Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters (1968)

directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda

Japan

80 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

I'm going to be screening the third film in the '60s Yokai Monsters trilogy pretty soon, so I figured I should have a review up of at least one of them.

This comes from Daiei back when they still had some kind of a budget, and it looks gorgeous. I remember the first time I watched this I got almost emotional seeing the kasa-obake puppet because something about it is so striking, despite its inherently silly vibe. Puppeteering just gets me, man - the way that thing moves and dances, it really looks like it's had life breathed into it. I might like the kasa-obake more than all the other yokai combined.

I think the most interesting thing about this movie is how the various human characters interact with the yokai - not even always the yokai themselves, just the hints and rumors of them. The story is centered around the impending destruction of a tenement house and the forced eviction of its residents following one of the owners getting blackmailed into selling his property, and when I first watched it, I got the impression that the residents were using the yokai as a kind of weapon against their would-be evictors. But now I'm realizing that that isn't quite the case.

Every side in this - humans, greedy developers, and yokai - moves independently of one another, although they are all ultimately intertwined. It takes a long time for the land developers to figure out that they're being besieged by yokai as a direct result of their greed, and if I'm remembering correctly (full disclosure, I just finished watching this 10 minutes ago, so if I'm not remembering correctly, there is probably something wrong with me) the tenement residents barely even mention the yokai, if at all. The picture I'm getting from this is a kind of GMK guardian spirits idea: the yokai guard the land, and if the people on that land can live in harmony with them - which, in this case, they do - then that's great. But if not, human lives aren't their concern.

The pacing of this thing is really its only problem, but it's a problem that is familiar to anybody who watches a lot of jidaigeki. I think this movie can be somewhat handicapped by modern ideas of the horror genre, despite being such a great Halloween watch, because if you go into it expecting a horror movie period, you'll probably be disappointed when you get jidaigeki with a side of monsters. But that's by design, and when the film decides to go whole hog - like the finale, and the scene where the last surviving would-be evictor is menaced by a troupe of yokai - it's pretty awesome.

The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty (1957)

directed by Kyōtarō Namiki

Japan

73 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

----

Let's just get it out of the way: this movie's claim to fame is that it was playing in the theater that the creator of the video game Earthbound accidentally walked into as a child and it traumatized him so bad he eventually turned that memory into Giygas, famously one of the most viscerally terrifying video game enemies of all time.

The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty is a slightly spooky murder mystery set, as the title would imply, within the military,  ~10 years prior to the present day as of its release. The film opens with the murder itself: we find out that someone - it's not clear who - murdered his pregnant girlfriend and dumped her dismembered body in a well because she was becoming too insistent on him marrying her, and he wanted to continue to fool around. It's true that this is a bit more lurid than other contemporary films, since it's Shintoho, but all of this is depicted in a way that would seem pretty tame to our modern sensibilities. In fact the scene that gave rise to Giygas was not actually a thing that ever happened in the film: Shigesato Itoi walked in on the murder scene and thought he was seeing a rape scene, which, although many horrible acts are committed in this film, is not something that's ever shown on screen.

I'm rewriting paragraphs a lot while trying to review this because I can't decide how I feel about it. The hints of the supernatural that lurk in the corners of the film are restrained so much that they're barely there, and on the one hand that feels like a tease, but on the other it gives the whole thing a sense of mystery. This isn't the scene that Itoi was so affected by, but one of the creepiest parts of the whole film is a shot that lasts all of maybe 30 seconds where the protagonist (played by Kiriyama taichou himself, Shoji Nakayama) thinks he sees the specter of the murdered woman in a window - but it's only a cat. The dead woman haunts the plot, if not in the sense of her actual ghost being there, then in the sense that her murder bothers Kosaka and his strong sense of morality - despite his obligation as a military policeman - enough to spur him to investigate when everyone around him just wants to speed up a confession, even if it's from the wrong man.

The moral implications of the film are what drive the central conflict between Kosaka and the rest of the characters: although he is also a soldier, he disagrees with the cruelty he sees from the men in the military around him, who are quick to torture someone who might be innocent just to get a neat resolution to the murder case. There's a few twists and turns to the plot and a satisfying reveal at the end that leaves no detail unexplained - it's a perfectly serviceable murder mystery at its core, and a ghost story as an afterthought.

If you want to watch a supernatural mystery set in the military that stars both Shoji Nakayama and Shigeru Amachi, you're way better off watching Ghost in the Regiment, which is much more eerie and atmospheric. I kept thinking about how good this one could have been if it were in the hands of Nobuo Nakagawa. If it had pushed a little harder with the shadowy, ghostly vibes, The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty might have gotten a higher rating from me, but as it is, although it was a solid and enjoyable movie, it feels somewhat rote.

Kibakichi (2004)

directed by Tomoo Haraguchi

Japan

95 minutes

3 stars out of 5

----

Werewolf samurai? Werewolf samurai.

The title character of Kibakichi is a member of a decimated clan of werewolves who wanders the backroads of Japan circa the early 1700s, always on the outskirts of humanity, but never quite accepted by the yokai, either. When he gets press-ganged into a dice game, he ends up staying in a town in which all he intended to do was get a drink far longer than anticipated, and eventually realizes that the whole town is full of yokai who have disguised themselves as humans and are under threat from a bunch of mercenaries dressed like Final Wars Xilliens. Up-front warning: this film contains less werewolfery than you may desire.

I think I understand why there aren't a ton more movies like this out there (hard to get right, goofy if done wrong) but the idea of a ronin who is separated from the rest of the populace not only by class barriers but by virtue of his actually being some kind of a supernatural creature is just fantastic. That angst Kibakichi experiences about not being monstrous enough to be a "monster" but being too close to a monster to be comfortable around humans feels like it fits perfectly with the lone-wolf outsider theme that a lot of jidaigeki with wandering ronin/gambler main characters have. The film itself totally plays up those genre conventions to its advantage, and it's really fun: all the tension and the questions of identity that frequently figure into good jidaigeki are here.

Ryūji Harada plays Kibakichi decently - but not fantastically - well. Kibakichi is interesting because he's one of those characters who works better as a silhouette than in closeups: our first image of him, in the classic round hat and tatty cloak, is essentially how his character is defined (except for the final scenes, which I'll get to in a minute). Any time we see him up close, something just feels kind of off. He seems like he's meant to be perceived conceptually rather than personally. Because of this, there could have been a lot of added weight to the handful of scenes where we can see Kibakichi's face clearly - a feeling of encountering him on a personal level rather than as an archetype - but something prevents him from being relatable in such a way.

There's way more tokusatsu to this than I expected. The film is chock full of Toho kaiju roars to a point where it's almost distracting. I was watching a werewolf vs. yokai fight but my brain was telling me it was hearing Gaira and Titanosaurus go to town on each other. This, as well as the excellent creature suits and concepts, is no coincidence; Tomoo Haraguchi has a great deal of toku credits under his belt (however you may feel about Death Kappa aside), including work on the Ultra series starting with 80. The final battle at the end of the film is pure tokusatsu fight scene, with a frankly ridiculous amount of explosions and a fully wolfed-out Kibakichi becoming nearly indestructible in the face of bullets and hand grenades.

As I've said when I've talked about other films with yokai in them, although this wasn't meant to be a Halloween movie, it fits the vibe in a way that feels entirely natural. Kibakichi is shrouded in atmosphere: the fog of a dark, fantastical past; a fog in which various creatures cavort and hide themselves - the most terrifying of which, to use a bit of a cliche, turn out to be humans. The film is a visual treat and super fun with its spooky atmosphere, and has an excellent opener and an excellent finale, but the middle faffs around a little, although not so much as to be boring.

Event Horizon (1997)

directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

UK, USA
95 minutes

5 stars out of 5

----

September is well underway, and as we all know, September is just a long pregame for Halloween. So I wanted to revisit one of my favorite horror movies, which I somehow haven't seen in eight years. Not only does it hold up as well as it did the last time I watched it (with the exception of the CGI, which continues to age like milk), I might have actually liked it better.

This is such a heavily visual film. So much of the information it wants to give the viewer is conveyed not through scenes where the human characters strive to figure out what's wrong with their surroundings but through those surroundings themselves. While we're onboard the rescue ship Lewis & Clark, we have an inkling of the sense of foreboding that surrounds the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of the Event Horizon, but it isn't until the crew actually boards the Event Horizon that we feel the full weight of its menace. Even before it went to Hell, the Event Horizon must have been an intensely discomfiting place for its crew to inhabit. One wonders if it always looked like that or if being in Hell changed its architecture on a fundamental level. It looks like a huge Gothic cathedral floating through space; remarkably cruciform, apparently captained by a man fluent in Latin.

The design of the ship's core cannot be anything other than an intentional nod to the idea of a "biblically accurate angel". It is three concentric wheels orbiting each other around a central mass, covered all over with spikes and orbs of light. There's a scene fairly early on where one of the rescue crew ends up in the chamber alone while they're all still surveying the ship, and all three rings of the core turn directly to him and lock into place - it's like it's looking right at him.

I actually feel like the area where this movie fails is with the dialogue. It doesn't feel like the language used can match up with the visual and psychological impact of the rest of the film. Lines like the ones from the aforementioned crew member who, after being corrupted by looking directly into wherever the ship's black hole drive sent it, would talk about the "dark inside of [him]", just feel trite in comparison with what the movie is trying to tell you in a big-picture sense. Even Weir's monologuing frequently falls short of describing everything that is implied by the film's concept.

That being said, high-concept science fiction movies like this oftentimes let character development fall by the wayside, but thankfully this one doesn't. The cast plays off each other perfectly, and they assemble to create a ship's crew that feels like an authentic crew, like seasoned sailors who know what they're doing and are not as enamored with the idea of the film's futuristic science as modern viewers, to whom it is fiction, would be. And - most importantly - they seem to care about each other as human beings. I appreciated Captain Miller about ten times more on this rewatch: he's extremely competent, always in control, but not unfeeling; surprisingly for such a stoic, no-nonsense spaceship captain, he's also one of the most vocal proponents of something being direly wrong with the Event Horizon. He takes what his crew experiences at face value even when they themselves don't, because he respects them. And for some reason I noticed this time that he was married. He wears a wedding ring. Only a few of the rescue ship crew are afforded backstories, but I found myself thinking about the idea that Miller had family back home, and never spoke of them.

I think this movie is extremely good at operating on multiple levels of horror. There is the basic concept of a ship that goes to hell and comes back demonically possessed, which is shown to us in every inch of film, basically, but then there's the real blood and guts of it - and that is restricted to only a few key moments. I always like to include the link to this Imgur gallery that shows frames from the film you wouldn't be able to catch without pausing it repeatedly (although if you are at all averse to graphic imagery, including imagery of a sexual nature, please don't view it). Had we been seeing things like that constantly, the film would be nowhere as scary as it is. As Weir says, hell is just a word. But while he follows that up by saying that reality is far worse, I would argue that - as a film viewer - what we can cook up in our imaginations is even worse than that. That's why I like that the movie respects its viewers enough to let us think about the implications it presents to us without having to be shown them at every corner.

I just really love this one. It's one of those movies that, to me, doesn't feel like anything else, and nothing else feels like it. It has its cheesy moments here and there (any time it attempts humor is just... really, really bad) but it's such a vibe. I wish it was three hours long.

ZillaFoot (2019)

directed by Anthony Polonia

USA

81 minutes

1.5 stars out of 5

----

I looked up reviews of this on Letterboxd prior to watching it and was surprised to see how negative the general consensus was. Kaiju fans tend to be a lot more appreciative of "bad" movies, especially when they're made with a genuine love of the genre, so what could be SO terrible about this one that absolutely no one seemed willing to even give it points for trying?

Well, I understand now.

During and after the cold open, I was actually feeling fairly okay about this. Bad acting is really not something I care too much about anymore, especially in a roughshod production such as this one; these days it matters more to me to be told an interesting story than to have the people involved in the story nail all of their performances. But then the plot ("plot") moved on, and I thought... are... are they dubbing this white woman with somebody doing a vaguely Japanese accent? Did they just call that white guy "Dr. Tazaki"? Oh, I am in for it, aren't I?

So yeah, the deal with this movie is that its cast of entirely non-Japanese actors are (for the most part) given Japanese names and overdubbed by VAs who sound like they're doing that plausibly-not-a-native-English-speaker accent that the voice cast of every Toho movie imported into America in the mid-20th century had. And half of the names they give these characters are actually just Japanese-sounding non-words (with some exceptions). This is... honestly kind of funny, but in a really terrible sort of way. I cringed bodily when two of the leads met up with the fake Ultraman's human host and he bowed to them. This was only one of many cringes the film drew out of me.

Everything I just mentioned is indicative of this movie's wider problem, and the reason why I think it's bad-bad and not "bad but endearing": plot- and idea-wise, the film seems like it has no idea what it's doing or why it's doing the things it's doing. There is a concept - aliens deploy a large creature to terrorize Earth in order to make way for their invasion, some scientists and a couple other people fight it - but that's all there is. ZillaFoot is filled with scenes that felt like they were inserted in at random, and past a certain point I lost all expectation that whatever came after what I was currently watching would have any relevance to it or progress the plot in a linear, understandable way.

The weird side effect of this choppy narrative is that there's one or two scenes that are actually extremely funny. Now, when I say "one or two", I do literally mean there's about two. There's a totally plot-irrelevant scene where a detective named "Dirty McCruption" parlays with a guy in a robe for some kind of ruby skull in exchange for his tiny dog, who the detective kidnapped - this is the only funny scene in the whole thing. Or maybe I just have a bad sense of humor. But when that detective was telling a rambling story about his encounter with something called a Disco Plesiosaur and he ended it by saying "...I died!" and then immediately moved on, oh man, something about that just got me.

But I really wouldn't recommend that you watch this even just to laugh at it. It is pretty clear that ZillaFoot is deliberately terrible - an extended scene in which the dubbing cast makes fun of itself (not for the weird maybe-accents, but for other things) proves this. This movie knows it's bad. I do feel like it was made by people who care about kaiju movies, and the crew even includes some people - like Raf Enshohma - who are in the Western tokusatsu community, but it cares more about being Bad™  than it goes about connecting with its audience at all.

(I do have to give the casting department credit for finding a guy who looks exactly like Osman Yusuf. That, at least, gives this a little more authenticity as a kaiju film.)

Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Final Chapter (2015)

directed by Koji Shiraishi

Japan

89 minutes

5 stars out of 5

----

Hi, hello, this is the best movie I've ever seen in my life.

I want to apologize if I've ever sounded dismissive when I was talking about Koji Shiraishi's preoccupation with his weird worm dimension thing. That was never my intent - I was never making fun of it, I never thought it was just some wacky idea, I always took it seriously; I guess I just thought it was a little funny how insistent he is about it. But now I see. This is what it was all leading to. This masterpiece of a film.

Here, the format of the previous entries in the Senritsu Kaiki File series is dispensed with entirely, as we pick up immediately after The Most Terrifying Movie in History. Ichikawa and Kudo are lost in worm hell, so Tashiro has been left behind to finish the movie (and he apparently makes a pretty good profit off of it, too). But things have been changing ever since the crew uncovered the demon soldier project. The world that Tashiro lives in now feels intensely unsafe. We see him talking to his livestream viewers in his apartment at night, alone, and even then, we can feel this sense of unease. Then Tashiro hears a knock on his window - his second-floor balcony window - and both he and the viewers are abruptly catapulted into complete and utter chaos.

Entering the picture very suddenly is a man named Eno whose origins are never explained (although the translator makes sure to note that he has a really strong Osaka accent). Eno seems to know everything about what the world is becoming - or maybe not everything about it, but he knows how to stop what's happening. (By "what's happening" I mean the growing crisis situation that followed the appearance of a massive hovering silhouette in the sky over Shinjuku - this will all be explained reasonably well if you've yet to catch up with the previous films.) Unfortunately for Tashiro, he is the only one who can execute this plan that will not only bring Ichikawa and Kudo back but also (ostensibly) correct the path towards annihilation that the world is headed down. Eno gives him four tasks that he says will result in his teammates coming back from the other dimension, and I won't get into what these are since every one of them is hideously disgusting, but through his steadfast adherence to Eno's plan, Tashiro confirms what we could all already tell - that only one thing matters to him:

Filming. He has to film everything. When Eno threatens to shoot him for not moving fast enough, he's afraid, of course, as anyone would be. But it doesn't compel him to act. What compels him is when Eno points the gun at the camera. That - and only that - is unacceptable.

Shiraishi is doing something really incredible here. This is the end game of the entire series. I was right about how it wasn't so much a bunch of disparate cases of paranormal phenomenon - maybe that all existed, but in the background the whole time, an apocalypse had been slowly forming. Shiraishi continues to use the found-footage tools he's demonstrated such proficiency with, but now instead of low-stakes (yet terrifying) movies about kappa and haunted toilets, he's showing us the fabric of reality folding and unfolding, truth and fiction blurring, timelines disintegrating. It feels real. Shiraishi convinces us that it is real, because he begins to involve himself - his real self. When Eno called Shiraishi by his real name it shook me to my core. The incredibly delicate and at times transparent third wall this movie sets up is a thing of beauty.

I have to talk about the climax. It's impossible to explain this without going through a play-by-play of the film as a whole, so I won't try. When Kudo was poised to end the entire world and therefore bring about a better one with his Cronenberg-ass arm gun supported by Ichikawa as Tashiro filmed it all, I realized that this moment was an encapsulation of the series as a whole. Kudo is raw, unhinged chaos energy, and Ichikawa is there to aim him at what needs to be done, to try to exert at least some small measure of control over his utterly batshit persona so that the team can run itself as something vaguely resembling a business. And Tashiro's role is to film it. Shiraishi's role is to film it. To make meaning out of what the team sees.

Can the three of them save the world this way? No. But they can destroy it and start again, and keep making movies in whatever new world they find themselves in.

Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 04: The Truth! Hanako-san in the Toilet (2013)

directed by Koji Shiraishi

Japan

73 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

I do apologize that this blog seems to be becoming The Gamera and Senritsu Kaiki File Show™, but hey, I like what I like.

The format is changed up a little bit here: instead of having a scene where the investigative crew watches a video together, then goes to interview the people involved in shooting it, we open with the team interviewing paranormal eyewitnesses right away. I must admit I don't know much about the story of Hanako, but it doesn't seem like it's too complicated; it's basically an urban legend that proliferates throughout many schools across Japan that claims the school toilets are haunted by the ghost of a girl who died in them. (No I am not familiar with the manga.) Our amateur videographers in File 04 are two girls who sneak into their old school during off hours to try to get Hanako to appear, which she does, and scares the living daylights out of them - so they do the logical thing and call the Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi folks. Together with a psychic they picked up, the film crew and the two girls return to the school in daytime to look into the footage.

(I'm going to talk openly about spoilers here because this movie takes a hard turn out of nowhere and it would be impossible to talk about the film itself without giving away the plot.)

Very suddenly and for no apparent reason this becomes a time travel movie. The crew and their plus-ones witness Hanako firsthand and are thrown into total dimensional chaos, meeting alternate versions of themselves face-to-face and getting sent into a bizarre time loop where they keep skipping around between days and nights and one of the two girls actually disappears. This is when I realized that Shiraishi was doing things with this movie that are extremely deft: this is a time-loop film, shot with almost zero cuts, shown virtually in real time, disguised as a found-footage horror movie. If we've been watching this series up to this point, we're used to seeing Kudo being an asshole and random ghosts showing up. We're not expecting to see the entire crew thrust into a fractured timeline that they seemingly can't escape from.

And it's kind of riveting to watch. Like I said, virtually no cuts, just the crew running around the school trying to figure out how to get the missing girl back and reset the timeline without encountering themselves (this can apparently do irreparable damage to reality somehow). Then there's Hanako, who serves as the vehicle for Shiraishi's beloved worm dimension, which is, as always, never elaborated upon. I love the idea that all of the disparate paranormal phenomena the team investigates throughout these films seems to be connected to the parallel dimension, as if the team is slowly uncovering the truth that there is no such thing as multiple ghosts but instead some kind of unified worldwide phenomenon linked not to the classic idea of spirits of the dead but to something altogether more alien.

The note Shiraishi ends the film on is so perfect. Kudo looking at the camera with an expression of defeat while Ichikawa frantically calls an ambulance in the background. That's it, no time to recuperate. Our story ends there. 

I have to say that this might be my favorite of the films in this series that I've watched thus far, which is a bit ironic considering that it's also the least indicative of the series' overall vibe. But this is really something: this not only proves that Shiraishi is a filmmaker who can do incredibly good horror movies, he's also just an incredibly good filmmaker in general. I feel like this could have won some kind of award for how much it does on such a small scale.

I will also warn you that if you're watching the version of this that's on YouTube, the subtitles are extremely bad. If you know even a little Japanese you will realize almost immediately that half of the dialogue does not match the subs. If it sounds stupid at times (and if the characters sound very profane) that's entirely down to the subtitles, not the film itself.