Dashcam (2021)

directed by Rob Savage

UK/USA

80 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is one of those recent movies that I put off watching for way too long for no real reason, and I should not have, because it's incredibly good. I've said this about a couple of movies before, but for this one your ability to enjoy it really hinges on your ability to tolerate a narrator who is unbelievably annoying (on purpose). Annie Hardy is more than just the narrator; she's literally the lens through which we see most of the film, this being a found-footage movie. She's the one in control of the camera, although for a lot of the running time it's mounted on her dashboard (obviously) or occasionally is being held by someone else.

Annie is your average MAGA hat-wearing edgelord, newly empowered by lockdowns and vaccines that only seem to confirm her vision of the government - and not only the government, but basically anybody who has the decency to wear a mask and ask that others do so as well - infringing upon her rights. Annie reflects that specific flavor of "rebellion" that emerged during the beginning of covid where going against every reasonable health and safety measure suddenly became the latest and greatest way to own the libs. I don't blame anybody who wouldn't be able to stomach watching a whole movie with a person like this, but I do think that the filmmakers were extremely deft in just how loudmouthed to make her. It's very very very clear that she shares the racist, xenophobic ideas that any given MAGA believer does, and so do the comments on the live chat during the stream that forms the basis for most of the film, but she's not constantly saying these things out loud. The film knows just where to stop so that we get the idea that this is a horrible person we're watching, but we don't feel like the film itself is trying to offend us or doesn't care if we do get offended.

The setup of the film is that Annie does this livestream where she improvises horrible white person rap over recycled beats that incorporate words suggested by people in the chat. This is also done from a moving car, which is definitely totally safe and fine. She decides for some reason to quit America and go visit her friend and former bandmate in England, but of course there's rational people there trying to mitigate the spread of a deadly virus too, so she very, very quickly runs afoul of basically everybody she encounters. After getting kicked out of her friend's house by his girlfriend on sight as soon as she enters wearing her "red hat" (go, girlfriend), she trolls her friend by picking up an order for him (he works as a delivery driver and left his work phone in the car), but things start to go extremely wrong when she gets to the restaurant.

Describing these things makes it seem like there's a concrete direction in which Dashcam is heading at any given moment, which is the opposite of reality and the opposite of why it's so fun to watch. It's nonstop once Annie touches down in England. You can't predict where it's going to go next or what's happening or why. There's no moment of safety because anything could happen at any time and none of the people in the film are remotely prepared to deal with any of it.

You would think that having a running commentary (the live chat) of all this on the side of the screen for much of the film would get annoying fast, and it kind of does, but it's also one of the things that makes this so good as a horror movie. I'm going to reference a film here that has nothing to do with horror or anything whatsoever that I'm talking about, but I think it provides a good parallel. In the fantastic and inimitable Ugandan action film Who Killed Captain Alex?, there's a running commentary throughout the entire movie where a narrator remarks on what's going on, roots for the characters, makes jokes, and generally does things that we might expect to hear if we were watching the movie with a goofy friend right next to us. It has the effect of drawing our attention to what's happening on screen and making us feel more invested in it. Dashcam's live chat is the same basic premise, but for horror. It ramps up the tension because we're not watching it alone, we're watching it with people who are all experiencing the same thing and, when they're not asking the characters to take their tits out, they're all terrified too. Even though we know it's fake, having other people along for the ride feels different. And if you want to ignore the live chat, the movie definitely works without it, too. I think the most important thing from it that gives some hint as to what's happening is that one person mentions how the restaurant Annie ends up in is located in an area with a lot of UFO sightings. We also at one point see someone claim to be from a news station and ask if anyone wants to talk to them about the stream, which is an indication of how many people are watching and a little bit of what's happening outside the narrow scope of the stream.

So yeah, it's really hard to talk about this movie because so much happens in it and we never get an explanation for any of it. This is from the director of the brilliant Host, one of if not the best covid-centric horror films, and by following essentially the same format as Host, it manages to also be one of if not the best covid-centric horror films. The characters have even less of an idea that they're in a horror movie than the people in Host did, but all the while something is going on in the background and we have no idea what it is. We never get any clue. It's important that Dashcam goes waaaay beyond the scope of Host and suddenly now we're not just dealing with chairs moving but bloody gore, levitation, creatures, bizarre timewarps, and all of these other things that you would think wouldn't work in a found-footage movie but absolutely, absolutely do. I'm sure the creators of the film had a framework in mind and could offer up a coherent explanation for what was going on, but the scariness of this movie lives in the fact that we don't. We're watching people who are just like us, who are not horror-savvy in the slightest, confronted all of a sudden with something inexplicable. And the way it's presented is incredibly effective. This is an exercise in the art of keeping details from the viewer during a horror movie to create maximum uncertainty and tension.

It's good because it's just so weird. It goes to such weird places. When you see a chair move on its own in a horror movie, it's scary, but your mind immediately goes to one explanation and that's "ghost", right? You can't do that with anything that happens in Dashcam. You have no frame of reference to be like "oh, this must be what's behind all of this". It just keeps getting weirder and harder to define. It's ambitious and judging from a lot of bad reviews it doesn't work for everyone. But it worked for me. This was one of the best movies I've seen all year. Yes, I hated Annie deeply. This movie is so good that it makes that work in its favor. There is so much to talk about here that I could go on even more, but honestly, the longer this review gets, the more self-conscious I feel about praising it so much in the face of some really dismal opinions on letterboxd, so I'll end it here.

Indie Kaiju Film Roundup, part II

Tokyo Abandonment Order Garateia (2016)

directed by Okuno Kengo/students and alumni of Osaka University of Arts, Film Department

Japan

17 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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So this was made for no other reason than sheer excitement over Shin Godzilla coming out in 2016, and it really shows. I was absolutely into Garateia from minute one because the love for the genre is so obvious. It doesn't try to distance itself from Godzilla; it is its own thing with its own newly-invented creature, but it features the Godzilla hotel, and basically instead of being a direct homage to Godzilla it's something more like a statement of "we wouldn't be here if not for this". It specifically references Shin Godzilla in the way most of the human characters are government or military officials convening to try to figure out what to do in the impossible scenario of a kaiju invasion, but it does get a little weird with it too, especially at the end.

For a 17-minute short I was very impressed with how Garateia manages to pretty much re-invent itself every other minute, constantly throwing in new ideas and going in directions you couldn't foresee even as it gets towards the finale. There's a moment that I absolutely love, where Garateia confronts the model Godzilla on the Gracery Hotel. That idea is so incredibly interesting to me: The real, live kaiju looking at a fictional version of itself. And there's not many memorable individual human characters in this, as is par for the course in kaiju film, but one line from a single defense force member is kind of sticking with me. It ends up being not a coordinated squadron, as the military would prefer, but instead a single woman who lures Garateia into the only area where it can be "safely" bombed with minimal risk to the human populace, and as she stares the creature down, she says "After this, what do I do?" Again, that is so interesting to me; the acknowledgement that life after you risk losing it is going to look different from the way it was before.

Another thing I appreciate is that the weapon of choice against Garateia is the good old "Rods from God", one of my favorite (hell, probably my favorite, I'm not much for real-world weaponry) scrapped bonkers U.S. military ideas. God, would I love to see an actual Godzilla film where they try to do that to him. For what it's worth, it does nothing to Garateia - I'm not going to spoil the ending, because it's another of this film's many exciting moments, but it takes more than some puny metal rods launched from orbit to confront this creature.

I'll just end this review by saying that the Garateia suit is also absolutely gorgeous. The miniatures are surprisingly good as well, especially the Gracery. My only complaint is one that I have about a lot of indie kaiju films, which is that it's just a wee bit too dark for my liking, something that I suspect was done on purpose to hide some of the rougher edges (as if I don't adore those rough edges) on the suit. All in all this could easily be a full-length film project.

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Gwanggong vs. Alien (2011), directed by Chung Man Leung

Hong Kong

16 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is a very loose remake of the movie War God, which I've seen and enjoyed quite a bit. Despite its short running time, not only does it do some really interesting things with the concept of the original film, but it also becomes solidly its own, original creation. It is definitely a send-up of the Chinese Communist government: The People's Liberation Army's idea for fighting off a sudden alien invasion is to send three pilots from Hong Kong, mainland China, and Macau out inside a giant mecha Lei Feng (by complete coincidence I watched this on Learn From Lei Feng Day) to fight it. But at the same time, they publicly maintain that there is nooooo alien invasion, the government has everything under control. Party higher-ups broadcast as such even while the alien is clearly visible behind them.

In addition to being a political satire and a tribute to a classic film, this is also a tribute to Ultraman. The opening credits make this fairly clear as well as the fact that Guan Yu is essentially Ultraman in everything but name and appearance: He comes to Earth and merges with a human who has died while protecting others, but is only able to maintain their bond for a short length of time (in this case the time it takes to burn one incense stick). I really have to appreciate a film that takes a group of different ideas ranging from political commentary to film appreciation to figures out of folklore, looks at them, and says, you know what could unite all of these topics? Ultraman.

The effects are surprisingly good for a short film from 2011. There are no kaiju but instead two different mechas (I'm counting the alien as a mecha because it just looks like one) and both are very good suits. The alien especially is, I would argue, easily of the quality of anything from a recent mainstream toku series, albeit maybe a bit more bare-bones. I love its design, though. I couldn't think of any reason or symbolism behind it looking like a bird until just a little while ago I realized that it might be in reference to China's attempted eradication of sparrows as part of the Four Pests Campaign that led to famine and an incredible death toll - but I could be making that up.

And the last thing this packed short manages to incorporate into its plot is the idea that Guan Yu survives only because the people believe in him, that he alone isn't anything, is just an idea, a deification of an ordinary man, but he's given weight by the continued proliferation of his image and legend. This is such a creative, fully-fleshed-out short - the director only has one credit on imdb, but I'm not sure how accurate that is because imdb is not the greatest for primarily non-English-language projects and people. If anybody knows of anything else this director has done, please let me know so I can see it.

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The Specter (2005), directed by Junya Okabe

Japan

41 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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Of the three films in today's roundup, this is definitely the one I felt the least enthused about. It is good, but never felt involved in it in the way a good short film can get you to feel even in just a couple of minutes - and this one runs for 41 minutes. This was produced by Konami, that Konami, Silent Hill Konami, and boy, does it show.

The fairly simple plot of this short is that, prior to it, during a period of increasing attacks on Earth from hostile aliens, a defense organization was formed from countries on Earth as well as allied aliens. The short itself focuses on an agent of this organization, nicknamed SPECTER (and played by a Timeranger), as he does Men in Black-type stuff while attempting to stop an invading alien from stealing important plans from a scientist (said scientist is totally fine to throw his assistant under the bus about it). You don't need to worry about that too much, because this is mostly something to be watched for the special effects.

In the opening couple of minutes, this is far more of a CGI showcase than one for practical effects, and it does continue that way throughout the rest of the film, but I feel like The Specter's good point is that it's a great example of how CGI and practical effects can work alongside each other. There's something that I love so much about this specific point in computer-animation history - maybe it's because this is the way video games looked when I was growing up, so I have some nostalgia for it. But I think I like it because the technology was not quite there to make things look basically photorealistic the way it is today, so any time CGI was used, you were going to be able to see that it was CGI, and instead of trying to hide it, a really good filmmaker - like the ones who made this - can use CGI as art. I think of all the older films where the effects were achieved by drawing directly onto the film strip. Good CGI should feel like that, not like it's horning in on everything or being used for cheap entertainment.

Most of the practical effects are concentrated around the invading aliens' makeup and facial prosthetics and I really liked this. There's a crowd of aliens shown at one point and from what I could tell (watching this in trash quality on YouTube did nothing to help it, by the way), even though they were all members of the same species, the makeup crew put in the effort to make their faces all slightly different - like humans. The leader of them uses this wacky device to turn itself into a gigantic rage-beast, which was a high point of the film effects-wise, and he pilots a mecha in this state, another nice blend of CGI and prosthetics. 

But then this short just ends. Or, really, it doesn't "end" so much as it just kind of stops happening. Factors like rough subtitles auto-translated from Chinese and bad picture quality kept me from getting fully engaged with the plot, but I felt like I was left hanging when I had just started to want to see more. This director seems to have also made a short film where Zatoichi fights a bunch of cyborg ninjas, which I need to watch immediately.

Smile (2022)

directed by Parker Finn

USA

115 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I initially dismissed this when it first came out, because not only did the trailers make it look cheesy and generic, but it also appeared to be a horror movie centering around mental illness, a sub-genre I avoid like the plague after learning from experience that it contains nothing good and a lot of stereotypes and stigmatization. However, I did see somebody whose opinions about horror movies I generally trust watch it and say that it's not what you think it is, that it uses tropes that have been done before to more effectiveness than other films have in the past. With a DVD in hand, I discovered that Smile is indeed not what you think it is. It is actually a horror movie that's nuanced, genuinely unsettling, and does not use mental illness tropes in quite the same way other horror movies usually do.

From the first minute, Smile makes it clear that it's not a movie about how scary mentally ill people are. It's a movie about how scary it is to be mentally ill, but it goes deeper than that. The vulnerability, exclusion, and societal stigma of being someone who "sees things", someone who meets the criteria the average person would define as a "nutcase", is the underlying horror of most of what happens to the main character, Rose, herself a therapist. Mental illness is never presented here as inherently connected to violent behavior. What's scary instead is that Rose is surrounded by people who don't even think before dismissing people who experience delusions or hallucinations as crazy, basket cases, beyond hope, etc. This is really a movie about being held in thrall to things your brain is trying to convince you are real while you get no sympathy whatsoever from anybody around you, who are all unconcerned with what's going on with you. It's never happened to them, so it's not their problem and they can't imagine what it's like and mostly just want you to be in a facility somewhere, out of sight. That's pretty scary to me.

The meat and potatoes of the story is essentially a little bit like a combination of Ringu and It Follows, without the video tapes or the... well, you know. Rose witnesses a woman, who she assumes is suffering from delusions, violently commit suicide in her hospital, in an evaluation room with what look like the most uncomfortable chairs known to humankind (seriously). This initial death is possibly the most important factor in setting up the events to come, and even though the actress portraying the patient (this is Caitlin Stasey - who is also playing this role while faking an American accent) is only in the film for a very short while, the sheer creepiness of her explanation of what she's seeing is crucial to get the viewer set up for what they're going into. The way she says that it looks like people, but it's not; how she describes the smile as "the worst smile I've ever seen in my life"... wide, unnatural smiles are, by now, an established trope in horror going back very nearly a hundred years (The Man Who Laughs) and off the screen into literature as well. But how it's handled here brings back the genuine eeriness of that imagery and takes it away from more recent horror films that seem to treat it as just a given: big smile scary, ooh, be scared.

It's really important that the actual image of the smile is not altered in any way. I've seen many horror films that use a digitally-enhanced creepy smile as their main selling point (most egregiously Truth or Dare, which I did not watch but saw many trailers for) and it always looks awful. No, it's much creepier to have a smile in a place you don't expect it than to have an overly sinister, clearly physically impossible smile that is screaming to you about how scared you should be of it. Context is king in Smile, and it's treated as such. There are jump scares, but the time between the jump scares is as creepy or even creepier. Sound design is also incredibly important here. The discomfiting, jarring score was composed by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who has also done music for many things you might know for  being unsettling, such as Black Mirror, Utopia, The Girl With All the Gifts and - I'm gonna pull out a deep cut here to shamelessly show off and also drop a recommendation - The Advantages of Traveling by Train.

So I want to talk a little bit about the "creature", for lack of a better term, because not only does this movie use the contagious suicide thing as metaphor for inherited trauma but also as a literal being that definitely exists. We get almost no information on exactly what this thing is, we only see the effect it has on the world and descriptions of the hold it has on people like the first patient who dies and the chain of other deaths that she's connected to. But instead of being solidly metaphor, with no meat to it, or a kind of hand-wavy ephemeral entity (I can easily see a lesser movie have Rose contact some google-savvy priest who comes up with fake grimoires claiming this to be an obscure demon with a sibilant-filled name), this is an actual creature. We do at one point see it in what I feel is probably its "true form" and my inner (I mean, outer, really, just look at the rest of this blog) monster lover ate that up. So even though we don't explicitly get information on what this thing is, because everybody who encounters it is too busy dying or killing other people to look into it any further, we can piece together what we do know to form a picture of some kind of conscious, thinking entity originating from elsewhere that is attracted to the human mind and enjoys spreading itself via hosts that it rapidly burns through. There really is something extremely J-horror about this. I would be surprised if the director had not seen such films as Ringu, Suicide Club, or One Missed Call. It's like if the basic concept of those films was mashed together and also given a physical body at one point, and that's extremely effective as horror.

Unfortunately I do feel like this movie kind of falls apart around the final 25 minutes, because it seems to feel like there has to be a direct confrontation between the protagonist and the creature, but then also insists that everything is hopeless, two concepts I don't feel were mutually compatible in this instance. It does definitely make for better, bleaker horror, but I guess I did want to see a different, maybe more optimistic ending. (It could also have been that around that time, my foot fell asleep and I had to relocate, breaking my immersion.) Smile is relentless and draws you deeper down an ominous rabbit hole until just kind of petering out into a forgettable finale, with the exception of the unveiling of that nice disgusting creature. But in all categories where a similarly-themed film might drop the ball, this one manages to stand out. I think it's to director Parker Finn's credit that such a trite concept is handled refreshingly well, and it's rare that a movie like this would break into the mainstream horror market - although obviously said market doesn't quite know what to do with it, judging by how many people like me were turned off by its outward appearance.

The Skull Soldier (1992)

directed by Masaki Kyômoto

Japan

90 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I only found out that this movie exists just last night and I was very surprised that I hadn't already seen it - me, who has seen every Tsuburaya production that's been subtitled, and several that haven't. The Skull Soldier came out during that long stretch between 1980 and 1996 where there was no Ultra series on the air, so although the franchise was still massively popular and remained in the public eye, Tsuburaya was not currently attached to the series that is by far its best-known creation. The protagonist was obviously designed by Keita Amemiya, and as a whole this film feels very much like it's trying to capitalize on the previous year's Zeiram and move away from more recognizable hero tropes towards a darker, more adult atmosphere. Mostly, it doesn't succeed at doing that, or at much of anything else; this is not a very good movie. But it is a rare one for the Tsupro diehards out there.

Within literally thirty seconds of starting the movie I began to get a bit of an inkling as to why this is not as well-known as the studio's other work. The whole film isn't like this, but the opening two minutes are dangerously close to pretty much softcore porn. Seeing this from Tsuburaya, a studio whose output has overwhelmingly been geared towards children, was, uh... jarring, to say the least. The explicit scenes towards the beginning of the film reinforce what feels, overall, like an overtly obvious attempt by a studio known for its tamer fare to reinvent itself. I don't feel like this artificial division between children's media and media aimed towards adults is at all necessary, and I'm especially surprised to see it from a studio like Tsuburaya, because the early Ultra series were full of incredibly complex, sometimes very emotionally distressing stories and imagery, and those shows have always been marketed at kids. So coming out with this film and putting boobs and gore in it just to make clear that it's not for kids kind of feels like overcompensating when I know the studio is capable of and has done better.

The film itself is about a young man, Narumi, who has created a new identity for himself through which he pursues revenge against the people who killed his sister. His sister was targeted by some bad guys who were involved somehow with an experimental scientific program that spawned an artificial hormone which had the effect of making bones stronger, giving skin the ability to heal faster, and in general creating supersoldiers - at a cost. If the recipient doesn't take an injection of the hormone every sixteen hours, they begin to experience grotesque side-effects that eventually lead to death. Narumi's not a bad guy but he is a fake lawyer - by day, he's mild-mannered, unassuming, just wants his client's money back, please and thank you. But secretly, he's taken advantage of his own dosage with the Skull Soldier hormone to become an armored fighter bent on personal revenge, if not actual justice. I'm not entirely clear on how or why Narumi's sister ran afoul of the people who ended up killing her or why they had such a grudge against Narumi himself that they tried to kill him too. You mostly don't need to worry about the plot too much. The overall aesthetic felt much more important to me than the storyline.

Apart from the opening scene, the next thing that surprised me about this film is that there's a ton of gay and trans characters in it. Now... this is not "good" representation; these characters are meant as comic relief and the whole reason they're there is kind of to show that Narumi has become a bit of an outcast in society and thus he hangs around all these supposed freaks and weirdos. Coarse, derogatory language gets thrown around a lot. But when the crew of Narumi's friends is around each other, there's a back-and-forth that feels remarkably less degrading than a lot of depictions of LGBTQ+ people I see in tokusatsu. Two of Narumi's friends are an older gay couple and towards the end of the film one of them pretty unambiguously comes out as a trans woman. ("Now isn't the time to talk about these things!" is as much commentary as that gets.) Talk about going to a sex change clinic is thrown around as casually as if people were talking about buying a new outfit. It's all done as a joke and this really, really isn't a fair or respectful way to depict gay/trans people onscreen, but just the sheer fact that there are gay and trans people in this and they aren't villains and they don't get killed... it was nice.

Actually, the whole movie has this very subtle trans vibe that I probably can't explain because I'm probably just imagining it. But I mean, there's the obvious element of the protagonist literally being on hormones, and then there's the way that his taking hormones leads directly to his appearance changing, that he has this secret identity where he has more power and freedom than in his normal, fake-lawyer public life. His main rival is also somewhat outside the gender binary, putting on his sister's lipstick and nail polish to prepare for the final battle. This is the kind of thing where, if I found out that the writer or director came out as trans sometime after making the film, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

So, like I said, the bit parts, the small side characters, are really the best part of The Skull Soldier. Personally, I watched this because Kenji Ushio is in it, and he's actually one of the most interesting characters in the whole film - in fact, I think he's a little too interesting from an objective standpoint, because wanting to know his backstory and why he was the way he was took away from wanting to know the same things about the guy who was supposed to be the protagonist. I don't even really know how to describe his character, Gaja. He happened upon Narumi half-drowned and dying and saved his life and then sometime after that they both decided he would be Narumi's sidekick. He drives Narumi around and deals with angry debtors and is even willing (with bulletproof plates, fortunately) to jump into the literal line of fire for him. He doesn't speak, and wears a very dapper old-fashioned suit with top hat at all times. Where he came from or what he was doing before he encountered Narumi is never explained. The way I'm describing him makes him sound not too out of the ordinary in terms of your perennial superhero butler type, but in the movie he really does have this vibe of being a much bigger deal than his role required. This could very well just be because I know he's Kenji Ushio under some godawful prosthetics. Anybody else in the role probably would not have given it such gravitas. Despite not having any spoken lines he brings that character to life surprisingly well.

So this is not a very good movie. Everybody seems to agree on this fact, based on reviews I'm reading, but everybody also seems to agree that they like it. I particularly agree with the review that says "This is so idiotic. There should be like five more of these movies". The Skull Soldier suit is essentially the only area of the film that's aesthetically interesting, the rest is generic, grimy, concrete-jungle-at-night atmosphere that you could find in any other movie. There's a sort of half-baked side story about Narumi's ex-boss from when he was a cop and it was so unimportant and boring that I actually forgot, until reading reviews reminded me, that there was cop stuff in this movie at all (although I do appreciate the way every character who eventually ends up fighting for good has to quit being a cop before they can do that). I would not recommend this for anything other than 90 minutes of fun, unless you're like me and trying to watch every single thing Tsuburaya Productions has ever done, and even then, watch at your own discretion.