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.