pandemic. The illness that ends up being the cause of Sister Edit's death was given to her by Holm, and the film implies that he contracted it just kind of through inevitability from his time being dirty and on the street. He is a consumptive and frequently coughs in others' faces in an attempt to bring his misery to them (successfully, in the case of the nurse). I think that Holm's disease is best viewed through the lens of metaphor rather than a literal desire to spread a contagion, though; he has become so full of self-loathing and bitterness that he wants to drag the whole world down with him, to see everyone with their healthy and happy lives that he envies and misses so much brought low by suffering the way he was. Despite all of this, despite knowing that getting too close risks contracting illness, the nurse darns his coat and tries desperately to befriend him, eventually falling in some kind of very upright and Godly love with him. Again, while to a modern viewer her sympathy and pure care for this ragged and jaded man does not need to have a motive beyond the sheer desire not to see another human suffer, at the time this would have been a template to the viewer for loving the poor and needy as an aspect of Christianity. Holm's eleventh-hour repentance when faced with the horrible consequence of his actions is a reminder that no person, no matter how far gone, is ever beyond salvation.

So, as I see it, this is not something to watch specifically for the purpose of watching a horror movie. While it has an extremely eerie atmosphere (practically any silent film does) and deals with very dark subject matter, it does not feel at  all like a film intended to frighten in the way that we would expect a horror movie to frighten us - it's more of a "scared straight" kind of fear, a "I don't want my life to be that way" fear. A "come to Jesus" moment, if you will. But I was absolutely taken by this film and the raw emotion it portrays, the way the actors are so un-self-consciously given over to their roles in a way that breaks from the stiff stage acting more common in American and British silent films of the era. The performances in The Phantom Carriage are far more fluid and messy than one would expect from this kind of film. While I did say that you could technically watch this with no soundtrack, the musical cues are of vital importance to enhancing the emotional highs and lows, and I would definitely recommend you find at least some kind of accompaniment. This was not at all a bad film to be watching as I crossed from 2022 over to 2023. I hope the new year brings us all excellent first-time watches and many happy returns from our old favorites as well.