Shock Waves (1977)

directed by Ken Wiederhorn

USA

84 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is one of those movies that I find myself rewatching often because there's just nothing else out there that feels exactly like it. If your desired vibe is "aquatic Nazis" you have Death Ship, which is pretty solid, but there's something about Shock Waves that's just... I don't know, it's really good.

The film almost goes out of its way not to introduce us to our characters. Our main cast is made up of a small group of clothing-reticent thirty-somethings, a grouchy middle-aged couple, a galley hand, and a captain; neither of the latter two are long for this world. We get given names (sometimes) but no surnames, and nothing in the way of backstory whatsoever. We don't even really know why all of these people are together or how they're related to each other. It's never explained if these are friends who knew each other before the events of the film or if they all just happened to be on the boat together. The middle-aged couple are certainly outliers - if I had to take a guess, I'd say they're just all chartering the same boat; but get used to this kind of ambiguity, because the movie never resolves it. And that's as it should be.

In place of characters, we have premise. It's a scant premise, but it works. The driving concept behind the film is that towards the end of WWII the Nazis had begun experimenting on humans with the intent of producing super-soldiers, and a nest of these experiments were lying dormant in the waters off of some unspecified island somewhere until our cast of characters are accidentally rammed by a desiccated Nazi ship and run aground, disturbing the zombie soldiers and their lone caretaker. There's really very little rhyme or reason here; one exposition dump in the middle is all you get, and the rest of the time the movie is heavily into "show, don't tell". And, again, that is as it should be.

The island where the film is set has this really authentic boggy, humid, sweltering vibe; to absolutely no one's surprise, it was shot in Miami. This was evidently Wiederhorn's first feature film, which he made after having won the Academy Award for best student film with producer Reuben Trane. It was shot for around $200,000 and the only real reason that Trane and Wiederhorn ended up making a horror movie at all was because the investors thought that horror movies had a better chance of making their money back. The aquatic Nazi zombies idea was basically pulled out of a hat, from what it sounds like.

Oh yeah and somehow they managed to get Peter Cushing to be in this thing. I don't know how. Like a lot of movies Cushing was in in the '70s, it's weird that he's there, but it would have been a much worse movie without him. His character in this is interesting; he doesn't have that much screen time, all things considered, but he's important to the larger narrative. He certainly isn't a sympathetic character by any means, but in a sense it feels like he has more depth than the others because he's the only one who actually does stuff (or is implied to have done stuff) instead of having things happen to him. There's one shot in particular, a lingering couple of takes on a tank full of exotic fish, that was probably intended as nothing more than some interesting padding between scenes, but it made me think a lot more about this random guy who's presumably been hiding alone on an island for 30+ years: somebody's feeding those fish, and it ain't the Nazi zombies. What was he doing? Living alone in a decrepit old hotel, feeding fish, trying not to wake up the zombies? He doesn't want intruders around as a matter of course, but he never gives any indication whether he actually cares if they end up killed or if he just doesn't want them exposing the zombies to the outside world. It's odd, and I doubt any of this was intended to be thought about for more than five seconds.

This whole production, and the whole film itself, is so spare and feels so lacking in detail that none of it should really work, but the starkness and the lack of melodrama is exactly why it's so great - not to mention the absurdly good soundtrack. I think this movie is a cult classic because it's really hard to sell someone on it unless you can convince them to go in blind. Basically the only way to describe it is that it's Just Real Weird, Man. It is a whole entire vibe. Every time I watch this I like it more.

Mexican Free-for-All (1968)

directed by Takashi Tsuboshima

Japan, Mexico, USA

162 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

84 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I'm a few days late, but happy birthday to possibly my favorite Godzilla movie aside from the original. This is one of several Godzilla movies (including the original) that I don't rewatch that often because it puts me in a bad mood every time I do. Rewatching it last night, though, I didn't have time to be put in a bad mood, because I was too busy thinking "Ah, this is the best movie ever made".

(Please read this review which sums up the movie in one paragraph better than I could if I wrote an entire book.)

While I think it's a masterpiece, Terror of Mechagodzilla had the lowest box office attendance of the Showa-era films. I tend to wonder whether the dour tone of the film had something to do with that. The previous year's Godzilla film, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, was one of the most bombastic, colorful, high-energy entries in the franchise, so to follow it up with a deadly serious, character-driven story where the monsters don't have any big funny moments - directed by master of melancholy films Ishirō Honda, no less - is a bit of an abrupt change of pace.

The film carries over a lot of plot elements from the previous film, the most central of which is an in-progress invasion by the Black Hole Planet 3 aliens and their most formidable weapon, Mechagodzilla, which they develop by abducting/coercing humans into working for them. The timeline of vs. Mechagodzilla is much more brief, however, and more traditional to the way these films are usually laid out, with the bulk of the story occurring in a linear fashion, and events unfolding as we watch the characters experience them. One of the intriguing things about Terror of Mechagodzilla, by contrast, is that the invasion had been going on in the background for a very long time: at least 20 years, as implied by the flashback of Katsura Mafune's accidental death and immediate revival by the aliens.

The thought I kept having while watching this film was that, on a surface level, a lot of what happens can be blamed on Dr. Mafune for being too stubborn to let go of an old grudge after being slighted by the scientific community. But despite this, despite him being written as a bitter old man who turns traitor to humanity as a whole, I can't do anything but feel bad for him. Both he and his daughter are manipulated at every turn by the Black Hole Planet 3 Aliens. He and Katsura are both victims. Watching this movie again I was struck by how abrupt the scene where Katsura dies for the first time is: the aliens don't give Dr. Mafune any time whatsoever to process it or even to find out who they are or what they want, they just immediately ingratiate themselves to his entire life in such a way that he's dependent on them for the continued preservation of the only thing really keeping him going - his daughter. To me - and this is a point I've never seen brought up before, so I'm probably wrong - it feels like Katsura's death had to have been pre-planned. For the aliens to be able to know the exact time that she would be electrocuted and be able to enter the scene right away as soon as she had died, they would have to have been watching. Using Katsura to manipulate her father was the plan right from the start.

The dub will let you forget this, and becoming jaded to kaiju movies in general will let you forget this, but the Black Hole Planet 3 aliens are incredibly brutal. There's kind of a cult indoctrination thing going on here. They insert themselves into Dr. Mafune's life and give him everything that he ever wanted: his daughter's life, the opportunity to prove himself right to his detractors, and access to what he wanted to research all along (Titanosaurus). Meanwhile they see him as so disposable that one of them uses him as a human shield without a second thought. (I remain salty that the English dub cuts out the part where he gets shot.) We also see that they abduct other humans for slave labor and cut their vocal cords. These may be, in name, the same aliens as the previous film, but the air of sinister coolness that Kuronuma had is replaced here by pure evil.

I'm still going. This is my review, I can make it as long as I want.

I would be remiss not to talk about Tomoko Ai's performance as Katsura, because she really is what holds the movie together; she's the most sympathetic character and the one who we're rooting for the whole time. She was at this point a very young actress with not a lot of experience, she had been playing a semi-regular role on Ultraman Leo prior to this and as the story goes she ran over while still in her uniform from that show to try out for the part of Katsura. She's really good at conveying that Katsura still has human emotions despite being a cyborg, but that those emotions are deeply buried. I love one specific moment after Katsura is resurrected for the second time, where Ichinose is tied up in the control room and Katsura gets up to adjust something on a panel in front of him; when he begs her to see reason, she says "Be silent", but why did she get up in the first place? Did that one knob really need to be fiddled with in that exact spot that would put her right in front of him?

I also want to talk about Akihiko Hirata's performance in this because I think he knocks it out of the park. I continue to maintain that he wasn't given enough roles where he got to actually act. (You all should watch Saga of the Vagabonds or Farewell Rabaul or something.) He adopts a specific set of mannerisms for this role that make the fake glasses and mediocre old age makeup they put him in forgettable. It's hard not to compare Mafune to Dr. Serizawa, since they were both played by Hirata - bookending his appearances in the Godzilla series - and in a lot of ways I feel like the stuff Mafune gets up to is exactly the kind of thing Serizawa would have been afraid would happen to him: Mafune's weakness is exploited by an interloper who seeks to use research of his for destructive purposes. I can see a reading of Mafune as an older version of Serizawa whose staunch refusal to let his invention fall into the wrong hands wavered after life treated him poorly.

So, yeah, this is a contender for my second-favorite Godzilla movie. Above all, the way I feel about this movie is that it is just phenomenally well-made, easily on par with anything and everything that came after it. Tonally, it's more akin to one of the Heisei films, like vs. Biollante or vs. Destoroyah. Every inch of this movie looks incredibly good. That first shot of Titanosaurus from below, set against the backdrop of a bright and sunny sky, is an all-timer. There's something sad about the way the film ends on a shot of Godzilla wading off into the sea when you consider that this was really the end of "old Godzilla": the series would return from its hiatus, and is still going strong even now, but everything would be different. This movie just means so much as an achievement in the series' history that I cannot understand why anybody wouldn't consider it one of the best.

Ultraman Arc the Movie: The Clash of Light and Evil (2025)

directed by Takanori Tsujimoto

Japan

75 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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So I finally got around to checking out the Arc movie. I say "finally", but it's only been a week or two since it got fansubbed, thanks to a team of people from r/ultraman helping with timing and whatnot. It certainly beats waiting donkey's years for the Blazar movie because Tsupro dragged their feet so hard on releasing it internationally! Ahem, anyway. I will talk spoilers in this review.

The Clash of Light and Evil is set between episodes 21 and 22, during some downtime for the Hoshimoto City branch of SKiP. It should be a fun, relaxing hot pot night, but a mystery man (who I am certain would have been played by Shōhei Akaboshi had this movie been made in the mid-'90s) turns up and insinuates himself onto Yuma, leading him through a rapid-fire series of tests intended to impress important lessons on him. We get a volley of new kaiju in this film, following the wonderful trend of Ultra series giving us original kaiju again: Mugon, a giant doglike creature; Gartura, an infectious alien plant; Repodias, the final form of an evil alien; as well as the debut of a dark-side Arc called Guil Arc and a couple of other aliens.

I have to say that this is one of the best Ultraman post-series movies I've seen. It's not that it's my favorite, per se - although it is very much up there, top five for sure - but I feel like this is the direction that a post-series movie should take: almost a fourth-wall break; you've seen the series, we know you've seen the series, we know you know these characters and what happens to them so let's dispense with trying to insert this movie in the middle of the timeline like nothing that came after it has happened yet. The way the film introduces itself, with voiceover narration from Yuma, is so clever that it immediately endeared me to it. The narration - and the broad sweep of the plot itself - situates the film in the middle of the series while acknowledging that it is doing so. It even feels like it's making fun of itself at times: the idea of Yuma basically having to speedrun the morality lesson that so often comes with an episode or story arc of an Ultra series is really funny.

Somebody (battleupsaber on twitter) pointed out that it's interesting how Yuma is reticent about the idea of humans and kaiju being able to coexist. This makes sense in-universe given that his parents were killed in front of him during a kaiju attack, but it is still a very interesting perspective for an Ultra protagonist to take, given that the tack taken by Ultra series basically since the beginning is that sometimes there can be kaiju who are not evil and don't need to be dealt with violently. The series has reckoned with this in various ways; early on, destroying monsters was something of a duty for Ultraman, even when he was uncomfortable with it - take Jamila for example - but that wasn't always the case, as the writers found ways to have Ultraman deal with kaiju in non-destructive ways, like shoving them into the Monster Graveyard where they'd be out of anyone's way (mostly). Yuma sees the consequences of the obligation he felt he had to report Mugon to the GDF. I think it's an interesting step for the series to take to show a protagonist who doesn't have an infallible sense of kaiju morality from the jump, and has feelings that are influenced by past trauma that he has to learn to deal with as he continues to hold the responsibility of being bonded with an Ultra.

I think Ultraman is going in a really promising direction. Blazar and Arc have genuinely felt like some of the most original shows from the New Gen era. It is pretty clear that the less toyetic elements are forced into the show, the better it is. I loved the armor equips in The Clash of Light and Evil, how Arc just manifests his armor when he needs it without cutting to the whole henshin sequence as happens in the series. I would really enjoy seeing it done that way in a mainline series, but unfortunately I don't think that will ever happen. Regardless, it is entirely possible to blend sponsor obligations with the series in a way that isn't distracting - which Arc mostly managed to do.

I feel good about this one. This movie was a really good cap to a really good series. I won't say "Ultraman is good again" because Ultraman has always been good. But I will say Ultraman continues to be good.

Without Warning (1994)

directed by Robert Iscove

USA

91 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I started to watch a video review of this the night before and found the concept of it so interesting that I actually paused it and decided to come back to it after I'd had time to watch the movie. It sounded familiar and I thought I'd probably seen it already way back in the shadowy recesses of time (2015 or '16, maybe) but it turns out I had not. While I did enjoy this movie, I had the opposite opinion of the reviewer (it was ZaGorudan, shoutout to ZaGorudan) in almost every respect.

So this was a CBS made-for-TV movie intended to pay homage to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds incident, in which a broadcast of a story about alien invasion caused real panic among listeners who didn't realize that it was fiction. The version I watched had the warnings cut off, but during its original broadcast, there were a multitude of bumpers and onscreen text crawls telling you in no uncertain terms that WHAT YOU ARE SEEING IS FICTION. Despite this, there were still, apparently, people who bought into it. This was probably due in large part to the fact that some real newscasters were part of the film: this is a tad before my time, but Sander Vanocur, Bree Walker, and the majority of the correspondents were played by actual reporters, working or retired. However, the rest of the cast is made up of (at times fairly recognizable) actors, which can take you out of the immersion if that's important to you when going into this film. (Or maybe you prefer to headcanon that everything is Q's fault.)

This works far better as a movie than as a movie that is asking you to pretend it's real. One of the ways in which the film gently reminders its viewers that it is fictional is with its pacing: events take place over the span of several hours, and this is mentioned within the dialogue, and yet the film is presented to us uncut save for commercial breaks, leading to a disparity between the stated time elapsed during the broadcast and the running time of the actual movie. This, while present for good reason, was something I didn't like about the movie. Things like Ghostwatch (which is much better) or even just other random found-footage movies done in a news broadcast/livestream format achieve a much higher level of immersion when they're presenting events to us in real-time, and it's always impressive to see a good "long take" that is in actuality the product of deft editing.

That being said, though, I actually did like the way the movie was paced - but only if I thought of it as a movie, not a plausible record of a real string of events. It knows when to pull out the really shocking things and exactly how long to wait between them. The naturally flat affect of the reporters adds a lot to the tension, because when it breaks, we know things are really starting to get serious; Vanocur, however, stays absolutely stoic up until the very end, which provides a very striking contrast with the other, more emotional players in the story.

Since everyone involved in this is supposed to be a real person, there are no "characters" per se, but the various job titles and political offices that make up the roster all play off of each other well. I did think the acting from some of the reporters was a bit stilted and even hammy (another point where I don't quite agree with ZaGorudan) but most of the interviewees were very convincing. One of the most important characters is a scientist who spends much of the movie understandably flipping shit: points like the conversation he has with the press after resigning from his job and thus no longer having to report to anyone reveal that this movie is indeed very good at knowing when to reveal major pieces of the narrative, but not in a way that feels at all like it reflects reality. I also really enjoyed the parts of this that were left unexplained and I wish there had been more of that. There are hints that perhaps there had been some kind of abduction component to the ongoing alien invasion: two people, one having shown up out of the blue and the other disappearing and reappearing later with burns and frostbite, live long enough to start mumbling mysterious gibberish before succumbing to their injuries - the gibberish is, of course, decoded at just the right moment within the narrative. 

It's interesting to me that this director has one of the most wildly unexpected filmographies of anybody who's ever made a horror film (this is the guy who did She's All That, for one) because it makes me wonder what this would have been like in the hands of people who were experienced with genre films. Would it have had the impact and spook factor of Ghostwatch, but at the price of losing the feeling of authenticity that comes from having no genre trappings whatsoever?

(If you want to hear someone with an actual brain talk about this, read Sally Jane Black's review on Letterboxd.)

Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds (1977)

directed by Junji Kurata

Japan

92 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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I'm rating this 2 stars with a caveat: last week I rewatched this at Flicker Theatre as the English-dubbed version, and although the original movie is still a pretty decent 2 stars, the dub took it up to a solid 4. It's not the worst dub I've ever seen, but something about its inherent goofiness combined with how absolutely dead serious the movie takes itself made for an extremely fun viewing experience, especially in a room full of maybe slightly drunk folks.

Although Toei is certainly no stranger to tokusatsu, Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds came late in the 1970s, when the kaiju and hero boom had given way to something new: the disaster movie boom. Our wonderful host at Flicker mentioned in his intro that this movie should be thought of more in the framework of things like Jaws and Orca and other nature- and animal-sploitation films than as a kaiju movie. Viewing it that way (along with, as I said, the goofy dub) helped me to be a lot more lenient this time, because I came to it with the understanding that it wasn't trying to be a kaiju movie and failing, it was trying to be a disaster movie and showing us some cool dinosaurs as a bonus, so shouldn't we all be grateful? Well, your mileage may vary on that last point.

The plot: Tsunehiko Watase plays Se-[coughs]Ashizawa, a geologist who gets wind of mysterious deaths and earthquakes in the area around Mt. Fuji that are rumored to be related to the dragon that, according to legend, lives in Lake Sai. Ashizawa comes to the village around Lake Sai to investigate and happens upon large tracks that look like they could belong to a dinosaur - just what his father studied, and no one believed him. Sightings of strange creatures mount and tension ramps up as more and more people and animals turn up dead, but the characters remain unaware of the plesiosaur for a relatively long time even as us viewers are treated to some weirdly sensual scenes of it killing various women who try to enter the lake.

The characters are fine. The first time I watched this I made a note that I really disliked Ashizawa, but this time, I can't say that I cared about him enough to have an opinion. Watase plays him with a kind of slick, slightly bastardy '70s dudeman vibe, which fits with the overall tone of the movie. I hope it doesn't say too much about me as a viewer that the part where he slaps his girlfriend didn't phase me because I've come to expect that kind of thing out of '70s movies. His girlfriend Akiko is played by yakuza movie actress Yōko Koizumi, and unfortunately aside from at the climax of the film (which looked like it was absolutely brutal to film) she doesn't get to do much acting, since there's a man present to shove her out of the way and get stuff done himself.

Throughout the whole movie I kept thinking how weird it was to watch a kaiju movie (okay, a "kaiju" movie) that was shot like a yakuza movie. All of the actors (note also Hiroshi Nawa, another Toei regular) are familiar from yakuza stuff. The insanely funky soundtrack could easily have been transplanted into any other gritty '70s crime flick. The director apparently worked exclusively in jidaigeki - especially films about ninjas - save for this film, which gives me the feeling that Toei just needed a guy and Kurata was the most convenient option. It's a weird thing, this movie, and it's kind of great.

Arguably, the film should be called Legend of Dinosaur and Monster Bird, singular. (And, I mean, in Japanese, it kind of is.) The film's two creatures are a plesiosaur and a rhamphorhyncus, portrayed (I think) with puppets rather than suitmation. Maybe it's just me, but I had no problems with the quality of the effects when it came to the dinosaurs; it they had been the most startlingly realistic dinosaurs ever put to film, it wouldn't fit with the movie's overall vibe. I really enjoy long-necked dinosaur-like creatures in tokusatsu, so I was rooting for the plesiosaur, but the smaller, more agile rhamphorhyncus won the day. In the end, though, it doesn't matter, because Mt. Fuji begins erupting and all is forgotten.

I'll end this review by talking about the thing I really, genuinely like about this movie: its sense of a global catastrophe starting to churn up, a paradigm shifting gradually as humans go about their business, singing honky-tonk cowboy songs and doing silly little science things, none of which amount to anything in the face of the awe-inspiring power of Mother Earth. If you really tune in to what the movie is saying and ignore the funk music and annoying protagonist, it's a solid disaster movie. It's one of those things where the portents of doom - Mt. Fuji blowing steam, ground subsidence, legendary monsters appearing - feel like they exist entirely separate from the human story at first, and when the human characters finally do become drawn irreversibly into their proper place in the natural order of things, all civilization falls by the wayside.

The Creeping Flesh (1973)

directed by Freddie Francis

UK

94 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I initially opened this review by saying something about how I usually have trouble reviewing Hammer horror movies because even though I like them they're just not that deep, but then I realized that this wasn't a Hammer movie. Well, it certainly has vibes like one. In any case, I rewatched The Creeping Flesh last night, and I found enough in it that I want to get some thoughts down. I'm going to be a bit negative in this review, which I feel okay about doing because I like this movie a lot.

The backbone of the plot is that a scientist, Emmanuel (Peter Cushing), believes that evil is a physical force that can be isolated and visually observed like any other part of the human body, and that a weird skeleton he found on an island somewhere is the key to unlocking this physical component of evil and, therefore, inoculating against it. He has personal investment in this idea because his wife - who dies early on in the film - had some form of mental illness which he fears she may have passed down to their daughter. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the skeleton has the annoying habit of continually trying to re-flesh itself, and must be kept dry at all times, since water has the effect of making it regenerate through vaguely supernatural, under-explained means.

I think we're all adults here and know enough to avoid falling victim to the idea that just because a movie depicts something, that means the movie endorses that thing. But The Creeping Flesh has such incredibly dated and racist ideas that it's hard to tell if said ideas come from 1973 or the late 1890s, when the film was set. I do tend to give it a little leeway because it feels so genuinely like the latter; the theories it presents about mental illness, women's propriety, and racial superiority/inferiority are so thoroughly entrenched in 19th-century eugenics that at times it feels like the film cannot but be attempting to cement itself inside the era during which it is set. It does add an air of authenticity that the narrative does not attempt to question these things, kind of like how The VVitch manages to be scary and intense specifically because it doesn't seek to subvert the idea that some accused witches weren't innocent.

But it also sucks.

We're shown a montage of Emmanuel's wife Marguerite "going insane", and what the movie defines as "going insane" is "being a slut". Having an affair with multiple other men while you're married is immoral, yes, but not insane. While Marguerite is in an asylum. eventually to die there, Emmanuel keeps the truth of her situation from his daughter Penelope, sheltering her into an immature naivete that ultimately backfires because by keeping Penelope from finding out she may have a hereditary mental illness she is also kept from, you know, tools and support that she may need to cope with said mental illness, giving her essentially no choice but to spiral down into self-destructive behaviors with no way to help herself. Her turn to insanity is, of course, also marked by slutty behavior and seeking casual sex - the perennial middle-aged man's worst nightmare of what could befall his precious daughter.

The issues with race need hardly to be addressed because the film itself lays them so bare in its synopsis: when you read that there's a skeleton of a "primitive man" brought back from New Guinea and supposed to hold mysterious secrets unknown to modern science, you know it's gonna get a little gross. Again, though, things were different 52 years ago than they were 130 years ago, and I want to give this movie the benefit of the doubt by assuming that it knows how gross it sounds when it talks about how "primitive" New Guineans will reach "a level of scientific sophistication that rivals ours" given 2,000 years' time.

Let's move on to the characters, because I think this is where the movie becomes really interesting. The wonderfully annoying thing about this (I say "wonderful" because I like when a movie makes you question where your sympathies should lie, even if this is unintentionally done) is that Emmanuel is framed as essentially blameless and victimized at the end of the film when the brunt of what happens is entirely his fault. Trying to mold his daughter into what he thinks a pure, upstanding woman should be at the cost of her own identity robs her of her freedom. Doing stupid racist science costs many people their lives. And it's only fitting that the film should end on him being confined to a narrow, secluded existence inside a mental asylum by someone who has power over him (his half-brother, played by a particularly Mephistophelean Christopher Lee).

All this and a nasty murderous reanimated skeleton too. The set dressing is unusually beautiful and intricate, and the film is confident enough to have multiple wordless stretches filled out with nothing but messing with various test tubes and beakers, which lends it a kind of artful feel. Lorna Heilbron does a great job as Penelope even if she's playing a laughable and dated idea of "insanity". The horror here is mellow and supplemented by interpersonal tensions and hubris rather than the in-your-face certainty of a vampire going around killing buxom women. It's a movie with a lot of flaws and I really enjoy all of them.