The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

directed by Robert Fuest

USA

94 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Every so often there's a classic movie that I suddenly realize I haven't seen yet and I get the irrepressible urge to fix that. Today it's Phibes Time. This is one of those horror movies, of which there really aren't any made lately that can compare, that's just fun. Not because it's aged in an amusing way, or because something about it is unintentionally hilarious, but because everything about it is executed in such a deliberately over-the-top way that it creates a complete and total picture of a scenario that is inherently absurd. The only other movie I can think of that has a comparable feeling is Phantom of the Paradise, so that should serve as an indicator of what you're in for.

For almost exactly the first ten minutes of this film, there's no dialogue at all. We're asked to give our full attention to the dubious deeds of the title character, Dr. Phibes - although at this point we don't know his name or anything about him yet. No extraneous goings-on are there to distract us from watching Phibes go ham on a stage organ, activate his presumably self-made band of animatronic musicians ("Dr. Phibes' Clockwork Wizards", prog rock bands in need of a name take note), and then get driven via chauffeur to go put a bunch of bats in a guy's bedroom that eat him alive. The first bit of dialogue comes when the bat victim's butler walks in to greet him in the morning and discovers his body, along with the bats. This is such a fantastic opening because everything Phibes does speaks for itself. It's not really prudent to question why he's doing any of this because the doing of it is itself the answer. There's a sense of extravagance throughout the whole film that is crucial to its individuality and its success as a movie.

My favorite thing about all of this is the fact that Dr. Phibes is an original character. This is probably a no-brainer to most people but I had to keep looking it up because everything about him feels like it stems from some other character written by some well-known horror author. I kept expecting to hear that this was adapted from a story by a minor short-story writer of the 1800s, or something like that. Dr. Phibes is such a distinct character that - to me, at least, maybe watching this in 1971 felt different - he feels like... for lack of a better term, he feels like A Something. You know, the way that you can watch an adaptation of Dracula and recognize that Dracula is A Dracula, or watch a Frankenstein production and recognize that that's A Frankenstein's Monster. Dr. Phibes feels like A Dr. Phibes. Like somebody they should have been selling dime-store Halloween masks of.

Because everything he does is so outlandish, this is not a movie where you root too much for the bad guy to be caught. This is a movie about the bad guy, but he's so wild and fun to watch that you kind of forget he's doing bad things. Ye olde spoilers for a 52-year-old movie: Dr. Phibes is killing doctors because they participated in the failed surgery that he believes killed his wife after a car accident that also left him unable to speak (but he does have a sort of nasty DIY electrolarynx, because god forbid we can't hear Vincent Price monologue). The police are laughably ineffective at doing anything whatsoever to stop any of these killings. They figure out what's going on fairly quickly, and have a complete list of every doctor who is going to be targeted, but they're just so inept and Dr. Phibes is on such an entirely different level that eight doctors get killed before it looks like there's even the slightest chance that the last one might be saved. The police are also pretty funny to watch, of course, because they're all extremely British and constantly squabbling with each other. There's maybe one of them who is actually competent, but even with him you never really feel like there's a possibility that they'll catch Phibes in the end.

As an aside, Phibes is killing his victims according to the set of plagues visited upon the Pharaohs as punishment for keeping the Israelites enslaved - why? For the drama. No half-measures with Dr. Phibes, that's why. But I wanted to mention that it was very surprising to me that whenever possible, this film uses the actual animals described in the curse. Those bats we get to see during the first kill are real live bats, and when is the last time you saw an actual bat in a horror movie instead of a terrible furry puppet on wires? They're absolutely adorable, little fuzzy puppies with wings. I was so taken aback by seeing actual, unembellished, live bats in a film that I think it automatically earned the rest of the movie some favor in my eyes.

This movie is so packed full of art deco gothic macabre-ness that it's hard to believe it's not better-known or didn't spawn something more extensive than a solidly "just pretty good" sequel and a modest cult following. Vincent Price is great as always and takes the whole cliche "revenge for dead wife" motivation to another level. The set decoration is incredible, those scenes of Phibes' grand manor with all his weird fake ballroom backdrops and mechanical musicians invented to serve his singular tastes - all of that is so good. I hesitate to say things like this because cinema today is at an entirely different place than it was in 1971, and there are incredible films being made now, but this movie feels like something that just isn't made anymore. That feeling of drama for no other reason than the sheer sense of mood, the maximalism, all the ridiculous "unnecessary" flourishes: All of that, if it were present in a movie made today, would get the movie branded with some moniker that would take away a little bit of the inherent quality of just being wild for wildness' sake. This is a movie that doesn't feel like it has - or needs - a reason to be so out there. I can see me rewatching this, especially to show it to other people, more than a few times in the future.

Evil Dead Trap (1988)

directed by Toshiharu Ikeda

Japan

102 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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So this has been somewhat of a cult classic (on these shores - not sure what the popular opinion of it is in Japan) that recently got a very nice DVD reissue so all us weirdos can watch it in hi-def. I had expected it to be much grosser and rougher around the edges than it was, and ended up being surprised by its quality. I was prepared for something like the Guinea Pig series or any other clandestine shot-on-video Japanese torture film you can think of, but instead, this almost feels like John Carpenter. It's even got a Carpenterian absurdly catchy theme song. I can't speak for the sequels because I didn't even know they existed until just now, but this, at least, is an excellent piece of obscure horror. You will absolutely not be able to guess where it ends up from where it starts.

This movie goes off in so many strange and different directions that it's impossible to get a sense of where it'll go from where it begins. A newscaster on a late-night news show receives a tape in the mail of a woman being tortured who either looks just like her or is her. With a van and some colleagues, she investigates the location until she finds the derelict warehouse where the tape was filmed. It's downhill from there, of course, but you can't guess in what ways. At first it seems like it's following slasher rules: The first to get killed are the first couple who have sex onscreen, and the others are picked off in very creative ways, but then when the killer's focus turns toward the main character, the killings just stop, and the plot changes completely. But the aesthetic remains the same throughout the film, even during the weirder parts, which is why I enjoyed this so much - it feels restrained when it has to be, yet it still manages to be super gory and include the memorable practical effects that I was expecting. It's all a perfect balance between story and gory, although the story may get a little rambling at times.

There is a vibe to this that is similar to those directors who were knocking it out of the park in Western horror during the '80s, and it even goes back a little earlier, using some visual cues lifted from giallo. It's got a perfect mixture of realism and curated aestheticism that makes its atmosphere feel really pleasing to watch. The style, not the subject matter but the overall style, reminds me weirdly of The People Under the Stairs - that film is a little newer than this one, and Evil Dead Trap doesn't involve a social issue, but the two feel similar in how they both look like a convincing depiction of a real physical location and yet somehow still look staged. Both films - although Evil Dead Trap is different in that it does take place in a real building, while TPUtS was presumably shot on set - don't look like real life but like an amped-up version of real life where your attention is drawn to specific areas that the film wants you to look at. Evil Dead Trap is full of foreboding, disorienting, a cold and inhuman backdrop of weirdness and confusion. And all this is before the killing even starts. I always appreciate a slasher that can make the non-slashing parts as nice to watch as the action scenes. I also always appreciate movies that make what was undoubtedly just a normal building in real life look like a hellish labyrinth; the super grimy industrial slab of a building Evil Dead Trap takes place in looks like it's made of mazes and hallways that lead nowhere, and there's even some The Shining hallway-extension tricks used to reinforce this feeling.

The characters aren't annoying but they do feel really dispassionate - I kept almost getting distracted because the main character in particular speaks so softly and evenly that it feels like she's sharing a tender moment, even when she's talking to some weird guy in sandals she just met. Even the sex scenes, which slashers typically crank up to be sleazy and titillating, just feel like people going through the motions. My emphasis on how unpredictable and strange this movie is might lead you to believe otherwise, but parts of this are extremely mellow and low-key. It's a very unique tone that makes this stick out from pretty much any other film I've seen.

I think what makes this movie so good is that it can manage to be so genuinely original and do things that slasher directors (not that this is really a slasher movie, but it's definitely inspired) would usually not do, breaking cardinal rules that at the time had only recently started to emerge as a trend, but also never feel "out of control". There's fun in that, of course - that's why I adore shot-on-video gross-out films made with very little budget. I like the stuff that feels like it was made up as it went along. But Evil Dead Trap is like a fusion of more mature, carefully-plotted horror and shot-on-video nastiness. It's a marriage of many different styles that makes the end product a treat to watch.

Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994)

directed by Kensho Yamashita

Japan

107 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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As usual, revisiting this after having seen every Godzilla movie finds me with a changed opinion of it. I'm rewriting my review a little to reflect that. Previously I opened by saying that I had limited interest in Godzilla fighting different versions of himself, and while it's true that the 1990s did see a lot of Godzilla movies with that scenario, I don't feel like it's inherently bad just because it gets done a lot of times. I also called M.O.G.U.E.R.A "slightly ridiculous", which I apologize profusely for, because both here as M.O.G.U.E.R.A (this stands for Mobile Operated G-Universal Expert Robot Aero-type, and don't you forget it) and in The Mysterians, that mole robot is my best beloved.

I really feel like this span of Heisei-era Godzilla movies that all took place in the same timeline (meaning the ones that have Miki Saegusa as their connecting thread), rather than starting over from scratch every time like most other Godzilla movies do, is a high period for the franchise as a whole. I'm not saying that they're my favorites, but they're some of the most consistent. Individually they work well, but together they present this collection of ideas and events that feels a lot more solidly grounded than a lot of other Godzilla timelines - again, this is because they don't jump around and re-start every so often.

The crowd response to Godzilla vs. Biollante seems to have had a lot of influence on the tone of the movies that came after it. Evidently its darker feel and more complex storyline wasn't very popular with kids, so many of the movies afterwards have a distinctly more child-friendly vibe. I don't really have an opinion on this; I might be too biased here, because to me, the Godzilla franchise has never bent so severely towards being For Kids™ that it's lost other things in sacrifice to being tame. But I may only have that opinion because I am too in love with the Godzilla movies we did get to be caught up in thoughts of what might have been. Aside from a story or two here and there, we'll never know how much incredibly cool stuff might have been cut behind the scenes for being too dark.

Onto the actual movie. The strategy for dealing with Godzilla that the best and brightest minds have thought up this time is to get Miki Saegusa (not just her, eventually the technologically is meant to be adapted so that anyone can use it, but she's the one who has to kick it off) to control Godzilla psychically using her powerful ESP. This is a nonviolent concept, but it still holds moral and ethical quandaries that the people who came up with it apparently don't see as too big of an issue: Is it right to dominate another creature with your mind and force it to act against its will? Is it ever right to just wrest control of another conscious, feeling being, even if that being is something as lethally destructive as Godzilla? These are unsaid implications, they don't really get dealt with outright in the film - which is another reason why I love Godzilla: These films feel like they respect the viewer enough to bring up topics and let you explore them yourself. At the same time, there's a lone-wolf type who's trying to kill Godzilla as revenge for the death of his brother. Like the concept of Godzilla fighting a second, slightly different Godzilla, this has been done before, many times. I don't feel that it's particularly compelling in this case, certainly not as much as it has been before, because the lone revenge-minded character feels like he was only brought in because the writers wanted a foil to the ESP institute, or perhaps another human faction to act as the "bad guys" instead of having SpaceGodzilla be the sole villain. A baby Godzilla is also hanging around, and whether this is Godzilla's biological child or just another member of his species is not important; Godzilla is going to parent the absolute hell out of this kid and god help you if you get in the way.

So what is SpaceGodzilla? He's actually kind of fascinating to me. I have an image saved to my computer of a note from the extras in the back of one of the Godzilla comics that says "The thing you need to know about SpaceGodzilla is that he's a Godzilla from space". One of the most memorable scenes in this film is when one of its peripherally-important scientist characters explains the origin of SpaceGodzilla, which is really just deeply wacky and sounds more like something somebody would come up with for their weird fanfiction than an actual, canonical thing that happened. Basically we're expected to believe that after the carnage of Godzilla fighting Biollante, some of his cells drifted up into the atmosphere and eventually escaped to find their way into a black hole, get spit out by a white hole (?) and combine with an unknown alien life form (??) to create a sort of bootleg clone of Godzilla. Okay. Sure. They also add that it's possible Godzilla's cells stuck onto Mothra to travel out of the atmosphere instead of being ejected after the Biollante fight, but however his biological material got into space doesn't seem to be relevant.

But what makes SpaceGodzilla interesting to me is that he seems to exist for no reason other than to be evil. Like, we all know by now that it's not Godzilla's fault that he's the way he is. We only have ourselves to blame for that. But SpaceGodzilla was created by forces that humanity doesn't understand, millions or billions or even trillions of miles removed from Earth. He was born from some bizarre cosmic influence that shaped him into a being with no sympathy and either no motivation behind killing or a motivation that's unknown to us. He steals Godzilla's maybe-child and then just rampages around causing the maximum amount of destruction possible; he's ruthless. There's a cold alien menace to SpaceGodzilla that makes up for his corny name. I love the scene of the final battle in Fukuoka, how SpaceGodzilla uses his crystals to mutate the entire city into something as alien as he is. I was thinking about it and realized for the first time that while most kaiju destroy cities, no kaiju (at least in the mainstream Godzilla canon) has specifically transformed a city like that. For a movie that is superficially so rote and uses old ideas over again, there are some things in this that are extremely original.

Well, I didn't mean to write this entire review over again, but I guess I did. My opinions and feelings have changed - not by much, but enough that I approach this with a different mindset now. I was too caught up before on how nothing about this movie makes sense, but now I know that being a Godzilla fan means letting go of the idea of making sense as you know it and allowing any given movie you're watching to inject you with its own version of making sense. That brings me back to why I think the Saegusa-connected span of Godzilla movies are so much fun. Instead of presenting ideas that only exist within one movie and then get overwritten when the next one comes out, we're invited to see a continuous timeline where characters deal with events with the benefit of knowledge of what came before. A lot of people don't like this movie and I specifically have seen people picking on the effects, which I don't really get, because to me they look fine for this time period. But again, I am biased. I love to see the wires, I love to see the shadows on the painted backdrop. It's not important to me that things look perfect, I enjoy it more when I can see what work was put into it.

Revealer (2022)

directed by Luke Boyce

USA

86 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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The thing that drew me to this movie is also probably the least relevant part of it as a whole: I like the idea of the (or "an") apocalypse happening sometime in the past. It's interesting to imagine how people during a different era would react to the end of the world. In this case, the apocalypse takes place in the late 1980s, at a place and time where preachy picketers and the sex trade are colliding. Sally is a particularly outspoken member of a group that regularly shouts and waves signs outside Revealer, the naughty bookstore where Angie works as a peep show dancer. On one morning not much different from any other morning, the apparent Biblical apocalypse suddenly begins, and the two very different women get trapped in the booths together as the world turns itself inside out outside. We're never shown any scenes of mass chaos, but that's not necessary in this situation because we have Sally's expert knowledge of exactly how Judgement Day was forecasted to go down, and everything that's written in the Bible about it is scary enough without a visual depiction. There is some gore and demons and whatnot, of course, but leaving the worst of the tribulations to a viewer's imagination is usually the right call with this kind of thing.

Before I get any further into talking about the movie itself, I wanted to talk about a point it brings up that I thought was really interesting and that I probably won't be able to explain well. Revealer doesn't try to alter the popular conception of sin and sinners, but instead uses it to conjure some very frightening implications. It becomes pretty clear that even though the message of the film is about not judging people and not thinking you're better than them because of your faith, the apocalypse is happening along the lines of the gospel according to Sally the holier-than-thou picketer. People literally are getting punished for being "harlots" and "sexual deviants". But the film still posits that being those things isn't bad. No, instead it takes this almost Gnostic view of the Christian God as an antagonistic, borderline negative force; whether you've been shamelessly flaunting your body for a living or devoting yourself completely to God (while hiding a secret that he deems "sinful"), you have the same chance of getting raptured - or not. The scenario that unfolds here is not terrifying because of the idea that we might not have been good enough, it's terrifying because the whole idea of "good" according to this specific rapture leaves out countless scores of people who are kind, lovely, and righteous people. It's terrifying because we suddenly realize that God is judging humanity by a metric that has absolutely nothing to do with who we are at heart and is, in fact, almost wholly unknowable.

Revealer doesn't even get that far explicitly; there's no outright discussion of who's getting raptured and who's left behind, but the vitriol that is spewed by the creatures who are loosed on the earth while God presumably just turns his back and lets it all happen proves that religion in this case operates on an idea of good and bad that does not spell redemption for much of humankind, if any.

Moving on. I guess it wasn't necessary for this to take place in 1987, as this kind of misdirected woman-against-woman hate has been going on for a long time, but saying that it wasn't necessary is kind of like saying that it wasn't necessary for a great artist to use red - when it comes to art, "necessary" isn't a productive idea. And this movie uses its '80s setting as an excuse to indulge in neon and garish outfits, which all looks great. I wish there'd been a little more meat to the soundtrack, because the one song it does feature is really good, but that's not the biggest deal. The acting seems to have turned a lot of people off, judging by reviews, and it did turn me off a little at first too. The actress playing Sally at times feels kind of stiff and overly rehearsed, but the more of the film I watched, the more I felt like her awkwardness fit well with her character, who is meant to be an awkward person.

This is one of those movies where you mostly know where it's going in terms of how the two characters are ultimately going to bond with each other, but there's nothing wrong with that and in fact if it hadn't gone down that path I would have been disappointed. You know they're going to become close despite their differences and that there's gonna be some gay stuff (okay, maybe you don't know that, but you hope it) and it doesn't feel trite when all that does happen, it just feels like it's going the way it should. Aside from its fairly unique idea that what should be a reward day for all the holiest people in the world actually sucks really bad, there's not too much depth to this, but it's still a very solid film. Unfortunate how blatantly it succumbs to the "black guy dies first" rule, especially when there's not a lot in the way of onscreen death, making it more like "only the black guy dies".

Not much else to say about this. It is an interesting scenario executed well and with some good (though sparse) practical effects here and there. For some reason, this almost felt like an episode of Into the Dark or some other one-off anthology segment expanded into a feature film.