The Giant Claw (1957)

directed by Fred F. Sears

USA

74 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Whew, it's been a while. I honestly didn't intend to disappear for so long, but I do have a (semi-)valid excuse this time, because I've been writing a book.¹ I don't know what to do with it, and it may never get read by anyone other than me, but it is a book, and I am writing it.

To me The Giant Claw, despite its reputation as a classic silly B-movie, is as serious as you choose to make it. Art is never created in a vacuum, and most of the really great science fiction pictures of the 1950s - and I'm not necessarily just counting American ones in this, though they are some of the most reactionary - stem from new fears born out of the wake of the second World War. The people who made The Giant Claw were not that far removed from a time when travel by airplane was just not a thing at all. These were people for whom the use of aircraft during war for the first time in human history was within living memory - for their parents, certainly, if not for themselves.

The idea that the sky isn't safe anymore, that an unknown enemy could attack from above at any minute and target not just indiscriminately but with precision, swooping down to snatch up innocent American teenagers on a joyride, or trains carrying precious raw materials to build up our booming postwar economy - that is a fear that really comes to light only in the first half of the twentieth century. And the fact that the terror-bird in The Giant Claw can only be stopped when the Americans invent a bigger, scarier, more scientific weapon than they ever have before - aided by a vaguely German scientist - is also a distinctly postwar convention.

So, you have to be aware of cultural context when you watch The Giant Claw, but also, yeah, the monster is very much just a giant turkey from space that's made of antimatter. That is absolutely what it is.

The whole "antimatter" thing felt completely ridiculous to me when it was first introduced by our scientist du jour, but after I had sat with it for a minute I found that I kind of liked it. I'm sure it was a product of the writers going "uh, how do we make it so just firing a bunch of rockets at the bird doesn't kill it and end the movie within 30 minutes", but it effectively takes an otherwise laughable monster and elevates it to an almost Lovecraftian level. It's not really a bird, it's something that looks like a bird; it comes from somewhere beyond our comprehension, and while we may find it analogous to things we have on Earth, under a microscope it is something even our most advanced scientific equipment cannot make sense of. I wish the movie had spent more time on this aspect of the monster, because it takes such pains to drive home the point that this bird is actually some kind of extraterrestrial freak of nature, but then immediately goes back to treating it like a big huge stupid bird.

I thought the practical effects were - and I will get pelted with eggs for this - pretty great. I really liked the bird. I've expounded before on how I much prefer monster movies to show their monster sparingly, since what you imagine is always scarier than what even the best special-effects team could show you, but sometimes it is better to have an actual physical thing that you can look at. And for what it's worth, they do a good job of it. They do. That awful scene where Mr. and Mrs. Snappy Dialogue and their friend French Canadian Stereotype are shooting at the bird's egg is a particularly strong example of this - the bird's face looks very lifelike; its nostrils move and its eyes roll, it feels like an animate creature.

I'm not saying this isn't a silly B-movie, I'm just saying that every silly B-movie has something behind it that's worth considering for longer than it takes to have a laff. Giving some thought to the intent and motive of the human artists who produced atomic-age B-movies can tell us a lot about why our society is the way it is right now. I'm afraid that AI art is going to make it even more difficult to get people to understand how important it is to study the meaning of a film and where it comes from and what it's trying to say. If we lose that kind of media literacy, we lose the ability to learn how we got here.

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1 I promise it's just a fiction book and not a biography.

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956)

directed by Fred F. Sears

USA

83 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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As a fan of practical effects, it pains me to admit that I have little experience with Ray Harryhausen. I've seen his work in gifs and through its influence on the tokusatsu films and television that I love, but aside from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms - which I adored - I've hardly ever sat down and watched any movies he was involved in. I'm working on fixing that.

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is one of those movies that, after a point, I was mostly watching for the effects, because the plot had gone off in directions I found unfavorable. The movie started out strong: Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor play off of each other fairly well, and that remains consistent through the whole film - the two of them, though not necessarily rife with chemistry, did convince me that their characters were in love with each other, and while the social climate of the time meant that Carol was portrayed as kind of second fiddle to her manly army man husband, she did at least feel like she mattered. (It's my blog and I can write as many run-on sentences as I like.)

But the opening scene also introduced something that became a problem throughout the film, which is that the characters occasionally reacted to things in ways that I just had trouble seeing the logic of. The couple witnesses a flying saucer looming enormously over their car as they drive through the desert, and yet they convince themselves so thoroughly that they didn't actually see it - and this despite the film's opening narration making it explicitly clear that UFO sightings are on the rise - that it takes a total accident (Russell having left a tape recorder running and capturing the sound of the UFO) for them to realize they did really see a UFO. That just felt kind of ridiculous to me. That and a lot of the other decisions people make could be easily explained by saying that nobody really would know how to react to a UFO, but again: this movie takes place in a time when everybody has been seeing UFOs.

The whole affair is in general a very Us vs. Them story about humankind taking back what we believe to be rightfully ours from a horde of literally faceless Others bent on invading us, and all the unfortunate moral implications that entails. In the first UFO landing scene, with no provocation whatever, the U.S. Army begins shooting at the aliens who emerge from the ship, killing one of them immediately. The aliens then retaliate, using far superior technology to not just kill the Army forces but totally disintegrate them - justification #1, "They have scarier weapons than us, so we had to!". This is fairly par for the course for a movie of this kind, but what really got me was that afterward it feels like the blame for this gets pinned on the aliens. We learn that they had tried to communicate with us peacefully prior to the landing but did not account for (or assumed that we would account for) a fundamental difference in perception of time, which rendered their message unintelligible. So the movie ostensibly frames the Army's violent reaction as "Oh, no! We didn't listen, so we reacted on instinct!" but what underlies that is actually "We didn't listen, but it was because they didn't make a good enough effort to convey their message, so our violence was still justified".

It's gross, man, I don't know what else to say.

But what isn't gross is the practical effects. It's a little odd seeing Harryhausen do UFOs - from what I've seen he seems to be known more for animating living creatures, skeletons and Gorgons and dinosaurs and whatnot, but as is very clear when you watch this movie, he also knocks it out of the park with his UFO effects too. There are one or two green-screen shots that come off a little awkward, but on the whole the compositing is actually done remarkably well for the time, and mostly you can't even tell when the UFOs are superimposed onto the scenery. The perspective is also really interesting, because I see a lot of sci-fi movies show UFOs either super far away or extremely close (usually using 1:1 scale models of a section of the ship for the actors to interact with), but Earth vs. the Flying Saucers gives us a lot of shots where the UFOs are so low to the ground as to be nearly on top of us, or aerial shots from either near or above the UFO's level, and the effect is really visually striking. It honestly reminded me of a lot of shots from Nope.

I also enjoyed the aliens themselves. They do look very goofy, but something about it works. It somehow fits that they look so awkward, lumbering around in their bulky suits (which we are told only weigh a few ounces, in reality). A lot of tokusatsu movies also feature aliens who are physically unassuming, or even weak and fragile, but possess powerful technology. I can see a lot of this movie's influence on Japanese cinema of the time - the interior shots of the spaceship particularly remind me of the Gamera series' spaceship interiors.

So, this turned out to be a very lengthy review of a movie where my opinion is basically "Nice effects, too much chest-beating". Nothing yucked me out in this vein more than the ending scene, featuring a white, able-bodied, heterosexual American couple frolicking on the beach and declaring the planet to be theirs. I can't really call this movie out more so than any other given atomic-age sci-fi movie, though, considering that pretty much all of them are like this. And at least this one has cool practical effects.

Oddity (2024)

directed by Damian McCarthy

Ireland

98 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I used to actually make an effort to try to keep up with new horror releases. The fact that I don't do that anymore is something I occasionally feel guilty about, but I've mostly accepted it now. If I ever feel like watching something new, I'll do it, and if it takes me two years to get around to watching a movie, as is the case with Oddity, well, it's not like the movie's going anywhere, I guess. (I will be discussing spoilers in this review and this is a movie you should definitely go into blind - preferably without even seeing a poster, but that's harder to avoid.)

One thing I was concerned about when I started watching the film is that it would stoop to demonizing mentally ill people as the source of its horror element, which is something I've always found extremely offensive in horror movies. I kind of figured Oddity had to have some kind of twist somewhere, because fortunately movies that do just straight up say "the killer was a scary insane guy who was so scary and insane, wooo, so scaaary, ooooh" with absolutely no depth or nuance seem to be getting fewer and fewer, but this movie really does seem like it's going in that direction for a while. Thankfully, though, it isn't, and save for one part at the end of the film that I felt was kind of unnecessary, the medical staff who work with mentally ill people are presented as much scarier than their patients.

So the thing about this movie is that it's a relatively normal supernatural murder mystery involving a character with extrasensory perception using her abilities to figure out that her sister's real murderer was not the man everyone believes did it and also what in the god damn hell is that thing. With a heaping helping of cold, dreary Irish weather and such traditionally creepy place-settings as a curiosity shoppe and a ramshackle old country house that's only partially renovated, Oddity presents us with plenty of atmosphere that would by itself make for a very good horror movie and also what in the god damn HELL is that thing. The real centerpiece of the movie is not the murder, it's not the sister with supernatural powers, it's not the canonically-established fact that ghosts and curses are all completely real within the universe of the film, it's whatever the god damn hell that thing is.

"That thing" is, of course, a large man carved out of wood that is, inexplicably, tied to the sister and is able to be controlled by her in some way. How she ended up with it is touched upon so briefly you might miss it. How exactly it works is never touched upon at all. It's present for virtually the entire movie, and when it's not onscreen you can actually kind of forget about it - like I said, there's so much else going on, with the murder, the psychic sister, the cursed objects, and an unholy asshole of a husband - but it's always there. The fact that we never learn what it is or why it is is crucial to basically the entire movie. It's just this deeply bizarre non-sequitur lurking at the edges of the picture. I wish more horror movies were so daring as to present you with an object that is vital to the plot and just not ever explain it.

And I LOVE the last shot of the movie. 98 minutes of what had been a tense, moody horror film gets capped off with basically a sight gag, and somehow it doesn't feel like tonal whiplash - or maybe it does, but it's perfectly-placed tonal whiplash. The husband thinks he's gotten away with three murders and is set for life, who cares about some silly blind girl who collects "cursed" items, what a crazy old bat, none of that could have been real, right? And the very last we see of him, he's two seconds away from getting the absolute living daylights scared out of him by an undead bellboy. If we can't see him brought fully to justice, then at least we can imagine him getting knocked down a peg or ten by the exact thing he so arrogantly assumed was not real.

Damian McCarthy previously directed Caveat, which I'll come right out and say is a much better film than this one, and is one of the rare horror movies to genuinely give me the willies. Oddity, compared to Caveat, is much more polished and seems like it probably had a higher budget, and despite still being a fundamentally weird movie, Oddity feels a little more rote, a little more mainstream. It'll be interesting to see how McCarthy follows this up, if or when he does; he seems pretty skilled at making horror movies that have something really strange at the center of them, and I hope that element of his films never gets ironed out for wider presentability.

The Green Slime (1968)

directed by Kinji Fukasaku, Katsuhiko Taguchi

Japan, USA

90 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Is it just something in your head?? Will you believe it when you're DEAD??? GREEEN SLIIIME!!!

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.

Harakiri (1962)

directed by Masaki Kobayashi

Japan

133 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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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.

The Ghoul (1975)

directed by Freddie Francis

UK

90 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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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.

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.