Operation Crazy Hong Kong (1963)

directed by Toshio Sugie

Japan

93 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Also known under the objectively more boring title Crazy Cats Go to Hong Kong.

Usually a film or television series tends to get more formulaic as it goes on, but with the Crazy Cats movies I've seen, it seems like the opposite is true. These earlier entries are, at times, virtually indistinguishable from each other except for a specific "hook" (in this case their trip to Hong Kong). This isn't a point against the films: they may be formulaic, but it's a good formula.

As with most of these, Hitoshi Ueki plays a guy who is trying harder than anybody has ever tried to not do work. The joke here (unstated, but implied by the lengths Ueki goes to) is that, in figuring out ways to weasel his way out of going to work and paying his tabs, he's actually doing a lot more work than if he just held down an office job without complaining. Ueki here has the same vibe he usually does; he's a carefree, roll-with-the-punches type of guy whose zeal for being irresponsible is infectious.

In the first half of the film, Ueki and some restaurant owners who he owes money to dream up a scheme to open a Japanese restaurant together in Hong Kong, the catch being that if they're successful, they'll all forgive Ueki's debts. The other restaurant owners consider it a fun idea, though ultimately just an idea, but Ueki is all for it, pulling connections to get himself endeared to a businessman from Hong Kong and a few other wealthy people who can finance the restaurant. But once the crew assembles and opens their restaurant, they find that just serving food isn't attracting many customers. It takes a stint in jail following a promotional parade-slash-public-disturbance for them to realize that people don't just want to sit and eat, they want to be entertained. All of this culminates in what is very much the central scene in the entire film: a live jazz performance where the Cats act like absolute fools to impress a stony-faced businessman who never laughs.

That performance really was the highlight for me. Everything else proceeded as expected; there were the requisite jokes and the usual guest actors (although I was quite happy and surprised to see Kingoro Yanagiya and Jimmy Lin Chong), but then that performance hits, and it's just such a perfect showcase of the talent this band had for physical comedy. No, the jokes are not that original, but they do them so well. Maybe that's why Crazy Cats kept making successful movies together for such a long time: they had a niche and they were the best at it.

I still wouldn't recommend this one over their much grander "Crazy Cats go to [location]" films such as Mexican Free-For-All or Las Vegas Free-For-All, but it's pretty solid. And beautiful as a little snapshot of Japan and Hong Kong ca. 1963, as well.

(I also have to mention that Eitaro Ishibashi and Senri Sakurai are pretty much canonically a gay couple in this. They're depicted in a very stereotypical and I suppose somewhat offensive way, but still. I'll take what I can get.)

Red Lion (1969)

directed by Kihachi Okamoto

Japan

117 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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A "here's the new boss, same as the old boss" movie for the ages.

I've watched this movie many times and consider it a favorite (it actually seems to get better every time I watch it, which is always a good quality for a movie to have) but I've never written about it before because with certain movies, especially ones grounded in historical events I'm not terribly familiar with, I feel like I'm not smart enough to say anything coherent about them. But this particular movie, despite being jidaigeki, very clearly has things to say not just about the state of things as they were at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, but also as they were in the 1960s and, I would argue, perennially.

To give a very broad overview: after the Shogunate is abolished, Imperial troops called the Sekiho-tai are tasked with spreading the message of the change in power across the country, stripping officials of their previously-endowed statuses, and convincing the populace of the wisdom and superiority of the new system of governance. Red Lion follows a very low-ranking member of these troops named Gonzo (Toshirō Mifune) as he basically charms his way into getting appointed as an official representative and is tasked with liberating his small, back-country hometown and its people. But while Gonzo has an optimistic vision of this new state of affairs as a peasant's dream - a system where poverty will be eased and the common people will no longer be under the boot of their previous rulers - the truth is that although the names and faces may change, the influence of governmental power on the lowest rungs of society remains the same.

And that last point is really the crux of this entire movie, and the reason why I like it so much. Gonzo is so, so genuinely convinced that this is really it: this is the time when people like him will finally get their day in the sun, when life will no longer be back-breaking labor just to live at a subsistence level under heavy taxes levied by rich men. He believes in this so thoroughly. He is such a deeply earnest man - and, yes, as the movie reminds us, a little simple, but if anything the viewer is urged to envy that about him, to admire his lack of jadedness. Gonzo is so wrapped up in his idea of a utopia - and his joy at playing a part in ushering in that utopia - that he's blind to the reality of his situation.

I really think that this is one of Mifune's best roles. As others have said, for him it's a bit of a... maybe the opposite of a face-heel turn? A heel-face turn? It's a rare example of an actor who is instantly recognizable managing to ease flawlessly into a role that requires him to act like a bumbling, simple, pure-hearted country bumpkin. Nothing about his performance here comes off forced: not his infectious physicality, not his stutter, not his zeal for collective liberation. And it's not just Mifune, either: this movie works as well as it does because it has a fantastic ensemble cast, from Minori Terada as Sanji the pickpocket to Nobuko Otowa's small but compelling role as Oharu, a freed prostitute. I also have to mention the comedic elements of the film as well, because besides being an effective societal commentary, the movie is also funny as hell (I want to study Yūnosuke Itō's line delivery in a lab).

Although Gonzo as an individual ends up unable to overcome the sheer power of the ruling class, the idea of liberation that he infects his hometown with survives beyond his death, as is implied in the final minutes of the film. This is, if we can call it "optimism", an unusually optimistic view for Okamoto, whose outlook tends to be a bit cynical - or, I guess, just realistic.

I'm sure this won't be the last time I revisit this movie, and I'm glad to see that there seem to be more positive reviews for it on Letterboxd than when I last looked. I think this is one of Okamoto's best, one of Mifune's best, and honestly, one of my favorite jidaigeki. Not only does the film have a deeply resonant moral, it's also just really, really fun.

Elves (1989)

directed by Jeffrey Mandel

USA

89 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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"Are you asking me if I believe in elves? No... but God did."

Every year I get worse at watching Christmas movies. Sidetracked by other stuff, too busy (somehow I seem to always take on more projects than usual around the holidays), bored by every Christmas movie on offer, or just plain unwilling. I could have even seen this at a local bar/theater, but it's cold outside and I work weird hours. So I Elved at home, and I'm not really sure I fully understand what I experienced.

Elves is a movie that makes me philosophical about the nature of the American film industry as a whole. I watch a lot of Japanese movies (obviously), and I definitely don't want to fall into the trap of thinking everything made in Japan is automatically better, but it really does strike me that even the shittiest Japanese movie I've seen seems to be at the very least watchable in a way that bad American movies are not. A bad Japanese V-cin horror movie from 1989 made on a beer-money budget by a bunch of teenagers feels like it has more life in it than Elves. It seems like there's a proliferation of American movies that, like Elves, look like real movies on the surface, but are just so deeply bizarre in terms of plot, pacing, character writing, and acting that it amazes me people actually managed to cobble together enough money to get this done and make it look professional and still managed to be so bad at it.

The story here is that a teenage-ish girl unwittingly finds herself part of a plan put into motion before her birth to have an elf impregnate her and produce a race of superhumans that will carry out Nazi orders and bring the Fourth Reich to bear. Elves, the film posits, were the "little creeping things" designated by God to have refuge on Noah's Ark at the time of the flood. (Yes, I am serious.) (None of this explains why the movie only seems capable of showing one elf at a time.)

Fortunately, Julie Austin, who plays Kirsten, is one of the movie's 2 decent actors (the other is Dan Haggerty doing down-on-his-luck MacReady) out of a cast of people who seem only vaguely aware that they're in a movie. Elves was actually a lot more watchable because of her and Haggerty; you can kind of get away with a movie being bad if one or two of your actors take it seriously. Kirsten's life sucks so bad it's almost not believable: abusive mom, grandfather who turns out to also be her father, pervert mall Santa and a neurotic boss making her job miserable, weird little brother, et cetera. But she is one of the more likable characters, which is fortunate since she's also the protagonist. She does tank her respectability by calling the elf the F-slur in what should be her climactic moment, but I guess you can't set your expectations too high for this sort of thing.

I watched this as a really bad VHS rip on YouTube, which added to the charm but also made it flat-out difficult to see anything. What I could see of the practical effects left something to be desired. The elf was puppeted well, but something about its static facial expression (gargoylish; laughable) made it look goofy instead of menacing or even really interesting. I did enjoy that the movie immediately turns into a peyote trip when the elf finally gets killed, that was fun.

All in all I think I definitely would have been better off watching this in a bar. There are one-off quotes that are absolutely hilarious out-of-context, such as the one I opened this review with, but on the whole, watching this alone in your house totally sober is just you, alone in your house, sober, watching a bad Nazi elf movie. Whether or not that sounds like a good time is up to your individual taste, but for me, if I'm watching a bad Christmas movie, I want it to at least be fun, and this just kind of bored me.

Trigger warning for animal cruelty.

Please read my essay.

Or don't, it's up to you. But I'd like it if you read at least some of it.

Here.

Hosts (2020)

directed by Richard Oakes, Adam Leader

UK

89 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Note: This is an old review that I've dug up from my archives and reworked for quality. I do not have my shit together enough to do a new review again this week.

When winter rolls around and I turn my eyes towards the crop of new holiday horror movies, I do not expect them to be good; if I can get a laugh out of them, that's great, but more likely they're just more slop on the pile and that's that. This is where I was coming from when I started to watch Hosts, and I got completely blindsided by a movie that was genuinely disturbing: a gut-punch in various ways. If this was not set at Christmastime, I would still have thought it was a brilliant movie, but Christmas provides some context for the events of the film that is important in two ways, one of which I'll get into now and one I'll talk about later.

So one of the many things this film is good at is creating characters who you really don't want to see die (and then killing them, of course). It is extremely heavy on the familial love, and some romantic love as well, and if you're particularly jaded about that it could feel cloying, but to me the performances were authentic enough that it didn't bother me how hard the film emphasizes the bonds between its characters. We don't spend a lot of time with the couple who eventually become the antagonists, but they come off like a young couple genuinely in love and then something happens very suddenly that I won't spoil, but that made me realize I was in for something better than the cut-rate holiday slasher with some possibly demonic twists that I expected. If you've seen this, I think you know what scene I'm talking about. I did not expect the possession to look like that. I've never seen possession look like that.

Another interesting thing this movie does is tell us that the things happening here are happening everywhere else too, outside of the scope of the film. Await Further Instructions, a movie I recently rewatched that cemented my opinion on it being one of my favorite horror movies of the past decade, also does this. The hints we see on the news that suggest our characters are only a random couple of victims in something that's turning into a country-wide phenomenon makes everything feel much more hopeless.

There are other elements that are used in the development of the film's villains that make them both interesting and genuinely terrifying, and this is the other thing I mentioned earlier that hinges on this being a Christmas movie. A really common theme in Christmas horror is for the villain or villains to kind of represent an anti-consumerist mindset - maybe it'll be somebody who's traumatized by Santa and fed up with the empty commercialization of the holiday, or maybe it'll be Krampus, who, uprooted from his origins, has become a symbol for those disillusioned with Christianity. But each time, when something like that is used, there's always a sort of wink-nudge to the viewer that we're supposed to, on some metaphorical level, sympathize with the villain - after all, the commercialization of Christmas is bad, and everyone is tired of having Christmas music shoved down our gullets. We're not expected to excuse murder in the name of being tired of Salvation Army bell-ringers, but the sentiment is something we can agree with: aren't you just exhausted by all of this? Aren't you tired of people faking charity and togetherness?

However, what Hosts does is use that basic premise (and this is done extremely artfully, only hinted at, never exposition-dumped on us) to construct a backstory for its villains - but it does not make them sympathetic. The implication that the entities that possess the first couple were/are something that existed pre-Christianity, and that they were duped into thinking there would be a place for them within Christianity, only to be driven out and painted as sacrilegious, is something that, in this case, is not presented as a sympathetic backstory. In this case, it makes them bitter, enraged, and vengeful. It's not funny and ironic when they return, fueled by hatred for the Christian holidays that subsumed their own worship; it's terrifying, because their power is coupled with an intense desire for revenge that's as illogical and self-absorbed as the fae, gods, and various other entities of old always are. And humans always end up at their mercy.

It's a latecomer, but this is definitely high up on my favorites list of the year. I would happily (well, maybe that's not the right word, as it is quite brutal and violent) watch this any time, not just around the holidays. There is something to be said about real-life stigmatization of pagan worship and the way this movie plays into the idea that it's a negative, dangerous thing, but... that's a whole other discussion.

Mickey 17 (2025)

directed by Bong Joon-Ho

USA, UK

137 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I read Edward Ashton's Mickey7 and its sequel Antimatter Blues not necessarily because I enjoyed his writing style but because the idea was interesting. I personally found his brand of humor to be too similar to what I've heard referred to as "Avengers humor": snarky, snappy one-liners that often feel inappropriately placed and never allow the work to give any weight to its subject. I didn't hate the writing style, but I sure didn't like it. Which is why I think sometimes it's okay if a film adapted from a book bears very little resemblance to its source material.

The main important plot points that are carried over from the book to the movie (if I'm remembering it right, it has been a while since I read Mickey7) were the basic idea of Mickey Barnes as an "expendable", a guy who signed up to have his consciousness uploaded into a brick and downloaded into an artificially-manufactured body reprinted on spec so that people could throw him at every possible dangerous situation and not get their hands dirty; the Niflheim colony, an inhospitable, icy human settlement on a distant planet; and Mickey's much-cooler-than-him girlfriend Nasha. And, of course, the fact that there are, for a time, two Mickeys, which is against some vaguely-defined international law that was enacted because one guy always ruins the fun for the rest of us. Or three guys ruin it. I don't know. That's kind of the point.

Robert Pattinson as Mickey brings something to the character that was entirely absent in the book. There, Mickey was a kind of short, schlubby, insecure dude who overcompensated for his perceived flaws with faked bravado and constant jokes. Pattinson instead plays Mickey as that one coworker you have who always tells you slightly disturbing stories about his personal life without being prompted. He's totally earnest, just trying to get through his life - lives - with a minimum of trouble. When Pattinson is playing both Mickeys, he manages to convey the differences in their personality with nothing but posture: 17 is more round-shouldered and timid, but 18 stands with confidence. They do feel like completely different people, even though they're supposed to be clones.

I was surprised by how much the plot of this movie feels like it's drifting along aimlessly. Maybe it's because I was expecting it to hit all (or most) of the same beats that the book did, but there's a real sense of "Oh, I guess we're focusing on this now?" that left me unable to predict what the movie would choose to make an important plot point and when. Again, it's nothing like the image I had in my head as I read the book, and again, that's good!

One thing I did really appreciate was all the small detail that went into this. It is obviously meant to be a satire on Trump's America, and it excels at that, but it also feels like a world of its own, which is crucial in making it feel like science fiction rather than a parody film. I particularly enjoyed the random guy in the pigeon suit. I don't know if that was a reference to something in real life that I was missing, but I hope it wasn't; I hope the pigeon was intended to be recognizable only to the characters in the film. Too much of it can get weird, but I love those kinds of things, little references to things that everyone acts like they're familiar with while we the viewers aren't in on the joke.

There's not a ton more I can say about this. It's a very satisfying movie. It's cutting and clear about who it's making fun of without being heavy-handed (though as someone who occasionally enjoys their movies with a heavy hand, I was mostly ambivalent about this). Everybody in the cast puts in a stellar performance. For a movie as long as it is, I'm not sure why it occasionally felt rushed - I guess that's just what happens when you condense the dozens-of-hours-long experience of reading a book into a 137-minute-long movie. But it's quite good. And it is one of only three new movies I managed to watch in 2025, so by default it's one of my favorites of the year.

Japan's No. 1 Playboy (1963)

directed by Kengo Furusawa

Japan

93 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Full disclosure: I did proofreading and QC for this movie's English subtitles. I'll be going into full spoilers below.

The Japan's No. 1 [....] series was a vehicle for the inimitable Hitoshi Ueki, one of the main faces of the jazz band/performance troupe Crazy Cats, who themselves had their own long-running series of films. I do prefer films where the Cats work as an ensemble (each of them does have a role in this film, but they're pretty perfunctory; it's Ueki's world, we all just live in it) but you absolutely cannot deny the magnetic energy Ueki has, which is the driving force behind this movie. But there's a little more to it than just that, and that's why I found this one so interesting.

Ueki plays Hitoshi Hikaru (most Crazy Cats-affiliated movies have them playing characters whose names are based off of their own), a music teacher who gets fired for being too funky. Immediately afterwards, he starts a new career path: smarming his way into a door-to-door salesman gig that he uses to shake down wealthy women (and their sugar daddies) and earn himself as much money in commission as possible. As the title implies, the film itself frames Hikaru as a ladies' man, irresistible whether he wants to be or not. But, again, there's more to it than just that.

This movie does something really clever by stringing you along and making you think that Hikaru's ladies'-man act is 100% genuine. When he sings laments about how women just can't stop throwing themselves at him wherever he goes, and bemoans his status as a helplessly attractive guy, we think "yeah, yeah, he's just full of himself". But then in the last five minutes or so we realize that he was actually, literally telling the truth the entire time: he really, really did not want to be such a ladies' man.

At the climax of the film, Hikaru assembles all of his women together in one hotel room and admits to them that he's been lying to them. He has a fiancée who he deeply loves, who developed a brain tumor and had to go to America for treatment. Everything he's been doing up to then has been in service of paying off her medical debt. At no point did he actually intend to be a playboy - he was never doing any of it for his own gain. Like in every other No. 1 movie, Ueki plays Hikaru with a kind of reckless, roll-with-the-punches attitude, so we don't get to see any of what he might have been feeling inside. But the movie places hints about Hikaru's backstory right under our noses without us realizing: throughout the film, we see Hikaru pulling something out of his inner jacket pocket, but we never see what it is until the end of the film, when it's revealed that it's a picture of his fiancée.

I love a movie like this that can trick its viewers into believing one thing is happening when it's actually something else, not by explicitly lying to us, but by laying all of its cards out and making us think we're seeing something that we're not. We have all the puzzle pieces the entire time, we just don't recognize them. Everything is right there: he does not want to be a ladies' man. He just needs money. But we don't believe him, because Ueki is so charming, it's impossible to think there might be anything else there. The very last shot of the film is Hikaru crying alone in his dingy apartment with women literally beating down his door - his fiancée left him and married her surgeon - and it's hilarious, or at least it was to me, but granted I had been working on subtitles for 11 hours straight by then. (Behind-the-scenes: at one point I ate a fruit bar one-handed at my laptop so I didn't have to stop working for breakfast.)

There are some dips in quality along the way with these No. 1/Crazy Cats movies, but ones like this that are not only funny and full of talented comic actors, but also surprisingly layered - those make me want to watch every single one of the rest.