Blood Suckers (1971)

directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, Julian More

UK, Greece

87 minutes

1.5 stars out of 5

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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.

Baby's First Silver Scream Spookshow

On May 17th some friends from my film screenings took me from my nice safe home and ferried me to spend a day in Atlanta going to my first Silver Scream Spookshow, which was featuring Mothra vs. Godzilla. The Spookshow is a kind of old-timey throwback horror-host thing starring Professor Morte and his troupe of Go-Go Ghouls, who put on a stage show before all of the movies they screen. I didn't know anything about this before my friend told me about it and very kindly offered to let me tag along, so here's me traveloguing about it. If you happened to be at the afternoon Spookshow and heard somebody yelling "HOLY SHIT IT'S KEMUR MAN", sorry, that was me, the spirit moved me.

the birds outside a french bakery are well fed indeed

Before the show, we went to the Monsterama Market Macabre, a fairly large dealer's room with a mix of people selling various vintage (and new) horror merch and vendors selling their original wares. I spent about an hour there and picked up a nice handful of random keshi figures (although some were suspiciously sticky, as old figures tend to be). The overall ratio of toku merch to general horror memorabilia was quite skewed in favor of horror, but there was one small Godzilla booth that I could have easily dropped much more money at than I did.

Afterward we ate lunch at a Peruvian place where the waiter referred to me as "young lady" which gave me the vibe that he perhaps thought I was a child or teenager (I am not a lady and I am also 26).

We rolled up to the Spookshow a good deal of time before it started and so got to watch as the place slowly got more and more packed. We were there for the early show, which was intended to be more child-friendly; there were a lot of kids in the audience but all were very well-behaved. The stage show lasted about 20 minutes and consisted of the Go-Go Ghouls' attempts to summon Mothra, which were largely unsuccessful but did summon a bearded human with what appeared to be two skeins of yarn stuffed into the chest area of their dress going by Madame Butterfly. During this time either Alien Zetton or Kemur Man (difficult to tell) and Cicada Human could be seen at large.

I was really, genuinely so normal about seeing an Alien Zetton in person.

Eventually the Ghouls' efforts to summon Mothra were successful and we were treated to a large and incredibly gorgeous Mothra puppet flying around the theater. I wanted to capture video of this but unfortunately I have dinosaur technology syndrome and the video I recorded only ended up running for one second.

Thankfully, I did get to meet the lady herself after the show. I also showed my Godzilla tattoo to Professor Morte. 

Yes, I've been Minilla this whole time. I'm sorry for lying to you all.

A short semi-interactive film featuring a really gorgeous Godzilla puppet resembling the GMK suit (Prof Morte mentioned something about the amalgamated souls of WWII, so I think this is their chosen origin story for Godzilla) was one of the highlights of the show for me. I saw the puppet and its creator after the show and was given a free zine as reward for wearing a sick-ass King Joe pin that day.

Afterwards we stopped by Videodrome, which I would choose as my preferred location for a kind of "locked in the shopping mall overnight"-slash-Groundhog Day scenario. I did not buy anything but I appreciated the Vinegar Syndrome pop-up that was happening outside the store and I hope I impressed the merits of Tai Katō upon the friend I was with.

I'm legally obligated to tell you that we absolutely, without a doubt watched the subtitled version and not the dub. For certain, that is what we did.

I don't get out of town too terribly often - much less to do three fun things in one day - so this was a blast. The Spookshow was everything I care about: kaiju movies, practical effects, supporting local movie theaters, people getting sprayed with Silly String (much more fun if you avoid being Strung yourself), et cetera. Consider this an advertisement for the Spookshow, which is playing a Ray Harryhausen movie as their next feature, if I understood correctly.

Ninja vs. Shark (2023)

directed by Koichi Sakamoto

Japan

77 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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Good if you want to see Haruki from Ultraman Z solo not just one but two evil sharks, the second of which explodes when killed.

I recently watched and reviewed Shogun's Ninja, and my opinion was that it was alright but the ending kind of pissed me off. Much like that film, Ninja vs. Shark has a cast largely made up of actors from tokusatsu series, in addition to having been written by Ultra series veteran Junichiro Ashiki. We've got Kohshu Hirano (Ultraman Z), Kanon Miyahara (the coolest person in this movie, Kamen Rider Gotchard), Yuichi Nakamura (Kamen Rider Hibiki), Hideyoshi Iwata (the guy who doesn't talk in Ultraman Geed as well as many in-suit Ultra roles), Takaya Aoyagi (Ultraman Orb, Ultraman Z) in a surprisingly small role, and more. There is a little less fight choreography in this than in the other film, which didn't bother me, but the film as a whole also feels less cohesive than Shogun's Ninja and is severely lacking in the "likeable characters" department, save for Miyahara's freaky kunoichi.

That leads me to the first point I'd like to address, this movie's elephant (shark?) in the room: Hirano's character Kotaro, towards the beginning of the film, rapes a woman and murders her husband as well as several bystanders, and this is not addressed at any point for the rest of the movie except - and this might actually be worse than if it had fully been left alone - when the murdered woman comes back as a reanimated corpse, carrying her husband's severed head and fighting against Kotaro via kunoichi enchantment. Three-quarters of the way through, in disbelief, I re-wound the movie back to the part where all that happened, just to make sure I wasn't misreading something. The protagonist - who has a character arc, a tragic backstory, and is ultimately set up to become the hero of the film - is a rapist and murderer and this is NEVER addressed? Not a single moment of "oh I've done some bad things in my past that I now regret"? No excuse, such as him being possessed by shark magic at the time? He just... commits rape and murder and then decides to fight as a good guy and no one ever mentions it? I'm probably going to rewind the movie a second time, because I just cannot believe it would do that. It soured the entire film for me and I think I otherwise would have enjoyed it.

So, moving past that as much as we can, let's talk about the plot, which is less bonkers than you might imagine for this kind of thing. A small village in Edo begins to have a significant sharkmurder issue thanks to a local cult leader using ninjitsu to possess sharks and have them kill pearl divers in order for the cult to obtain their pearls, which also have magic powers. The cult leader himself can turn into a kind of half-shark, half-human hybrid when necessary, and has also been stealing young, handsome men to bodysnatch them and maintain his eternal youth, spirit-hopping from body to body when his current one gets too old. That is all really pretty cool. Conceptually, this movie is pretty cool. Practically, it kind of does feel like a time-travel tokusatsu episode stretched out to 77 minutes and with more characters added into the mix. Is that a bad thing? Not inherently, but I already had some animus towards this movie due to its bizarre choices, so I didn't vibe with it.

The acting in this one is surprisingly decent, with Hirano putting in a particularly intense performance of a terrible character. I mostly know him as Haruki, who was a bit of a goofball; there's absolutely none of that here, he plays Kotaro totally straight. Speaking of intensity, Miyahara as Kikuma is also fully absorbed in her role, and with a lack of other interesting characters, she was the only person in the film I really cared about. The movie doesn't have Sakamoto's signature explicit horniness per se, but unfortunately there's still a really bad vibe running throughout it where despite the film only being 77 minutes it contains an uncomfortable amount of sexual assault that often comes out of nowhere. The cult leader is implied to maybe be attracted to men but that element is only tossed in to make the viewer uncomfortable.

And the sharks. A thought occurred to me while I was watching this, which was that if the whole idea of sharksploitation didn't exist, Ninja vs. Shark would honestly just kinda be a movie. The film is obviously conscious of the sharksploitation subgenre, but the way it incorporates sharks into the plot feels... diegetic, if we can apply that term here? Replace sharks with literally any other animal and it would still work. If the cult leader had the ability to enchant tigers and transform into them, this could be Ninja vs. Tiger. The CGI on the sharks looks dreadful, of course, but a sharksploitation movie wouldn't feel right without bad CGI.

I don't really know what to make of this. There's a good movie in there somewhere. Well, not "good", but fun. I just wish it had made better choices along the way. A combination of Ninja vs. Shark and Shogun's Ninja would be incredible, if it existed: women ninjas fighting evil sharks with a gay couple somewhere in the mix? Sakamoto, if you're listening, the people do seem to love a shared cinematic universe.

Shogun's Ninja (2025)

directed by Koichi Sakamoto

76 minutes

Japan

2 stars out of 5

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I'm going to be discussing spoilers here because I'm extremely salty about the ending of this movie.

Let's be real: most of the audience for Shogun's Ninja is probably tokusatsu fans. Directed by Koichi Sakamoto (Ultraman, Kamen Rider, a couple Metal Heroes and sentai titles, etc) and starring Himena Tsukimiya (Ultraman Blazar), Raiga Terasaka and Katsuya Takagi (Ultraman Trigger), Ayane Nagabuchi (Ultraman Orb: The Origin Saga which was good and you can fight me about it), Kanon Miyahara (Kamen Rider Gotchard), and probably a few other people I'm not aware of, there is obvious appeal for anybody who has seen at least one tokusatsu series made in the last 10 years. Outside of the casting, however, there's really not a lot of appeal if you like the actual tokusatsu parts of tokusatsu; the practical effects are basically nonexistent, and the fight choreography is good, but nothing special.

The story, however, was unexpected. Two ninjas, reduced to taking odd jobs after the Fuma clan was destroyed, become involved in helping shogun Iemitsu avoid his court's attempts to get him to sire an heir, which he doesn't want to do because he is gay. I was vaguely aware of the idea that Iemitsu was attracted to men, but I wasn't ready for it to be a factor in this movie, nor for it to be relatively - key word, relatively, there's heavily implied kissing but it's mostly done just offscreen - explicit. Moreover, even the villains in this movie don't have a problem with him being gay specifically; none of Iemitsu's family or retinue are actually homophobic, they just hate that he can't have a child if he doesn't take a concubine. It's always really refreshing to watch a movie that doesn't feel like it hates gay people... well, that's what I thought, anyway.

I'm kind of conflicted about how hard to be on this movie because I know that a lot of movies involving a gay romance subplot face immense pressure to not be accused of depicting homosexuality as, like, 100% a good thing. It is unfortunately still controversial to have a gay love story where the couple ends up happy together at the end. That being said, though, there's no shortage of BL out there and I just don't understand why this movie had to end the way it did. Again, it does feel very much like the ending was tacked on so as to not stir the pot too much, but it was disappointing to watch 70 minutes of ass-kicking in defense of Iemitsu and boyfie only to have him end up having a child with a woman he didn't love - the thing that the entire movie was structured to prevent him from being forced to do. I know it might not be historically accurate to see Iemitsu successfully evade his obligations to the shogunate, but I'm pretty sure none of the Fuma ninjas had supernatural powers, so that isn't historically accurate either, and it still happens in this movie.

Ugh. This movie is just... so good, up until it's not. One thing I really enjoyed about it was how many of the characters were women and how none of them really had a "reason" to be a woman: a lot of movies like this with women as both the heroes and the villains will give them some kind of special backstory while their male counterparts get to just exist for no reason, but it doesn't feel like any of the women in this movie had to justify their existence. There's no uncomfortable sexualization either, which is nice considering that Sakamoto's Sharivan movie was gross. All in all this was an unexpected movie where a bunch of women band together to protect a gay guy and his boyfriend from his manipulative family right up until it became a predictable disappointment. At least there's a gay couple in it at all, though. I recognize what a positive thing that is.

Attack of the Giant Teacher (2019)

directed by Yoshikazu Ishii

Japan

70 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

Before I watched this, the impression I had of it was that it was basically a worse version of Big Man Japan (which I haven't seen, because it's two hours long and I'm tired), but now I see that, aside from the fact that they both feature a giant human man, the two films aren't alike at all. Attack of the Giant Teacher is a compact, earnest, charming little movie, and the film is carried more by the fun that everyone involved in making it seemed to have than by its simple plot.

Said plot is thus: Mr. Miyazawa is a teacher at a night school, leading a class of nontraditional students who we get to know to some extent over the course of the film. Miyazawa is a good teacher who cares about his students, but he learns at the beginning of the film that his school is to be shut down for poor performance. He and some of his students brainstorm the idea to put on a musical as the school's last hurrah for its open-house day that year - this isn't a "we have to put on a musical to save the school!" kind of plot; one of the more interesting things about it is how there's no sign that anything that happens during the film actually influences the fate of the school itself. It lends a bittersweet quality to the whole thing when you realize afterward that, even though Miyazawa not only saved his students but also his city, he will still be out of a job pretty soon. While all of this is happening, evil aliens are headed towards Earth to eat its people. Refugees whose planet was destroyed by these aliens are hiding among Miyazawa's students, and they give him special pills that will cause him to become gigantic enough to physically throw down with the alien mothership.

The only two students who get much in the way of backstory are the disguised alien couple, but all of them feel like real people. No one in the cast has much in the way of previous film credits, which adds to that vibe. (I would have sworn in a court of law that the actress who played Toko in Cell Phone Investigator 7 was in this, but apparently it was someone else.) There is a bit of a red herring in that there's one odd guy in the class who is absolutely convinced that the world is about to end, but it turns out that's just kind of how he is, he has no weird secret motive, he's just another one of the students. Similar to the sparse and inexperienced cast, the sets are pretty rudimentary, but this works in the film's favor considering that much of it is set in a small, underperforming night school. The green screen and miniatures are surprisingly good, perhaps owing to director Ishii's experience on mainstream toku.

I'm not saying that this is the best movie ever made, but I'm really surprised that all of the top reviews on Letterboxd are either very negative or dismiss the film outright as a joke. Like I said, this movie feels like something that everybody involved in it really wanted to make. It doesn't try overly hard to be funny, even though its premise may come off as inherently comedic to anybody who isn't expecting it. It kind of feels like The 12 Day Tale of the Kaiju that Died in 8, although I think that film did not do as good of a job selling the viewer on what it was saying. I'd really love to see another movie like this from Ishii: the tokusatsu is fun, the obvious visual reference to one of my favorite Ultraseven aliens delighted me, the cast is charming and carries the film well, and it's aesthetically pleasing in a bare-bones, honest sort of way.

Don't want to give too much away too early, buuuut...

I'm about to start on a special subtitling project starring a special gal who may look just a liiiiiittle bit familiar. (Consider my other blog when I say this.)

  

All will be revealed in time.