The Triangle (2016)

directed by David Blair, Nathaniel Peterson, Adam Pitman, Andrew Rizzo & Adam Stilwell

USA

94 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I continue to disappear into the æther for long periods of time (I'm moving, it's going not very good), but I now return briefly to talk about one of my favorite movies in the world.

(You should listen to Polygondwanaland by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard a lot before watching this movie. It makes sense, just trust me.)

The Triangle is a faux-documentary that is both incredibly authentic and extremely subtle. It begins with a road trip montage, not too dissimilar from a thousand other road trip montages you've probably seen before, but in the context of this film - which took about three years to edit, supposedly, and was directed by five different people, all of whom also shared writing credits - you get the sense that this is actual, real footage of an actual, real road trip. The characters (if we can even call them that) are familiar with each other in the way real friends are, and the narrative renders it unnecessary for them to introduce themselves to us: we feel like we know them even from before the film begins; that's just the way things are set up.

Looking at reviews, I see that a lot of people regard the first two acts before the big finale as being kind of slow. I wouldn't disagree with this, but I also think that build-up is absolutely crucial. The way this movie evolves is unpredictable, low-key and, when it finally climaxes, somehow utterly terrifying. Without the sun-baked hippie nonsense of the first hour, none of that would hit nearly as hard.

Something of the overall theme of the movie (again, if there can be said to be a theme) is foreshadowed a bit in how insignificant the characters feel, and how de-centered their activities in the commune turn out to be when all is said and done. The characters are all just there, doing stuff, saying stuff, having opinions, the way real people do. The film seems to be pointing us in the direction of certain individuals. notably Rizzo, the leader of the cult-commune-thing, who comes off somewhat abrasive and we are primed to distrust him due to his status as pretty much a cult leader, but when shit hits the fan Rizzo actually turns out to be a good guy. The movie doesn't let the human characters get in the way of the overall story but at the same time it filters what is going on at the commune through human eyes, and the end result of this is a sense - which I am sure is exactly what the filmmakers were aiming for - that we're watching something happen that is unfathomably larger than a handful of individuals cooking lasagna in the desert and sleeping in yurts.

I love, and I have to emphasize LOVE, the way this movie culminates. I still have never seen anything like it. Nothing is ever, ever explained. We get hints of some kind of prophetic dream but not enough of it for us to be able to interpret it. That's the key here, I think: there's no way to interpret anything, it's all just happening. It can't be known. It just is.

There's not much else I can say about this without going into spoilers. This is really one of those movies that came out of nowhere, and despite not getting any fanfare now or close to its release, it still lives on in my heart next to Banshee Chapter as one of the most unique things I've ever seen. And, hey, technically counts as a KaiJune pick since it sort of has a monster in it. Maybe?

Banshee Chapter (2013)

directed by Blair Erickson

USA

87 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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"Can we go already? It's 2:45 in the morning and my eyes are bleeding."

I decided on Banshee Chapter for my Halloween night watch this year because having just seen The Thing in a theater got me in the mood for another movie that involves unknown entities puppeting human beings around. This movie has been an old favorite of mine since it came out, and it's one of very few movies that I've seen a multitude of times and have yet to get tired of - I might be mostly used to the scares at this point, but I still enjoy them.

Banshee Chapter is upfront about its basis in reality: from the outset the movie purports to be an exploration of what really went on during the U.S. government's MK-Ultra mind control experiments. Watching this in November of 2025, I unfortunately found the government's involvement to be the weakest part of the movie, to the point where it almost killed my immersion - maybe in 10 years, if we somehow have a semi-sane government, it'll be scary again, but right now, the government is openly doing things that are arguably far worse and much more materially detrimental than non-consensually summoning Outer Ones into the bodies of its citizens. That aside, though, if we can get past the concept that it's the government doing these experiments, the backbone of Banshee Chapter is scary as hell.

One of the highlights of the film is the video of protagonist Ann (Katia Winter)'s friend just before he (or his body, at least) went missing. We'll discuss the movie's quasi-found-footage style in a moment, but this part is shot as genuine found-footage. In the midst of research for his novel about MK-Ultra, James (Michael McMillan) gets his hands on a sample of the drug that was used in the original experiments and ingests it himself, with a friend filming the whole thing. This sequence of the movie is creepy from start to finish, but the thing that really bothers me about it is that it makes it very clear that the drug doesn't solely effect the person who ingests it. When it kicks in, James's radio starts picking up weird signals that his friend who's filming him can hear - as in, the drug summons something to the general vicinity, not just into James's mind. This right here is the really terrifying part of Banshee Chapter. If you take a drug and it makes beings from another plane notice you and come possess your body, then whatever, sounds like a you problem. But if you take a drug and it makes beings from another plane come and haunt your entire house and everybody else who happens to be in it, instead of just restricting itself to you, that's a little more serious.

As I just mentioned, the filming style is sort of a mix of found-footage and otherwise, and the camerawork has a kind of loose, handheld style that isn't quite Cloverfield-level shakycam but also feels like it could easily just be somebody accompanying Ann with a camcorder. You do keep expecting her to turn to whoever's holding the camera and make remarks about the film, but it never happens. The result is that we feel like we're seeing everything unfold in real-time, even though there are the normal cuts and time-skips between scenes that we expect from a typical narrative film.

Most of the scares in this movie are jump scares. I never thought I'd be in the position of having to defend jump scares, because for the most part I'm of the opinion that a lot of horror movies don't know how to use them properly, but in this case Banshee Chapter happens to be really adept at knowing exactly how much of its horror to show (and when) to create a sense of consistent unease that lingers even when the disturbing imagery is not on-screen. It's a really brilliant move for a low-budget horror movie, too: show a few cumulative seconds of the creepiest shit you've ever seen and spend the rest of the movie having people trip out of their minds and talk about horrifying things. That being said, though, one of the scariest scenes in the whole movie is actually not a jump scare: when Ann is in the abandoned experimental facility and sees something shambling down the hallway towards her, my god, that was freaky. We don't see enough of it to make it out - all we can see is the outline of something that's stretching out its human costume like a tall man trying to wear a too-small shirt.

As effectively scary as this movie is, it feels like it's destined to forever be one of those things that doesn't really get a lot of mainstream recognition and mostly relies on word-of-mouth to be seen at all. Every so often I hear people talk about it, and the tone is always mild surprise: usually something like "Hey, have you heard of this thing? I went into it blind and it's, like, really creepy". It's not a perfect movie, and I think I might be starting to see more plot holes now that I've seen it so many times, but it remains distinctly unsettling in a way that a lot of horror movies fail to be.

Deadball (2011)

directed by Yudai Yamaguchi

Japan

99 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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Deadball offers us no explanation for the fact that our (anti)hero is possessed of preternatural baseball skills. It simply opens with the incident that decides his fate: him smoking Mickey Curtis in the nog with a baseball so hard he explodes. This happens when he is about 16, and next we see him he's a full-grown (well, sort of) juvenile delinquent - the worst in the country, wanted on "54 charges, including Dropping Televisions On People". He is finally arrested and brought to the harshest possible prison, where he's offered a deal: his freedom and the freedom of all the other inmates if they, banding together as a baseball team, can defeat the rival team from the all-girl Saint Black Dahlia high school. Of course, this was never a fair shake for the boys' side: the warden simply wants to get rid of them, and knows the opposing team will annihilate them.

The film's sense of humor is so offensive that it becomes almost banal. While I don't think Nazi imagery is something that should be trotted out simply for its aesthetic value, that is a relatively common practice in certain niches of Japanese cinema, and the pure aesthetic is so divorced from any actual ideological practices associated with it that it's hard to really feel anything after you've seen it a few times. Ditto everything else that happens here: so purely for shock value without any actual attempt at being mean about it that I almost don't care. Almost. The movie's weird homophobia is its only stance that feels like it has fangs, but again, when you know beforehand that the movie you're about to watch it as bizarre and offensive as Deadball, it's hard to feel surprised.

With a movie like this, a lot depends on the actors' individual skills. It won't work if every single person acts like they're in the world's most bugnuts film. There should, ideally, be a few people who take themselves just seriously enough that it highlights how outlandish everything else is. Tak Sakaguchi pulls off the Yakyu role really well, playing it not quite fully straight but with all the stoicism and bravado that a delinquent hero protagonist should have. (He also played a Xillien in Godzilla Final Wars.) Other people who felt like they brought exactly as much sauce to their roles as was necessary were Miho Ninagawa as the warden and Mari Hoshino as Shinosuke, Yakyu's 16-year-old cellmate and the only truly sympathetic character in the film.

There is also, I suppose, technically, in some way, a plot. It doesn't really develop until the second half to final quarter of the film, but we occasionally get nuggets of information that hint at the storied past of Yakyu and his brother Musashi (yeah, those are their names). After the accidental death of their father, Yakyu becomes a delinquent while Musashi is forced to turn to much more unpleasant means of making profit until he finally snaps and commits murder, and after that is never seen again, the mystery of his unknown fate being a thorn in the side of our hero. (He shows back up at the end in a truly spectacular way which I will not mention in detail due to it being a spoiler.) Like I said, Sakaguchi carries this off with enough seriousness that you can get invested in it - all insanity all the time would have made this thing unwatchable.

Did I like this? I don't know. It happened, that's all I can say about it. I really liked the running gag where Yakyu could reach out of frame and grab a lit cigarette to smoke for dramatic effect at any given time. Other characters react to this, which makes it even funnier. If you like splatterpunk films, there's some pretty good gore in this, and there's a scene where a character gets punched through a telephone, so if that kind of thing sounds like something you'd be willing to sit through a lot of visually offensive jokes about basically everybody and everything for, go for it.

Indie Kaiju Roundup, part III

Yatsuashi [2021]

Directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

12 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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

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

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

Godaizer [2010]

Directed by Hillary Yeo

19 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

Magara: The Final Showdown [2015]

Directed by Jun Awazu

5 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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

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

Howl from Beyond the Fog (2019)

directed by Daisuke Sato

Japan

35 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attack of the Giant Teacher (2019)

directed by Yoshikazu Ishii

Japan

70 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

Santa Jaws (2018)

directed by Misty Talley

USA

88 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Santa Jaws cold-opens with a dream sequence that I wish had set the tone for the rest of the film. Yes, the Christmas humor is goofy, but it's a clearly deliberate goofiness that everyone involved appears to be enjoying. But then the protagonist wakes up, and - ugh, we're going to be dealing with an angsty teenage boy for this entire movie?

That being said, though, I want to emphasize that Reid Miller absolutely kills it in the lead role. I think this movie would have been far worse had there been some other kid playing Cody. The material he's given to work with is frequently clichéd and the actors he plays off of - including most of the adults - kind of phone it in sometimes. But Miller 100% believes everything he's saying, and it makes me believe him too. There's a delicate balance here where the peripheral characters who exist mostly as comic relief and/or to get shark-murdered are allowed to be a little hammier, but the protagonist, around whom everything revolves, could not risk being even a little bit unserious. Miller nails that. I've never heard of anything else he's been in, but if he eventually moves beyond bad shark movies, he could really have a future - ditto for the director, who appears to, thus far, have worked exclusively in bad shark movies.

I say as if I'm somebody who knows anything whatsoever about acting.

Anyway, this is a killer Christmas shark movie. You already know what to expect when you sit down to watch it. The aforementioned seriousness with which it treats its premise is a big plus; it is silly to us, but feels dead serious to its characters. And there's a lot more going on here than in your typical shark movie or your typical Christmas slasher: the main character is gifted a magic pen that brings everything he draws to life, and when he uses it to ink a drawing of the villain in his comic book Santa Jaws, the demonic shark becomes real and immediately begins picking off his entire circle of family and friends. (The shark gained its powers by eating Santa Claus. It is attracted to Christmas items and Christmas music and likewise can only be injured by Christmas-y things, such as a crossbow with garland wrapped around it.)

The parts where the film drags are the parts where a lot of slasher films drag: the spread of the threat beyond the protagonist and into the larger world. It's just always really boring to go through the motions of having one person try to make everybody around them believe they're in danger - the cycle of "what are you talking about, don't be silly!", getting brutally killed, everyone finally believing the danger is real, everyone arming themselves, so on and so forth. There's not much avoiding that in a lot of cases, but sometimes a movie can find creative ways to make it feel like less of a chore, and Santa Jaws doesn't quite do that, despite all of its originality in other areas.

But you can tell that there's talent across the board even though the premise is silly, so the film is fun to watch and doesn't have too many amateurish pacing issues. The location also feels authentic (the comic shop looked like a real comic shop) and it's tasteful enough with its sub-par CGI gore that when there is a shark kill it feels genuinely funny as opposed to immersion-breaking.

I'm starting to realize that I really don't like watching Christmas movies, but things like this make me realize that there are a few out there that mess with the formula enough to be fun. While it never gets ridiculous enough to make for good "you and your friends pretending to be Joel and the bots" fodder - which works in its favor, the balance of seriousness and humor is the best thing about this - it's definitely recommended if you've seen everything else and are tired of Santa-themed slashers. You kind of have to not think about it very hard, though: how hard is it to not get killed by a shark? Just stay away from the marina and it'll probably eventually starve to death or just get bored and look for less wily prey.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

directed by Shinji Higuchi, Hideaki Anno

Japan

121 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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In 2016, this was the first Godzilla movie I ever watched. I'm wondering if that decision is what led to me appreciating Godzilla on its own merits instead of having to go through the process of "hey, this goofy rubber monster stuff I watched as bad dubs on TV when I was a kid is actually good" to rediscover Godzilla like a lot of people do. A recent podcast episode that some people I know in meatspace put together made me want to revisit it, since I realized it had been a couple of years since my last rewatch, and I have to say I think this is one of my favorite Godzilla movies now.

Every time I rewatch this I feel like Higuchi and Anno are doing something with this movie that I understand on a subconscious level but that my brain can't fully parse. There's so many layers to it. It's a Godzilla movie, right? It's about Godzilla. But actually, it's about the inability of the Japanese government to respond to a natural disaster and the resultant loss of life and property. But actually, it's about nuclear waste dumping. But actually, it's about foreign relations. But actually, it's about the fact that humanity might have grown too big for its britches, that the immensity of the response we mount to Godzilla may be an indication that we've doomed ourselves to a perpetual arms race through which more and more horrifying weapons are brought into existence with no way to ever stop it until we all die. We could choose to stop it, of course, but will we?

But actually, it's about Godzilla, because Godzilla is about all of those things.

The entire first half of this movie is almost really funny. The stark contrast between humans running from boardroom to boardroom, volleying decisions around from government official to government official, and the actual on-the-ground reality of a giant monster destroying Tokyo is unavoidably comical. It only gets worse the more Shin evolves: eventually you have this devil-creature who looks like the most evil thing ever born inexorably making its way through the city while shooting lasers out of its back, and you still have to have boardroom meetings about it. None of the human characters are likeable in an individual sense (except, maybe, Patterson; she starts out looking vain and power-hungry, but she does eventually show that she really seems to have a personal connection to what she's trying to protect that goes beyond politics). All of them feel more like titles than people. You get the sense that some - maybe even a lot - of them are trying very hard to do what they believe is right, and that fact is the only shred of optimism the movie leaves us with, but for the most part, even the ones who do genuinely want to unite and help have to put up with bureaucratic labyrinths, if not within their own country, then with other country's governments.

And then there's the big sea creature who is sick and in constant pain from eating radioactive garbage. It's wandered onto land in a place that's not safe for it. It's bigger than us, and much more powerful than us, but it doesn't hate us. It doesn't want to hurt us. It doesn't want anything other than to not be in pain anymore. I can't conceive of a way you could find Shin scary. The whole "man is the real monster" thing gets bandied about all the time in these movies, but this is one of the first times I've really understood it: is it not horrifying that we have the ability to bring skyscrapers down upon a hurt and confused animal, and to freeze its blood? Hell, was it not horrifying 70 years ago that we (briefly, anyway) had the ability to rip it apart at the atomic level? I won't argue whether every effort to kill Godzilla has been the "right" decision or not, but wouldn't we mourn at least a little for the beauty of a man-eating tiger after it had been shot?

Watching Minus One and this movie in quick succession has made me so excited about the state of Godzilla. We can do so much more with it now. I am at least a little bit an annoying Showa purist, it doesn't get much better than Godzilla '54 to me, but the world has changed so much and there are so many new people around now who have lived with Godzilla their whole lives and are ready to bring their own skills and perspectives to the table. It's riveting! To have seen how this whole thing has grown and changed over the last 70 years, and to know it's got a vibrant future.

ZillaFoot (2019)

directed by Anthony Polonia

USA

81 minutes

1.5 stars out of 5

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I looked up reviews of this on Letterboxd prior to watching it and was surprised to see how negative the general consensus was. Kaiju fans tend to be a lot more appreciative of "bad" movies, especially when they're made with a genuine love of the genre, so what could be SO terrible about this one that absolutely no one seemed willing to even give it points for trying?

Well, I understand now.

During and after the cold open, I was actually feeling fairly okay about this. Bad acting is really not something I care too much about anymore, especially in a roughshod production such as this one; these days it matters more to me to be told an interesting story than to have the people involved in the story nail all of their performances. But then the plot ("plot") moved on, and I thought... are... are they dubbing this white woman with somebody doing a vaguely Japanese accent? Did they just call that white guy "Dr. Tazaki"? Oh, I am in for it, aren't I?

So yeah, the deal with this movie is that its cast of entirely non-Japanese actors are (for the most part) given Japanese names and overdubbed by VAs who sound like they're doing that plausibly-not-a-native-English-speaker accent that the voice cast of every Toho movie imported into America in the mid-20th century had. And half of the names they give these characters are actually just Japanese-sounding non-words (with some exceptions). This is... honestly kind of funny, but in a really terrible sort of way. I cringed bodily when two of the leads met up with the fake Ultraman's human host and he bowed to them. This was only one of many cringes the film drew out of me.

Everything I just mentioned is indicative of this movie's wider problem, and the reason why I think it's bad-bad and not "bad but endearing": plot- and idea-wise, the film seems like it has no idea what it's doing or why it's doing the things it's doing. There is a concept - aliens deploy a large creature to terrorize Earth in order to make way for their invasion, some scientists and a couple other people fight it - but that's all there is. ZillaFoot is filled with scenes that felt like they were inserted in at random, and past a certain point I lost all expectation that whatever came after what I was currently watching would have any relevance to it or progress the plot in a linear, understandable way.

The weird side effect of this choppy narrative is that there's one or two scenes that are actually extremely funny. Now, when I say "one or two", I do literally mean there's about two. There's a totally plot-irrelevant scene where a detective named "Dirty McCruption" parlays with a guy in a robe for some kind of ruby skull in exchange for his tiny dog, who the detective kidnapped - this is the only funny scene in the whole thing. Or maybe I just have a bad sense of humor. But when that detective was telling a rambling story about his encounter with something called a Disco Plesiosaur and he ended it by saying "...I died!" and then immediately moved on, oh man, something about that just got me.

But I really wouldn't recommend that you watch this even just to laugh at it. It is pretty clear that ZillaFoot is deliberately terrible - an extended scene in which the dubbing cast makes fun of itself (not for the weird maybe-accents, but for other things) proves this. This movie knows it's bad. I do feel like it was made by people who care about kaiju movies, and the crew even includes some people - like Raf Enshohma - who are in the Western tokusatsu community, but it cares more about being Bad™  than it goes about connecting with its audience at all.

(I do have to give the casting department credit for finding a guy who looks exactly like Osman Yusuf. That, at least, gives this a little more authenticity as a kaiju film.)

Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Final Chapter (2015)

directed by Koji Shiraishi

Japan

89 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Hi, hello, this is the best movie I've ever seen in my life.

I want to apologize if I've ever sounded dismissive when I was talking about Koji Shiraishi's preoccupation with his weird worm dimension thing. That was never my intent - I was never making fun of it, I never thought it was just some wacky idea, I always took it seriously; I guess I just thought it was a little funny how insistent he is about it. But now I see. This is what it was all leading to. This masterpiece of a film.

Here, the format of the previous entries in the Senritsu Kaiki File series is dispensed with entirely, as we pick up immediately after The Most Terrifying Movie in History. Ichikawa and Kudo are lost in worm hell, so Tashiro has been left behind to finish the movie (and he apparently makes a pretty good profit off of it, too). But things have been changing ever since the crew uncovered the demon soldier project. The world that Tashiro lives in now feels intensely unsafe. We see him talking to his livestream viewers in his apartment at night, alone, and even then, we can feel this sense of unease. Then Tashiro hears a knock on his window - his second-floor balcony window - and both he and the viewers are abruptly catapulted into complete and utter chaos.

Entering the picture very suddenly is a man named Eno whose origins are never explained (although the translator makes sure to note that he has a really strong Osaka accent). Eno seems to know everything about what the world is becoming - or maybe not everything about it, but he knows how to stop what's happening. (By "what's happening" I mean the growing crisis situation that followed the appearance of a massive hovering silhouette in the sky over Shinjuku - this will all be explained reasonably well if you've yet to catch up with the previous films.) Unfortunately for Tashiro, he is the only one who can execute this plan that will not only bring Ichikawa and Kudo back but also (ostensibly) correct the path towards annihilation that the world is headed down. Eno gives him four tasks that he says will result in his teammates coming back from the other dimension, and I won't get into what these are since every one of them is hideously disgusting, but through his steadfast adherence to Eno's plan, Tashiro confirms what we could all already tell - that only one thing matters to him:

Filming. He has to film everything. When Eno threatens to shoot him for not moving fast enough, he's afraid, of course, as anyone would be. But it doesn't compel him to act. What compels him is when Eno points the gun at the camera. That - and only that - is unacceptable.

Shiraishi is doing something really incredible here. This is the end game of the entire series. I was right about how it wasn't so much a bunch of disparate cases of paranormal phenomenon - maybe that all existed, but in the background the whole time, an apocalypse had been slowly forming. Shiraishi continues to use the found-footage tools he's demonstrated such proficiency with, but now instead of low-stakes (yet terrifying) movies about kappa and haunted toilets, he's showing us the fabric of reality folding and unfolding, truth and fiction blurring, timelines disintegrating. It feels real. Shiraishi convinces us that it is real, because he begins to involve himself - his real self. When Eno called Shiraishi by his real name it shook me to my core. The incredibly delicate and at times transparent third wall this movie sets up is a thing of beauty.

I have to talk about the climax. It's impossible to explain this without going through a play-by-play of the film as a whole, so I won't try. When Kudo was poised to end the entire world and therefore bring about a better one with his Cronenberg-ass arm gun supported by Ichikawa as Tashiro filmed it all, I realized that this moment was an encapsulation of the series as a whole. Kudo is raw, unhinged chaos energy, and Ichikawa is there to aim him at what needs to be done, to try to exert at least some small measure of control over his utterly batshit persona so that the team can run itself as something vaguely resembling a business. And Tashiro's role is to film it. Shiraishi's role is to film it. To make meaning out of what the team sees.

Can the three of them save the world this way? No. But they can destroy it and start again, and keep making movies in whatever new world they find themselves in.

Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 04: The Truth! Hanako-san in the Toilet (2013)

directed by Koji Shiraishi

Japan

73 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I do apologize that this blog seems to be becoming The Gamera and Senritsu Kaiki File Show™, but hey, I like what I like.

The format is changed up a little bit here: instead of having a scene where the investigative crew watches a video together, then goes to interview the people involved in shooting it, we open with the team interviewing paranormal eyewitnesses right away. I must admit I don't know much about the story of Hanako, but it doesn't seem like it's too complicated; it's basically an urban legend that proliferates throughout many schools across Japan that claims the school toilets are haunted by the ghost of a girl who died in them. (No I am not familiar with the manga.) Our amateur videographers in File 04 are two girls who sneak into their old school during off hours to try to get Hanako to appear, which she does, and scares the living daylights out of them - so they do the logical thing and call the Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi folks. Together with a psychic they picked up, the film crew and the two girls return to the school in daytime to look into the footage.

(I'm going to talk openly about spoilers here because this movie takes a hard turn out of nowhere and it would be impossible to talk about the film itself without giving away the plot.)

Very suddenly and for no apparent reason this becomes a time travel movie. The crew and their plus-ones witness Hanako firsthand and are thrown into total dimensional chaos, meeting alternate versions of themselves face-to-face and getting sent into a bizarre time loop where they keep skipping around between days and nights and one of the two girls actually disappears. This is when I realized that Shiraishi was doing things with this movie that are extremely deft: this is a time-loop film, shot with almost zero cuts, shown virtually in real time, disguised as a found-footage horror movie. If we've been watching this series up to this point, we're used to seeing Kudo being an asshole and random ghosts showing up. We're not expecting to see the entire crew thrust into a fractured timeline that they seemingly can't escape from.

And it's kind of riveting to watch. Like I said, virtually no cuts, just the crew running around the school trying to figure out how to get the missing girl back and reset the timeline without encountering themselves (this can apparently do irreparable damage to reality somehow). Then there's Hanako, who serves as the vehicle for Shiraishi's beloved worm dimension, which is, as always, never elaborated upon. I love the idea that all of the disparate paranormal phenomena the team investigates throughout these films seems to be connected to the parallel dimension, as if the team is slowly uncovering the truth that there is no such thing as multiple ghosts but instead some kind of unified worldwide phenomenon linked not to the classic idea of spirits of the dead but to something altogether more alien.

The note Shiraishi ends the film on is so perfect. Kudo looking at the camera with an expression of defeat while Ichikawa frantically calls an ambulance in the background. That's it, no time to recuperate. Our story ends there. 

I have to say that this might be my favorite of the films in this series that I've watched thus far, which is a bit ironic considering that it's also the least indicative of the series' overall vibe. But this is really something: this not only proves that Shiraishi is a filmmaker who can do incredibly good horror movies, he's also just an incredibly good filmmaker in general. I feel like this could have won some kind of award for how much it does on such a small scale.

I will also warn you that if you're watching the version of this that's on YouTube, the subtitles are extremely bad. If you know even a little Japanese you will realize almost immediately that half of the dialogue does not match the subs. If it sounds stupid at times (and if the characters sound very profane) that's entirely down to the subtitles, not the film itself.

Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Preface: True Story of the Ghost of Yotsuya (2014)

directed by Kōji Shiraishi

Japan

71 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I've mentioned before that I'm a big fan of Yotsuya Kaidan and I love to see how it's handled through all the different adaptations of it that there are. I have not seen very many modern adaptations, however (Over Your Dead Body excepted, which is one of my favorite horror movies) and especially not one done in a found-footage style by possibly Japan's finest found-footage director.

I've reviewed at least one of these Senritsu Kaiki File movies before, so I'll run through the basics of the series pretty quickly: the setup is that there's a team who investigates videos of apparently paranormal phenomena that are sent in to them by viewers, but where this series differs from other ghost-investigation found-footage (besides Shiraishi putting his usual spin on it, which I'll get to later) is that the leader of the team is genuinely unhinged, and his crew seems to stick with him largely out of fear. This is... not quite played for laughs, but there's definitely some kind of absurdist humor going on here.

The paranormal video that the team is sent in this film comes from another film crew who were in the middle of making a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation, but believed they'd provoked Oiwa's spirit because they didn't perform the proper purification ritual that's necessary to do before putting on a Yotsuya Kaidan production. (Note: I don't know if this is actually a thing.) The video is kinda bogus: all it is is what might be a floating head behind an actress wearing gyaru makeup. The team investigates the actress who was in the video and gets chased away with a knife when they find her, and then they look into another crew member from the art department, whose house also seems to be haunted. It becomes clear that none of the locations they visit is the problem, though - the problem is that Oiwa's spirit has attached itself to Ichikawa, co-host of the show.

I gotta say this really feels like The Ichikawa Movie™. Ichikawa undergoes a grueling exorcism to attempt to remove Oiwa's spirit from her, during which time she becomes possessed by it. Chika Kuboyama's performance in this scene gave me the impression that this was something she'd been holding back this entire time and only now was she given the chance to actually do some acting. It's kind of amazing.

I wouldn't recommend this for someone purely interested in the Yotsuya Kaidan connection, because it doesn't really focus that heavily on the play or its backstory, but what it does instead makes it even more interesting. The film posits that Oiwa is a fictional character who has been brought into a physical existence by the collective imagination: one of the film's more genuinely creepy moments is a surprisingly low-key interview with a scholar who elaborates on how a ghost story that is believed by enough people can gain the power to manifest itself in reality. But the film then takes a left turn and says that Oiwa is just a puppet, that there's something older and more terrible using her as a kind of conduit to enter our world. As always, the metafictional element of this series allows for some really fascinating explorations of the nature of ghost stories and how they influence reality, but you do have to put up with Shiraishi's quirks in order to enjoy it.

I have no trouble with said quirks, because I've already been a huge fan of Shiraishi's for a long time, but... the best way I can put it is like this: imagine you have a friend who is really, really good at telling scary stories. He has a huge repertoire and he's excellent at creating atmosphere, and all your friends get really into it whenever you're sat around a campfire or whatever listening to him tell a story. No two of them are the same - he has a great talent for inventing new stories. But every story ends with your friend talking about how there's a parallel dimension that's filled with worms. The things he has to say about the worm dimension are as creepy and engaging as the preceding story itself, but the worm dimension is always there. Some of your friends don't mind, because they find the worm dimension to be an interesting topic, and your friend is so good at telling his stories about it that it's hard to find fault. But some of your other friends just go "ugh, he's going off about the worm dimension again."

That's Kōji Shiraishi. You have to put up with the worms to watch his movies. They are always there. Always.

The Great Buddha: Arrival (2018)

directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

Japan

60 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is going to be a short, quick review because I have other stuff to do, but I liked this film so much that I would feel bad if I didn't say something about it. The version with English subtitles that I watched will give you some background before the film, but basically, to recap, The Giant Buddha Statue's Travel Through The Country (sometimes also known as "The Great Buddha Arrival") was a film, made and released in 1934, that is important to the history of tokusatsu. It doesn't feature any kaiju, but as the title would imply, it concerns a giant buddha statue that becomes animate, and the work put into miniatures and presence of a human in costume as a giant being means that it's generally considered the "first"* tokusatsu movie. Unfortunately it is also lost due to the Pacific War; no one alive has seen footage of it, but a few tantalizing still pictures do survive.

There's something really striking about how important and respected the 1934 Giant Buddha is, despite being almost entirely lost with no chance of ever being found. It's something that at this point is so far in the past that no one living has any memory of it. Of course modern art - including film - learns from older art, but typically we learn from it because we still have older art to look at and interpret. Nobody has any way of viewing The Giant Buddha anymore, but it's still part of the tokusatsu canon.

So this film posits itself to be a remake, but in reality what it is is weirder and more difficult to pin down than that. It opens with Akira Takarada (RIP - it's great to see him here, and he doesn't remotely look 84) talking about The Giant Buddha, which was released the year he was born. In the fictional version of events The Great Buddha: Arrival sets up, the earlier film was apparently a recreation of a time when the director witnessed firsthand the Great Buddha of Shugakuen (currently in Tokai City) standing up and walking about. This does not happen in a vacuum, there are historical events occurring at the time that are important to the plot, but that I am not familiar with; evidently there was a rash of suicides around this time that are also covered in the 1934 film, and the director was about to become one of them when the Buddha became animate. So it's not like the statue is walking for no reason, there is a connection between it and the sphere of human activity. I would go further into that if I could, but I'm not aware of it beyond what this film explains to me.

In The Great Buddha: Arrival, the main character - played by the real-life writer of the film - works at a film studio and is compiling all of these snippets of research together to make something like a documentary about the lost film. So this is a half-documentary, half-sequel; again, the way it's so hard to classify is why I loved this film so much. It doesn't simply take an idea and expand upon it. It does that and it takes the existence of the original film itself and envelops it in its own concept, bringing the lost film into something a little different from reality, creating this story where - because there is now nothing left to dispute it - the existence of the film is itself an element in the film's mythos. And while all of this is unfolding, the Buddha statue once again begins to walk.

Narratively, I will admit this film is all over the place. There really aren't any "characters" since it's filmed with something close to a faux-documentary style, and the characters that are there don't actually talk to each other much about what's going on. The two film studio workers have more dialogue about the bike one of them is trying to strap a jet engine onto(???) than the Buddha, or the lost film. Much of the dialogue here is sound bites of Takarada and an huge cast of famous tokusatsu actors from the previous century talking about the Buddha, or about the lost film. And honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way. I didn't need more plot, or more intriguing characters. It is enough for this movie to be exactly how it is.

I guess I'm really not even talking about this movie itself, now. I've been thinking a lot recently about how important it is that there is a current generation making movies like this. I may be overstepping here, as my home country's film industry sucks and I can't lay any claim to tokusatsu other than being a huge fan of it, but I just feel like it's absolutely crucial as time goes on that the memory of the origins of the medium are not forgotten, and are continually retold and reinvented. And I mean, this really goes for any type of film from anywhere in the world. The people who made the movies are going to be outlived by them, and so preserving them and continuing to learn from them and keeping an open dialogue between films from the past and today's culture is what we have to do. Even a film that is lost can remain "alive" if we keep engaging with it.

____

*With some qualifications. Reminder that "tokusatsu" just means "special effects", and it's a technique, not a genre; saying this is not like saying something is "the first horror film" or "the first spy flick". It's just one of the earliest movies from Japan to utilize the kind of techniques that would become popular later in the 20th century.

Thermae Romae (2012)

directed by Hideki Takeuchi

Japan

108 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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It is taking everything I have not to title this review "Hot Tub Time Machine".

Hey, did you know there was a movie where Hiroshi Abe plays an ancient Roman architect who gets sucked into a modern-day Japanese onsen through a portal inside a Roman bath, and takes the concepts he witnesses back to his own time, revolutionizing indoor plumbing and becoming a hero of the Empire? Neither did I, until yesterday, and by god am I glad I watched it immediately.

So that's basically the whole plot, with some padding here and there to stretch it out to 108 minutes. Abe plays Lucius, an architect who designs Roman baths but is kind of down on his luck, in an unhappy marriage, preoccupied with his job but otherwise essentially stagnant. When a whirlpool in the side of a public bath transports him inexplicably to the modern era, to a public bathhouse in Japan full of jolly old dudes who delight in his presence, he assumes he's somehow ended up in a far-flung province of the Roman Empire, and that everybody there must be slaves. But what he refers to as the "flat-faced tribe" has innovations so far ahead of his own people's technology that it puts him to great shame - he is brought to literal tears by his first taste of fruit-flavored milk - and when he returns to his own timeline, he gets to work bringing innovations from the modern day to the Romans. Of course, because he has no idea about automation or electronics, he assumes everything he sees that works with no apparent human intervention is powered by slaves toiling somewhere offscreen (blowing bubbles into the hot tub, stoking fires under the baths to keep them warm, playing an actual orchestra for background music, etc), and he uses those methods when he implements the modern-day technologies in his own time, so his success is kind of a double-edged sword. But this is not elaborated upon aside from the occasional visual gag.

To Thermae Romae's credit, it seems to be trying as hard as it possibly can not to be an isekai, but eventually Lucius meets Mami, a failing manga artist who's really, really into Fist of the North Star and works at a hot springs inn. It takes a while for the two to spend any real length of time together, because Lucius is always getting sucked back to Rome at the worst moments, and nobody believes Mami about him. But eventually she brushes up on her Latin and accidentally gets transported back to Rome along with Lucius. So it's a little bit of an isekai after all.

Perhaps because of the effort to not shoehorn this into typical genre conventions, one of the film's shortfalls is that it takes a really long time to feel like the actual storyline is kicking in. The plot is obvious from the start, and I can't say that I hated watching Hiroshi Abe explore modern bathhouses in bewilderment, but it takes until over halfway through the film for there to be any real conflict or expectations that Lucius must face. The parallels between him and Mami are interesting, though: both of them struggle in some way with being true to themselves, Lucius because it bothers him increasingly that he's cribbing his ideas from other people, and Mami because even though she's a good artist and extremely determined to make it in the business, her stories are too lackluster for a publisher to accept them, and it's looking like she might have to marry for convenience so her parents don't have to support her anymore. The two of them don't have any particular on-screen chemistry, but their romance is cute anyway, and the two characters compliment each other well.

The best part is how completely straight Abe plays it. Not much of this required any real suspension of disbelief, even though when you really think about it, the system of how Rome and Japan are portrayed onscreen is fairly complicated. In the scenes that take place in Rome, everybody speaks Japanese (which I guess we pretend is Latin - doesn't bother me, I watched Chernobyl) and for the most part they're not played by Japanese actors; there's a handful of more important characters who are, like the emperor Hadrian (in an instance of truly inspired casting, you may recognize Hadrian as the voice of Mewtwo in several Pokemon films) and a few of his higher-ups, but the whole idea here is that we are absolutely not supposed to believe any of the Romans are Japanese. Lucius is recognized as a foreigner when he's transported to modern Japan. Also, when Lucius is in the present day, his thoughts are mostly conveyed through internal monologues, but when he does speak out loud, he speaks Latin. It's... you really just kind of have to not worry about it. It's fine. Just go with it. And even though in the canon of the film, nobody in ancient Rome is actually Japanese, it didn't bother me at all to imagine there could be ethnically-Japanese citizens of the Empire, because we do know that the remains of people with East Asian features have been found within Rome. (Although if we're being technical, the people living in what would eventually become Japan at the time this film takes place were mostly concerned with getting good at farming and making really cool pots, and I doubt any of them came to live in the Empire, but hey, people have always known how to sail, nothing's impossible.)

Historical accuracy is not a huge concern when considering this film critically, because the whole thing is goofy and not meant to be a perfect depiction of ancient Roman life, but nevertheless I really enjoy it as somebody who is into history because I feel like it embodies the spirit of why history fascinates people so much. Everybody fantasizes about meeting somebody from thousands of years ago, which is why movies that use that as a plot point remain so interesting to me. And the backbone of Thermae Romae goes beyond the simple exchange of ideas between time periods and into the idea of cultural interchange in general - Lucius at first is struck by guilt about his ideas not being original, and feels like he's stealing from this mysterious tribe he's encountered, but by the end of the movie, a bunch of Mami's hot springs inn customers get transported back to Rome too, and enthusiastically help construct a bunch of ondol huts (houses that take advantage of the heat and warmth of a natural hot spring for healing and relaxation, without the actual bath component) for wounded soldiers. The message here feels like it's implying that cultural exchange is best when it's two-sided. I would hesitate before assuming any real-world philosophy from a movie where a Roman encounters a bidet and it practically sends him to another plane of existence, but the idea that everybody can learn something from everybody else and it's even better if all involved parties willingly exchange those ideas is a good takeaway.

So yeah, this is a movie that exists. At some point I realized the primary function of it may have been for looking at Hiroshi Abe almost entirely nude, but it's interesting even beyond that. At another point I also realized that this was made over ten years ago in Japan, very clearly depicts ancient Rome as a multi-ethnic society, and yet Americans still struggle enormously with the idea that ancient European societies weren't exclusively 100% white. I wouldn't consider this groundbreaking cinema - actually, yeah, I kind of would, it's a little bit incredible and I love it - but it's really fun and has a good conscience behind it. I really like how some of the scene transitions are marked by a guy singing opera alone in what appears to be the tokusatsu quarry.

Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 05: The Most Terrifying Movie In History (2014)

directed by Koji Shiraishi

Japan

80 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Oh boy. 

I'm watching these out of order because they can be a bit hard to find and continuity doesn't seem to be too much of an issue. I'm not exactly sure how many there are, but I can't imagine there'd be a lot more of them after this one, because of... well, the way that it is. I tried to avoid spoilers in my review of Shivering Ghost, but I'm going to make no such effort here. It's just too complicated to dance around everything that happens. Depending on translation, the full title of this movie is something like "Terribly Scary and Weird Files: The Most Terrifying Movie in the World". You can't lose with a name like that.

So the setup is the same as the past films: a documentary crew producing a show where they investigate the weirdest, creepiest videos they can find is sent a new video, this time from a fan who goes into a notoriously haunted village specifically to shoot something to send the crew. His girlfriend disappears, and when the crew tracks him down, he attempts to kill himself in front of them and then disappears as well. The crew ventures into the village themselves, and from then on it goes in so many different directions that I can't sum it all up in one paragraph.

Right off the bat I was not as enthused with the supernatural stuff here as I have been with the previous two Senritsu Kaiki films I've seen. Compared to everything else, the wispy ghost hands erupting from people's mouths and grabbing their heads just feels a little wishy-washy. The thing I've come to expect from Koji Shiraishi is imagery that's jarring and unfamiliar; the ghost hands feel like something I've seen before. Even the investigation into the village is kind of boring, with the exception that somebody claims it to be the birthplace of the writer of Yotsuya Kaidan, who they allege was also a black magician and is somehow involved with the current extremely haunted state of the village. But it's all very routine: pixelated footage of what we're supposed to believe are severed animal heads and bloody body parts, people screaming, getting possessed, that kind of thing. I should note that there's a real-life idol in this film, who shows off her actual gravure books and whatnot that you can actually buy. I have no idea why she's there and neither does she. She mentions that the film crew paid her specifically to go along with them but that she thought she was doing some kind of variety show. No concrete explanation for her presence is ever provided. Along with her, they have an exorcist from a previous film, and a scientist who is clearly not buying any of the crew's nonsense. Kudo, his cohost Ichikawa, and their three guests each apply their own unique method of investigation to the haunted village.

And then this movie loses its entire mind. I'd started running out of patience for what had been a sparse depiction of silly possessions and bad CGI ghost hands when The Most Terrifying Movie in History took its first hard turn into the bizarre and then took about thirty more. We find out that Kudo, the host of the investigation show, is connected to the village via his parents, who were scientists working there on a project to create enormous, demonic super-soldiers during WWII. (For some reason these soldiers must be girls, hence why Kudo himself didn't get turned into one. Also they're naked.) Kudo brought along another weird talisman, which ended up merging with his body and eventually causing him to get sucked into the worm dimension (second Shiraishi film I've seen that involves somebody getting sucked into the worm dimension) where he witnesses his cohost being decapitated and is transported to the past. He meets his parents and his child self, and after failing to convince his parents to stop their research, he murders both of them. This doesn't seem to do anything to stop the giant ghosts of the super-soldiers from escaping the village, which leads to one of the most memorable final shots I've seen from a filmmaker whose most recognizable signature is memorable final shots. All that is only a quick rundown of what happens in this film.

It's pretty clear now that the backbone of this series is Kudo. He's unhinged in a way that is hard to describe. The completely deadpan way he's played by Shigeo Ôsako makes him feel real-life unhinged, not movie-unhinged. He does seem to have real human feelings - he attempts to stop a guy from cutting his own throat, and appears concerned when the exorcist disappears - but he also just straight-up kills at least three people. He might be self-aware, at least a little: someone asks him if he's an idiot and he says "maybe". Kudo's kind of terrifying because there's no trigger when he goes sicko mode. He's just constantly ready to punch people and beat them with aluminum baseball bats at a moment's notice with no preparation. His film crew are visibly scared of him but for some reason keep going along with whatever he does. I think they're afraid to leave him alone for fear of what else he might do. There are very few characters who feel as bonkers as Kudo. He also becomes a kyodai hero by the end of the movie, so yeah. Ultraman Kudo.

I really don't know what to make of this one. It devolves into chaos harder and in more directions simultaneously than maybe any other Shiraishi film I've seen. I would say that the actual paranormal stuff feels somewhat subdued, but "subdued" is not quite the right word - it feels different because it's taken to the macro scale. This is where the weirdness breaches containment, and now there's a bunch of giants roaming around the country, and all the characters are trapped in the worm dimension. It's no longer just a haunting, it's everyone's problem, and that makes it feel a little less personal and a little less creepy. But for sheer insanity factor, for the Kudo Method taken to its (il)logical extreme, you can't beat this. Unless you can. I still haven't seen all of these movies. And there's something to be said about how the restraints of budget do not keep Shiraishi from crafting something with as much impact and complexity as anything else. It shows that if you're dedicated enough, the medium of film can be used in pretty much limitless ways.

Apologies if this review is not quite up to snuff. I'm working on something.

The Cult (A Seita) (2015)

directed by André Antônio

Brazil

70 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This was a pick from my project where I use a list randomizer to get a random movie off of my giant watchlist and watch it, no matter what it is. Thus far this project has been all hits and literally no misses, and The Cult continues that trend.

This is a very low-key sci-fi movie where most elements of the "fi" half are introduced via the protagonist's voice-over narration, rather than portrayed through visuals. I say "most" because the exception to this is a sort of holographic image gallery the main character flicks through that requires no screen or visible input, but even that will probably be reality at some point. Our protagonist (I will alternatingly refer to him as the narrator and the protagonist, because he is both) is telling us the story of the year 2040, which he says was an important year for him for two reasons: The first is that it was the year he moved back to Recife.

The narrator is from something called the "space colonies", which he addresses repeatedly but without context, as if the audience for his recollection are peers of his that would immediately know what he's referring to. It's pretty self-explanatory, though it's not clear if the colonies belong to Brazil or to any one specific country. We infer that it's a much more wealthy society than that of those still living on Earth, which is not surprising considering that that's already the way space colonization seems to be heading. Because his currency is more valuable in Recife than in the colonies, the protagonist is able to move back into his old house and furnish it lavishly, living a life of what looks like ease and luxury. Despite the near-vacant streets and aging buildings, there's a real sense that the people in Recife post-"exodus" don't view their lives as anything other than the best they can be - but there's also a feeling that the lens through which we see life in Recife may be tainted by the protagonist's personal views. Another of the fictional elements is that at some point between now and when the film takes place, a mandatory vaccine was introduced that eliminated the need for humans to sleep. However, Recife is a holdout where dreamers still live, a small hamlet where people are still able to fall asleep. This becomes very important later.

Because there's little dialogue, most of what The Cult accomplishes as a film is conveyed through aesthetics. This is an absolutely gorgeous movie and it feels like in spite of minimal visual effects it manages to establish a sense of being in a place of the future, a place similar to, but ultimately different in its evolution away from, the Earth we're familiar with. Again, what we might look at and describe as "run-down" in Recife is anything but to its residents, and especially to the protagonist and narrator who has returned to it as his beloved home. It is - at least during the day - a haven for him. He walks the streets alongside men who dress like him. It should be mentioned that the protagonist is very openly and overtly gay, and all the people he interacts with are also men who love men, whether gay, bi, or anything else. Recife seems to be a kind of locus for safe, easy, even joyful cruising, and the protagonist spends much of the first half of the film doing nothing but lounging in beautiful clothing (or no clothing) in his beautiful house in bed with another beautiful man, in the beautiful weather of a city that feels like it's shed its aspersions and finally belongs to its people.

The second reason why 2040 is important to the narrator is because that's the year that he found the Cult. Midway through the film, one of the protagonist's partners calls him out for what he sees as his "fetishism" of Recife, chiding him for ignoring police brutality and fantasizing about the Recife he remembers from his rose-tinted childhood memories rather than the Recife that really is. Whether or not this is objectively true, it does seem to send the protagonist into introspection, and the next major plot development after this is his discovery of an underground cult (really more like a big recurring party) in the city. Instead of addressing his place in the city and his perception of it, the protagonist - and the narrative - draws further away from reality and towards fantasy. We're also told during the first half of the film that despite being what looks like a paradise during the day, Recife isn't safe to walk around at night in. However, I feel like the reveal of the cult and their aims may alter the legitimacy of this claim somewhat. While the cult is not doing anything that is technically harmful to anybody, stories of their presence may have been disseminated to create a general sense of danger that was not entirely accurate.

I was entranced by this movie. The atmosphere of languor, of carefree living, drew me in. The way the protagonist moves through the world surrounded by beautiful objects and beautiful people without the need to work for money or do anything other than desire something and achieve it was intoxicating. But it may be that we're experiencing Recife circa 2040 through a very narrow scope - even if misinterpretations of the cult led to most of the warnings about not going out at night, there's still apparently a heavy police presence. Recife may be an oasis - for gay men, for aesthetes, for anybody who wants to live in beauty atop the corpse of capitalism - but outside the oasis is always a harsh desert. The scope that The Cult encompasses despite being only 70 minutes long is impressive, and as an art object it looks flawless, a perfectly executed vision. I've spoken before about horror as a genre being large enough to contain films as lo-fi and sparse as this one as well as major classics, but the science fiction genre can be that inclusive as well. This is a brilliant movie, and it also makes excellent use of "Melody Day" by Caribou, one of my favorite songs.

Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 02: Shivering Ghost (2012)

directed by Koji Shiraishi

Japan

72 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm not sure if I've ever reviewed anything by Koji Shiraishi before, but he has the distinction of having made possibly my favorite horror movie of all time, Noroi: The Curse. I know I throw around the term "favorite movie" often, but Noroi is head and shoulders above everything else and is one of the finest works of horror I've ever seen. It is also, by far, Shiraishi's best-known film; he is quite prolific but with little following outside of Japan. The majority of his horror films are found-footage and all involve a very specific theme, which I will go into further later. I'm also going to spoil basically the whole plot of this thing with reckless abandon, because I feel a burning need to talk about it, so if you're interested in watching this, don't read past this paragraph and just go do it. I consider Koji Shiraishi an essential director for any found-footage horror fan because of the way he messes with a subgenre that tends to get a little same-y after a while.

(I should note that this is the second in a series, and I haven't yet seen any of the others, but based on how good this one was, I'm going to take care of that immediately. The preceding film is mentioned at some points during this one, but the mentions of it do enough explaining that you don't feel like you're missing something.)

So on the surface this is a very straightforward found-footage movie. It purports to follow a film crew who investigate video files of strange, paranormal activity that are sent to them, traveling to the location shown on the videos and trying to see if they can capture or replicate the phenomena. They don't seem to have any context on the video they're sent in Shivering Ghost, but backstory on the people involved in the video will unfold throughout the film. The film depicts another amateur ghost-hunting crew going into a fairly disgusting abandoned building in search of an apparition. They start hearing weird noises, like the sound of a bell with no apparent source, as they home in on the location of the ghost. This is all filmed in a fantastically creepy way: Your mileage may vary with regards to how much you can stomach found-footage movies where somebody is whining and crying out of fear the whole time, but personally, if the rest of the film is handled well, I think having a character react with abject terror onscreen does a lot to boost my own feeling of anxiety towards the film. Shiraishi is really nothing less than a found-footage master; he knows exactly when to pause and zoom on a "ghost" so that, although it may be just a couple of blurry pixels, you feel like you're seeing something horrifying.

The ghost footage ends with the crew running out of the building in fear after having seen the apparition, and Shivering Ghost itself picks up when the documentary crew tracks down most of the people from the original footage and decides to accompany them back into the building to investigate further. All but one of the original crew go along for the ride: One of them, a woman named Yuko, is apparently missing. This will become important later. The second exploration of the building doesn't reveal any more ghosts, but there's still bizarre things going on, like most of the crew members from the original video suddenly seizing at the same time, and a spot in the ghost room that swallows up flashlight beams. Neither of these things are ever explained or brought up further.

This is pretty much where the ghost story ends. The genius of this film is that it only looks like a ghost story on the surface, and beneath, it's hiding something much, much less comprehensible. The direction the documentary crew goes in next is to try to find out what happened to Yuko, spurred on by one of the original crew members admitting that, after the footage, Yuko started acting "strange". (Another reason why you may find it hard to suspend your disbelief for this movie is how often people hold important information back for seemingly no in-universe reason; in actuality, it's clearly so that Shivering Ghost can have some kind of a plot, because if all the information was on the table from the start, there would be no movie.) During filming, the crew gets a voicemail from Yuko that's just gutteral screaming, so they go to her apartment, where she isn't there, but more bizarre events follow, as well as the manifestation of another apparition. We learn that Yuko has been in simultaneous relationships with several men and women, and those of them that the crew interviews talk about her as if she is herself some kind of strange entity; hinting - even coming out and saying - that she isn't human, and occasionally spawning an aura of darkness at, uh, inopportune times.

Trying to explain all of the individual events that happen in this movie is useless, because it goes off in so many different directions after the initial ghost video ends that you can barely keep track of them. But at the heart of it is an idea that Shiraishi revisits over and over in his films. Nearly everything of his I've seen has, at some point or another, circled back around to this concept that there are invisible, extradimensional, wormlike beings inhabiting or possibly invading the Earth, visible only to certain people, who are usually dismissed as insane. To my knowledge Occult is the film of his that deals with this most directly. Noroi, perhaps contributing to its being more accessible than the rest of his ouevre, deals with it only minimally, if at all, although the ghost fetuses do bear a resemblance to how Shiraishi usually depicts the creatures when they're made visible.

Since this is a series, I really can't say if any of the others pick up the thread or expand on what happens in Shivering Ghost, but the exact reason why I love this movie so much is because it is just utterly inexplicable. Something weird will happen and everyone will move on. Nobody seems to be much affected by having had actual seizures at the same time for no apparent reason. The thing with the flashlight beam disappearing once it crosses an invisible line in the ghost building is really, really creepy, and it's never explored. After a while it comes out that the actual building itself was designed to have something to do with these invisible beings, and that Yuko and the building's architect had some kind of teacher-student relationship, which hints at a far, far deeper history than just a simple ghost video. This whole thing, without the context of any other films around it, is so totally weird and out there, when at first all it looks like is a movie about an old haunted building. This is what you get from Shiraishi every single time: Something that continually stumps you, leading you to dead ends and roundabouts, constantly reinventing the story and dragging it by force into weirder and weirder places until you're not sure what a haunting or a possession really is anymore.

Colossal (2016)

directed by Nacho Vigalondo

Canada, South Korea, Spain, USA

109 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I was recommended this by somebody who knows I'm really into kaiju, and it made me realize that I had no excuse for not having already seen it. It's been out for seven years, I'm a fan of Nacho Vigalondo, and it does have a giant monster in it (a giant robot too!), despite not being what I would really call a "kaiju film", strictly speaking. This is a movie that uses monsters to represent many different concepts, most of them relating to the manifestation of the unconscious and our responsibility as individuals, and at best, it's a really interesting, original film with ideas that I truly haven't seen before, while at worst, some of it just... doesn't work. This review will contain major spoilers.

Anne Hathaway plays Gloria, an alcoholic rapidly losing control of her life, although the people around her also really suck and I'd argue they're responsible for half of her problems. After getting kicked out of her boyfriend's apartment, she returns to her dismal hometown, setting up in a ramshackle house that belonged or belongs to some little-elaborated-upon relative. While she's there, she meets Oscar, a "friend" from when she was a kid, who seemingly wants to lend her a hand, giving her a part-time job at his bar and occasionally dropping off random furniture. At the same time, news breaks of a giant monster attacking Seoul, South Korea. We should basically all know this by now, but the monster is connected to and controlled by Gloria, appearing in a specific district of Seoul at 8:05 in the morning when Gloria also happens to be in a specific spot (a park outside a school) at that same time. Although she doesn't realize it at first, she can control the monster's movements, and is absolutely horrified to find out that her actions have physical, material results, leading to the deaths of an unspecified number of people and immeasurable property damage.

Usually I don't put too much stock into names in fiction unless it seems really obvious the author is trying to tell us something, because personally, I know that when I write, I just name my characters whatever comes to mind first. But for some reason I think it's interesting that the lead is named "Gloria". Maybe it stuck out to me because it's a name that I think of as an "old person name", at least in the English-speaking world; Vigalondo is Spanish, and it may have different connotations elsewhere. It was only introduced to English audiences in the 1890s, as the name of a character in a novel who was herself Portuguese. So having a young, English-speaking woman with that name felt unusual to me. The name literally means "glory", obviously, and it is part of the Spanish and Portuguese titles of the Virgin Mary. One could argue that the Gloria in this film does give birth to the monster through a kind of immaculate conception, but I think naming her something that means "glory" is also relevant to her status as a hero, a rescuer, someone who evolved from believing she was the center of the world for selfish reasons to realizing that, in this context, she kind of is the center of the world, and she needs to use that power responsibly. There are problems with this, of course, and I'll talk about those towards the end of this review.

The monster is not just a monster. It's never just a monster. In this case it is a physical manifestation of the protagonist's inner feelings, which mostly constitute self-hatred. I think part of the metaphor here may have been the idea that if you're unkind to yourself, the world as a whole suffers, and that by improving yourself, you improve the world. That certainly does happen in Colossal, literally: When Gloria stops acting like a drunk idiot and realizes that her actions are having real-world consequences that are harming and even killing people, the monster also stops being a force of destruction, and the world suffers a little less. This is also emphasized by the fact that her old buddy Oscar turns out to be a cad and a scoundrel, and unfortunately he also happens to have a giant external id running around in Seoul, in the form of a robot. Whereas Gloria is devastated when she learns the results of what just felt like harmless drunk fun and immediately curtails her behavior, Oscar figures since he wasn't technically, physically there, who cares? Those people are far away, I didn't hurt them with my own two hands, so whatever. I can stomp on anything I want because it's not really me doing the harm. And one of the results of this is that the film shifts from being about Gloria trying to get her life together to being about Gloria getting into this really quite terrifying abusive relationship with Oscar - not a relationship in the romantic sense, but in the sense that he's forcing her to remain in physical proximity to him and do what he wants because he knows how to manipulate her. He knows that as long as he's there threatening to wipe out Seoul, she'll stay to try and stop him.

Now... I'm making a good-faith assumption on Vigalondo's part and assuming he realizes that he's using an entire country as helpless bystanders for his metaphor, and realizes that that is kiiiind of not a great look. That two white Westerners' actions can be so influential as to have an entire non-Western country under their thrall is self-congratulatory at best. I have to say I almost got to really disliking this movie at the end, when the day is saved because a white woman Knows What To Do. The Korean military is useless, the citizens are at the mercy of these two people an ocean away, until Gloria steps in. I know that pretty much everything in this movie is meant to be taken as a metaphor, but when the metaphor involves actual, real-life people, you have to be a lot more delicate. Also, Toho sued the production company (this is what happens when you say the G-word in public as a filmmaker), which is rumored to have been why the location was changed to Seoul instead of somewhere in Japan, which would fit more with the popular conception of kaiju movies. So it doesn't really matter where Gloria's monster is materializing - it just had to be somewhere far off that isn't Us™.

I also forgot most of the time that this is apparently supposed to be somewhat of a comedy. I don't think there was anything in this film I found funny. There were moments where I could recognize that things could be taken as funny, like Oscar stomping around on the playground while people scream in the background, but I had a reaction much more like Gloria when she realizes what she's done. It's all just kind of too harrowing to be funny.

This is a really inventive movie that does what everybody should do with monsters, which is use them to explore human psychology (because it's us that creates the monsters, which means that in some way, the monsters are us, right?). It delivers an interesting message about growing out of self-hate and being dragged down by jealous people, and also about selfishness. When everybody starts getting tired of Oscar watching the viral "thug life" slap gif over and over, he says "I'm not the one watching it a thousand times, everyone else has". This is a perfect example of how nobody ever thinks anything is their fault - Oscar's never the bad guy, the bad things are being done by other people. He's not contributing to the problem, how can he? He's just his little old self, just one person. But the whole end message of this is that one person can make a massive difference. I just wish it hadn't fallen into the gravity well of the White Savior narrative to achieve that message.