The Calamari Wrestler (2004)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

91 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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At this point I've watched quite a few of Kawasaki's films, and while not all of them hit as hard as his best ones, like Executive Koala, I do still think they're all interesting. What distinguishes these movies is Kawasaki's unwavering commitment to the bit, which extends across the board to everybody else involved, too: no matter how goofy the premise is, all of this is always played completely straight.

The Calamari Wrestler is about a man who becomes a squid. As the title implies, the film is set within the world of pro wrestling, and the squid in question is the reincarnated form of famous wrestler Kanichi Iwata, who was forced to retire at the height of his popularity by a terminal illness and returned as a squid. We meet him when he ambushes another wrestler, Koji Taguchi, poised to himself become the top wrestler in Japan, and absolutely smites him. Though it isn't an official match, Taguchi obsesses over this loss and demands to face up against Iwata fair and square.

Outside of the obvious weirdness of having the antagonist of the film be a squid (with the protagonist eventually becoming an octopus - more on that in a minute), this is basically a normal movie. Even boring. The way it manages to subvert your expectations at every turn is what makes it. If you took all the seafood out, this would be an average love story set against a pro wrestling backdrop and I would probably not care for it in the slightest. But through the addition of a wild card element - the squid - Kawasaki produces something that makes us pay attention not just to the squid itself but to the larger narrative. It makes us think more about how other stories that follow the same beats but lack squid function.

What I thought was unusual about all of this is that there's a fluidity between squid and human that essentially implies that being a squid might be better than being a human, at least if you want to be a wrestler. Iwata was only able to reincarnate as a squid under the strict supervision of an elder monk and his team of younger monks, and he can maintain squid form so long as he resists his earthly desires. He's fully able to turn back to a human - but it's an accidental thing, and framed as a mistake; when he meets his girlfriend and they get down and dirty, he returns to being a human. Suppressing desire and connection to the material realm is what grants him squidhood. The same thing eventually happens to his opponent, Taguchi: through training and self-denial, he is able to become an octopus and fight Iwata on even ground.

Topping all of this off is some seriously awesome creature design and suit acting. I was wowed by the squid suit: it's simple, just a big squid with legs and wrestling boots, but the way its face is articulated gives it a surprising level of expressiveness. Instead of having a mouth that moves when he talks, the squid has articulated eyelids, which on paper sounds weird, but when you watch it in action, it just works really well. The top of the suit also has some mobility around the brow area, so the squid can actually change his facial expressions and convey emotion. Neither of the other suits have this level of articulation.

I'm kind of conflicted about what rating to give this, because on the one hand as a love story and a story about pro wrestling - something I could not care less about, personally - this is a little boring. The only thing it's got going for it is giant seafood, but boy, what a thing that is. This kind of movie will probably only appeal to a narrow subset of the populace, and even then, I don't see it being anybody's favorite thing ever in the world. But it is pretty good.

I don't know where else to put this, but in researching this movie on Japanese Wikipedia, I found out that production was supervised by none other than Akio Jissōji. Yes, that Akio Jissōji. This Transient Life Akio Jissōji. Overseeing a movie about a wrestling squid.

The 12 Day Tale of the Monster That Died in 8 (2020)

directed by Shunji Iwai

Japan

88 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Maybe the real covid vaccine... was... the friends we made along the way?

I put off watching this for a long time after reading a negative review or two, but it seemed like the beef a few of those negative reviewers had with it was simply not wanting to be reminded of covid lockdown, which is fair. Personally, the whole concept of this movie holds some specialness for me, because lockdown was the reason why I got into tokusatsu in the first place. I spontaneously decided, while everything was closed and I was stuck inside for several weeks, that marathonning every Godzilla movie was going to be the thing that got me through this. So a movie where people stuck inside during the lockdowns turn to telling each other stories about kaiju and aliens hits very close to my heart.

Takumi Saitoh (later of Shin Ultraman fame) plays Takumi, an out-of-work actor who buys some capsule monsters online and attempts to raise them. It's apparent from the start that this movie takes place in a world just slightly different from our own - one where kaiju and aliens actually exist, and the events depicted in shows like Ultraseven, while having taken place before most of our characters were born, are also factual. So Takumi gets his monster capsules (more like eggs, really) and documents the changes they go through over the course of several days. Other characters include a vlogger Takumi watches who's doing the same thing, with better results; Takumi's friend Non, who buys an actual alien online; Shinji Higuchi playing himself; and So Takei - who I am not familiar with - essentially playing himself as well. It's just Takumi and his buddies, basically, only they're all playing slightly fictionalized versions of themselves.

Although the film shows only a narrow slice of what the worst days of the pandemic were like for a specific section of people, it really does capture that specific feeling of being quarantined and never having gone through anything like this before and just navigating yourself and your world within the confines of your own home. A lot of people made art during lockdown. A lot of people turned inward when it was no longer viable to interact physically with the outside world. Everything and everywhere felt empty - at least for a little while; I'm under no illusion that "lockdown" was ever total and that there weren't still people who had no choice but to continue their jobs as normal under the risk of sickness and death. But certain scenes in this film, like the drone shots of a semi-vacant Tokyo and the interludes of dancers out on the deserted streets, really capture a unique pandemic emptiness that is almost unthinkable today.

This is the kind of movie that gets very close to being ridiculous, but is saved by how earnest everybody involved in it seems to be about its concept. I love this idea of being stuck indoors and starting to just make stuff up. Getting people together over Zoom and making a movie where you all pretend kaiju and aliens are real. The end message of the film is one of personal responsibility in the face of the pandemic, and how something as small as wearing a mask and staying indoors can be a heroic act. If you're not buying into this I can understand how silly it might look from the outside, with Takumi naming his capsule monsters after covid treatments and the final form his remaining capsule takes being the shape of a face mask, but something about it is so authentic that I couldn't help but vibe with it.

I wouldn't call this a spectacular movie, but the concept is interesting, and it reflects an exceptional time not just in the history of one country or group but of the entire world. I don't know about anybody else, but I kind of expected there to be a glut of media about covid, so much so that we'd all get really tired of it, but that never actually happened. Instead, the media about covid that we did get remain little slices of a shared experience that everybody processed and interpreted in their own way, and I think, even if whatever media in question is technically "bad", all of those narratives are worth thinking about.

Battle in Outer Space (1959)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

90 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I watched this several years ago when I was first getting into tokusatsu, but remembered it as really boring and never felt inclined to watch it again until I had the privilege of screening The Mysterians to a group of real actual people in meatspace. That got me wondering if this was as forgettable as I was thinking. As is usually the case, it's definitely not - plot-wise, maybe, but this is such a practical effects tour de force that if I were rating it based on that alone, it would get an easy five stars.

This is a semi-sequel to The Mysterians which is connected to the previous film through two recurring characters, Etsuko Shiraishi and Dr. Adachi, both played by different actors this time (Kyoko Anzai and Koreya Senda, respectively). None of the events of The Mysterians are recounted or flashed-back to, and whether or not this film even takes place in the same timeline is ambiguous at best, so... don't worry about it, it's a spiritual sequel. The most important thread linking the two is the basic concept that Honda was toying with, where all nations of the world come together to fight an external threat as one. He broached this subject in The Mysterians, but explores it more fully here, although in different ways. I have heard that Honda considered The Mysterians to be his favorite of his tokusatsu films - this from a director who was usually hard on himself. I do think The Mysterians is the superior film, but Battle in Outer Space definitely fleshes out the international-cooperation concept more robustly, so I wonder why Honda preferred one over the other.

The storyline follows the same basic path as The Mysterians but makes a few changes, most notably that the aliens - this time called the Natarl - are far more distant and honestly a lot scarier than the Mysterians ever were. You don't see a Natarl's face at any point, but their influence is massive: they have the ability to remotely possess and control humans, ordering them to do their bidding and abducting them with their UFOs at will. There's this incredibly creepy scene where the Earth astronauts arrive on the moon and one of them gets mobbed and almost killed by what we're lead to believe are Natarls themselves - I have a headcanon that these guys were actually something like Shocker footsoldiers and not the real aliens, but there's something about that scene that's just so eerie. The Natarls' proportions look off, their heads are too big, they move awkwardly, and there are too many of them. There's a real uncanny valley effect here that overrides some of the inherent goofiness of their costumes.

Because this is an Ishirō Honda film, we of course have one guy who sacrifices himself heroically for the good of the rest of the space crew. This character is played by the inimitable Yoshio Tsuchiya, whose best roles by far are his villains, but he does a commendable job in this situation as well. Another great scene is when Tsuchiya's character, Iwamura, is possessed by the Natarl while driving to Ginza. By the time he arrives there he no longer has a will of his own. The musical score becomes frenetic and disorienting, the neon lights flash across the screen, and we see a dazed Iwamura in the middle of the city, a passenger now in his own body.

Unfortunately, the recycled plot fails to fill out the film's runtime. But what it lacks in plot, it more than makes up for in practical effects. The Mysterians was Toho's big tokusatsu extravaganza, but the effects in this film easily rival it - if not surpass it altogether. Again, although there's many similarities between the two, changes are made here: whereas The Mysterians was almost entirely Earth-bound, Battle in Outer Space is a distinctly space-age film. All of its real standout sequences occur in the SPIP spaceships and on the moon (the lava fields of Mt. Mihara here standing in for the rocky lunar surface). Absolutely gorgeous 1950s conceptions of what the future would look like abound. At about 70 minutes in the plot essentially grinds to a halt and the remaining runtime is filled with expertly-filmed aerial dogfights, but I didn't even care that nothing was actually happening in terms of story because the effects were so fun to look at.

I still think The Mysterians is better, but it's a "two cakes" situation: fussing over the comparative quality of each film takes a backseat, for me, to celebrating the fact that we got two of a very good thing.

The Invisible Man Appears (1949)

directed by Shigehiro Fukushima, Shinsei Adachi

83 minutes

Japan

3.5 stars out of 5

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I recently got together a list of every tokusatsu film I've ever seen and realized that this and The Invisible Man vs. The Human Fly were conspicuously absent. I have seen Motoyoshi Oda's Invisible Man, but that's it in the way of invisible-man movies. So let's talk about this little-known but important early work of tokusatsu.

One can definitely see influences from this on Toho's "Transforming Human" trilogy. Not only in the fact that it's a noir-ish story about an altered human with a little crime thrown in for funsies, but also because the effects were done by Eiji Tsuburaya as his first postwar work (he had previously done effects for war films). I can't compare it to the Universal Invisible Man, because the only memories I have of that are seeing it playing on a TV somewhere in public when I was a small child. For what it's worth, even though the visual language is a direct callback to the Universal film, The Invisible Man Appears was actually based on a different source (a children's science fiction novel). However, Japanese Wikipedia claims that a lot was altered from this source, so it remains that riffing on the Universal original was probably intentional after all.

There's a general vibe of scientific experimentation run amok in the plotline, and the scenario chosen to highlight that is basically the idea that being invisible, you could do whatever you want, including - shock horror - jewel thievery. It gets a little more complicated than that along the way, because there's confusion about who exactly the invisible man is: is it the professor who invented the invisibility formula, or someone else? And is someone taking advantage of the whole situation and dressing up as the invisible man to get away with crimes? (The answer to that one is "yes".) To be honest, the plot was really confusing to me, and it required some Wiki journeying to unravel it all - could be because I was so tired I started passing out during the last half-hour of the film - but, while this is fun as a very of-its-time crime thriller, the real draw here is the special effects.

There's a reason why the unwrapping sequence from the Universal film is still so instantly recognizable. It might have been surpassed by computer animation in terms of quality, but I think - I hope - people still appreciate the effort behind creating an effect so sophisticated at such an early date. It's the same with The Invisible Man Appears. The effects are remarkably good for the time thanks to Tsuburaya's mastery of the medium, and the film is full of shots that take full advantage of the concept of an invisible human running wild. We see the invisible man manipulate objects around him, we see chairs depress when he sits on them, we see him gradually disappear when he removes his clothing. The sense of physicality despite the lack of a visible physical body is conveyed extremely well. (The first reveal scene was so good it almost made me not think about how I was basically watching a guy invade somebody's home and get completely butt-ass naked in front of him.)

It's also just really fun to watch this as an artifact of the time it was made. I was happily surprised to see that there's a scene where the characters all go to see a Takarazuka Revue, which is something I have a little knowledge about and interest in. I particularly want to highlight one member of the cast: Takiko Mizunoe, who was herself an opera performer in real life; she was Japan's first female film producer and a prolific player of male roles in theater. She definitely stands out from the rest of the actors as someone who looks and acts more like a stage performer than everyone else. Aside from that, the only face I recognized was a very young Saburo Date in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role.

This was a pretty obscure film for a long time, and was unavailable on home media outside of Japan until its Arrow Video release in 2021, which is a shame because everybody loves Eiji Tsuburaya. (He apparently didn't regard his work on this film as being that good, and in fact decided not to stay at Daiei because of it - imagine!) I would love to have a movie marathon of the Transforming Human trilogy and stick this in alongside it, I think it fits really well with later kaijin-type films.