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?