Rex: A Dinosaur's Story (1993)

directed by Haruki Kadokawa

Japan

106 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995)

directed by Takao Okawara

Japan

103 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warrior Of Love Rainbowman Special

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

² Young Challengers, 1968, dir. Yasuki Chiba.

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

King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

directed by Roger Corman

USA/UK

90 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

directed by Koji Shiraishi

Japan

80 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Oh boy. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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