Elves (1989)

directed by Jeffrey Mandel

USA

89 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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"Are you asking me if I believe in elves? No... but God did."

Every year I get worse at watching Christmas movies. Sidetracked by other stuff, too busy (somehow I seem to always take on more projects than usual around the holidays), bored by every Christmas movie on offer, or just plain unwilling. I could have even seen this at a local bar/theater, but it's cold outside and I work weird hours. So I Elved at home, and I'm not really sure I fully understand what I experienced.

Elves is a movie that makes me philosophical about the nature of the American film industry as a whole. I watch a lot of Japanese movies (obviously), and I definitely don't want to fall into the trap of thinking everything made in Japan is automatically better, but it really does strike me that even the shittiest Japanese movie I've seen seems to be at the very least watchable in a way that bad American movies are not. A bad Japanese V-cin horror movie from 1989 made on a beer-money budget by a bunch of teenagers feels like it has more life in it than Elves. It seems like there's a proliferation of American movies that, like Elves, look like real movies on the surface, but are just so deeply bizarre in terms of plot, pacing, character writing, and acting that it amazes me people actually managed to cobble together enough money to get this done and make it look professional and still managed to be so bad at it.

The story here is that a teenage-ish girl unwittingly finds herself part of a plan put into motion before her birth to have an elf impregnate her and produce a race of superhumans that will carry out Nazi orders and bring the Fourth Reich to bear. Elves, the film posits, were the "little creeping things" designated by God to have refuge on Noah's Ark at the time of the flood. (Yes, I am serious.) (None of this explains why the movie only seems capable of showing one elf at a time.)

Fortunately, Julie Austin, who plays Kirsten, is one of the movie's 2 decent actors (the other is Dan Haggerty doing down-on-his-luck MacReady) out of a cast of people who seem only vaguely aware that they're in a movie. Elves was actually a lot more watchable because of her and Haggerty; you can kind of get away with a movie being bad if one or two of your actors take it seriously. Kirsten's life sucks so bad it's almost not believable: abusive mom, grandfather who turns out to also be her father, pervert mall Santa and a neurotic boss making her job miserable, weird little brother, et cetera. But she is one of the more likable characters, which is fortunate since she's also the protagonist. She does tank her respectability by calling the elf the F-slur in what should be her climactic moment, but I guess you can't set your expectations too high for this sort of thing.

I watched this as a really bad VHS rip on YouTube, which added to the charm but also made it flat-out difficult to see anything. What I could see of the practical effects left something to be desired. The elf was puppeted well, but something about its static facial expression (gargoylish; laughable) made it look goofy instead of menacing or even really interesting. I did enjoy that the movie immediately turns into a peyote trip when the elf finally gets killed, that was fun.

All in all I think I definitely would have been better off watching this in a bar. There are one-off quotes that are absolutely hilarious out-of-context, such as the one I opened this review with, but on the whole, watching this alone in your house totally sober is just you, alone in your house, sober, watching a bad Nazi elf movie. Whether or not that sounds like a good time is up to your individual taste, but for me, if I'm watching a bad Christmas movie, I want it to at least be fun, and this just kind of bored me.

Trigger warning for animal cruelty.

Guinea Pig 4: Devil Doctor Woman (1986)

directed by Hajime Tabe

Japan

48 minutes

4 stars out of 5

____

I have to say I think this might be my favorite Guinea Pig movie I've seen so far. All of them have had their own unique, individual (disgusting) charms, and in terms of impressive practical effects, Devil Doctor Woman isn't the best of them, but it's such a genuinely fun movie that I ended up really loving it.

We're introduced to the film by the "devil doctor" herself, an underground doctor and surgeon who takes care of patients with unusual illnesses. What does "unusual" mean in this context? That's what we find out over the ensuing 45 minutes, after the good doctor is thoroughly coated in blood and has gotten us as ready as we'll ever be for what we're about to see. The film is presented as an assembled series of "kartes" (basically just means "tapes") of individual cases, with the doctor usually stepping in or narrating to explain what's going on - like with He Never Dies, it's not quite found-footage, but it's also not not found-footage.

The "illnesses" in Devil Doctor Woman are things like an entire family stricken with a disease that makes their heads explode if they get upset, a guy with a human-face-shaped growth on his stomach that has a personality of its own, a guy who's slowly turning into a zombie, a guy whose tattoo has begun roaming around his body, etc.; but then there are also things shown on the kartes that aren't really illnesses per se but just records of random things happening. For instance: a human flesh buffet and a very short story about an unidentified internal organ that's just running loose on the streets. The doctor knows what to do in all these cases, although most of the time her "cure" is as unconventional as the illness.

And honestly I love her. The doctor (I do wish she had an actual name) knows her reputation, knows she's operating without a license outside of the purview of dry academic propriety, and embraces it. Yeah, maybe she's kinda killing people sometimes, but most of the time the illness would have been fatal anyway. She's just so unperturbed and has so much know-how no matter the situation; I think I might want to be her when I grow up.

As much fun as the actual movie itself is, watching the entire thing is almost worth it just to get to the end credits, which are a montage of nearly every person who worked on and performed in the movie getting hit in the face with a pie made of fake nails and blood. It's really obvious that everyone involved in this had a good time, and that's reflected in the genuinely funny absurdist humor running through the film. The Guinea Pig series has a reputation for being ultra-gory, but once you actually start watching them you find that a lot of them are seriously funny, too. I wish we could have seen the doctor return for several more V-Cin follow-ups to this, but if we want to see her actor again, at least we can watch, uh, [checks notes] Akira Kurosawa's Ran? That can't be right.

Guzoo: The Thing Forsaken by God (1986)

directed by Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu

Japan

40 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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(This is a review “from the vaults”, so it might not be up to my current quality standards. Forgive me, but I’m too busy to write anything new again this week.)

This movie is a little short to get an entire review, but the myriad of excellent splatter films from Japan that came out in the 80s and 90s deserve recognition despite very few of them ever reaching close to an hour of run time. I don't think anybody is watching these things for the plot, and more often than not, the plot is simply a ticking clock counting down to the tentacle stuff, but in this case the monster's backstory is genuinely interesting, and even quasi-Lovecraftian. If we suppose that in this context there is a God who created all life, imagine a creature that evolved outside of God's purview, that God turned his/her/its/their back from: this is Guzoo, our unholy tentacle monster du jour. And it lives inside a summer house guarded by a mad scientist who keeps it at bay by playing a special song on a flute.

The creature design here is just miles above what I expected. This is the very definition of a typical Lovecraftian shambling monstrosity. It has very few defined parts - no resemblance to an Earth life-form, no discernible eyes or nose or a countable number of limbs, just snapping amorphous jaws at one end of a large, sticky, fleshy-looking body covered in unsettling protrusions and whipping tentacles. The size is perfect: it's not big enough to dwarf the humans, but it's not tiny enough to be silly. It’s just about the size where, if a dog that big came at you, you'd be really terrified. 

There's a specific frame towards the end of the film where two surviving girls are running through the house, trying to escape Guzoo, and for a second we see the girls and then Guzoo peeking through the doorway in the background, and I don't know why, but the way the whole sequence is shot is just beautiful to me- Guzoo feels so present, so there.

This isn't even a direct Lovecraft adaptation and it gets the whole "squirming tentacle monster" thing down in a way that makes said monster feel far more directly threatening than they typically are. For a splatter film, this veers far more towards dread than the gross-out effect most of its contemporaries go for. It doesn't feel like the intent here was just to make us lose our lunch. There's a distinct ominousness to Guzoo. Its appearance isn't just scary because it looks gross. There's something about Guzoo that conveys a sense of it not being right.

Everything just kind of fizzles out at the end, Guzoo turns into a harmless turtle (?) and the remaining girls limp off into the mist.  People got eaten, property was destroyed, wounds were dealt. But we'll never forget Guzoo, and we'll never stop hoping that maybe, just maybe, 39 years later, somebody with practical effects experience and a love of shot-on-video splatter movies will take up the Guzoo torch and bring the world a very belated sequel.

Guinea Pig 3: He Never Dies (1986)

directed by Masayuki Kusumi

Japan

40 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

Trigger warning for suicide and self-harm.

After watching Frankenstein's Love, I was in the mood for more V-Cin. I didn't mean it this way, but this installment of the Guinea Pig series actually has a tenuous connection to Frankenstein's Love in that the main character is unable to die, much like Frankenstein's monster. I don't really know where I'm going with that, I just thought I'd bring it up.

He Never Dies follows Hideshi, a disaffected salaryman who, unhappy in his job and with no real purpose in life, wants to die. He cuts his wrist with seemingly no real thought behind it - it's just another thing he does aimlessly, listlessly, nothing better to do. But the bleeding and pain both stop very quickly, and Hideshi realizes that something is wrong with his body: no matter what kind of injury he inflicts on himself, he never dies. He doesn't heal - the stuff he does to himself "takes", and whatever damage he does is permanent, but it never brings him any closer to dying. We see Hideshi experiment with how far he can take this before he has the idea to invite one of his coworkers over and harass him with his newfound immortality.

I should mention at this point that this movie is arguably a comedy. I don't know if "comedy" is really the right word here, but I don't know what else to call a movie where you've got a guy with a plastic ruler sticking out of his head zombie-walking towards another guy who is wearing an Elvis mask and scaring the absolute daylights out of him. There's also something weirdly philosophical about all of this: it's only at the very end of the movie, when Hideshi has whittled himself down to just a head sitting on a table, that he seems like he's getting something out of life and having positive interactions with the people around him. Like he had to go through some kind of violent catharsis before he could realize that he wanted to live.

The main reason to watch this is the incredible gore effects. I think the last Guinea Pig movie I watched was Mermaid in a Manhole, and I distinctly remember thinking, at multiple points during the movie, "How in the world are they doing this?" It could be that the fuzz of 40-year-old film hides some of the rough edges, but to me, there was virtually nothing in He Never Dies that looked visibly fake (up until Hideshi was a disembodied head). The wrist-cutting scenes were uncomfortably realistic. There's a part where Hideshi cuts his stomach open and throws his guts at his coworker until we see his spinal column through his empty torso. It's extremely creative and a credit to the FX team that a "lowbrow" movie like this looks better than even a lot of horror movies shot today.

The only part about this I couldn't figure out was that for some reason it's presented in quasi-Unexplained Mysteries style by a white guy who, with classic "bad paranormal docudrama" panache, introduces the story of the man who couldn't die as one of a number of inexplicable phenomena (that are actually completely explicable). The white guy talks about the story as if it's a videotape that's been found and edited, but the movie itself is shot like a normal, professional film, not found-footage style at all, so it really doesn't make any sense. But then again, not much about this movie does.

Pretty Body: Frankenstein's Love (1988)

directed by Takafumi Nagamine

Japan

54 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

____

I only watched this because the thing I meant to watch fell through. I'd been aware of it for a while; it got subtitled relatively recently and looked like the kind of thing I'd be interested in, but until I thought to myself "who the hell is responsible for this" midway through the film, I had no idea it was directed by the same guy who made Diva in the Netherworld, a favorite of mine that is still in need of subtitles.

Pretty Body is a film that, on the surface, is not very complicated: it's a story about a girl named Izumi who moves into an apartment above an otolaryngologist's office while, unbeknownst to her, the doctor and his assistant have been murdering (and continue to murder) apartment residents and other random folks to harvest their body parts for a Frankenstein's Monster they're making. Somewhere along the way, the girl catches sight of the monster and falls immediately and intensely in love with him.

It would be a lot easier to explain the way it feels to watch this movie to someone who has already seen Diva in the Netherworld, because it's almost exactly like that. Diva in the Netherworld itself would be easier to explain to someone who's seen House, so to oversimplify things (perhaps to an unfair degree), I guess we could say that Pretty Body feels like a mixture of House and maybe one of the Guinea Pig movies if it was directed by somebody whose only previous work had been idol videos.

Despite its simple plot, and despite the bizarre, dreamlike execution of that plot, I do think there's some sense being made here, somewhere. The more I thought about it, the more this started feeling like a classic "coming of age" story (I do not tend to be a fan of these, but sometimes they are at least interesting). A girl who's young enough that she probably hasn't been living on her own for long moves into a strange new place and, still innocent enough to find love and magic wherever she goes, meets another innocent like her, while all around them the world is full of random murders and sex & violence. At the end of the film, Izumi is forced to grow up when everything goes wrong and she's separated from the monster she loves, but her attitude shows that despite her loss, she seems like she's going to do fine in the larger world. There's also some upsetting implications, given the fact that we see very graphically where the body parts that made up the monster came from. This creature Izumi falls in love with is very much his own person with agency and autonomy, but he is made of pieces from people who had been Izumi's own neighbors until relatively recently.

I want to come back to that word "dreamlike" just now, because there's no better way to describe this movie. It really does feel like a lot of the imagery is taken directly from things that you would see in a weird anxiety dream. There's a scene where the doctor's assistant comes in the room and tries to talk to him while he's on the toilet and she doesn't acknowledge that this is unusual in any way even though it clearly makes the doctor uncomfortable. Then there's the viewing window to the chamber where the doctor keeps the monster, which is opened by way of giving a wet willie to a sculpture of a giant ear on the wall next to it. The practical effects are dialed down here more than they were in Diva in the Netherworld, and the aesthetic is much more beachy and modern, but the environment still gives off a similar feeling of unreality.

I don't really know how to end this review, so I guess I'll just mention for tokusatsu fans that Noboru Mitani and Tomorowo Taguchi are in this (Taguchi in only a small role, Mitani as the doctor), so if you're some kind of completionist, you are now compelled to watch whatever this is.

Celia (1989)

directed by Ann Turner

Australia

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Note: I am still extremely busy and haven't had the time to write anything new, so this is an old review that I've dug up from my archives and reworked for quality. My apologies - by hook or by crook I will be back to writing new reviews next week.

Celia is a horror movie (if it can be called a horror movie at all) where the horror is experienced through a child's perspective, it's also a movie that presents that horror as part of the experience of being a child. The horror here is inextricable from personal experience instead of existing as an external force that can be corroborated by an outside observer. What this movie is really about is how the worlds of children and the worlds of adults are often totally incompatible and incomprehensible to each other. The title character is a nine-year-old girl who has a relatively normal childhood (insofar as any childhood can be called "normal"), with all of life's mysteries still yet to be revealed, and to her - and, arguably, objectively - all of the adults in her life act against what she believes to be morally correct. 

A really good example of this last point is the way the film deals with politics. A running theme is the ruling by the then-PM of Australia that all rabbits, including those belonging to children as pets, are to be rounded up and killed, as they are considered vermin. Celia has to cope with this despite not having the capacity to understand it the way adults do. At one point she draws devil features on a picture of the PM in class and is told off for it by the teacher. While the adults view this as extremely disrespectful, they don't see that Celia is interpreting the PM's actions according to the rules of engagement that govern her and her peers: it does not follow that this man should be above recourse, he's a stranger who is telling Celia that her beloved pet is to be surrendered and killed, what is she supposed to do? Not fight back? Celia has no internalized concept of politics or the idea of respecting someone solely based on their office: she treats the PM the same way she would treat her own contemporaries.

Another running theme is the adults around Celia attempting to force her into cutting off relationships based on their own fears of communism. Celia also deals with this the same way she'd deal with a contemporary: you tell me they're communists, and that they're bad people, but they've never hurt me or my friends, and they're always kind to me, so how can they be bad people just because you say they are? The logic the adults follow is the strange stuff here, not what Celia does - the fallacy of shunning some people because of their beliefs and blindly following the rule of others - of strangers - simply because they hold the highest office in the land is presented as a more childish belief than the rituals and games Celia involves herself with.

The way Celia's most heinous act (not spoiling it) is dealt with is also interesting because I think a lot of other movies would make that the thing that ends the film. Other movies wouldn't show, afterwards, her doing something else that could have ended in a similarly disastrous fashion, but didn't. They would make it a black-and-white issue: as soon as Celia did it, she would have been established as being in the wrong. But the mock hanging of her friend afterwards shows that the balance between life and death, justice and injustice, and the definition of what is and isn't a violent act does not hold constant between the worldviews of children and those of adults. It doesn't cast judgement on Celia for what she did or place blame on the people in her life for not teaching her right; it presents her as someone with agency who made a logical choice according to the way she understood justice and reciprocity.

I very much enjoyed this movie and despite it not turning out to be what I'd call "horror" without reservations, I thought it was one of the better films to explore the unique anxiety of being a child. I intended to watch it as a Christmas movie but that didn't really work out.

Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan (1987)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

47 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

____

The last movie I watched before this one was Hideo Gosha's Goyokin. Only real cinema for me, thank you.

It's easy to put on Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan and just think "oh, this is bad". I admit I thought that at the start. This is compounded by the fact that I still haven't quite figured Minoru Kawasaki out, despite how many of his films I've watched; I'm never entirely sure when he intends for us to laugh at something and when we're meant to be laughing with it. But the further Iko-chan goes, the clearer things become: Kawasaki understands tokusatsu intimately. I don't think - and I could be wrong here, because I still haven't read any statements from the director himself - any of this is intended in a mean-spirited way. Tokusatsu is the kind of thing where even though us fans love it dearly and defend its genuine artistic merit wholeheartedly, we are, at least every once in a while, guilty of laughing at it a little when it's not trying to be funny.

The protagonist of the film is Iko Kawai, a schoolgirl of no particular importance until she chances upon an alien who gives her a magical pink headset that can give her special powers and grant wishes. Iko, being possessed of a pure heart, uses the headset to stop a rampaging kaiju by communicating with it and finding out that it's not really mad or hateful, it just doesn't like living in a monstrous body that it never asked to be born in. (So right off the bat there's your transgender subtext.) She shrinks it down to a smaller size and it eventually repays the favor later on in the film. From there, as a matter of course, Iko finds herself drawn to the obligatory vaguely useless defense team, which counts among their members a very useless kyodai hero. Tension ramps up when Iko helps out two wounded Martians who tell her that their planet has been taken over by an evil dictator who plans on deploying a bomb that kills all humans but leaves everything else untouched.

If this sounds goofy, it's because it is. And it's meant to be. Akiko Isozaki, who plays Iko, is very obviously not a great actress, but she does feel like she's trying, and that authentically amateur performance accounts for a lot of Iko's charm. The kaiju suits and puppets are inordinately good for something this low-budget (I genuinely thought they'd managed to commandeer a Baragon suit for a few seconds) and the acting behind them is also top-notch - god, those Martians, the puppeteers really knew how to get emotion out of a face that has about as much expression as Kermit the Frog when someone's hand is up him. This movie is silly but it isn't cynical. It's exactly what the people who made it wanted it to be.

I can't really put my finger on exactly what it is about this movie that makes it so good, but it is So Good. I'm going to quote from its current top review on Letterboxd by the eloquent and well-stated "PeepeeDoodooBitch ?" to make up for my lack of insight: "[...]pure and unadulterated passion that manifests in the form of over ambitious props and special effects, fast little story lines carefully crafted to utilize all of the film’s minuscule budget, and gloriously weird moments and plots that are absent of studio interference. "

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.

The Thing (1982)

directed by John Carpenter

USA

109 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Note: This is an old review that I've dug up from my archives and reworked for quality. I am extremely busy this month, and did not have time to write anything new. My apologies.

Not even considering its massive cultural impact, The Thing is one of my favorite movies. I think it's also objectively one of the best horror movies ever made, with one of the most interesting and well-executed concepts for a monster. Even though that concept is not original, having been adapted from another film that was itself adapted from a book, it's done so uniquely in this iteration that it stands out from its predecessors.

The first time I watched this was when I was only just getting into movies, and I wasn't "good at" watching them. Stuff just didn't occur to me; I would miss huge parts of the plot because I wasn't paying attention to anything. I don't know if it's because of that or just because it's been a while since I saw it, but so much in The Thing jumped out at me that didn't the first time. The film's opening scene follows a dog across the frozen white Antarctic landscape as a helicopter tries desperately to track and shoot it, for reasons as yet unknown to us viewers. The Norwegians' desperate attempts to kill the dog and warn the U.S. base - attempts that fail, but may have been in vain anyway - are the frontispiece to what will become a building of dread that never stops throughout the whole movie. 

It really struck me upon this rewatch that this movie is just that: dreadful. It has an ominousness to it that maybe can only be understood when you've seen it and you know what's coming, which might seem counterintuitive given the anticipatory nature of dread, but watching capable people encounter an entity that they don't (and can't) understand gives off such a strong feeling of wrongness that it fills the whole atmosphere with foreboding.

I also did not know how to appreciate practical effects the first time I saw this. I didn't recognize that besides the very obvious fact that the effects in this are some of the best ever put to film, they're also used to perfection, at the perfect times; enough is shown that we feel like the alien - or, technically, the organisms the alien possesses and attempts to imitate - is flesh, a real creature. I can't really say that it doesn't tip over the line into being excessive, because the whole thing is an excess of blood and guts; entrails whipping around to find purchase; dragging itself along by its organs; body parts sprouting new, horrible limbs never glimpsed by any Earthly creature. But it's one of the only times where such a liberal application of grossery is needed, where it's used as real, genuine horror instead of a cheap attempt to shock.

I want to talk about the alien. I could talk about it all day and all night if I was given the chance. Because like I said, this is one of the most enduringly frightening concepts in horror that I've ever had the pleasure of giving space in my brain to. It is something that has no physical body itself or has a physical body that can be discarded at will, something that exists as a possessing spirit. It is an organism that is only concerned with survival, and it has the ability to alter its body plan in the blink of an eye to do whatever it can do evade injury and continue its goal of infecting as many life forms as possible. There is something so uncanny about the concept of a being that can just sprout new appendages if needed; it doesn't have to conform to evolution's idea of an ideal body plan honed over millions of years because it can reach out a coil of intestine as a grasping limb or grow a new mouth full of teeth on whatever spot its body needs one. And all of this is depicted with what I'm calling accuracy - it may be a misnomer considering that such a creature (thankfully) does not exist and so there isn't a way to depict it "accurately", but the practical effects team created what felt like a true-to-life depiction of the concept.

That scene where one of the infected men tries to run from the others but is found half-mutated, his hands horrifically misshapen and a blank alien look in his eyes. The noise he makes. That's fodder for a thousand nightmares. I can see how that single scene echoes in my favorite horror film of all time, Banshee Chapter.

I could go on even longer about this movie - how Jed the dog is one of the best canine actors of all time, managing to convey not the obvious immediate threat that an angry dog would, but cunning. Malice. Granted, a lot of that is more a credit to good editing than the dog himself, but I want to point out another specific scene, and then I'll close this review: Towards the beginning, when Nauls is told to turn down his Stevie Wonder, refuses, and then the camera explores empty corridors with the sounds of "Superstition" playing muffled in the background, we see the husky silently slip his nose in the door. He silently pads down the hallway until he finds a room with a human, and enters, as the human's shadow on the wall turns toward him, and then the scene cuts. I felt like I was watching a predator. Not just a dog, but something else. I think maybe it's the segue from light humor to a vision of dread that does it. That you can still hear humanity in the background while you watch the beginning of its downfall on four legs. That scene and every other in this film is why it's one of my favorite horror movies.

Summer of Demon (1981)

directed by Yukio Ninagawa

Japan

96 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

I've mentioned on here before that I'm really into Yotsuya Kaidan and am always looking for screen adaptations of it that I haven't seen. Unfortunately I will never be able to watch them all due to the sheer amount of Japanese films from the early 20th century that were destroyed during WWII (if I had a stereotypical lamp genie, the first thing I'd do after getting it to grant me infinite wishes would be to ask it for a copy of Shōzō Makino's adaptation) but there are a good many of them that survive, and they still continue to be made.

One of the things that caught my eye about Summer of Demon was that it had comedic elements. (There are definitely comedy versions of Yotsuya Kaidan out there, but not a ton of them.) The other thing that made me want to see it was Renji Ishibashi in the role of Naosuke. I feel like Naosuke's role is the real wild card of any Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation: some films play him up as diabolically, remorselessly evil; some make him out to be almost a goofball; some have him just be a shady grifter, looking for money and not much else. More on Naosuke's role in this specific adaptation in a moment.

Another thing I think I mentioned in one of my Yotsuya Kaidan reviews is that there is a spectrum of Iemon Nastiness™ that fluctuates throughout these films. Some of the most compelling are ones like Keisuke Kinoshita's version, where Iemon very clearly did love Oiwa at some point and is more of a bystander in a process that he is horrified by than a murderous, adulterous husband. The Iemon of Summer of Demon is somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. I would say he leans further and further into cruelty the more you think about him, though: he's not concerned with Oiwa's safety and well-being as a person and as his wife, just whether or not he's able to possess her for himself. To this end, he kills her father early on in the film to get him to stop asking Iemon to give her back. What's interesting is that Iemon actually seems to see everything coming: he says that he's concerned about people "interfering" with their life, and outright declares that he has to protect Oiwa, to protect their family, but protecting her, to him, is less about her protection and more about his strength and his ability to protect as a man.

And surprisingly, while he is a murderer and a general scumbag, Iemon is not the one to kill Oiwa. He's fine with it when he learns that the father of his new bride has started slowly poisoning Oiwa, and continues to make sure she takes the poison, but when Oiwa dies, it's an accident. I think a lot of Iemon's torment comes, therefore, from knowing that his hand was not on the sword that killed her; he could have stepped in to stop the process of her death, but didn't.

One of my favorite scenes in this is when Iemon, Oiwa, and Oume all go to watch a play together that appears to actually be a version of Yotsuya Kaidan. This exemplifies how oblivious the characters are to the cycle that they're caught up in. If you want to get deeper into symbolism, the figure in the play who is suffering what Oiwa would later suffer is scarred over her left eye, while Oiwa's illness affects her right eye - the play is a mirror that no one recognizes themselves in.

Back to Naosuke - I don't think I can recall having seen a version of Yotsuya Kaidan in which Naosuke and Iemon are contrasted this much as characters. Iemon is uncomfortable in the shabby, poor life of a ronin, but Naosuke actively wants that life. Naosuke doesn't care that he isn't a samurai anymore: he's done with that, would rather hang out at brothels and marry a pretty girl no matter her status. Iemon jumps at the chance to regain some standing by marrying a noblewoman who is obsessed with him - never mind that he already had a wife. Both of them kill someone in the first act of the film, and their reactions could not be more different: Iemon retains some of his samurai mindset in that he goes about the killing of Oiwa's father with a modicum of formality, but Naosuke kills a guy practically just for kicks and then laughs hysterically about it - and it's not even the guy he meant to kill. Iemon is amoral and conscience-haunted; Naosuke is amoral and having a great time, thank you very much.

Ishibashi steals the show in every scene he's in, by the way; Kenichi Hagiwara - former lead singer of The Tempters - as Iemon is good, but I didn't feel like he brought much depth to the role.

The cinematography is surprisingly gorgeous even when watched as a poor-quality webrip. There is one scene where Iemon's retinue of ne'er-do-wells are all running around a brothel as viewed from above, and then it cuts to an aerial shot of a group of women holding umbrellas - the jagged, squareish hallways of the brothel immediately giving way to the perfect circles of the umbrellas - and honestly, that was so, so visually satisfying. I personally prefer my jidaigeki dark as hell, so the comedy elements in this felt a little jarring, but it's balanced out by the fact that this is a really well-made film in all respects. Yukio Ninagawa is apparently mostly known for his Japanese-language adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, which makes a lot of sense.

Ultraman: The Adventure Begins (1987)

directed by Ray Patterson, Mitsuo Kusakabe

USA/Japan

78 minutes

1.5 stars out of 5

----

So I knew that an Ultraman cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbera existed, but I'd for the longest time I was under the impression that it was an entire series, not just this one-off thing, so I'd been treating it like Hanna-Barbera's Godzilla: "I'll get around to that someday, maybe, if I feel like it." The Adventure Continues was evidently intended to be an entire series, but that didn't work out, and honestly, I'm okay with it.

The premise should be somewhat familiar to anybody who's seen an Ultra series, and easily digestible to those who haven't: three pilots - Chuck, Beth, and Scott - collide with a mysterious energy sphere, later revealed to have been Ultras from the M78 nebula heading to Earth. The pilots would have been killed in the accident, but the Ultras chose instead to merge with their bodies, giving them the ability to shift forms. At the same time, an invasion by aliens from a planet called Sorkin is going on, and although attempts are made to deal with the monsters non-violently, the Ultras must protect the Earth against these giant monsters with their newfound powers.

It's been a while since I've rated anything this low. Maybe it feels worse because I've been watching a lot of good stuff lately, but I've got to say, the quality of this one ranges from "mildly entertaining" to "pretty dismal". I'll try to be kind to it, and get the stuff I liked out of the way first, but after that... no guarantees.

I have a soft spot for late-'80s/early-'90s anime, which is basically what this is; the animation is clearly not done by a US studio (as many cartoons aired in the States weren't) and it's got the vibe of anime from that era, where everybody is blocky and buff and all the women look the same. I'm not saying the animation is good, but it's comfortingly familiar to someone like me who enjoys that kind of thing. There is interesting conflict between Dr. Susan Rand and her team, who are dedicated to researching the monsters instead of just killing them, and the three pilots/Ultras. They're eventually persuaded into seeing the value of a non-violent solution to dealing with the monsters whenever possible, but unfortunately, it's not possible very often. Looking at this with the knowledge that it was meant to be expanded into a full series, introducing that option of having monsters who were not intentionally destructive and were dealt with in a kind and gentle fashion would have provided a nice change of pace. The fight scenes are also extremely entertaining; aerial battles are definitely the place (the only place) where the animation team shines and the cartoon feels like it's actually getting decent.

Also, Zoon, the big fat dragon who's just a sweet confused baby, was great. What an adorable little dude. I loved seeing the Ultras take care of him and relocate him to somewhere he could live in peace. Perfect creature.

I really have to struggle to come up with nice things to say about this, because the balance of good and bad here is weighted heavily towards "bad". Maybe this is my fault for having internet brainrot, but I could not stop thinking about G.I. Joe PSAs throughout this entire thing. The voice acting is so bad and so ill-fitting with the animation that it creates these unintentionally hysterical moments, such as the pilots' boss witnessing them all die horribly in a fiery crash and just solemnly going "They were the best." All of the dialogue feels like a parody of emotion, a script written by an AI who's never met a human before and has only been fed on Saturday morning cartoons. And that's not even touching on the jokes - the humor is so, so stale. Absolutely nothing about it that's intended to be funny is. The only humorous moments were when I was cracking up thinking "Hey, kid, I'm a computer! Stop all the downloadin'!"

I was trying to give this the benefit of the doubt, because I think all Ultra is good Ultra, and I didn't want to have a bias against The Adventure Begins just because of its being produced by a domestic, mainstream studio. I don't have to worry about that, though, because as it turns out I have a bias against it because it is bad. To be fair, it's not really right to judge this by itself, because how many pilot episodes are considered the best part of a series? If it had been given the chance to develop its storylines and feature more interesting ideas and fresher jokes, it could have turned into something good, and maybe that's the real tragedy here - maybe this thing was cut off before it could blossom. What we have, though, is just a dud, to me. The action sequences are fun, but I couldn't say I got much out of this. If there's anything good about it, it's that Tsuburaya has embraced Team USA into their fold, and they appear in some truly fun scenes in the Ultra Galaxy Fight side-series. Ultrawoman Beth for life.

The Return of Godzilla (1984)

directed by Koji Hashimoto

Japan

103 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm noticing a pattern that's emerging every time I rewatch any given Godzilla movie, which I've done, for most of them, at least three times now: the first time I don't give it much thought, or I come at it with an attitude of inherent skepticism; the second time I think "what was I thinking when I said I didn't like this"; the third time I'm in love with it enough that I have a hard time saying anything bad about it. What this says about me as a film critic, I don't know, but I'm having a good time. Let me have fun.

I guess "fun" might be the wrong word to use in relation to this, one of the most serious Godzilla films.

Throughout all 70 years of the franchise's existence, there's only been four mainline films in which Godzilla carries the story alone, not fighting an opponent; all four of those have a markedly different fan response than the others. Having Godzilla be the sole monster in the film signifies, in large part, that the film is going to be responding to the original 1954 movie in particular. (Not that Godzilla's "vs." films don't also do this, but it's the solo ones that really allow for contemplation of the series as a concept.) Shin Godzilla takes a lot of its DNA from this movie, expanding upon the idea of bureaucracy during a time of crisis; Minus One involves the idea of war and survivor's guilt, and I don't have space here to talk about what the original does. So I'll move on to The Return of Godzilla.

One of the complaints - not always really a "complaint", but something people are definitely aware of - I hear about Godzilla films is that Godzilla itself is only in them for a few minutes. This is objectively true, but I think it's only an issue if you're unfamiliar with the series. In my opinion, and in the right hands, a Godzilla movie can be at its most terrifying when Godzilla is not in the frame, but only exists as a shadow haunting the story. Return of Godzilla was in precisely the right position to achieve this, because it was building on the massive hype of the first return to the franchise since 1975's Terror of Mechagodzilla, and it was releasing to an audience who, themselves, were at an age where many of them did not experience Godzilla firsthand in 1954, but had a concept of it that was formed through later films and secondhand knowledge. Godzilla lurking just outside the frame is all the more powerful when Godzilla has been lurking just outside the frame of real life for the past 30 years.

And I would argue that the most terrifying parts of Return of Godzilla come not when Godzilla is actively destroying cities but when the people who may have the power to influence a response to it are tasked to act. The tensest, most nerve-wracking scene in this film is when the representatives of both America and Russia are practically begging the Prime Minister of Japan (played brilliantly by Keiju Kobayashi) to let them nuke the country again. These are representatives of countries who Japan had clashed variously with at different times in the not-too-distant past, and while they may espouse peace during peacetime, as soon as they see the opportunity, they're disturbingly eager to drop bombs again. It's even worse when you consider that Japan's PM seems to be older than the both of them - I don't know what his age was meant to be, specifically, but he's certainly older than 40 and probably has firsthand memories of the last time his country was nuked. Now he's in a room with men bowling each other over to be the first to persuade him to let them do it again.

The character of Godzilla in this film is also reworked in a way that's very interesting. The continuity here totally ignores all the other films of the past 30 years save for the original and establishes Godzilla as, at the basest level, an animal. This Godzilla has almost no intelligence and operates solely on instinct, not hostility. For a long time I thought that scene where Godzilla is siphoning off steam from a nuclear power plant and then gets distracted by some birds and wanders off was just really silly, but when I rewatched it this time I found it incredibly poignant. This is the enemy, this is the thing that returns to haunt humankind perennially, with no end, and it's so absent-minded that a flock of birds can make it forget what it was doing. This is the creature we're nuking. A big animal. A cat with a laser pointer. This is not lost on the film: Godzilla's death in Mt. Mihara is treated with a weighty solemnity, and the fact that the plan to lure him into the volcano is even possible - that Godzilla is so instinctual, so unintelligent, that you can get it to walk straight into an active volcano if you play the right sounds - itself serves as an admonishment to the humans who have to do it in the first place.

The only thing I still don't like about this movie is Godzilla's physical appearance. There's something - I don't know what it is exactly, maybe the eyes are too big, the arms too long. It just doesn't look right. This is all purely on the aesthetic level, of course; the cybot Godzilla is a technical feat and I appreciate the time and work that goes into constructing a Godzilla suit even if it's one I personally don't like. But I'm somebody who will defend even the goofy appearance of the '54 and Raids Again suits, and I'll readily admit that this suit... I just don't like it.

The deep human tension and political strife that signified really the first time the franchise had experimented with those things make this movie stand out from the others. I don't think it's a perfect movie - for example, on my third rewatch I noticed that there's literally one woman in the entire film - but it showed that the franchise could do new things and head in a direction vastly different from the heroic, child-friendly Godzilla it left off on - and that people wanted to see it. This film kicked off the most critically-successful era of Godzilla, a string of story-driven, technically masterful films that remain some of the best in the series, and its ideas would go on to inspire future films as well. I don't know how other people feel about it but I don't think I gave it enough credit the first time I saw it. I hope Minus One isn't the last solo Godzilla film we get for another long span of time.

Cyclops (1987)

directed by George Iida

Japan

52 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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George (sometimes spelled Jôji) Iida is such an underrated horror director, having made two stand-out films (Spiral, Battle Heater) that only make the scarcity of his others all the more irritating. He's also a screenwriter, television director, and novelist, but none of his work in those fields is any more well-known than his films. Cyclops is something that had been on my radar for a long time, but was unavailable to watch with anything better than auto-generated English subs, so finally finding it with good subs in what I must say is some of the clearest, crispest quality I've ever seen a pre-2000s film in was a delight.

The main concept of the film, as explained through on-screen text at the beginning, is that some time in the past a scientist was doing research towards proof of his hypothesis that babies born with severe deformities (like cyclopia, hence the title) are not medical anomalies but actually a new stage in human evolution, equipped to handle increasing pollution and adverse circumstances. This is kind of ridiculous, but when you consider that one of the main causes of birth defects is environmental pollution or chemical side-effects, it's an interesting idea. This specific scientist is offscreen for the whole of the film, but a ragtag team of weird guys is continuing his research.

There's not much in the way of humor in this, but what of it that is there comes from the mismatched group of bad guys. There's an identifiable leader and an identifiable "heavy", but then there's a couple of henchmen who pop in and out of the story and seem to have defined identities, even though those identities don't ever get fleshed out. I think one of the best things you can do if you're going to have a large cast who don't get much spotlight time is give them mannerisms that immediately distinguish them as an individual - like the one guy repeatedly glancing towards his subject as she's laying nude on an operating table, or the other guy feverishly praying (?) aloud.

This movie is known mostly as a splattery, gory type of thing, but it's actually a really slow burn. The cinematography is top-notch for something this compact and definitely speaks to Iida's proficiency in mainstream, feature-length films, unlike most splatterpunk directors, who cut their teeth on weird indie shorts, and it shows if they ever produce anything more formal. This is basically a normal movie for about 40-45 minutes, with some really artful framing and lighting - even a character brushing their teeth is shot in a remarkably thoughtful, deliberate way - and then the stuff we're all waiting for happens.

I appreciated the unusual clarity of the video file I was watching very, very much when it got to the finale, because it meant I got to see the practical effects in all their slimy glory the way they were meant to be seen. This is a movie with mutation at its heart. Because it takes so long to get to the payoff, I won't spoil it by describing it too much, but there's a lot of really beautiful fleshy blobs and sticky, gooey transformation sequences. I particularly liked the sequence in the elevator because I think having an action scene take place in an elevator is inherently an interesting way to set something up on film: the time it takes for the action to unfold is limited by how long it takes for the elevator to get where it's going, so you have a guaranteed payoff whenever the door opens, and cutting away to another character watching once the elevator gets to its floor adds a sense of anticipation. Again, this movie is really artful and shows a definite mastery of scene and framing that is a rare addition to something this yucky.

I wonder why shot-on-video films of less than an hour's running time never became a thing in the West. There are some, but they don't really achieve even cult status the way Japanese splatterpunk movies like this one do. It seems like the phenomenon of a short movie that gets everything done within less than an hour is just not something that ever became part of Western filmmaking tradition. 

Weirdly, Kai Ato, the actor playing the head bad guy who gets super-mutated, was in nothing but very serious, well-regarded films, such as Station, Lady Snowblood, Ballad of Orin, and Kagemusha, of all things. I think this is the only time I've seen an actor who's been in a Kurosawa movie also be in a movie where he has an arm burst out of his stomach and strangle someone.

Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (1988)

directed by Teruyoshi Ishii

Japan

49 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

My excitement about seeing this was disproportionate to its short running time. It sounded like something that ticked all of my boxes, and it was. There was this brief moment in the 1980s and '90s where a lot of movies were coming out that explored how old traditions of ghosts and hauntings might be integrated into a world that was rapidly becoming more technologically advanced, and some real bangers came out of that question - I'm thinking Prince of Darkness - but now the subgenre of "digital haunting" seems to have become saturated by a thousand iterations of "what if there was an evil app and a ghost came out of it".

Psychic Vision: Jaganrei purports to have been intended as a documentary about an idol revamping her image and debuting as a more mature singer with a new single. It's not any kind of incisive deep-dive into the idol industry, which is horror fodder unto itself, but pretty soon a few odd things start cropping up as the crew follows the process of writing, producing, and recording the song. I love how this movie segues into the supernatural because it's so innocuous at first. When it becomes clear that the original writer of the idol's new song is unknown, it doesn't feel that strange, because songs are so often ghostwritten or lifted from magazine contest submissions that it's entirely possibly the true authorship could just get forgotten. But as the film goes on, the identity of the writer becomes a crucial element to its plot. This film is so short that it would be easy to spoil it, so I'm going to keep my review brief and try not to give away too much.

There's a moment where the movie palpably ramps up from being a fairly tame mystery to showing its teeth a little, and I'm not going to say what it is, but if you've seen this, you probably know. It involves a car. That's what I'm talking about when I say that this movie knows how to segue: Abruptly, when it has to get your attention, but also, at the same time, slowly, over the course of the entire film, to keep that attention. It's got a big vibe for such a short movie, and covers lot of themes that I'm personally really fascinated with - the transfer of energy into a digital format, basically a "grudge"; this is revisited in Ringu when it's revealed that Sadako is making films using pure psychic energy. If I have any complaints about this at all, it's that the backstory of the weird psychic attacks is made too cut-and-dry - I liked it better when it was an onslaught of bizarre, unstoppable terror with no apparent explanation, but that's a personal preference.

I have no doubt whatsoever that the song being titled "Love Craft" was just a random choice. H.P. Lovecraft absolutely has a following in Japan, and this director also helmed several episodes of Ultraman Tiga and Ultraman Gaia - the spookier episodes, of course - and both of those series notably took story elements from Lovecraft's work. He also directed for Ultraman Cosmos, Choseishin Gransazer, and unfortunately not a whole lot else. The actress who played the idol, Emi Satô, is just credited as "self", so I'm not sure if that means that she's an idol in real life or not, but a quick glance at her filmography doesn't make it look that way. It's too bad that this is so obscure, and that everything else by the director - popular television series excepted - is obscure as well, because there's some really interesting stuff in Psychic Vision: Jaganrei, and I kind of wish this was a full-length film.

Evil Dead Trap (1988)

directed by Toshiharu Ikeda

Japan

102 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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So this has been somewhat of a cult classic (on these shores - not sure what the popular opinion of it is in Japan) that recently got a very nice DVD reissue so all us weirdos can watch it in hi-def. I had expected it to be much grosser and rougher around the edges than it was, and ended up being surprised by its quality. I was prepared for something like the Guinea Pig series or any other clandestine shot-on-video Japanese torture film you can think of, but instead, this almost feels like John Carpenter. It's even got a Carpenterian absurdly catchy theme song. I can't speak for the sequels because I didn't even know they existed until just now, but this, at least, is an excellent piece of obscure horror. You will absolutely not be able to guess where it ends up from where it starts.

This movie goes off in so many strange and different directions that it's impossible to get a sense of where it'll go from where it begins. A newscaster on a late-night news show receives a tape in the mail of a woman being tortured who either looks just like her or is her. With a van and some colleagues, she investigates the location until she finds the derelict warehouse where the tape was filmed. It's downhill from there, of course, but you can't guess in what ways. At first it seems like it's following slasher rules: The first to get killed are the first couple who have sex onscreen, and the others are picked off in very creative ways, but then when the killer's focus turns toward the main character, the killings just stop, and the plot changes completely. But the aesthetic remains the same throughout the film, even during the weirder parts, which is why I enjoyed this so much - it feels restrained when it has to be, yet it still manages to be super gory and include the memorable practical effects that I was expecting. It's all a perfect balance between story and gory, although the story may get a little rambling at times.

There is a vibe to this that is similar to those directors who were knocking it out of the park in Western horror during the '80s, and it even goes back a little earlier, using some visual cues lifted from giallo. It's got a perfect mixture of realism and curated aestheticism that makes its atmosphere feel really pleasing to watch. The style, not the subject matter but the overall style, reminds me weirdly of The People Under the Stairs - that film is a little newer than this one, and Evil Dead Trap doesn't involve a social issue, but the two feel similar in how they both look like a convincing depiction of a real physical location and yet somehow still look staged. Both films - although Evil Dead Trap is different in that it does take place in a real building, while TPUtS was presumably shot on set - don't look like real life but like an amped-up version of real life where your attention is drawn to specific areas that the film wants you to look at. Evil Dead Trap is full of foreboding, disorienting, a cold and inhuman backdrop of weirdness and confusion. And all this is before the killing even starts. I always appreciate a slasher that can make the non-slashing parts as nice to watch as the action scenes. I also always appreciate movies that make what was undoubtedly just a normal building in real life look like a hellish labyrinth; the super grimy industrial slab of a building Evil Dead Trap takes place in looks like it's made of mazes and hallways that lead nowhere, and there's even some The Shining hallway-extension tricks used to reinforce this feeling.

The characters aren't annoying but they do feel really dispassionate - I kept almost getting distracted because the main character in particular speaks so softly and evenly that it feels like she's sharing a tender moment, even when she's talking to some weird guy in sandals she just met. Even the sex scenes, which slashers typically crank up to be sleazy and titillating, just feel like people going through the motions. My emphasis on how unpredictable and strange this movie is might lead you to believe otherwise, but parts of this are extremely mellow and low-key. It's a very unique tone that makes this stick out from pretty much any other film I've seen.

I think what makes this movie so good is that it can manage to be so genuinely original and do things that slasher directors (not that this is really a slasher movie, but it's definitely inspired) would usually not do, breaking cardinal rules that at the time had only recently started to emerge as a trend, but also never feel "out of control". There's fun in that, of course - that's why I adore shot-on-video gross-out films made with very little budget. I like the stuff that feels like it was made up as it went along. But Evil Dead Trap is like a fusion of more mature, carefully-plotted horror and shot-on-video nastiness. It's a marriage of many different styles that makes the end product a treat to watch.

A Chinese Ghost Story (1987)

directed by Tony Ching Siu-Tung

Hong Kong

98 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I love Hong Kong horror movies, but I always come up at a loss when I try to review them because usually the "complexity of plot" to "comprehensibility of subtitles" ratio is so imbalanced that I have no idea what's going on. But as it turns out (and as I probably should have known from the start), this is really a very different animal from the type of movie I was thinking of. It's absolutely nothing like your average Shaw Bros outing; with far higher production value and a more mature humor, this is more along the lines of a historical romance than a goofy schlocky horror movie*.

Our main character (played by Leslie Cheung!) is a tax collector who's very poor, with no worldly possessions except the pack he carries around for much of the movie. In classic horror movie fashion, when he asks around for a place he can stay the night with no money involved, he gets the old "Well... there's that weird old temple that's supposed to be horrifically haunted..." and, having no real choice, ends up staying at said temple. This is a gross oversimplification of a movie that already has a surprisingly simple plot. Most of the appeal comes from how well an old story is executed, visually. The cinematography is beautiful and much more relaxed and subtle than I was expecting - for example, I liked the visual tricks employed to make the protagonist stick out of the faceless crowds that he is often in, like how even with no knowledge of the film we would be able to tell immediately who the main character was just from the fact that he's carrying around that huge bindle all the time. The running joke where everyone talks about him behind his back and shuts up as soon as he turns around to look at them was very funny. He also ends up shoved against a shop display selling hell money and gets the ink, and the inscriptions, smeared all over his back, which later is our first tip-off that the girl he falls for might not be entirely human. This is another example of the subtle visual clues this movie is good at deploying.

Once he gets to the temple, the protagonist - whose name I have not been using because I've seen it Romanized in many ways and I don't know which one is the right one - finds that the rumors of it being haunted are true, but the nature of the haunting is more faceted than the townspeople seem to think, and hey, who's this really pretty but kind of weird girl who lives at the temple, who's very pale and freezing cold all the time?

The character who I am tentatively calling Nieh Hsiao-Tsing (and please forgive me if this is a mangled spelling) was a bit of a surprise to me because, honestly, I'm sorry that I keep comparing this to movies that it has nothing to do with, but I've been watching a lot of Shaw Bros lately and I'm used to women having a status lower than furniture in these films. Generally a woman in a bad HK horror movie is not allowed to have desire except as a joke; bawdy old women and prostitutes are typically the only time a woman is seem expressing her own wants and needs. But the first time we see Nieh Hsiao-Tsing, she's falling all over our protagonist, begging for him, oblivious, to warm her up. It is clearly in line with her character as a lonely being who hasn't felt normal human touch for a long time, but to me it was notable to see a woman who so clearly knows what she wants and in fact makes the first move. He doesn't have to woo her, or convince her of anything. The romance is two-sided and entirely consensual.

Another character who stood out to me was Hsiao-Tsing's captor, who the subtitles called "The Old Dame". From what I could tell, she was a kind of ancient, malevolent tree spirit who fed off of energy from living humans. What I liked about this character was that she (I'm relying on mangled subtitles here - the other characters could very well have been avoiding pronouns altogether when talking about the Old Dame) has aspects of male and female and this is not presented entirely as a joke. Crossdressing is another thing I run into frequently in HK horror and it is always strictly for a cheap laugh, some guy in garish makeup and women's dress acting lewd and we're all supposed to think it's the funniest thing ever. This character is a man in makeup, but she is not treated as inherently funny. Her voice is dubbed to very interesting effect where at random it switches between a higher and deeper register. This character's gender is never explicitly brought up, but I understand there are many beings in Chinese mythology who have aspects of more than one gender or do not have a gender at all. It's just not very often that I see that depicted in what is almost approaching a respectful manner.

Moving on. Like I said, this is primarily a love story, but it's one done in a way that feels genuine, not rushed, and has that element of star-crossed love that does usually get to me regardless of my pretensions. It's not that original - I think most people could name, or at least are familiar with, a story or two where a couple is in love but one is unaware that the other is a ghost. That A Chinese Ghost Story takes place in a Daoist setting makes this more complicated and, in my opinion, more tragic, because it means that the kindest act our protagonist can do for the girl he's fallen in love with is make sure her remains are properly interred so that she can finally reincarnate - whereupon he'll never see her again, because her soul will now be in the body of someone who could be anywhere in the world. It's a twist on the typical ending to these stories of just having to accept that you can't be with someone, and I don't know if it's comforting or even more sad.

There are still action scenes in this, and some zombie skeletons and various ghouls, you know, that kind of thing, and they're all great. Most of the comedy relief not delivered by our protagonist himself being so good-hearted and innocent comes from a somewhat rowdy monk who also hangs out at the temple. Midway through the movie he bursts into what I can only describe as a hip-hop song and dance number about Daoism for no apparent reason. Also, whenever he does some epic action move, the transformation sound effect from the original 1966 Ultraman would play, which was driving me absolutely crazy. I think my favorite thing about this film was the cinematography, but it's got everything, rolled into one: A good love story, a little spookiness here and there, awesome practical effects, nice soundtrack, and humor that never feels like it's hitting you over the head. I wonder if the sequels manage to maintain this level of quality.

*please note that I deeply love goofy, schlocky Shaw Bros movies as well.

Legend of the Cat Monster / Reibyo Densetsu (1983)

directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi

Japan

95 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I watched this without subtitles when it was uploaded to the internet for the first time in September, and said to myself that if anybody ever fansubbed it, I would watch it again and give it the proper review it deserves, but I didn't seriously expect that to happen... until it did. I can't even express how happy I am that this film, which I had been searching for for ages, is finally available online and easy to find. It gives me hope that other obscure films I'm after will eventually see the light of day too. After a second viewing with more context, I'm bumping my rating up from four to five stars because I truly can't find anything wrong with this film at all.

I think Nobuhiko Obayashi is probably at his best when he's making movies about movies. A good portion of his works involve elements of metafiction, and when he uses that to talk about cinema and the role of film in our lives and in our memories, his usual style becomes a reflection on the nature of fiction and memory itself that is really inimitable. This is a movie all about how cinema works to freeze a moment in time so that we can go back to it over and over, living in it forever if we want to - to our detriment, ultimately, if we lose ourselves in it. But it's also about how seductive it is to lose ourselves in it.

The story of the film is about a scenario writer, Ryohei, who attaches himself to a film studio that was once magnificent but now is just plugging along, riding the wave of its earlier success for as long as it can - which doesn't seem to be able to last. It is also about a once-famous, now reclusive actress who has gone into seclusion on a private island she owns, along with the director who made her career. Once the studio gets wind that she's still living there and learns that somehow she remains unnaturally young, stuck the way she looked at the height of her career and subsequent disappearance from the public eye, they see a scoop, a way to take advantage of her one last time. They send Ryohei to the island - which he doesn't do against his will, it should be noted; he falls as quickly in love with the actress as the studio execs do with the idea of the paycheck she could bring in - where initially he's regarded as just one of many tourists who come seeking a glimpse of the forever starlet, but eventually is taken in by her personally after they meet in a dreamlike chance encounter at a restaurant and she gives him a necklace.

The film itself echoes the themes that its story presents. A lot of the actors in it are actually people who were active in Japan's film industry during its golden age, and at the time of its release had been acting (many of them together) for thirty years or more. There's people in this who you will definitely recognize if you've seen pretty much any Toho film ever, and casting them changes this from just a movie about filmmaking to something that has an element of truth. (I really love when Makoto Satō shows up inexplicably dressed like a cowboy.) Possibly the most important casting choice was Wakaba Irie playing the starlet and Takako Irie, her real-life mother, playing the older version of herself. The elder Irie did a stint of bakeneko films early on in her career, and her/her daughter's role in this film is an actress who also made a name playing in bakeneko film. Wakaba Irie is quite striking and looks remarkably like her mother, so having the two of them switch roles depending on the scene creates an effect that is almost uncanny.

So like I said, the main theme of this is the deep sense of nostalgia that cinema fosters in us. The actress Ryuzoji exits her role in society to forever play a role alone on her island, to forever be who she was at that one moment, in her best film. She's obsessed with a man from her past, her co-star, who left to become a Hollywood actor and whose leaving she could never fully accept - this is why she takes in Ryohei, the writer; his resemblance to her former lover (they are both played by the same actor) means she can't let him go either, and draws him into the pocket of frozen time she's created on the island. The film studio itself is also a place where time acts strangely: clocks stop, everyone who lives around it seems arrested in a perpetual single moment. Almost everybody who works there except for Ryohei is dressed anachronistically or just strangely. Legend of the Cat Monster is full of in-between spaces created by the influence of filmmaking on the world around it, places where everything stays the same and you can revisit it as many times as you like. But while a film may never age, the viewer inevitably will. The idyllic, pastoral feeling of the first half of this film comes up harshly against the realization that the second half introduces - that a person cannot exist forever in the same moment of time - but it's never without melancholy, a feeling that even though being stuck in the past hurts us in the long run, doesn't the hurt feel good, a little bit?

Ryohei, before he becomes ensnared in the actress' aura, is also in love with his coworker Yoko, who eventually follows him to the island to try to break through whatever's drawn him there. She is rebuked, physically, from the actress and director's home, chased off the island, because she represents the re-starting of time: A younger woman, a woman living in the modern world, moving forward, can't be tolerated. She reminds everyone too much that they're aging and will eventually be replaced by a new generation. This is also brought up, but not cast in such a negative light, by a small boy hanging around with a tiny camera, playing director - he says he's the director, and he is the director. He's the generation that will grow up to become new directors, new filmmakers, doing everything over again but with a fresh eye. The breaking of the spell by Yoko has disastrous consequences for nearly everyone involved who is unable to overcome the cognitive dissonance of having her there. When we finally see what Ryohei spent all this time writing, the screenplay that's supposed to make him, and all it is is pages and pages of him writing his own name over and over, desperately trying to remember who he is while Ryuzoji desperately tries to make him into the man she wishes he was... there's something so potent about that.

I'm having a much harder time talking about this film than I thought I would because I'm trying to assume no real familiarity with Obayashi and his particular style on the reader's part. I can tell you that I love this movie and it means a lot to me and it's one of my favorites of his and it makes me sad in a very specific way, but I can't really tell you why, because everyone experiences a film differently. All I can do is recommend it to everyone, and maybe you'll get what I got out of it, maybe not. But I think that everyone can understand that feeling of (sometimes painful) nostalgia that comes with watching an old film and recognizing an era that is gone forever for you now. It doesn't even have to be a fictional film, it can be a home movie. This is more about how the act of capturing something on camera places it in a different register in our minds, one where it exists forever in that one moment. The addition of a fictional storyline to that creates an end product that is forever slightly better than reality - something we can never quite go back to, no matter how much we try.

Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989)

directed by Kazuki Ōmori

Japan

105 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Last week, Kazuki Ōmori passed away. I wanted to post a review I did some months ago of vs. Biollante that I considered too long-winded to make public. Ōmori was a part of some of my favorite Godzilla films of the Heisei era and I know I'm not alone in saying that.

Picking up where Return of Godzilla left off in 1984, vs. Biollante begins with a newscast showing the scale of devastation that Godzilla left after the Super X and the military drove him into Mt. Mihara. The aftermath of a kaiju's visit to a populated area is something that doesn't always get shown onscreen, but here we get a taste of it and it's basically as bad as you might imagine: a near-total loss, just fathomless destruction, but still with survivors picking up the pieces. I particularly liked how we're shown that one building had its façade reconstructed into a skylight around a perfect Godzilla footprint that nearly destroyed it and has been renamed as "Godzilla Memorial Lounge". After the newscast, the first thing we see is some soldiers trying to loot cast-off Godzilla biological material from the scene to bring back to their country for use in nefarious scientific developments. This lays out humanity's incredibly short memory and outright refusal to learn from our mistakes - something that will become the main theme in this film.

Because this takes place in the same continuity as Return of Godzilla, this is a version of Japan that has only experienced two - soon to be three - confrontations with Godzilla: the first, in 1954, the second in 1984, and now the developing situation that starts off this film. I personally think this is one of the most interesting of the many Godzilla timelines because no one has fully had the time to get used to Godzilla. There's a heavy focus on scientific research and the preparation of advanced-warning systems in the event that Godzilla or another of the species comes ashore, but with only two previous encounters to go off of, the country is largely in a state of nail-biting. No one is quite sure what to do with Godzilla when he does appear, but they are certain that sooner or later, he will come back. It's also implied, in other films but here as well, that Godzilla's more frequent appearances herald some fundamental change in human society, that as newer and more devastating weaponry is invented by rapid advances in science, the fabric of society breaks down quicker and quicker, and the increasing frequency of Godzilla attacks is tied somehow to the oncoming collapse of civilization.

It's not directly stated, but the whole of vs. Biollante seems to find the country in a sort of twilight era where, despite superficially being able to recover from their two previous attacks, the lack of any unified learning from past mistakes is slowly sliding humanity into our ultimate downfall. No one seems to really grasp what they're supposed to be doing, and so instead are flailing around clutching at whatever they think can give them bigger, better guns to fend off imagined "enemies" who they assume to be doing the same thing simultaneously. The core principle of Godzilla is that you cannot keep inventing a superweapon over and over and expecting that this time, maybe, you'll be smart enough or good enough that the worst won't happen to you. You can't, like both the Japanese government and the fictional country of Saradia attempt to do in vs. Biollante, essentially recycle the worst manmade disaster ever created into a new weapon without the past repeating itself. Professor Shiragami also proves that you really just can't mess with that in general, for any reason - his motivations may have come from a place of sorrow and loss, but he ignores precedent as well, and makes the mistake of thinking he can somehow logic his way into eliminating the part of Godzilla that inevitably proves fatal for humanity. The professor isn't a bad person - the point of his story isn't to paint him as ignorant or uncaring; it's an example of how history isn't always changed for the worse by evil people, but by good people who don't recognize that they too bear the weight of mistakes made by those before them.

The relationship between Biollante and Godzilla is an interesting one. Artificially created, Biollante is a genetic chimera incorporating cells from a human, a rosebush, and Godzilla. In the film it's established that they are the same thing, that they see each other as the same thing, and have some fundamental connection because of their shared genetic material. This relationship between the two creatures as well as Biollante's nature in and of itself was something I was thinking about a lot on my third rewatch. I didn't realize until now how long it takes for Biollante to reach her final, monstrous form, and how anti-climactic the fight between her and Godzilla is when it finally does happen. Biollante isn't vicious like a lot of Godzilla's opponents have been; she seems to lash out mostly from fear and anguish rather than a genuine desire to hurt Godzilla. She begins life out in the middle of a lake and never approaches civilization, and the fight between her and Godzilla doesn't hit the same beats as a typical kaiju smash does. There's no real winner between the two, in the end. It's just a short, seemingly agonizing battle between two creatures who have humans to blame for their existence. It's morbid, really, when you think of it like that; like putting two beetles in a jar and making them fight to the death, except you're the one who created the beetles.

It's also really interesting how visibly bewildered Godzilla is when he sees Biollante for the first time. Is this, perhaps, because when Godzilla sensed Biollante calling out to him, he expected, upon arriving at her location, to find another Godzilla?

This film also introduces us to Miki Saegusa, who is one of my favorites out of the few recurring characters in the series. Psychic research seems to have arisen out of the wake of the 1984 attack - not specifically for the purpose of communicating with Godzilla, but that's how it ends up being used. Saegusa is a young but extremely powerful psychic whose presence I always appreciate because she's an alternative to the knee-jerk military response most typically seen in these films. In vs. Biollante, she provides one of my favorite scenes in the whole Heisei era, and I feel one of the most crucial moments in developing Godzilla as a character: when she attempts to confront him directly, standing on a dock only a short distance away as he wades through the sea, for a moment they each have the other's attention, observing each other directly, and when Saegusa establishes a psychic link with Godzilla she is immediately overwhelmed and loses consciousness. This is why, when people bring up the question of Godzilla's intellect relative to a human, I always say that I personally imagine him operating "at or above" a human level. Saegusa's physical response to linking up with him hints that there's an aspect to him that is incomprehensible to us. Also, that great scene where the kids in the psyonics institute are asked to draw what they dreamt about and they all simultaneously draw Godzilla - like Godzilla stirring inside Mt. Mihara is somehow sending out waves of psychic energy that blanket the surrounding area.

In general, this movie lacks a lot of the showiness that the franchise's other entries surrounding it have. It has an overarching feeling of slow decay for society, a dim premonition that we're going to continue down the path that leads to our own destruction because we keep our backs turned when we should be looking behind us to learn from the past. I think Saegusa is a ray of hope - a young person exploring alternative ways of communicating with the threat instead of just killing it - which is what makes her role in the later Godzilla vs. Destoroyah so heartrending. vs. Biollante is one of the best examples of why this franchise has remained so relevant throughout the years, and also an example of how it's survived for so long: by continually reinventing itself and playing off of the same themes to different ends.