War of the Gargantuas (1966)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

88 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This is basically a sequel to the previous year's Frankenstein vs. Baragon, but mostly just in a continuity sense. The lab dedicated to studying Frankensteins from that film is carried over into this one, but neither the specific Frankenstein from the earlier film nor Baragon are referenced. So I guess it's more of a spiritual sequel; one that works with a lot of the same ideas, but is largely separate. But, like Frankenstein vs. Baragon, there's a deep sense of empathy for the mutated humanoids referred to as "Frankenstein/s". This is a very, very Ishirō Honda movie in that respect, as well as in other respects I'll get to later in this review. I just rewatched this last night, and while this particular movie isn't a case of me revisiting something I had previously maligned (I liked it the first time and will always like it), I do want to update my review a little.

So what is a Frankenstein? This film's conception of said creature is entirely different from the Western idea of Frankenstein's Monster and I really love that. There are no references to the Shelley story here at all and the term "Frankenstein" is essentially just used as shorthand for an enormous, human-ish or humanoid creature who typically owes at least some of its existence to science. In the case of the first Frankenstein, he grew to inhuman proportions from eating a discarded heart that was being experimented upon; in the case of these two they're just kind of lab escapees - so the science rule isn't absolute, but it seems like to be a Frankenstein means you have to have been touched by the hand of humankind in some way, and not for the better. The two Frankensteins in this film, named Gaira and Sanda, are something between brothers and clones, one formed from the cells of the other, but vastly different in personality and emotions.

The two giant monsters are by far the most human creatures in this film. In fact, I had trouble staying engaged with it at times because the actions of the human characters turned my stomach. Even for Ishirō Honda's tendency to make kaiju films with philosophical angles to them, this one goes quite far in establishing the humans as the bad guys. Aside from the Frankenstein research people, humans don't even attempt to understand or humanely capture either of the gargantuas/Frankensteins at all. We're explicitly the side who's responsible for the most suffering and destruction because we're the only side capable of truly understanding that we're doing it and continuing to do it willingly. That first lengthy fight scene between the military and Gaira, where they not only shoot masers and bombs at him, but also electrify a whole river, causing him to fall in and be shocked into near-unconsciousness before he's carried away by his brother, is genuinely really upsetting. There's a relentlessness to the military movements in this that feels elaborate even for kaiju movies. When the army shears off and burns the top of what looks like an entire forest just to rout out Gaira like a trapped animal I felt sympathy for him as if I was watching somebody slaughter a deer for a trophy. This movie mostly is about watching the military advance with an inhuman coldness towards their goal of destroying both monsters; the military action takes up the majority of the running time. This is why I said this movie feels so trademark Honda: there's a sense of direness and absolute dead seriousness all throughout that doesn't let anything but tragedy feel like the inevitable outcome.

Despite never having any spoken lines, Sanda and Gaira have an incredibly compelling drama unfolding between them throughout the course of the film. One of our first introductions to Gaira makes it very clear that he eats people. Maybe the only funny (if dark as hell) moment in the film comes when he scoops up a lady, chews on her, then spits out something she was carrying. Even before the human-eating becomes explicit, he's shown messing with a boat and generally scaring the wits out of everybody, which of course means that the government and the military's first response is to figure out how to stop and destroy this creature - but thankfully the research lab, and its scientists who have firsthand experience that proves that a Frankenstein can be a gentle, harmless creature if raised with love, is there to provide a tempering voice. Not that it's heard by the factions attempting to destroy Gaira, but it is at least there so us viewers don't feel completely alienated.

I want to talk about the sets and the suits because I feel like even though this is not one of the more well-known of Toho's Showa-era kaiju films, both things are some of the best examples I've ever seen from the studio. Both Sanda and Gaira are the kind of creatures that my brain accepts as just being what they are. With a lot of kaiju suits, your mind kind of unconsciously goes to the air and sight holes in the neck, the seams, where the actor's head would be, basically there's always a sense of the suit being an object no matter how good it looks. Sanda and Gaira are things I look at and I don't see a human in them, I just see them. The suits were evidently constructed by layering material over a regular boilersuit-like garment, instead of basing it around wetsuit material as was normal for suits at the time, and this gave them a level of maneuverability that allowed for much more human body language and movement. The masks were similarly made of layered material over life casts of each suit actor's face. Haruo Nakajima is, as always, the best, and Hiroshi Sekita, in the Sanda suit, plays his respective Frankenstein equally as well. But I also want to talk about the miniatures because they are mindblowing to me. The Hanada airport scene, one of Gaira's first forays onto land, is genuinely one of the best miniature sets I've seen in tokusatsu of this era. There's a moment where Nakajima in the Gaira suit just books it across the runway and I've been thinking about that ever since the first time I watched this film because nothing else looks like that. The sense of scale is perfect - the Frankensteins are not taller than the buildings around them, so instead of looking unstoppable in the middle of a city, there's a feeling of them being lost and confused in a world that they don't fit into.

Sanda and Gaira's relationship is by far the most memorable thing about this film, story-wise. The humans are important for their role in nurturing a Frankenstein into a well-adjusted being, but as usual, it's the monster stuff that really matters. Sanda is the one who has been around humans and understands a little more of how to behave, and as soon as he finds out Gaira's habit of eating humans, he's horrified. He tries to kill Gaira for this, but - although, again, neither of them speak - you really feel his sense of anguish about this, the panic that drives Sanda to do it, and his regret. Both creatures are connected to each other in a way that goes deeper than a familial bond. Gaira is a tragic creature because he was shaped by the environment of deprivation that he grew up in, and even though neither are human, there's something you can empathize with deeply in seeing Sanda watch this other part of him go down a path that can only lead to destruction. Sanda trying to urge his brother away with very human body language when he knows he's walking right into the military's zone of conflict towards the end of the film is another thing that affected me on my first watch.

There's also a bunch of other stuff that goes on here, but it's comparatively a blip against the brother-on-brother violence and emotional turmoil. There's an octopus for like five minutes at the beginning that makes it onto some of the film's posters despite not even being remotely relevant to anything. There's a lounge scene where a woman sings genuinely one of the worst songs I've ever heard not just on film but like, ever, and is then snatched by Gaira. (I'm told that Devo recorded a cover of this song.) I guess I can see aspects of this film that people might deride, and its tone of total seriousness at all times can feel a little impenetrable, but I just... I feel like everything works together, it's all just as it should be, and I'm really surprised this isn't a more popular film.

Nezura 1964 (2020)

directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

Japan

53 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is quite a short movie - it's not even as long as the 53 minutes it claims to be. There's maybe ten minutes at the end that is made up of credits and other stuff. I would, however, highly recommend sticking around for that ten minutes, because the "other stuff" consists of behind-the-scenes shots that show the cast and crew having a great time, and also Mach Fumiake looking really beautiful and singing the film's theme tune, as well as another song by the immediately recognizable Akira Kushida over the end credits, which was a surprise. So basically this is a film that just keeps on giving right up until the very end.

I'd been waiting to see this for a long time, and it was as exciting to finally watch it as I'd hoped, with the added bonus that I had somehow been geared up for a cynical comedy and ended up watching something far more heartfelt. The film itself gives you some context in the opening, but to recap: During the monster-movie boom in the mid-20th century, Daiei Studios, not yet having come out with their biggest hit, Gamera, was planning to make a movie called Giant Horde Beast Nezura. ("Nezura" is a kaiju-ified version of the word "nezumi", which means rat.) The film's monster concept was to use literal live rats that were brought in off the street and were going to be filmed (hopefully) rampaging through detailed miniature city sets, and then eventually there would be a giant rat creature and other actors and all that usual business too. As one might expect, this didn't go so well, with the rats being city rats and infested with fleas and sickness; eventually production ceased and the rats were incinerated per an order by the city health department.

Nezura 1964 is a faux documentary that focuses on the crew behind this planned film, specifically how everyone put a ton of hope and effort into a project that eventually crashed and (literally) burned. It is comedic, but ultimately the sensational headline we all know about that one weird monster movie where they were gonna use live rats falls by the wayside in favor of an exploration of just plain human nature - the nature of humans to do what we love, and to feel bereft and devastated when that's taken away from us by circumstance. And if you pay attention you'll see that "haha why did they use real rats that was stupid" isn't the point, the point is also that this was all happening at a time when focus was shifting rapidly and drastically away from feature films and onto television - a change that led to the birth of the Ultra series, but meant a lot of concepts for kaiju films never got out of development.

If the faux-documentary angle sounds familiar to you, maybe you've also seen The Great Buddha: Arrival. The concept of that film is in many ways the same as Nezura 1964, but The Great Buddha: Arrival is a meta-love letter to a lost film and a treatise on the importance of memory as a practice of keeping things alive, and Nezura 1964 is... well, I just watched it, so I need some time to digest it, but like I said, it's a movie about people who are invested in making movies putting their sweat and tears into an endeavor that fails. The lead "actor" from The Great Buddha: Arrival is also the lead actor in this film, and the rest of the cast is made up of a bunch of other people you'll recognize from various other toku series, specifically a lot of Gamera folks.

So, is the movie itself good? Very. It's pretty bare-bones, there's not a lot to it, but what makes it good is not even necessarily how it feels to watch it - even though it is fun and I liked it - but the fact that there's a director who is making these movies with a cast and crew who are as passionate as he is about preserving the idea of lost or unmade films that are as special and important to the history of this particular area of cinema as are the films that did get made. (He also did Hedorah: Silent Spring, which is great fun.) I think this one looks a little bit more polished than The Great Buddha: Arrival, but it's not supposed to be, since it's framed as a documentary shot in the early 1960s. There's not as much of a meta element here, which is fine, Great Buddha called for that and this one didn't, but it's still fascinating as an exploration of fiction and that liminal space inhabited by things that got so close to existing that the idea of them is still out there in the world even if they aren't. And the rats are so cute! A big part of why Nezura failed was because the crew couldn't rile the rats up enough to look menacing. And they really, really aren't, they just look adorable. I presume the crew of this film sourced them more ethically than they did in the '60s.

The Lake (2022)

directed by Lee Thongkham

Thailand

105 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This was something I was peripherally aware of for a while and interested in as an up-and-coming giant monster movie, but I didn't know too much about it aside from having seen someone claim it was "scarier than The Host". Also, I love that super generic tagline: "A Monster Will Rise". It certainly does! If all you get out of this is "scary giant monster movie", though, then I feel like you may have missed its underlying message - which, ironically, is also the case with The Host.

A voiceover narration at the beginning of the film provides us with some context about the world all of this is taking place in - that is to say, our world. The appearance of a monster is very much tied to the general unbalancing of nature, of climate change and the human sphere rapidly falling into chaos due to our own actions. Whether or not it's stated outright, this kind of thing is implicit in many, many monster movies: the monster as representation of a failing of things we've taken for granted about modern life, as a visual and physical indication that it's all falling apart. After a spectacular introduction to our monster, which I will address further later in this review, we start off on a farm (side note: more goats in this film than expected) where a little girl finds an unusually large egg and, unthinking, removes it from the water, causing its kin to come looking for it and venture into the middle of civilization where their presence wreaks havoc.

This movie is way more personal about its monster-on-human violence than a lot of monster movies dare to be, especially when the monster in question is huge. But to be fair, the huge one isn't the only monster here; there's a second, closer-to-human-sized, mostly bipedal creature who is the one that does most of the up-front killing. It's really brutal: we watch the characters flee from this creature as it flings other people aside ruthlessly, smashing them with its tail or its claws, carving its way through all of the farm workers until eventually the main-ish characters manage to escape to a hospital, telling their story about what they've seen (and not being believed at first, as is par for the course). The violence of this smaller monster initially raises some questions about what seems to be the core message of the film: how can we see ourselves in something that is mercilessly gouging its way through humans? But that's the truth of the whole thing, isn't it? I feel like this isn't a movie where the point is that humans vs. monsters is a one-sided battle; the monster isn't supposed to be a poor, misunderstood, helpless creature (although we do relentlessly misunderstand it), it's supposed to be like us, and we're like it. We're capable of senseless violence, sometimes to protect our own young, sometimes for no reason. So this movie is not asking us "You've just seen this monster kill all of your coworkers and your children, but please, have some sympathy for it", it's asking us "What parts of yourself do you see in what this monster is doing?" Are we ready to face that?

(Or maybe it's asking us none of this, and this is just extrapolation. But if I can't interpret art then what is art for? And what am I for?)

Okay, so let's talk about some good-looking monsters. I was extremely impressed with the first look we get of The Lake's lake creature - it is beautiful, rain-soaked and lumbering, huge and unaffected. The influences on its appearance are clearly all over the map, from aquatic creatures to dinosaurs to other monsters from other monster movies (can you feel the self-control it's taking me not to reference Godzilla in this review?), and in some frames, not in all of them, but in some of them, it looks so plausibly like a real creature that it gave me one of those moments of awe at the state of modern CGI. Unfortunately not all of it is that good, and I have a feeling that those early shots of the big monster are only as convincing as they are because of the pouring rain and darkness masking some of its rougher edges. I have to say I didn't care for the smaller monster nearly as much as I did the bigger one, and this is where you see a lot of the things that CGI can't quite smooth over, because you see it in daylight, moving at a much quicker pace than the big monster. The big one looks so real because its movements are so slow that it doesn't have the opportunity to look fake; there's not many actual life-forms that lumber around at that size, so we don't have a frame of reference to compare it to and think "boy, that looks nothing like a real animal". We're used to seeing stuff run around, and we're not as used to seeing stuff lumber, so it's easier to get away with faking lumbering. The smaller one runs and lopes and is far more motile, and looks less convincing because of that. In my opinion CGI hasn't gotten to the point where it can imitate a real creature's walk cycle perfectly - there's always something that looks unnatural, either too smooth or too jerky. I also just like the idea of a huge monster doing damage more than a littler one getting up close and personal. But the "up close and personal" is kind of the point of this film.

There's a couple of different human characters throughout this and none of them really feels like the "main" one. The one who gets the most focus on his personal backstory is (unfortunately) the cop and his recalcitrant teenage daughter. Cops with recalcitrant teenage daughters are a constant across all forms of media from all countries, and although the injection of a personal angle in a movie where most of the characters don't go beyond the surface level is probably a good thing, I was still bored by this because I see it too many times. Another thing this movie does more than expected is that thing you see in monster movies sometimes where they dedicate a few seconds to a totally clueless bystander's reaction just for comic relief: a guy with earbuds is oblivious to the carnage around him, a woman gripes about the "traffic" as people run and scream past her car, a couple snipping at each other get distracted by the huge beast about to crush their car. It's funny, and I wouldn't say The Lake overdoes this, but... it kind of gets close.

I will admit I don't fully understand the ending. I think I get the vibe, and it's something I love to see in monster movies - alternative solutions to a life post-monster than just "kill it real hard" - but if you asked me to explain it to you, I couldn't. Honestly, this movie feels like it ends around minute 80. What was happening then seemed so final that I was beginning to wonder if maybe this was just one of those movies that have ridiculously long end credits. The brunt of the film takes place over a very small slice of time, one panicked day or portion of a day when a bunch of people experience something weird and impossible, and then there's about 20 minutes of aftermath. It's interesting how the official police line is just to deny that anything happened, and it's also interesting how the film itself doesn't fully demonize anyone for this - there's no real individual human failure here, the end message is just a kind of whole-scale realization that humanity is looking at nature wrong and that this is going to come back and bite us (literally). The police chief who cements the official story that nothing happened is not necessarily a bad person, he's just doing the only thing he thinks is right; he's got family, he's seen horrific things, and this is his reaction. Our cop dad disagrees with this so much that he quits, but it's not a moment of hard feelings, just an irreconcilable difference. Faceted, measured stuff, not the knee-jerk macho yelling you expect out of cops.

There's stuff I didn't like in this and stuff I liked a lot but overall I think it's good because it's a new direction for a monster movie to go in. I would not expect anything less from Thailand's movie industry, which has produced some iconic horror films as well as multiple filmmakers who have pioneered and changed cinema in a more experimental direction. I recommend this but not if you're just looking to get scared. You have to think about it too.

Ghost Man (1954)

directed by Motoyoshi Oda

Japan

73 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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So this was a treat: A fairly early Toho film that I wasn't aware existed, fully (if a little roughly) subtitled and in decent quality if you don't mind your audio being a bit crunchy. And just look at that poster. There's not a lot of names in this that most people would probably recognize, although Motoyoshi Oda is perhaps best known for directing Godzilla Raids Again*, and this whole movie is based on a Kōsuke Kindaichi mystery. Kindaichi's actor, Seizaburō Kawazu, has a lengthy filmography including multiple solid gold Toho classics, but his role in Ghost Man is essentially next to nothing as Kindaichi doesn't even show up until halfway through the film. Haruo Tanaka, an extremely prolific actor who worked for around 70 years, is also in a supporting role as one of the more interesting of several fairly unremarkable characters.

The film opens with a brief scene of a mysterious three-fingered man escaping from a mental hospital. It's par for the course for this era, but there's no nuance in the film's portrayal of mentally ill people or mental hospitals; this character's status as an escapee is used as shorthand for his evil and dangerous nature. The general public is aware of this incident through newspaper articles concerning the worrying escape of the so-called "Ghost Man" from a local asylum; we then learn that sometime after this event, a spate of murders has begun to occur in which the killer targets young, beautiful women working as nude models and poses them for disturbing photographs after killing them. This has the members of an art/photography club that hires out a group of young women as nude models understandably worried. This club is where the central characters of the film (aside from Kindaichi, but again, he's kind of a secondary concern here) are all located. The real action kicks off when that same mysterious, three-fingered man visits the club looking for a model on behalf of his unseen employer. Unaware of the Ghost Man's appearance, the club lets an (incredibly frightened) model go home with this man to a predictable result.

I want to talk for a minute about the role of women in this movie because there is something interesting about it. I'm in no way claiming that this is progressive or feminist, but I did find it unusual that all of the women we see in this film work in a profession that's generally looked down upon - as either nude models or, later in the film, strippers. There's nothing lewd whatsoever here, even the strip show we see later in the film is very, very classy and modest, and doing work like this that would usually be dismissed as immoral or desperate is... for lack of a better term, it's presented as art. It's also presented as work. These are working women who talk about having to feed their families, and they're good at what they do, but they take jobs that they know put them at risk because they need the money. None of the women are central characters but they are all important characters, always present. Which leads me into my next point.

There's just a ton of people in this movie. Other reviews I've seen have remarked on this as well and it's totally true; this movie has a huge central cast. I guess this isn't relevant to the plot, but it gives the whole of Ghost Man a unique feeling. At one point after everyone has sufficient evidence to be concerned about the wellbeing of the first model who goes missing, four guys from the club and the other four models all pile into the 1950s equivalent of a soccer mom van and go investigate the Ghost Man's creepy old house. In any given scene in this movie there will be at least eight people, and most of them are silent, so the camera's not constantly jumping between them and it's not hard to follow or anything, but really the only time there's a single person focused on is when someone is getting murdered. There's a feeling of safety in numbers - especially with the women - that reinforces the sinister, dangerous tone of the whole film.

There's honestly nothing much that stands out about this movie, which is not surprising considering Raids Again is probably the Godzilla series' weakest point, but I have to say it's one of those things that I knew wasn't outstanding but enjoyed watching very much anyway. It hits all the typical beats for a mystery in which the suspect is completely unknown and motivated by a bizarre obsession, but it's also just a tiny bit darker than I expected it to be. The Ghost Man, his face wrapped in bandages, is somehow not as aesthetically imposing a figure as he's meant to be, but the way he works in the shadows and produces unsettling photographs of women he's done terrible things to makes him genuinely menacing. There's a scene where he's sitting in some dark corner of an attic flipping through a scrapbook of his "works" and it's very effective. His henchman is not particularly interesting, aside from having been played by an actor who was actually missing some fingers, and really seems to be there as a delivery vehicle for a twist that was, similarly, not particularly interesting. But if this movie lacks depth in its characters, it at least makes up for that by having a boatload of them to choose from.

That's about all I can say about this. I liked it. The lighting is really interesting and the film has that "seedy underbelly" feel despite its steadfast refusal to overtly characterize nude modeling and dancing as a shameful profession. A lot of movies might have relegated the models, who are present in all steps of the investigation - it's their lives at risk here, anyway - to the background, a pool of meaningless characters to be picked off, but this one doesn't do that. I do wish this got more recognition, because a lot of '50s Toho films tend to fall by the wayside in favor of their biggest hits from that decade.

*I am dying to see his film "A Texan in Tokyo", which is apparently about "a Texan visiting Tokyo [who] takes medicine that gives him strength".

Dashcam (2021)

directed by Rob Savage

UK/USA

80 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indie Kaiju Film Roundup, part II

Tokyo Abandonment Order Garateia (2016)

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

Japan

17 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

Hong Kong

16 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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The Specter (2005), directed by Junya Okabe

Japan

41 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

Smile (2022)

directed by Parker Finn

USA

115 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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