Ultraman Arc the Movie: The Clash of Light and Evil (2025)

directed by Takanori Tsujimoto

Japan

75 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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So I finally got around to checking out the Arc movie. I say "finally", but it's only been a week or two since it got fansubbed, thanks to a team of people from r/ultraman helping with timing and whatnot. It certainly beats waiting donkey's years for the Blazar movie because Tsupro dragged their feet so hard on releasing it internationally! Ahem, anyway. I will talk spoilers in this review.

The Clash of Light and Evil is set between episodes 21 and 22, during some downtime for the Hoshimoto City branch of SKiP. It should be a fun, relaxing hot pot night, but a mystery man (who I am certain would have been played by Shōhei Akaboshi had this movie been made in the mid-'90s) turns up and insinuates himself onto Yuma, leading him through a rapid-fire series of tests intended to impress important lessons on him. We get a volley of new kaiju in this film, following the wonderful trend of Ultra series giving us original kaiju again: Mugon, a giant doglike creature; Gartura, an infectious alien plant; Repodias, the final form of an evil alien; as well as the debut of a dark-side Arc called Guil Arc and a couple of other aliens.

I have to say that this is one of the best Ultraman post-series movies I've seen. It's not that it's my favorite, per se - although it is very much up there, top five for sure - but I feel like this is the direction that a post-series movie should take: almost a fourth-wall break; you've seen the series, we know you've seen the series, we know you know these characters and what happens to them so let's dispense with trying to insert this movie in the middle of the timeline like nothing that came after it has happened yet. The way the film introduces itself, with voiceover narration from Yuma, is so clever that it immediately endeared me to it. The narration - and the broad sweep of the plot itself - situates the film in the middle of the series while acknowledging that it is doing so. It even feels like it's making fun of itself at times: the idea of Yuma basically having to speedrun the morality lesson that so often comes with an episode or story arc of an Ultra series is really funny.

Somebody (battleupsaber on twitter) pointed out that it's interesting how Yuma is reticent about the idea of humans and kaiju being able to coexist. This makes sense in-universe given that his parents were killed in front of him during a kaiju attack, but it is still a very interesting perspective for an Ultra protagonist to take, given that the tack taken by Ultra series basically since the beginning is that sometimes there can be kaiju who are not evil and don't need to be dealt with violently. The series has reckoned with this in various ways; early on, destroying monsters was something of a duty for Ultraman, even when he was uncomfortable with it - take Jamila for example - but that wasn't always the case, as the writers found ways to have Ultraman deal with kaiju in non-destructive ways, like shoving them into the Monster Graveyard where they'd be out of anyone's way (mostly). Yuma sees the consequences of the obligation he felt he had to report Mugon to the GDF. I think it's an interesting step for the series to take to show a protagonist who doesn't have an infallible sense of kaiju morality from the jump, and has feelings that are influenced by past trauma that he has to learn to deal with as he continues to hold the responsibility of being bonded with an Ultra.

I think Ultraman is going in a really promising direction. Blazar and Arc have genuinely felt like some of the most original shows from the New Gen era. It is pretty clear that the less toyetic elements are forced into the show, the better it is. I loved the armor equips in The Clash of Light and Evil, how Arc just manifests his armor when he needs it without cutting to the whole henshin sequence as happens in the series. I would really enjoy seeing it done that way in a mainline series, but unfortunately I don't think that will ever happen. Regardless, it is entirely possible to blend sponsor obligations with the series in a way that isn't distracting - which Arc mostly managed to do.

I feel good about this one. This movie was a really good cap to a really good series. I won't say "Ultraman is good again" because Ultraman has always been good. But I will say Ultraman continues to be good.

Without Warning (1994)

directed by Robert Iscove

USA

91 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I started to watch a video review of this the night before and found the concept of it so interesting that I actually paused it and decided to come back to it after I'd had time to watch the movie. It sounded familiar and I thought I'd probably seen it already way back in the shadowy recesses of time (2015 or '16, maybe) but it turns out I had not. While I did enjoy this movie, I had the opposite opinion of the reviewer (it was ZaGorudan, shoutout to ZaGorudan) in almost every respect.

So this was a CBS made-for-TV movie intended to pay homage to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds incident, in which a broadcast of a story about alien invasion caused real panic among listeners who didn't realize that it was fiction. The version I watched had the warnings cut off, but during its original broadcast, there were a multitude of bumpers and onscreen text crawls telling you in no uncertain terms that WHAT YOU ARE SEEING IS FICTION. Despite this, there were still, apparently, people who bought into it. This was probably due in large part to the fact that some real newscasters were part of the film: this is a tad before my time, but Sander Vanocur, Bree Walker, and the majority of the correspondents were played by actual reporters, working or retired. However, the rest of the cast is made up of (at times fairly recognizable) actors, which can take you out of the immersion if that's important to you when going into this film. (Or maybe you prefer to headcanon that everything is Q's fault.)

This works far better as a movie than as a movie that is asking you to pretend it's real. One of the ways in which the film gently reminders its viewers that it is fictional is with its pacing: events take place over the span of several hours, and this is mentioned within the dialogue, and yet the film is presented to us uncut save for commercial breaks, leading to a disparity between the stated time elapsed during the broadcast and the running time of the actual movie. This, while present for good reason, was something I didn't like about the movie. Things like Ghostwatch (which is much better) or even just other random found-footage movies done in a news broadcast/livestream format achieve a much higher level of immersion when they're presenting events to us in real-time, and it's always impressive to see a good "long take" that is in actuality the product of deft editing.

That being said, though, I actually did like the way the movie was paced - but only if I thought of it as a movie, not a plausible record of a real string of events. It knows when to pull out the really shocking things and exactly how long to wait between them. The naturally flat affect of the reporters adds a lot to the tension, because when it breaks, we know things are really starting to get serious; Vanocur, however, stays absolutely stoic up until the very end, which provides a very striking contrast with the other, more emotional players in the story.

Since everyone involved in this is supposed to be a real person, there are no "characters" per se, but the various job titles and political offices that make up the roster all play off of each other well. I did think the acting from some of the reporters was a bit stilted and even hammy (another point where I don't quite agree with ZaGorudan) but most of the interviewees were very convincing. One of the most important characters is a scientist who spends much of the movie understandably flipping shit: points like the conversation he has with the press after resigning from his job and thus no longer having to report to anyone reveal that this movie is indeed very good at knowing when to reveal major pieces of the narrative, but not in a way that feels at all like it reflects reality. I also really enjoyed the parts of this that were left unexplained and I wish there had been more of that. There are hints that perhaps there had been some kind of abduction component to the ongoing alien invasion: two people, one having shown up out of the blue and the other disappearing and reappearing later with burns and frostbite, live long enough to start mumbling mysterious gibberish before succumbing to their injuries - the gibberish is, of course, decoded at just the right moment within the narrative. 

It's interesting to me that this director has one of the most wildly unexpected filmographies of anybody who's ever made a horror film (this is the guy who did She's All That, for one) because it makes me wonder what this would have been like in the hands of people who were experienced with genre films. Would it have had the impact and spook factor of Ghostwatch, but at the price of losing the feeling of authenticity that comes from having no genre trappings whatsoever?

(If you want to hear someone with an actual brain talk about this, read Sally Jane Black's review on Letterboxd.)

Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds (1977)

directed by Junji Kurata

Japan

92 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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I'm rating this 2 stars with a caveat: last week I rewatched this at Flicker Theatre as the English-dubbed version, and although the original movie is still a pretty decent 2 stars, the dub took it up to a solid 4. It's not the worst dub I've ever seen, but something about its inherent goofiness combined with how absolutely dead serious the movie takes itself made for an extremely fun viewing experience, especially in a room full of maybe slightly drunk folks.

Although Toei is certainly no stranger to tokusatsu, Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds came late in the 1970s, when the kaiju and hero boom had given way to something new: the disaster movie boom. Our wonderful host at Flicker mentioned in his intro that this movie should be thought of more in the framework of things like Jaws and Orca and other nature- and animal-sploitation films than as a kaiju movie. Viewing it that way (along with, as I said, the goofy dub) helped me to be a lot more lenient this time, because I came to it with the understanding that it wasn't trying to be a kaiju movie and failing, it was trying to be a disaster movie and showing us some cool dinosaurs as a bonus, so shouldn't we all be grateful? Well, your mileage may vary on that last point.

The plot: Tsunehiko Watase plays Se-[coughs]Ashizawa, a geologist who gets wind of mysterious deaths and earthquakes in the area around Mt. Fuji that are rumored to be related to the dragon that, according to legend, lives in Lake Sai. Ashizawa comes to the village around Lake Sai to investigate and happens upon large tracks that look like they could belong to a dinosaur - just what his father studied, and no one believed him. Sightings of strange creatures mount and tension ramps up as more and more people and animals turn up dead, but the characters remain unaware of the plesiosaur for a relatively long time even as us viewers are treated to some weirdly sensual scenes of it killing various women who try to enter the lake.

The characters are fine. The first time I watched this I made a note that I really disliked Ashizawa, but this time, I can't say that I cared about him enough to have an opinion. Watase plays him with a kind of slick, slightly bastardy '70s dudeman vibe, which fits with the overall tone of the movie. I hope it doesn't say too much about me as a viewer that the part where he slaps his girlfriend didn't phase me because I've come to expect that kind of thing out of '70s movies. His girlfriend Akiko is played by yakuza movie actress Yōko Koizumi, and unfortunately aside from at the climax of the film (which looked like it was absolutely brutal to film) she doesn't get to do much acting, since there's a man present to shove her out of the way and get stuff done himself.

Throughout the whole movie I kept thinking how weird it was to watch a kaiju movie (okay, a "kaiju" movie) that was shot like a yakuza movie. All of the actors (note also Hiroshi Nawa, another Toei regular) are familiar from yakuza stuff. The insanely funky soundtrack could easily have been transplanted into any other gritty '70s crime flick. The director apparently worked exclusively in jidaigeki - especially films about ninjas - save for this film, which gives me the feeling that Toei just needed a guy and Kurata was the most convenient option. It's a weird thing, this movie, and it's kind of great.

Arguably, the film should be called Legend of Dinosaur and Monster Bird, singular. (And, I mean, in Japanese, it kind of is.) The film's two creatures are a plesiosaur and a rhamphorhyncus, portrayed (I think) with puppets rather than suitmation. Maybe it's just me, but I had no problems with the quality of the effects when it came to the dinosaurs; it they had been the most startlingly realistic dinosaurs ever put to film, it wouldn't fit with the movie's overall vibe. I really enjoy long-necked dinosaur-like creatures in tokusatsu, so I was rooting for the plesiosaur, but the smaller, more agile rhamphorhyncus won the day. In the end, though, it doesn't matter, because Mt. Fuji begins erupting and all is forgotten.

I'll end this review by talking about the thing I really, genuinely like about this movie: its sense of a global catastrophe starting to churn up, a paradigm shifting gradually as humans go about their business, singing honky-tonk cowboy songs and doing silly little science things, none of which amount to anything in the face of the awe-inspiring power of Mother Earth. If you really tune in to what the movie is saying and ignore the funk music and annoying protagonist, it's a solid disaster movie. It's one of those things where the portents of doom - Mt. Fuji blowing steam, ground subsidence, legendary monsters appearing - feel like they exist entirely separate from the human story at first, and when the human characters finally do become drawn irreversibly into their proper place in the natural order of things, all civilization falls by the wayside.

The Creeping Flesh (1973)

directed by Freddie Francis

UK

94 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I initially opened this review by saying something about how I usually have trouble reviewing Hammer horror movies because even though I like them they're just not that deep, but then I realized that this wasn't a Hammer movie. Well, it certainly has vibes like one. In any case, I rewatched The Creeping Flesh last night, and I found enough in it that I want to get some thoughts down. I'm going to be a bit negative in this review, which I feel okay about doing because I like this movie a lot.

The backbone of the plot is that a scientist, Emmanuel (Peter Cushing), believes that evil is a physical force that can be isolated and visually observed like any other part of the human body, and that a weird skeleton he found on an island somewhere is the key to unlocking this physical component of evil and, therefore, inoculating against it. He has personal investment in this idea because his wife - who dies early on in the film - had some form of mental illness which he fears she may have passed down to their daughter. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the skeleton has the annoying habit of continually trying to re-flesh itself, and must be kept dry at all times, since water has the effect of making it regenerate through vaguely supernatural, under-explained means.

I think we're all adults here and know enough to avoid falling victim to the idea that just because a movie depicts something, that means the movie endorses that thing. But The Creeping Flesh has such incredibly dated and racist ideas that it's hard to tell if said ideas come from 1973 or the late 1890s, when the film was set. I do tend to give it a little leeway because it feels so genuinely like the latter; the theories it presents about mental illness, women's propriety, and racial superiority/inferiority are so thoroughly entrenched in 19th-century eugenics that at times it feels like the film cannot but be attempting to cement itself inside the era during which it is set. It does add an air of authenticity that the narrative does not attempt to question these things, kind of like how The VVitch manages to be scary and intense specifically because it doesn't seek to subvert the idea that some accused witches weren't innocent.

But it also sucks.

We're shown a montage of Emmanuel's wife Marguerite "going insane", and what the movie defines as "going insane" is "being a slut". Having an affair with multiple other men while you're married is immoral, yes, but not insane. While Marguerite is in an asylum. eventually to die there, Emmanuel keeps the truth of her situation from his daughter Penelope, sheltering her into an immature naivete that ultimately backfires because by keeping Penelope from finding out she may have a hereditary mental illness she is also kept from, you know, tools and support that she may need to cope with said mental illness, giving her essentially no choice but to spiral down into self-destructive behaviors with no way to help herself. Her turn to insanity is, of course, also marked by slutty behavior and seeking casual sex - the perennial middle-aged man's worst nightmare of what could befall his precious daughter.

The issues with race need hardly to be addressed because the film itself lays them so bare in its synopsis: when you read that there's a skeleton of a "primitive man" brought back from New Guinea and supposed to hold mysterious secrets unknown to modern science, you know it's gonna get a little gross. Again, though, things were different 52 years ago than they were 130 years ago, and I want to give this movie the benefit of the doubt by assuming that it knows how gross it sounds when it talks about how "primitive" New Guineans will reach "a level of scientific sophistication that rivals ours" given 2,000 years' time.

Let's move on to the characters, because I think this is where the movie becomes really interesting. The wonderfully annoying thing about this (I say "wonderful" because I like when a movie makes you question where your sympathies should lie, even if this is unintentionally done) is that Emmanuel is framed as essentially blameless and victimized at the end of the film when the brunt of what happens is entirely his fault. Trying to mold his daughter into what he thinks a pure, upstanding woman should be at the cost of her own identity robs her of her freedom. Doing stupid racist science costs many people their lives. And it's only fitting that the film should end on him being confined to a narrow, secluded existence inside a mental asylum by someone who has power over him (his half-brother, played by a particularly Mephistophelean Christopher Lee).

All this and a nasty murderous reanimated skeleton too. The set dressing is unusually beautiful and intricate, and the film is confident enough to have multiple wordless stretches filled out with nothing but messing with various test tubes and beakers, which lends it a kind of artful feel. Lorna Heilbron does a great job as Penelope even if she's playing a laughable and dated idea of "insanity". The horror here is mellow and supplemented by interpersonal tensions and hubris rather than the in-your-face certainty of a vampire going around killing buxom women. It's a movie with a lot of flaws and I really enjoy all of them.

Do YOU want to hear all about a highly obscure 71-year-old Toho movie?

I've completed the project I was working on that caused me to miss a weekly post: here it is.

I've done a full (very amateur) fan translation of an early draft script for Rakugo Nagaya ha Hana Zakari, a Toho movie released in 1954 that has no surviving full prints. In 2010 someone reached out to Toho directly about screening it at a film festival and received a shortened, 38-minute re-release version, which has since been screened a whopping 3 times, the last one being in 2016. But that leaves over half of the movie that is lost to time.

...unless?

Like I said, it's an early draft (it may even be the first draft, judging by how many revisions the script contains), so it doesn't reflect the finished film 1:1, but if you like rakugo or '50s Toho movies, it may be of some interest. Navigate over to the tag I've created for the film on my other blog to hear me talk about it - there are more posts about it forthcoming.

Lost World of Sinbad (1963)

directed by Senkichi Taniguchi

Japan

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Every time I rewatch this, I'm surprised by how much I like it. I had a generally poor opinion of it the first go-around, possibly because I watched it in a stretched-out aspect ratio and terrible image quality and I had read a lot of many negative reviews. But now I genuinely love this movie. It's a blast. I don't understand why there seems to be a consensus of mediocrity among reviewers.

Toshirō Mifune plays Sukezaemon (or Sukeza) Luzon, a random guy who escapes being burnt at the stake for piracy and decides to become a pirate for real to spite his accusers. Our introduction to Mifune's character and the sequence that sets him on the path he'll follow for the rest of the film is very brief, almost comedically so; within the span of maybe ten minutes Luzon has gotten himself a big cartoony treasure chest full of jewels, engaged in naval warfare against a rival pirate (Makoto Satō, delivering the evilest evil cackles of his career), seemingly been punished by the gods for his hubris with a terrible storm, and washed up in a random unspecified country where everybody is surprised that he is Japanese but also, at the same time, all speak Japanese themselves. Mifune is of course eminently watchable and I'm tempted to say that he carries the whole film, but this works so well as an ensemble piece that that wouldn't really be fair to everybody else in it.

Luzon quickly finds that all is not well in the kingdom. The king is slowly being poisoned while a shifty chancellor attempts to seize power for himself and marry the princess. The chancellor's interim government demands tribute in the form of local young women who are taken to the castle and forced into slavery, and there are other generally oppressive measures leading the people in the kingdom towards mounting a revolt. But it'll take more than just a peasant uprising - it'll take some dude who isn't from around here and almost drowned a couple of days ago to gather enough strength to storm the castle and fight the Black Pirate and the chancellor's supporters.

The really fun thing about this movie is how many distinct characters make up the cast, and how every single one of them brings something new to the plot. It is a story about justice vs. injustice when you get right down to it, but there's such a broad range of actors involved in how the story unfolds. Some of them are somewhat opportunistic and switch sides according to their own whims (Jun Tazaki, for example, who looks absolutely lethal dual-wielding sai). Some are not very bright but side with Luzon for the craic. Two of my favorite characters really have no investment in the faction-vs-faction fight at all and have their own rivalry going on in the background, secondary to what Luzon is doing; these are Granny the witch (played by Hideyo Amamoto technically in drag but not really committed to it) and the hermit who got kicked out of heaven for being too horny (Ichirō Arashima). The panoply of personalities all contribute to why this movie moves at such a fast clip and avoids ever slipping into a lull at any point.

Whenever I try to think of which movie I'd recommend first between Sinbad and its "sister film" Adventure in Kigan Castle, I always have a hard time. Kigan Castle is objectively the better film, its production is far more elaborate and it has better pacing, but Sinbad is, in my opinion, way more fun. Although the scope is not as grand as Kigan Castle, which was shot partially on location in Iran, Sinbad still has some remarkable practical effects and the same feeling of "doesn't matter if the technology isn't there yet, we're gonna do it anyway" that all Showa tokusatsu is imbued with. I could probably rewatch this a bunch more times without getting tired of it, and if my tokusatsu film screening series doesn't crash and burn this year, it might make it into the roster at some point.

No review this week because I am busy.

I've been working on something big and I just need to focus all of my energy on it until it gets done. This is the only time I've ever missed a week, and probably the only time I ever will. I don't feel good about it at all, but I just did not manage to find the time to sit down and give anything a proper review this week. I promise the project I'm working on is worth it.

We'll be back in business next week. In the meantime, can I offer you a Varan?

Let's Go See A Movie

I originally wrote this post to celebrate having had my other blog for a year. I worked really hard on it, but then I decided it was extremely silly and not a good fit for that blog. So I'm shunting it over here instead.

_________

I've been running this blog for a year now. I must admit I've poured a considerable amount of money and an even more considerable amount of time into it. So it's only appropriate that for my one-year anniversary post, I've done something that involves both money and time: I've bought us a time machine!

"Where'd you get it?" What do you mean, where'd I get it? Yahoo! Auctions, of course, that's where I get everything.

Anyway, you and me are going to go back to 1959 and catch a showing of The Mysterians stateside. Yes, the dub is bad, but we're witnessing history here. We're going to San Francisco's Metro Theatre, because I like San Francisco. It's way too expensive these days, but in 1959 we'll be paying about a dollar for our tickets. We can sneak out before the movie they're double-billing it with comes on.

Here we are, and there's a line out the door! Everybody's scrambling to see The Mysterians and American movie critics in the '50s have a ton of respect for Japanese films and don't think they're a joke in the slightest.^{[citation needed]}

The lobby is nice and air-conditioned, but San Francisco in late spring isn't too hot in the first place. We're here in the last week or two of May, just after the film opened on the 15th. If you look closely, you can see a poster in the back advertising another upcoming imported feature - it's The H-Man, set to release on the 28th! Don't worry, there's enough juice in the time machine for a second trip.

Because I have a guy on the inside, we've got an original pressbook to look through while we're waiting in line. (We may be a bit early; time machine calibration is not an exact science.)

Let's see how they're trying to sell this one to theater owners across the nation:

• "Invaders from space coming to steal our women" is probably the #1 selling point across all the U.S. advertising materials.
• The color and scope are also highly emphasized, but this gets my goat a little, because it's shilled all over as a CinemaScope picture that utilizes Eastmancolor - it's not, it's TohoScope, but we wouldn't know that since the American cut removes the TohoScope logo. The technical specifications of TohoScope are almost identical to CinemaScope, I admit, but... it's just not, okay? 
• Space is cool! Everyone loves space! The Mysterians fit in quite well with the mania for atomic/science/space-themed sci-fi films in the 1950s.
• You can order 4,000 "heralds" (small two-page folded pamphlets) for $28.75 - that's about $313 in today's money. (I have of course ordered these to be sent to your house when you get back from our trip.)
• Moguera is hyped up in promotional materials but seen as a bit of a joke by critics, as we'll see shortly.

If we turned on the radio - we do have a radio inside the time machine - we might be able to catch an announcement advertising the film. There were eight different varieties of these for broadcasters to choose from. In the interest of space I won't duplicate every single one here, just the longest (which I've had to reconstruct a bit since the pamphlet I'm looking at is cut off on one side):

"From behind the moon they come - to invade the Earth - to abduct our women and [level] our cities!! They are THE MYSTERIANS... demons from behind the moon, who top our every top secret! MGM now [presents] an enthralling motion picture about a master race that smashed the atom before we even saw the light of day - THE MYSTERIANS! [Aliens] who abduct Earth's women so that they themselves [can breed]... super-sonic war erupts from out of space before your very eyes! [A giant robot]... sheathed in heavy metal... fifty times the size [of a man]! [Crushing every] human being in its path with the dreadful searing rays [from its eyes] - see it all in THE MYSTERIANS! A terrifying, fantastic [feature presented in] giant CinemaScope and Color! THE MYSTERIANS!"

And the shortest:

"MGM presents a first in terror - THE MYSTERIANS - a master race that smashed the atom before we were born! See electronic war erupt from outer space! See THE MYSTERIANS - in Giant Cinemascope and Color!"

Our theater has chosen to spring for all possible advertisement. We're beset by many different sizes of lobby cards, most of which feature lovely (although maybe not quite screen-accurate) original illustrations by Lt. Colonel Robert B. Rigg. 

I ask the guy behind the counter selling tickets so nicely if I can buy this one off him but he won't let me:

This is actually meant for advertising in newspapers and so probably wouldn't be on display in a theater. Also god damn

We might even see some kids playing around with a Mysterian trading card from Nu-Card, featuring a tremendously bad pun.

How did all this advertising pay off? Pretty well - the film grossed $975,000 in the American box office. Adjusted for inflation that is $10,607,092. Unfortunately 1959 is also the year that Ben-Hur came out, grossing $74,432,704 in the North American (U.S. and Canada) box office, which, adjusted for inflation, is $809,758,520. That's insane money. I could buy at least two DVDs off YesAsia with that. Still! Almost a million dollars for an imported Japanese feature means the people do like The Mysterians.

And enough about us, who already know and love this movie. What do the critics say? Before I picked you up in this time machine I went to a couple newsstands and grabbed some old papers and periodicals. Here's the May 23 issue of Harrison's Reports:

"From the production point of view, this Japanese-made science-fiction thriller, which is enhanced by CinemaScope and Eastmancolor, is far better than most America-made pictures of its type." Wow! That's much nicer than what most American critics of Japanese films had to say. 

Now let's look at Boxoffice. Dear reader - I mean, time machine companion - I hate this one.

Americans in the 1950s would go see a Japanese movie and be like "aw man there's Japanese people in this"

Emphasizing that "the cast means nothing" not once but twice within a one-paragraph review, describing Kenji Sahara and Yumi Shirakawa as having "only a slightly Oriental cast of features and [almost resembling] American teenagers"... oh boy. I forgot we were still in the 1950s for a moment.

Let's move on to Variety. Oh, it doesn't look good already. "As corny as it is furious, The Mysterians is red-blooded phantasmagoria - made in Japan and dedicated to those undiscerning enough to be taken in by its hokum."

"The cast - from Kenji Sahara to Minosuke Yamada - isn't intended to sell many Yankee tickets." Okay?

I've got a review from the New York Times as well, but I won't repeat it here since it's much of the same wisecracking and actually goes so far as to refer to it as a "mess". I do appreciate this quote, however: "It has to do with a huge, globular fortress that plops to earth 'from the fifth planet' (wherever that is), envelops a group of glamour girls and is finally destroyed by a brave young Galahad."

Hmm. Well, while the critics seem intent on dismissing the Japanese cast altogether, the people in the Metro with us today who have more "highbrow" tastes will definitely recognize Takashi Shimura from the Kurosawa films that have been playing stateside since Rashomon in the early '50s. People have also seen Yoshio Tsuchiya if they've seen Seven Samurai, but they probably wouldn't recognize him here, as his face is covered in The Mysterians and he is dubbed over. Anybody who's seen Godzilla, King of the Monsters! will (theoretically) recognize both Momoko Kōchi and Akihiko Hirata, and a very select few might have seen Hirata in other things - possibly one of Inagaki's Samurai films, or even Itsuko and Her Mother, although the chances of that being the thing they know him from are vanishingly slim since, as far as I know, that film only screened in Hawaii. And, of course, anybody here who's seen Rodan could recognize him, Kenji Sahara, and Yumi Shirakawa. We'll be seeing them all again quite soon in The H-Man as well.

So the cast means nothing to Americans, huh? It's debatable how much anybody actually cared, but to say that none of the cast of The Mysterians would have been familiar to American audiences is just not true.

I'll leave this alone in a minute, I promise, but stick with me a little longer here. I've always been curious about how much American audiences were actually paying attention to the cast of the imported Japanese films they were watching. I looked up Variety's review of The H-Man, which is credited to the same person who reviewed The Mysterians, and...

...this critic appears to have mixed up Kenji Sahara and Akihiko Hirata's roles in the film, which means he presumably was not recognizing people who were in the same movie he'd just watched a week or two prior (or at least not bothering to put names to faces). So the answer to "how much did Americans care?" is probably not very much.

Alright, the movie's about to start. We're in our seats, and you've endured me lecturing you for this long, time to get down to business. For a more extensive overview of how the American cut differs from the Japanese original, I'll turn it over to our friend Brian Culver at The History Vortex. One of the more notable losses in the American cut - which is fairly good as far as these things go - is Ifukube's formidable score, which appears to have been distorted into something more like the eerie, theremin-soaked sci-fi soundtracks Americans were used to. The second Moguera is also cut out entirely, which is a shame, because I screened The Mysterians to a small audience myself back in the present day and that moment got some big laughs.

The Metro is a stadium-style theater that has only one single screen but a massive seating capacity - 856 seats by the time of its closure, but probably a bit less when we're here. We're sitting in the front row, naturally. Can you see us? We're right down there.

85 minutes later (the U.S. cut shaves down some special effects scenes, removing three minutes of runtime), we're ready to get out of here before Watusi starts and go back home.

Thank you for accompanying me on this journey. I'm not talking about the time machine anymore, I'm talking about this blog. It's a lonely business running a fansite for an actor who most people in the English-speaking world only know for one role, but I genuinely enjoy writing these posts very much. I think it is worth doing and I hope you think it is worth reading.

Even if you don't, there will still be more posts.

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Note:

In this post I've embellished a few details to give a fictionalized idea of what it would be like to sit down and see The Mysterians in a U.S. theater during its initial run. While I have no proof that The Mysterians ever played at the Metro Theater specifically, it very well could have. However, everything else is factual and is taken from reliable primary sources. The photo of the theater interior I've used is not the Metro Theater but the Bagdad Theater in Portland, Oregon; I've chosen it for its ambiance and the size of its screen. You can find more information about the Metro Theater here.

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Image credits:

Metro Theater exterior: from Jack Tillmany collection

Metro Theater lobby: photo by Ted Newman, from Jack Tillmany collection

Bagdad Theater interior: photo by Kathleen Nyman

At the Earth's Core (1976)

directed by Kevin Connor

UK/USA

90 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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At the Earth's Core is honestly the most I've felt like I was watching tokusatsu during any single movie made outside of Japan. The dichotomy between how Japanese practical effects films were/are perceived - especially in the '70s - and how Western ones are perceived means that no one would acknowledge it (Japan makes the goofy rubber-suit-and-cardboard-city movies, the US and UK make Art™, or so popular opinion goes), but there really is not much aesthetic difference between the suitmation in this and something like, say, Ultraman Taro.

We get little introduction to the lead characters: the first time we see them is pretty much as soon as they set off on their underground voyage, and instead of stopping to give us backstory at any point, the film remains firmly focused on the present, having them react to challenges in front of them as if they came into existence when the film started. As our two leads we've got a guy named David who is the most unremarkable man in the world, and his sidekick, Dr. Perry, played with extreme Britishness by Peter Cushing. If there's any aspect of this film I solidly disliked, it was David, and really by extension all characters except for Perry; I would have accepted a version of this movie that was just him down there getting into random situations. But the two do play off of each other very well. David is the kind of bland protagonist that exists in a lot of adventure novels where he has such a lack of personality that the reader is given to map their own thoughts and feelings onto him, but to me that seems like it works much better in a book than on film. This movie has a lot of issues that any given book-to-film adaptation usually has (namely, that a lot of things feel unearned due to having spent less time with the characters than we would if we'd been reading a book), but it's also awesome and I love it.

The majority of what happens once the digging machine - which is the Gotengo, by the way, it is so perfectly the Gotengo - reaches the center of the Earth is generic male fantasy stuff. David commits a social faux pas by being nice to a girl, which turns out to be a no-no in this society of cartoon barbarians, and then spends the rest of the film fighting monsters and other guys for the right to marry her. To her credit she ultimately refuses him at the end but it's out of some weird sense of racial pride, that her lot in life is to stay down in the underground with her own people, which... yeah, we're gonna get into the race stuff in a minute, but it's not handled very well, although from what I know about the source material, the racism is actually toned WAY down here.

But my god, dude, the monster suits. The foggy, neon-lit soundstage jungle. The rear projection which is so obviously rear projection but you're too immersed in it to really care. It's one of those movies where you can see the zippers and the wires and imagine the boundaries of the set, but instead of looking cheaper for it, it's all the more impressive how much the film attempts to do. There are multiple types of weird creatures: shouty monkey guys herding humans into chain gangs to do their bidding, telepathic birdmen who control the monkey guys, hippopotamus-like dinosaurs who shoot fire, other dinosaurs, living plants, giant Venus flytraps... there's an entire ecosystem presented to us in glorious suitmation, and honestly, I love every minute of it. And if you like worldbuilding, this is Burroughs we're talking about - the film doesn't even scratch the surface, but it's an admirable attempt.

Now, the first time I watched this, I didn't pay too much attention to the whole idea of multiple human tribes existing in Pellucidar who were constantly at odds with each other, because what the movie does to depict these tribes is give all the non-white actors the same really bad curly wig. I didn't catch that these were meant to be members of a different "tribe" the first time around because I just assumed they had bad wigs for no reason other than somebody in costuming thought it was a good idea. It's not really a huge part of the story, but another deed our savior David does on his journey through Pellucidar is unify the tribes, which is shown as a big celebration with much dancing and music - but, again, the word here is "unearned". If there was real-world commentary intended here, it's not fleshed out enough to be anything other than awkward and poorly done.

On the whole, the movie is frequently cheesy, extremely unserious, a bit of a mess, and has a few flaws, but I do still think it's one of the more unique things I've seen. The Isao Tomita score (not really, but that's what it sounds like) and multitude of strange beasts that all seem to explode instantly upon death, the wide-eyed ten-year-old boy fantasy vibe, the occasionally groan-worthy humor... there's so much going on in this movie's 90 minutes. For better or worse, this kind of thing could only exist in 1976, and even if it's a critical failure, I'm glad people made this movie so I can keep rewatching it and going back to its hypnotic, hallucinatory, out-of-time fantasy world.

Eraserhead (1977)

directed by David Lynch

USA

88 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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It's been probably over ten years since I last watched this and it has been one of those films that exists in my head as a concept more than as an actual memory of having seen it. And, like many if not all films that attain that category, even if I consider them to be personal favorites, I'm always surprised by how good they are once I finally do watch them again.

David Lynch's death is a hard one to deal with. Much has been said lately about his refusal to elaborate upon or explain themes in his films, choosing instead to leave it up to the viewer to interpret them. I think that this is an extremely admirable way of making art, and one that, if the artist is able to be personally content with putting their work out there in its finished form and letting it speak for itself, can be fulfilling for both the artist and the viewer. Art will always exist as much in the mind of the audience as it does in the mind of the artist. An artist might mean something specific by incorporating a specific thing in their work, but that thing will always ultimately be most meaningful to them; what resonates with a single viewer could be wholly different from what the artist intended when they created the work.

It's freeing, as a viewer, to be able to interpret a film without feeling like you're coming to the "wrong" conclusion about it. For that reason, I'm going to talk about what I think of Eraserhead on a personal level.

One of my biggest takeaways from the film is that there's something weirdly American about it. It feels heavily reminiscent of dour Soviet and Eastern European films like Stalker, The Ugly Swans, and 1980's Golem (among many others), but the characters, the way they conduct themselves, the music and the furnishings that they're surrounded with, all speak to a kind of uniquely desperate mid-20th-century American way of life. It's a little anachronistic; I wasn't alive in the late 1970s, but to my understanding people didn't really dress like the Lady in the Radiator or even like Henry's girlfriend Mary unless they were elderly. Henry himself goes around in a suit most of the time and proclaims that he works in a factory. It feels a little bit more like the times Lynch himself might have grown up in rather than the contemporary atmosphere.

A theme that seems to recur throughout the film is the horror of a hole. Things come out of, and happen inside, holes. Our introduction to the place where Henry lives is through an apocalyptic aerial zoom of a house with a large hole in its roof. A non sequitur involving the worm thing Henry finds in his mailbox ends in the worm itself growing a gaping maw that the camera falls into. Henry's brief affair with the woman next door culminates in the two of them sinking slowly into a hole that appears in the center of his bed. And at the very beginning, the film's horror of horrors, the baby itself, is birthed from Henry's open mouth. This is a deeply, deeply unsettling film, more frightening with what it shows you than with what it holds back, but there is still that sense that there are things in the shadows of it, at the bottom of holes, craters, canyons, mouths.

One tempting and even somewhat compelling read of the film is a literalist approach that says the world it depicts is some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland, where everything and everyone is strange because they're poisoned and mutated from radioactive fallout or some such. The film itself even gives us a small detail that could seem to point to this interpretation: the framed picture of a mushroom cloud next to Henry's bed. This could be a hint, or it could mean something else, or it could mean nothing at all. Personally, I think it kind of fits in with the American-ness of it all, the casual display of a symbol of incredible destructive power out of pride, maybe, or fascination; hung prominently the way one might mount a small crucifix.

And then there is the baby. I honestly forgot how horrible that thing is. It's one of the rare elements of the film that is acknowledged as being somehow wrong and bizarre within the film itself - "They're not even sure it is a baby" - and characters react to it in a way that seems reasonable given what it is, which can't be said for most other aspects of the film. On some level it does elicit a sympathetic reaction, since it is a helpless, sick creature too weak to do anything but cry and move its head a little, but it's also just so disturbing that it's impossible to really empathize with it. As for its significance to the narrative, to me it felt like after a while the baby was becoming an extension of Henry himself. They do become physically indistinguishable after a point, with Henry losing his own head and having it replaced with the baby's. Henry finally cutting the baby open and stabbing it could be read as a kind of suicide.

There's a scene in the movie Jigoku that I kept thinking about during this. The guilt-ridden protagonist of that film descends through Buddhist hell until he meets his dead girlfriend, who tells him that she's had a baby down there, but she put it on a big leaf and sent it floating away down the river, and he has to rescue it right now, hurry up, he has no choice, he has to save his baby, right now, go! Overwhelmingly, watching that scene, as with watching Eraserhead, I got the feeling that I was watching a nightmare on screen, because nightmares are the only place where I personally have experienced such a sense of deep urgency and obligation coupled with a situation that is so outwardly bizarre and impossible. It feels like a classic nightmare situation to be tasked with doing something that is of life-and-death importance but is also nearly impossible and makes very little sense in the first place, like raising a disgusting cow fetus-baby when no one has ever told you where it actually came from, just that you are somehow the father.

I guess I have to stop this somewhere. This is one of my favorite movies. It's an easy five stars. I could watch this ten more times and come away from it with ten new interpretations, each entirely different from the last. It's a film that really feels perfectly realized, and I think that may owe a lot to Lynch's ability to put art out there without explaining it. I love that a film can just be weird and nightmarish without having to justify itself.

Cellphone Investigator 7 (2008)

directed by Takashi Miike, Takeshi Watanabe, Hiroyuki Tsuji, Manabu Asō, Kazuya Konaka et al

Japan

4.5 stars out of 5

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As a tokusatsu fan, I should probably know better than to judge by appearances at this point, but I have to be honest: I did not expect the television show about a walking, talking cell phone who solves cyber crimes with a 16-year-old boy as its partner to be one of the best things I've watched in recent memory.

The show basically gives you everything you need to know about it within its opening credits. Keita, a high school student, suddenly finds the whole course of his life changed when he witnesses a man killed by a rogue construction crane in front of him, and discovers that the man was secretly an agent for Under Anchor, an organization developing special AI-powered cell phones to combat cyber crimes. Keita is reluctant at the beginning of the show but becomes a full-fledged Anchor agent soon enough, and by the end, god damn, that high schooler is the best agent they ever had. (Okay, maybe not the best, but probably the most emotionally invested.)

This show has pacing issues. I will say that up front because I think that what constitutes "issues" for any other show is instead, for CPI7, something it wears with pride. One of the things this show does that I really admire, and that I wish more series would do, is bring in different directors and let them keep their directorial style. Every so often there will be an episode that's so wildly different that you think "wow, who did that one?" and you look it up and surprise! It's Mamoru Oshii (for example), and you can tell it's Mamoru Oshii, because instead of keeping to a baseline throughout the entire series, some episodes are allowed to just be these wonderful little one-off capsules of weird that don't develop the plot but feel instead like a movie starring the characters of the show you've been watching.

For a show ostensibly about cyber crimes, there's really not a lot of cyber crime-solving going on. Most of what happens is very self-contained and usually the stakes aren't that high: Keita and some random guy almost get killed by gun smugglers, a little girl finds Seven (the phone) and he helps her get over feeling alienated by her parents' impending divorce, a really bad comedian makes it his mission in life to court Touko, and, like, literally just The Ring, to name a few. Like I said, the double episode that Oshii directed is one of the most astonishing things I've seen in the context of a television series, and it has absolutely nothing to do with solving crime. It just lets us meditate with the characters for a while in a world that is wholly a fantasy and is more real for it.

"Life is just saying goodbye."

"Then what is the spring that always returns?"

I think by far the crowning achievement of CPI7 is how much it got me to care about the phones. When we begin the series' storyline, Anchor had been developing cell phones called Phone Bravers with the ability to walk and talk and learn from their partners, seven of which were created but only three remain functional (we learn about the others as the show progresses). The phones are partnered with human agents who are referred to as their "Buddy", and develop a bond with them where each influences the other, as the phones provide tactical and logistical support that a human couldn't, and the human provides, for lack of a better term, life skills for the Phone Bravers. And let me tell you, they are doing some kind of magic with how well the Bravers are integrated into the cast. By the end of the show I was 1000% invested in the phones and 1000% forgetting they were little CGI phones and not actual human cast members. It's just absolutely perfect at making you care about the Bravers and feel for them as they respond to - and develop - emotions in their own flawed, weird, nonlinear, very human way.

To discuss the story in-universe a little bit: the bond between the Bravers and their buddies is integral to the overarching plot of the show. The ultimate villain is a rogue AI named Gene created by Ultraman Agul a shady tech CEO that evolves to come to the conclusion that humans are making the world a worse place and should be eliminated. Gene becomes a villain precisely because it's let loose without the ability to learn from an individual human the way the Phone Bravers are. Gene's creator failed to provide the kind of care, attention, and empathy that the Under Anchor agents did for their phones, and instead he just mass-produced them as quickly as possible with a childlike brain intended for rapid growth and self-sufficiency rather than emotional reasoning and understanding. The Phone Braver program works because the phones are treated like people, because they functionally are. The relationship between the Bravers and their buddies is a friendship between equals. Gene is a feral child left to fend for itself, with nobody else to learn from but other feral children.

I want to nominate Masataka Kubota, who plays Keita, for every award retroactively. The way he handles the massive tonal shifts from episode to episode is admirable. He does at times feel authentically like a 16-year-old boy, but he doesn't play Keita like a parody of himself. And he always sells his interactions with Seven and the other Bravers. The whole cast does, but Keita has more direct interaction with the phones than anyone else. I was so fully invested in the final episode due to how Kubota was nailing it and how the writing team was managing to make these phones feel like real living characters that it was honestly a little overwhelming.

So, yeah. I watched the cell phone detective show and it got me really emotional. I wish there were more shows like this, but this one is a special, rare thing, and maybe that's how it should be.

Mystery Comet Tsuifon

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000)

directed by Masaaki Tezuka

Japan

105 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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As its full title ("The G Extermination Strategy") suggests, this is one of those Godzilla films in which the goal is simple eradication - not finding a way to live with Godzilla through psychic mediation, not putting him somewhere where he can never be a problem again, just killing him dead, no nuance. This straightforward approach reflects Godzilla's role in the film as well. However, even though he is a cut-and-dry villain here, this is one of the more comedic Godzilla iterations. I was actually surprised by how comedic he is on my most recent rewatch; some of the fight scenes are Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster-level goofy.

Some of these movies give Godzilla a real "jealous boyfriend" attitude: on the one hand, when humanity does anything he doesn't like - such as developing nuclear weapons - he comes to put us in our place. But on the other hand, if any other kaiju emerge to threaten humanity, he'll also come and dispatch them. Not to protect us, but because Godzilla can only ever be the sole arbiter of humanity's fate, and no potential usurpers will be tolerated. This film in particular takes place in a neatly explained timeline in which the original Godzilla was the beginning of a series of attacks, where any time a milestone of scientific development was reached, Godzilla would appear and destroy it. There is a human villain at the end who is unscrupulous enough to risk getting Japan stomped in favor of financial gain, but humans on the whole are not the bad guys per se. Still, the human characters are too thinly developed to really root for: the protagonist is given the most predictable of backstories (her mentor was killed by falling debris during a Godzilla attack in front of her, now she swears vengeance), and Godzilla is just doing what he usually does in knocking humanity down a peg when they get too high and mighty.

I really don't like bug kaiju. Not because I'm afraid of bugs but because I think "thing, but huge" is a really silly and uninteresting format for a monster (this is also why I dislike King Kong). Megaguirus is no exception. I appreciate the level of detail put into her (her?) design, and the puppetry was so good I kept forgetting it was puppetry, but as a character she doesn't compel me nearly as much as other Godzilla antagonists, especially considering this movie was sandwiched between Godzilla 2000 and GMK, which - and you can dislike 2000 as much as you like, but Orga was a cool idea - both have great kaiju casts.

This kind of feels like a Godzilla movie for people who don't particularly want to watch a Godzilla movie. It is good, and I enjoy it whenever I watch it, but it's a movie I watch and then don't think about very much, whereas every other Godzilla movie occupies a permanent spot in my brain. The black hole gun is an interesting idea but it becomes almost laughable when Godzilla repeatedly shrugs it off almost every time they fire it at him. Killing Godzilla for real at the end of the film was basically not ever going to happen, so even the big moment where they seemingly blast Godzilla into the crust of the Earth has its impact dulled by the final scene implying the Dimension Tide didn't work so well after all.

This is not my favorite Godzilla movie, but I rewatched it on New Year's Eve, and - without timing it at all - it hit midnight almost exactly as they fired the Dimension Tide for the last time, and let me tell you, it got me hype as hell.