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.