Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993)

directed by Takao Okawara

Japan

108 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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Yeah, four and a half stars. Objective film ratings are a sham. I'm finding that I've yet to rewatch a Godzilla movie and see it as being worse than I thought it was the first time. It's funny, I can look back on certain films - especially the Heisei ones - and remember not liking things about them, but then it comes time to rewatch them and I don't know what I was thinking. This was definitely the case upon my third rewatch of vs. Mechagodzilla II, one of the Godzilla movies I frequently forgot existed, and a film that I feel is possibly hampered by being marketed as a Mechagodzilla movie while containing the most sauceless Mechagodzilla in the series. (Unbelievable soundtrack, too - those drums hit right in your soul.)

vs. Mechagodzilla II takes place in the Heisei continuity where humans have, if not a firm grasp, then at least some vague ideas and plans about how we might be able to live with Godzilla, born out of repeated encounters that end in disaster for both parties (but largely for us). The anchor for this timeline is of course Miki Saegusa, whose psychic abilities and emotional link to Godzilla represent an alternative way of looking at humanity's relationship with him. In this film, Saegusa - as well as Azusa Gojo, a biologist and BabyGodzilla's foster mom - are essentially blocked at every opportunity by a faction of hard-nosed military men who seem increasingly less tolerant of both Saegusa and Gojo's attempts to seek a nonviolent resolution to the threat of Godzilla.

I think the human characters in this one are interesting because this is one of those times where you really get the sense that humanity is starting to get a little too big for their britches. I probably shouldn't say this because it is outright blasphemy but looking at BabyGodzilla gave me a feeling like you're supposed to get when you look at icon paintings of Christ with the Virgin Mary that contain allusions to Jesus' eventual crucifixion. What should be a picture of an adorable baby instead betrays the foreknowledge that the child is born to be a sacrifice. Movies that involve a juvenile Godzilla always also involve people trying to use it to manipulate the adult Godzilla: no matter how cute and friendly Baby is, Gojo can't keep him under lock and key forever, not only because his appearance lures Godzilla into whatever area he's being housed in, but also because the government will never stop coming after him and trying to enlist him into their plan to defeat Godzilla.

I know this is really weird but I kind of get a feeling like Godzilla is ashamed of himself in this one. I think "ashamed" is maybe too light of a word, actually. Godzilla is grappling with what he is. He is drawn magnetically to the presence of an infant member of his species only to sense psychically that said infant is terrified of him, at which point he sulks his way back through the city he just stomped. I feel like there's even an allusion to Godzilla (or a Godzilla) having placed the egg in Rodan's territory on purpose when Gojo mentions how some birds will lay eggs in other birds' nests if they feel they can't care for them.

The weakest part of this movie is Mechagodzilla. Its origin story is by far the least compelling out of every other Mechagodzilla. We've got a ruthless killing machine constructed by aliens, a haunted fortress made to fight its own brother against its will, and basically a big flying warship shaped like Godzilla, piloted by a bunch of guys whose only personality traits are "cocky and irritating". The two other main-line Mechagodzillas have some aspect that makes them feel narratively interesting and, to put it plainly, worth keeping around: '74/5 Mechagodzilla is the first of its kind put to film and is such a formidable threat with its boundless supply of missiles that it's an outright joy to watch, and Kiryu is just horrifying to think about. But what is this Mechagodzilla? Human hubris given the form of our most enduring enemy. We keep building superweapons, we never learn. This Mechagodzilla is just another mistake.

I'm not sure what my problem was with this movie that made me remember it as one of the least good of the Heisei era. There's something so comforting about these movies - everything about them is so familiar and welcoming to me now, even the fuzzy, warm colors of the un-remastered DVD rip. We've also lost some people since I last watched this - Akira Nakao, Kenpachirō Satsuma - so I think it's even more important to keep watching these movies even as it seems like the Godzilla series might finally be moving forward again. Every Godzilla movie is good. That's that about that.

Santa Jaws (2018)

directed by Misty Talley

USA

88 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Santa Jaws cold-opens with a dream sequence that I wish had set the tone for the rest of the film. Yes, the Christmas humor is goofy, but it's a clearly deliberate goofiness that everyone involved appears to be enjoying. But then the protagonist wakes up, and - ugh, we're going to be dealing with an angsty teenage boy for this entire movie?

That being said, though, I want to emphasize that Reid Miller absolutely kills it in the lead role. I think this movie would have been far worse had there been some other kid playing Cody. The material he's given to work with is frequently clichéd and the actors he plays off of - including most of the adults - kind of phone it in sometimes. But Miller 100% believes everything he's saying, and it makes me believe him too. There's a delicate balance here where the peripheral characters who exist mostly as comic relief and/or to get shark-murdered are allowed to be a little hammier, but the protagonist, around whom everything revolves, could not risk being even a little bit unserious. Miller nails that. I've never heard of anything else he's been in, but if he eventually moves beyond bad shark movies, he could really have a future - ditto for the director, who appears to, thus far, have worked exclusively in bad shark movies.

I say as if I'm somebody who knows anything whatsoever about acting.

Anyway, this is a killer Christmas shark movie. You already know what to expect when you sit down to watch it. The aforementioned seriousness with which it treats its premise is a big plus; it is silly to us, but feels dead serious to its characters. And there's a lot more going on here than in your typical shark movie or your typical Christmas slasher: the main character is gifted a magic pen that brings everything he draws to life, and when he uses it to ink a drawing of the villain in his comic book Santa Jaws, the demonic shark becomes real and immediately begins picking off his entire circle of family and friends. (The shark gained its powers by eating Santa Claus. It is attracted to Christmas items and Christmas music and likewise can only be injured by Christmas-y things, such as a crossbow with garland wrapped around it.)

The parts where the film drags are the parts where a lot of slasher films drag: the spread of the threat beyond the protagonist and into the larger world. It's just always really boring to go through the motions of having one person try to make everybody around them believe they're in danger - the cycle of "what are you talking about, don't be silly!", getting brutally killed, everyone finally believing the danger is real, everyone arming themselves, so on and so forth. There's not much avoiding that in a lot of cases, but sometimes a movie can find creative ways to make it feel like less of a chore, and Santa Jaws doesn't quite do that, despite all of its originality in other areas.

But you can tell that there's talent across the board even though the premise is silly, so the film is fun to watch and doesn't have too many amateurish pacing issues. The location also feels authentic (the comic shop looked like a real comic shop) and it's tasteful enough with its sub-par CGI gore that when there is a shark kill it feels genuinely funny as opposed to immersion-breaking.

I'm starting to realize that I really don't like watching Christmas movies, but things like this make me realize that there are a few out there that mess with the formula enough to be fun. While it never gets ridiculous enough to make for good "you and your friends pretending to be Joel and the bots" fodder - which works in its favor, the balance of seriousness and humor is the best thing about this - it's definitely recommended if you've seen everything else and are tired of Santa-themed slashers. You kind of have to not think about it very hard, though: how hard is it to not get killed by a shark? Just stay away from the marina and it'll probably eventually starve to death or just get bored and look for less wily prey.

I'm cooking on my other blog.

Just FYI.

I've done scanlations of the Kodansha The Mysterians/Atragon mook and the H-Man/Secret of the Telegian one. Only took me two weeks of constant work, part of which was done in the dark with snail-speed internet thanks to a tripped breaker that wouldn't come back on.

You should check out my other blog anyway, it’s pretty fun. If you follow me exclusively for Godzilla content, I went a little extra for Godzilla Day over there this year as well.

Secret of the Telegian (1960)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Rewatched this a third time after far too long. Coming back to these movies after having seen more tokusatsu - especially Toho films - is always rewarding, because now I feel like I understand them in their context much better. In particular it's impressive how Jun Fukuda was able to direct a film that fits so neatly with the rest of the Transforming Human series despite never having directed a tokusatsu film before (although he was assistant director for Rodan) and only having solo directorial credit on one other movie thus far.

I just want to talk about how much I love that opening murder scene where we see Sudo for the first time (although we don't know who he is yet). We follow a man entering a haunted house at a theme park, not to enjoy it like all the other attendees but to meet up with someone. He's surrounded by witnesses, who are later interviewed by police and can't describe what they saw happen next. The man reaches the back of the cave and all of a sudden something happens to him: out of nowhere there is another man standing exactly where he had been, and all we the viewers see of this second man is his back - there one second, gone the next - before his victim collapses dead with a knife in him. There are shots like this of Sudo throughout the film and it's something I think is absolutely fascinating: these back shots, other characters framed on either side of his shoulders, no face, nothing to identify with, just this looming presence. The camera almost has the same POV as him, but he himself blocks some of the shot.

Tadao Nakamaru plays this character really, really well. After he saw his own performance in a test screening he apparently realized with some horror that he was "in a ridiculous movie" and didn't want to play his role in The Human Vapor because of that. I think we can reevaluate this character now, because he isn't ridiculous and neither is the movie he's in. Sudo is interesting because he really was at one point a victim: even if he comes off uptight trying to stop some guys from stealing gold bars in the chaos at the end of the war, the fact is that he was murdered for it, and his murderers got away with it. But in the process of reinventing himself into the tele-transmitted man, he's lost most of his humanity. I absolutely love the reveal at the end that he's physically scarred and burned because of the teleporter he uses. It may have been simple revenge but now it's taken him over. It's really the teleporter that's the scary thing, in conjunction with its user - I think both World Wars kind of quashed the idea of technology and science being a basic universal force for good, and now all we can do is be afraid of what people are going to do with the new weapons we keep inventing. 

Also, in the original Japanese, Sudo is never referred to as the "Telegian" or anything like that. The in-universe name for him is "juken-ma", which translates to something like "bayonet demon" or "bayonet devil". This is what the police and reporters call him by.

I read somewhere that Toho didn't do a lot of noir films at this point like some other studios did because they "weren't good at them", but when it comes to noir with a sci-fi element, they really nail it. Aside from Sudo, none of the characters in this have much personality, but everybody fills their various generic cop roles really well and in concert it makes for a riveting investigation into something that looks more and more as the film goes on like a supernatural event. That being said, it's weird that Koji Tsuruta is here. I never get used to him in this movie. From what I understand he was close with Fukuda and was in this as kind of a favor to him since he was a new director (Tsuruta was one of Toho's biggest stars and it was probably very expensive and difficult to get him in a movie). But his character is just some guy, a nebulously-defined "old college friend" who gets in the way at first but eventually is absorbed into the main cast. A lot of Toho movies are like that, actually: the cast of characters is just whoever happened to stick around the longest.

I will say the pacing is also odd - this is one of the only times I've looked to see what time it was and realized I'd been watching the movie for 55 minutes when I thought I'd only been watching it for 15 or 20 at most. And something about the filming occasionally feels a little awkward, like shots are starting and stopping at not quite the right time. But you will never catch me saying a bad word about the practical effects, which are the highlight of the film. Toho is known mostly for large physical work, kaiju suits and vehicle miniatures and things like that, but rotoscoping scanlines onto Sudo undoubtedly took an excessive amount of time and meticulous frame-by-frame effort.

The last thing I want to mention is just this really small detail: in the final scene, where Sudo's teleportation goes wrong and he dies horribly, clutching at his coat collar in agony, Tsuruta's character Kirioka is watching him and holding his own collar as well. This could have been totally unintentional, and since practical effects and drama scenes were filmed in separate locations, they probably weren't even actually looking at each other, but I got a real sense of Kirioka being absorbed in and horrified by what he was seeing.

Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater: Present (2005)

directed by Yudai Yamaguchi

Japan

47 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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It's been a few years since I've seen this, and considering that the season has rolled around once again and I'm running out of Christmas horror movies (I have been running out of Christmas horror movies for several years now), and the fact that Kazuo Umezu recently passed away, I thought it was time for a rewatch. This might lead to me rewatching the other Horror Theater films, actually - they're all really solid.

Present opens with its main character, Yuko, in a flashback to her childhood, awake in bed after a strange dream. It's almost Christmas, and Yuko's parents remind her that Santa is always watching, and that he brings presents to good children, but if you're bad, he'll "come get you". This flashback sequence ends with Yuko looking out her window with a big grin, and it's implied that she sees something, but what happens next - if anything - is kept ambiguous for the whole film.

Next we see Yuko, she's an adult with a rowdy bunch of friends. It's Christmas again and everybody goes to stay at a hotel to have some fun. Yuko's the quiet one of the bunch, but she's making moves on the guy she likes, except... all this Christmas stuff seems to leave her really uneasy. We as viewers can tell she's got some heavy unaddressed trauma surrounding whatever happened to her that one night as a kid. Actually, this entire thing feels like it's about unaddressed Christmas-related trauma. Every cheery holiday thing Yuko sees seems to set her on edge, and it only gets worse when she sees the clerk at the hotel is a guy dressed like Santa.

This might turn out to be a longer review than warrants a 47-minute movie because I honestly think this thing is so interesting. There aren't many Japanese Christmas horror films, but those that exist put such a refreshing spin on the genre that I wish there were more. Santa in Present feels like an ancient god, capricious and vengeful, omniscient, ever-changing. The extent of Yuko's friends' involvement in the story is basically to be slasher fodder, but the film establishes that they all see Santa differently according to whatever their childhood idea of him was: one of them sees him as a woman, since her feminist mother told her Santa was a woman, and the other sees him as his father, presumably because he caught on early that Santa was actually his parents. Yuko sees what she was told Santa was: a big white guy with blue eyes. And remember the "come and get you" part? That's kind of the key here.

This movie packs so much gore into such a small space that it almost ruins the pacing sometimes. Although the elements like Santa being some kind of wrathful shapeshifting god are what make Present stand out from the slagpile of Christmas horror, it does at times feel like a long slasher movie chase sequence with a little tiny plot attached. There's a lesson here about being good and responsible - I've read a few other Umezu manga where the message is basically "bad girls get punished" - but for the most part we're watching it for the creative kills. (The film was certainly directed by the right man for the job: Yudai Yamaguchi is responsible for such films as Meatball Machine and Battlefield Baseball.) The overall atmosphere is unsettling and the lack of dialogue makes everything dreamlike - the characters have to be responsible for acting out the story rather than giving it to us via exposition dump, so a lot of the backstory only exists in what can be put together by the viewer through vague context clues.

I would love to someday see this in better quality than 240p on YouTube with the opening theme music muted to avoid a copyright strike. I just love the idea of Santa delivering gory retribution for "denigrating Christmas".

The Thing (1982)

directed by John Carpenter

USA

109 minutes

5 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 am extremely busy this month, and did not have time to write anything new. My apologies.

Not even considering its massive cultural impact, The Thing is one of my favorite movies. I think it's also objectively one of the best horror movies ever made, with one of the most interesting and well-executed concepts for a monster. Even though that concept is not original, having been adapted from another film that was itself adapted from a book, it's done so uniquely in this iteration that it stands out from its predecessors.

The first time I watched this was when I was only just getting into movies, and I wasn't "good at" watching them. Stuff just didn't occur to me; I would miss huge parts of the plot because I wasn't paying attention to anything. I don't know if it's because of that or just because it's been a while since I saw it, but so much in The Thing jumped out at me that didn't the first time. The film's opening scene follows a dog across the frozen white Antarctic landscape as a helicopter tries desperately to track and shoot it, for reasons as yet unknown to us viewers. The Norwegians' desperate attempts to kill the dog and warn the U.S. base - attempts that fail, but may have been in vain anyway - are the frontispiece to what will become a building of dread that never stops throughout the whole movie. 

It really struck me upon this rewatch that this movie is just that: dreadful. It has an ominousness to it that maybe can only be understood when you've seen it and you know what's coming, which might seem counterintuitive given the anticipatory nature of dread, but watching capable people encounter an entity that they don't (and can't) understand gives off such a strong feeling of wrongness that it fills the whole atmosphere with foreboding.

I also did not know how to appreciate practical effects the first time I saw this. I didn't recognize that besides the very obvious fact that the effects in this are some of the best ever put to film, they're also used to perfection, at the perfect times; enough is shown that we feel like the alien - or, technically, the organisms the alien possesses and attempts to imitate - is flesh, a real creature. I can't really say that it doesn't tip over the line into being excessive, because the whole thing is an excess of blood and guts; entrails whipping around to find purchase; dragging itself along by its organs; body parts sprouting new, horrible limbs never glimpsed by any Earthly creature. But it's one of the only times where such a liberal application of grossery is needed, where it's used as real, genuine horror instead of a cheap attempt to shock.

I want to talk about the alien. I could talk about it all day and all night if I was given the chance. Because like I said, this is one of the most enduringly frightening concepts in horror that I've ever had the pleasure of giving space in my brain to. It is something that has no physical body itself or has a physical body that can be discarded at will, something that exists as a possessing spirit. It is an organism that is only concerned with survival, and it has the ability to alter its body plan in the blink of an eye to do whatever it can do evade injury and continue its goal of infecting as many life forms as possible. There is something so uncanny about the concept of a being that can just sprout new appendages if needed; it doesn't have to conform to evolution's idea of an ideal body plan honed over millions of years because it can reach out a coil of intestine as a grasping limb or grow a new mouth full of teeth on whatever spot its body needs one. And all of this is depicted with what I'm calling accuracy - it may be a misnomer considering that such a creature (thankfully) does not exist and so there isn't a way to depict it "accurately", but the practical effects team created what felt like a true-to-life depiction of the concept.

That scene where one of the infected men tries to run from the others but is found half-mutated, his hands horrifically misshapen and a blank alien look in his eyes. The noise he makes. That's fodder for a thousand nightmares. I can see how that single scene echoes in my favorite horror film of all time, Banshee Chapter.

I could go on even longer about this movie - how Jed the dog is one of the best canine actors of all time, managing to convey not the obvious immediate threat that an angry dog would, but cunning. Malice. Granted, a lot of that is more a credit to good editing than the dog himself, but I want to point out another specific scene, and then I'll close this review: Towards the beginning, when Nauls is told to turn down his Stevie Wonder, refuses, and then the camera explores empty corridors with the sounds of "Superstition" playing muffled in the background, we see the husky silently slip his nose in the door. He silently pads down the hallway until he finds a room with a human, and enters, as the human's shadow on the wall turns toward him, and then the scene cuts. I felt like I was watching a predator. Not just a dog, but something else. I think maybe it's the segue from light humor to a vision of dread that does it. That you can still hear humanity in the background while you watch the beginning of its downfall on four legs. That scene and every other in this film is why it's one of my favorite horror movies.

Ultraman Blazar The Movie: Tokyo Kaiju Showdown (2024)

directed by Kiyotaka Taguchi
75 minutes
Japan
4 stars out of 5

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I watched this immediately after episode 19 of Ultraman Arc aired because it made me realize how much I'd been missing Blazar. Did you know that, for no clear reason, Tsuburaya still has not released Ultraman Blazar The Movie: Tokyo Kaiju Showdown, the best Ultra movie from the late Heisei and Reiwa era, internationally?

Yes, I said "the best". I know Blazar hype may be a bit overplayed - there were people calling it the best series in recent memory back when all we had was clips and trailers - but it really is remarkable how much it feels like it revitalized the franchise. Coming right off of Decker, which was utterly unoriginal and middling (although fun), Blazar was such a breath of fresh air. Finally, an Ultra series felt genuinely unique, with themes that extended beyond a surface level, actors who brought range to the cast, and humor that didn't feel like it was aimed specifically at children. And it segued perfectly into Arc, which is, at least currently, shaping up to be almost as good as Blazar.

Tokyo Kaiju Showdown was sort of intended to be the final episode of Blazar, but things didn't work out that way because of runtime restrictions. I think this is palpable from the tone of the film: instead of the apocalyptic, let's-end-this-once-and-for-all sendoff that a lot of post-series Ultra films are (let's say Gaia Again, for an example), this just feels like an episode. And the series itself had such strong stand-alone episodes that this is a good thing. The movie doesn't feel like it's overextending itself: it doesn't try to add deep lore or cast any of the characters as being even more heroic than they already are. Instead it gives us what we want out of a Blazar movie: more Blazar.

There is no clear villain in the film. There is instead a concatenation of people inflicting pain on each other, mostly unknowingly, always selfishly, and sometimes at a societal level, that leads to a crescendo of destruction, embodied in the mindless artificial lifeform Gongilgan. Gongilgan is the result of an accident at a storage facility housing a new chemical (damudoxin) which is highly unstable and has the unfortunate tendency to coalesce into some kind of physical being if too much of it is in the same place. It's surprisingly creepy, with shades of Belyudra and Beast THE ONE; if you stare at it too long, you realize it has faces all over, and its spines look like limbs all mashed together. Which makes sense, since it's a chimera, made from kaiju and inorganic materials.

What animates Gongilgan is the soul of Yuki, its unwitting creator's son, who is absolutely furious with his father and by extension with all adults in the world. Here's the fascinating thing about this movie: it gives me the same feeling as Showa Ultra did, where the kaiju is very clearly not in the wrong but is destroyed anyway. It's been a long time since I've left an Ultra battle feeling like the Ultra really didn't do the right thing by killing the kaiju. I don't know, man, there's just something about Gongilgan - it's an angry child, basically, an angry child throwing a tantrum, but it's a child whose anger is righteous, whose point - that adults thrust the responsibility for the future of the planet onto children for their own sake - is completely valid. Yuki is preyed on by the damudoxin, which amplifies his frustration and anger into fuel for Gongilgan's rampage, and Gongilgan doesn't really have a mind of its own, but it's still all valid. Yuki's dad does have a change of heart when he finally realizes just how badly his son needs his respect and attention, but there's no real catharsis here. Gongilgan still has to die.

It's... it's really something. Visually stunning, shot more like a Shin film than a post-series Ultra movie, it's like an upgraded episode of the series. It's got all the intricate detail and superb suit acting that filled out the show itself, but shot with a cinematic eye. The action is exciting but the emotional core of the movie is what drives it - I want to emphasize, again, that this really gave me a feeling I haven't experienced since watching, like, My Home is Earth or something. Ultraman is good, y'all. It's really good.

Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

89 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Three years after her debut film, Mothra goes up against Godzilla in an obligatory test of mettle for any kaiju worth their salt, but the real enemy, as usual, is humanity.

While Godzilla was definitely not the apocalyptic destruction god that he had been in his debut film, Mothra vs. Godzilla is still a strong "good monster vs. bad monster" story. It was the first movie where Godzilla had fought an original kaiju who had debuted in their own movie, and Mothra has in fact proved so enduring that she remains the only Godzilla-series kaiju to continue getting solo movies even after her appearance in this film. 

Godzilla vs. Mothra also introduces what would become really a cornerstone of Mothra as a character: her intimate connection to ecological concerns. In this film, Mothra's home, Infant Island, is reduced to a barren, radioactive wasteland by bomb testing. The government either didn't notice or, more likely, didn't care that there was a native population living on the island at the time. It sucks that he used people in brownface to do it, but what Honda is saying here is surprisingly deep: native populations have had their trust betrayed time and time again and have been ignored and stepped on in the name of capitalism and "scientific progress" in a multitude of ways. Should they - and by extension, in this case, Mothra - really have to forgive anybody for that? If forgiveness is at all possible, it can only be done by improving the world in a material sense, which is a sentiment all of the main human characters share by the end of the film.

About those human characters: it isn't their show. I tend to disagree strongly when people talk about how the human side of Godzilla movies doesn't matter, but in this case I really struggled to even remember any details about the human cast between the last time I watched this movie and now. They're fine - nobody phones it in, and I'm glad they're there (especially egg guy), but aside from Yoshifumi Tajima doing great in one of his only performances where he gets more than a few lines, none of them felt that interesting.

All the tokusatsu in this movie is extremely well-crafted. This is Toho at their best, even when the budget shows. They may reuse the same footage of people evacuating until they wring the life out of it, but it's the macro details rather than the micro ones that are important here. Even though logically I know humans can't be ten inches tall, my brain just refuses to believe that the Shobijin are not real tiny people because they're integrated into the scenery so well. The miniature work on the buildings and cityscapes is top-notch too, as always. The MosuGoji suit is fantastically expressive, part of which apparently came by accident: Godzilla's jowly-bulldog look is a result of an accident where Haruo Nakajima tripped and fell while in the suit and knocked a few of its teeth out. It's very endearing.

I screened this to a group, and one of my friends said afterward that her only hang-up with a lot of kaiju movies is how drawn-out the fight scenes are, which is a valid complaint; I'd like to point out that it's really easy to take special effects for granted nowadays, but when this movie was released, nobody had done this stuff before. It makes sense that they want to show you every single tank and every single plane because this was the first time anybody was seeing effects like this. I also think it's very important to remember that tokusatsu is inextricable from war movies: the technique was essentially born out of Eiji Tsuburaya and his crew making propaganda. Toku has always been made by and for the boat/plane/vehicle nerds.

It's such a joy to watch these earlier Godzilla movies, the way they just flow from start to finish - it kind of feels like watching somebody do a magic trick and really pull it off, so seamlessly you have no idea how they did it. There are rough parts (some iffy compositing, mostly) but there's something about those that feels diegetic; it doesn't take me out of the film. I think I forgot how good this one was. Happy 60th.

Island of Lost Souls (1932)

directed by Erle C. Kenton

USA

71 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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I recently read H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau for the first time and was curious if any of the film adaptations made over the years have managed to get it right (or at least fail and be entertaining in the process) and while I do respect this for being an early sci-fi/horror film, I wasn't moved by it. I feel like disliking any movie from the 1930s immediately gets you branded as un-intellectual, or something like that, but this just didn't grab me. I appreciate the early practical effects, but in terms of actually conveying the feeling that I got from reading the book, Island of Lost Souls falls short.

Dispensing with the opening of the story within a whirlwind minute or two, the film introduces us to our soggy-cardboard-quality protagonist, Parker, as he's "rescued" after his ship goes down and only he survives. The drunkard captain of the ship that picked him up decides he no longer wants to have anything to do with him or the cargo he's been tasked to deliver to Dr. Moreau's isolated South Seas island, and essentially chucks it all overboard. Moreau is introduced earlier in the film than he is in the book, but it doesn't make that much of a difference; neither builds up much of an air of mystery around him; we know that he's morally bankrupt and delusional and there's no real need for a big reveal. Charles Laughton as Moreau is really the best thing about this particular adaptation, and although Laughton really doesn't have any kind of "mad scientist" vibe per se, he's still entertaining to watch and I wouldn't have picked anybody else to play Moreau.

This film also introduces an extremely boring love triangle between Parker, his fiancée Ruth, and Lota, the Panther Woman, one of Dr. Moreau's creations (she is actually credited as "the Panther Woman"). Nothing like this is present in the book, if I'm remembering correctly. There's not the kind of fixation on gender difference that there is in this film: at no point does Dr. Moreau focus on creating a woman in contrast to creating a man; he seems to have experimented with creating different genders, and it is at least mentioned that some of his creations are women, but the whole "can she love like a woman? does she have a woman's impulses?" thing is not a plot point in the book at all. This is why I said that this movie is really nothing special - it has cheap, borderline misogynistic elements inserted purely to meet studio demands of a love story. (Not to mention the hints of racism and exoticism, which actually are there - and a bit worse - in the book as well.)

I'm really just not getting anything out of this. Maybe it's my fault for comparing it to the book. I see reviews on Letterboxd referring to the storyline as "compelling and multifaceted" and praising the actors' performances. I don't get it. I will say that the moment where this actually stood out from the book was at the climax when Moreau's creations realize that he can die - this is more straightforward than the ending of the book, and much more powerful for it. I think restrictions in both content and production kept this from being all that it could (this is technically pre-Hayes Code, but very tame), but I have seen tons of horror movies from this time that still manage to be creepy and atmospheric without utilizing what would eventually become canonized as traditional horror imagery, so there's no inherent reason why Island of Lost Souls should feel like it lacks the ambiance of the book. Although The Island of Dr. Moreau is quite short, it needs something a bit more expansive than a 71-minute movie to get its message across on anything further than a surface level.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

directed by Shinji Higuchi, Hideaki Anno

Japan

121 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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In 2016, this was the first Godzilla movie I ever watched. I'm wondering if that decision is what led to me appreciating Godzilla on its own merits instead of having to go through the process of "hey, this goofy rubber monster stuff I watched as bad dubs on TV when I was a kid is actually good" to rediscover Godzilla like a lot of people do. A recent podcast episode that some people I know in meatspace put together made me want to revisit it, since I realized it had been a couple of years since my last rewatch, and I have to say I think this is one of my favorite Godzilla movies now.

Every time I rewatch this I feel like Higuchi and Anno are doing something with this movie that I understand on a subconscious level but that my brain can't fully parse. There's so many layers to it. It's a Godzilla movie, right? It's about Godzilla. But actually, it's about the inability of the Japanese government to respond to a natural disaster and the resultant loss of life and property. But actually, it's about nuclear waste dumping. But actually, it's about foreign relations. But actually, it's about the fact that humanity might have grown too big for its britches, that the immensity of the response we mount to Godzilla may be an indication that we've doomed ourselves to a perpetual arms race through which more and more horrifying weapons are brought into existence with no way to ever stop it until we all die. We could choose to stop it, of course, but will we?

But actually, it's about Godzilla, because Godzilla is about all of those things.

The entire first half of this movie is almost really funny. The stark contrast between humans running from boardroom to boardroom, volleying decisions around from government official to government official, and the actual on-the-ground reality of a giant monster destroying Tokyo is unavoidably comical. It only gets worse the more Shin evolves: eventually you have this devil-creature who looks like the most evil thing ever born inexorably making its way through the city while shooting lasers out of its back, and you still have to have boardroom meetings about it. None of the human characters are likeable in an individual sense (except, maybe, Patterson; she starts out looking vain and power-hungry, but she does eventually show that she really seems to have a personal connection to what she's trying to protect that goes beyond politics). All of them feel more like titles than people. You get the sense that some - maybe even a lot - of them are trying very hard to do what they believe is right, and that fact is the only shred of optimism the movie leaves us with, but for the most part, even the ones who do genuinely want to unite and help have to put up with bureaucratic labyrinths, if not within their own country, then with other country's governments.

And then there's the big sea creature who is sick and in constant pain from eating radioactive garbage. It's wandered onto land in a place that's not safe for it. It's bigger than us, and much more powerful than us, but it doesn't hate us. It doesn't want to hurt us. It doesn't want anything other than to not be in pain anymore. I can't conceive of a way you could find Shin scary. The whole "man is the real monster" thing gets bandied about all the time in these movies, but this is one of the first times I've really understood it: is it not horrifying that we have the ability to bring skyscrapers down upon a hurt and confused animal, and to freeze its blood? Hell, was it not horrifying 70 years ago that we (briefly, anyway) had the ability to rip it apart at the atomic level? I won't argue whether every effort to kill Godzilla has been the "right" decision or not, but wouldn't we mourn at least a little for the beauty of a man-eating tiger after it had been shot?

Watching Minus One and this movie in quick succession has made me so excited about the state of Godzilla. We can do so much more with it now. I am at least a little bit an annoying Showa purist, it doesn't get much better than Godzilla '54 to me, but the world has changed so much and there are so many new people around now who have lived with Godzilla their whole lives and are ready to bring their own skills and perspectives to the table. It's riveting! To have seen how this whole thing has grown and changed over the last 70 years, and to know it's got a vibrant future.

Happy Birthday Godzilla!

Here's to the next 70 years. Personally, I would love nothing more than to live as long as possible but still not see the end of the Godzilla series within my lifetime.

Like many people, I'm going to be seeing Godzilla Minus One this weekend. But I'm doing it while fully conscious that decisions by Toho - extremely deliberate decisions - regarding the international distribution of Minus One have led to huge swaths of the world having no way to see this movie in theaters. Toho is blatantly favoring North America (and the UK, to a lesser extent) because they know North American fans are where the money is. Putting profits over what people want from them, they ignore fans in other parts of Asia. One Twitter user has been very vocal about this situation ever since the first release of Minus One, and I won't name names since he's understandably tired of being dragged into debates about it, but you can find his posts about the matter on the r/godzilla subreddit as well.

I'm saying all of this because I love Godzilla. I know that there are people elsewhere in the world who also love Godzilla and just want to watch as many Godzilla movies as possible. I'm not an economist so I'm not going to get on here and pretend to advise Japan's largest film studio about distribution tactics, but it seems frankly stupid to be this stubborn about Minus One. They did this last year and now they're doing it all over again. Keeping Minus One out of theaters isn't going to stop anyone from watching it - they're just going to do it through avenues that Toho won't profit off of, which is the opposite of what they want. And yet this keeps happening. With the announcement that a new Godzilla movie has been greenlit, I sincerely hope Toho will make a change next time.

If you're celebrating 70 years of Godzilla this month (like I am), I would encourage you to celebrate 70 years of Godzilla, not Toho. They're a corporation just like any other, and are going to continue to make preposterous business decisions that don't reflect what fans really want out of them. Celebrate the incredibly talented people who have brought us seven decades of Godzilla movies. Celebrate the staff who've worked for Toho as artists and craftspeople - not the ones trying to decide who can and can't watch the movies. Celebrate the complexity of Godzilla's story and the ways it has been interpreted. Celebrate the beautiful art that comes out of every single Godzilla movie. Don't celebrate a corporation that doesn't care about the same things as you.

(I most certainly have some Godzilla '54 posts up on my other blog.)

Happy Halloween from yours truly.

Not really a "post pictures of my face on the internet" kind of person but I want everyone to know I do indeed still have the Mysterian costume and in fact I have upgraded it with a better jumpsuit this year.

 

Longlegs (2024)

directed by Osgood Perkins

Canada/USA

101 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This may be the only new film besides Ultraman: Rising that I review this year. I've severely fallen out of the loop with new horror, and that used to make me feel guilty, but now I'm mostly okay with it. I'll get around to stuff when I get around to it.

I'm inherently skeptical of any movie focusing on Satanic Panic themes. The phenomenon is a bit like the witchhunts of late medieval Europe and colonial America: the witches weren't real, but the hunt was, and it had devastating consequences. The two subjects are similar also in that there are a lot of people who view it on an aesthetic level (E.G. Salem's thriving tourist industry), which can feel really disrespectful to the victims and their families. I think Longlegs handles this fairly well because it's level-headed about what there actually was to fear about the possibility of a network of Satanic cults throughout America: serial killers, actual serial killers, not random rock musicians encoding backwards messages into their records or Harry Potter books encouraging children to do witchcraft. I'm going to assume Perkins has thought about these things and how to depict them with as much sensitivity towards real-world people as possible while still creating an effectively scary, authentically Satanic movie.

I think I mentioned in my review of Skinamarink how interesting it is when a horror movie uses the type of lighting and set decoration that my brain associates with coziness or a feeling of being comfy and safe at home: enclosed, lived-in spaces with low ceilings lit softly by lamps or a single light on somewhere in the house, usually at night, sometimes in the dark parts of the year. A lot of Longlegs takes place in lighting like that. When this is done right, the effect can be discomfiting in an almost subconscious way, and I think Longlegs does it very right - it front-loads with these types of scenes, giving us a lot of shots of Harker within her quiet house or her workplace after dark, but it also introduces horror into that environment, giving us the feeling, for the rest of the film, that the environments we think could be a refuge might actually harbor demons.

I've seen a few people saying that Satan is not a scary enough villain. I'm one of those people, but I also don't think that necessarily has to effect the way I feel about Longlegs, because even if I don't think Satan is scary (because I don't think he's real), I can still accept and become absorbed in a movie where the people in the movie think Satan is real, or where Satan actually IS real, within the context of the story. It's like watching haunted house movies when you don't believe in ghosts. And again, this is a thing that I think Perkins probably payed attention to: depicting a full-frontal Baphomet holds no surprises; there's no real scares to be had in black metal imagery. So instead he has these hints of something terrifying and otherworldly peppered throughout the film. There's one split-second shot of a silhouette against a glass door that stood out as one of the best moments in the film, to me.

I'm not sure how I feel about the way Longlegs really does seem to move further into the supernatural and weird as it goes on. I realize the irony of saying this about a movie that posits that Satan is real, but the whole plot element with the dolls failed to land in my eyes because it feels like it just goes too far out. It's too complicated. There's too much left unexplained. "Everything happened because Satan" is a simple explanation, but it's one that makes sense because it's been done before. Expecting me to accept some kind of weird metaphysical transfer of energy into a series of creepy dolls that somehow have mind control powers and can be used to allow Satan to infiltrate people's homes and drive them to murder each other is just... no, actually, no thanks, that's weird, I don't want that in my otherwise fairly grounded horror movie.

I disliked Gretel & Hansel on everything save for an aesthetic level for much the same reason as above. It could have been a really solid The Witch-style folk horror, but Perkins does all this weird stuff with it that leaves it feeling more fantastical than I feel suited its premise.

I've always like Maika Monroe, and though I was doubtful of casting somebody as recognizable as Nic Cage as the villain, I think what they do with him is really interesting - putting him in such heavy facial prosthetics that you can't really tell who he is lets him lend his inherent Nic Cage-ness to a character other than himself. I think that was a good choice. I guess your enjoyment or non-enjoyment of Longlegs boils down to how much of it you want to take seriously, because there is a lot in it that cannot be taken seriously at all. Overall, it's alright. Watch it in a vacuum without having seen any previews or read any reviews and you will probably get more out of it.

Guyver: The Bioboosted Armor (2005)

directed by Katsuhito Akiyama

Japan

780 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Another review for a TV series today. I held off watching this for a long time because all I ever heard about it was that it was less gory than and generally inferior to the '89 series - which I hold dear in my heart - but after finally watching it, I have no idea what everybody was talking about. This show rules.

I think you should listen to the absolute ripper of an op while reading this for maximum effect.

It would be an understatement to say that a lot of anime and manga focus on high school students stumbling into a dangerous or bizarre situation and ending up gaining (or finding out that they've always had) special powers. It's probably impossible to reckon the number of series that use that trope. But Bioboosted Armor feels like it does it differently. The story begins with a high school boy, Sho, and his friend Tetsuro coming across a Control Medal (the device that allows a wearer to bond with and activate a Guyver suit) in the woods. Sho touches it and it immediately and forcibly equips him with the Guyver suit, leading him on accident down a path that will entangle his life with the destiny of the entire planet. Pure chance - not fate, not destiny; unless you want to headcanon it that way.

Sho himself doesn't get a lot of characterization, he's just sort of A Guy, but the people around him are presented in really interesting, faceted ways that I want to explore before getting further into the review. One of the standout characters to me is Mizuki, Sho's classmate and maybe-girlfriend, who is dragged into the chaos by virtue of being Tetsuro's sister. I will never forget a YouTube comment I read when I was watching the '89 series that said something like "I feel so bad for Mizuki, she's just a little girl and her entire life got turned upside-down". Mizuki is in a lot of ways the exact opposite of the traditional anime schoolgirl: she's clearly immature, not equipped to handle everything that's being thrown at her, constantly depressed and anxious, etc - basically, she's the only person in the show who acts realistically given the situation. I love how when everyone around her talks about fighting and dying and giving one's life to protect the greater good, Mizuki is there essentially saying "What THE HELL are you people talking about, you guys are my FRIENDS and you're GOING TO DIE. That is NOT NORMAL and why are you acting like it is."

Tetsuro is also cool because they never shoehorn him into either being the funny fat guy comic relief or the funny smart guy comic relief. He is clearly very smart but he has his own issues and deals with the ongoing trauma of the series in his own way.

The thing about watching this after having already seen the original series was that I knew I was eventually going to get to the part where Sho's dad (Fumio) dies. I swear, man, I've seen NGE, and Sho's dad dying bothers me almost as much as anything that goes on in that show. Fumio is one of the most normal anime dads I've ever seen: he loves his son very, very much; when we get to read his diary, he talks about how he's concerned for Sho (who has acquired the Guyver suit, but keeps it secret), but he trusts that he'll open up to him sooner or later. The set-up of Fumio as a caring, kind father who believes in his son makes it incredibly painful when - and this is a big SPOILER, but I want to elaborate the whole scenario for emphasis - it seems like both of them finally escape from Cronos, but Fumio has secretly been processed into a Zoanoid, and because Sho refuses to fight him after both of them transform, Fumio as Zoanoid crushes Sho's skull and activates the Guyver suit's incredibly aggressive autopilot mode, rendering Sho into a passenger within his body as he literally vaporizes his own father.

I knew it was coming and it still hit hard.

The concept of the series is premium juicy sci-fi, although the pacing suffers at points due to repeated exposition dumps that bring the show to a halt for several episodes in a row. I love stories where humans are left to infer information about an alien species through their technology because the aliens themselves are absent. We know the Creators' basic goal - engineering humans as perfect living weapons - but we don't know why, or how they operated on Earth. The Guyver suits were never meant for human use, and seeing Sho and the others wear them and eventually even pilot an abandoned Creator ship feels like this almost Rendezvous with Rama scenario where something beyond our imagination is left to us with no explanation.

Unfortunately, most Guyver series seem to have "non-ending" syndrome. After building up a ton of momentum Bioboosted Armor fizzles out into a final three episodes that halfheartedly introduce a future where Cronos rules the world and Zoanoids are integrated into human society. This could have been interesting if it was given the proper time to be fleshed out, but as it is, it feels like an afterthought. The fight between final-form Guyot and Makishima while Sho is desperately trying to pilot the Creator ship out of a volcano and get everyone to safety is more riveting than anything the final few episodes contained, and that's a shame. For a series that had been so epic before, we should have gotten an ending that felt more cathartic than this.

I'm going to stop here, because I've gone on way too long, but I want to go to bat for this series that seems to be dismissed in favor of the earlier one. I do think that I like the '89 series better, but it was so hamstrung by budget constraints and other production issues that it never felt like it achieved its full potential. This series gets closer - but again, the rushed ending does it a disservice.

Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters (1968)

directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda

Japan

80 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Gamera vs. Viras (1968)

directed by Noriaki Yuasa

Japan

81 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Masao and Jim are two boy scouts who have little in the way of personality other than that they love to play pranks. After a cold open (and a really potent title card drop) that establishes the alien invasion plot and shows us Gamera trying to stop it, we spend some time watching the two boys pull a fast one on their scout leader and some scientists with the end goal of getting them to let the kids pilot a submarine - if they can break it, then they're the only ones who'll be able to fix it, so the adults won't have any choice but to let them pilot it, right? It works, and after a disorienting ride, the scout leader and the head scientist turn the sub over to the boys, who use it to have a little race with Gamera. I really liked this part because if you think about it as coming chronologically after the cold open, it implies that Gamera fought with the Viras aliens, lost, came back to Earth to recuperate, and still made time to have an underwater race with a couple of kids and let them drive their mini submarine around his legs. What a champ.

But through a series of accidents, the boys end up abducted into the Viras mothership, and, by their quick thinking and Gamera's brute strength combined, have to figure out how to thwart the invasion.

The sequence of events where the boys rig up the submarine so that they're the only ones who'll know how to pilot it also establishes a theme that will run throughout the entire movie, and to an extent throughout all Gamera movies: adults do not know what they're doing, and most of the time they just get in the way. Kids in Gamera movies are treated as if they alone are capable of seeing the world in a way that adults just can't, and that's why I like these movies so much. They treat a child's perspective as a valuable and unique thing, not something of lesser value than an adult's way of navigating the world. I've read that this was something Noriaki Yuasa fully intended of his Gamera films - that adults know nothing, and children know everything.

When you think about it, the Viras aliens in their separate forms are an extension of the ignorant adults at the beginning of the film: they never let the kids get away with anything cool (their ship's replicator refuses to give them weapons), they try to make the kids do what they tell them to, they treat the kids like obstacles and want them to get out of the way. I like the individual Viras aliens, even though their combined form is one of my least favorite Gamera enemies. They're all wearing surgical scrubs for some reason. I have this weird idea that when they were observing Earth, they picked up our television signals, saw people in surgical scrubs cutting open, mutilating, and dealing apparent massive violence to other unconscious, helpless humans, and decided that wearing scrubs would be the best way to convey to humanity their intent to subjugate them by force.

This was made during bad financial times for Daiei, and has a third of the budget of its predecessor, Gamera vs. Gyaos. The film makes great use of what original material it's capable of concocting, but it does grind to a halt when the stock footage interlude hits. But aside from the stock footage, there is some real beauty to this. I was, even on this second viewing, still enraptured by the design of that spaceship. It's really something else, and not only is it aesthetically interesting, it's also technologically impressive: it can rearrange its segments and jettison damaged sections in response to an attack. I mentioned in my review of vs. Guiron that one of my favorite things was how the interior of the spaceship just has painted wooden floors, giving it this tangible, realistic feel, and I feel the same way about the interior of the Viras ship too. It looks like a big art exhibit.

I had a lot of fun with this one. I think it's one of the lesser-appreciated Showa Gamera movies, but I enjoyed it. I will say that it's a very uneven movie, though, and while the opening is a grand old time, it does struggle to regain its footing after the lengthy stock footage sequence, and never quite gets to the high point it hit at the beginning. It's still worthwhile for the art design if nothing else - these movies are so well-crafted that there's a timelessness to them that transcends their heavy 1960s aesthetic.