It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

directed by Robert Gordon

USA

79 minutes

3 stars out of 5

___

So we round out this year's KaiJune with yet another non-Japanese monster movie. I'm including this one because it is irrevocably tied to kaiju film history, being a product of the same zeitgeist as Godzilla - or I guess I should call it Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, since that's what American audiences would have seen.

I ended up liking a lot of things about this movie but also absolutely hating a lot of other things. The opening of the film is incredibly strong: the interior of an atomic submarine, the camaraderie of its crew, and the sudden, inexplicable things that begin to happen when, unbeknownst to the men inside, the giant Mindanao octopus grips the sub fast in its tentacles. No windows means that while we, the viewer, with the benefit of 70 years of pop culture to inform us of what's going on, are in on the unfolding events, all the crew have to go by is murky sonar images and the uncanny sensation of being very, very tiny in the grasp of something very, very large.

But as soon as they introduce the woman scientist, things get... 1950s. I am limited in how much I want to complain about this movie's misogyny because I know there's no real point in expecting an old movie to have modern attitudes, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Prof. Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue) is arguably the film's best character (although the film isn't stellar at all in terms of the human plot) but she spends the whole movie having to fight tooth and nail to justify her existence as both a scientist and a woman. She's constantly being belittled by the men around her, particularly one of the ones she's having some kind of romantic liaisons with. It's only when a man sticks up for her that her worth as a professional and her individuality are recognized, and even then, it has to be couched in a statement about the "new breed of woman" who is every bit as smart and capable as any given man. In some sense it does feel radical to have a man step aside and make room for women as intellectual equals, but I'm not comfortable with how that statement dismisses the often grueling, thankless, unacknowledged work of women prior to WWII and women becoming more visible in the workforce.

And it's even more of a shame because I really like Domergue's performance here. There's something about her body language and expressions that makes Prof. Joyce feel constantly absorbed in whatever she's doing. Domergue gets into the role in a very believable way. In an era where actors could be fairly stiff or over-polished, Joyce feels like a real human.

I think one of the problems with this movie is that it doesn't really feel like it gets excited about anything. It's not fair to compare it to Godzilla - it's not fair to compare anything to Godzilla - but I couldn't help doing it. The issue that almost ruined the film to me was that the initial octopus scene comes out of absolutely nowhere: when I think about how that Odo Island reveal with Godzilla's ugly head cresting over the hill felt like something that had never, ever been done before, and how it was done with much more rudimentary puppetry than this, I feel like this movie has no real excuse for just throwing in our first full look at the monster octopus at random with no build-up or fanfare. All the action scenes in this thing feel unearned, and while the effects are undeniably impressive, there could have been a much better sense of segue between the monster and everything else that was going on around it. Not to mention that the film is entirely lacking any sense of pathos or poignancy; the Mindanao octopus is just a giant animal to be destroyed by man's might.

All that being said, though, I still did like this more than I thought I would. Its flat, dry tone honestly kind of works sometimes - like in the opening submarine scene, where panic and terror would have felt cheap. I liked the procedural, scientific aspect. I actually also liked how the octopus was just a big creature with no particular intelligence (inaccurate, given what we know about octopuses now) that was too large and destructive to be allowed near human civilization. The film doesn't manage to express the sense of monster as paradigm shift that Godzilla does, but as long as you're not expecting a game-changer, this is a pretty solid atomic sci-fi flick.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

directed by Yoshimitsu Banno

Japan

85 minutes

4 out of 5 stars

----

Godzilla vs. Hedorah is a tonal nightmare. Environmental horror presented through a lens of dancing hippies, random Mt. Fuji jam sessions, giant flying sludge piles, and a cuddly, heroic Godzilla. While focusing on the things that make vs. Hedorah such a distinct entry within the series is useful for talking about it as an individual film, I think emphasizing those traits can have a tendency to make it seem like this film does not fit with the overall tone of the Godzilla series. Especially on my most recent rewatch, it's very obvious to me that Banno and everyone involved with the film was - while creating something a lot more bombastic and trippy than the series had yet seen - keeping very closely to the message of the original 1954 Godzilla in their own weird way.

One of the first things we see in the film is a kid playing with some Godzilla toys. We're at full commercialization at this point (not that we haven't always been - there was a lot more marketing done around the time of G '54 than a lot of people may think) and Godzilla is explicitly a hero, suitable for the fantasies of children. But rather than see this as a horrific aberration, as the character being mishandled and fundamentally altered from what it was originally intended to have been, I feel like there's also a way to see some bitterness and irony in this. The simplest way to put it is that in the face of a threat like Hedorah, Godzilla really doesn't look that bad. When one of the characters remarks on the awful state of the planet, how polluted and dirty it is, and says that "if Godzilla saw this, I bet he'd be mad" - I honestly thought "yeah, I bet he would". I think if Godzilla saw that humanity had continued to ruin the planet, not with nuclear power this time but with chemical smog, poisoned earth, and uninhabitable oceans, he probably would be pretty mad. 

I think this movie totally knows what it's doing. On the outside it looks like a stark departure from the roots of the Godzilla series, but I really think it's not. There's an obvious callback to the original movie in the fact that one of the main human characters (insofar as any of the human characters are "main", humans are remarkably useless here, even for this series) is a scientist who ends up spending much of the movie with bandages over his right eye. Even more to the point is that he keeps fish in his lab, like Dr. Serizawa also did. The movie really wants to show us that fish tank, and I have to admit that I can't figure out why the fish were made to feel so important - maybe there was an implication that even these perfect creatures, kept isolated from the toxic slime that was choking their non-captive-bred counterparts in the open ocean, would eventually fall victim to sludge like all the rest of the planet, given enough time. Nothing is safe.

This movie is scary. It deals with scary things. It may not seem like it, because it's so colorful and wild that you almost get distracted from the imagery of people dismembered and buried under stifling piles of sludge. But there is a solid philosophy here, under the fish masks and the dancing girls in bodysuits. The younger characters take the view that the good green Earth their parents grew up with is gone, so the only thing to do is sing and dance: the planet is dying, we are all dying, what else can we do? It's the same core concept of revulsion at what humanity is capable of that fueled a lot of the original Godzilla, but instead of getting all mopey, Banno decides to have his characters party about it.

I also think Hedorah rules. Kenpachiro Satsuma knocks it out of the park with this performance (and so does Nakajima in the Godzilla suit, as always). There's something that really clicked with me about Hedorah's overall vibe this time; I just love its silhouette, how lumpy and blobby it is, how its body plan is so totally opposite from Godzilla. It drives home the point that Hedorah is not a creature born from Earth, even though it may be breeding here. Hedorah looks and acts like an alien. I love its static facial expression in contrast to Godzilla, who had been becoming more and more human-like in his expressions since the 1960s.

Yeah, man, the movie's good. This had been one of my least-frequently-rewatched Godzilla movies because it does feel like such an outlier on the surface. But watching it last night made me realize how good it is and how well it fits with the rest of the series. Banno is often maligned for the choices he made in this film, but imagine a continuity where outside directors were invited into the Godzilla series more often. We could have had a few more super artsy, daring films like this at a time when the series was mostly sticking to an increasingly child-oriented vibe.

Indie Kaiju Roundup, part III

Yatsuashi [2021]

Directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

12 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

This very short short comes to us from director Hiroto Yokokawa, who has made more well-known feature-length kaiju films such as Great Buddha Arrival, Nezura 1964, and recently Hoshi 35. As with much of his work it features Kazuma Yoneyama in a central role, although not the lead role; there's an Iron King thing going on here where the guy who actually transforms is not technically the main character. 

Yatsuashi was evidently based off of a scrapped Daiei film called Great Demon Beast Dagora, which I can find virtually no information about (most of the Google results for that title lead back to Yatsuashi itself). Based on a Japanese blog post and a tweet from the creative team behind Yatsuashi, I gather that Dagora was an attempt in the same vein as the disastrous Nezura to use a live animal or animals rampaging in a miniature set to portray a giant monster, only instead of rats, Dagora would have used an octopus. Taking an unmade project and spinning the idea into a brand-new film is always a really interesting experiment, especially when it turns into something like Yatsuashi that is probably nowhere near what the original filmmakers intended to create. Like I said when I reviewed Great Buddha Arrival, that's how lost and unmade films can continue to survive: by influencing a new generation of filmmakers.

As for the plot, Yatsuashi is essentially about a guy who is so frustrated by his job that he turns into a giant octopus. That is pretty much it. Bin Furuya appears on a news broadcast at one point. There's not much else I can say about a 12-minute film. I really enjoyed this short's sense of creativity and how much it felt like everybody involved was passionate about what they were making, and even though the octopus scenes were minimal, the way it's photographed feels very deliberate, like the creative team really wanted to convey how strange and alien an octopus looks, not just slap one in front of the camera and leave the viewer to decide how to feel about it.

Godaizer [2010]

Directed by Hillary Yeo

19 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

This one hails from Singapore, which is always cool. It's on YouTube under the title "Giant Robot vs. Monster Animated Short" and that is certainly what it is. With no dialogue, the short uses environmental storytelling and lingering shots of news clippings to introduce us to a world where a small family had, at some point in the past, been making and piloting giant robots to defeat a sudden kaiju invasion, until eventually the cost of deploying the robots became too much of a strain on resources... or so they say.

The animation style here is interesting. I did not know how old this was and took it for a more recent production, assuming the patchy, almost brushstroke-like style was a deliberate choice, but now that I know it's 15 years old, I think some of that feel may have simply been due to technical limitations of the time. Still, though, I really did like the way this looked - it's the kind of thing where you can tell the storyboards for it were probably really beautiful.

The story being told here is also interesting: the past is only hinted at, but there's clearly a deep sadness to the characters and their backstory that is fully expressed despite the lack of dialogue. Facial expressions exchanged between the father and son convey everything we need to know.

That time period between when the mecha program apparently ended and when the events of the film take place is what I kept thinking about after I watched this - the father-son team clearly have a lot of robots fully built, serviced, and ready to go, considering that they deploy on fairly short notice as soon as the monster escapes containment, so you have to imagine a decade or more of these folks just... watching their robots rust, knowing they could be used for good, but probably getting told over and over "no, we don't have the budget for that". Again, this is something that isn't stated, but the feeling of being forced to let your passion stagnate because you're not being given the resources you need is incredibly frustrating in a very real-world sense.

Magara: The Final Showdown [2015]

Directed by Jun Awazu

5 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

At just five minutes, this is probably the shortest short I've reviewed. Like the earlier Negadon, this is entirely CG-animated, but unlike Negadon, I think this one lacks some of the expressiveness that the human characters in the earlier film had. Granted, this one has a total of two human characters: the mech pilot and a little boy on the street having his absolute mind blown by the kaiju showdown he's witnessing.

There's not much to talk about here, but the kaiju design is gorgeous - sort of a standard dragonish thing, but something about the head design and the shape of the mouth was really beautiful to me. I would love to see what the 3D model for it looked like. And then we have the mecha, which is clearly based off of Dogoo ceramics and is actually pretty bad at its job. The best thing about this short is that it's an example of a scenario I don't see in tokusatsu often enough: "What if we deployed the mecha and it just made everything worse?"

Howl from Beyond the Fog (2019)

directed by Daisuke Sato

Japan

35 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

Another slightly unconventional pick for our second week of KaiJune, but one that, again, most definitely does have a giant monster in it.

Howl from Beyond the Fog bowled me over for about the first ten minutes. The film begins with a young man returning to his childhood home after the death of his twin brother (this is thematically significant but never addressed). There he meets a blind girl - who everyone thought was supposed to be dead - living in seclusion inside his house, and she introduces him to the god inhabiting the lake in the middle of their village, a creature that just wants to live and breathe along with everything else in the world.

I screened Great Buddha Arrival to a small audience this past month, and afterward, my friend and I were talking about the sense of never being able to go home again, of having memories of some specific place or thing that you can never, ever replicate, because even if you try, whatever you're nostalgic for is never going to be the same as the first time you experienced it. To me, that was the overwhelming feeling of the first ten minutes of this short: coming back home to find that everything is the same but also different - it's your home, the place you grew up, but there are aspects of it that you never recognized, here represented as the tremendous, unmovable force of nature that is the creature, but also the undercurrent of hatred in the village that the protagonist may have been too young to notice the first time around.

This is a stop-motion film where all of the characters are portrayed using puppets. Their static faces did not bother me at all, because I wasn't looking to the individual characters for information, I was listening to what was being told through their actions and the imagery onscreen. The creature (canonically named Nebula, which I think is quite beautiful, although it's never named in the film) was designed by legendary creature designer and modeler Keizō Murase. Most relevant to our discussion of this film is the fact that Murase also designed Varan, a creature who was also depicted as being a god to the people who lived nearby. Varan feels very influential on Nebula, and in a way, the story of Howl from Beyond the Fog is a bit like what an alternate-universe version of the movie Varan might look like. Varan is one of my favorite kaiju because of its unconventional origins, and I've always wanted a story where we get to see the creature in its context as a god.

I also want to mention that the film has this way of making Nebula's roar almost diegetic that I thought was really amazing. There's a soundtrack that starts up almost every time Nebula is onscreen, and when the creature roars, it fits in with the music so well that it feels like it's part of it. I don't know, that just gave me chills whenever it happened. Some of the music in this is actually rather unfitting, but the part of the soundtrack that blends Nebula's roar into itself is gorgeous.

I don't think this movie is all that it could have been, but it's pretty close. Going into this with expectations is not the best way to encounter it. Try to just live in it for a little while, get past the lack of human actors and revel in the craft of making this film.

Comedy Trio [Owarai san'ningumi] with English Subtitles

It took longer than I wanted it to, but I finally finished the subtitling project I've been working on: two episodes of Comedy Trio subtitled in English for the first time. This series has been on my radar because it's the most well-known work of Yoshiko Otowa: singer, actress, and younger sister of Akihiko Hirata.

Read more about Comedy Trio here and see the post about my subtitles - which includes the archive.org link to the episodes as well as my TL notes - here.

Zarkorr! The Invader (1996)

directed by Michael Deak

USA

80 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

"We have Shobijin at home."

Welcome back to KaiJune. Since I opted to do KaiJuly last year due to having started a night shift job and having scrambled eggs for brains, you've technically gotten two kaiju months within one year. Aren't I just so generous. I remain a stickler for applying the term "kaiju" only to specifically Japanese monsters, because I don't think it makes sense otherwise, but I'm justifying including this movie in KaiJune by saying that if you like kaiju movies you are probably going to like this.

Zarkorr! The Invader sounds like a fake movie that a nerdy character on a TV show would get made fun of by other characters for liking. "Look at Steve with his Zarkorr lunchbox, har har!" It is very much a real movie, though, and honestly, for much of its running time, it's kind of delightful. I enjoyed this a lot right off the bat for its creativity, authenticity, and commitment to the bit, even though all of that started fizzling out once it passed about the half-hour mark.

The film begins with footage of a giant monster rampaging through California. Exactly what we love to see. Since this is how the film starts, I'll start out by talking about the monster: I really, really like everything about it. A lot of American monster suits just look kind of... trashy, for lack of a better term; they look cobbled-together and they move weird, which is often exacerbated by bad editing. It could be the fact that I watched this in very poor quality, but the Zarkorr suit looked and moved fantastic, and the miniatures it destroys were similarly well outfitted. To me, Zarkorr looks like an Ultraman Tiga monster who somehow got transported to California.

After that, we meet our protagonist, a very average guy who had been completely unaware of Zarkorr's rampage until a tiny hologram of a teenage girl shows up in his kitchen and tells him to switch on the news. She proceeds to tell him that he is the only one who can defeat Zarkorr: half of the people on Earth would be worse than him at it, and half the people would be better, so he's perfectly in the middle, and therefore the highly advanced alien race that the hologram's real self belongs to chose him. All the while she's exposition-dumping on our protag, I'm thinking "wow, this is so cool!" It's so interesting, like a writing prompt brought to life: a random guy with no special powers, chosen fairly arbitrarily by an alien race to defeat a monster (that they kind of sent on purpose for funsies) that cannot be killed by any conventional weapon either currently in existence or in development. Where do we go from there? How do we build off of such a neat set-up for a story?

Not very well, it turns out. Where this movie really fumbles the bag is in spending too much time doing what I really hate it when sci-fi movies do: establishing that everybody but the main character thinks the main character is crazy. To me, this is unnecessary: the time that the movie wastes on having the protagonist take a cryptozoologist hostage and try to convince the cops and everybody else that he can defeat the giant monster and Should Not be taken to jail under Any Circumstances could be spent doing something more interesting. A monster movie where everybody acknowledges the monster and skips the awkward human conflict is usually a much smoother viewing experience.

The middle part of the movie only gets worse. We're introduced to a pretty cringey stereotypical hacker character who is acted fairly decently but could have been... reconsidered, perhaps. One of the cops joins the main group because he's a conspiracy theorist and therefore predisposed to believe what the protagonist is claiming. This leads into another problem this movie has: all of its attempts at humor fall so flat that it would be better if they weren't there. I don't think there are actually any "jokes" in this thing per se; its style of humor is more "here is a thing that is supposed to be funny because of the way that it is". "Here is an eccentric wacky hacker guy", "here is a cop who believes in UFOs", "isn't it funny that this guy is supposed to save the world when he's so totally unremarkable". Having a little light banter here and there might have actually been beneficial, if used sparingly.

The ending is anticlimactic but in a way that I honestly kind of love. Like, why does killing a monster have to be a huge deal? Why can't the journey to kill the monster be the more elaborate aspect of the story, as opposed to the final fight? Our protagonist gives Zarkorr the old Zetton treatment (as in, he's Zetton and Zarkorr is Ultraman) and it pops out of existence and then it's done.

I think this is a movie that had cool ideas in it but didn't execute them so well. I'm beyond caring about a visibly low budget or poor acting, the only thing that matters to me is an interesting story that feels like the filmmakers cared about it. For the most part, Zarkorr has that. But it doesn't seem to be able to stretch it out even to its relatively short running time. I mean this in a mostly positive way: finding out that the director was a makeup artist whose only directing credit is this movie makes a lot of sense.

Blood Suckers (1971)

directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, Julian More

UK, Greece

87 minutes

1.5 stars out of 5

---

The first thing I noticed about Blood Suckers was ultimately incidental to the narrative of the film itself, but it did set me up for the experience I was about to have. After some B-roll and an opening voiceover in which the course of events leading up to the film is established, the first actual scene of the film hits, and the editing immediately made me feel like I was going crazy. This could just be me, and I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, but you know when a production team can't get two actors's schedules coordinated, so they have to film them in separate locations and then edit the footage so that it looks like they're in the same room? The whole first scene of Blood Suckers feels exactly like that, except all of the actors are in a room together. Every time someone speaks, the frame changes to focus on a shoulders-up shot of that person, and when someone else replies, it changes to them, on and on, with the dialogue uncomfortably rapid-fire and the cuts way too fast. There's just something really bizarre and disorienting about it, and things only got worse when the film segued awkwardly into an orgy scene that felt like it lasted about a half an hour.

Honestly, I am going to stay on that orgy scene for another minute because it is so jarring that it deserves further attention. I actually enjoyed the way it was edited when it turned into a bad trip and a woman got murdered - that was the only place in the film where its gonzo editing style felt like it fit the mood. But that orgy absolutely could have been half or even a quarter as long as it was.

So, what is this movie about? Well, despite the opening narration by one of the characters, the fun thing about this movie is that it doesn't really have a main character, and as a result, the plot feels entirely different depending on who you're focusing on. To disappeared Oxford student Richard Fountain's friends, it's about the search for a promising young academic who runs off to Greece and gets involved in weird drug orgies and other sexual deviancy. To Fountain, it's about the time he realized he could only get it up for vampires. To any of the friends who go to Greece to look for him, it's a series of increasingly odd events culminating in a death or two followed by the rescue of their friend who falls in love with a witchy Greek lady and subsequently decides "fuck the Ivory Tower" and kills his girlfriend. The vampirism thread is, unsatisfyingly, left somewhat open-ended: is it "true" vampirism or is it just the wiles of an exotic foreign enchantress taking advantage of a guy's secret vampire fetish?

I promise you, this is much more boring than I'm making it seem. This is one of those movies that is really not entertaining in the sense that it's well-made or even interesting at all, but every choice involved in its production and everything about the way the final product was put together adds up into a horror movie that is so tonally strange that it's hard to peel your eyes off of it. I looked into the film on Wikipedia to see if I could find any explanation for why it is the way that it is, and apparently they just kind of ran out of money during filming. The voice-over narration was added because the film was essentially shot in two parts - one pre- and one post-going broke - and the second half added in a lot of new actors and scenes that required some extensive piecing together to make work with the previously-shot footage.

I can't say I would ever recommend this to anybody, because it's the kind of thing where if you stumble across it and think it sounds good, you already know your own tastes and are virtually guaranteed to be down for what you're getting into. If I had to pick between this and Land of the Minotaur in terms of "weird '70s Greek horror that Peter Cushing was inexplicably involved in", I would pick Land of the Minotaur any day, both because of the Brian Eno score and because, unlike Blood Suckers, it lacks a scene where someone says "Could Bob's African background have given him some kind of vivid imagination?"

Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer (1984)

directed by Mamoru Oshii

Japan

97 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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Hi, hello, I don't know a single thing about Urusei Yatsura but I was convinced to watch this because I heard that it had a scene where the characters watch Godzilla. I didn't even have any idea that it was directed by Mamoru Oshii until just now, which in hindsight makes everything about it make a lot more sense.

Since I don't have any context whatsoever for any of the characters or settings in this anime, I'm going to talk strictly about this film and this film alone, and hopefully not put my foot in it too much. The film assumes prior familiarity on the viewer's part, but if you're not overly concerned with anything, it can certainly be watched as a stand-alone thing - the plot is so engaging and philosophically potent that you could probably adapt it into any given fictional setting and it would still be fascinating regardless of what characters were exploring its bounds.

From what I gather, Urusei Yatsura is about Lum, an alien girl, her boyfriend Ataru whom she refers to as Darling, and a cast of their classmates as well as the school's nurse who is secretly a sorceress. That is about all you need to know before going into Beautiful Dreamer, and you barely even need to know that. The film begins as the characters' school is preparing for a festival, and scenes of the students preparing props and costumes are jam-packed with tokusatsu references: people dressed like Xilliens, kaiju cameos from the likes of baby Mothra, Kanegon, Alien Baltan, Megalon and more, an Ultra or two in the background, and so on and so forth. Setting the events of the first quarter of the film on the eve of a big festival gives the film - if I may be excused for using what is, at this point, a fairly worn-out phrase - a liminal atmosphere. Everybody is preparing for something big to happen, but we're not concerned with the big thing itself - just the nervous energy of the night before, knowing that tomorrow will be a big day.

But after a while some of the students realize that something isn't quite right. When two of them are sent out into the city to go pick up food, they realize that they've been staying overnight at the school for what has to have been several nights in a row, only leaving to get food. One of the faculty soon realizes that events seem to be repeating themselves over and over. It's always the night before the festival. Everything is always the same. Eventually, all of the characters try to go their separate ways in order to leave the school, but they can't break free: they always come back to the school in the end. Although the film moves on to explore other concepts, the pure psychological horror of this first quarter is so memorable: what if you suddenly became aware that you had essentially been acting out the story of your life, and everything around you - all of the people you knew, all the places you go - was just a set? What would it feel like to walk through your life with the knowledge that you were trapped in a loop? Everything would be the same, but you would be different - or would it be you who was the same, and everything else had changed?

One of the students, Mendou, who seems to be a weapon/vehicle nerd, happens to have a Harrier jet at his home. Everybody piles into it and attempts to escape the time loop by flying into the upper atmosphere. They do escape - but, looking down at what had been their home planet, they discover that all it really is is a circular plateau drifting through space on the back of a giant stone turtle.

Returning home, it's like some kind of spell is broken. After some time passes, the state of the planet regresses into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The kids are able to live relatively normal lives: the convenience store miraculously never runs out of stock, there's one house that still has water and electricity for them all to live together in, and although all other humans on the planet have disappeared, leaving crumbled wreckage in their wake, the students have each other. Still, though, nothing will ever be the way it was: for reasons beyond the comprehension of any of the characters, as soon as they broke out of the time loop, the world ended.

But... is this really a bad thing?

The scope of what this movie asks about human existence is so wide-reaching that I couldn't possibly hash it all out in one post. There are questions here about the difference between dreams and reality. If someone was able to have everything they wanted given to them within a dream that was indistinguishable from reality, a dream that they could live in for the rest of their life, peopled by their friends and family and anything they could possibly desire - would that not become their reality? How can anyone tell that they aren't dreaming at any given time? Why do we separate dreams and reality with such a hard and fast line?

I'm not even scratching the surface of how it feels to become absorbed in the world that this movie creates. It's scary at times - there is a scene where Ataru is running endlessly through the school's infinitely regressing hallways, only for Lum to rescue him and find that, from an outsider's perspective, he had really been running in place. But it's also beautiful in that way that only sun-drenched '80s anime can be. The animation style is incredibly fluid, and I was in awe at how creative the "camera angles" could get. The occasional watercolor still montage of a vacant planet populated by a handful of students and an endless amount of seabirds, fish, and other wildlife break the mold of traditional depictions of a post-apocalyptic Earth. The whole idea of this movie is just so fascinating and so hard to pin down. There's something about this whole deal that kept making me think of the work of Akio Jissōji and I would love to hear if anybody agrees with me on that or if I'm just weird and watch too much Akio Jissōji.

While this was my first experience with Urusei Yatsura, it most likely won't be my last. I continue to discover these huge cinematic blind spots that I've had without knowing, and anime is one area where I know there's so much more that would blow my mind if I would just sit down and watch it.

Baby's First Silver Scream Spookshow

On May 17th some friends from my film screenings took me from my nice safe home and ferried me to spend a day in Atlanta going to my first Silver Scream Spookshow, which was featuring Mothra vs. Godzilla. The Spookshow is a kind of old-timey throwback horror-host thing starring Professor Morte and his troupe of Go-Go Ghouls, who put on a stage show before all of the movies they screen. I didn't know anything about this before my friend told me about it and very kindly offered to let me tag along, so here's me traveloguing about it. If you happened to be at the afternoon Spookshow and heard somebody yelling "HOLY SHIT IT'S KEMUR MAN", sorry, that was me, the spirit moved me.

the birds outside a french bakery are well fed indeed

Before the show, we went to the Monsterama Market Macabre, a fairly large dealer's room with a mix of people selling various vintage (and new) horror merch and vendors selling their original wares. I spent about an hour there and picked up a nice handful of random keshi figures (although some were suspiciously sticky, as old figures tend to be). The overall ratio of toku merch to general horror memorabilia was quite skewed in favor of horror, but there was one small Godzilla booth that I could have easily dropped much more money at than I did.

Afterward we ate lunch at a Peruvian place where the waiter referred to me as "young lady" which gave me the vibe that he perhaps thought I was a child or teenager (I am not a lady and I am also 26).

We rolled up to the Spookshow a good deal of time before it started and so got to watch as the place slowly got more and more packed. We were there for the early show, which was intended to be more child-friendly; there were a lot of kids in the audience but all were very well-behaved. The stage show lasted about 20 minutes and consisted of the Go-Go Ghouls' attempts to summon Mothra, which were largely unsuccessful but did summon a bearded human with what appeared to be two skeins of yarn stuffed into the chest area of their dress going by Madame Butterfly. During this time either Alien Zetton or Kemur Man (difficult to tell) and Cicada Human could be seen at large.

I was really, genuinely so normal about seeing an Alien Zetton in person.

Eventually the Ghouls' efforts to summon Mothra were successful and we were treated to a large and incredibly gorgeous Mothra puppet flying around the theater. I wanted to capture video of this but unfortunately I have dinosaur technology syndrome and the video I recorded only ended up running for one second.

Thankfully, I did get to meet the lady herself after the show. I also showed my Godzilla tattoo to Professor Morte. 

Yes, I've been Minilla this whole time. I'm sorry for lying to you all.

A short semi-interactive film featuring a really gorgeous Godzilla puppet resembling the GMK suit (Prof Morte mentioned something about the amalgamated souls of WWII, so I think this is their chosen origin story for Godzilla) was one of the highlights of the show for me. I saw the puppet and its creator after the show and was given a free zine as reward for wearing a sick-ass King Joe pin that day.

Afterwards we stopped by Videodrome, which I would choose as my preferred location for a kind of "locked in the shopping mall overnight"-slash-Groundhog Day scenario. I did not buy anything but I appreciated the Vinegar Syndrome pop-up that was happening outside the store and I hope I impressed the merits of Tai Katō upon the friend I was with.

I'm legally obligated to tell you that we absolutely, without a doubt watched the subtitled version and not the dub. For certain, that is what we did.

I don't get out of town too terribly often - much less to do three fun things in one day - so this was a blast. The Spookshow was everything I care about: kaiju movies, practical effects, supporting local movie theaters, people getting sprayed with Silly String (much more fun if you avoid being Strung yourself), et cetera. Consider this an advertisement for the Spookshow, which is playing a Ray Harryhausen movie as their next feature, if I understood correctly.

Ninja vs. Shark (2023)

directed by Koichi Sakamoto

Japan

77 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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Good if you want to see Haruki from Ultraman Z solo not just one but two evil sharks, the second of which explodes when killed.

I recently watched and reviewed Shogun's Ninja, and my opinion was that it was alright but the ending kind of pissed me off. Much like that film, Ninja vs. Shark has a cast largely made up of actors from tokusatsu series, in addition to having been written by Ultra series veteran Junichiro Ashiki. We've got Kohshu Hirano (Ultraman Z), Kanon Miyahara (the coolest person in this movie, Kamen Rider Gotchard), Yuichi Nakamura (Kamen Rider Hibiki), Hideyoshi Iwata (the guy who doesn't talk in Ultraman Geed as well as many in-suit Ultra roles), Takaya Aoyagi (Ultraman Orb, Ultraman Z) in a surprisingly small role, and more. There is a little less fight choreography in this than in the other film, which didn't bother me, but the film as a whole also feels less cohesive than Shogun's Ninja and is severely lacking in the "likeable characters" department, save for Miyahara's freaky kunoichi.

That leads me to the first point I'd like to address, this movie's elephant (shark?) in the room: Hirano's character Kotaro, towards the beginning of the film, rapes a woman and murders her husband as well as several bystanders, and this is not addressed at any point for the rest of the movie except - and this might actually be worse than if it had fully been left alone - when the murdered woman comes back as a reanimated corpse, carrying her husband's severed head and fighting against Kotaro via kunoichi enchantment. Three-quarters of the way through, in disbelief, I re-wound the movie back to the part where all that happened, just to make sure I wasn't misreading something. The protagonist - who has a character arc, a tragic backstory, and is ultimately set up to become the hero of the film - is a rapist and murderer and this is NEVER addressed? Not a single moment of "oh I've done some bad things in my past that I now regret"? No excuse, such as him being possessed by shark magic at the time? He just... commits rape and murder and then decides to fight as a good guy and no one ever mentions it? I'm probably going to rewind the movie a second time, because I just cannot believe it would do that. It soured the entire film for me and I think I otherwise would have enjoyed it.

So, moving past that as much as we can, let's talk about the plot, which is less bonkers than you might imagine for this kind of thing. A small village in Edo begins to have a significant sharkmurder issue thanks to a local cult leader using ninjitsu to possess sharks and have them kill pearl divers in order for the cult to obtain their pearls, which also have magic powers. The cult leader himself can turn into a kind of half-shark, half-human hybrid when necessary, and has also been stealing young, handsome men to bodysnatch them and maintain his eternal youth, spirit-hopping from body to body when his current one gets too old. That is all really pretty cool. Conceptually, this movie is pretty cool. Practically, it kind of does feel like a time-travel tokusatsu episode stretched out to 77 minutes and with more characters added into the mix. Is that a bad thing? Not inherently, but I already had some animus towards this movie due to its bizarre choices, so I didn't vibe with it.

The acting in this one is surprisingly decent, with Hirano putting in a particularly intense performance of a terrible character. I mostly know him as Haruki, who was a bit of a goofball; there's absolutely none of that here, he plays Kotaro totally straight. Speaking of intensity, Miyahara as Kikuma is also fully absorbed in her role, and with a lack of other interesting characters, she was the only person in the film I really cared about. The movie doesn't have Sakamoto's signature explicit horniness per se, but unfortunately there's still a really bad vibe running throughout it where despite the film only being 77 minutes it contains an uncomfortable amount of sexual assault that often comes out of nowhere. The cult leader is implied to maybe be attracted to men but that element is only tossed in to make the viewer uncomfortable.

And the sharks. A thought occurred to me while I was watching this, which was that if the whole idea of sharksploitation didn't exist, Ninja vs. Shark would honestly just kinda be a movie. The film is obviously conscious of the sharksploitation subgenre, but the way it incorporates sharks into the plot feels... diegetic, if we can apply that term here? Replace sharks with literally any other animal and it would still work. If the cult leader had the ability to enchant tigers and transform into them, this could be Ninja vs. Tiger. The CGI on the sharks looks dreadful, of course, but a sharksploitation movie wouldn't feel right without bad CGI.

I don't really know what to make of this. There's a good movie in there somewhere. Well, not "good", but fun. I just wish it had made better choices along the way. A combination of Ninja vs. Shark and Shogun's Ninja would be incredible, if it existed: women ninjas fighting evil sharks with a gay couple somewhere in the mix? Sakamoto, if you're listening, the people do seem to love a shared cinematic universe.

Shogun's Ninja (2025)

directed by Koichi Sakamoto

76 minutes

Japan

2 stars out of 5

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I'm going to be discussing spoilers here because I'm extremely salty about the ending of this movie.

Let's be real: most of the audience for Shogun's Ninja is probably tokusatsu fans. Directed by Koichi Sakamoto (Ultraman, Kamen Rider, a couple Metal Heroes and sentai titles, etc) and starring Himena Tsukimiya (Ultraman Blazar), Raiga Terasaka and Katsuya Takagi (Ultraman Trigger), Ayane Nagabuchi (Ultraman Orb: The Origin Saga which was good and you can fight me about it), Kanon Miyahara (Kamen Rider Gotchard), and probably a few other people I'm not aware of, there is obvious appeal for anybody who has seen at least one tokusatsu series made in the last 10 years. Outside of the casting, however, there's really not a lot of appeal if you like the actual tokusatsu parts of tokusatsu; the practical effects are basically nonexistent, and the fight choreography is good, but nothing special.

The story, however, was unexpected. Two ninjas, reduced to taking odd jobs after the Fuma clan was destroyed, become involved in helping shogun Iemitsu avoid his court's attempts to get him to sire an heir, which he doesn't want to do because he is gay. I was vaguely aware of the idea that Iemitsu was attracted to men, but I wasn't ready for it to be a factor in this movie, nor for it to be relatively - key word, relatively, there's heavily implied kissing but it's mostly done just offscreen - explicit. Moreover, even the villains in this movie don't have a problem with him being gay specifically; none of Iemitsu's family or retinue are actually homophobic, they just hate that he can't have a child if he doesn't take a concubine. It's always really refreshing to watch a movie that doesn't feel like it hates gay people... well, that's what I thought, anyway.

I'm kind of conflicted about how hard to be on this movie because I know that a lot of movies involving a gay romance subplot face immense pressure to not be accused of depicting homosexuality as, like, 100% a good thing. It is unfortunately still controversial to have a gay love story where the couple ends up happy together at the end. That being said, though, there's no shortage of BL out there and I just don't understand why this movie had to end the way it did. Again, it does feel very much like the ending was tacked on so as to not stir the pot too much, but it was disappointing to watch 70 minutes of ass-kicking in defense of Iemitsu and boyfie only to have him end up having a child with a woman he didn't love - the thing that the entire movie was structured to prevent him from being forced to do. I know it might not be historically accurate to see Iemitsu successfully evade his obligations to the shogunate, but I'm pretty sure none of the Fuma ninjas had supernatural powers, so that isn't historically accurate either, and it still happens in this movie.

Ugh. This movie is just... so good, up until it's not. One thing I really enjoyed about it was how many of the characters were women and how none of them really had a "reason" to be a woman: a lot of movies like this with women as both the heroes and the villains will give them some kind of special backstory while their male counterparts get to just exist for no reason, but it doesn't feel like any of the women in this movie had to justify their existence. There's no uncomfortable sexualization either, which is nice considering that Sakamoto's Sharivan movie was gross. All in all this was an unexpected movie where a bunch of women band together to protect a gay guy and his boyfriend from his manipulative family right up until it became a predictable disappointment. At least there's a gay couple in it at all, though. I recognize what a positive thing that is.

Attack of the Giant Teacher (2019)

directed by Yoshikazu Ishii

Japan

70 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

Before I watched this, the impression I had of it was that it was basically a worse version of Big Man Japan (which I haven't seen, because it's two hours long and I'm tired), but now I see that, aside from the fact that they both feature a giant human man, the two films aren't alike at all. Attack of the Giant Teacher is a compact, earnest, charming little movie, and the film is carried more by the fun that everyone involved in making it seemed to have than by its simple plot.

Said plot is thus: Mr. Miyazawa is a teacher at a night school, leading a class of nontraditional students who we get to know to some extent over the course of the film. Miyazawa is a good teacher who cares about his students, but he learns at the beginning of the film that his school is to be shut down for poor performance. He and some of his students brainstorm the idea to put on a musical as the school's last hurrah for its open-house day that year - this isn't a "we have to put on a musical to save the school!" kind of plot; one of the more interesting things about it is how there's no sign that anything that happens during the film actually influences the fate of the school itself. It lends a bittersweet quality to the whole thing when you realize afterward that, even though Miyazawa not only saved his students but also his city, he will still be out of a job pretty soon. While all of this is happening, evil aliens are headed towards Earth to eat its people. Refugees whose planet was destroyed by these aliens are hiding among Miyazawa's students, and they give him special pills that will cause him to become gigantic enough to physically throw down with the alien mothership.

The only two students who get much in the way of backstory are the disguised alien couple, but all of them feel like real people. No one in the cast has much in the way of previous film credits, which adds to that vibe. (I would have sworn in a court of law that the actress who played Toko in Cell Phone Investigator 7 was in this, but apparently it was someone else.) There is a bit of a red herring in that there's one odd guy in the class who is absolutely convinced that the world is about to end, but it turns out that's just kind of how he is, he has no weird secret motive, he's just another one of the students. Similar to the sparse and inexperienced cast, the sets are pretty rudimentary, but this works in the film's favor considering that much of it is set in a small, underperforming night school. The green screen and miniatures are surprisingly good, perhaps owing to director Ishii's experience on mainstream toku.

I'm not saying that this is the best movie ever made, but I'm really surprised that all of the top reviews on Letterboxd are either very negative or dismiss the film outright as a joke. Like I said, this movie feels like something that everybody involved in it really wanted to make. It doesn't try overly hard to be funny, even though its premise may come off as inherently comedic to anybody who isn't expecting it. It kind of feels like The 12 Day Tale of the Kaiju that Died in 8, although I think that film did not do as good of a job selling the viewer on what it was saying. I'd really love to see another movie like this from Ishii: the tokusatsu is fun, the obvious visual reference to one of my favorite Ultraseven aliens delighted me, the cast is charming and carries the film well, and it's aesthetically pleasing in a bare-bones, honest sort of way.

Don't want to give too much away too early, buuuut...

I'm about to start on a special subtitling project starring a special gal who may look just a liiiiiittle bit familiar. (Consider my other blog when I say this.)

  

All will be revealed in time.

Truck Rascals VI: I Am A Man of Honor (1977)

directed by Norifumi Suzuki

Japan

103 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Yeah, sure, let's review a Truck Rascals movie. Why not.

In case somebody hasn't heard of it, since I don't think I've ever talked about these on here before: Truck Rascals was a series of ten films that ran through much of the 1970s, produced by Toei and directed by Norifumi Suzuki. A lot of the things I say about this movie will be applicable to the series in general, because after the first one or two films, they really hit on a predictable formula and each film kind of works on perfecting each aspect of that formula. On paper it seems like it would get old after a while, but it doesn't. The two protagonists of the series are Momojiro and Jonathan (played by Bunta Sugawara and Kin'ya Aikawa, respectively), who are both long-distance truckers, taking jobs that see them driving all over Japan, usually to multiple destinations within one film.

There are things that happen reliably in pretty much every entry in the series: Momojiro falls in love with a girl, signaled by a shot of the actress with glittering stars around her head (an effect that always reminds me of something that I'd see in an Ōbayashi film, for some reason) but isn't able to marry or pursue any kind of long-term relationship with her due to a whole bunch of factors that usually culminate in him doing something that ends their relationship in favor of her continued happiness, often with another man. Momo will usually encounter a rival trucker who he almost always gets into a fistfight with at some point. There's also a perilous race against time where at least Momo and sometimes Jonathan as well have to do some ill-advised high-speed trucking across dangerous obstacles (at least one reviewer has referred to the miniatures used to accomplish these scenes as "torakkusatsu"). Jonathan tries to run out on his wife and their ten kids a lot, which is toned down as the series goes on but is still kind of gross. Despite me being able to rattle off everything you can expect out of a Truck Rascals movie, they're really good every single time.

I Am a Man of Honor sees Momo trying to help out not just one but two women. The girl he falls in love with (Masako Natsume) turns out to have a sister who went missing in the middle of an unhappy marriage, leaving behind a young son and a remorseful husband who has managed to turn his life around. But then Momo's would-be girlfriend ends up having a boyfriend too. The truck race du jour comes when Natsume's character realizes that she really does want to go to Brazil with her boyfriend after all, but there's only a few hours to get partway across the country to meet him at the airport - easily manageable in Momo's truck, but requiring a little bridge-jumping and cop-avoiding on the way. One of the things that's great about this series is that even though Momo is a total meathead he does still seem to have respect for whoever he falls in love with. There is a lot - a lot - of misogyny throughout these films, but there's something refreshing about seeing tough-guy Sugawara act like an awkward high schooler when he falls in love, trying to pretend he's good at random stuff to impress girls and being as chivalrous as he can physically manage. 

The guest star this time is Tomisaburō Wakayama, paying direct tribute to his character in the Lone Wolf and Cub series. Having a crossover between Lone Wolf and Cub and Truck Rascals kind of feels like something I would think up while laying in bed at 2 AM unable to fall asleep, but Toei went ahead and did it. Wakayama is usually the star of his own show, so it's kind of fun to see him play a guest role in somebody else's film, and the inevitable fight scene between his character and Momo is over-the-top. There's an argument between the two of them about whether or not it's right to deck out your truck with lights and murals and ornaments the way Momo does or keep it simple and un-ostentatious, which feels like a made-up argument that nobody has ever had in real life, but it's interesting.

I'm starting to get the urge to rewatch these movies after a year or so, and I'm looking forward to revisiting them now that I know what to expect. These being subbed is largely the effort of two people, one of whom I know personally, and it's wild to think that a few years ago you could not see any of this series with subtitles at all.

The Revenge of Dr. X (1967)

directed by Norman Thomson

USA, Japan

94 minutes

1 star out of 5

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I watched a video where some people watched (and made fun of) this movie and its badness compelled me. 94 minutes seemed like an eternity to sit through something that I knew from the jump would be awful, so to make it easier on myself, I decided early on that I would fast-forward through all the pointless scenes of people driving. Even with the running time shortened by doing that, let me tell you, I barely made it through this thing.

The plot - insofar as there is one - concerns an inexplicably cranky scientist whose concerned coworker gently suggests that he should go to Japan on vacation because being so cranky all the time may be bad for his health. While in Japan, the scientist, Dr. Bragan (there is no Dr. X in this movie - the film was found in a warehouse and the wrong opening credits were slapped onto it), begins research and experimentation towards his ultimate goal of creating a plant-human hybrid. Midway through the film he indeed reaches this goal, but the resulting creature of course has a thirst for blood, consuming many small animals and becoming generally unruly. However, Bragan refuses to destroy his creation, insisting on its miraculous nature as a brand-new life form and his own genius.

We're introduced to Dr. Bragan by seeing him visibly agitated about seemingly nothing at all and we never get any explanation about this - I wasn't sure if I was supposed to read him as some kind of tortured genius, clashing with polite society because of his radical ideas, or if he was being written from the beginning as just a flat-out mad scientist. James Craig's portrayal of the character is so all over the place that you can't get a feel for the character's "baseline".

This movie is just baffling to me. Everything about it. I don't understand how it got made. The state that it survives in today befits it - a god-awful pan-and-scan with so much visual noise that it looks like you're holding two magnets on either side of whatever device you're watching it on - but even if it were restored to something approaching HD, its air of stale faux exotica and faint smell of alcohol would remain. This is really one of the most unapologetically bad movies I've ever seen, and it's not even the kind of bad that is made palatable because you can tell the cast and crew were having fun. This is a movie that feels like nobody wanted to be in it. Exception made for Atsuko Rome, who barely kept this watchable and does seem to have enjoyed her time in the film. (I did an actual double-take when I read that Ryō Ikebe came to a party for the premiere of the film. That is honestly kind of insane.)

The reason why people like me are interested in this at all is because Toei (may have?) distributed it in Japan, where it was titled Akuma no niwa, "The Devil's Garden", a much more compelling and accurate title than any of the English ones it has gone by over the years. However, I was under the impression that the effects were also done by a Japanese crew a la Green Slime or something like that. While part of the film was shot in Japan with some Japanese cast members, I have no evidence that the monster suit itself was technically tokusatsu. It could have been, but I can't prove that it was. It sure does look like a really bad Kamen Rider kaizo ningen-of-the-week, though.

Reading Rome's interview makes me more inclined to be gentle towards this film, given the details of production that she remembers. She says: "I think this group production was more like a hobby. I don’t know the detail of things like that. But that was a group of people working for government, retired people from the U.S. military. Those people, I think, invested in it. Then they invited James Craig as the main person from the U.S." It would make a lot of sense if this movie was made by a bunch of non-professionals in a short period of time on funding from the U.S. military. That is certainly what it feels like. Rome is also asked who was in the monster suit and says that she didn't know but assumed it was a Japanese actor, bringing this perilously close to being tokusatsu after all.

Everything about Revenge of Dr. X screams "made by people who have seen a few movies and want to try making one". I love the absolutely pointless horror movie music whenever the hunchbacked assistant is on-screen - it means nothing, alludes to nothing, the assistant has nothing at all to do with the plot, the filmmakers just thought "well, we have to have horror movie music for this cliche hunchbacked assistant". I flip-flopped between being endeared by this movie and being genuinely almost bored to tears by it, but ultimately I think this is "so bad it's bad", not "so bad it's good".

Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

81 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is probably the Godzilla movie that most fans would agree is the most notorious for being "bad", aside from, perhaps, All Monsters Attack. Maybe if its international distribution had gone differently, this wouldn't be the case. If someone hadn't mistakenly thought the film was in the public domain and began releasing a slurry of low-quality, badly-dubbed VHS tapes and TV broadcasts, allowing much of the Anglosphere's impression of the Godzilla series to be this low-budget entry that showcases the series at its goofiest, maybe this movie would have a better reputation. It certainly deserves it.

Godzilla vs. Megalon begins with a nuclear test. It's never specified who sets it off, but the reverberations are felt immediately: first on Monster Island, and then on a lake somewhere in Japan where people are just trying to have a nice afternoon outing. The weight of this opening nuclear test really hit me during that scene where Goro, Jinko (a nickname, his full name is Jinkawa... not beating the allegations with that one) and Roku are driving home. The Godzilla series has done a lot more looking at the large-scale, long-term effects of nuclear energy - Godzilla himself is a "large-scale, long-term effect of nuclear energy" - than it has bringing it down to a personal level, so in a way, seeing our trio have to cancel their fun trip early feels almost more affecting than a scene of city-level devastation. We've seen destruction and misery inflicted upon the masses, but I don't think the series has ever made it more personal than making us watch this gay couple and their kid have to abandon their afternoon plans and go home because of earthquakes caused by some distant nuclear test, conducted by people we never even see.

I don't want to make it seem like I think this movie should be taken deadly serious, because it's very obviously not intended to be. This was meant to be an entertaining movie that kids would like. It's actually because of that that including a part where the main characters are personally affected by nuclear testing feels like such a smart choice.

The characters in Godzilla vs. Megalon live in a cool house covered with colorful artwork and seem to spend their free time messing around with robots. I love how vibrant this movie is, like almost all of Jun Fukuda's work that is in color. One thing that stands out to me is how the Seatopian agents are dressed: both of them, especially Kotaro Tomita's character, look like something out of Yellow Submarine. The movie plays it fast and loose with the idea of science and invention, and that can come off a little silly (Jet Jaguar developing a personality and deciding to save the day through sheer force of will, Goro Ibuki and boyfriend having the technology to casually deduce trace evidence left behind after the Seatopians break in, even just random side details like the Baby-Rider), but I just love the world this takes place in. I love the contrast between the nuclear test at the start of the film and the understated optimism of Goro Ibuki's work as an inventor.

The thing this movie gets absolutely pitch-perfect is kaiju fights. Am I brave enough to say that this has some of the best fights in the series? No, I'd get pilloried in the streets. But I do kind of think it does. The way you can almost imagine dialogue being exchanged between the monsters: Megalon and Gigan trading "why I oughta" gestures when they first meet, then teaming up and taking great delight in torturing Jet Jaguar and Godzilla as a gruesome twosome. Megalon, Gigan, Jet Jaguar and Godzilla all feel like such distinct personalities, it's hard not to cheer for them even as an adult. (And I wouldn't fault anybody for cheering for the bad guys: they're just so diabolical and gleeful about it that you almost want to see them beat on Godzilla and Jet Jaguar.)

Fukuda himself may have hated his Godzilla movies, but he had the touch that was necessary to bring this kind of super-modern, energetic, lovable Godzilla to life. Is it the Godzilla that Honda envisioned? Certainly not, but I personally have gotten over my hangups about the idea of Godzilla having to be only one thing. We all understand where Godzilla comes from, and the best Godzilla movies are the ones that return to that origin, but there's room to mess around a little in the margins.

Shock Waves (1977)

directed by Ken Wiederhorn

USA

84 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is one of those movies that I find myself rewatching often because there's just nothing else out there that feels exactly like it. If your desired vibe is "aquatic Nazis" you have Death Ship, which is pretty solid, but there's something about Shock Waves that's just... I don't know, it's really good.

The film almost goes out of its way not to introduce us to our characters. Our main cast is made up of a small group of clothing-reticent thirty-somethings, a grouchy middle-aged couple, a galley hand, and a captain; neither of the latter two are long for this world. We get given names (sometimes) but no surnames, and nothing in the way of backstory whatsoever. We don't even really know why all of these people are together or how they're related to each other. It's never explained if these are friends who knew each other before the events of the film or if they all just happened to be on the boat together. The middle-aged couple are certainly outliers - if I had to take a guess, I'd say they're just all chartering the same boat; but get used to this kind of ambiguity, because the movie never resolves it. And that's as it should be.

In place of characters, we have premise. It's a scant premise, but it works. The driving concept behind the film is that towards the end of WWII the Nazis had begun experimenting on humans with the intent of producing super-soldiers, and a nest of these experiments were lying dormant in the waters off of some unspecified island somewhere until our cast of characters are accidentally rammed by a desiccated Nazi ship and run aground, disturbing the zombie soldiers and their lone caretaker. There's really very little rhyme or reason here; one exposition dump in the middle is all you get, and the rest of the time the movie is heavily into "show, don't tell". And, again, that is as it should be.

The island where the film is set has this really authentic boggy, humid, sweltering vibe; to absolutely no one's surprise, it was shot in Miami. This was evidently Wiederhorn's first feature film, which he made after having won the Academy Award for best student film with producer Reuben Trane. It was shot for around $200,000 and the only real reason that Trane and Wiederhorn ended up making a horror movie at all was because the investors thought that horror movies had a better chance of making their money back. The aquatic Nazi zombies idea was basically pulled out of a hat, from what it sounds like.

Oh yeah and somehow they managed to get Peter Cushing to be in this thing. I don't know how. Like a lot of movies Cushing was in in the '70s, it's weird that he's there, but it would have been a much worse movie without him. His character in this is interesting; he doesn't have that much screen time, all things considered, but he's important to the larger narrative. He certainly isn't a sympathetic character by any means, but in a sense it feels like he has more depth than the others because he's the only one who actually does stuff (or is implied to have done stuff) instead of having things happen to him. There's one shot in particular, a lingering couple of takes on a tank full of exotic fish, that was probably intended as nothing more than some interesting padding between scenes, but it made me think a lot more about this random guy who's presumably been hiding alone on an island for 30+ years: somebody's feeding those fish, and it ain't the Nazi zombies. What was he doing? Living alone in a decrepit old hotel, feeding fish, trying not to wake up the zombies? He doesn't want intruders around as a matter of course, but he never gives any indication whether he actually cares if they end up killed or if he just doesn't want them exposing the zombies to the outside world. It's odd, and I doubt any of this was intended to be thought about for more than five seconds.

This whole production, and the whole film itself, is so spare and feels so lacking in detail that none of it should really work, but the starkness and the lack of melodrama is exactly why it's so great - not to mention the absurdly good soundtrack. I think this movie is a cult classic because it's really hard to sell someone on it unless you can convince them to go in blind. Basically the only way to describe it is that it's Just Real Weird, Man. It is a whole entire vibe. Every time I watch this I like it more.

Mexican Free-for-All (1968)

directed by Takashi Tsuboshima

Japan, Mexico, USA

162 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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At this point I've seen a good few Crazy Cats movies (with and without subtitles) and an interesting thing about them is that they represent such a wide range of quality. None of the ones I've seen have been bad per se, but when you look at something like The Boss of Pick-pocket Bay, which was put together in not quite three weeks and was so rushed that they forgot to write a role for one of the actors, and compare it to Mexican Free-for-All... well, it's a stark contrast. But the thing that keeps every Crazy Cats movie from falling apart is Crazy Cats themselves, who are such ridiculously talented performers that even a shambles like Pick-pocket Bay is still fun. 

Specifically, the glue holding these movies together is always Hitoshi Ueki. He is absolutely riveting to watch and seemed to have an almost preternatural gift for entertaining, even outside of the Crazy Cats series. He plays the same character most of the time: a care-free everyman who rolls with life's punches and turns every hardship into an opportunity to make a quick buck. He's often in crappy jobs or dealing with the stress of modern life, but as the refrain in Mexican Free-for-All goes, hey, life is only 25,000 days, and nobody ever died from dreaming too big.

So, let's talk about Mexican Free-for-All specifically. The first thing to get out of the way is that it's obviously based around a really touristy depiction of Mexico that reduces the entire country to an aesthetic, but this is far from the only movie to have done that (and it happens to Japan all the time as well). The film was actually shot (partially) in Mexico, so fortunately most of the actors playing Mexican people are actually Mexican - with a couple of exceptions, most memorably Hideyo Amamoto as Guy With Big Hat, but at least nobody seemed to be in brownface. Honestly, the section of the film that takes place in Mexico is almost the least exciting part of it; aside from that insane musical interlude, I kind of preferred the hijinx that were occurring back in Japan and in San Francisco to what the Cats get up to when it's time to get down to treasure-hunting and trying to insinuate themselves upon a random girl named Maria.

As with most Crazy Cats movies, the three main actors are Hitoshi Ueki, Hajime Hana, and Kei Tani, with the rest of the troupe filling out tertiary roles. Ueki, Hana and Tani play three guys who end up involved in each other's business through a complicated series of misunderstandings and misfortunes that is fascinating to watch unfold. The MacGuffin here is a small stone statue: Hana's character is tasked with stealing it, Ueki finds out about this and realizes he can make bank by stealing the real statue and replacing it with a fake, Tani basically just gets mistaken for somebody else, and all of them eventually get sent to San Francisco through an increasingly unlikely course of events that culminates in them getting deported to Mexico on extremely shaky ground. Don't look for logic and reason in this film, because you will not find it. The important thing is that the plot flows smoothly, not that it makes sense at all.

The production value of this thing is off the charts, especially compared to some other entries in the series - which, again, are perfectly serviceable, but man, when they put in the effort, it really shows. There's a lot of location shooting, and the scenery in Mexico is genuinely very beautiful. But even in the parts of the film that take place in Japan, the set dressing is elaborate and immersive and the whole movie feels like a trip back in time, especially since the print I watched was so crisp and clear. The film's sense of humor is a little stupid and none of the actors shy away from looking like fools - in fact, they all embrace it. The film is made really well, with a lot of creative scene transitions, and as mentioned, there is an imaginary musical interlude that occurs while the Cats are figuring out how to make some money in Mexico City that is both a little bit of a fourth wall break and one of the best song-and-dance sequences I've seen in a movie to date.

This is one of several Crazy Cats films that have been getting English fansubs lately due to the efforts of mostly a single group of people, one of whom I know in real life. Just a few years ago if you wanted to see a Crazy Cats movie with subs, you were out of luck, and now I can throw on Mexican Free-for-All fully subtitled from start to finish. God bless fansubbers.

Also, did I see Hitoshi Ueki just eating a block of cheese at one point during this?

Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

84 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I'm a few days late, but happy birthday to possibly my favorite Godzilla movie aside from the original. This is one of several Godzilla movies (including the original) that I don't rewatch that often because it puts me in a bad mood every time I do. Rewatching it last night, though, I didn't have time to be put in a bad mood, because I was too busy thinking "Ah, this is the best movie ever made".

(Please read this review which sums up the movie in one paragraph better than I could if I wrote an entire book.)

While I think it's a masterpiece, Terror of Mechagodzilla had the lowest box office attendance of the Showa-era films. I tend to wonder whether the dour tone of the film had something to do with that. The previous year's Godzilla film, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, was one of the most bombastic, colorful, high-energy entries in the franchise, so to follow it up with a deadly serious, character-driven story where the monsters don't have any big funny moments - directed by master of melancholy films Ishirō Honda, no less - is a bit of an abrupt change of pace.

The film carries over a lot of plot elements from the previous film, the most central of which is an in-progress invasion by the Black Hole Planet 3 aliens and their most formidable weapon, Mechagodzilla, which they develop by abducting/coercing humans into working for them. The timeline of vs. Mechagodzilla is much more brief, however, and more traditional to the way these films are usually laid out, with the bulk of the story occurring in a linear fashion, and events unfolding as we watch the characters experience them. One of the intriguing things about Terror of Mechagodzilla, by contrast, is that the invasion had been going on in the background for a very long time: at least 20 years, as implied by the flashback of Katsura Mafune's accidental death and immediate revival by the aliens.

The thought I kept having while watching this film was that, on a surface level, a lot of what happens can be blamed on Dr. Mafune for being too stubborn to let go of an old grudge after being slighted by the scientific community. But despite this, despite him being written as a bitter old man who turns traitor to humanity as a whole, I can't do anything but feel bad for him. Both he and his daughter are manipulated at every turn by the Black Hole Planet 3 Aliens. He and Katsura are both victims. Watching this movie again I was struck by how abrupt the scene where Katsura dies for the first time is: the aliens don't give Dr. Mafune any time whatsoever to process it or even to find out who they are or what they want, they just immediately ingratiate themselves to his entire life in such a way that he's dependent on them for the continued preservation of the only thing really keeping him going - his daughter. To me - and this is a point I've never seen brought up before, so I'm probably wrong - it feels like Katsura's death had to have been pre-planned. For the aliens to be able to know the exact time that she would be electrocuted and be able to enter the scene right away as soon as she had died, they would have to have been watching. Using Katsura to manipulate her father was the plan right from the start.

The dub will let you forget this, and becoming jaded to kaiju movies in general will let you forget this, but the Black Hole Planet 3 aliens are incredibly brutal. There's kind of a cult indoctrination thing going on here. They insert themselves into Dr. Mafune's life and give him everything that he ever wanted: his daughter's life, the opportunity to prove himself right to his detractors, and access to what he wanted to research all along (Titanosaurus). Meanwhile they see him as so disposable that one of them uses him as a human shield without a second thought. (I remain salty that the English dub cuts out the part where he gets shot.) We also see that they abduct other humans for slave labor and cut their vocal cords. These may be, in name, the same aliens as the previous film, but the air of sinister coolness that Kuronuma had is replaced here by pure evil.

I'm still going. This is my review, I can make it as long as I want.

I would be remiss not to talk about Tomoko Ai's performance as Katsura, because she really is what holds the movie together; she's the most sympathetic character and the one who we're rooting for the whole time. She was at this point a very young actress with not a lot of experience, she had been playing a semi-regular role on Ultraman Leo prior to this and as the story goes she ran over while still in her uniform from that show to try out for the part of Katsura. She's really good at conveying that Katsura still has human emotions despite being a cyborg, but that those emotions are deeply buried. I love one specific moment after Katsura is resurrected for the second time, where Ichinose is tied up in the control room and Katsura gets up to adjust something on a panel in front of him; when he begs her to see reason, she says "Be silent", but why did she get up in the first place? Did that one knob really need to be fiddled with in that exact spot that would put her right in front of him?

I also want to talk about Akihiko Hirata's performance in this because I think he knocks it out of the park. I continue to maintain that he wasn't given enough roles where he got to actually act. (You all should watch Saga of the Vagabonds or Farewell Rabaul or something.) He adopts a specific set of mannerisms for this role that make the fake glasses and mediocre old age makeup they put him in forgettable. It's hard not to compare Mafune to Dr. Serizawa, since they were both played by Hirata - bookending his appearances in the Godzilla series - and in a lot of ways I feel like the stuff Mafune gets up to is exactly the kind of thing Serizawa would have been afraid would happen to him: Mafune's weakness is exploited by an interloper who seeks to use research of his for destructive purposes. I can see a reading of Mafune as an older version of Serizawa whose staunch refusal to let his invention fall into the wrong hands wavered after life treated him poorly.

So, yeah, this is a contender for my second-favorite Godzilla movie. Above all, the way I feel about this movie is that it is just phenomenally well-made, easily on par with anything and everything that came after it. Tonally, it's more akin to one of the Heisei films, like vs. Biollante or vs. Destoroyah. Every inch of this movie looks incredibly good. That first shot of Titanosaurus from below, set against the backdrop of a bright and sunny sky, is an all-timer. There's something sad about the way the film ends on a shot of Godzilla wading off into the sea when you consider that this was really the end of "old Godzilla": the series would return from its hiatus, and is still going strong even now, but everything would be different. This movie just means so much as an achievement in the series' history that I cannot understand why anybody wouldn't consider it one of the best.