The Curse of the Ghost (1969)

directed by Kazuo Mori

Japan

94 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

As evidenced by other adaptations I've reviewed on here, I'm a HUGE Yotsuya Kaidan fan. This particular version eluded me for a long time, and it was one that I was very interested in due to Akiji Kobayashi (best known either from Ultraman or Kamen Rider, depending on if you like Ultraman or Kamen Rider more) playing Naosuke. I have to say I'm not the biggest fan of the English title because it takes the emphasis off of whose ghost we're talking about here: the original translates to Ghost Story of Yotsuya: Oiwa's Ghost.

In the role of Iemon we have Kei Sato, who should have been fairly perfect for it considering his track record of playing various yakuza baddies and scumbag samurai - he's just got one of those good villain faces - but I think he plays it almost too casually. There is something interesting in an Iemon who does his evil deeds with a kind of matter-of-fact boredom, which is what Sato delivers here, but I just feel like his performance is a little too flat at times when it could have been more intense. Kazuko Inano plays Oiwa and does a very good job, her theatricality as Oiwa's ghost making up for the flatness of Sato's performance. Kobayashi is good as Naosuke, he's definitely got the voice to play a kind of shady, rascally type of guy, but again, aside from Oiwa, nobody feels like they have all that much going on here.

The best part of any Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation is the way things descend slowly down an irreversible path of violence and misery. It starts when Iemon and Naosuke commit near-simultaneous murders, and becomes locked in place when Iemon makes the decision to kill his wife so he can marry Oume. Everything after that - if the movie does what it should - is a guilt-ridden nightmare, the viewer dragged into Iemon's visions of Oiwa's phantom tormenting him. What I really enjoyed about the way Curse of the Ghost executes this aspect of the story is the score. It's not music per se, but a kind of unsettling, rhythmic pulsing noise that pervades much of the film. At times you can forget it's there, but when things start ramping up, it almost has the effect of making you feel like something is behind you. The composer for this score seems to have been Ichirō Saitō, who has a very high pedigree; he's credited with the music for such renowned films as Ugetsu, Sound of the Mountain, Floating Clouds, and Late Chrysanthemums. I think his work on Ugetsu is particularly relevant to what he does with Curse of the Ghost.

All in all I wouldn't say this was my favorite version of the story; it lacks the depth of character of Kinoshita's adaptation or the sheer sweaty terror of Nakagawa's, but it hits all the beats and it has a very convincing Oiwa. Even a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation that just does the bare minimum is still a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation. If I may steal a quote from Letterboxd user Rui Ozpinhead that sums up how I feel: "It's hard to completely mess up due to the quality of the source material."

Mickey 17 (2025)

directed by Bong Joon-Ho

USA, UK

137 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

I read Edward Ashton's Mickey7 and its sequel Antimatter Blues not necessarily because I enjoyed his writing style but because the idea was interesting. I personally found his brand of humor to be too similar to what I've heard referred to as "Avengers humor": snarky, snappy one-liners that often feel inappropriately placed and never allow the work to give any weight to its subject. I didn't hate the writing style, but I sure didn't like it. Which is why I think sometimes it's okay if a film adapted from a book bears very little resemblance to its source material.

The main important plot points that are carried over from the book to the movie (if I'm remembering it right, it has been a while since I read Mickey7) were the basic idea of Mickey Barnes as an "expendable", a guy who signed up to have his consciousness uploaded into a brick and downloaded into an artificially-manufactured body reprinted on spec so that people could throw him at every possible dangerous situation and not get their hands dirty; the Niflheim colony, an inhospitable, icy human settlement on a distant planet; and Mickey's much-cooler-than-him girlfriend Nasha. And, of course, the fact that there are, for a time, two Mickeys, which is against some vaguely-defined international law that was enacted because one guy always ruins the fun for the rest of us. Or three guys ruin it. I don't know. That's kind of the point.

Robert Pattinson as Mickey brings something to the character that was entirely absent in the book. There, Mickey was a kind of short, schlubby, insecure dude who overcompensated for his perceived flaws with faked bravado and constant jokes. Pattinson instead plays Mickey as that one coworker you have who always tells you slightly disturbing stories about his personal life without being prompted. He's totally earnest, just trying to get through his life - lives - with a minimum of trouble. When Pattinson is playing both Mickeys, he manages to convey the differences in their personality with nothing but posture: 17 is more round-shouldered and timid, but 18 stands with confidence. They do feel like completely different people, even though they're supposed to be clones.

I was surprised by how much the plot of this movie feels like it's drifting along aimlessly. Maybe it's because I was expecting it to hit all (or most) of the same beats that the book did, but there's a real sense of "Oh, I guess we're focusing on this now?" that left me unable to predict what the movie would choose to make an important plot point and when. Again, it's nothing like the image I had in my head as I read the book, and again, that's good!

One thing I did really appreciate was all the small detail that went into this. It is obviously meant to be a satire on Trump's America, and it excels at that, but it also feels like a world of its own, which is crucial in making it feel like science fiction rather than a parody film. I particularly enjoyed the random guy in the pigeon suit. I don't know if that was a reference to something in real life that I was missing, but I hope it wasn't; I hope the pigeon was intended to be recognizable only to the characters in the film. Too much of it can get weird, but I love those kinds of things, little references to things that everyone acts like they're familiar with while we the viewers aren't in on the joke.

There's not a ton more I can say about this. It's a very satisfying movie. It's cutting and clear about who it's making fun of without being heavy-handed (though as someone who occasionally enjoys their movies with a heavy hand, I was mostly ambivalent about this). Everybody in the cast puts in a stellar performance. For a movie as long as it is, I'm not sure why it occasionally felt rushed - I guess that's just what happens when you condense the dozens-of-hours-long experience of reading a book into a 137-minute-long movie. But it's quite good. And it is one of only three new movies I managed to watch in 2025, so by default it's one of my favorites of the year.

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.

Zarkorr! The Invader (1996)

directed by Michael Deak

USA

80 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

"We have Shobijin at home."

Welcome back to KaiJune. Since I opted to do KaiJuly last year due to having started a night shift job and having scrambled eggs for brains, you've technically gotten two kaiju months within one year. Aren't I just so generous. I remain a stickler for applying the term "kaiju" only to specifically Japanese monsters, because I don't think it makes sense otherwise, but I'm justifying including this movie in KaiJune by saying that if you like kaiju movies you are probably going to like this.

Zarkorr! The Invader sounds like a fake movie that a nerdy character on a TV show would get made fun of by other characters for liking. "Look at Steve with his Zarkorr lunchbox, har har!" It is very much a real movie, though, and honestly, for much of its running time, it's kind of delightful. I enjoyed this a lot right off the bat for its creativity, authenticity, and commitment to the bit, even though all of that started fizzling out once it passed about the half-hour mark.

The film begins with footage of a giant monster rampaging through California. Exactly what we love to see. Since this is how the film starts, I'll start out by talking about the monster: I really, really like everything about it. A lot of American monster suits just look kind of... trashy, for lack of a better term; they look cobbled-together and they move weird, which is often exacerbated by bad editing. It could be the fact that I watched this in very poor quality, but the Zarkorr suit looked and moved fantastic, and the miniatures it destroys were similarly well outfitted. To me, Zarkorr looks like an Ultraman Tiga monster who somehow got transported to California.

After that, we meet our protagonist, a very average guy who had been completely unaware of Zarkorr's rampage until a tiny hologram of a teenage girl shows up in his kitchen and tells him to switch on the news. She proceeds to tell him that he is the only one who can defeat Zarkorr: half of the people on Earth would be worse than him at it, and half the people would be better, so he's perfectly in the middle, and therefore the highly advanced alien race that the hologram's real self belongs to chose him. All the while she's exposition-dumping on our protag, I'm thinking "wow, this is so cool!" It's so interesting, like a writing prompt brought to life: a random guy with no special powers, chosen fairly arbitrarily by an alien race to defeat a monster (that they kind of sent on purpose for funsies) that cannot be killed by any conventional weapon either currently in existence or in development. Where do we go from there? How do we build off of such a neat set-up for a story?

Not very well, it turns out. Where this movie really fumbles the bag is in spending too much time doing what I really hate it when sci-fi movies do: establishing that everybody but the main character thinks the main character is crazy. To me, this is unnecessary: the time that the movie wastes on having the protagonist take a cryptozoologist hostage and try to convince the cops and everybody else that he can defeat the giant monster and Should Not be taken to jail under Any Circumstances could be spent doing something more interesting. A monster movie where everybody acknowledges the monster and skips the awkward human conflict is usually a much smoother viewing experience.

The middle part of the movie only gets worse. We're introduced to a pretty cringey stereotypical hacker character who is acted fairly decently but could have been... reconsidered, perhaps. One of the cops joins the main group because he's a conspiracy theorist and therefore predisposed to believe what the protagonist is claiming. This leads into another problem this movie has: all of its attempts at humor fall so flat that it would be better if they weren't there. I don't think there are actually any "jokes" in this thing per se; its style of humor is more "here is a thing that is supposed to be funny because of the way that it is". "Here is an eccentric wacky hacker guy", "here is a cop who believes in UFOs", "isn't it funny that this guy is supposed to save the world when he's so totally unremarkable". Having a little light banter here and there might have actually been beneficial, if used sparingly.

The ending is anticlimactic but in a way that I honestly kind of love. Like, why does killing a monster have to be a huge deal? Why can't the journey to kill the monster be the more elaborate aspect of the story, as opposed to the final fight? Our protagonist gives Zarkorr the old Zetton treatment (as in, he's Zetton and Zarkorr is Ultraman) and it pops out of existence and then it's done.

I think this is a movie that had cool ideas in it but didn't execute them so well. I'm beyond caring about a visibly low budget or poor acting, the only thing that matters to me is an interesting story that feels like the filmmakers cared about it. For the most part, Zarkorr has that. But it doesn't seem to be able to stretch it out even to its relatively short running time. I mean this in a mostly positive way: finding out that the director was a makeup artist whose only directing credit is this movie makes a lot of sense.

Attack of the Giant Teacher (2019)

directed by Yoshikazu Ishii

Japan

70 minutes

3 stars out of 5

____

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.

Without Warning (1994)

directed by Robert Iscove

USA

91 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000)

directed by Masaaki Tezuka

Japan

105 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater: Present (2005)

directed by Yudai Yamaguchi

Japan

47 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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It's been a few years since I've seen this, and considering that the season has rolled around once again and I'm running out of Christmas horror movies (I have been running out of Christmas horror movies for several years now), and the fact that Kazuo Umezu recently passed away, I thought it was time for a rewatch. This might lead to me rewatching the other Horror Theater films, actually - they're all really solid.

Present opens with its main character, Yuko, in a flashback to her childhood, awake in bed after a strange dream. It's almost Christmas, and Yuko's parents remind her that Santa is always watching, and that he brings presents to good children, but if you're bad, he'll "come get you". This flashback sequence ends with Yuko looking out her window with a big grin, and it's implied that she sees something, but what happens next - if anything - is kept ambiguous for the whole film.

Next we see Yuko, she's an adult with a rowdy bunch of friends. It's Christmas again and everybody goes to stay at a hotel to have some fun. Yuko's the quiet one of the bunch, but she's making moves on the guy she likes, except... all this Christmas stuff seems to leave her really uneasy. We as viewers can tell she's got some heavy unaddressed trauma surrounding whatever happened to her that one night as a kid. Actually, this entire thing feels like it's about unaddressed Christmas-related trauma. Every cheery holiday thing Yuko sees seems to set her on edge, and it only gets worse when she sees the clerk at the hotel is a guy dressed like Santa.

This might turn out to be a longer review than warrants a 47-minute movie because I honestly think this thing is so interesting. There aren't many Japanese Christmas horror films, but those that exist put such a refreshing spin on the genre that I wish there were more. Santa in Present feels like an ancient god, capricious and vengeful, omniscient, ever-changing. The extent of Yuko's friends' involvement in the story is basically to be slasher fodder, but the film establishes that they all see Santa differently according to whatever their childhood idea of him was: one of them sees him as a woman, since her feminist mother told her Santa was a woman, and the other sees him as his father, presumably because he caught on early that Santa was actually his parents. Yuko sees what she was told Santa was: a big white guy with blue eyes. And remember the "come and get you" part? That's kind of the key here.

This movie packs so much gore into such a small space that it almost ruins the pacing sometimes. Although the elements like Santa being some kind of wrathful shapeshifting god are what make Present stand out from the slagpile of Christmas horror, it does at times feel like a long slasher movie chase sequence with a little tiny plot attached. There's a lesson here about being good and responsible - I've read a few other Umezu manga where the message is basically "bad girls get punished" - but for the most part we're watching it for the creative kills. (The film was certainly directed by the right man for the job: Yudai Yamaguchi is responsible for such films as Meatball Machine and Battlefield Baseball.) The overall atmosphere is unsettling and the lack of dialogue makes everything dreamlike - the characters have to be responsible for acting out the story rather than giving it to us via exposition dump, so a lot of the backstory only exists in what can be put together by the viewer through vague context clues.

I would love to someday see this in better quality than 240p on YouTube with the opening theme music muted to avoid a copyright strike. I just love the idea of Santa delivering gory retribution for "denigrating Christmas".

Kibakichi (2004)

directed by Tomoo Haraguchi

Japan

95 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Werewolf samurai? Werewolf samurai.

The title character of Kibakichi is a member of a decimated clan of werewolves who wanders the backroads of Japan circa the early 1700s, always on the outskirts of humanity, but never quite accepted by the yokai, either. When he gets press-ganged into a dice game, he ends up staying in a town in which all he intended to do was get a drink far longer than anticipated, and eventually realizes that the whole town is full of yokai who have disguised themselves as humans and are under threat from a bunch of mercenaries dressed like Final Wars Xilliens. Up-front warning: this film contains less werewolfery than you may desire.

I think I understand why there aren't a ton more movies like this out there (hard to get right, goofy if done wrong) but the idea of a ronin who is separated from the rest of the populace not only by class barriers but by virtue of his actually being some kind of a supernatural creature is just fantastic. That angst Kibakichi experiences about not being monstrous enough to be a "monster" but being too close to a monster to be comfortable around humans feels like it fits perfectly with the lone-wolf outsider theme that a lot of jidaigeki with wandering ronin/gambler main characters have. The film itself totally plays up those genre conventions to its advantage, and it's really fun: all the tension and the questions of identity that frequently figure into good jidaigeki are here.

Ryūji Harada plays Kibakichi decently - but not fantastically - well. Kibakichi is interesting because he's one of those characters who works better as a silhouette than in closeups: our first image of him, in the classic round hat and tatty cloak, is essentially how his character is defined (except for the final scenes, which I'll get to in a minute). Any time we see him up close, something just feels kind of off. He seems like he's meant to be perceived conceptually rather than personally. Because of this, there could have been a lot of added weight to the handful of scenes where we can see Kibakichi's face clearly - a feeling of encountering him on a personal level rather than as an archetype - but something prevents him from being relatable in such a way.

There's way more tokusatsu to this than I expected. The film is chock full of Toho kaiju roars to a point where it's almost distracting. I was watching a werewolf vs. yokai fight but my brain was telling me it was hearing Gaira and Titanosaurus go to town on each other. This, as well as the excellent creature suits and concepts, is no coincidence; Tomoo Haraguchi has a great deal of toku credits under his belt (however you may feel about Death Kappa aside), including work on the Ultra series starting with 80. The final battle at the end of the film is pure tokusatsu fight scene, with a frankly ridiculous amount of explosions and a fully wolfed-out Kibakichi becoming nearly indestructible in the face of bullets and hand grenades.

As I've said when I've talked about other films with yokai in them, although this wasn't meant to be a Halloween movie, it fits the vibe in a way that feels entirely natural. Kibakichi is shrouded in atmosphere: the fog of a dark, fantastical past; a fog in which various creatures cavort and hide themselves - the most terrifying of which, to use a bit of a cliche, turn out to be humans. The film is a visual treat and super fun with its spooky atmosphere, and has an excellent opener and an excellent finale, but the middle faffs around a little, although not so much as to be boring.

Gamera vs. Viras (1968)

directed by Noriaki Yuasa

Japan

81 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Masao and Jim are two boy scouts who have little in the way of personality other than that they love to play pranks. After a cold open (and a really potent title card drop) that establishes the alien invasion plot and shows us Gamera trying to stop it, we spend some time watching the two boys pull a fast one on their scout leader and some scientists with the end goal of getting them to let the kids pilot a submarine - if they can break it, then they're the only ones who'll be able to fix it, so the adults won't have any choice but to let them pilot it, right? It works, and after a disorienting ride, the scout leader and the head scientist turn the sub over to the boys, who use it to have a little race with Gamera. I really liked this part because if you think about it as coming chronologically after the cold open, it implies that Gamera fought with the Viras aliens, lost, came back to Earth to recuperate, and still made time to have an underwater race with a couple of kids and let them drive their mini submarine around his legs. What a champ.

But through a series of accidents, the boys end up abducted into the Viras mothership, and, by their quick thinking and Gamera's brute strength combined, have to figure out how to thwart the invasion.

The sequence of events where the boys rig up the submarine so that they're the only ones who'll know how to pilot it also establishes a theme that will run throughout the entire movie, and to an extent throughout all Gamera movies: adults do not know what they're doing, and most of the time they just get in the way. Kids in Gamera movies are treated as if they alone are capable of seeing the world in a way that adults just can't, and that's why I like these movies so much. They treat a child's perspective as a valuable and unique thing, not something of lesser value than an adult's way of navigating the world. I've read that this was something Noriaki Yuasa fully intended of his Gamera films - that adults know nothing, and children know everything.

When you think about it, the Viras aliens in their separate forms are an extension of the ignorant adults at the beginning of the film: they never let the kids get away with anything cool (their ship's replicator refuses to give them weapons), they try to make the kids do what they tell them to, they treat the kids like obstacles and want them to get out of the way. I like the individual Viras aliens, even though their combined form is one of my least favorite Gamera enemies. They're all wearing surgical scrubs for some reason. I have this weird idea that when they were observing Earth, they picked up our television signals, saw people in surgical scrubs cutting open, mutilating, and dealing apparent massive violence to other unconscious, helpless humans, and decided that wearing scrubs would be the best way to convey to humanity their intent to subjugate them by force.

This was made during bad financial times for Daiei, and has a third of the budget of its predecessor, Gamera vs. Gyaos. The film makes great use of what original material it's capable of concocting, but it does grind to a halt when the stock footage interlude hits. But aside from the stock footage, there is some real beauty to this. I was, even on this second viewing, still enraptured by the design of that spaceship. It's really something else, and not only is it aesthetically interesting, it's also technologically impressive: it can rearrange its segments and jettison damaged sections in response to an attack. I mentioned in my review of vs. Guiron that one of my favorite things was how the interior of the spaceship just has painted wooden floors, giving it this tangible, realistic feel, and I feel the same way about the interior of the Viras ship too. It looks like a big art exhibit.

I had a lot of fun with this one. I think it's one of the lesser-appreciated Showa Gamera movies, but I enjoyed it. I will say that it's a very uneven movie, though, and while the opening is a grand old time, it does struggle to regain its footing after the lengthy stock footage sequence, and never quite gets to the high point it hit at the beginning. It's still worthwhile for the art design if nothing else - these movies are so well-crafted that there's a timelessness to them that transcends their heavy 1960s aesthetic.

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.

First Love of Okon (1958)

directed by Kunio Watanabe

Japan

85 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I planned on reviewing this as a Pride Month thing, because those movies where Hibari Misora plays a man are, to me, as a trans person and a jidaigeki nerd, honestly exhilarating to watch. Gender euphoria, etc etc. But Misora in drag receives only a very limited amount of screen time in First Love of Okon despite the poster prominently featuring her in a chonmage, which is kind of funny to me; Toei knew what we all wanted to see. I'll still review this anyway, but it'll be a short one.

Misora plays Okon, a kitsune (fox spirit) who lives in the mountains with others of her kind. When humans trap a young kitsune with the intent to cook him up and eat him, Okon transforms into a human man to rescue him. Afterwards, she gets trapped herself, but is saved by a woodcutter named Onokichi. The two of them become friends and eventually fall in love, but the story is bittersweet and wrought with obstacles, as there's a deputy who wants Okon for his concubine and also wants Onokichi's forest for the money.

This is a musical. If you're familiar with the Russian Fantastika genre, this will seem very familiar; while a bit less gaudy, the setpieces are similarly fairytale-like, especially during the more elaborate song and dance sequences. Misora is enchanting to watch as always, and this is definitely her movie, but another reason why you should watch it is for Jun Tazaki, prolific portrayer of extremely stoic, stiff-upper-lipped military generals, playing the goofball deputy. He sings too, and generally runs around being the butt of many jokes, along with his retinue, who all also sing.

Although Misora's male role in this film is restricted to basically only one scene, Okon and two of her kitsune sisters also transform into the deputy and two of his men at least once. The fluid way that this film depicts gender is really interesting: how casual it is for Okon and the other kitsune women to become men, just like they shapeshift into other things. It is all a fantasy, but fantasy was the lens through which these stories could be told in mainstream cinema at the time. I guarantee you there were people watching Misora perform as a man and either realizing things about themselves or feeling like the things about themselves they already knew were maybe not so rare and unusual after all.

I unfortunately had to watch this as a garbage-quality, poorly-cropped VHS rip, but even still, the magic is there. I'm surprised I don't hear about this and others of its ilk talked about more as queer cinema. Women playing male roles (and men playing female roles) in traditional Japanese theater is of course not inherently a queer thing and I'm not trying to map my own Western values onto that concept, but it's also true that there are trans people everywhere who can and assuredly have seen themselves reflected in that.

The Calamari Wrestler (2004)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

91 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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At this point I've watched quite a few of Kawasaki's films, and while not all of them hit as hard as his best ones, like Executive Koala, I do still think they're all interesting. What distinguishes these movies is Kawasaki's unwavering commitment to the bit, which extends across the board to everybody else involved, too: no matter how goofy the premise is, all of this is always played completely straight.

The Calamari Wrestler is about a man who becomes a squid. As the title implies, the film is set within the world of pro wrestling, and the squid in question is the reincarnated form of famous wrestler Kanichi Iwata, who was forced to retire at the height of his popularity by a terminal illness and returned as a squid. We meet him when he ambushes another wrestler, Koji Taguchi, poised to himself become the top wrestler in Japan, and absolutely smites him. Though it isn't an official match, Taguchi obsesses over this loss and demands to face up against Iwata fair and square.

Outside of the obvious weirdness of having the antagonist of the film be a squid (with the protagonist eventually becoming an octopus - more on that in a minute), this is basically a normal movie. Even boring. The way it manages to subvert your expectations at every turn is what makes it. If you took all the seafood out, this would be an average love story set against a pro wrestling backdrop and I would probably not care for it in the slightest. But through the addition of a wild card element - the squid - Kawasaki produces something that makes us pay attention not just to the squid itself but to the larger narrative. It makes us think more about how other stories that follow the same beats but lack squid function.

What I thought was unusual about all of this is that there's a fluidity between squid and human that essentially implies that being a squid might be better than being a human, at least if you want to be a wrestler. Iwata was only able to reincarnate as a squid under the strict supervision of an elder monk and his team of younger monks, and he can maintain squid form so long as he resists his earthly desires. He's fully able to turn back to a human - but it's an accidental thing, and framed as a mistake; when he meets his girlfriend and they get down and dirty, he returns to being a human. Suppressing desire and connection to the material realm is what grants him squidhood. The same thing eventually happens to his opponent, Taguchi: through training and self-denial, he is able to become an octopus and fight Iwata on even ground.

Topping all of this off is some seriously awesome creature design and suit acting. I was wowed by the squid suit: it's simple, just a big squid with legs and wrestling boots, but the way its face is articulated gives it a surprising level of expressiveness. Instead of having a mouth that moves when he talks, the squid has articulated eyelids, which on paper sounds weird, but when you watch it in action, it just works really well. The top of the suit also has some mobility around the brow area, so the squid can actually change his facial expressions and convey emotion. Neither of the other suits have this level of articulation.

I'm kind of conflicted about what rating to give this, because on the one hand as a love story and a story about pro wrestling - something I could not care less about, personally - this is a little boring. The only thing it's got going for it is giant seafood, but boy, what a thing that is. This kind of movie will probably only appeal to a narrow subset of the populace, and even then, I don't see it being anybody's favorite thing ever in the world. But it is pretty good.

I don't know where else to put this, but in researching this movie on Japanese Wikipedia, I found out that production was supervised by none other than Akio Jissōji. Yes, that Akio Jissōji. This Transient Life Akio Jissōji. Overseeing a movie about a wrestling squid.

ESPY (1974)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

94 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Another incredibly good international tagline: "PARANORMALISTS CRUSH A STUPENDOUS PLOT TO DESTROY MANKIND".

I don't know why I held off on watching this for so long. I mean, it should have bothered me a lot more that there was a tokusatsu movie directed by Jun Fukuda that I was basically ignoring. (There's a lot of his other non-toku movies that I desperately need to see, but I digress.) It may have been the length; 95 minutes is just about my threshold for how long I can watch something without falling asleep. But it was Fukuda's birthday recently, so I decided to give this a watch.

The film centers around an organization made up of five people with strong psychic and telekinetic abilities who use their powers to fight crime. You're kind of dropped in the middle of the action; the captain of the organization (played by Yūzō Kayama, who looks faintly out-of-place in a sci-fi movie) recruits their fifth and newest member, Miki, after he uses his powers to avoid wrecking his race car, and from then on stuff just happens, there's not a ton of backstory. I've read at least one review referring to Miki as an "audience surrogate" and I think that's an interesting way to put it. Miki is basically only there as a way to introduce the concept of the ESPY group in a manner that feels like you're approaching it from the outside, rather than being confronted with confusing internal politics right away.

The group takes on their toughest challenge yet: foiling an assassination plot that has so far claimed the lives of several important politicos already. Their main objective is to stop the prime minister of Baltonia, a fake eastern-European country, from being assassinated. The actual story is very thin on the ground, but it's padded out to a(n arguably overlong) 94 minutes with no shortage of action scenes, location-hopping, psychic fights, regular fights, and a cute dog.

I watch a lot of sentai and one thing that's essentially a constant is that the villains are always more interesting than the good guys. Maybe this is just my bias as a big fan of Tomisaburō Wakayama speaking, but I think that's the case with ESPY too. Wakayama plays a mysterious character named Urlov, head of a rival organization just referred to as "enemies", and I wish more time had been spent on his opaque and sinister motives than on... whatever else this movie was doing in the meantime. At his death scene during the climax of the film, the plot decides to get a little freaky with it and suggest - basically imply, really - that Urlov either was or was possessed by some kind of extraterrestrial force, which was the reason behind his animosity towards all of humankind. Urlov the human tells a story about watching his father, a psychic, be imprisoned and eventually executed for no actual reason, and it's easy to imagine that maybe this is where that possessing force came in: he struck a bargain with something that gave him immense psychic power, because the two of them had the same grudge against humans. But this is total speculation based on about five minutes of film. Wakayama's compelling performance gave me more to think about than the actual psychic stuff.

This feels like a movie that a lot of people would probably just be watching for the actors who are in it. It's a who's-who of charismatic Showa guys; Kayama is the captain, as I said, and he's joined by Hiroshi Fujioka, Goro Mutsumi, and Masao Kusakari, who I'm really not familiar with (I think the only thing I've ever seen him in was a movie called Invitation of Lust, but we're not going to get into that here). The team's token female member is played by Kaoru Yumi, and her character predictably gets the shaft as the sole woman in the film.

All in all, it's just kind of an odd thing. It reminds me really strongly of Dengeki!!! Strada-5: team of people with special abilities who fight crime, all of them men except for one woman, captain played by a guy who was really famous 10-15 years ago and doesn't usually do tokusatsu stuff. The whole affair has more of a "TV series" vibe than anything. The script apparently existed as far back as 1966, but the boom in popularity of psychic media due to Uri Geller (ugh) was the impetus for finally getting it made in the '70s. Shooting took a month, which... yeah, it feels like a movie that was shot in a month. It's fun, but I still like Fukuda's Godzilla movies much, much better. There's a sense of energy and youthfulness to those that I personally felt was absent in ESPY when compared to things like Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and Son of Godzilla, although that could be because those films were openly aimed at children. Either way, I still think Fukuda's directorial style is better suited to the aesthetic of the 1960s.

As a final note, Toho Kingdom cites a quote from Fukuda where he says he was disappointed that audiences weren't as surprised by Fujioka's teleportation scene as he'd hoped. I gotta say I was NOT part of the crowd who wasn't phased by that. All the other business happening in this movie and I still didn't expect somebody to straight up teleport.

The Manster (1959)

directed by George P. Breakston, Kenneth G. Crane

United States/Japan

72 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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TEMPLE PRIEST SLAIN BY FIEND!

I had not heard of this until I read about it in Stuart Galbraith's Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo!, and I was intrigued because American sci-fi/horror movies from the '50s and Japanese monster movies are basically my two favorite things. How could a movie that combines the two exist without being more widely known?

This was a Japanese-American co-production, shot in Japan, and actually released a full three years earlier there than it was in the States. Reception seems to have been lukewarm at the time of release, and continues to be lukewarm today; for once, I'm not going to be a dissenting voice about that. This isn't a spectacular movie. It's fun, but no great shakes, especially if you've already seen a lot from either contributing country's monster film back catalogue. I looked into director Breakston's previous works, and... I'm not going to be exploring him any further, to say the least. The other guy was at least partially to blame for the Americanized version of Half Human so he's verboten too as far as I'm concerned.

The main character of the film is a foreign correspondent, Larry Stanford, working in Tokyo but about to return to the US. His last job is to interview a scientist named Dr. Suzuki in his lab way up in the mountains (something about the aesthetic of a hidden laboratory in such a rural setting was really cool to me), but once he gets there, Suzuki starts asking him some strange questions... questions, say, that one might ask if one was planning to turn one's conversational partner into a manster. The scientist drugs our hapless protagonist and injects him with a mystery solution that slowly but surely starts mutating him into something more than human. We see the previous results of whatever was in that needle in the form of Suzuki's wife and son, both locked up in his basement after their transformation into terrible, incoherent creatures. Why exactly Stanford was meant to turn out better than the previous two attempts is not entirely clear to me, but by the end Suzuki realizes his mistake.

It's pretty standard schlocky fare. The main problem I had with this was that it's got too much "man" and not enough "-ster". Once Stanford's transformation ramps up, things start getting interesting, but for a 72-minute movie, there's a lot of time spent on Stanford's infidelities and other human woes. I'm also not sure if his sudden turn towards drink and women when he'd previously described himself as a "good boy" was some kind of side-effect of the mystery serum, but we spend a good deal of time watching this guy running himself into the ground before we get to see any monster stuff. In my opinion, this movie picks up once more characters enter the scene: various policemen, Stanford's boss, his wife, and numerous eyewitnesses and unfortunate victims serve to flesh out what had, until then, been a pretty boring cast. It's also fun to see Tetsu Nakamura, who I recognized as one of the goons from Mothra, in a substantial, non-goon role, but he's not in it enough to really carry the film; the task is instead allotted to our somewhat less-than-capable protagonist.

Special effects were handled by Shinpei Takagi, which is... weird, considering this is the only time in his entire career that he did special effects (he was an actor, and also played the doomed priest in this film). The transformation sequence is very choppy and jumps jarringly from one stage to the next; technology at the time was, of course, not at a point where a true, real-time transformation could be shown, but I still feel like there could have been some in-between with regards to how quickly Stanford starts mutating. I will say one of the best scenes in the whole film is when Stanford, messy drunk and alone, tears off his shirt to reveal a fully-formed eye on his shoulder. That's a kind of gross that I wasn't expecting from this. Otherwise, the effects are alright. If I could have found a print of this in better than total garbage quality, I might have appreciated them more.

Recommended mostly for monster movie fans and dedicated ones at that.

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

directed by Roger Corman

USA/UK

90 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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(This review was written in late summer of 2021.)

When I was a kid, I had a book with a few illustrated and abridged versions of popular Edgar Allan Poe stories. Unfortunately I don't remember the publisher or the illustrator, but what has stuck with me all these years is its version of Masque of the Red Death. I was probably too young to be reading something like that, or at least too young to be giving it as much thought as I did, but the climax of the story was rendered as horrendously macabre in the book's art style, and I still remember the masked figure in red stalking through the halls trailing an actual, physical red wake. I remember the clock chiming midnight, the figures of the revelers twisted and diseased, the slow progression through each colored room. I remember a feeling of weighty silence even though it was only images on a page. I probably like that artwork better than I like Poe's original story, and because of it, Red Death has remained my favorite of his.

This movie is, of course, not that. My apologies for going on, but I wanted to mention that to give an idea of the impression that Masque of the Red Death made on me at a very young age. I wish I didn't have to ever say this, but the story itself is extremely relevant right now: a cruel, uncaring ruler holed up in his castle with a select few of the super-rich while the poor die in droves right outside the gates. It's the perfect pandemic movie, and I doubt anybody involved in its production could ever have imagined it would be so relevant. I think almost all of the top reviews of it on Letterboxd right now are covid jokes. That says something about where peoples' minds are when they watch a movie about rich people hoarding power in the middle of a pandemic. Of course, the idea of the rich isolating themselves from the poor is not new, but the combination of it and a contagious disease (even if said disease is more metaphor than anything) hits particularly hard right now.

Vincent Price as Prince Prospero is the obvious centerpiece of this whole film, and even his signature slight hamminess can't hide the fact that the character he plays is just a hideous human being with no redeeming qualities. His cruelty is almost cartoonish, but almost is the key word there - neither the script nor Price's performance ever tip the scales so much that he becomes entirely unbelievable as a villain. Maybe this is an effect of the film's aforementioned current relevance, but even though he does ridiculous things, like command people to crawl around on the ground doing various animal impressions, Prospero is never more funny than he is despicable. And it's also fairly harrowing to watch Francesca's slow descent into acceptance of her fate, being dragged along like a plaything with no possible chance of escape until she doesn't even want to escape anymore. A lot of the acting is not up to today's standards, and seeing everyone pull off these performances while dressed in dollar store medieval chic takes a little away from it, but Francesca's abduction and captivity remain upsetting nevertheless.

Something I'm really interested in that has no real relevance to the actual quality of this film is the ending, when figures implied to be personifications of different plagues show up, but they are also, curiously, coded to the colors of Prospero's indulgent colored rooms that he has for no reason other than to show off his wealth. (It would of course be a little harder and more expensive to assemble such rooms when colors and dyes weren't as easy to come by as going to Home Depot with some paint swatches.) There's something I find compelling about that. When Prospero constructed the rooms, was he driven, unknowingly, by the invisible hand of each specter of disease? Was something - fate, or possibly God - guiding him to create physical reminders of his own mortality? And would he have been able to recognize that reminder of his mortality if he were not fooled by his own riches and power into believing he was functionally immortal? Those rooms always gave me an uneasy feeling, even when I was reading the book as a kid, and I've never been able to figure out why.

I don't have much else to say about this. It's not the best movie I've ever seen, but the performances and the symbolism and everything else about it, especially the camerawork by Nicolas Roeg of all people, make it shine brighter. I just can't stop thinking about how this is a movie that doesn't feel like it should be this depressing or leave me as reflective about real life as it does. It's too gothic and has too much grandeur for that. Plus, it's too cheesy - Vincent Price shouldn't give me a sense of ennui, and yet. This should remain a grotesque but fictional story, and instead we're all living in it and we don't even get to wear cool masks.

The Ghost of the Hunchback (1965)

directed by Hajime Sato

Japan

81 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This comes to us from Hajime Sato, director of such bangers as Goke, Bodysnatcher from Hell, the live-action Golden Bat adaptation, Terror Beneath the Sea (which I'm the only fan of), and at least some of the Captain Ultra TV series. Until relatively recently it was apparently considered lost media, or at least the original Japanese audio track was: It survived via Italian dubs, but became obscure in Japan. It's a bit of an odd movie, not quite conforming to the flow of a typical haunted house movie in some ways, but in other ways laying on the haunted house tropes as thick as it possibly can.

The film begins with a woman waking from a dream of her husband's death only to immediately receive news that her husband really did die. From minute one, this movie is jam-packed with gothicness: Darkened windows show us trees twisting and blowing in the wind and rain, crows lurk in the shadows, blood drips everywhere, the very atmosphere seems thick with dread. The title card is played over a half-rotten skeleton that gets shoved in your face, as if you couldn't already tell what kind of a movie you were in for. That the film is in black-and-white adds to this sense of ominousness; even when characters are outside in the woods in the middle of the day, it still feels foreboding. A lawyer arrives to inform the widow, Yoshie, that her husband has left her the key to a rambling old villa, and the approach to the house is as doom-laden as any classic Hollywood gothic has ever been. This is an interesting example of a "house as character" film, wherein the location the human characters are in is as important to the story as the human characters themselves.

Several people eventually end up staying at the villa, including the widowed Yoshie, her father-in-law, the lawyer, and so many others that I had trouble keeping their roles straight in my brain. The house is cared for by a hunchbacked servant, played to pitch-perfection by Kō Nishimura, who is mostly why I wanted to watch this. I know him better from his jidaigeki roles, but as shown in such films as The Living Skeleton, he also plays a really, really good cartoonishly evil bad guy. We're not quite sure what to make of his character in this film at first; he's somewhat taciturn, but doesn't seem threatening apart from having a sinister appearance. I am of course not very fond of this portrayal of physical difference as inherently suspicious, and I only use the original title over the international one ("House of Terrors") because it is a more direct translation. It becomes apparent later in the film that it is necessary to have Nishimura's character look in some way different from his deceased twin brother, but there's plenty of ways that could have been achieved without resorting to a tired, ableist trope. But I digress: Again, Nishimura plays the role really well. And he's part of a slew of classic horror tropes that this movie is full of, although most of them are less offensive than the perennial suspicious hunchback.

Very early on in the film somebody points out that the angles of the house are out of true, and posits that people have been driven mad in similar houses because their subconscious notices something is wrong without them ever fully realizing what it is. I found this interesting because it's brought up once and then never amounts to anything, which is contrary to the rhythm of haunted house movies, where if a logical explanation such as that is ever going to be brought up, it's usually reserved until the very end of the film, when it neatly wraps everything up, not the beginning. And it proves to be wrong, anyway: This house is indeed super haunted, there may be problems with the beams or the foundation, but they're not what's making its residents see ghosts and hear mysterious voices.

Another interesting thing is that for all of its reliance on established ways of creating a spooooky, gothic atmosphere, there's not much that happens in the house that's identifiable as a classic signifier of horror. No creepy skeletons, no pouncing bats (lots of crows, though), no wraiths in the shadows, no weird lab in the basement. The Ghost of the Hunchback uses horror language to deliver a story without any actual already-established horror imagery. The real story of what's happening in the house is very original to this film, a sordid tale involving a man witnessing the death of the woman he loves at the hands of the army and vowing revenge from beyond the grave for what they did to her and eventually to him as well. I cannot help but wonder if the extremely negative portrayal of the military, along with several direct mentions of one of the characters having performed vivisections on Chinese prisoners during the war, is why this movie has fallen into obscurity.

Unfortunately the movie kind of falls off a cliff for the last 20 minutes. It's such a short movie to begin with, and once it gets about an hour in and most of the backstory is finally revealed, it spends the rest of its runtime having the hunchback rip a bunch of women's clothes off and run around the house doing nefarious things. It's actually kind of jarring how much the tone changes from something that had up to then been engaging and going in an intriguing direction to "oh, this is one of those movies where somebody rips a bunch of women's clothes off". Thankfully that stuff is reserved until the end so you get a lot of genuinely ominous, creepy fun beforehand, including some kills that are genuinely a lot more violent than I expected.

Deadman Inferno (2015)

directed by Hiroshi Shinagawa

Japan

108 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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If you're going to watch a "weird things happen to yakuza" movie, you can't do much better than Takashi Miike's Yakuza Apocalypse (except maybe with Takashi Miike's Gozu). That being said, if you're not looking for a cinematic masterpiece such as those and are content with a mid-tier zombie movie that will deliver the guts and nastiness you expect and not much else, Deadman Inferno is certainly not your worst choice, especially in the final act when it becomes almost an entirely different film in terms of quality and tone. I will be discussing spoilers towards the end of this review, but just in the form of non-main-character deaths.

The film begins a decade before any zombie business ever gets going, but with no less blood, as two yakuza groups exchange gunfire that ends in basically one entire side's death and the lasting injury of the group's leader. It's interesting that the movie decides to spend its set-up time on this instead of any kind of zombie lore; the zombies in this movie are generic creatures, not much depth to them, no explanation afforded aside from the conjecture of one character (more on that later). The film then skips ahead ten years to when the leader of the murdered group's close friend and non-blood brother is about to be released from jail. He has a daughter whose life he's been gone for much of, and she's a major player in the film herself. Her anxiety over her father's upcoming release date and not wanting to see him again leads her to run away from home with a friend, eventually ending up on Zeni Island, which is where the real action starts.

For a movie that's basically "yakuza vs zombies", the yakuza are the least interesting characters here. I much preferred watching the rest of the cast fight for survival rather than the leader and his brother, who were meant to kind of be the main characters. I think this is because of a crucial stumbling block that this movie keeps hitting: Parts of it are ostensibly meant to be funny, but it doesn't ever feel like it commits enough to the bit, either when it's meant to be funny or when it's meant to be serious. The movie is too middle-of-the-road for the jokes to work - the yakuza are neither treated with 100% drama and profundity, nor are they portrayed as goofy and weird, so the end result is just these stock video-game-character-feeling guys. The non-humorous parts of the film largely feel like it's going through the motions, being perfunctorily sad or tragic, but never doing anything original enough to complement its attempts at humor. This is all, as I mentioned, up until the ending. The last half an hour or so of this could have been made by a whole different director.

(There's also the issue that a lot of the jokes just aren't funny - there's a good helping of rape jokes in the form of one of the rival yakuza who is presented as a slow-witted oaf who can't control himself around women, which is supposed to be funny somehow. And, while they fortunately do remain fully dressed and non-panty-shotted, the leader's daughter and her friend are repeatedly referred to as "hot schoolgirls".)

Once everybody gets onto the island, a cast of characters is assembled that includes a bunch of yakuza, the two girls, a kind of lecherous doctor and his exes (zombies), the world's least responsible cop, his friend who believes he's on candid camera for most of the film, and of course the entire island's population, who have become zombies. The origin of the zombies is, as I said, not delved into that much, but the doctor is genre savvy, and quickly determines that, basing his observations off of the zombie movie canon, these are the runner-type zombies, and their vector of infection is likely an already-existing virus that was mutated by the introduction of a synthetic drug. (He's better at zombie analysis than he seems to be at practicing medicine, also he looks, like, 22.) This is a zombie movie that absolutely acknowledges that it's a zombie movie and has the characters fully aware that they are in a zombie-apocalypse scenario, which I personally prefer over something where people are running around panicking and inventing non-zombie-related names for the creatures, like "The Infected". No frills, no pretensions, this is a zombie flick.

The film moves at a steady pace until the final half-hour. That's when the main cast starts dying. It's like at the same time everybody who isn't already a zombie has a revelation about themselves and their lives where they realize that the zombies are a form of deliverance. Everybody in this is more or less either a bad person trying to go straight or an unremorseful criminal, and for their own personal reasons, past a certain point, people start choosing the zombies rather than living with themselves. And it's... kind of glorious. It's kind of cathartic. I particularly love when the doctor realizes both his exes are there, in zombie form, and just kind of goes "welp" and decides there's nothing he'd rather do than die at the hands of two women he at one point loved. There's some hidden magic going on on the part of the narrative that stops the viewer from going "What are you people doing?! Why aren't you fighting?!" It's not that the zombies are particularly tough to beat, although they are fast. The characters are all adequately equipped and there's a boat involved and everybody could probably have held out a little longer if they'd really wanted to. But they don't want to. They realize that they're so far gone, for reasons either personal or external, that they don't want to go back to being who they used to be. So they choose being a zombie. I'm drawing a comparison here that takes some serious mental footwork, but this honestly calls back to 1963's Matango and its question of whether or not, in a society that is rapidly decaying and becoming untenable, it might be better to voluntarily become something inhuman than cling to a humanity that you will inevitably lose.

So this is mostly worth watching for the ending. It's not all submitting to the bloody claws of fate, a lot of characters do fight back and they fight back magnificently, and some do survive, but it's not the ones you expect to survive. Also, for what it's worth, even though this is not a scary movie at all (it's just a bit gory), I went to bed right after and had one of the most disturbing nightmares of my entire life.

Gorgo (1961)

directed by Eugène Lourié

Ireland, UK, USA

78 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I wasn't sure if I wanted to review this as part of KaiJune '23, because I am a little bit of a stickler about not calling just any old giant monster who isn't from Japanese media a "kaiju" as an English-speaking writer. I don't know what the general consensus is about that, but it strikes me as a little weird - sure, Gorgo is technically a kaiju, but by the same token I could say a horse is technically an "uma", or a crab is technically a "kani". But this did get a near-simultaneous release in Japan (a poster for your delectation), and Gorgo himself very much feels like part of the canon that includes other characters who can unequivocally be called kaiju, so I think he does qualify at least in an honorary sense. The first time I reviewed this I called it a "k-Eire-ju" movie. I'm sticking with that.

As has been noted, the plot of Gappa: The Triphibian Monster is pretty similar to the plot of this movie, with some differences. A small, fictional Irish island is devastated by a sudden storm at the same time as an underwater treasure hoard is discovered, and the continued searching for more treasure eventually brings divers into contact with a strange, prehistoric-looking animal: Gorgo. Just like how they comb the sea floor for treasure to be made into a profit, the two main characters quickly realize that they could make a lot of money off of exhibiting Gorgo and charging admission. He's captured, shipped off to London where he attracts massive crowds, and everybody is making money hand over fist - but at what cost, we wonder?

Like Gappa, this is a movie where all of the main characters are kind of terrible people. Gappa is different in that some of the characters are nice about it and we're not supposed to hate them, but all of the adults in Gorgo have nothing but money in mind. I guess not all of them, really; the two main guys are warned by everybody around them, who have a very sensible mindset of "What is wrong with you? You have no idea what this creature is and you just want to stick it in a cage and charge money for people to gawk at it?" And much like Gappa, the only person with any sense is a child, in this case a little boy with no parents who helps out an archaeologist living on the island (which, by the way, is called Nara, but, you know, not that Nara). I could have been missing something but I don't think the film's tagline - something to do with "Only a child knows his secret!!!" - is entirely accurate to what's shown in the film; the boy is clearly more savvy than everybody else, but I don't think he or anyone ever gives a clear-cut explanation of Gorgo's "secret" beyond just "it isn't right to be parading around an animal like this".

I'm really fond of the Gorgo and Ogra (Gorgo's helicopter mom) suits. Mick Dillon is listed as the suit actor for both of them, but evidently there may have been other suit actors who did not get credit: Wikizilla lists them as "likely" being David Wilding, Peter Brace and Peter Perkings. The creatures do have a very classic kaiju look about them: very reptilian, dinosaurian, big hands, big teeth, you know the deal. The elephant roar is reminiscent of Titanosaurus, but that would not come about until over a decade later. The miniatures are also nothing to sneeze at, and while very obvious to modern viewers, neither is the repeated use of optical effects to edit people into any given backdrop. It's a very well-made movie for its time.

Behind-the-scenes, a lot was apparently cut from this, and it sounds like it was mostly for the good. 78 minutes is a perfect running time for this and it allows for the philosophical aspects of the story (such as they are) to be focused on after we're introduced to Gorgo and his mom. There's an awkwardly shoehorned-in news reporter at the end of the film who kind of does some Takashi Shimura-ing, telling us what folly it is to believe we're the dominant species, warning us away from our disrespect of nature, etc. I think this would have been more potent if it had been a character we'd seen already doing this monologue instead of just a random guy, but it still mostly works. The destruction that Ogra visits upon London in search of her child is truly at a devastating scale - our newsman says that it's worse than it ever was during the Blitz, and the effects are remarkably good at conveying a city being almost completely torn to shreds. Like most kaiju, Ogra isn't deliberately killing people, she's just mad and looking for her kid, and her kid happens to be in the middle of an extremely populated area. And whose fault is that? Ours.

So it's easy to look at this as kind of a goofy artifact of the '60s, and in a lot of ways it really is, but it's not without its message, even if said message feels a little tacked-on. Notably, Lourié wasn't originally going to include the city destruction scenes, which provides for an interesting thought about what could have been: Would he have gone in an even more philosophical direction, dealing with what the two monsters represent in the imaginary instead of in physical space? Or would he have replaced the destruction with something worse, possibly a goofy romance subplot like a lot of mid-20th-century monster movies have? He did self-edit a version of this film in the 1980s to conform more closely to his original plan for it, but this was never shown to the public, so we will never know what it could have been like. Fortunately, though, the movie we do have is just fine by me.