The Green Slime (1968)

directed by Kinji Fukasaku, Katsuhiko Taguchi

Japan, USA

90 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Is it just something in your head?? Will you believe it when you're DEAD??? GREEEN SLIIIME!!!

I think I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've rewatched a movie and had my opinion of it change as much as it did when I watched Green Slime for the second time last night. What I remembered watching three or so years back was a movie with fun SFX that was bogged down by a love triangle subplot that the Japanese cut of the film had the right idea in shortening. What I watched last night, though, was a well-paced, rollicking good time, with characters who aren't actually that annoying if you can make peace with the fact that their roles are more or less perfunctory.

I am going to skip right into talking about the film's visual effects, because they are frankly pretty stupendous. Especially its color palette. It's so intense and in-your-face that it almost shouldn't work: the reds aren't just red, they're the deepest, bloodiest, almost glowing scarlet that you've ever seen; the greens aren't just green, they're visceral, chlorophyllic, vegetal. The choice to contrast the two and have the rogue planetoid that the green slime is native to be so pervasively red is really striking. For about the first half-hour of Green Slime, the foremost thought on my mind was The Color out of Space. Film adaptations of the story seem to unanimously agree that the titular color should be visually depicted as a kind of violet-reddish-purple, but to me, no movie has ever (unintentionally) captured what I think the color should look like better than Green Slime. Although it's dated, the film does an excellent job at making the alien planet look like how an alien planet in a sci-fi movie should: not realistic, but visually arresting.

It's not just the slime and the alien planet, either: the Gamma-III space station is also a masterpiece of late-1960s interior design, with many set-pieces that look to have been fully ornamental. It reminded me of spaceships in the Gamera series, how they look absolutely ridiculous but pleasing to the eye, like little art sculptures flying around in space. Even the Gamma-III crew compliments the film's overall aesthetic with their understated uniforms, in a narrow selection of solid, off-primary colors, and the way the film stock captures their hair color and complexion.

And then there's these weird little shuffling one-eyed alien babies who scream and wave their arms around all the time. You can't overlook how inherently ridiculous the Green Slime are (it does seem to be plural; the aliens are never given a name in-universe and the tagline announces that "the Green Slime are coming"), and maybe that's okay. Their silliness feels right at home with how visually elaborate everything else about this movie is. That there are so many of them has always been interesting to me: usually a kaiju movie will have one suit and perhaps a maquette version and/or a cruddier alternate suit for use in underwater scenes, but there's a whole plethora of these guys just kicking it on the space station, traveling everywhere in small herds like schoolchildren crossing the street. They're honestly really cute. I felt bad every time one of them got poked in the eye, which happens much more often than you might think. I guess when your head consists almost entirely of eye, it makes for an easy target.

The movie is, as I said, much better-paced than I remembered it being. It introduces us to the slime fairly quickly, and once the slime is loose on the spaceship, the action pretty much never stops until the end credits roll. If there's anything I mildly dislike about this, it is that love triangle. Dr. Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi) is unfortunate enough to be aboard the station with both her fiancé and her former lover, who are intent on making their mutual involvement with her a big deal while she, meanwhile, seems pretty much fine with it and just wants to do her job. It is frustrating to watch Dr. Benson repeatedly be the voice of reason, only to have her level-headed suggestions and observations met with either of the two male leads going "No, I'm gonna do something really stupid instead".

But, all in all, it's great stuff. At a tight 90 minutes, I no longer feel like the Japanese cut, with its lopped-off runtime, is the superior one. It may not be the most cerebral science fiction out there, but it knows what it's doing and the people making it were at the top of their game in terms of visual effects. Weird that this was directed by the same guy who did Cops vs. Thugs, but that's how it is sometimes.

Harakiri (1962)

directed by Masaki Kobayashi

Japan

133 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is one of many movies that I've feared to approach for a while because I considered that I might not be smart enough to really get it. As it turns out, this is an excellent movie to watch not only for myself but also for others who might be putting off the "classics" for any number of reasons - despite its age and the accessibility barrier (for some) of subtitles, this is a movie that definitely still resonates and tells its story in a clear, masterful, and absolutely ruthless way.

And it really does feel like being told a story. The narrative here is laid out a bit unconventionally: we're presented with nothing at the start, nothing except for what we see on the screen: a ronin named Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) appears at the gates of the House of Ii, claiming that he wishes to commit seppuku in their courtyard, being in a state of financial and social ruin and having nothing else to do to restore his name but die honorably. He is invited in, but cautioned that this is not the first situation of the like that the House of Ii has seen. He's told about the ronin who preceded him, and the fate that befell that man; not truly intending to die, but hoping to be given some dispensation, the previous ronin was instead forced to make good on his claim and commit seppuku with a dull bamboo sword, without even the mercy of a second to relieve his suffering.

Slowly, the layers of the story begin to peel away. We find out that the preceding ronin was Tsugumo's son-in-law, who lived with him, and that his wife and their son were both sick and, lacking money for a doctor, he chose to beg for aid from the House of Ii - a true last resort from which there would be no coming back. His gambit failed, and Tsugumo pursues the same path, hoping to get answers if not justice. But there are still more layers than that, and this is where I'll stop going into detail because there are aspects of this movie that are really best experienced for yourself.

Saying what I'm about to say sounds crazy, and I know it sounds crazy, but I fully believe Tsugumo would kill a health insurance CEO in the street if this movie was set in the present day. That sentiment is what this movie is about, to me. It is a critique of justice without mercy, of any man who follows the letter of the law rather than the spirit, and of men who, gaining enough power to do so, define those laws themselves. Tsugumo repeatedly decries bushido as a façade. So too democracy. It's remarkable that a movie made in different circumstances in a different time can have such universal relevance.

Not to mention that it's a visually arresting movie, every shot hitting with what feels like palpable weight when accompanied by Toru Takemitsu's masterful score. Yoshio Miyajima, the cinematographer, also worked on Kwaidan, as did one of the two art directors, Shigemasa Toda.

A story depends a lot on the person telling it, and in this case the narrative is conveyed through the person of Tsugumo, as played by Tatsuya Nakadai in one of his most reserved but also one of his best performances. You wait the entire movie to see him really let loose, but he's as good before the payoff as after. The film builds steadily into an incredibly satisfying climactic swordfight with clearly impossible odds - the impossibility of victory less the point than the fight itself. As a noted swordfighting expert (this is sarcasm, I don't know what I'm talking about), to my discerning eye, the swordplay here looks deliberately showy: as with everything else in the film, its visual aspect does not feel like it's designed to be realistic; it's designed to have impact, to convey the story that it's telling in a fashion that is memorable and sometimes even darkly, brutally beautiful.

Sometimes renowned films are renowned for a reason, and this is an example of that. I will likely be revisiting this one from time to time now that I've accepted it into my life.

The Curse of the Ghost (1969)

directed by Kazuo Mori

Japan

94 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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As evidenced by other adaptations I've reviewed on here, I'm a HUGE Yotsuya Kaidan fan. This particular version eluded me for a long time, and it was one that I was very interested in due to Akiji Kobayashi (best known either from Ultraman or Kamen Rider, depending on if you like Ultraman or Kamen Rider more) playing Naosuke. I have to say I'm not the biggest fan of the English title because it takes the emphasis off of whose ghost we're talking about here: the original translates to Ghost Story of Yotsuya: Oiwa's Ghost.

In the role of Iemon we have Kei Sato, who should have been fairly perfect for it considering his track record of playing various yakuza baddies and scumbag samurai - he's just got one of those good villain faces - but I think he plays it almost too casually. There is something interesting in an Iemon who does his evil deeds with a kind of matter-of-fact boredom, which is what Sato delivers here, but I just feel like his performance is a little too flat at times when it could have been more intense. Kazuko Inano plays Oiwa and does a very good job, her theatricality as Oiwa's ghost making up for the flatness of Sato's performance. Kobayashi is good as Naosuke, he's definitely got the voice to play a kind of shady, rascally type of guy, but again, aside from Oiwa, nobody feels like they have all that much going on here.

The best part of any Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation is the way things descend slowly down an irreversible path of violence and misery. It starts when Iemon and Naosuke commit near-simultaneous murders, and becomes locked in place when Iemon makes the decision to kill his wife so he can marry Oume. Everything after that - if the movie does what it should - is a guilt-ridden nightmare, the viewer dragged into Iemon's visions of Oiwa's phantom tormenting him. What I really enjoyed about the way Curse of the Ghost executes this aspect of the story is the score. It's not music per se, but a kind of unsettling, rhythmic pulsing noise that pervades much of the film. At times you can forget it's there, but when things start ramping up, it almost has the effect of making you feel like something is behind you. The composer for this score seems to have been Ichirō Saitō, who has a very high pedigree; he's credited with the music for such renowned films as Ugetsu, Sound of the Mountain, Floating Clouds, and Late Chrysanthemums. I think his work on Ugetsu is particularly relevant to what he does with Curse of the Ghost.

All in all I wouldn't say this was my favorite version of the story; it lacks the depth of character of Kinoshita's adaptation or the sheer sweaty terror of Nakagawa's, but it hits all the beats and it has a very convincing Oiwa. Even a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation that just does the bare minimum is still a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation. If I may steal a quote from Letterboxd user Rui Ozpinhead that sums up how I feel: "It's hard to completely mess up due to the quality of the source material."

Operation Crazy Hong Kong (1963)

directed by Toshio Sugie

Japan

93 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Also known under the objectively more boring title Crazy Cats Go to Hong Kong.

Usually a film or television series tends to get more formulaic as it goes on, but with the Crazy Cats movies I've seen, it seems like the opposite is true. These earlier entries are, at times, virtually indistinguishable from each other except for a specific "hook" (in this case their trip to Hong Kong). This isn't a point against the films: they may be formulaic, but it's a good formula.

As with most of these, Hitoshi Ueki plays a guy who is trying harder than anybody has ever tried to not do work. The joke here (unstated, but implied by the lengths Ueki goes to) is that, in figuring out ways to weasel his way out of going to work and paying his tabs, he's actually doing a lot more work than if he just held down an office job without complaining. Ueki here has the same vibe he usually does; he's a carefree, roll-with-the-punches type of guy whose zeal for being irresponsible is infectious.

In the first half of the film, Ueki and some restaurant owners who he owes money to dream up a scheme to open a Japanese restaurant together in Hong Kong, the catch being that if they're successful, they'll all forgive Ueki's debts. The other restaurant owners consider it a fun idea, though ultimately just an idea, but Ueki is all for it, pulling connections to get himself endeared to a businessman from Hong Kong and a few other wealthy people who can finance the restaurant. But once the crew assembles and opens their restaurant, they find that just serving food isn't attracting many customers. It takes a stint in jail following a promotional parade-slash-public-disturbance for them to realize that people don't just want to sit and eat, they want to be entertained. All of this culminates in what is very much the central scene in the entire film: a live jazz performance where the Cats act like absolute fools to impress a stony-faced businessman who never laughs.

That performance really was the highlight for me. Everything else proceeded as expected; there were the requisite jokes and the usual guest actors (although I was quite happy and surprised to see Kingoro Yanagiya and Jimmy Lin Chong), but then that performance hits, and it's just such a perfect showcase of the talent this band had for physical comedy. No, the jokes are not that original, but they do them so well. Maybe that's why Crazy Cats kept making successful movies together for such a long time: they had a niche and they were the best at it.

I still wouldn't recommend this one over their much grander "Crazy Cats go to [location]" films such as Mexican Free-For-All or Las Vegas Free-For-All, but it's pretty solid. And beautiful as a little snapshot of Japan and Hong Kong ca. 1963, as well.

(I also have to mention that Eitaro Ishibashi and Senri Sakurai are pretty much canonically a gay couple in this. They're depicted in a very stereotypical and I suppose somewhat offensive way, but still. I'll take what I can get.)

Red Lion (1969)

directed by Kihachi Okamoto

Japan

117 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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A "here's the new boss, same as the old boss" movie for the ages.

I've watched this movie many times and consider it a favorite (it actually seems to get better every time I watch it, which is always a good quality for a movie to have) but I've never written about it before because with certain movies, especially ones grounded in historical events I'm not terribly familiar with, I feel like I'm not smart enough to say anything coherent about them. But this particular movie, despite being jidaigeki, very clearly has things to say not just about the state of things as they were at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, but also as they were in the 1960s and, I would argue, perennially.

To give a very broad overview: after the Shogunate is abolished, Imperial troops called the Sekiho-tai are tasked with spreading the message of the change in power across the country, stripping officials of their previously-endowed statuses, and convincing the populace of the wisdom and superiority of the new system of governance. Red Lion follows a very low-ranking member of these troops named Gonzo (Toshirō Mifune) as he basically charms his way into getting appointed as an official representative and is tasked with liberating his small, back-country hometown and its people. But while Gonzo has an optimistic vision of this new state of affairs as a peasant's dream - a system where poverty will be eased and the common people will no longer be under the boot of their previous rulers - the truth is that although the names and faces may change, the influence of governmental power on the lowest rungs of society remains the same.

And that last point is really the crux of this entire movie, and the reason why I like it so much. Gonzo is so, so genuinely convinced that this is really it: this is the time when people like him will finally get their day in the sun, when life will no longer be back-breaking labor just to live at a subsistence level under heavy taxes levied by rich men. He believes in this so thoroughly. He is such a deeply earnest man - and, yes, as the movie reminds us, a little simple, but if anything the viewer is urged to envy that about him, to admire his lack of jadedness. Gonzo is so wrapped up in his idea of a utopia - and his joy at playing a part in ushering in that utopia - that he's blind to the reality of his situation.

I really think that this is one of Mifune's best roles. As others have said, for him it's a bit of a... maybe the opposite of a face-heel turn? A heel-face turn? It's a rare example of an actor who is instantly recognizable managing to ease flawlessly into a role that requires him to act like a bumbling, simple, pure-hearted country bumpkin. Nothing about his performance here comes off forced: not his infectious physicality, not his stutter, not his zeal for collective liberation. And it's not just Mifune, either: this movie works as well as it does because it has a fantastic ensemble cast, from Minori Terada as Sanji the pickpocket to Nobuko Otowa's small but compelling role as Oharu, a freed prostitute. I also have to mention the comedic elements of the film as well, because besides being an effective societal commentary, the movie is also funny as hell (I want to study Yūnosuke Itō's line delivery in a lab).

Although Gonzo as an individual ends up unable to overcome the sheer power of the ruling class, the idea of liberation that he infects his hometown with survives beyond his death, as is implied in the final minutes of the film. This is, if we can call it "optimism", an unusually optimistic view for Okamoto, whose outlook tends to be a bit cynical - or, I guess, just realistic.

I'm sure this won't be the last time I revisit this movie, and I'm glad to see that there seem to be more positive reviews for it on Letterboxd than when I last looked. I think this is one of Okamoto's best, one of Mifune's best, and honestly, one of my favorite jidaigeki. Not only does the film have a deeply resonant moral, it's also just really, really fun.

Japan's No. 1 Playboy (1963)

directed by Kengo Furusawa

Japan

93 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Full disclosure: I did proofreading and QC for this movie's English subtitles. I'll be going into full spoilers below.

The Japan's No. 1 [....] series was a vehicle for the inimitable Hitoshi Ueki, one of the main faces of the jazz band/performance troupe Crazy Cats, who themselves had their own long-running series of films. I do prefer films where the Cats work as an ensemble (each of them does have a role in this film, but they're pretty perfunctory; it's Ueki's world, we all just live in it) but you absolutely cannot deny the magnetic energy Ueki has, which is the driving force behind this movie. But there's a little more to it than just that, and that's why I found this one so interesting.

Ueki plays Hitoshi Hikaru (most Crazy Cats-affiliated movies have them playing characters whose names are based off of their own), a music teacher who gets fired for being too funky. Immediately afterwards, he starts a new career path: smarming his way into a door-to-door salesman gig that he uses to shake down wealthy women (and their sugar daddies) and earn himself as much money in commission as possible. As the title implies, the film itself frames Hikaru as a ladies' man, irresistible whether he wants to be or not. But, again, there's more to it than just that.

This movie does something really clever by stringing you along and making you think that Hikaru's ladies'-man act is 100% genuine. When he sings laments about how women just can't stop throwing themselves at him wherever he goes, and bemoans his status as a helplessly attractive guy, we think "yeah, yeah, he's just full of himself". But then in the last five minutes or so we realize that he was actually, literally telling the truth the entire time: he really, really did not want to be such a ladies' man.

At the climax of the film, Hikaru assembles all of his women together in one hotel room and admits to them that he's been lying to them. He has a fiancée who he deeply loves, who developed a brain tumor and had to go to America for treatment. Everything he's been doing up to then has been in service of paying off her medical debt. At no point did he actually intend to be a playboy - he was never doing any of it for his own gain. Like in every other No. 1 movie, Ueki plays Hikaru with a kind of reckless, roll-with-the-punches attitude, so we don't get to see any of what he might have been feeling inside. But the movie places hints about Hikaru's backstory right under our noses without us realizing: throughout the film, we see Hikaru pulling something out of his inner jacket pocket, but we never see what it is until the end of the film, when it's revealed that it's a picture of his fiancée.

I love a movie like this that can trick its viewers into believing one thing is happening when it's actually something else, not by explicitly lying to us, but by laying all of its cards out and making us think we're seeing something that we're not. We have all the puzzle pieces the entire time, we just don't recognize them. Everything is right there: he does not want to be a ladies' man. He just needs money. But we don't believe him, because Ueki is so charming, it's impossible to think there might be anything else there. The very last shot of the film is Hikaru crying alone in his dingy apartment with women literally beating down his door - his fiancée left him and married her surgeon - and it's hilarious, or at least it was to me, but granted I had been working on subtitles for 11 hours straight by then. (Behind-the-scenes: at one point I ate a fruit bar one-handed at my laptop so I didn't have to stop working for breakfast.)

There are some dips in quality along the way with these No. 1/Crazy Cats movies, but ones like this that are not only funny and full of talented comic actors, but also surprisingly layered - those make me want to watch every single one of the rest.

Jigoku (1960)

directed by Nobuo Nakagawa

Japan

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I have returned from my hiatus to kick off the spooky season with a film that I could superlatively describe with an awful pun¹ but am consciously choosing not to.

I happen to be in the middle of reading The Penguin Book of Hell at the moment, and that combined with my overall interest in religious studies makes for a mindset that is intensely receptive of everything Jigoku lays on its viewers. Something that I think any secular observer (and probably a good deal of non-secular observers) will begin to notice once they've been exposed to enough visions of various religions' underworlds is that after a while it really feels like concepts of an afterlife full of torment say more about the god or gods who created such a place than they do about the people who have been sentenced to live in them for eternity.

Case in point: the main character of Jigoku, Shiro Shimizu (played by Shigeru Amachi). An extremely normal person, guilty of essentially nothing by his own hand and by the standards of today's society, who ends up damned to hell alongside a crowd of his family, friends, and vague acquaintances, all of whom are objectively more "sinful" than him. Things seem to go very wrong whenever Shimizu is around, but again, none of it is his fault: his first "crime" is simply being the passenger during a hit-and-run that ends up claiming the life of a supposedly big-cheese yakuza, whose girlfriend and mother immediately begin plotting revenge not just on Tamura (we'll get to him in a moment - oh, boy, will we ever), the man driving the car, but on Shimizu, who happened to be in that place at that time because he wanted to take a different route than Tamura did.

Very shortly after the first car accident, before Shimizu has really had time to recover, he finds himself in another accident that ends up taking the life of his fiancée, Yukiko (the lovely Utako Mitsuya). Again, it is not directly his fault, but he is in the situation because he insisted on taking a taxi when Yukiko wanted to walk. He could justifiably walk away from both incidents carrying no blame whatsoever, but instead he chooses to take the burden on himself - therefore damning himself even before his death to a life in which he deems himself a murderer.

While Shimizu is the protagonist, arguably the most fascinating character in Jigoku is Shimizu's "friend" Tamura (Yōichi Numata). Every time I rewatch this, I spend the entire movie wondering if Tamura was ever human at all. He shows up out of nowhere accompanied by a sound (whether diegetic or not is hard to tell) like an onrushing train and seems to goad Shimizu further into believing life is nothing but sin and degeneration until you inevitably die and suffer for all eternity. He revels in others' suffering, and is oftentimes the cause of it: Tamura is the one who should logically be held accountable for the first accident, but instead he ropes Shimizu into sharing the blame, and later snipes at him for trying to "sell him out" - as if he is not the one actually culpable for a crime. We don't ever find anything out about Tamura as a person: where he's from, why he's attracted to Shimizu, what his overall problem is. Even Shimizu wonders "who is this guy?" at one point. When Tamura dies, he's no less of a bizarre psychopomp - he is, in fact, more of one. Numata's sudden shift into full kabuki actor mode when Tamura visits Shimizu in hell (only to be chastised by a force even more evil than himself, leading one to believe that Tamura was perhaps human all along) is one of my favorite moments in the latter part of the film.

The world is faintly hellish even while Shimizu is still alive. The disquieting atmosphere is so similar to Nakagawa's later film Yotsuya Kaidan that I looked up the cinematographer for Jigoku, expecting to see them credited for that film as well, only to find that Yotsuya Kaidan and Jigoku share no crew members aside from composer Chumei Watanabe. I think the nightmarish imagery is largely carried by both Nakagawa and art director Haruyasu Kurosawa, who worked on numerous other horror movies, but Watanabe's score certainly does a lot to help the sense of a deeply haunted world that we feel while watching the film as well.

So, arguably, the most horrifying thing about Jigoku is not the elaborately staged underworld scenes, featuring people being flayed, decapitated, boiled, reduced to skeletons, bashed in the teeth with hammers &c, it's the fact that, like, there's a baby down there, dude. If Shimizu can get damned not only by himself but along with his girlfriend, his unborn child, his sister, and his parents for things that he was both not really guilty of and in one case was not even aware he was doing - if there are gods who will damn a baby to eternal torment to that - then those gods are infinitely more frightening than the demons bashing people's teeth in with hammers. And maybe even more frightening than that is the idea that maybe Shiro only went there because he felt like he deserved to be there.

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1 It is, in point of fact, one hell of a movie.

The Age of Assassins (1967)

directed by Kihachi Okamoto

Japan

99 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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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 Revenge of Dr. X (1967)

directed by Norman Thomson

USA, Japan

94 minutes

1 star out of 5

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I watched a video where some people watched (and made fun of) this movie and its badness compelled me. 94 minutes seemed like an eternity to sit through something that I knew from the jump would be awful, so to make it easier on myself, I decided early on that I would fast-forward through all the pointless scenes of people driving. Even with the running time shortened by doing that, let me tell you, I barely made it through this thing.

The plot - insofar as there is one - concerns an inexplicably cranky scientist whose concerned coworker gently suggests that he should go to Japan on vacation because being so cranky all the time may be bad for his health. While in Japan, the scientist, Dr. Bragan (there is no Dr. X in this movie - the film was found in a warehouse and the wrong opening credits were slapped onto it), begins research and experimentation towards his ultimate goal of creating a plant-human hybrid. Midway through the film he indeed reaches this goal, but the resulting creature of course has a thirst for blood, consuming many small animals and becoming generally unruly. However, Bragan refuses to destroy his creation, insisting on its miraculous nature as a brand-new life form and his own genius.

We're introduced to Dr. Bragan by seeing him visibly agitated about seemingly nothing at all and we never get any explanation about this - I wasn't sure if I was supposed to read him as some kind of tortured genius, clashing with polite society because of his radical ideas, or if he was being written from the beginning as just a flat-out mad scientist. James Craig's portrayal of the character is so all over the place that you can't get a feel for the character's "baseline".

This movie is just baffling to me. Everything about it. I don't understand how it got made. The state that it survives in today befits it - a god-awful pan-and-scan with so much visual noise that it looks like you're holding two magnets on either side of whatever device you're watching it on - but even if it were restored to something approaching HD, its air of stale faux exotica and faint smell of alcohol would remain. This is really one of the most unapologetically bad movies I've ever seen, and it's not even the kind of bad that is made palatable because you can tell the cast and crew were having fun. This is a movie that feels like nobody wanted to be in it. Exception made for Atsuko Rome, who barely kept this watchable and does seem to have enjoyed her time in the film. (I did an actual double-take when I read that Ryō Ikebe came to a party for the premiere of the film. That is honestly kind of insane.)

The reason why people like me are interested in this at all is because Toei (may have?) distributed it in Japan, where it was titled Akuma no niwa, "The Devil's Garden", a much more compelling and accurate title than any of the English ones it has gone by over the years. However, I was under the impression that the effects were also done by a Japanese crew a la Green Slime or something like that. While part of the film was shot in Japan with some Japanese cast members, I have no evidence that the monster suit itself was technically tokusatsu. It could have been, but I can't prove that it was. It sure does look like a really bad Kamen Rider kaizo ningen-of-the-week, though.

Reading Rome's interview makes me more inclined to be gentle towards this film, given the details of production that she remembers. She says: "I think this group production was more like a hobby. I don’t know the detail of things like that. But that was a group of people working for government, retired people from the U.S. military. Those people, I think, invested in it. Then they invited James Craig as the main person from the U.S." It would make a lot of sense if this movie was made by a bunch of non-professionals in a short period of time on funding from the U.S. military. That is certainly what it feels like. Rome is also asked who was in the monster suit and says that she didn't know but assumed it was a Japanese actor, bringing this perilously close to being tokusatsu after all.

Everything about Revenge of Dr. X screams "made by people who have seen a few movies and want to try making one". I love the absolutely pointless horror movie music whenever the hunchbacked assistant is on-screen - it means nothing, alludes to nothing, the assistant has nothing at all to do with the plot, the filmmakers just thought "well, we have to have horror movie music for this cliche hunchbacked assistant". I flip-flopped between being endeared by this movie and being genuinely almost bored to tears by it, but ultimately I think this is "so bad it's bad", not "so bad it's good".

Mexican Free-for-All (1968)

directed by Takashi Tsuboshima

Japan, Mexico, USA

162 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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At this point I've seen a good few Crazy Cats movies (with and without subtitles) and an interesting thing about them is that they represent such a wide range of quality. None of the ones I've seen have been bad per se, but when you look at something like The Boss of Pick-pocket Bay, which was put together in not quite three weeks and was so rushed that they forgot to write a role for one of the actors, and compare it to Mexican Free-for-All... well, it's a stark contrast. But the thing that keeps every Crazy Cats movie from falling apart is Crazy Cats themselves, who are such ridiculously talented performers that even a shambles like Pick-pocket Bay is still fun. 

Specifically, the glue holding these movies together is always Hitoshi Ueki. He is absolutely riveting to watch and seemed to have an almost preternatural gift for entertaining, even outside of the Crazy Cats series. He plays the same character most of the time: a care-free everyman who rolls with life's punches and turns every hardship into an opportunity to make a quick buck. He's often in crappy jobs or dealing with the stress of modern life, but as the refrain in Mexican Free-for-All goes, hey, life is only 25,000 days, and nobody ever died from dreaming too big.

So, let's talk about Mexican Free-for-All specifically. The first thing to get out of the way is that it's obviously based around a really touristy depiction of Mexico that reduces the entire country to an aesthetic, but this is far from the only movie to have done that (and it happens to Japan all the time as well). The film was actually shot (partially) in Mexico, so fortunately most of the actors playing Mexican people are actually Mexican - with a couple of exceptions, most memorably Hideyo Amamoto as Guy With Big Hat, but at least nobody seemed to be in brownface. Honestly, the section of the film that takes place in Mexico is almost the least exciting part of it; aside from that insane musical interlude, I kind of preferred the hijinx that were occurring back in Japan and in San Francisco to what the Cats get up to when it's time to get down to treasure-hunting and trying to insinuate themselves upon a random girl named Maria.

As with most Crazy Cats movies, the three main actors are Hitoshi Ueki, Hajime Hana, and Kei Tani, with the rest of the troupe filling out tertiary roles. Ueki, Hana and Tani play three guys who end up involved in each other's business through a complicated series of misunderstandings and misfortunes that is fascinating to watch unfold. The MacGuffin here is a small stone statue: Hana's character is tasked with stealing it, Ueki finds out about this and realizes he can make bank by stealing the real statue and replacing it with a fake, Tani basically just gets mistaken for somebody else, and all of them eventually get sent to San Francisco through an increasingly unlikely course of events that culminates in them getting deported to Mexico on extremely shaky ground. Don't look for logic and reason in this film, because you will not find it. The important thing is that the plot flows smoothly, not that it makes sense at all.

The production value of this thing is off the charts, especially compared to some other entries in the series - which, again, are perfectly serviceable, but man, when they put in the effort, it really shows. There's a lot of location shooting, and the scenery in Mexico is genuinely very beautiful. But even in the parts of the film that take place in Japan, the set dressing is elaborate and immersive and the whole movie feels like a trip back in time, especially since the print I watched was so crisp and clear. The film's sense of humor is a little stupid and none of the actors shy away from looking like fools - in fact, they all embrace it. The film is made really well, with a lot of creative scene transitions, and as mentioned, there is an imaginary musical interlude that occurs while the Cats are figuring out how to make some money in Mexico City that is both a little bit of a fourth wall break and one of the best song-and-dance sequences I've seen in a movie to date.

This is one of several Crazy Cats films that have been getting English fansubs lately due to the efforts of mostly a single group of people, one of whom I know in real life. Just a few years ago if you wanted to see a Crazy Cats movie with subs, you were out of luck, and now I can throw on Mexican Free-for-All fully subtitled from start to finish. God bless fansubbers.

Also, did I see Hitoshi Ueki just eating a block of cheese at one point during this?

Lost World of Sinbad (1963)

directed by Senkichi Taniguchi

Japan

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Every time I rewatch this, I'm surprised by how much I like it. I had a generally poor opinion of it the first go-around, possibly because I watched it in a stretched-out aspect ratio and terrible image quality and I had read a lot of many negative reviews. But now I genuinely love this movie. It's a blast. I don't understand why there seems to be a consensus of mediocrity among reviewers.

Toshirō Mifune plays Sukezaemon (or Sukeza) Luzon, a random guy who escapes being burnt at the stake for piracy and decides to become a pirate for real to spite his accusers. Our introduction to Mifune's character and the sequence that sets him on the path he'll follow for the rest of the film is very brief, almost comedically so; within the span of maybe ten minutes Luzon has gotten himself a big cartoony treasure chest full of jewels, engaged in naval warfare against a rival pirate (Makoto Satō, delivering the evilest evil cackles of his career), seemingly been punished by the gods for his hubris with a terrible storm, and washed up in a random unspecified country where everybody is surprised that he is Japanese but also, at the same time, all speak Japanese themselves. Mifune is of course eminently watchable and I'm tempted to say that he carries the whole film, but this works so well as an ensemble piece that that wouldn't really be fair to everybody else in it.

Luzon quickly finds that all is not well in the kingdom. The king is slowly being poisoned while a shifty chancellor attempts to seize power for himself and marry the princess. The chancellor's interim government demands tribute in the form of local young women who are taken to the castle and forced into slavery, and there are other generally oppressive measures leading the people in the kingdom towards mounting a revolt. But it'll take more than just a peasant uprising - it'll take some dude who isn't from around here and almost drowned a couple of days ago to gather enough strength to storm the castle and fight the Black Pirate and the chancellor's supporters.

The really fun thing about this movie is how many distinct characters make up the cast, and how every single one of them brings something new to the plot. It is a story about justice vs. injustice when you get right down to it, but there's such a broad range of actors involved in how the story unfolds. Some of them are somewhat opportunistic and switch sides according to their own whims (Jun Tazaki, for example, who looks absolutely lethal dual-wielding sai). Some are not very bright but side with Luzon for the craic. Two of my favorite characters really have no investment in the faction-vs-faction fight at all and have their own rivalry going on in the background, secondary to what Luzon is doing; these are Granny the witch (played by Hideyo Amamoto technically in drag but not really committed to it) and the hermit who got kicked out of heaven for being too horny (Ichirō Arashima). The panoply of personalities all contribute to why this movie moves at such a fast clip and avoids ever slipping into a lull at any point.

Whenever I try to think of which movie I'd recommend first between Sinbad and its "sister film" Adventure in Kigan Castle, I always have a hard time. Kigan Castle is objectively the better film, its production is far more elaborate and it has better pacing, but Sinbad is, in my opinion, way more fun. Although the scope is not as grand as Kigan Castle, which was shot partially on location in Iran, Sinbad still has some remarkable practical effects and the same feeling of "doesn't matter if the technology isn't there yet, we're gonna do it anyway" that all Showa tokusatsu is imbued with. I could probably rewatch this a bunch more times without getting tired of it, and if my tokusatsu film screening series doesn't crash and burn this year, it might make it into the roster at some point.

Secret of the Telegian (1960)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Rewatched this a third time after far too long. Coming back to these movies after having seen more tokusatsu - especially Toho films - is always rewarding, because now I feel like I understand them in their context much better. In particular it's impressive how Jun Fukuda was able to direct a film that fits so neatly with the rest of the Transforming Human series despite never having directed a tokusatsu film before (although he was assistant director for Rodan) and only having solo directorial credit on one other movie thus far.

I just want to talk about how much I love that opening murder scene where we see Sudo for the first time (although we don't know who he is yet). We follow a man entering a haunted house at a theme park, not to enjoy it like all the other attendees but to meet up with someone. He's surrounded by witnesses, who are later interviewed by police and can't describe what they saw happen next. The man reaches the back of the cave and all of a sudden something happens to him: out of nowhere there is another man standing exactly where he had been, and all we the viewers see of this second man is his back - there one second, gone the next - before his victim collapses dead with a knife in him. There are shots like this of Sudo throughout the film and it's something I think is absolutely fascinating: these back shots, other characters framed on either side of his shoulders, no face, nothing to identify with, just this looming presence. The camera almost has the same POV as him, but he himself blocks some of the shot.

Tadao Nakamaru plays this character really, really well. After he saw his own performance in a test screening he apparently realized with some horror that he was "in a ridiculous movie" and didn't want to play his role in The Human Vapor because of that. I think we can reevaluate this character now, because he isn't ridiculous and neither is the movie he's in. Sudo is interesting because he really was at one point a victim: even if he comes off uptight trying to stop some guys from stealing gold bars in the chaos at the end of the war, the fact is that he was murdered for it, and his murderers got away with it. But in the process of reinventing himself into the tele-transmitted man, he's lost most of his humanity. I absolutely love the reveal at the end that he's physically scarred and burned because of the teleporter he uses. It may have been simple revenge but now it's taken him over. It's really the teleporter that's the scary thing, in conjunction with its user - I think both World Wars kind of quashed the idea of technology and science being a basic universal force for good, and now all we can do is be afraid of what people are going to do with the new weapons we keep inventing. 

Also, in the original Japanese, Sudo is never referred to as the "Telegian" or anything like that. The in-universe name for him is "juken-ma", which translates to something like "bayonet demon" or "bayonet devil". This is what the police and reporters call him by.

I read somewhere that Toho didn't do a lot of noir films at this point like some other studios did because they "weren't good at them", but when it comes to noir with a sci-fi element, they really nail it. Aside from Sudo, none of the characters in this have much personality, but everybody fills their various generic cop roles really well and in concert it makes for a riveting investigation into something that looks more and more as the film goes on like a supernatural event. That being said, it's weird that Koji Tsuruta is here. I never get used to him in this movie. From what I understand he was close with Fukuda and was in this as kind of a favor to him since he was a new director (Tsuruta was one of Toho's biggest stars and it was probably very expensive and difficult to get him in a movie). But his character is just some guy, a nebulously-defined "old college friend" who gets in the way at first but eventually is absorbed into the main cast. A lot of Toho movies are like that, actually: the cast of characters is just whoever happened to stick around the longest.

I will say the pacing is also odd - this is one of the only times I've looked to see what time it was and realized I'd been watching the movie for 55 minutes when I thought I'd only been watching it for 15 or 20 at most. And something about the filming occasionally feels a little awkward, like shots are starting and stopping at not quite the right time. But you will never catch me saying a bad word about the practical effects, which are the highlight of the film. Toho is known mostly for large physical work, kaiju suits and vehicle miniatures and things like that, but rotoscoping scanlines onto Sudo undoubtedly took an excessive amount of time and meticulous frame-by-frame effort.

The last thing I want to mention is just this really small detail: in the final scene, where Sudo's teleportation goes wrong and he dies horribly, clutching at his coat collar in agony, Tsuruta's character Kirioka is watching him and holding his own collar as well. This could have been totally unintentional, and since practical effects and drama scenes were filmed in separate locations, they probably weren't even actually looking at each other, but I got a real sense of Kirioka being absorbed in and horrified by what he was seeing.

Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

89 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Three years after her debut film, Mothra goes up against Godzilla in an obligatory test of mettle for any kaiju worth their salt, but the real enemy, as usual, is humanity.

While Godzilla was definitely not the apocalyptic destruction god that he had been in his debut film, Mothra vs. Godzilla is still a strong "good monster vs. bad monster" story. It was the first movie where Godzilla had fought an original kaiju who had debuted in their own movie, and Mothra has in fact proved so enduring that she remains the only Godzilla-series kaiju to continue getting solo movies even after her appearance in this film. 

Godzilla vs. Mothra also introduces what would become really a cornerstone of Mothra as a character: her intimate connection to ecological concerns. In this film, Mothra's home, Infant Island, is reduced to a barren, radioactive wasteland by bomb testing. The government either didn't notice or, more likely, didn't care that there was a native population living on the island at the time. It sucks that he used people in brownface to do it, but what Honda is saying here is surprisingly deep: native populations have had their trust betrayed time and time again and have been ignored and stepped on in the name of capitalism and "scientific progress" in a multitude of ways. Should they - and by extension, in this case, Mothra - really have to forgive anybody for that? If forgiveness is at all possible, it can only be done by improving the world in a material sense, which is a sentiment all of the main human characters share by the end of the film.

About those human characters: it isn't their show. I tend to disagree strongly when people talk about how the human side of Godzilla movies doesn't matter, but in this case I really struggled to even remember any details about the human cast between the last time I watched this movie and now. They're fine - nobody phones it in, and I'm glad they're there (especially egg guy), but aside from Yoshifumi Tajima doing great in one of his only performances where he gets more than a few lines, none of them felt that interesting.

All the tokusatsu in this movie is extremely well-crafted. This is Toho at their best, even when the budget shows. They may reuse the same footage of people evacuating until they wring the life out of it, but it's the macro details rather than the micro ones that are important here. Even though logically I know humans can't be ten inches tall, my brain just refuses to believe that the Shobijin are not real tiny people because they're integrated into the scenery so well. The miniature work on the buildings and cityscapes is top-notch too, as always. The MosuGoji suit is fantastically expressive, part of which apparently came by accident: Godzilla's jowly-bulldog look is a result of an accident where Haruo Nakajima tripped and fell while in the suit and knocked a few of its teeth out. It's very endearing.

I screened this to a group, and one of my friends said afterward that her only hang-up with a lot of kaiju movies is how drawn-out the fight scenes are, which is a valid complaint; I'd like to point out that it's really easy to take special effects for granted nowadays, but when this movie was released, nobody had done this stuff before. It makes sense that they want to show you every single tank and every single plane because this was the first time anybody was seeing effects like this. I also think it's very important to remember that tokusatsu is inextricable from war movies: the technique was essentially born out of Eiji Tsuburaya and his crew making propaganda. Toku has always been made by and for the boat/plane/vehicle nerds.

It's such a joy to watch these earlier Godzilla movies, the way they just flow from start to finish - it kind of feels like watching somebody do a magic trick and really pull it off, so seamlessly you have no idea how they did it. There are rough parts (some iffy compositing, mostly) but there's something about those that feels diegetic; it doesn't take me out of the film. I think I forgot how good this one was. Happy 60th.

Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters (1968)

directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda

Japan

80 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I'm going to be screening the third film in the '60s Yokai Monsters trilogy pretty soon, so I figured I should have a review up of at least one of them.

This comes from Daiei back when they still had some kind of a budget, and it looks gorgeous. I remember the first time I watched this I got almost emotional seeing the kasa-obake puppet because something about it is so striking, despite its inherently silly vibe. Puppeteering just gets me, man - the way that thing moves and dances, it really looks like it's had life breathed into it. I might like the kasa-obake more than all the other yokai combined.

I think the most interesting thing about this movie is how the various human characters interact with the yokai - not even always the yokai themselves, just the hints and rumors of them. The story is centered around the impending destruction of a tenement house and the forced eviction of its residents following one of the owners getting blackmailed into selling his property, and when I first watched it, I got the impression that the residents were using the yokai as a kind of weapon against their would-be evictors. But now I'm realizing that that isn't quite the case.

Every side in this - humans, greedy developers, and yokai - moves independently of one another, although they are all ultimately intertwined. It takes a long time for the land developers to figure out that they're being besieged by yokai as a direct result of their greed, and if I'm remembering correctly (full disclosure, I just finished watching this 10 minutes ago, so if I'm not remembering correctly, there is probably something wrong with me) the tenement residents barely even mention the yokai, if at all. The picture I'm getting from this is a kind of GMK guardian spirits idea: the yokai guard the land, and if the people on that land can live in harmony with them - which, in this case, they do - then that's great. But if not, human lives aren't their concern.

The pacing of this thing is really its only problem, but it's a problem that is familiar to anybody who watches a lot of jidaigeki. I think this movie can be somewhat handicapped by modern ideas of the horror genre, despite being such a great Halloween watch, because if you go into it expecting a horror movie period, you'll probably be disappointed when you get jidaigeki with a side of monsters. But that's by design, and when the film decides to go whole hog - like the finale, and the scene where the last surviving would-be evictor is menaced by a troupe of yokai - it's pretty awesome.

Gamera vs. Viras (1968)

directed by Noriaki Yuasa

Japan

81 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Masao and Jim are two boy scouts who have little in the way of personality other than that they love to play pranks. After a cold open (and a really potent title card drop) that establishes the alien invasion plot and shows us Gamera trying to stop it, we spend some time watching the two boys pull a fast one on their scout leader and some scientists with the end goal of getting them to let the kids pilot a submarine - if they can break it, then they're the only ones who'll be able to fix it, so the adults won't have any choice but to let them pilot it, right? It works, and after a disorienting ride, the scout leader and the head scientist turn the sub over to the boys, who use it to have a little race with Gamera. I really liked this part because if you think about it as coming chronologically after the cold open, it implies that Gamera fought with the Viras aliens, lost, came back to Earth to recuperate, and still made time to have an underwater race with a couple of kids and let them drive their mini submarine around his legs. What a champ.

But through a series of accidents, the boys end up abducted into the Viras mothership, and, by their quick thinking and Gamera's brute strength combined, have to figure out how to thwart the invasion.

The sequence of events where the boys rig up the submarine so that they're the only ones who'll know how to pilot it also establishes a theme that will run throughout the entire movie, and to an extent throughout all Gamera movies: adults do not know what they're doing, and most of the time they just get in the way. Kids in Gamera movies are treated as if they alone are capable of seeing the world in a way that adults just can't, and that's why I like these movies so much. They treat a child's perspective as a valuable and unique thing, not something of lesser value than an adult's way of navigating the world. I've read that this was something Noriaki Yuasa fully intended of his Gamera films - that adults know nothing, and children know everything.

When you think about it, the Viras aliens in their separate forms are an extension of the ignorant adults at the beginning of the film: they never let the kids get away with anything cool (their ship's replicator refuses to give them weapons), they try to make the kids do what they tell them to, they treat the kids like obstacles and want them to get out of the way. I like the individual Viras aliens, even though their combined form is one of my least favorite Gamera enemies. They're all wearing surgical scrubs for some reason. I have this weird idea that when they were observing Earth, they picked up our television signals, saw people in surgical scrubs cutting open, mutilating, and dealing apparent massive violence to other unconscious, helpless humans, and decided that wearing scrubs would be the best way to convey to humanity their intent to subjugate them by force.

This was made during bad financial times for Daiei, and has a third of the budget of its predecessor, Gamera vs. Gyaos. The film makes great use of what original material it's capable of concocting, but it does grind to a halt when the stock footage interlude hits. But aside from the stock footage, there is some real beauty to this. I was, even on this second viewing, still enraptured by the design of that spaceship. It's really something else, and not only is it aesthetically interesting, it's also technologically impressive: it can rearrange its segments and jettison damaged sections in response to an attack. I mentioned in my review of vs. Guiron that one of my favorite things was how the interior of the spaceship just has painted wooden floors, giving it this tangible, realistic feel, and I feel the same way about the interior of the Viras ship too. It looks like a big art exhibit.

I had a lot of fun with this one. I think it's one of the lesser-appreciated Showa Gamera movies, but I enjoyed it. I will say that it's a very uneven movie, though, and while the opening is a grand old time, it does struggle to regain its footing after the lengthy stock footage sequence, and never quite gets to the high point it hit at the beginning. It's still worthwhile for the art design if nothing else - these movies are so well-crafted that there's a timelessness to them that transcends their heavy 1960s aesthetic.

Crazy Big Adventure (1965)

directed by Kengo Furusawa

Japan

107 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Hey, they got the Shobijin in this thing.

I've reviewed a few Crazy Cats (and Crazy Cats-adjacent) movies over on my other blog, but this was the first one I've seen that had real English subtitles. I'd always been surprised that none of the Crazy Cats movie seemed to have been subtitled, but it turns out at least one or two of them are floating around out there with subs. Shouts out to Joey.

There isn't much plot to speak of, but we have some of the Cats playing cops and some playing robbers: Hitoshi Ueki plays Uematsu, the world's most unbothered counterfeiter, and Kei Tani plays Tanii, his inventor/assistant/future brother-in-law. Hajime Hana and Hiroshi Inuzuka play Hanai and Inui, cops assigned (by Tora-san's Masami Shimojō if I'm not mistaken) to investigate a global counterfeiting ring. Ētarō Ishibashi, Senri Sakurai, and Shin Yasuda are less important, background characters.

Uematsu isn't directly involved in the counterfeiting ring, but when his buddy Tanii invents a forgery machine that can reproduce bank notes almost perfectly, he accidentally gets himself roped into it after he tries to run a random note through the machine and realizes that the note was itself a forgery, meaning somebody else out there has access to an even better counterfeiting machine. One of the funniest things about this character is how utterly he lacks a conscience, and how casual he is about it - he doesn't give a rip about whether or not it's illegal to forge money, his only focus is on getting enough money to marry his fiancé (Reiko Dan, underused). Unfortunately, since he's about to expose the international counterfeiting ring - which is just one part of a world domination plot by an underground network of Nazis - the criminals begin pursuing him across Japan.

The movie basically frontloads with plot and then lapses, for the majority of its running time, into one lengthy chase scene. This is where the fun is. The cat-and-mouse game between Uematsu (sometimes Tanii) and the criminals (also the police) goes on for so long and becomes so convoluted and cartoonish that you can't help but laugh about it. At one point Uematsu hops into a truck full of goats to escape the cops, escapes the cops, loses the truck, ends up dangling from a bridge, falls off the bridge and onto a horse, loses the horse, regains the horse, and outruns the counterfeiters' goons. At another point he falls into a truck carrying futon mattresses. The whole time he's just having a ball, constantly cracking wise and, more often than not, singing.

Which brings me to my next point: Hitoshi Ueki has such a magnetic screen presence that he is half of why this movie is so fun to watch. Even Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay, which was a total mess that barely qualifies as a movie, is watchable because it has Ueki anchoring it in the lead. I don't think he's even technically the "frontman" of Crazy Cats - as far as I know that's Hajime Hana, as the band is sometimes called "Hajime Hana and Crazy Cats" - but he's probably the most fun to watch of all of them.

It is mildly terrifying that all of Ueki's stunts seem to have been real. There are obvious places where you can tell they're doing at least the barest minimum to make it safer, such as when Uematsu is clinging to someone's car and if you pay attention you can tell they're actually going really slow despite the edited-in screeching tire noises, but for the most part he is genuinely hanging off of buildings and riding on top of trucks and whatnot.

Crazy Big Adventure also looks great due to that Eiji Tsuburaya secret sauce, with surprisingly detailed sets and some moments of really cool miniature work. Watching '60s Toho movies is like chicken soup for me, and this is the studio and all of its talented artists at their best. I like when it gets meta at the end: Crazy Cats the band performs a 10th anniversary concert at Uematsu's wedding reception, and some of them are in the audience watching themselves onstage. Having seen three and a half movies out of a very plentiful film series isn't exactly a great sample size to base sweeping judgements off of, but I think I'm getting an idea for when the Crazy Cats movies hit their stride and when they seem to fumble it a little. Crazy Big Adventure is an example of a time when everything goes right; they hit all the notes and the end result is a really fun wild ride of a film.

Son of Godzilla (1967)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

85 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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Son of Godzilla, despite being a bombastic, colorful, and incredibly well-made movie, was apparently disliked by audiences enough that Toho considered ending the series afterward. This was the height of the kaiju boom in Japan: as I mentioned in my Space Monster Wangmagwi review, 1967 saw every major film studio produce a kaiju movie. But every bubble must burst, and the burgeoning success of Ultraman and Ultraseven signaled a shift towards television that would leave film studios struggling to raise theater attendance. For now, though, this is Toho at the top of their game.

Visually - and sonically, Masaru Satō's score is genuinely one of the best soundtracks ever put to film - this movie is such a delight. It was filmed on location in Guam (you can tell because everybody is really tan), so there's no shortage of jungle scenes that are more convincing than anything achieved even on one of Toho's reality-defying open sets, but it's the miniatures that shine the most here. I love the cohesive look of it all. There's something about the brightly-colored structures the scientists live and work in that almost feels a little... dreamlike, perhaps, like an idea that a child might have of what doing science is like.

The editing and compositing here is some of Toho's finest, I believe. This is my fourth rewatch of the film, and it seems like lately when I've been rewatching Godzilla movies I've really been taking notice of the way scale is achieved. I'm thinking about a scene where Godzilla blasts one of the Kamacuras with his atomic breath and a piece of it goes flying off and lands, flaming, while the tiny-in-comparison human characters flee. The optical printing is remarkably well done here, and shots of puppets - small in reality but made convincingly huge - superimposed over the jungle landscape look great. The creative editing even extends to the human story too: I love that scene after the weather balloon experiment fails spectacularly where we hear Fujisaki narrate everything that's gone wrong on the island over a montage of floods and storms, and then it cuts to him writing about it in a journal. That was just such a unique way to structure a narrative moment meant to immerse us further in the environs of the film.

I recently read an article talking about the way science has been used throughout the Godzilla series that I thought was really interesting, and it highlighted this movie in specific and how it has a very different view on the use of science to assert mastery over nature than a lot of previous films. In short, while doing experiments does give rise to monsters - Kamacuras and Kumonga - and cause the weather on the island to go haywire, the thing that stops all of that is just doing more science. The solution to messing things up through your experimentation is to experiment harder. This is a strikingly optimistic viewpoint in contrast to the often dismal opinion of scientific interference with nature that many Godzilla films hold, although if you think too hard about what the people on Solgel Island are doing, they do still seem a little arrogant: it's for the greater good, but they are wrecking the ecosystem of an island which had up until then been in balance, and that includes the other living creatures on it. Kamacuras is as much a product of man's meddling with nature as the original Godzilla was, but Kamacuras is portrayed in a far less sympathetic light than Godzilla.

I will admit this is not my favorite Godzilla suit, but Hiroshi Sekita's performance makes me not care about how the suit looks. Sekita was chosen instead of Haruo Nakajima - Godzilla's default suit actor, pretty much - because he was taller than Nakajima and the film's producers wanted to create more contrast between Godzilla and Minilla. I can't source this because I don't recall where I read it, but apparently Sekita would speak to Minilla while in the suit (either out loud or in his head), narrating what Godzilla would be saying to his son: instructions on how to use his atomic breath, admonishments on venturing into dangerous parts of the island, et cetera. There is consistently so much effort put into bringing Godzilla to life as a character. I will talk about this until I'm blue in the face because for so long bad dubs and a lack of attention caused the Godzilla series to be regarded as "goofy rubber monster movies".

I understand how jarring this movie must seem when you consider the idea of Godzilla as a bringer of misery and pain, as he had been in his first two films (and would be again). But to me the thing that's so, so fascinating about Godzilla as a character, and why he has proved so enduring, is this: there's what Godzilla is - a stand-in for the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, depicted as such with varying degrees of fervency depending on whether you're going off Kayama's original idea for him or Honda's interpretation - and then there's what you do with him. In large part, this transition away from Godzilla as a force of terror and dread was due to Toho recognizing that their biggest audience was children, and so the people who made movies like this maybe did not necessarily want to make them this way - but they did. Godzilla as a cultural icon survived this long precisely because he has changed, and will continue to, but at the same time, there's always been a core concept that has remained throughout all of his iterations. There's no denying that there is a solid idea of What Godzilla Is, but, conversely, it also must be recognized that there's a What Godzilla Can Be.

Gamera vs. Guiron (1969)

directed by Noriaki Yuasa

Japan

82 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Strange things are afoot on the pale blue dot. Unusual radio waves and anomalous activity in space have been detected and are being studied by scientists on Earth. This is the last year of the hyper-modern 1960s, and all eyes and ears are turning outward and upward, to the vast cosmos, wondering: who - or what - is out there?

Well, there's Gamera, for starters.

While the adults are concerned with finding the source of the enigmatic radio waves, Akio and Tom are miles ahead of them. Using nothing more than a simple balcony telescope, they witness a UFO and follow it as it lands nearby. They board it with no hesitation and immediately hijack the thing, which is super fun at first, but then a little scary when meteors threaten to strike the ship as soon as it gets into space. But Gamera is there to save the day - until, controlled by some external force, the UFO starts accelerating faster than even Gamera can keep up with, and soon, the boys are on the mysterious tenth planet, unwilling houseguests of the real owners of the spacecraft.

This is a movie that hides absolutely nothing from its viewers. There's satisfaction in picking at and unraveling a complex plot, in watching a film that demands attention and multiple viewings to fully understand it. But there's also something fun about a movie like this where everything happens in a masterfully controlled linear flow from start to finish. This is just one of the ways that this movie caters - and I do not say "caters" in a pejorative sense - to its young audience. Children are the focus here, and although the film was made by adults, it feels like it has such an understanding of what it's like to be a kid. When the boys are using a dart gun to mess with their local cop and the cop tells them to run along now, returning Tom's dart by sticking it to his forehead, he almost turns to the camera for a second, like "aw jeez, can you believe this?" The language of the film is something that takes steps to include children at every turn.

It's also, to me, one of the most visually stunning Gamera movies. Everything about this is the reason why I love tokusatsu. I've been thinking recently, due to an interview I'm machine-translating (spoilers!), about the inherent unpredictability of tokusatsu and how it differs from visual effects achieved by CGI: I'm not implying in any sense that the distinctive aesthetic of this movie is accidental or that the people making it didn't know what they were doing, but the process of creating something like the Guiron suit and putting it on film is one that necessarily entails a lot of discovery. You can't be sure what something is going to look like on camera, and even once you've filmed it, you now have the work of integrating it within the wider narrative of the film through the editing process. This handmade nature is why older films like this have such a unique feel.

I think one of my favorite parts of this is how the room where Akio and Tom end up almost getting their brains eaten has visible wooden floorboards, painted white. I just love the feeling I get from looking at a spaceship with wooden board flooring.

So I've talked about the visuals, what about the real stars (the monsters)? I'm kind of a Zigra stan - love that wacky goblin shark - but upon this most recent rewatch, Guiron is seriously challenging that. Guiron's first appearance is so, so stunning. For some reason I kept thinking about that scene in Rodan - one of my favorite sequences in all of tokusatsu - where the lead character goes down into a mine and witnesses incomprehensible sights, like the giant baby Rodan emerging from its egg and eating giant larvae. The sheer horror of the scene in Rodan is not there at all, but the sense of seeing something that shifts your paradigm totally is. The real feeling of weightiness that Guiron has is what makes him so good: he's a big lug and he feels like a big lug, you can feel how every step is laborious, how much gravity tugs at his body. Gamera: Rebirth took an interesting tack in their redesign of Guiron as a spring-loaded, weirdly ferrety creature, considering how palpably heavy the original is.

And this whole thing is just so coherent. You understand on instinct how the aliens' equipment works. Reiko Kasahara and Hiroko Kai play Barbella and Flobella the spacewomen like they studied from a real exoplanetary culture.

Like Godzilla, Gamera had a debut that established him as a creature that was not actively malevolent but operated as more of a natural disaster, but by this time, Gamera was firmly entrenched in his role as a protector of children. Every single second of Gamera vs. Guiron reflects that: this is one of the most "made for kids" movies I've ever seen, and that's what's beautiful about it. Or, to elaborate, the fact that, in addition to being one of the most "made for kids" movies I've ever seen, this is also - IMO - one of the most visually stunning non-Toho monster movies to come out of the 1960s - that's what's beautiful about it.

Destroy All Monsters (1968)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

89 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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Somehow it's been three years since the last time I saw this. I watch most of the other Godzilla movies yearly if not bi-yearly, but this one slipped through the cracks.

This film begins by fleshing out the idea of Monster Island, something which continues to pop up within Godzilla media to this day: a remote island where the world's most notorious monsters get sent for being very naughty, able to live in seeming harmony with each other while being kept away from civilization. I'm honestly surprised that more isn't made of this within the film, but it's established that Monster Island has been a thing for at least the past 20 years by the time the story begins, so I guess people had time to get used to it. But to me, creating a place where every monster that had once terrorized the world can live in peace, away from humankind, is one of the most monumental achievements within this franchise - and of course it all goes wrong, because this is an Ishirō Honda film and no hubris can go unpunished.

When an invading race of aliens, the Kilaaks, put the monsters of Monster Island - as well as some human scientists - under mind control, the obvious flaw in keeping all those monsters in such close proximity to one another becomes apparent. The monsters scatter across the planet, wreaking havoc in every major city as commanded by the Kilaaks. What exactly the Kilaaks want with Earth is never explained in great detail, but we all know the genre conventions by now. It's enough to see aliens show up and announce that they plan to take over the world, we don't need to know why.

The thing that struck me upon rewatching this was that the human characters are shockingly competent. In general, the human story is mixed with the kaiju action in a superb way, and I'll talk about that in a minute, but I want to dedicate this paragraph to appreciating the fact that everybody in this movie just gets stuff done. There's not a lot of depth to the character development (the old man, played by Ikio Sawamura, who accidentally retrieves the Kilaak's homing beacon and mentions that his son works on the moon base has more character development than any of the main cast) and so most of the characters mainly exist as embodiments of whatever their job description is than individual personalities, but it works really, really well. The film doesn't even allow the mind-control plot to overstay its welcome when it comes to the human scientists who the Kilaaks use to spread their message. They get their mind-control implants removed and it's immediately back to business. No messing around. The military has their obligatory confrontations here and there, but for the most part it's the Monster Island crew, the moon base workers, and some associated scientists, who know exactly what has to be done and exactly how to do it.

This is really Toho at the peak of their special-effects prowess. Sadamasa Arikawa was director of special effects, and you can see the influence of Teruyoshi Nakano starting to become apparent in the prominence of missile-barrage sequences and other explosions. What I'm impressed by the most is the way scale is established, and how huge, impossible things - not just the kaiju but also scenes like the Kilaak home base - are integrated within the human world. There's no moment where it feels like the human actors and the fantastical space-age world around them are separate, even though they are; the cuts between a monster showing up and everybody standing around goggling at it all feel like they were shot at the same time. Destroy All Monsters establishes its world so well that, even though it's intended to be the future, it fits right in with the time it was released. The film invites you to believe everything in it is plausible, and makes you forget that it isn't. This is, I believe, a perfect example of tokusatsu as an art form.

The plot is pretty thin when you actually sit down and consider it, but when the visual storytelling is this good, that all feels like it's not a big deal.

I think this is a movie to recommend to people - of which there are many, for some reason - who are unconvinced of the importance of human characters in kaiju film. No, there's no intricate personal storylines like in the first Godzilla film, or in Terror of Mechagodzilla or Minus One, but this movie shows that just having characters who are good at their jobs is more than satisfying enough. Watching a clear, crisp print of it where you can appreciate the cinematography and beautiful lighting and color palette is a really rewarding experience, even for me as somebody who already knows they like Godzilla a lot.