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.

Island of Lost Souls (1932)

directed by Erle C. Kenton

USA

71 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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I recently read H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau for the first time and was curious if any of the film adaptations made over the years have managed to get it right (or at least fail and be entertaining in the process) and while I do respect this for being an early sci-fi/horror film, I wasn't moved by it. I feel like disliking any movie from the 1930s immediately gets you branded as un-intellectual, or something like that, but this just didn't grab me. I appreciate the early practical effects, but in terms of actually conveying the feeling that I got from reading the book, Island of Lost Souls falls short.

Dispensing with the opening of the story within a whirlwind minute or two, the film introduces us to our soggy-cardboard-quality protagonist, Parker, as he's "rescued" after his ship goes down and only he survives. The drunkard captain of the ship that picked him up decides he no longer wants to have anything to do with him or the cargo he's been tasked to deliver to Dr. Moreau's isolated South Seas island, and essentially chucks it all overboard. Moreau is introduced earlier in the film than he is in the book, but it doesn't make that much of a difference; neither builds up much of an air of mystery around him; we know that he's morally bankrupt and delusional and there's no real need for a big reveal. Charles Laughton as Moreau is really the best thing about this particular adaptation, and although Laughton really doesn't have any kind of "mad scientist" vibe per se, he's still entertaining to watch and I wouldn't have picked anybody else to play Moreau.

This film also introduces an extremely boring love triangle between Parker, his fiancée Ruth, and Lota, the Panther Woman, one of Dr. Moreau's creations (she is actually credited as "the Panther Woman"). Nothing like this is present in the book, if I'm remembering correctly. There's not the kind of fixation on gender difference that there is in this film: at no point does Dr. Moreau focus on creating a woman in contrast to creating a man; he seems to have experimented with creating different genders, and it is at least mentioned that some of his creations are women, but the whole "can she love like a woman? does she have a woman's impulses?" thing is not a plot point in the book at all. This is why I said that this movie is really nothing special - it has cheap, borderline misogynistic elements inserted purely to meet studio demands of a love story. (Not to mention the hints of racism and exoticism, which actually are there - and a bit worse - in the book as well.)

I'm really just not getting anything out of this. Maybe it's my fault for comparing it to the book. I see reviews on Letterboxd referring to the storyline as "compelling and multifaceted" and praising the actors' performances. I don't get it. I will say that the moment where this actually stood out from the book was at the climax when Moreau's creations realize that he can die - this is more straightforward than the ending of the book, and much more powerful for it. I think restrictions in both content and production kept this from being all that it could (this is technically pre-Hayes Code, but very tame), but I have seen tons of horror movies from this time that still manage to be creepy and atmospheric without utilizing what would eventually become canonized as traditional horror imagery, so there's no inherent reason why Island of Lost Souls should feel like it lacks the ambiance of the book. Although The Island of Dr. Moreau is quite short, it needs something a bit more expansive than a 71-minute movie to get its message across on anything further than a surface level.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

directed by Shinji Higuchi, Hideaki Anno

Japan

121 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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In 2016, this was the first Godzilla movie I ever watched. I'm wondering if that decision is what led to me appreciating Godzilla on its own merits instead of having to go through the process of "hey, this goofy rubber monster stuff I watched as bad dubs on TV when I was a kid is actually good" to rediscover Godzilla like a lot of people do. A recent podcast episode that some people I know in meatspace put together made me want to revisit it, since I realized it had been a couple of years since my last rewatch, and I have to say I think this is one of my favorite Godzilla movies now.

Every time I rewatch this I feel like Higuchi and Anno are doing something with this movie that I understand on a subconscious level but that my brain can't fully parse. There's so many layers to it. It's a Godzilla movie, right? It's about Godzilla. But actually, it's about the inability of the Japanese government to respond to a natural disaster and the resultant loss of life and property. But actually, it's about nuclear waste dumping. But actually, it's about foreign relations. But actually, it's about the fact that humanity might have grown too big for its britches, that the immensity of the response we mount to Godzilla may be an indication that we've doomed ourselves to a perpetual arms race through which more and more horrifying weapons are brought into existence with no way to ever stop it until we all die. We could choose to stop it, of course, but will we?

But actually, it's about Godzilla, because Godzilla is about all of those things.

The entire first half of this movie is almost really funny. The stark contrast between humans running from boardroom to boardroom, volleying decisions around from government official to government official, and the actual on-the-ground reality of a giant monster destroying Tokyo is unavoidably comical. It only gets worse the more Shin evolves: eventually you have this devil-creature who looks like the most evil thing ever born inexorably making its way through the city while shooting lasers out of its back, and you still have to have boardroom meetings about it. None of the human characters are likeable in an individual sense (except, maybe, Patterson; she starts out looking vain and power-hungry, but she does eventually show that she really seems to have a personal connection to what she's trying to protect that goes beyond politics). All of them feel more like titles than people. You get the sense that some - maybe even a lot - of them are trying very hard to do what they believe is right, and that fact is the only shred of optimism the movie leaves us with, but for the most part, even the ones who do genuinely want to unite and help have to put up with bureaucratic labyrinths, if not within their own country, then with other country's governments.

And then there's the big sea creature who is sick and in constant pain from eating radioactive garbage. It's wandered onto land in a place that's not safe for it. It's bigger than us, and much more powerful than us, but it doesn't hate us. It doesn't want to hurt us. It doesn't want anything other than to not be in pain anymore. I can't conceive of a way you could find Shin scary. The whole "man is the real monster" thing gets bandied about all the time in these movies, but this is one of the first times I've really understood it: is it not horrifying that we have the ability to bring skyscrapers down upon a hurt and confused animal, and to freeze its blood? Hell, was it not horrifying 70 years ago that we (briefly, anyway) had the ability to rip it apart at the atomic level? I won't argue whether every effort to kill Godzilla has been the "right" decision or not, but wouldn't we mourn at least a little for the beauty of a man-eating tiger after it had been shot?

Watching Minus One and this movie in quick succession has made me so excited about the state of Godzilla. We can do so much more with it now. I am at least a little bit an annoying Showa purist, it doesn't get much better than Godzilla '54 to me, but the world has changed so much and there are so many new people around now who have lived with Godzilla their whole lives and are ready to bring their own skills and perspectives to the table. It's riveting! To have seen how this whole thing has grown and changed over the last 70 years, and to know it's got a vibrant future.

Happy Birthday Godzilla!

Here's to the next 70 years. Personally, I would love nothing more than to live as long as possible but still not see the end of the Godzilla series within my lifetime.

Like many people, I'm going to be seeing Godzilla Minus One this weekend. But I'm doing it while fully conscious that decisions by Toho - extremely deliberate decisions - regarding the international distribution of Minus One have led to huge swaths of the world having no way to see this movie in theaters. Toho is blatantly favoring North America (and the UK, to a lesser extent) because they know North American fans are where the money is. Putting profits over what people want from them, they ignore fans in other parts of Asia. One Twitter user has been very vocal about this situation ever since the first release of Minus One, and I won't name names since he's understandably tired of being dragged into debates about it, but you can find his posts about the matter on the r/godzilla subreddit as well.

I'm saying all of this because I love Godzilla. I know that there are people elsewhere in the world who also love Godzilla and just want to watch as many Godzilla movies as possible. I'm not an economist so I'm not going to get on here and pretend to advise Japan's largest film studio about distribution tactics, but it seems frankly stupid to be this stubborn about Minus One. They did this last year and now they're doing it all over again. Keeping Minus One out of theaters isn't going to stop anyone from watching it - they're just going to do it through avenues that Toho won't profit off of, which is the opposite of what they want. And yet this keeps happening. With the announcement that a new Godzilla movie has been greenlit, I sincerely hope Toho will make a change next time.

If you're celebrating 70 years of Godzilla this month (like I am), I would encourage you to celebrate 70 years of Godzilla, not Toho. They're a corporation just like any other, and are going to continue to make preposterous business decisions that don't reflect what fans really want out of them. Celebrate the incredibly talented people who have brought us seven decades of Godzilla movies. Celebrate the staff who've worked for Toho as artists and craftspeople - not the ones trying to decide who can and can't watch the movies. Celebrate the complexity of Godzilla's story and the ways it has been interpreted. Celebrate the beautiful art that comes out of every single Godzilla movie. Don't celebrate a corporation that doesn't care about the same things as you.

(I most certainly have some Godzilla '54 posts up on my other blog.)

Happy Halloween from yours truly.

Not really a "post pictures of my face on the internet" kind of person but I want everyone to know I do indeed still have the Mysterian costume and in fact I have upgraded it with a better jumpsuit this year.

 

Longlegs (2024)

directed by Osgood Perkins

Canada/USA

101 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This may be the only new film besides Ultraman: Rising that I review this year. I've severely fallen out of the loop with new horror, and that used to make me feel guilty, but now I'm mostly okay with it. I'll get around to stuff when I get around to it.

I'm inherently skeptical of any movie focusing on Satanic Panic themes. The phenomenon is a bit like the witchhunts of late medieval Europe and colonial America: the witches weren't real, but the hunt was, and it had devastating consequences. The two subjects are similar also in that there are a lot of people who view it on an aesthetic level (E.G. Salem's thriving tourist industry), which can feel really disrespectful to the victims and their families. I think Longlegs handles this fairly well because it's level-headed about what there actually was to fear about the possibility of a network of Satanic cults throughout America: serial killers, actual serial killers, not random rock musicians encoding backwards messages into their records or Harry Potter books encouraging children to do witchcraft. I'm going to assume Perkins has thought about these things and how to depict them with as much sensitivity towards real-world people as possible while still creating an effectively scary, authentically Satanic movie.

I think I mentioned in my review of Skinamarink how interesting it is when a horror movie uses the type of lighting and set decoration that my brain associates with coziness or a feeling of being comfy and safe at home: enclosed, lived-in spaces with low ceilings lit softly by lamps or a single light on somewhere in the house, usually at night, sometimes in the dark parts of the year. A lot of Longlegs takes place in lighting like that. When this is done right, the effect can be discomfiting in an almost subconscious way, and I think Longlegs does it very right - it front-loads with these types of scenes, giving us a lot of shots of Harker within her quiet house or her workplace after dark, but it also introduces horror into that environment, giving us the feeling, for the rest of the film, that the environments we think could be a refuge might actually harbor demons.

I've seen a few people saying that Satan is not a scary enough villain. I'm one of those people, but I also don't think that necessarily has to effect the way I feel about Longlegs, because even if I don't think Satan is scary (because I don't think he's real), I can still accept and become absorbed in a movie where the people in the movie think Satan is real, or where Satan actually IS real, within the context of the story. It's like watching haunted house movies when you don't believe in ghosts. And again, this is a thing that I think Perkins probably payed attention to: depicting a full-frontal Baphomet holds no surprises; there's no real scares to be had in black metal imagery. So instead he has these hints of something terrifying and otherworldly peppered throughout the film. There's one split-second shot of a silhouette against a glass door that stood out as one of the best moments in the film, to me.

I'm not sure how I feel about the way Longlegs really does seem to move further into the supernatural and weird as it goes on. I realize the irony of saying this about a movie that posits that Satan is real, but the whole plot element with the dolls failed to land in my eyes because it feels like it just goes too far out. It's too complicated. There's too much left unexplained. "Everything happened because Satan" is a simple explanation, but it's one that makes sense because it's been done before. Expecting me to accept some kind of weird metaphysical transfer of energy into a series of creepy dolls that somehow have mind control powers and can be used to allow Satan to infiltrate people's homes and drive them to murder each other is just... no, actually, no thanks, that's weird, I don't want that in my otherwise fairly grounded horror movie.

I disliked Gretel & Hansel on everything save for an aesthetic level for much the same reason as above. It could have been a really solid The Witch-style folk horror, but Perkins does all this weird stuff with it that leaves it feeling more fantastical than I feel suited its premise.

I've always like Maika Monroe, and though I was doubtful of casting somebody as recognizable as Nic Cage as the villain, I think what they do with him is really interesting - putting him in such heavy facial prosthetics that you can't really tell who he is lets him lend his inherent Nic Cage-ness to a character other than himself. I think that was a good choice. I guess your enjoyment or non-enjoyment of Longlegs boils down to how much of it you want to take seriously, because there is a lot in it that cannot be taken seriously at all. Overall, it's alright. Watch it in a vacuum without having seen any previews or read any reviews and you will probably get more out of it.

Guyver: The Bioboosted Armor (2005)

directed by Katsuhito Akiyama

Japan

780 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Another review for a TV series today. I held off watching this for a long time because all I ever heard about it was that it was less gory than and generally inferior to the '89 series - which I hold dear in my heart - but after finally watching it, I have no idea what everybody was talking about. This show rules.

I think you should listen to the absolute ripper of an op while reading this for maximum effect.

It would be an understatement to say that a lot of anime and manga focus on high school students stumbling into a dangerous or bizarre situation and ending up gaining (or finding out that they've always had) special powers. It's probably impossible to reckon the number of series that use that trope. But Bioboosted Armor feels like it does it differently. The story begins with a high school boy, Sho, and his friend Tetsuro coming across a Control Medal (the device that allows a wearer to bond with and activate a Guyver suit) in the woods. Sho touches it and it immediately and forcibly equips him with the Guyver suit, leading him on accident down a path that will entangle his life with the destiny of the entire planet. Pure chance - not fate, not destiny; unless you want to headcanon it that way.

Sho himself doesn't get a lot of characterization, he's just sort of A Guy, but the people around him are presented in really interesting, faceted ways that I want to explore before getting further into the review. One of the standout characters to me is Mizuki, Sho's classmate and maybe-girlfriend, who is dragged into the chaos by virtue of being Tetsuro's sister. I will never forget a YouTube comment I read when I was watching the '89 series that said something like "I feel so bad for Mizuki, she's just a little girl and her entire life got turned upside-down". Mizuki is in a lot of ways the exact opposite of the traditional anime schoolgirl: she's clearly immature, not equipped to handle everything that's being thrown at her, constantly depressed and anxious, etc - basically, she's the only person in the show who acts realistically given the situation. I love how when everyone around her talks about fighting and dying and giving one's life to protect the greater good, Mizuki is there essentially saying "What THE HELL are you people talking about, you guys are my FRIENDS and you're GOING TO DIE. That is NOT NORMAL and why are you acting like it is."

Tetsuro is also cool because they never shoehorn him into either being the funny fat guy comic relief or the funny smart guy comic relief. He is clearly very smart but he has his own issues and deals with the ongoing trauma of the series in his own way.

The thing about watching this after having already seen the original series was that I knew I was eventually going to get to the part where Sho's dad (Fumio) dies. I swear, man, I've seen NGE, and Sho's dad dying bothers me almost as much as anything that goes on in that show. Fumio is one of the most normal anime dads I've ever seen: he loves his son very, very much; when we get to read his diary, he talks about how he's concerned for Sho (who has acquired the Guyver suit, but keeps it secret), but he trusts that he'll open up to him sooner or later. The set-up of Fumio as a caring, kind father who believes in his son makes it incredibly painful when - and this is a big SPOILER, but I want to elaborate the whole scenario for emphasis - it seems like both of them finally escape from Cronos, but Fumio has secretly been processed into a Zoanoid, and because Sho refuses to fight him after both of them transform, Fumio as Zoanoid crushes Sho's skull and activates the Guyver suit's incredibly aggressive autopilot mode, rendering Sho into a passenger within his body as he literally vaporizes his own father.

I knew it was coming and it still hit hard.

The concept of the series is premium juicy sci-fi, although the pacing suffers at points due to repeated exposition dumps that bring the show to a halt for several episodes in a row. I love stories where humans are left to infer information about an alien species through their technology because the aliens themselves are absent. We know the Creators' basic goal - engineering humans as perfect living weapons - but we don't know why, or how they operated on Earth. The Guyver suits were never meant for human use, and seeing Sho and the others wear them and eventually even pilot an abandoned Creator ship feels like this almost Rendezvous with Rama scenario where something beyond our imagination is left to us with no explanation.

Unfortunately, most Guyver series seem to have "non-ending" syndrome. After building up a ton of momentum Bioboosted Armor fizzles out into a final three episodes that halfheartedly introduce a future where Cronos rules the world and Zoanoids are integrated into human society. This could have been interesting if it was given the proper time to be fleshed out, but as it is, it feels like an afterthought. The fight between final-form Guyot and Makishima while Sho is desperately trying to pilot the Creator ship out of a volcano and get everyone to safety is more riveting than anything the final few episodes contained, and that's a shame. For a series that had been so epic before, we should have gotten an ending that felt more cathartic than this.

I'm going to stop here, because I've gone on way too long, but I want to go to bat for this series that seems to be dismissed in favor of the earlier one. I do think that I like the '89 series better, but it was so hamstrung by budget constraints and other production issues that it never felt like it achieved its full potential. This series gets closer - but again, the rushed ending does it a disservice.