Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan (1987)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

47 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

____

The last movie I watched before this one was Hideo Gosha's Goyokin. Only real cinema for me, thank you.

It's easy to put on Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan and just think "oh, this is bad". I admit I thought that at the start. This is compounded by the fact that I still haven't quite figured Minoru Kawasaki out, despite how many of his films I've watched; I'm never entirely sure when he intends for us to laugh at something and when we're meant to be laughing with it. But the further Iko-chan goes, the clearer things become: Kawasaki understands tokusatsu intimately. I don't think - and I could be wrong here, because I still haven't read any statements from the director himself - any of this is intended in a mean-spirited way. Tokusatsu is the kind of thing where even though us fans love it dearly and defend its genuine artistic merit wholeheartedly, we are, at least every once in a while, guilty of laughing at it a little when it's not trying to be funny.

The protagonist of the film is Iko Kawai, a schoolgirl of no particular importance until she chances upon an alien who gives her a magical pink headset that can give her special powers and grant wishes. Iko, being possessed of a pure heart, uses the headset to stop a rampaging kaiju by communicating with it and finding out that it's not really mad or hateful, it just doesn't like living in a monstrous body that it never asked to be born in. (So right off the bat there's your transgender subtext.) She shrinks it down to a smaller size and it eventually repays the favor later on in the film. From there, as a matter of course, Iko finds herself drawn to the obligatory vaguely useless defense team, which counts among their members a very useless kyodai hero. Tension ramps up when Iko helps out two wounded Martians who tell her that their planet has been taken over by an evil dictator who plans on deploying a bomb that kills all humans but leaves everything else untouched.

If this sounds goofy, it's because it is. And it's meant to be. Akiko Isozaki, who plays Iko, is very obviously not a great actress, but she does feel like she's trying, and that authentically amateur performance accounts for a lot of Iko's charm. The kaiju suits and puppets are inordinately good for something this low-budget (I genuinely thought they'd managed to commandeer a Baragon suit for a few seconds) and the acting behind them is also top-notch - god, those Martians, the puppeteers really knew how to get emotion out of a face that has about as much expression as Kermit the Frog when someone's hand is up him. This movie is silly but it isn't cynical. It's exactly what the people who made it wanted it to be.

I can't really put my finger on exactly what it is about this movie that makes it so good, but it is So Good. I'm going to quote from its current top review on Letterboxd by the eloquent and well-stated "PeepeeDoodooBitch ?" to make up for my lack of insight: "[...]pure and unadulterated passion that manifests in the form of over ambitious props and special effects, fast little story lines carefully crafted to utilize all of the film’s minuscule budget, and gloriously weird moments and plots that are absent of studio interference. "

The Age of Assassins (1967)

directed by Kihachi Okamoto

Japan

99 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

____

Kihachi Okamoto is one of my favorite directors. His filmography is a bit unusual because each of what I would consider his "great films" (or even good films) are very distinctive from each other. While he certainly does have a trademark style that's present even in the late-'50s work he considered "just doing a job", it's hard to imagine the same person who made The Age of Assassins made Sword of Doom and by that token it's hard to imagine the same person who made Sword of Doom also made University Bandits. But the majority of his films seem to be united by a philosophy that is as nihilistic as it is absurdist: in movies like Age of Assassins and to an extent many of his more socially critical war films, there's something deeply wrong with the world, something rotten that is inherent in the way society functions, and the only way to really deal with it is to just be insane, because the world itself is insane, corrupt, and morally bankrupt, and we're all going to die eventually, probably at the hands of our fellow human beings in some way or another. I think it's impossible to separate this common thread running through all of Okamoto's films from the fact that he himself had seen active combat during the war - something that you feel more than anything in the way he shoots his action sequences.

At least, that's what I get out of it.

The Age of Assassins is one of his most boundary-pushing films, at times feeling like it has a vague notion of being film noir but too fond of the '60s avant-garde movement within Japanese cinema to really push in that direction. It's a hard movie to write about because it gives you almost nothing. Upon first watch, it can feel almost plotless; events happen according to a logic that is known only to the characters within the film. I think this is, in large part, because the protagonist of the movie spends the entire thing knowing exactly what's going on but not letting on to either the viewer or anybody around him that he knows what's going on.

Tatsuya Nakadai plays Shinji Kikyo, outwardly a scruffy, scatterbrained college professor but internally an enigma. He is targeted by a murder association in league with the Nazi Party for reasons that remain fairly murky throughout the entire film. At first he seems to just be an unfortunate bystander, the third in a line of random killings that the Nazis demand the murder association commit to prove the viability of their plan to train residents of an insane asylum to be professional killers (or maybe just killers). But then it starts to seem like that might have been a ruse when it's revealed that he was injured in Nazi Germany as a young boy and a Nazi surgeon took the opportunity to hide a precious diamond within his body. For anyone in this film to have a motivation so clear and comprehensible as wanting to steal a diamond is almost laughable, though - whatever is going on with Kikyo and why everybody wants to kill him is still something that, three rewatches later, I have trouble straightening out in my head.

The strength of this movie comes largely from the performances of Nakadai as Kikyo and also of Hideyo Amamoto as Shogo Mizorogi, mastermind of the murder association and the primary villain of the film. Nakadai does this thing throughout the movie where he very slowly sheds his nerdy professor disguise with such subtlety that halfway through the film you start thinking "wait a minute, is this still that weird guy we saw at the beginning?" Kikyo is a master of the long game, and it's only after we've watched the movie (preferably more than once) that we can see several moments where it's obvious that he's far more aware of what he's involved in than he lets on. Seeing Hideyo Amamoto play a villain is nothing unusual (in fact it's more unusual when he's not the villain in whatever movie he's in) but as Mizorogi he's got an edge that his villain performances don't typically have. While Kikyo's motivations remain largely personal for the entire film, Mizorogi is very open and philosophical about his beliefs about mass murder; it's a bit of a reverse-card version of the usual good vs. bad format, where the hero is plain-spoken and relatable and the villain remains a spooky unknown.

I don't think Toho was entirely comfortable with how out there this movie was, and for that matter I don't think any other studio was, either. Even Nikkatsu apparently decided to pass on it, and Toho shelved it for a while before finally releasing it very quietly in 1967. It was not promoted, was released along with a racing documentary that was not expected to draw high viewership, and was scheduled for release in February, the month with the lowest theater attendance. From its birth it seems like Age of Assassins was destined to be a cult classic only, and that makes sense; there's something too vicious about it for polite society, something a little too incisive and nasty, presented in a way that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But it is one of my favorite Okamoto movies, and one of my favorite movies in general, because it is all of those things and it's also really fun. It wants you to have fun with murder. It's gleeful in its depiction of madness and death. It's an Okamoto movie to the core, made great by its cast and cinematography, and it's something that benefits greatly from more than one viewing.

The Viper Brothers (1971)

directed by Sadao Nakajima

Japan

87 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

____

Does anybody else remember the joke where somebody hears a sinister-sounding guy outside his door saying "I am the viper! I am the viper!" and he's all scared until finally the guy says "I come to vipe your vindows"? That isn't relevant here, just thought I'd mention it.

I don't believe I've ever reviewed a yakuza movie before, mostly because the vast majority of them tend to blend together in my brain. I always have fun watching them, but afterward I sometimes have trouble remembering exactly what went on in which one; exceptions made for the really really good ones, the classics of the genre like Violent Streets and Cops vs. Thugs. While The Viper Brothers isn't the single greatest yakuza movie of all time, the strength of its two leads and the solid direction by possibly my favorite yakuza director Sadao Nakajima make this one more memorable than your average outing.

The film follows two sworn brothers, Masa (Bunta Sugawara) and Katsuji (Tamio Kawachi), who are more enthusiastic about the idea of being yakuza than they are about actually being yakuza. The first shot of the film shows Masa getting out of his 12th stint in jail, and we can tell right away from how the shot is framed that this is a movie with style: Masa stands dwarfed by the massive wall outside the jail, looming over him almost like it's threatening to swallow him back up - which it will, eventually, and probably for the rest of his life. His brother Katsuji on the outside quickly gets him up to speed on all the latest fashions among the modern punks and they have a bad time trying to eat at a fancy French restaurant. All of this is to introduce us to them as characters but also, more subtly, to introduce one of two female characters, Sayako (Tomomi Satō), who Katsuji tries to pay to get her to have sex with Masa. (The movie is not as bad about women as a lot of yakuza flicks, but it's still gross-ish.)

While The Viper Brothers isn't an out-and-out comedy, it does have some humorous elements. But that humor is used in service of what is actually a fairly devastating bigger picture. Masa and Katsuji's antics as they try as hard as possible to perform the duties involved in being Bad Dudes are funny, but ultimately this is a story about two guys who were cast aside by the world and are spending their lives self-destructively trying to figure out how to fit into whatever parts of society are left to them after growing up in orphanages and juvie leaves them with no practical skills other than dirty tricks and violence. They aren't "bad people" - Masa almost instantly has concern for the film's secondary female character, a 15-year-old girl named Yuki (Keiko Yamada) who has dropped out of school to care for her siblings, and Katsuji eventually feels bad for stealing some fruit.

There's a thing about masculinity here that I thought was really interesting too - Masa begging practically on his hands and knees to be given a tattoo because he's so certain that that's the key to finally Being A Man, finally making something of himself, as if the role he so desires is something he can just put on and wear, externally, superficially. It would be easier if it was.

Essentially the entire reason why I wanted to review this is because there are two moments that made me think "okay, this is not your typical yakuza movie". The first was when Masa and Katsuji are driving to the final raid and all the background noise drops out and is replaced with a woman's voice singing. We the viewers can hear it but so do the characters, somehow, and Katsuji tries to remember why he knows it - maybe it was his mother who sang it for him, he says, and both seem to relive, for a moment, life before they were forced to fend for themselves. The second moment is the very last shot of the film, the two of them walking together in the rain as we see their elaborate back tattoos washing off. I thought that was just one of the most brilliant shots I've ever seen in a yakuza movie. It's not how you expect that sort of thing to end; usually the main characters end up dying in a blaze of glory or getting sent to jail, or returning to fight again in the sequel. But Masa and Katsuji just kind of... decide to call it quits. We see the remnants of their old life of violence literally washing away. It was a beautiful way to end a movie that, while it had a slightly uneven second act, is one of the better yakuza films I've watched recently.

Murder on D Street (1998)

directed by Akio Jissōji

Japan

95 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

____

The murder in Murder on D Street doesn't occur until well over halfway through the film. As with most murder mysteries, following the murder there is an investigation (here conducted by Edogawa Ranpo's detective character Kogoro Akechi, played by erstwhile Yasunori Katō Kyūsaku Shimada, nearly unrecognizable with a goatee), but even this is decentralized from the plot. The murder and subsequent investigation, in fact, feels like it derails the plot; it interrupts what had been a perfectly good sequence of voyeuristic glimpses into the weird little private lives of some somewhat well-off business owners ca. 1927.

Hiroyuki Sanada plays Fukiya, an art forger, who is possibly the closest thing we have to a "protagonist". Fukiya is hired to produce sophisticated forgeries of classic pornographic art prints for Tokiko Sunaga, the wife of a ramen shop owner (Yumi Yoshiyuki) - herself later revealed to have been the model for the original artist. Fukiya, somewhat abruptly, murders his client after she discovers that Fukiya had been sneaking a little too much of himself into the forgeries he was giving her: painting a small mole - his own - onto the faces of the women in the prints. What exactly his motive was, though, I can only assume; we don't, if I'm remembering the film correctly, ever see that Fukiya has discovered that Sunaga has discovered what he's done with the prints (although she has). He simply decides that she has to die.

We're introduced to Akechi, again, well over halfway through, and this is not the smooth, confident Detective Akechi of later adaptations but a disheveled recluse living alone surrounded by stacks of novels in a room he doesn't pay the rent for. The reason for Akechi's seemingly having fallen into a deep depression is not explained by the plot, nor is his springing into action with no trace of his temporary ennui after the murder is committed. It's almost like - and this is about to bring me to my main point about this film - the murder activates him. He becomes a detective again because the plot needs him. Because the viewers need him. The Akechi we see in his dirty rented room is the offscreen, off-page Akechi; he only becomes Akechi when he has something to investigate.

What I took away from this movie was that it was a study of art and literature and how the act of reading something that someone else has written or viewing something that someone else has drawn carries with it an inherent perversion, an inherent voyeurism. The characters in Murder on D Street encounter the fantasies of others within novels and paintings and then replicate them in their own lives: Fukiya becomes the subject of the paintings he's faking, paintings in which Sunaga became the subject of torture scenes from a play that the artist Shundei painted her into. We can read a weird book or watch a weird movie and become aware of the internal lives of others in ways that are not acceptable to demonstrate openly in polite society. So much of Ranpo's work seems to reflect this: intellectual characters with secrets, violating societal norms with each other.

When you watch a Jissōji movie, you kind of know what you're going to get: disorienting camera angles framing nearly every shot, a pervasive and discordant soundtrack even during innocuous scenes, a stance on eroticism where it's almost impossible to tell if the director is condemning or celebrating it, and characters who feel as if they're completely unaware they're fictional. Murder on D Street features an interesting framing device where we occasionally see the set as a paper diorama assembled and moved by someone clearly from contemporary times, rather than the early Showa era where the film is set. Using this device Jissōji reminds us that everything we're seeing is a façade, but he also invites us to be participants. The murder feels unimportant, but everything else is.

Sanshō the Bailiff (1954)

directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

Japan

124 minutes

4 stars out of 5

____

Now we come to the second Mizoguchi film on the "summer of classic Japanese cinema" watchlist that I created for myself. Much like Ugetsu, Sanshō the Bailiff is concerned with the human condition, but where Ugetsu has its characters unable to escape the prison of bodily existence except in their fleeting, ephemeral dreams, the main character in Sanshō quite literally rolls up his sleeves and does something about it. (A feel-good movie this is not, however.)

The first forty minutes of the film follow the family of a former nobleman who was cast into exile after getting into arguments with too many influential military men. Although he was in a position of power, this was a truly good man; he impressed upon his son the importance of always having mercy, no matter what. After his exile, his wife Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka) and two children (Masahiko Tsugawa and Keiko Enami as young Zushio and Anju respectively, Yoshiaki Hanagi and Kyōko Kagawa as their adult versions) begin journeying to find him, but they are taken advantage of on the road by an old woman who shelters them to earn their trust and then tricks Tamaki into being separated from Zushio and Anju while the children are forced into slavery.

Something that I feel the need to note here is that the film is titled after a character who is barely a part of it. One could argue (probably correctly) that Sanshō the Bailiff actually is the driving force of the film, being the man who ruled the enslaved workers on his estate with an iron fist and therefore compelling Zushio to rise up against him and tear down the institution of slavery that he benefited from. But we hardly ever see Sanshō, really. The main character is Zushio. However, naming a film after the driving antagonistic force - whether human or monster - is not at all unusual. Count Dracula is not technically the main character in Bram Stoker's book, but it is still titled Dracula, because the story is inherently about him. It's the same with Sanshō the Bailiff: Sanshō may feel like a relatively unimportant character, but he represents the whole rotten system that Zushio rebels against. As I've seen pointed out, Sanshō is vile because he is not unique - he's just one of many.

The story of Sanshō is personal, but the broader picture is political. It's one of those movies where you can identify messages that are still incredibly relevant to our own times; perhaps this is, like Ugetsu with its emphasis on the eternal misery of living in the flesh, a statement about the perennial nature of human cruelty. But - crucially - it also posits that we do have the power to change our circumstances and the circumstances of everyone around us. When the film is concerning itself with Zushio's attempts to seize power and wield it, not for his own gain, but to erase the damage done by evil men who had previously held it, it feels like nothing so much as a tendency film - those left-leaning pictures made in the earlier half of the 20th century that criticized a tendency that the author felt was present in (and detrimental to) society. I felt this every time one of the characters would remark on how the people in power reduce them to something less than human. It is true now as it mostly always has been that those in the highest positions lose sight of anything not directly relevant to them - even the minister who endows Zushio with the office that eventually enables him to ban slavery from his territories, a seemingly gentle man, only becomes involved with Zushio after he realizes that their families were connected in some way.

Zushio becomes the mythical "good" ruler: the very idealized philosopher-king who rises to power only long enough to utilize it to liberate as many people as he can from suffering, and then relinquishes it before it can begin to corrupt him. This is a perfect example of the kind of thing that critics like Donald Richie tend to see as overtly leftist propaganda - again, there are so many moments when this reads as a tendency film - and that may be so. But, my god, living in America in 2025, I just want to see someone do something good.

In the final shot, the camera pans up and up and up as Zushio and Tamaki embrace - our part in the story is over for now, but the final shot - the sea and the trees, a small human in the foreground going about his work of drying seaweed - feels like it's reminding us that Zushio's story is the story of human life, of the entire world. I think about that shot in parallel with the shot of Anju's death - the ripples on the surface of the water conveying the transience of life, and then the expansive final frame that situates us in the world as a whole, constituting a part of it but not all of it. As I said, although Zushio's journey is inherently political, at the end of the film, he is just a man, just a living creature, choosing mercy, defying cruelty, and that's the most important thing about him.

Ugetsu (1953)

directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

Japan

97 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

____

At the beginning of this summer, I made a list of 10 films from across the history of Japanese cinema that I needed to see but hadn't yet - no specific criterion for inclusion, just ones that came to mind when I thought to myself "I can't believe I still haven't seen [x]". As happens often, ticking items off that list hasn't been going as quickly as I'd hoped, and Ugetsu is the first one I've actually managed to get to. But if you're going to pick one Japanese film to watch - for any reason, at any time, ever - you can absolutely, positively do a lot worse than picking Ugetsu.

I was vaguely familiar with the source material for this film because I had seen other versions of it, one of which is a favorite of mine (The Bride from Hades, with Kōjirō Hongō's excellent performance) and the other of which (Hellish Love) served to highlight how good the first one was in comparison. But when contrasted with Ugetsu, both of them feel extremely stripped-down. They both focus on only one story - of the man who becomes infatuated with a ghost woman and either explicitly has sex with and marries her or is implied to - whereas Ugetsu, despite itself clarifying that it is a "new refashioning" of the source in its own preamble, situates that story within a more broadly developed world and uses it to convey a much clearer message.

The first thing that stuck out to me while I was watching this and the thing that is sticking with me now, the morning after, is the way the movie is framed. Most of the scenes are shot so that we can see the actors head-to-toe, moving through their environment in a way that conveys on an instinctual level that they are part of the scenery, part of their world, not part of ours. There's also something about the way the actors live out their characters' lives that feels private and almost uncomfortably intimate. It feels like we are (or at least I felt like I was) not being shown a story, the way we're so used to movies feeling; it's more like we're in the space with these people, but they aren't aware of us. Like the viewer is the ghost in the room, or in the village, or wherever. I was really struck by this method of showing the entirety of a person whenever they were in the frame, restricting headshots or other more closely focused framing to a minimum, and how effective it is at drawing the viewer into the scene. It's kind of incredible.

Oddly, something about the set-up for the film reminded me of The Hidden Fortress: we follow characters who are trying to live during wartime but are not themselves anybody special, and exist on the fringes of the action, only infrequently seeing it directly, but continually feeling its influence.

As has been pointed out, two worlds exist side-by-side in Ugetsu, the boundaries of which are often so thin as to be virtually nonexistent. When Genjuro slips out of his world of strife and hardship and into the perfumed, hallucinatory paradise of Lady Wakasa's mansion, there is a distinct line between where he had been previously and where he was now, but he's the only one who doesn't see it. The point of connection between the world of the living and the world Genjuro is briefly invited into is his own pottery - when he is served sake in his own wares, it feels like a very sudden and jarring reminder of who he is and where he comes from. There's nothing physically distinguishing the ghosts from living humans, but regardless, their entire presence gives off an almost "uncanny valley" effect in the middle of the sweaty, dirty world of trying to live and work and make money: they are too perfect, too beautiful; they don't belong here, which we know, because we're in on the secret, but Genjuro isn't. Machiko Kyo is really something else here; the way Lady Wakasa's every move feels so deliberately choreographed and practiced serves to add another layer of unreality to her physical presence.

I suppose the easiest takeaway here is that the film posits that we are inevitably doomed to suffer and any attempt to rise above this suffering will result in temporary pleasure at best and punishment at worst. By the end of the film, the only person who really seems to appreciate living is Miyagi, who has died, and can now only watch her husband and child from the same in-between space inhabited by the two ghost women. No one is happy, no one got what they wanted. The most they can hope for is that things would stay the same instead of actively getting worse. At least most of the character survive, but for what? It's a stunning, technically impressive, near-flawless film, but it is also, to use academic parlance, a huge bummer. Something I see a lot in reviews of this film is the claim that it carries a message about greed, but honestly, I didn't get that from it. What the characters experience doesn't even feel like the consequence of greed: it just feels like they're being punished for daring to imagine what it's like to live beyond a subsistence level.

There's not much I can say about this movie that hasn't already been said in a more incisive and intelligent way - to that end I really do want to read some actual essays about this film, it's that good - so I guess as a closing note I'll mention a specific scene that I loved. This movie has one of the creepiest scenes I've ever watched in anything that isn't traditionally considered a "horror movie": when Lady Wakasa is dancing as she and Genjuro are undertaking marriage ceremonies, we begin to hear a deeper voice accompanying her singing, a man's voice; at first, I assumed this was diegetic, since there is chanting elsewhere on the soundtrack - but then the camera slowly pans to the mask belonging to Lady Wakasa's deceased father, and we realize that we're hearing his ghost, and so are the characters.

Crab Goalkeeper (2006)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

80 minutes

4 stars out of 5

____

Happy Marine Day.

I made a mistake by going into this film thinking I knew what it would be like. I would have watched it sooner, but I had a preconceived notion of it according to Kawasaki's other "animal with job" movies and, while I do like those, some of them get a little tiresome when the jokes fail to land. But Crab Goalkeeper is so much more than an "animal with a job" movie. It's an often fairly brutal assessment of the value society places on ability to work as a measure of personal worth, but at the same time it's also a testament to the power of being genuinely kind in the face of a world that is too quick to leave people behind. I am dead serious when I say that you could apply Marxist praxis to this movie if you tried hard enough.

We begin the movie with a giant crab washing up on a beach, being kicked and hit with sticks by several boys. Our main(-ish) human character Shinichi rescues the crab, takes it back to his home, and teaches it to speak - in secret at first, but you can only hide a big, beautiful crab for so long. Shinichi's parents are constantly squabbling about the kinds of issues adults have: money, usually; it seems to be all they talk about, and it prevents them from seeing each other as real people. All they are is bodies who either can or can't, will or won't, make money. After Shinichi's parents discover the crab, their immediate thought is to sell it. His father even recounts a story of how his own father cooked and ate a pet chicken he had while describing how he fully intends to do the same thing to Shinichi's crab for money. The crab is never - can never - simply be a crab. Humans are only capable of viewing the crab as a commodity, not as a friend, not as a living, feeling being. In this way the crab is not only an example of the way capitalism makes us all cogs in the machine but perhaps, specifically, a spotlight on the unfair treatment of immigrants: if you wash up on our shore, you'd better make yourself useful.

One of the most interesting and unexpected things about this movie is its treatment of women. The crab, being automatically marginalized due to its appearance, ends up in contact with a lot of people who are equally marginalized in society - mostly sex workers. The film never, ever objectifies these women or presents them as anything other than people doing a job - a job that, because of their gender, leaves them specifically open to violence and exploitation. This the crab also experiences: it has the ability to generate foam when it's thirsty, so it's forced to work in a bubble bath brothel. All it wants to do is make enough money that it can go home and see its family, but it's forced to use its body to the point of exhaustion because its body - its ability to produce foam, its rich crab miso - is its only value.

I would be remiss not to mention that the crab itself has agency in all of this. The crab's personality is extremely childlike, and as has been demonstrated time and again, often the best way to point out the cruelty of the world in fiction is by making a character who is totally innocent be forced to navigate a harsh reality that has no intention of being kind to them. The crab, no matter what happens to it, is completely earnest in its zeal for life and its love of the people around it. The crab is totally accepting: it understands that Etsuko, the woman it befriends as she's about to kill herself after getting scammed out of all her money multiple times, is not stupid, just naive - something like itself. The crab demonstrates that it is worth giving people the grace we wish we'd be given ourselves. And it's not that the crab does all of this on purpose: it's born with this kindness by virtue of not having been corrupted by the caprices of human society. When Etsuko gets scammed again after the crab gives her several million yen that it made to repay her debts, it doesn't think twice about whether or not to help her. It doesn't judge. The crab is a better person than most people.

I was expecting some kind of humor out of this, but honestly, aside from the situational comedy of watching a giant crab who can only walk sideways get itself into trouble, there's very little about this that I would call funny. Okay, one thing was funny: the way they didn't edit out the rubbery, squeaky noises the crab suit made every time it moved. Other than that, I really just loved this for what it says about the inherent worth of a being outside of their ability to participate in capitalism and for how pure and good the crab was. Hiroshi Fujioka is also there, I guess.

Cinema.

Battlefield Baseball (2003)

directed by Yudai Yamaguchi

Japan

87 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

____

Last week I took a look at Deadball, so this week I'm writing about its predecessor, Battlefield Baseball. Because this film came first and seems to be a bit more popular than the later one, I assumed it would be superior in most respects, but I was surprised to find that - at least to me, personally - this was not the case.

Tak Sakaguchi again plays walking bad pun Jubeh Yakyu, but this is a very different Jubeh from the one we saw in Deadball. While his backstory is pretty much the same minus the younger brother (grew up loving baseball but too good at it for his own good, accidentally kills own father with pitch, becomes a wandering semi-delinquent), this Jubeh is a much gentler soul. When he transfers to a new school, there are rumors about him, but no indications that any of it is true; where the later Jubeh turned his guilt and shame over his father's death outward by committing such crimes as Dropping Televisions On People, this Jubeh carries the burden of his past far more stoically. Sakaguchi again seems like he's having a good time with this role, but this Jubeh doesn't have the same self-awareness as the other one. His only really great moments are the ones where he's doing obviously ridiculous stuff like punching a guy's entire skeleton out of his body.

The rest of the cast is similarly lackluster when compared to Deadball. I said in my previous review that Deadball kind of worked because everybody felt like they were bringing something to the table that was individually funny, but in Battlefield Baseball too many of the actors come off like they were given instructions to be as over-the-top as possible.

In fact, Battlefield Baseball's problem is that most of the time it is just not very funny. It feels like watching a bad comedian, except the entire cast is bad comedians. There were a lot of "ugh" moments, like when someone would break into song for no reason, when the kid they call Megane would get made fun of just for his inherent wimpiness, or when there would be a piss or fart joke that came from nowhere. But at the same time I have to admit that there were other moments in the film that absolutely did land and landed in a way that was actually better than Deadball.

The second half of Battlefield Baseball is where it feels like it finally hits its stride. The more far-out the humor is, the less hold the plot has on reality, the better. Death absolutely does not matter in this film. Quite literally the entire cast of characters dies at some point or another but it doesn't stick. I should mention that both of these movies are an adaptation of a manga; I've been leaving that out because I'm not familiar with it at all and so cannot judge the live-action films in comparison, but both of these definitely have that "this is a manga adaptation" vibe in how lax the rules are at all times. The final baseball game (which really is not baseball so much as all the players getting on the field and attempting to kill each other) is probably the best part of the film. The whole ensemble cast is together in one space and they play off of each other decently well instead of floundering about alone as they had previously done. The good guys assemble their team and it is a few high school students, two guys who died but got resurrected as mechas, a random cheerleader who up until then had basically not been in the movie at all, and someone's mom. Again, the times when this movie does manage to be funny outweigh even the best parts of Deadball - it just can't keep that pace up consistently. (But, to be fair, neither could Deadball.)

And there is nothing that will prepare you for the reveal at the end of who had been narrating the film the entire time.

Deadball (2011)

directed by Yudai Yamaguchi

Japan

99 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

----

Deadball offers us no explanation for the fact that our (anti)hero is possessed of preternatural baseball skills. It simply opens with the incident that decides his fate: him smoking Mickey Curtis in the nog with a baseball so hard he explodes. This happens when he is about 16, and next we see him he's a full-grown (well, sort of) juvenile delinquent - the worst in the country, wanted on "54 charges, including Dropping Televisions On People". He is finally arrested and brought to the harshest possible prison, where he's offered a deal: his freedom and the freedom of all the other inmates if they, banding together as a baseball team, can defeat the rival team from the all-girl Saint Black Dahlia high school. Of course, this was never a fair shake for the boys' side: the warden simply wants to get rid of them, and knows the opposing team will annihilate them.

The film's sense of humor is so offensive that it becomes almost banal. While I don't think Nazi imagery is something that should be trotted out simply for its aesthetic value, that is a relatively common practice in certain niches of Japanese cinema, and the pure aesthetic is so divorced from any actual ideological practices associated with it that it's hard to really feel anything after you've seen it a few times. Ditto everything else that happens here: so purely for shock value without any actual attempt at being mean about it that I almost don't care. Almost. The movie's weird homophobia is its only stance that feels like it has fangs, but again, when you know beforehand that the movie you're about to watch it as bizarre and offensive as Deadball, it's hard to feel surprised.

With a movie like this, a lot depends on the actors' individual skills. It won't work if every single person acts like they're in the world's most bugnuts film. There should, ideally, be a few people who take themselves just seriously enough that it highlights how outlandish everything else is. Tak Sakaguchi pulls off the Yakyu role really well, playing it not quite fully straight but with all the stoicism and bravado that a delinquent hero protagonist should have. (He also played a Xillien in Godzilla Final Wars.) Other people who felt like they brought exactly as much sauce to their roles as was necessary were Miho Ninagawa as the warden and Mari Hoshino as Shinosuke, Yakyu's 16-year-old cellmate and the only truly sympathetic character in the film.

There is also, I suppose, technically, in some way, a plot. It doesn't really develop until the second half to final quarter of the film, but we occasionally get nuggets of information that hint at the storied past of Yakyu and his brother Musashi (yeah, those are their names). After the accidental death of their father, Yakyu becomes a delinquent while Musashi is forced to turn to much more unpleasant means of making profit until he finally snaps and commits murder, and after that is never seen again, the mystery of his unknown fate being a thorn in the side of our hero. (He shows back up at the end in a truly spectacular way which I will not mention in detail due to it being a spoiler.) Like I said, Sakaguchi carries this off with enough seriousness that you can get invested in it - all insanity all the time would have made this thing unwatchable.

Did I like this? I don't know. It happened, that's all I can say about it. I really liked the running gag where Yakyu could reach out of frame and grab a lit cigarette to smoke for dramatic effect at any given time. Other characters react to this, which makes it even funnier. If you like splatterpunk films, there's some pretty good gore in this, and there's a scene where a character gets punched through a telephone, so if that kind of thing sounds like something you'd be willing to sit through a lot of visually offensive jokes about basically everybody and everything for, go for it.

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

directed by Robert Gordon

USA

79 minutes

3 stars out of 5

___

So we round out this year's KaiJune with yet another non-Japanese monster movie. I'm including this one because it is irrevocably tied to kaiju film history, being a product of the same zeitgeist as Godzilla - or I guess I should call it Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, since that's what American audiences would have seen.

I ended up liking a lot of things about this movie but also absolutely hating a lot of other things. The opening of the film is incredibly strong: the interior of an atomic submarine, the camaraderie of its crew, and the sudden, inexplicable things that begin to happen when, unbeknownst to the men inside, the giant Mindanao octopus grips the sub fast in its tentacles. No windows means that while we, the viewer, with the benefit of 70 years of pop culture to inform us of what's going on, are in on the unfolding events, all the crew have to go by is murky sonar images and the uncanny sensation of being very, very tiny in the grasp of something very, very large.

But as soon as they introduce the woman scientist, things get... 1950s. I am limited in how much I want to complain about this movie's misogyny because I know there's no real point in expecting an old movie to have modern attitudes, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Prof. Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue) is arguably the film's best character (although the film isn't stellar at all in terms of the human plot) but she spends the whole movie having to fight tooth and nail to justify her existence as both a scientist and a woman. She's constantly being belittled by the men around her, particularly one of the ones she's having some kind of romantic liaisons with. It's only when a man sticks up for her that her worth as a professional and her individuality are recognized, and even then, it has to be couched in a statement about the "new breed of woman" who is every bit as smart and capable as any given man. In some sense it does feel radical to have a man step aside and make room for women as intellectual equals, but I'm not comfortable with how that statement dismisses the often grueling, thankless, unacknowledged work of women prior to WWII and women becoming more visible in the workforce.

And it's even more of a shame because I really like Domergue's performance here. There's something about her body language and expressions that makes Prof. Joyce feel constantly absorbed in whatever she's doing. Domergue gets into the role in a very believable way. In an era where actors could be fairly stiff or over-polished, Joyce feels like a real human.

I think one of the problems with this movie is that it doesn't really feel like it gets excited about anything. It's not fair to compare it to Godzilla - it's not fair to compare anything to Godzilla - but I couldn't help doing it. The issue that almost ruined the film to me was that the initial octopus scene comes out of absolutely nowhere: when I think about how that Odo Island reveal with Godzilla's ugly head cresting over the hill felt like something that had never, ever been done before, and how it was done with much more rudimentary puppetry than this, I feel like this movie has no real excuse for just throwing in our first full look at the monster octopus at random with no build-up or fanfare. All the action scenes in this thing feel unearned, and while the effects are undeniably impressive, there could have been a much better sense of segue between the monster and everything else that was going on around it. Not to mention that the film is entirely lacking any sense of pathos or poignancy; the Mindanao octopus is just a giant animal to be destroyed by man's might.

All that being said, though, I still did like this more than I thought I would. Its flat, dry tone honestly kind of works sometimes - like in the opening submarine scene, where panic and terror would have felt cheap. I liked the procedural, scientific aspect. I actually also liked how the octopus was just a big creature with no particular intelligence (inaccurate, given what we know about octopuses now) that was too large and destructive to be allowed near human civilization. The film doesn't manage to express the sense of monster as paradigm shift that Godzilla does, but as long as you're not expecting a game-changer, this is a pretty solid atomic sci-fi flick.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

directed by Yoshimitsu Banno

Japan

85 minutes

4 out of 5 stars

----

Godzilla vs. Hedorah is a tonal nightmare. Environmental horror presented through a lens of dancing hippies, random Mt. Fuji jam sessions, giant flying sludge piles, and a cuddly, heroic Godzilla. While focusing on the things that make vs. Hedorah such a distinct entry within the series is useful for talking about it as an individual film, I think emphasizing those traits can have a tendency to make it seem like this film does not fit with the overall tone of the Godzilla series. Especially on my most recent rewatch, it's very obvious to me that Banno and everyone involved with the film was - while creating something a lot more bombastic and trippy than the series had yet seen - keeping very closely to the message of the original 1954 Godzilla in their own weird way.

One of the first things we see in the film is a kid playing with some Godzilla toys. We're at full commercialization at this point (not that we haven't always been - there was a lot more marketing done around the time of G '54 than a lot of people may think) and Godzilla is explicitly a hero, suitable for the fantasies of children. But rather than see this as a horrific aberration, as the character being mishandled and fundamentally altered from what it was originally intended to have been, I feel like there's also a way to see some bitterness and irony in this. The simplest way to put it is that in the face of a threat like Hedorah, Godzilla really doesn't look that bad. When one of the characters remarks on the awful state of the planet, how polluted and dirty it is, and says that "if Godzilla saw this, I bet he'd be mad" - I honestly thought "yeah, I bet he would". I think if Godzilla saw that humanity had continued to ruin the planet, not with nuclear power this time but with chemical smog, poisoned earth, and uninhabitable oceans, he probably would be pretty mad. 

I think this movie totally knows what it's doing. On the outside it looks like a stark departure from the roots of the Godzilla series, but I really think it's not. There's an obvious callback to the original movie in the fact that one of the main human characters (insofar as any of the human characters are "main", humans are remarkably useless here, even for this series) is a scientist who ends up spending much of the movie with bandages over his right eye. Even more to the point is that he keeps fish in his lab, like Dr. Serizawa also did. The movie really wants to show us that fish tank, and I have to admit that I can't figure out why the fish were made to feel so important - maybe there was an implication that even these perfect creatures, kept isolated from the toxic slime that was choking their non-captive-bred counterparts in the open ocean, would eventually fall victim to sludge like all the rest of the planet, given enough time. Nothing is safe.

This movie is scary. It deals with scary things. It may not seem like it, because it's so colorful and wild that you almost get distracted from the imagery of people dismembered and buried under stifling piles of sludge. But there is a solid philosophy here, under the fish masks and the dancing girls in bodysuits. The younger characters take the view that the good green Earth their parents grew up with is gone, so the only thing to do is sing and dance: the planet is dying, we are all dying, what else can we do? It's the same core concept of revulsion at what humanity is capable of that fueled a lot of the original Godzilla, but instead of getting all mopey, Banno decides to have his characters party about it.

I also think Hedorah rules. Kenpachiro Satsuma knocks it out of the park with this performance (and so does Nakajima in the Godzilla suit, as always). There's something that really clicked with me about Hedorah's overall vibe this time; I just love its silhouette, how lumpy and blobby it is, how its body plan is so totally opposite from Godzilla. It drives home the point that Hedorah is not a creature born from Earth, even though it may be breeding here. Hedorah looks and acts like an alien. I love its static facial expression in contrast to Godzilla, who had been becoming more and more human-like in his expressions since the 1960s.

Yeah, man, the movie's good. This had been one of my least-frequently-rewatched Godzilla movies because it does feel like such an outlier on the surface. But watching it last night made me realize how good it is and how well it fits with the rest of the series. Banno is often maligned for the choices he made in this film, but imagine a continuity where outside directors were invited into the Godzilla series more often. We could have had a few more super artsy, daring films like this at a time when the series was mostly sticking to an increasingly child-oriented vibe.

Indie Kaiju Roundup, part III

Yatsuashi [2021]

Directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

12 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

This very short short comes to us from director Hiroto Yokokawa, who has made more well-known feature-length kaiju films such as Great Buddha Arrival, Nezura 1964, and recently Hoshi 35. As with much of his work it features Kazuma Yoneyama in a central role, although not the lead role; there's an Iron King thing going on here where the guy who actually transforms is not technically the main character. 

Yatsuashi was evidently based off of a scrapped Daiei film called Great Demon Beast Dagora, which I can find virtually no information about (most of the Google results for that title lead back to Yatsuashi itself). Based on a Japanese blog post and a tweet from the creative team behind Yatsuashi, I gather that Dagora was an attempt in the same vein as the disastrous Nezura to use a live animal or animals rampaging in a miniature set to portray a giant monster, only instead of rats, Dagora would have used an octopus. Taking an unmade project and spinning the idea into a brand-new film is always a really interesting experiment, especially when it turns into something like Yatsuashi that is probably nowhere near what the original filmmakers intended to create. Like I said when I reviewed Great Buddha Arrival, that's how lost and unmade films can continue to survive: by influencing a new generation of filmmakers.

As for the plot, Yatsuashi is essentially about a guy who is so frustrated by his job that he turns into a giant octopus. That is pretty much it. Bin Furuya appears on a news broadcast at one point. There's not much else I can say about a 12-minute film. I really enjoyed this short's sense of creativity and how much it felt like everybody involved was passionate about what they were making, and even though the octopus scenes were minimal, the way it's photographed feels very deliberate, like the creative team really wanted to convey how strange and alien an octopus looks, not just slap one in front of the camera and leave the viewer to decide how to feel about it.

Godaizer [2010]

Directed by Hillary Yeo

19 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

This one hails from Singapore, which is always cool. It's on YouTube under the title "Giant Robot vs. Monster Animated Short" and that is certainly what it is. With no dialogue, the short uses environmental storytelling and lingering shots of news clippings to introduce us to a world where a small family had, at some point in the past, been making and piloting giant robots to defeat a sudden kaiju invasion, until eventually the cost of deploying the robots became too much of a strain on resources... or so they say.

The animation style here is interesting. I did not know how old this was and took it for a more recent production, assuming the patchy, almost brushstroke-like style was a deliberate choice, but now that I know it's 15 years old, I think some of that feel may have simply been due to technical limitations of the time. Still, though, I really did like the way this looked - it's the kind of thing where you can tell the storyboards for it were probably really beautiful.

The story being told here is also interesting: the past is only hinted at, but there's clearly a deep sadness to the characters and their backstory that is fully expressed despite the lack of dialogue. Facial expressions exchanged between the father and son convey everything we need to know.

That time period between when the mecha program apparently ended and when the events of the film take place is what I kept thinking about after I watched this - the father-son team clearly have a lot of robots fully built, serviced, and ready to go, considering that they deploy on fairly short notice as soon as the monster escapes containment, so you have to imagine a decade or more of these folks just... watching their robots rust, knowing they could be used for good, but probably getting told over and over "no, we don't have the budget for that". Again, this is something that isn't stated, but the feeling of being forced to let your passion stagnate because you're not being given the resources you need is incredibly frustrating in a very real-world sense.

Magara: The Final Showdown [2015]

Directed by Jun Awazu

5 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

At just five minutes, this is probably the shortest short I've reviewed. Like the earlier Negadon, this is entirely CG-animated, but unlike Negadon, I think this one lacks some of the expressiveness that the human characters in the earlier film had. Granted, this one has a total of two human characters: the mech pilot and a little boy on the street having his absolute mind blown by the kaiju showdown he's witnessing.

There's not much to talk about here, but the kaiju design is gorgeous - sort of a standard dragonish thing, but something about the head design and the shape of the mouth was really beautiful to me. I would love to see what the 3D model for it looked like. And then we have the mecha, which is clearly based off of Dogoo ceramics and is actually pretty bad at its job. The best thing about this short is that it's an example of a scenario I don't see in tokusatsu often enough: "What if we deployed the mecha and it just made everything worse?"

Howl from Beyond the Fog (2019)

directed by Daisuke Sato

Japan

35 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Another slightly unconventional pick for our second week of KaiJune, but one that, again, most definitely does have a giant monster in it.

Howl from Beyond the Fog bowled me over for about the first ten minutes. The film begins with a young man returning to his childhood home after the death of his twin brother (this is thematically significant but never addressed). There he meets a blind girl - who everyone thought was supposed to be dead - living in seclusion inside his house, and she introduces him to the god inhabiting the lake in the middle of their village, a creature that just wants to live and breathe along with everything else in the world.

I screened Great Buddha Arrival to a small audience this past month, and afterward, my friend and I were talking about the sense of never being able to go home again, of having memories of some specific place or thing that you can never, ever replicate, because even if you try, whatever you're nostalgic for is never going to be the same as the first time you experienced it. To me, that was the overwhelming feeling of the first ten minutes of this short: coming back home to find that everything is the same but also different - it's your home, the place you grew up, but there are aspects of it that you never recognized, here represented as the tremendous, unmovable force of nature that is the creature, but also the undercurrent of hatred in the village that the protagonist may have been too young to notice the first time around.

This is a stop-motion film where all of the characters are portrayed using puppets. Their static faces did not bother me at all, because I wasn't looking to the individual characters for information, I was listening to what was being told through their actions and the imagery onscreen. The creature (canonically named Nebula, which I think is quite beautiful, although it's never named in the film) was designed by legendary creature designer and modeler Keizō Murase. Most relevant to our discussion of this film is the fact that Murase also designed Varan, a creature who was also depicted as being a god to the people who lived nearby. Varan feels very influential on Nebula, and in a way, the story of Howl from Beyond the Fog is a bit like what an alternate-universe version of the movie Varan might look like. Varan is one of my favorite kaiju because of its unconventional origins, and I've always wanted a story where we get to see the creature in its context as a god.

I also want to mention that the film has this way of making Nebula's roar almost diegetic that I thought was really amazing. There's a soundtrack that starts up almost every time Nebula is onscreen, and when the creature roars, it fits in with the music so well that it feels like it's part of it. I don't know, that just gave me chills whenever it happened. Some of the music in this is actually rather unfitting, but the part of the soundtrack that blends Nebula's roar into itself is gorgeous.

I don't think this movie is all that it could have been, but it's pretty close. Going into this with expectations is not the best way to encounter it. Try to just live in it for a little while, get past the lack of human actors and revel in the craft of making this film.

Comedy Trio [Owarai san'ningumi] with English Subtitles

It took longer than I wanted it to, but I finally finished the subtitling project I've been working on: two episodes of Comedy Trio subtitled in English for the first time. This series has been on my radar because it's the most well-known work of Yoshiko Otowa: singer, actress, and younger sister of Akihiko Hirata.

Read more about Comedy Trio here and see the post about my subtitles - which includes the archive.org link to the episodes as well as my TL notes - here.

Zarkorr! The Invader (1996)

directed by Michael Deak

USA

80 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

"We have Shobijin at home."

Welcome back to KaiJune. Since I opted to do KaiJuly last year due to having started a night shift job and having scrambled eggs for brains, you've technically gotten two kaiju months within one year. Aren't I just so generous. I remain a stickler for applying the term "kaiju" only to specifically Japanese monsters, because I don't think it makes sense otherwise, but I'm justifying including this movie in KaiJune by saying that if you like kaiju movies you are probably going to like this.

Zarkorr! The Invader sounds like a fake movie that a nerdy character on a TV show would get made fun of by other characters for liking. "Look at Steve with his Zarkorr lunchbox, har har!" It is very much a real movie, though, and honestly, for much of its running time, it's kind of delightful. I enjoyed this a lot right off the bat for its creativity, authenticity, and commitment to the bit, even though all of that started fizzling out once it passed about the half-hour mark.

The film begins with footage of a giant monster rampaging through California. Exactly what we love to see. Since this is how the film starts, I'll start out by talking about the monster: I really, really like everything about it. A lot of American monster suits just look kind of... trashy, for lack of a better term; they look cobbled-together and they move weird, which is often exacerbated by bad editing. It could be the fact that I watched this in very poor quality, but the Zarkorr suit looked and moved fantastic, and the miniatures it destroys were similarly well outfitted. To me, Zarkorr looks like an Ultraman Tiga monster who somehow got transported to California.

After that, we meet our protagonist, a very average guy who had been completely unaware of Zarkorr's rampage until a tiny hologram of a teenage girl shows up in his kitchen and tells him to switch on the news. She proceeds to tell him that he is the only one who can defeat Zarkorr: half of the people on Earth would be worse than him at it, and half the people would be better, so he's perfectly in the middle, and therefore the highly advanced alien race that the hologram's real self belongs to chose him. All the while she's exposition-dumping on our protag, I'm thinking "wow, this is so cool!" It's so interesting, like a writing prompt brought to life: a random guy with no special powers, chosen fairly arbitrarily by an alien race to defeat a monster (that they kind of sent on purpose for funsies) that cannot be killed by any conventional weapon either currently in existence or in development. Where do we go from there? How do we build off of such a neat set-up for a story?

Not very well, it turns out. Where this movie really fumbles the bag is in spending too much time doing what I really hate it when sci-fi movies do: establishing that everybody but the main character thinks the main character is crazy. To me, this is unnecessary: the time that the movie wastes on having the protagonist take a cryptozoologist hostage and try to convince the cops and everybody else that he can defeat the giant monster and Should Not be taken to jail under Any Circumstances could be spent doing something more interesting. A monster movie where everybody acknowledges the monster and skips the awkward human conflict is usually a much smoother viewing experience.

The middle part of the movie only gets worse. We're introduced to a pretty cringey stereotypical hacker character who is acted fairly decently but could have been... reconsidered, perhaps. One of the cops joins the main group because he's a conspiracy theorist and therefore predisposed to believe what the protagonist is claiming. This leads into another problem this movie has: all of its attempts at humor fall so flat that it would be better if they weren't there. I don't think there are actually any "jokes" in this thing per se; its style of humor is more "here is a thing that is supposed to be funny because of the way that it is". "Here is an eccentric wacky hacker guy", "here is a cop who believes in UFOs", "isn't it funny that this guy is supposed to save the world when he's so totally unremarkable". Having a little light banter here and there might have actually been beneficial, if used sparingly.

The ending is anticlimactic but in a way that I honestly kind of love. Like, why does killing a monster have to be a huge deal? Why can't the journey to kill the monster be the more elaborate aspect of the story, as opposed to the final fight? Our protagonist gives Zarkorr the old Zetton treatment (as in, he's Zetton and Zarkorr is Ultraman) and it pops out of existence and then it's done.

I think this is a movie that had cool ideas in it but didn't execute them so well. I'm beyond caring about a visibly low budget or poor acting, the only thing that matters to me is an interesting story that feels like the filmmakers cared about it. For the most part, Zarkorr has that. But it doesn't seem to be able to stretch it out even to its relatively short running time. I mean this in a mostly positive way: finding out that the director was a makeup artist whose only directing credit is this movie makes a lot of sense.

Blood Suckers (1971)

directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, Julian More

UK, Greece

87 minutes

1.5 stars out of 5

---

The first thing I noticed about Blood Suckers was ultimately incidental to the narrative of the film itself, but it did set me up for the experience I was about to have. After some B-roll and an opening voiceover in which the course of events leading up to the film is established, the first actual scene of the film hits, and the editing immediately made me feel like I was going crazy. This could just be me, and I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, but you know when a production team can't get two actors's schedules coordinated, so they have to film them in separate locations and then edit the footage so that it looks like they're in the same room? The whole first scene of Blood Suckers feels exactly like that, except all of the actors are in a room together. Every time someone speaks, the frame changes to focus on a shoulders-up shot of that person, and when someone else replies, it changes to them, on and on, with the dialogue uncomfortably rapid-fire and the cuts way too fast. There's just something really bizarre and disorienting about it, and things only got worse when the film segued awkwardly into an orgy scene that felt like it lasted about a half an hour.

Honestly, I am going to stay on that orgy scene for another minute because it is so jarring that it deserves further attention. I actually enjoyed the way it was edited when it turned into a bad trip and a woman got murdered - that was the only place in the film where its gonzo editing style felt like it fit the mood. But that orgy absolutely could have been half or even a quarter as long as it was.

So, what is this movie about? Well, despite the opening narration by one of the characters, the fun thing about this movie is that it doesn't really have a main character, and as a result, the plot feels entirely different depending on who you're focusing on. To disappeared Oxford student Richard Fountain's friends, it's about the search for a promising young academic who runs off to Greece and gets involved in weird drug orgies and other sexual deviancy. To Fountain, it's about the time he realized he could only get it up for vampires. To any of the friends who go to Greece to look for him, it's a series of increasingly odd events culminating in a death or two followed by the rescue of their friend who falls in love with a witchy Greek lady and subsequently decides "fuck the Ivory Tower" and kills his girlfriend. The vampirism thread is, unsatisfyingly, left somewhat open-ended: is it "true" vampirism or is it just the wiles of an exotic foreign enchantress taking advantage of a guy's secret vampire fetish?

I promise you, this is much more boring than I'm making it seem. This is one of those movies that is really not entertaining in the sense that it's well-made or even interesting at all, but every choice involved in its production and everything about the way the final product was put together adds up into a horror movie that is so tonally strange that it's hard to peel your eyes off of it. I looked into the film on Wikipedia to see if I could find any explanation for why it is the way that it is, and apparently they just kind of ran out of money during filming. The voice-over narration was added because the film was essentially shot in two parts - one pre- and one post-going broke - and the second half added in a lot of new actors and scenes that required some extensive piecing together to make work with the previously-shot footage.

I can't say I would ever recommend this to anybody, because it's the kind of thing where if you stumble across it and think it sounds good, you already know your own tastes and are virtually guaranteed to be down for what you're getting into. If I had to pick between this and Land of the Minotaur in terms of "weird '70s Greek horror that Peter Cushing was inexplicably involved in", I would pick Land of the Minotaur any day, both because of the Brian Eno score and because, unlike Blood Suckers, it lacks a scene where someone says "Could Bob's African background have given him some kind of vivid imagination?"

Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer (1984)

directed by Mamoru Oshii

Japan

97 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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Hi, hello, I don't know a single thing about Urusei Yatsura but I was convinced to watch this because I heard that it had a scene where the characters watch Godzilla. I didn't even have any idea that it was directed by Mamoru Oshii until just now, which in hindsight makes everything about it make a lot more sense.

Since I don't have any context whatsoever for any of the characters or settings in this anime, I'm going to talk strictly about this film and this film alone, and hopefully not put my foot in it too much. The film assumes prior familiarity on the viewer's part, but if you're not overly concerned with anything, it can certainly be watched as a stand-alone thing - the plot is so engaging and philosophically potent that you could probably adapt it into any given fictional setting and it would still be fascinating regardless of what characters were exploring its bounds.

From what I gather, Urusei Yatsura is about Lum, an alien girl, her boyfriend Ataru whom she refers to as Darling, and a cast of their classmates as well as the school's nurse who is secretly a sorceress. That is about all you need to know before going into Beautiful Dreamer, and you barely even need to know that. The film begins as the characters' school is preparing for a festival, and scenes of the students preparing props and costumes are jam-packed with tokusatsu references: people dressed like Xilliens, kaiju cameos from the likes of baby Mothra, Kanegon, Alien Baltan, Megalon and more, an Ultra or two in the background, and so on and so forth. Setting the events of the first quarter of the film on the eve of a big festival gives the film - if I may be excused for using what is, at this point, a fairly worn-out phrase - a liminal atmosphere. Everybody is preparing for something big to happen, but we're not concerned with the big thing itself - just the nervous energy of the night before, knowing that tomorrow will be a big day.

But after a while some of the students realize that something isn't quite right. When two of them are sent out into the city to go pick up food, they realize that they've been staying overnight at the school for what has to have been several nights in a row, only leaving to get food. One of the faculty soon realizes that events seem to be repeating themselves over and over. It's always the night before the festival. Everything is always the same. Eventually, all of the characters try to go their separate ways in order to leave the school, but they can't break free: they always come back to the school in the end. Although the film moves on to explore other concepts, the pure psychological horror of this first quarter is so memorable: what if you suddenly became aware that you had essentially been acting out the story of your life, and everything around you - all of the people you knew, all the places you go - was just a set? What would it feel like to walk through your life with the knowledge that you were trapped in a loop? Everything would be the same, but you would be different - or would it be you who was the same, and everything else had changed?

One of the students, Mendou, who seems to be a weapon/vehicle nerd, happens to have a Harrier jet at his home. Everybody piles into it and attempts to escape the time loop by flying into the upper atmosphere. They do escape - but, looking down at what had been their home planet, they discover that all it really is is a circular plateau drifting through space on the back of a giant stone turtle.

Returning home, it's like some kind of spell is broken. After some time passes, the state of the planet regresses into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The kids are able to live relatively normal lives: the convenience store miraculously never runs out of stock, there's one house that still has water and electricity for them all to live together in, and although all other humans on the planet have disappeared, leaving crumbled wreckage in their wake, the students have each other. Still, though, nothing will ever be the way it was: for reasons beyond the comprehension of any of the characters, as soon as they broke out of the time loop, the world ended.

But... is this really a bad thing?

The scope of what this movie asks about human existence is so wide-reaching that I couldn't possibly hash it all out in one post. There are questions here about the difference between dreams and reality. If someone was able to have everything they wanted given to them within a dream that was indistinguishable from reality, a dream that they could live in for the rest of their life, peopled by their friends and family and anything they could possibly desire - would that not become their reality? How can anyone tell that they aren't dreaming at any given time? Why do we separate dreams and reality with such a hard and fast line?

I'm not even scratching the surface of how it feels to become absorbed in the world that this movie creates. It's scary at times - there is a scene where Ataru is running endlessly through the school's infinitely regressing hallways, only for Lum to rescue him and find that, from an outsider's perspective, he had really been running in place. But it's also beautiful in that way that only sun-drenched '80s anime can be. The animation style is incredibly fluid, and I was in awe at how creative the "camera angles" could get. The occasional watercolor still montage of a vacant planet populated by a handful of students and an endless amount of seabirds, fish, and other wildlife break the mold of traditional depictions of a post-apocalyptic Earth. The whole idea of this movie is just so fascinating and so hard to pin down. There's something about this whole deal that kept making me think of the work of Akio Jissōji and I would love to hear if anybody agrees with me on that or if I'm just weird and watch too much Akio Jissōji.

While this was my first experience with Urusei Yatsura, it most likely won't be my last. I continue to discover these huge cinematic blind spots that I've had without knowing, and anime is one area where I know there's so much more that would blow my mind if I would just sit down and watch it.

Baby's First Silver Scream Spookshow

On May 17th some friends from my film screenings took me from my nice safe home and ferried me to spend a day in Atlanta going to my first Silver Scream Spookshow, which was featuring Mothra vs. Godzilla. The Spookshow is a kind of old-timey throwback horror-host thing starring Professor Morte and his troupe of Go-Go Ghouls, who put on a stage show before all of the movies they screen. I didn't know anything about this before my friend told me about it and very kindly offered to let me tag along, so here's me traveloguing about it. If you happened to be at the afternoon Spookshow and heard somebody yelling "HOLY SHIT IT'S KEMUR MAN", sorry, that was me, the spirit moved me.

the birds outside a french bakery are well fed indeed

Before the show, we went to the Monsterama Market Macabre, a fairly large dealer's room with a mix of people selling various vintage (and new) horror merch and vendors selling their original wares. I spent about an hour there and picked up a nice handful of random keshi figures (although some were suspiciously sticky, as old figures tend to be). The overall ratio of toku merch to general horror memorabilia was quite skewed in favor of horror, but there was one small Godzilla booth that I could have easily dropped much more money at than I did.

Afterward we ate lunch at a Peruvian place where the waiter referred to me as "young lady" which gave me the vibe that he perhaps thought I was a child or teenager (I am not a lady and I am also 26).

We rolled up to the Spookshow a good deal of time before it started and so got to watch as the place slowly got more and more packed. We were there for the early show, which was intended to be more child-friendly; there were a lot of kids in the audience but all were very well-behaved. The stage show lasted about 20 minutes and consisted of the Go-Go Ghouls' attempts to summon Mothra, which were largely unsuccessful but did summon a bearded human with what appeared to be two skeins of yarn stuffed into the chest area of their dress going by Madame Butterfly. During this time either Alien Zetton or Kemur Man (difficult to tell) and Cicada Human could be seen at large.

I was really, genuinely so normal about seeing an Alien Zetton in person.

Eventually the Ghouls' efforts to summon Mothra were successful and we were treated to a large and incredibly gorgeous Mothra puppet flying around the theater. I wanted to capture video of this but unfortunately I have dinosaur technology syndrome and the video I recorded only ended up running for one second.

Thankfully, I did get to meet the lady herself after the show. I also showed my Godzilla tattoo to Professor Morte. 

Yes, I've been Minilla this whole time. I'm sorry for lying to you all.

A short semi-interactive film featuring a really gorgeous Godzilla puppet resembling the GMK suit (Prof Morte mentioned something about the amalgamated souls of WWII, so I think this is their chosen origin story for Godzilla) was one of the highlights of the show for me. I saw the puppet and its creator after the show and was given a free zine as reward for wearing a sick-ass King Joe pin that day.

Afterwards we stopped by Videodrome, which I would choose as my preferred location for a kind of "locked in the shopping mall overnight"-slash-Groundhog Day scenario. I did not buy anything but I appreciated the Vinegar Syndrome pop-up that was happening outside the store and I hope I impressed the merits of Tai Katō upon the friend I was with.

I'm legally obligated to tell you that we absolutely, without a doubt watched the subtitled version and not the dub. For certain, that is what we did.

I don't get out of town too terribly often - much less to do three fun things in one day - so this was a blast. The Spookshow was everything I care about: kaiju movies, practical effects, supporting local movie theaters, people getting sprayed with Silly String (much more fun if you avoid being Strung yourself), et cetera. Consider this an advertisement for the Spookshow, which is playing a Ray Harryhausen movie as their next feature, if I understood correctly.