The H-Man (1958)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

87 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is a favorite of mine to watch while I'm on... herbal supplements, but I decided to watch it sober and finally give it a proper review. I'm never sure how much plot to talk about when I write these reviews, because I review movies with an audience in mind who has either seen them or has easy access to Google to look up what the hell I'm talking about, but to summarize this incredibly briefly: The H-Man is about humans who have become contaminated with nuclear radiation and transformed into sentient slime that has the ability to melt and consume other humans. The idea that the post-transformation "H-Men" (this is one of the only times where I think the English rebranding of a Toho movie is more succinct; in the original film they're simply referred to as "ekitai ningen", liquid humans) could retain their mental capacity is something I'll explore later on in this review. 

Honda directed so many movies in which the supernatural element is introduced by way of gangsters running afoul of it that I have to wonder if the noir-ish detective story framework was something imposed by the studio, hoping to capitalize on trends of the time, or if it was something that personally resonated with Honda and the screenwriters (Takeshi Kimura, in the case of the Transforming Human trilogy). This particular film isn't shy at all about where its inspiration lies: the film opens with newspaper headlines about a missing fishing boat feared contaminated by nuclear testing, a blatant reference to the real-life Lucky Dragon no. 5 incident that informed much of Honda's filmmaking.

This film came out the same year as The Blob, and it's impossible not to draw comparisons between the two in terms of how the practical effects for the creature/s in question were achieved. (The Blob is actually the latter of the two films, having been released in September while The H-Man was released in June, but it's still worth thinking about.) But a more interesting comparison, I believe, is the ways in which Japanese contemporary film was lifting tropes from American sci-fi and horror movies and utilizing them to tell stories with different meaning than their Western counterparts. American science fiction of the 1950s-60s was frequently obsessed with the concept of an other, of some invading force - sometimes thinly-veiled communists, sometimes just anybody who isn't a WASP-y American - whereas Japanese sci-fi films of this era seem to be more concerned with the idea of becoming the other. The terror at the heart of The H-Man lies in the possibility that one's body could be so transformed, through the echoing aftereffects of nuclear testing, that one would no longer be recognizable to one's fellow humans and - worse - would have no choice but to act in a way that is actively hostile to non-mutated humanity. Japanese science fiction often feels like it understands the outsider in a much more nuanced way than American films that were being released at the same time.

This is where the idea of sentient slime people comes in. It's not given a lot of focus in the film itself, but there is speculation that humans who have mutated into H-Men still have the mental capacity that they did before their transformation. It's even brought up that they might be purposefully returning to Tokyo out of some kind of instinctual, remembered pull. Despite this, the film ends with all of the known H-Men having been eliminated quite brutally, through the ignition of huge gas fires to drive them out of the sewers and the use of guns (yes, shooting the slime with a gun works; I love the 1950s). Like a lot of Honda's films, the ending is unfulfilling for those expecting a neat, tidy, day-is-saved wrap-up: there's no such thing as hope or optimism, just the stark acknowledgement that the world has changed irrevocably and things such as what we just witnessed will continue happening.

Interestingly, the element of the H-Men retaining their human memories was cut completely from the American version of the film.

It's also just a really good and fun movie. The colors are absolutely gorgeous (that's Toho Scope, baby!) and the music and fashion makes it a perfect little slice of 1950s cinema that exists out of time when viewed through a contemporary lens. These genre hybrids that Toho put out are so fascinating because they allow for heavier topics to be explored using visual language normally reserved for non-genre cinema. 

I've kind of intentionally been talking more about the implications of the concept of this film than the practical effects, because a lot has already been said about that side of it, but I have to acknowledge how extremely good the effects are anyway. It's one of those movies where you would think watching it in the best possible quality would make the effects less convincing since you'd be able to see all the rough edges, but it actually makes it better the more clearly you can see it. I am, tentatively, attempting to start up a tokusatsu film club in real life, and movies like this are the kind of thing I want to show to people.

Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (1970)

directed by Kihachi Okamoto

Japan

115 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I revisited this movie after about two years because I wanted to see if it was truly as mid as I remembered it being. Everybody I've talked to about it agrees: it's good, but it's just good. I really don't want this movie to be "just good", because it has literally everything I could ever want out of a chanbara film: Zatoichi? And Yojimbo? Directed by Kihachi Okamoto? Co-starring Shin Kishida as a goth yakuza with a pistol? Soundtrack by Akira Ifukube? How in the world could all of that combine into something even remotely less than awesome?

Well, I will say one thing: no matter how so-so the bulk of the film is, those last fifteen minutes absolutely whip.

Ichi journeys homeward, to a village on the outskirts of his hometown, but finds that since the last time he'd visited, it's been taken over by yakuza, and the townspeople are suffering for it. He's hoping to relax a little, especially after a tumultuous fight that opens the film, but the town has changed so much that none of the tranquility he remembers remains. Thrown into the mix is a character instantly recognizable (although they never say that it's him, the implication is fairly obvious): a scruffy, drunk ronin played by Toshirō Mifune. And a fairly complicated subplot about hidden gold.

I have a theory that there's two major reasons why this movie didn't turn out as good as it could have. The first is that it rests too heavily on the interplay between Katsu and Mifune's characters. I actually don't see this as an objective problem, because personally, over the past two years, I've seen a shipload of films starring both actors, and I was very entertained watching them play off of each other here. Is that enough to carry an entire film? I don't think so, unless you are specifically watching it for either of these two. I also think that, despite the title making it clear that, yes, they are putting Mifune in this on purpose and they want you to think of his character from Yojimbo, the ronin is far meaner than Sanjuro ever was. I do kind of love it - his wheedling senseiiii!! as he mocks one of his lackeys is, though cruel, really funny - but it feels like too-clever marketing to do all of this and then make the bodyguard in question a different character from who you're thinking of.

The second reason why I think this fell short is because they didn't let Okamoto do the Okamoto thing. I don't know anything about the production history of this film, or of the Zatoichi series in general, but I was getting a sense that Okamoto had maybe been told to tone down his usual wildness a little bit so that his entry wouldn't be the proverbial sore thumb of the franchise. So instead of two hours of antics and shenanigans à la Red Lion, we get two hours of talking capped by fifteen glorious minutes where Okamoto is finally loosed upon the production.

If you've seen a lot of his films, you can instantly recognize a battle scene from an Okamoto movie. It doesn't matter whether he's directing a war film or a swordfight in a jidaigeki, all of his climactic battles have the same disorganized, chaotic, brutal, bloody choreography. Nothing is pretty or practiced: limbs fly off, people die with no dignity whatever. Okamoto witnessed combat during the Pacific War and he films his battle scenes with a kind of frenetic violence that can be uncomfortable to watch. That is present during the climax of Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, and the stylistic choice is also paired with a pathos that had been building since the beginning of the film: the hidden gold is finally uncovered, in the form of dust secreted inside Jizo statues, and the fight occurs as high winds kick up, so the town is literally suffuse with the gold: the yakuza, the town youths, Ichi, and Sasa are all fighting while physically covered in the thing they're fighting for, which is impermanent, blowing away with the wind, ultimately useless. The futility of violence is on full display, and although Ichi may not be a party to greed the way the other characters are, he is still part of the fight.

I also think, because I managed to see a print of this that was one of the clearest, crispest film-watching experiences I've ever had, this is an extremely well-shot movie. The lighting is really unique. Every shot has this Caravaggio quality to it, with the extreme darks and stark lights side-by-side. It's genuinely beautiful for every second of the film. The physicality of the run-down town that the film takes place in is also impressive: I particularly liked one shot where Ichi is tackling a four-story staircase, and the scene is filmed from outside the house, so you see Ichi going up the stairs through the open windows. And the Ifukube score sounds like all of his other scores - which is to say, fantastic.

I've given this an extremely subjective four stars because it's got everybody I like in it and the climax is so good it makes me sweat. But you do have to sit through about an hour and forty minutes of actors who you may or may not be a fan of to get to it. It's ironic that despite much of Okamoto's typical directorial quirks being removed from the equation, this unusually lengthy entry in the Zatoichi series still feels different - not entirely in a good way - from the others.

The Whale God (1962)

directed by Tokuzō Tanaka

Japan

100 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I tried watching this quite some time ago but couldn't make it through, I guess because it felt too long. But recently, thanks to it finally getting a good home media release, people have started talking about this movie again - and for good reason, because sitting down and mustering the energy to focus on this fairly demanding, but extremely rewarding film made me realize how much of an underrated gem it is.

This is a movie about a whaling village driven collectively to madness by their repeated failure to catch and kill an abnormally large whale which they've taken to naming the "Whale God" (kujira-gami; it's more or less a literal translation, but there are subtleties to the word "kami"/"gami" that I encourage you to look into). From an outside perspective, it's easy to balk at that runtime given the simplicity of the plot - "Movie about a whale, 100 minutes" - but there's so much that goes into the story that it makes those 100 minutes feel expertly utilized.

Most of the first half of the movie deals with establishing individual characters and developing conflicts between them. One thing that's interesting about this is that the presence of so many extras and various background actors in every scene gives the characters who are focused on more of a sense of just being random members of the village. They're not - one of the leads is the son of the village's best spearman, and other prominent figures such as the village elder and his daughter come into play - but there's none of that feeling of the movie being full of random nobodies and then a couple of famous actors that you might get in a Hollywood film with a similar setting. Not that the actors in the forefront are nobodies: we have Kōjirō Hongō (Gamera, reluctantly), Shintarō Katsu (Zatoichi), and Takashi Shimura (everything), as well as Shiho Fujimura in a smaller role, who is not immediately recognizable but had a career playing various supporting female characters in many famous films. But these more familiar faces are blended really well into the overall atmosphere of the village so that everybody feels like they're on even ground.

I want to take a second to talk about Katsu's performance in specific because he's really great here. His character, Kishu (this I think was less of a name and more just a nickname based on where he says he came from) is an outsider whose only goal is to make money off the Whale God. The village elder promises his home, title, and his daughter's hand in marriage to whoever can kill the whale. Not only does Kishu have his sights set on all of this, but he openly brags that he won't be satisfied there; he'll sell the daughter to a brothel and continue making money off of his kill. Katsu in this role exudes a malevolence, a total lack of conscience. He has an unsettling and domineering physicality to him that makes for a real contrast with his role as Ichi. Kishu plays off of Hongō's character, Shaki, in very interesting ways; had I the time to do so, I would want to go on at further length about how deeply homoerotic the fight scene between the two of them felt, but I'll leave that thought in my brain for now.

An element of this movie that I think is absolutely fascinating but remains subtle is the fact that this whaling village is either undergoing or has already undergone Christianization. A white Christian priest has a church in the village, and when Shaki adopts the child his girlfriend Ei has after Kishu rapes her, they have the baby baptized in the church. Although the backdrop of Christianity is there, the villagers nonetheless continue to conceptualize the whale as a kami, and this is never shown as being in conflict with the growth of Christianity in the village. Indeed, traditional religion seems to take precedence over Christianity when it really matters - although the priest is against it, the villagers move the dying Shaki to where he can converse with the remains of the whale in his last days. 

There is an implication here that, with Shaki and Ei's child, the future of the village and its traditional animistic religion is uncertain. The killing of the Whale God could be an element of this. With the death of the whale there is now one less god in the world - a trivial thing, perhaps, when your worldview holds that every single object and animal is inhabited by its own god - but the presence of a new God begins to take shape. The villagers' collective rage and hatred towards the whale swells to such an all-consuming height that one cannot help but begin to wonder if there's something else underneath it.

An incredibly dark, at times somewhat slow-paced film, The Whale God is capped off by twenty or so minutes of total practical effects insanity. Both Hongō and Katsu spend the latter part of the film on top of the whale (sorry, Raúl Ruiz fans, pun intended) in a protracted sequence that looked absolutely miserable to film but extremely compelling. The whale is very realistic, but what really cinches it is the performance both actors give while attempting to ring the whale's nose and bring it to shore to be killed. It's totally believable, as is everything else about the film. Akira Ifukube's inimitable score, Kaneto Shindo's screenplay, Tokuzō Tanaka's direction, and the myriad of impressive acting skills on display here all work together to create a film of rare caliber.

Seven Samurai (1954)

directed by Akira Kurosawa

Japan

207 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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For a long time I was carrying around a dirty little secret, and that secret was that despite being a huge fan of Showa-era Japanese film, I had not seen Seven Samurai. I wasn't unfamiliar with Kurosawa, and I wanted to watch this, but you gotta carve out time for a 207-minute-long movie, even when you know doing so will be a rewarding experience. (This is not, as of this time, the longest movie I've ever seen; it is tied with Inagaki's 1963 Chushingura, which is also exactly 207 minutes.) Many people have written a library's worth of words about this movie far more intelligently than I ever could, but not saying at least something about it feels wrong.

It's kind of amazing that almost four hours of film can come out of a remarkably simple premise. The plot of the film is that a village of poor farmers, pushed to near-starvation by continued bandit raids on their rice crops, hires a group of samurai to fight back against the bandits and protect them. The film is split down the middle by an intermission, and while I'm not sure if it was intentional to divide it into two distinct halves, there is a definite change in tone, from a focus on planning in the first half to a focus on doing in the second. And the beauty of it is that the planning stages are almost as interesting, if not more so, than the action.

Now, this was my first watch, and I haven't even read any of those far more intelligent things people have said about this movie yet. But I think I'm onto it. I think I might have it figured out. I think the idea here is that Seven Samurai is not about the samurai.

Kurosawa does this thing that I've noticed in almost all of his films where he has a way of making characters - even ones who should be the "protagonists", ones who we spend the most time with and should be getting to know the best - decentralized. Instead of populating his movies with heroes, he populates them with people, making it so the characters who are in the spotlight feel like they're functionally no deeper than the villagers in the background. We never get much backstory on the seven, and if you're not familiar with the movie, like I wasn't, you might be expecting that. I think the movie plays with that expectation intentionally: it's only the leader of the seven, Shimada (played by Takashi Shimura in one of his best performances), who realizes that the victory belongs to the peasants, not his group. Neither are the antagonists ever expanded upon: the difference between villain and victim here is somewhat ill-defined, and the film presents a cycle of violence that should make the viewer slightly uneasy about assigning glory to any side.

The best example of this kind of surprising de-valorization of characters who would in any other movie have been framed as heroes comes in Kikuchiyo's death. Most if not all of the samurai do have at least some kind of personality, but Kikuchiyo is the most outsized by far - of course he is, it's Toshiro Mifune in the role - and he dies in the mud without final words, like a peasant. Which he was - he's one of the only characters to have backstory, and we learn that he was born a poor farmer just like the villagers he's reluctantly protecting. That totally unexpected coda to an incredibly colorful, loud, energetic character is the perfect example of how this movie shifts the focus off of who we would expect to be focused on, and onto the people in the background.

Seven Samurai is one of those movies where time has done it a bit of a disservice - it's not that it doesn't warrant the reputation it has as one of the best movies ever made, but its constant popularity throughout the past 70 years has done a lot to obscure our context of the film. Because movies like this can be made with relative ease today through the use of CGI and other "cheats", one can sometimes forget that all of this was real, physical stuff; real sets, real mud, real (extremely terrified) horses. The history of Japanese cinema began decades earlier, but I would argue that with such landmark films as Seven Samurai, Godzilla, and Twenty-Four Eyes, 1954 was a huge step for the country's film industry.

I won't brook a single argument about whether or not this deserved to be three hours and forty minutes long. It deserves to be longer, if it wants to be. There's nothing in here that feels unnecessary to the larger picture. Visually, narratively, and in its dialogue, this is a really monumental film. But it's also that way because of what isn't in it. It's brilliant because it leaves these holes through which you can get a better feel for the real core of it. The end doesn't feel triumphant - the peasants certainly seem to have triumphed, but there's not a sense of satisfying victory. But the end isn't the point. To risk deploying a cliche, this is a movie that is totally about the journey rather than the destination.

Ultraman: The Adventure Begins (1987)

directed by Ray Patterson, Mitsuo Kusakabe

USA/Japan

78 minutes

1.5 stars out of 5

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So I knew that an Ultraman cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbera existed, but I'd for the longest time I was under the impression that it was an entire series, not just this one-off thing, so I'd been treating it like Hanna-Barbera's Godzilla: "I'll get around to that someday, maybe, if I feel like it." The Adventure Continues was evidently intended to be an entire series, but that didn't work out, and honestly, I'm okay with it.

The premise should be somewhat familiar to anybody who's seen an Ultra series, and easily digestible to those who haven't: three pilots - Chuck, Beth, and Scott - collide with a mysterious energy sphere, later revealed to have been Ultras from the M78 nebula heading to Earth. The pilots would have been killed in the accident, but the Ultras chose instead to merge with their bodies, giving them the ability to shift forms. At the same time, an invasion by aliens from a planet called Sorkin is going on, and although attempts are made to deal with the monsters non-violently, the Ultras must protect the Earth against these giant monsters with their newfound powers.

It's been a while since I've rated anything this low. Maybe it feels worse because I've been watching a lot of good stuff lately, but I've got to say, the quality of this one ranges from "mildly entertaining" to "pretty dismal". I'll try to be kind to it, and get the stuff I liked out of the way first, but after that... no guarantees.

I have a soft spot for late-'80s/early-'90s anime, which is basically what this is; the animation is clearly not done by a US studio (as many cartoons aired in the States weren't) and it's got the vibe of anime from that era, where everybody is blocky and buff and all the women look the same. I'm not saying the animation is good, but it's comfortingly familiar to someone like me who enjoys that kind of thing. There is interesting conflict between Dr. Susan Rand and her team, who are dedicated to researching the monsters instead of just killing them, and the three pilots/Ultras. They're eventually persuaded into seeing the value of a non-violent solution to dealing with the monsters whenever possible, but unfortunately, it's not possible very often. Looking at this with the knowledge that it was meant to be expanded into a full series, introducing that option of having monsters who were not intentionally destructive and were dealt with in a kind and gentle fashion would have provided a nice change of pace. The fight scenes are also extremely entertaining; aerial battles are definitely the place (the only place) where the animation team shines and the cartoon feels like it's actually getting decent.

Also, Zoon, the big fat dragon who's just a sweet confused baby, was great. What an adorable little dude. I loved seeing the Ultras take care of him and relocate him to somewhere he could live in peace. Perfect creature.

I really have to struggle to come up with nice things to say about this, because the balance of good and bad here is weighted heavily towards "bad". Maybe this is my fault for having internet brainrot, but I could not stop thinking about G.I. Joe PSAs throughout this entire thing. The voice acting is so bad and so ill-fitting with the animation that it creates these unintentionally hysterical moments, such as the pilots' boss witnessing them all die horribly in a fiery crash and just solemnly going "They were the best." All of the dialogue feels like a parody of emotion, a script written by an AI who's never met a human before and has only been fed on Saturday morning cartoons. And that's not even touching on the jokes - the humor is so, so stale. Absolutely nothing about it that's intended to be funny is. The only humorous moments were when I was cracking up thinking "Hey, kid, I'm a computer! Stop all the downloadin'!"

I was trying to give this the benefit of the doubt, because I think all Ultra is good Ultra, and I didn't want to have a bias against The Adventure Begins just because of its being produced by a domestic, mainstream studio. I don't have to worry about that, though, because as it turns out I have a bias against it because it is bad. To be fair, it's not really right to judge this by itself, because how many pilot episodes are considered the best part of a series? If it had been given the chance to develop its storylines and feature more interesting ideas and fresher jokes, it could have turned into something good, and maybe that's the real tragedy here - maybe this thing was cut off before it could blossom. What we have, though, is just a dud, to me. The action sequences are fun, but I couldn't say I got much out of this. If there's anything good about it, it's that Tsuburaya has embraced Team USA into their fold, and they appear in some truly fun scenes in the Ultra Galaxy Fight side-series. Ultrawoman Beth for life.