Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

directed by Yoshimitsu Banno

Japan

85 minutes

4 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indie Kaiju Roundup, part III

Yatsuashi [2021]

Directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

12 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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

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

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

Godaizer [2010]

Directed by Hillary Yeo

19 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

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

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

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

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

Magara: The Final Showdown [2015]

Directed by Jun Awazu

5 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

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

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

Howl from Beyond the Fog (2019)

directed by Daisuke Sato

Japan

35 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comedy Trio [Owarai san'ningumi] with English Subtitles

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

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

Zarkorr! The Invader (1996)

directed by Michael Deak

USA

80 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

"We have Shobijin at home."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blood Suckers (1971)

directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, Julian More

UK, Greece

87 minutes

1.5 stars out of 5

---

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

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

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

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

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

Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer (1984)

directed by Mamoru Oshii

Japan

97 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

But... is this really a bad thing?

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

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

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