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.