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.