Saturday, February 21, 2026

The Green Slime (1968)

directed by Kinji Fukasaku, Katsuhiko Taguchi
Japan, USA
90 minutes
4 stars out of 5
____


I think I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've rewatched a movie and had my opinion of it change as much as it did when I watched Green Slime for the second time last night. What I remembered watching three or so years back was a movie with fun SFX that was bogged down by a love triangle subplot that the Japanese cut of the film had the right idea in shortening. What I watched last night, though, was a well-paced, rollicking good time, with characters who aren't actually that annoying if you can make peace with the fact that their roles are more or less perfunctory.

I am going to skip right into talking about the film's visual effects, because they are frankly pretty stupendous. Especially its color palette. It's so intense and in-your-face that it almost shouldn't work: the reds aren't just red, they're the deepest, bloodiest, almost glowing scarlet that you've ever seen; the greens aren't just green, they're visceral, chlorophyllic, vegetal. The choice to contrast the two and have the rogue planetoid that the green slime is native to be so pervasively red is really striking. For about the first half-hour of Green Slime, the foremost thought on my mind was The Color out of Space. Film adaptations of the story seem to unanimously agree that the titular color should be visually depicted as a kind of violet-reddish-purple, but to me, no movie has ever (unintentionally) captured what I think the color should look like better than Green Slime. Although it's dated, the film does an excellent job at making the alien planet look like how an alien planet in a sci-fi movie should: not realistic, but visually arresting.

It's not just the slime and the alien planet, either: the Gamma-III space station is also a masterpiece of late-1960s interior design, with many set-pieces that look to have been fully ornamental. It reminded me of spaceships in the Gamera series, how they look absolutely ridiculous but pleasing to the eye, like little art sculptures flying around in space. Even the Gamma-III crew compliments the film's overall aesthetic with their understated uniforms, in a narrow selection of solid, off-primary colors, and the way the film stock captures their hair color and complexion.

And then there's these weird little shuffling one-eyed alien babies who scream and wave their arms around all the time. You can't overlook how inherently ridiculous the Green Slime are (it does seem to be plural; the aliens are never given a name in-universe and the tagline announces that "the Green Slime are coming"), and maybe that's okay. Their silliness feels right at home with how visually elaborate everything else about this movie is. That there are so many of them has always been interesting to me: usually a kaiju movie will have one suit and perhaps a maquette version and/or a cruddier alternate suit for use in underwater scenes, but there's a whole plethora of these guys just kicking it on the space station, traveling everywhere in small herds like schoolchildren crossing the street. They're honestly really cute. I felt bad every time one of them got poked in the eye, which happens much more often than you might think. I guess when your head consists almost entirely of eye, it makes for an easy target.

The movie is, as I said, much better-paced than I remembered it being. It introduces us to the slime fairly quickly, and once the slime is loose on the spaceship, the action pretty much never stops until the end credits roll. If there's anything I mildly dislike about this, it is that love triangle. Dr. Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi) is unfortunate enough to be aboard the station with both her fiancé and her former lover, who are intent on making their mutual involvement with her a big deal while she, meanwhile, seems pretty much fine with it and just wants to do her job. It is frustrating to watch Dr. Benson repeatedly be the voice of reason, only to have her level-headed suggestions and observations met with either of the two male leads going "No, I'm gonna do something really stupid instead".

But, all in all, it's great stuff. At a tight 90 minutes, I no longer feel like the Japanese cut, with its lopped-off runtime, is the superior one. It may not be the most cerebral science fiction out there, but it knows what it's doing and the people making it were at the top of their game in terms of visual effects. Weird that this was directed by the same guy who did Cops vs. Thugs, but that's how it is sometimes.

Monday, February 16, 2026

Harakiri (1962)

directed by Masaki Kobayashi
Japan
133 minutes
5 stars out of 5
____

This is one of many movies that I've feared to approach for a while because I considered that I might not be smart enough to really get it. As it turns out, this is an excellent movie to watch not only for myself but also for others who might be putting off the "classics" for any number of reasons - despite its age and the accessibility barrier (for some) of subtitles, this is a movie that definitely still resonates and tells its story in a clear, masterful, and absolutely ruthless way.

And it really does feel like being told a story. The narrative here is laid out a bit unconventionally: we're presented with nothing at the start, nothing except for what we see on the screen: a ronin named Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) appears at the gates of the House of Ii, claiming that he wishes to commit seppuku in their courtyard, being in a state of financial and social ruin and having nothing else to do to restore his name but die honorably. He is invited in, but cautioned that this is not the first situation of the like that the House of Ii has seen. He's told about the ronin who preceded him, and the fate that befell that man; not truly intending to die, but hoping to be given some dispensation, the previous ronin was instead forced to make good on his claim and commit seppuku with a dull bamboo sword, without even the mercy of a second to relieve his suffering.

Slowly, the layers of the story begin to peel away. We find out that the preceding ronin was Tsugumo's son-in-law, who lived with him, and that his wife and their son were both sick and, lacking money for a doctor, he chose to beg for aid from the House of Ii - a true last resort from which there would be no coming back. His gambit failed, and Tsugumo pursues the same path, hoping to get answers if not justice. But there are still more layers than that, and this is where I'll stop going into detail because there are aspects of this movie that are really best experienced for yourself.

Saying what I'm about to say sounds crazy, and I know it sounds crazy, but I fully believe Tsugumo would kill a health insurance CEO in the street if this movie was set in the present day. That sentiment is what this movie is about, to me. It is a critique of justice without mercy, of any man who follows the letter of the law rather than the spirit, and of men who, gaining enough power to do so, define those laws themselves. Tsugumo repeatedly decries bushido as a façade. So too democracy. It's remarkable that a movie made in different circumstances in a different time can have such universal relevance.

Not to mention that it's a visually arresting movie, every shot hitting with what feels like palpable weight when accompanied by Toru Takemitsu's masterful score. Yoshio Miyajima, the cinematographer, also worked on Kwaidan, as did one of the two art directors, Shigemasa Toda.

A story depends a lot on the person telling it, and in this case the narrative is conveyed through the person of Tsugumo, as played by Tatsuya Nakadai in one of his most reserved but also one of his best performances. You wait the entire movie to see him really let loose, but he's as good before the payoff as after. The film builds steadily into an incredibly satisfying climactic swordfight with clearly impossible odds - the impossibility of victory less the point than the fight itself. As a noted swordfighting expert (this is sarcasm, I don't know what I'm talking about), to my discerning eye, the swordplay here looks deliberately showy: as with everything else in the film, its visual aspect does not feel like it's designed to be realistic; it's designed to have impact, to convey the story that it's telling in a fashion that is memorable and sometimes even darkly, brutally beautiful.

Sometimes renowned films are renowned for a reason, and this is an example of that. I will likely be revisiting this one from time to time now that I've accepted it into my life.

Friday, January 23, 2026

The Ghoul (1975)

directed by Freddie Francis
UK
90 minutes
2 stars out of 5
____

A friend described this movie to me recently, and I thought "Surely, I have to have seen this already?" but could not recall a single thing about it. As it turns out, I had watched it at some point, since it was on the list I keep of every horror movie I've ever seen, but for whatever reason my brain decided not to retain any memory of it whatsoever. I'm thinking that may have been for the best, honestly.

The movie is set somewhere around the roaring '20s, and begins during a house party full of very contrived faux-flappers and their beaus. Everybody gets sauced and decides to have the world's most boring drag race using those new-fangled things they're calling "motorcars", but along the way, the couple in the lead run out of petrol and are stranded in a moor. After the man goes off to get more fuel, the woman wanders off, encountering a random creeper (played by a very young John Hurt) who smokes her in the nog with a rock and then brings her back to his weird shed full of caged animals. That's only the start, though: from there, the woman is "taken in" by a man (Peter Cushing) living alone in a large house with his Indian maid (played by Gwen Watford, a white lady with the whitest white lady name you could imagine). Mysteries and secrets abound!

...but does any of that actually make for an interesting movie? No, it does not.

This whole thing has such an odd vibe to it, and I'm sure it didn't help that I watched it as a VHS rip on YouTube (although I have to say it was a surprisingly decent-quality VHS rip). I would describe it as "dingy and sad". The wigs and costuming look cheap, the set decoration is okay but feels recycled from other movies, and there are only a handful of actors in the main cast, so the whole thing feels kind of desolate and unpopulated. For a horror movie, all of that could add up into a net positive: a movie set in a rambling old house on a fog-shrouded moor should be eerie and claustrophobic. But instead everything just feels like an obvious façade.

And then there's the racism. Oh, boy, is there ever. The movie treats Hinduism as some scary, evil "foreign" religion, and frames India as a whole in terms that make it sound like some terrifying wasteland full of depraved extremists that no one ever returns from alive. I kept hoping that the movie's deep-rooted xenophobia might get turned on its head, or at least that it would be commented upon at some point, but it's not. It's not just the characters who are suspicious of non-white people and their mysterious religious rites; it feels like it's the movie itself.

If there's any one redeeming feature to this thing, it's something that the movie may not even have been doing on purpose: its lack of explanation for the titular ghoul. I'm going to spoil it fully, because who cares? not I: Cushing's character had a son while living in India who, for totally unclear reasons, was some kind of obligate cannibal. There is absolutely no elaboration on why the son turned out this way or what exactly his nature was. How often did he have to eat human flesh? Why could he only eat human flesh? What made him this way? Was he under some kind of weird curse? We don't know. We just know that he is a ghoul who Cushing keeps locked up in a room due to a promise he made to his late wife. That mystery is the only vaguely intriguing thing about this otherwise severely boring and somewhat offensive film.

Fun if you want to see a very young John Hurt (who puts in a decent performance alongside Cushing among a cast of over-actors) but I wouldn't recommend it, at least not sober.

Monday, January 19, 2026

An Update Regarding Updates

As of this week I'm going to be switching this blog from a strict "every Monday at 8 AM" update schedule to a strict "whenever I write something decent enough to publish" update schedule.

The reason for this is mostly just that I'm finding it an increasingly frequent occurrence that I'm too busy/tired/cavernously sad to get a new review done in time. And, as I've said a few times, I've been running this thing for probably close to ten years (although I've deleted a lot of my older work) and have gotten precisely zero actual audience engagement. I like the idea of having a blog, but I think people might just not really have any interest in reading film reviews. Maybe I should have realized that ten years ago?

In the meantime, you can always find me on my other blog, which is much livelier than this one, and updates probably more often than it should. Ciao for now. See you whenever.

Monday, January 12, 2026

The Curse of the Ghost (1969)

directed by Kazuo Mori
Japan
94 minutes
3 stars out of 5
____

As evidenced by other adaptations I've reviewed on here, I'm a HUGE Yotsuya Kaidan fan. This particular version eluded me for a long time, and it was one that I was very interested in due to Akiji Kobayashi (best known either from Ultraman or Kamen Rider, depending on if you like Ultraman or Kamen Rider more) playing Naosuke. I have to say I'm not the biggest fan of the English title because it takes the emphasis off of whose ghost we're talking about here: the original translates to Ghost Story of Yotsuya: Oiwa's Ghost.

In the role of Iemon we have Kei Sato, who should have been fairly perfect for it considering his track record of playing various yakuza baddies and scumbag samurai - he's just got one of those good villain faces - but I think he plays it almost too casually. There is something interesting in an Iemon who does his evil deeds with a kind of matter-of-fact boredom, which is what Sato delivers here, but I just feel like his performance is a little too flat at times when it could have been more intense. Kazuko Inano plays Oiwa and does a very good job, her theatricality as Oiwa's ghost making up for the flatness of Sato's performance. Kobayashi is good as Naosuke, he's definitely got the voice to play a kind of shady, rascally type of guy, but again, aside from Oiwa, nobody feels like they have all that much going on here.

The best part of any Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation is the way things descend slowly down an irreversible path of violence and misery. It starts when Iemon and Naosuke commit near-simultaneous murders, and becomes locked in place when Iemon makes the decision to kill his wife so he can marry Oume. Everything after that - if the movie does what it should - is a guilt-ridden nightmare, the viewer dragged into Iemon's visions of Oiwa's phantom tormenting him. What I really enjoyed about the way Curse of the Ghost executes this aspect of the story is the score. It's not music per se, but a kind of unsettling, rhythmic pulsing noise that pervades much of the film. At times you can forget it's there, but when things start ramping up, it almost has the effect of making you feel like something is behind you. The composer for this score seems to have been Ichirō Saitō, who has a very high pedigree; he's credited with the music for such renowned films as Ugetsu, Sound of the Mountain, Floating Clouds, and Late Chrysanthemums. I think his work on Ugetsu is particularly relevant to what he does with Curse of the Ghost.

All in all I wouldn't say this was my favorite version of the story; it lacks the depth of character of Kinoshita's adaptation or the sheer sweaty terror of Nakagawa's, but it hits all the beats and it has a very convincing Oiwa. Even a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation that just does the bare minimum is still a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation. If I may steal a quote from Letterboxd user Rui Ozpinhead that sums up how I feel: "It's hard to completely mess up due to the quality of the source material."

Monday, January 5, 2026

Operation Crazy Hong Kong (1963)

directed by Toshio Sugie
Japan
93 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
____

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.)

Monday, December 29, 2025

Red Lion (1969)

directed by Kihachi Okamoto
Japan
117 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
____

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.