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?

The Giant Claw (1957)

directed by Fred F. Sears

USA

74 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Whew, it's been a while. I honestly didn't intend to disappear for so long, but I do have a (semi-)valid excuse this time, because I've been writing a book.¹ I don't know what to do with it, and it may never get read by anyone other than me, but it is a book, and I am writing it.

To me The Giant Claw, despite its reputation as a classic silly B-movie, is as serious as you choose to make it. Art is never created in a vacuum, and most of the really great science fiction pictures of the 1950s - and I'm not necessarily just counting American ones in this, though they are some of the most reactionary - stem from new fears born out of the wake of the second World War. The people who made The Giant Claw were not that far removed from a time when travel by airplane was just not a thing at all. These were people for whom the use of aircraft during war for the first time in human history was within living memory - for their parents, certainly, if not for themselves.

The idea that the sky isn't safe anymore, that an unknown enemy could attack from above at any minute and target not just indiscriminately but with precision, swooping down to snatch up innocent American teenagers on a joyride, or trains carrying precious raw materials to build up our booming postwar economy - that is a fear that really comes to light only in the first half of the twentieth century. And the fact that the terror-bird in The Giant Claw can only be stopped when the Americans invent a bigger, scarier, more scientific weapon than they ever have before - aided by a vaguely German scientist - is also a distinctly postwar convention.

So, you have to be aware of cultural context when you watch The Giant Claw, but also, yeah, the monster is very much just a giant turkey from space that's made of antimatter. That is absolutely what it is.

The whole "antimatter" thing felt completely ridiculous to me when it was first introduced by our scientist du jour, but after I had sat with it for a minute I found that I kind of liked it. I'm sure it was a product of the writers going "uh, how do we make it so just firing a bunch of rockets at the bird doesn't kill it and end the movie within 30 minutes", but it effectively takes an otherwise laughable monster and elevates it to an almost Lovecraftian level. It's not really a bird, it's something that looks like a bird; it comes from somewhere beyond our comprehension, and while we may find it analogous to things we have on Earth, under a microscope it is something even our most advanced scientific equipment cannot make sense of. I wish the movie had spent more time on this aspect of the monster, because it takes such pains to drive home the point that this bird is actually some kind of extraterrestrial freak of nature, but then immediately goes back to treating it like a big huge stupid bird.

I thought the practical effects were - and I will get pelted with eggs for this - pretty great. I really liked the bird. I've expounded before on how I much prefer monster movies to show their monster sparingly, since what you imagine is always scarier than what even the best special-effects team could show you, but sometimes it is better to have an actual physical thing that you can look at. And for what it's worth, they do a good job of it. They do. That awful scene where Mr. and Mrs. Snappy Dialogue and their friend French Canadian Stereotype are shooting at the bird's egg is a particularly strong example of this - the bird's face looks very lifelike; its nostrils move and its eyes roll, it feels like an animate creature.

I'm not saying this isn't a silly B-movie, I'm just saying that every silly B-movie has something behind it that's worth considering for longer than it takes to have a laff. Giving some thought to the intent and motive of the human artists who produced atomic-age B-movies can tell us a lot about why our society is the way it is right now. I'm afraid that AI art is going to make it even more difficult to get people to understand how important it is to study the meaning of a film and where it comes from and what it's trying to say. If we lose that kind of media literacy, we lose the ability to learn how we got here.

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1 I promise it's just a fiction book and not a biography.

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956)

directed by Fred F. Sears

USA

83 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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As a fan of practical effects, it pains me to admit that I have little experience with Ray Harryhausen. I've seen his work in gifs and through its influence on the tokusatsu films and television that I love, but aside from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms - which I adored - I've hardly ever sat down and watched any movies he was involved in. I'm working on fixing that.

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is one of those movies that, after a point, I was mostly watching for the effects, because the plot had gone off in directions I found unfavorable. The movie started out strong: Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor play off of each other fairly well, and that remains consistent through the whole film - the two of them, though not necessarily rife with chemistry, did convince me that their characters were in love with each other, and while the social climate of the time meant that Carol was portrayed as kind of second fiddle to her manly army man husband, she did at least feel like she mattered. (It's my blog and I can write as many run-on sentences as I like.)

But the opening scene also introduced something that became a problem throughout the film, which is that the characters occasionally reacted to things in ways that I just had trouble seeing the logic of. The couple witnesses a flying saucer looming enormously over their car as they drive through the desert, and yet they convince themselves so thoroughly that they didn't actually see it - and this despite the film's opening narration making it explicitly clear that UFO sightings are on the rise - that it takes a total accident (Russell having left a tape recorder running and capturing the sound of the UFO) for them to realize they did really see a UFO. That just felt kind of ridiculous to me. That and a lot of the other decisions people make could be easily explained by saying that nobody really would know how to react to a UFO, but again: this movie takes place in a time when everybody has been seeing UFOs.

The whole affair is in general a very Us vs. Them story about humankind taking back what we believe to be rightfully ours from a horde of literally faceless Others bent on invading us, and all the unfortunate moral implications that entails. In the first UFO landing scene, with no provocation whatever, the U.S. Army begins shooting at the aliens who emerge from the ship, killing one of them immediately. The aliens then retaliate, using far superior technology to not just kill the Army forces but totally disintegrate them - justification #1, "They have scarier weapons than us, so we had to!". This is fairly par for the course for a movie of this kind, but what really got me was that afterward it feels like the blame for this gets pinned on the aliens. We learn that they had tried to communicate with us peacefully prior to the landing but did not account for (or assumed that we would account for) a fundamental difference in perception of time, which rendered their message unintelligible. So the movie ostensibly frames the Army's violent reaction as "Oh, no! We didn't listen, so we reacted on instinct!" but what underlies that is actually "We didn't listen, but it was because they didn't make a good enough effort to convey their message, so our violence was still justified".

It's gross, man, I don't know what else to say.

But what isn't gross is the practical effects. It's a little odd seeing Harryhausen do UFOs - from what I've seen he seems to be known more for animating living creatures, skeletons and Gorgons and dinosaurs and whatnot, but as is very clear when you watch this movie, he also knocks it out of the park with his UFO effects too. There are one or two green-screen shots that come off a little awkward, but on the whole the compositing is actually done remarkably well for the time, and mostly you can't even tell when the UFOs are superimposed onto the scenery. The perspective is also really interesting, because I see a lot of sci-fi movies show UFOs either super far away or extremely close (usually using 1:1 scale models of a section of the ship for the actors to interact with), but Earth vs. the Flying Saucers gives us a lot of shots where the UFOs are so low to the ground as to be nearly on top of us, or aerial shots from either near or above the UFO's level, and the effect is really visually striking. It honestly reminded me of a lot of shots from Nope.

I also enjoyed the aliens themselves. They do look very goofy, but something about it works. It somehow fits that they look so awkward, lumbering around in their bulky suits (which we are told only weigh a few ounces, in reality). A lot of tokusatsu movies also feature aliens who are physically unassuming, or even weak and fragile, but possess powerful technology. I can see a lot of this movie's influence on Japanese cinema of the time - the interior shots of the spaceship particularly remind me of the Gamera series' spaceship interiors.

So, this turned out to be a very lengthy review of a movie where my opinion is basically "Nice effects, too much chest-beating". Nothing yucked me out in this vein more than the ending scene, featuring a white, able-bodied, heterosexual American couple frolicking on the beach and declaring the planet to be theirs. I can't really call this movie out more so than any other given atomic-age sci-fi movie, though, considering that pretty much all of them are like this. And at least this one has cool practical effects.

The Green Slime (1968)

directed by Kinji Fukasaku, Katsuhiko Taguchi

Japan, USA

90 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Is it just something in your head?? Will you believe it when you're DEAD??? GREEEN SLIIIME!!!

I think I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've rewatched a movie and had my opinion of it change as much as it did when I watched Green Slime for the second time last night. What I remembered watching three or so years back was a movie with fun SFX that was bogged down by a love triangle subplot that the Japanese cut of the film had the right idea in shortening. What I watched last night, though, was a well-paced, rollicking good time, with characters who aren't actually that annoying if you can make peace with the fact that their roles are more or less perfunctory.

I am going to skip right into talking about the film's visual effects, because they are frankly pretty stupendous. Especially its color palette. It's so intense and in-your-face that it almost shouldn't work: the reds aren't just red, they're the deepest, bloodiest, almost glowing scarlet that you've ever seen; the greens aren't just green, they're visceral, chlorophyllic, vegetal. The choice to contrast the two and have the rogue planetoid that the green slime is native to be so pervasively red is really striking. For about the first half-hour of Green Slime, the foremost thought on my mind was The Color out of Space. Film adaptations of the story seem to unanimously agree that the titular color should be visually depicted as a kind of violet-reddish-purple, but to me, no movie has ever (unintentionally) captured what I think the color should look like better than Green Slime. Although it's dated, the film does an excellent job at making the alien planet look like how an alien planet in a sci-fi movie should: not realistic, but visually arresting.

It's not just the slime and the alien planet, either: the Gamma-III space station is also a masterpiece of late-1960s interior design, with many set-pieces that look to have been fully ornamental. It reminded me of spaceships in the Gamera series, how they look absolutely ridiculous but pleasing to the eye, like little art sculptures flying around in space. Even the Gamma-III crew compliments the film's overall aesthetic with their understated uniforms, in a narrow selection of solid, off-primary colors, and the way the film stock captures their hair color and complexion.

And then there's these weird little shuffling one-eyed alien babies who scream and wave their arms around all the time. You can't overlook how inherently ridiculous the Green Slime are (it does seem to be plural; the aliens are never given a name in-universe and the tagline announces that "the Green Slime are coming"), and maybe that's okay. Their silliness feels right at home with how visually elaborate everything else about this movie is. That there are so many of them has always been interesting to me: usually a kaiju movie will have one suit and perhaps a maquette version and/or a cruddier alternate suit for use in underwater scenes, but there's a whole plethora of these guys just kicking it on the space station, traveling everywhere in small herds like schoolchildren crossing the street. They're honestly really cute. I felt bad every time one of them got poked in the eye, which happens much more often than you might think. I guess when your head consists almost entirely of eye, it makes for an easy target.

The movie is, as I said, much better-paced than I remembered it being. It introduces us to the slime fairly quickly, and once the slime is loose on the spaceship, the action pretty much never stops until the end credits roll. If there's anything I mildly dislike about this, it is that love triangle. Dr. Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi) is unfortunate enough to be aboard the station with both her fiancé and her former lover, who are intent on making their mutual involvement with her a big deal while she, meanwhile, seems pretty much fine with it and just wants to do her job. It is frustrating to watch Dr. Benson repeatedly be the voice of reason, only to have her level-headed suggestions and observations met with either of the two male leads going "No, I'm gonna do something really stupid instead".

But, all in all, it's great stuff. At a tight 90 minutes, I no longer feel like the Japanese cut, with its lopped-off runtime, is the superior one. It may not be the most cerebral science fiction out there, but it knows what it's doing and the people making it were at the top of their game in terms of visual effects. Weird that this was directed by the same guy who did Cops vs. Thugs, but that's how it is sometimes.

Elves (1989)

directed by Jeffrey Mandel

USA

89 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trigger warning for animal cruelty.

Mickey 17 (2025)

directed by Bong Joon-Ho

USA, UK

137 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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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.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

directed by Roy William Neill

USA

74 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Some friends took me into Atlanta to catch the afternoon Silver Scream Spookshow presentation of this film last weekend, which was an all-around great time. The danger with seeing a movie in a theater is that I usually don't have my brain powered up enough to review it since I'm more focused on the overall experience of being in a theater; doubly so if I just watched a 30-minute live stage show with puppetry and antics and skits and whatnot. But Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man kind of crept up on me, so I want to get some thoughts about it down in writing.

(Also please note that I basically have never watched a Universal monster movie so I might say some things here that would be "Well, yeah, duh" territory to anyone who has.)

The thing that really struck me about this movie was the incredibly sympathetic portrayal of the Wolf Man. At the beginning of the film he is dug up from his grave by tomb robbers looking for fresh-ish corpses with money on them, and despite having "died" four years ago, the man who in life was known as Larry Talbot somehow remains alive - very much against his will. Talbot is immediately, horrifyingly aware of his situation - of his status of a lycanthrope - but no one around him will take him seriously. There is something so deeply tragic about seeing Talbot plead, essentially, "I have no control over my own actions, when the full moon strikes I am a passenger in my own body, I am committing acts that are reprehensible to me and I desperately need to die because there is no other way for me to stop myself" and having no one listen to him.

The practical effects makeup here is obviously ahead of its time and an enormous amount of effort was put into what amounts to probably about 0.15% of the running time of an already quite short movie - our (g)host Professor Morte mentioned that the initial transformation scene was done over the course of eight hours and that Lon Chaney Jr. had to stay in the same pose on a pillow that was made out of plaster because a real pillow would have shifted around too much and ruined the real-time transformation effect. That is all remarkable, but what I think really cinched this movie was Chaney's performance as Talbot. Not as the Wolf Man - as Talbot. He has this forlorn expression on most of the time, and carries himself with the body language of a man heavily burdened, who knows that he doesn't belong among the vibrant, carefree living humans around him. Although this is a short, simple film, the true horror of being the Wolf Man is conveyed in a way that I found extremely compelling.

I haven't mentioned Bela Lugosi in heavy makeup as Frankenstein's Monster because he was somewhat of a weak point in the film to me, which from what I understand had a lot to do with behind-the-scenes decisions to cut a lot of his lines. I also think that every other character besides the two monsters could basically have been an NPC with the exception of Maleva, whose genuine care and compassion for the Wolf Man and total acceptance of him as a being did move me deeply.

One of the friends I was with pointed out the "economy of storytelling" in this film, which I agree is definitely one of its strong points; the plot moves along very quickly and doesn't get stuck on any one point or another for longer than feels necessary. It is a pleasure to watch a 74-minute film that feels like it got its entire message across and couldn't have been longer if it tried. I'm attempting to muster the effort to say that there's also something about this simplicity that is a detriment to the film, because although any more length would probably have drawn the plot out further than it could handle, in the end, instead of a satisfying conclusion, we basically get... nothing. Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf Man fight, the dam possibly gets blown up, we see some great practical effects, and then the "The End" card hits and we all left the theater. Just another ten minutes could have made that ending feel like an actual ending.

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

directed by Robert Gordon

USA

79 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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So we round out this year's KaiJune with yet another non-Japanese monster movie. I'm including this one because it is irrevocably tied to kaiju film history, being a product of the same zeitgeist as Godzilla - or I guess I should call it Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, since that's what American audiences would have seen.

I ended up liking a lot of things about this movie but also absolutely hating a lot of other things. The opening of the film is incredibly strong: the interior of an atomic submarine, the camaraderie of its crew, and the sudden, inexplicable things that begin to happen when, unbeknownst to the men inside, the giant Mindanao octopus grips the sub fast in its tentacles. No windows means that while we, the viewer, with the benefit of 70 years of pop culture to inform us of what's going on, are in on the unfolding events, all the crew have to go by is murky sonar images and the uncanny sensation of being very, very tiny in the grasp of something very, very large.

But as soon as they introduce the woman scientist, things get... 1950s. I am limited in how much I want to complain about this movie's misogyny because I know there's no real point in expecting an old movie to have modern attitudes, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Prof. Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue) is arguably the film's best character (although the film isn't stellar at all in terms of the human plot) but she spends the whole movie having to fight tooth and nail to justify her existence as both a scientist and a woman. She's constantly being belittled by the men around her, particularly one of the ones she's having some kind of romantic liaisons with. It's only when a man sticks up for her that her worth as a professional and her individuality are recognized, and even then, it has to be couched in a statement about the "new breed of woman" who is every bit as smart and capable as any given man. In some sense it does feel radical to have a man step aside and make room for women as intellectual equals, but I'm not comfortable with how that statement dismisses the often grueling, thankless, unacknowledged work of women prior to WWII and women becoming more visible in the workforce.

And it's even more of a shame because I really like Domergue's performance here. There's something about her body language and expressions that makes Prof. Joyce feel constantly absorbed in whatever she's doing. Domergue gets into the role in a very believable way. In an era where actors could be fairly stiff or over-polished, Joyce feels like a real human.

I think one of the problems with this movie is that it doesn't really feel like it gets excited about anything. It's not fair to compare it to Godzilla - it's not fair to compare anything to Godzilla - but I couldn't help doing it. The issue that almost ruined the film to me was that the initial octopus scene comes out of absolutely nowhere: when I think about how that Odo Island reveal with Godzilla's ugly head cresting over the hill felt like something that had never, ever been done before, and how it was done with much more rudimentary puppetry than this, I feel like this movie has no real excuse for just throwing in our first full look at the monster octopus at random with no build-up or fanfare. All the action scenes in this thing feel unearned, and while the effects are undeniably impressive, there could have been a much better sense of segue between the monster and everything else that was going on around it. Not to mention that the film is entirely lacking any sense of pathos or poignancy; the Mindanao octopus is just a giant animal to be destroyed by man's might.

All that being said, though, I still did like this more than I thought I would. Its flat, dry tone honestly kind of works sometimes - like in the opening submarine scene, where panic and terror would have felt cheap. I liked the procedural, scientific aspect. I actually also liked how the octopus was just a big creature with no particular intelligence (inaccurate, given what we know about octopuses now) that was too large and destructive to be allowed near human civilization. The film doesn't manage to express the sense of monster as paradigm shift that Godzilla does, but as long as you're not expecting a game-changer, this is a pretty solid atomic sci-fi flick.

Zarkorr! The Invader (1996)

directed by Michael Deak

USA

80 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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"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.

Shock Waves (1977)

directed by Ken Wiederhorn

USA

84 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is one of those movies that I find myself rewatching often because there's just nothing else out there that feels exactly like it. If your desired vibe is "aquatic Nazis" you have Death Ship, which is pretty solid, but there's something about Shock Waves that's just... I don't know, it's really good.

The film almost goes out of its way not to introduce us to our characters. Our main cast is made up of a small group of clothing-reticent thirty-somethings, a grouchy middle-aged couple, a galley hand, and a captain; neither of the latter two are long for this world. We get given names (sometimes) but no surnames, and nothing in the way of backstory whatsoever. We don't even really know why all of these people are together or how they're related to each other. It's never explained if these are friends who knew each other before the events of the film or if they all just happened to be on the boat together. The middle-aged couple are certainly outliers - if I had to take a guess, I'd say they're just all chartering the same boat; but get used to this kind of ambiguity, because the movie never resolves it. And that's as it should be.

In place of characters, we have premise. It's a scant premise, but it works. The driving concept behind the film is that towards the end of WWII the Nazis had begun experimenting on humans with the intent of producing super-soldiers, and a nest of these experiments were lying dormant in the waters off of some unspecified island somewhere until our cast of characters are accidentally rammed by a desiccated Nazi ship and run aground, disturbing the zombie soldiers and their lone caretaker. There's really very little rhyme or reason here; one exposition dump in the middle is all you get, and the rest of the time the movie is heavily into "show, don't tell". And, again, that is as it should be.

The island where the film is set has this really authentic boggy, humid, sweltering vibe; to absolutely no one's surprise, it was shot in Miami. This was evidently Wiederhorn's first feature film, which he made after having won the Academy Award for best student film with producer Reuben Trane. It was shot for around $200,000 and the only real reason that Trane and Wiederhorn ended up making a horror movie at all was because the investors thought that horror movies had a better chance of making their money back. The aquatic Nazi zombies idea was basically pulled out of a hat, from what it sounds like.

Oh yeah and somehow they managed to get Peter Cushing to be in this thing. I don't know how. Like a lot of movies Cushing was in in the '70s, it's weird that he's there, but it would have been a much worse movie without him. His character in this is interesting; he doesn't have that much screen time, all things considered, but he's important to the larger narrative. He certainly isn't a sympathetic character by any means, but in a sense it feels like he has more depth than the others because he's the only one who actually does stuff (or is implied to have done stuff) instead of having things happen to him. There's one shot in particular, a lingering couple of takes on a tank full of exotic fish, that was probably intended as nothing more than some interesting padding between scenes, but it made me think a lot more about this random guy who's presumably been hiding alone on an island for 30+ years: somebody's feeding those fish, and it ain't the Nazi zombies. What was he doing? Living alone in a decrepit old hotel, feeding fish, trying not to wake up the zombies? He doesn't want intruders around as a matter of course, but he never gives any indication whether he actually cares if they end up killed or if he just doesn't want them exposing the zombies to the outside world. It's odd, and I doubt any of this was intended to be thought about for more than five seconds.

This whole production, and the whole film itself, is so spare and feels so lacking in detail that none of it should really work, but the starkness and the lack of melodrama is exactly why it's so great - not to mention the absurdly good soundtrack. I think this movie is a cult classic because it's really hard to sell someone on it unless you can convince them to go in blind. Basically the only way to describe it is that it's Just Real Weird, Man. It is a whole entire vibe. Every time I watch this I like it more.

Mexican Free-for-All (1968)

directed by Takashi Tsuboshima

Japan, Mexico, USA

162 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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At this point I've seen a good few Crazy Cats movies (with and without subtitles) and an interesting thing about them is that they represent such a wide range of quality. None of the ones I've seen have been bad per se, but when you look at something like The Boss of Pick-pocket Bay, which was put together in not quite three weeks and was so rushed that they forgot to write a role for one of the actors, and compare it to Mexican Free-for-All... well, it's a stark contrast. But the thing that keeps every Crazy Cats movie from falling apart is Crazy Cats themselves, who are such ridiculously talented performers that even a shambles like Pick-pocket Bay is still fun. 

Specifically, the glue holding these movies together is always Hitoshi Ueki. He is absolutely riveting to watch and seemed to have an almost preternatural gift for entertaining, even outside of the Crazy Cats series. He plays the same character most of the time: a care-free everyman who rolls with life's punches and turns every hardship into an opportunity to make a quick buck. He's often in crappy jobs or dealing with the stress of modern life, but as the refrain in Mexican Free-for-All goes, hey, life is only 25,000 days, and nobody ever died from dreaming too big.

So, let's talk about Mexican Free-for-All specifically. The first thing to get out of the way is that it's obviously based around a really touristy depiction of Mexico that reduces the entire country to an aesthetic, but this is far from the only movie to have done that (and it happens to Japan all the time as well). The film was actually shot (partially) in Mexico, so fortunately most of the actors playing Mexican people are actually Mexican - with a couple of exceptions, most memorably Hideyo Amamoto as Guy With Big Hat, but at least nobody seemed to be in brownface. Honestly, the section of the film that takes place in Mexico is almost the least exciting part of it; aside from that insane musical interlude, I kind of preferred the hijinx that were occurring back in Japan and in San Francisco to what the Cats get up to when it's time to get down to treasure-hunting and trying to insinuate themselves upon a random girl named Maria.

As with most Crazy Cats movies, the three main actors are Hitoshi Ueki, Hajime Hana, and Kei Tani, with the rest of the troupe filling out tertiary roles. Ueki, Hana and Tani play three guys who end up involved in each other's business through a complicated series of misunderstandings and misfortunes that is fascinating to watch unfold. The MacGuffin here is a small stone statue: Hana's character is tasked with stealing it, Ueki finds out about this and realizes he can make bank by stealing the real statue and replacing it with a fake, Tani basically just gets mistaken for somebody else, and all of them eventually get sent to San Francisco through an increasingly unlikely course of events that culminates in them getting deported to Mexico on extremely shaky ground. Don't look for logic and reason in this film, because you will not find it. The important thing is that the plot flows smoothly, not that it makes sense at all.

The production value of this thing is off the charts, especially compared to some other entries in the series - which, again, are perfectly serviceable, but man, when they put in the effort, it really shows. There's a lot of location shooting, and the scenery in Mexico is genuinely very beautiful. But even in the parts of the film that take place in Japan, the set dressing is elaborate and immersive and the whole movie feels like a trip back in time, especially since the print I watched was so crisp and clear. The film's sense of humor is a little stupid and none of the actors shy away from looking like fools - in fact, they all embrace it. The film is made really well, with a lot of creative scene transitions, and as mentioned, there is an imaginary musical interlude that occurs while the Cats are figuring out how to make some money in Mexico City that is both a little bit of a fourth wall break and one of the best song-and-dance sequences I've seen in a movie to date.

This is one of several Crazy Cats films that have been getting English fansubs lately due to the efforts of mostly a single group of people, one of whom I know in real life. Just a few years ago if you wanted to see a Crazy Cats movie with subs, you were out of luck, and now I can throw on Mexican Free-for-All fully subtitled from start to finish. God bless fansubbers.

Also, did I see Hitoshi Ueki just eating a block of cheese at one point during this?

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.)

At the Earth's Core (1976)

directed by Kevin Connor

UK/USA

90 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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At the Earth's Core is honestly the most I've felt like I was watching tokusatsu during any single movie made outside of Japan. The dichotomy between how Japanese practical effects films were/are perceived - especially in the '70s - and how Western ones are perceived means that no one would acknowledge it (Japan makes the goofy rubber-suit-and-cardboard-city movies, the US and UK make Art™, or so popular opinion goes), but there really is not much aesthetic difference between the suitmation in this and something like, say, Ultraman Taro.

We get little introduction to the lead characters: the first time we see them is pretty much as soon as they set off on their underground voyage, and instead of stopping to give us backstory at any point, the film remains firmly focused on the present, having them react to challenges in front of them as if they came into existence when the film started. As our two leads we've got a guy named David who is the most unremarkable man in the world, and his sidekick, Dr. Perry, played with extreme Britishness by Peter Cushing. If there's any aspect of this film I solidly disliked, it was David, and really by extension all characters except for Perry; I would have accepted a version of this movie that was just him down there getting into random situations. But the two do play off of each other very well. David is the kind of bland protagonist that exists in a lot of adventure novels where he has such a lack of personality that the reader is given to map their own thoughts and feelings onto him, but to me that seems like it works much better in a book than on film. This movie has a lot of issues that any given book-to-film adaptation usually has (namely, that a lot of things feel unearned due to having spent less time with the characters than we would if we'd been reading a book), but it's also awesome and I love it.

The majority of what happens once the digging machine - which is the Gotengo, by the way, it is so perfectly the Gotengo - reaches the center of the Earth is generic male fantasy stuff. David commits a social faux pas by being nice to a girl, which turns out to be a no-no in this society of cartoon barbarians, and then spends the rest of the film fighting monsters and other guys for the right to marry her. To her credit she ultimately refuses him at the end but it's out of some weird sense of racial pride, that her lot in life is to stay down in the underground with her own people, which... yeah, we're gonna get into the race stuff in a minute, but it's not handled very well, although from what I know about the source material, the racism is actually toned WAY down here.

But my god, dude, the monster suits. The foggy, neon-lit soundstage jungle. The rear projection which is so obviously rear projection but you're too immersed in it to really care. It's one of those movies where you can see the zippers and the wires and imagine the boundaries of the set, but instead of looking cheaper for it, it's all the more impressive how much the film attempts to do. There are multiple types of weird creatures: shouty monkey guys herding humans into chain gangs to do their bidding, telepathic birdmen who control the monkey guys, hippopotamus-like dinosaurs who shoot fire, other dinosaurs, living plants, giant Venus flytraps... there's an entire ecosystem presented to us in glorious suitmation, and honestly, I love every minute of it. And if you like worldbuilding, this is Burroughs we're talking about - the film doesn't even scratch the surface, but it's an admirable attempt.

Now, the first time I watched this, I didn't pay too much attention to the whole idea of multiple human tribes existing in Pellucidar who were constantly at odds with each other, because what the movie does to depict these tribes is give all the non-white actors the same really bad curly wig. I didn't catch that these were meant to be members of a different "tribe" the first time around because I just assumed they had bad wigs for no reason other than somebody in costuming thought it was a good idea. It's not really a huge part of the story, but another deed our savior David does on his journey through Pellucidar is unify the tribes, which is shown as a big celebration with much dancing and music - but, again, the word here is "unearned". If there was real-world commentary intended here, it's not fleshed out enough to be anything other than awkward and poorly done.

On the whole, the movie is frequently cheesy, extremely unserious, a bit of a mess, and has a few flaws, but I do still think it's one of the more unique things I've seen. The Isao Tomita score (not really, but that's what it sounds like) and multitude of strange beasts that all seem to explode instantly upon death, the wide-eyed ten-year-old boy fantasy vibe, the occasionally groan-worthy humor... there's so much going on in this movie's 90 minutes. For better or worse, this kind of thing could only exist in 1976, and even if it's a critical failure, I'm glad people made this movie so I can keep rewatching it and going back to its hypnotic, hallucinatory, out-of-time fantasy world.

Eraserhead (1977)

directed by David Lynch

USA

88 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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It's been probably over ten years since I last watched this and it has been one of those films that exists in my head as a concept more than as an actual memory of having seen it. And, like many if not all films that attain that category, even if I consider them to be personal favorites, I'm always surprised by how good they are once I finally do watch them again.

David Lynch's death is a hard one to deal with. Much has been said lately about his refusal to elaborate upon or explain themes in his films, choosing instead to leave it up to the viewer to interpret them. I think that this is an extremely admirable way of making art, and one that, if the artist is able to be personally content with putting their work out there in its finished form and letting it speak for itself, can be fulfilling for both the artist and the viewer. Art will always exist as much in the mind of the audience as it does in the mind of the artist. An artist might mean something specific by incorporating a specific thing in their work, but that thing will always ultimately be most meaningful to them; what resonates with a single viewer could be wholly different from what the artist intended when they created the work.

It's freeing, as a viewer, to be able to interpret a film without feeling like you're coming to the "wrong" conclusion about it. For that reason, I'm going to talk about what I think of Eraserhead on a personal level.

One of my biggest takeaways from the film is that there's something weirdly American about it. It feels heavily reminiscent of dour Soviet and Eastern European films like Stalker, The Ugly Swans, and 1980's Golem (among many others), but the characters, the way they conduct themselves, the music and the furnishings that they're surrounded with, all speak to a kind of uniquely desperate mid-20th-century American way of life. It's a little anachronistic; I wasn't alive in the late 1970s, but to my understanding people didn't really dress like the Lady in the Radiator or even like Henry's girlfriend Mary unless they were elderly. Henry himself goes around in a suit most of the time and proclaims that he works in a factory. It feels a little bit more like the times Lynch himself might have grown up in rather than the contemporary atmosphere.

A theme that seems to recur throughout the film is the horror of a hole. Things come out of, and happen inside, holes. Our introduction to the place where Henry lives is through an apocalyptic aerial zoom of a house with a large hole in its roof. A non sequitur involving the worm thing Henry finds in his mailbox ends in the worm itself growing a gaping maw that the camera falls into. Henry's brief affair with the woman next door culminates in the two of them sinking slowly into a hole that appears in the center of his bed. And at the very beginning, the film's horror of horrors, the baby itself, is birthed from Henry's open mouth. This is a deeply, deeply unsettling film, more frightening with what it shows you than with what it holds back, but there is still that sense that there are things in the shadows of it, at the bottom of holes, craters, canyons, mouths.

One tempting and even somewhat compelling read of the film is a literalist approach that says the world it depicts is some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland, where everything and everyone is strange because they're poisoned and mutated from radioactive fallout or some such. The film itself even gives us a small detail that could seem to point to this interpretation: the framed picture of a mushroom cloud next to Henry's bed. This could be a hint, or it could mean something else, or it could mean nothing at all. Personally, I think it kind of fits in with the American-ness of it all, the casual display of a symbol of incredible destructive power out of pride, maybe, or fascination; hung prominently the way one might mount a small crucifix.

And then there is the baby. I honestly forgot how horrible that thing is. It's one of the rare elements of the film that is acknowledged as being somehow wrong and bizarre within the film itself - "They're not even sure it is a baby" - and characters react to it in a way that seems reasonable given what it is, which can't be said for most other aspects of the film. On some level it does elicit a sympathetic reaction, since it is a helpless, sick creature too weak to do anything but cry and move its head a little, but it's also just so disturbing that it's impossible to really empathize with it. As for its significance to the narrative, to me it felt like after a while the baby was becoming an extension of Henry himself. They do become physically indistinguishable after a point, with Henry losing his own head and having it replaced with the baby's. Henry finally cutting the baby open and stabbing it could be read as a kind of suicide.

There's a scene in the movie Jigoku that I kept thinking about during this. The guilt-ridden protagonist of that film descends through Buddhist hell until he meets his dead girlfriend, who tells him that she's had a baby down there, but she put it on a big leaf and sent it floating away down the river, and he has to rescue it right now, hurry up, he has no choice, he has to save his baby, right now, go! Overwhelmingly, watching that scene, as with watching Eraserhead, I got the feeling that I was watching a nightmare on screen, because nightmares are the only place where I personally have experienced such a sense of deep urgency and obligation coupled with a situation that is so outwardly bizarre and impossible. It feels like a classic nightmare situation to be tasked with doing something that is of life-and-death importance but is also nearly impossible and makes very little sense in the first place, like raising a disgusting cow fetus-baby when no one has ever told you where it actually came from, just that you are somehow the father.

I guess I have to stop this somewhere. This is one of my favorite movies. It's an easy five stars. I could watch this ten more times and come away from it with ten new interpretations, each entirely different from the last. It's a film that really feels perfectly realized, and I think that may owe a lot to Lynch's ability to put art out there without explaining it. I love that a film can just be weird and nightmarish without having to justify itself.

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.

The Thing (1982)

directed by John Carpenter

USA

109 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Island of Lost Souls (1932)

directed by Erle C. Kenton

USA

71 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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I recently read H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau for the first time and was curious if any of the film adaptations made over the years have managed to get it right (or at least fail and be entertaining in the process) and while I do respect this for being an early sci-fi/horror film, I wasn't moved by it. I feel like disliking any movie from the 1930s immediately gets you branded as un-intellectual, or something like that, but this just didn't grab me. I appreciate the early practical effects, but in terms of actually conveying the feeling that I got from reading the book, Island of Lost Souls falls short.

Dispensing with the opening of the story within a whirlwind minute or two, the film introduces us to our soggy-cardboard-quality protagonist, Parker, as he's "rescued" after his ship goes down and only he survives. The drunkard captain of the ship that picked him up decides he no longer wants to have anything to do with him or the cargo he's been tasked to deliver to Dr. Moreau's isolated South Seas island, and essentially chucks it all overboard. Moreau is introduced earlier in the film than he is in the book, but it doesn't make that much of a difference; neither builds up much of an air of mystery around him; we know that he's morally bankrupt and delusional and there's no real need for a big reveal. Charles Laughton as Moreau is really the best thing about this particular adaptation, and although Laughton really doesn't have any kind of "mad scientist" vibe per se, he's still entertaining to watch and I wouldn't have picked anybody else to play Moreau.

This film also introduces an extremely boring love triangle between Parker, his fiancée Ruth, and Lota, the Panther Woman, one of Dr. Moreau's creations (she is actually credited as "the Panther Woman"). Nothing like this is present in the book, if I'm remembering correctly. There's not the kind of fixation on gender difference that there is in this film: at no point does Dr. Moreau focus on creating a woman in contrast to creating a man; he seems to have experimented with creating different genders, and it is at least mentioned that some of his creations are women, but the whole "can she love like a woman? does she have a woman's impulses?" thing is not a plot point in the book at all. This is why I said that this movie is really nothing special - it has cheap, borderline misogynistic elements inserted purely to meet studio demands of a love story. (Not to mention the hints of racism and exoticism, which actually are there - and a bit worse - in the book as well.)

I'm really just not getting anything out of this. Maybe it's my fault for comparing it to the book. I see reviews on Letterboxd referring to the storyline as "compelling and multifaceted" and praising the actors' performances. I don't get it. I will say that the moment where this actually stood out from the book was at the climax when Moreau's creations realize that he can die - this is more straightforward than the ending of the book, and much more powerful for it. I think restrictions in both content and production kept this from being all that it could (this is technically pre-Hayes Code, but very tame), but I have seen tons of horror movies from this time that still manage to be creepy and atmospheric without utilizing what would eventually become canonized as traditional horror imagery, so there's no inherent reason why Island of Lost Souls should feel like it lacks the ambiance of the book. Although The Island of Dr. Moreau is quite short, it needs something a bit more expansive than a 71-minute movie to get its message across on anything further than a surface level.

Longlegs (2024)

directed by Osgood Perkins

Canada/USA

101 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This may be the only new film besides Ultraman: Rising that I review this year. I've severely fallen out of the loop with new horror, and that used to make me feel guilty, but now I'm mostly okay with it. I'll get around to stuff when I get around to it.

I'm inherently skeptical of any movie focusing on Satanic Panic themes. The phenomenon is a bit like the witchhunts of late medieval Europe and colonial America: the witches weren't real, but the hunt was, and it had devastating consequences. The two subjects are similar also in that there are a lot of people who view it on an aesthetic level (E.G. Salem's thriving tourist industry), which can feel really disrespectful to the victims and their families. I think Longlegs handles this fairly well because it's level-headed about what there actually was to fear about the possibility of a network of Satanic cults throughout America: serial killers, actual serial killers, not random rock musicians encoding backwards messages into their records or Harry Potter books encouraging children to do witchcraft. I'm going to assume Perkins has thought about these things and how to depict them with as much sensitivity towards real-world people as possible while still creating an effectively scary, authentically Satanic movie.

I think I mentioned in my review of Skinamarink how interesting it is when a horror movie uses the type of lighting and set decoration that my brain associates with coziness or a feeling of being comfy and safe at home: enclosed, lived-in spaces with low ceilings lit softly by lamps or a single light on somewhere in the house, usually at night, sometimes in the dark parts of the year. A lot of Longlegs takes place in lighting like that. When this is done right, the effect can be discomfiting in an almost subconscious way, and I think Longlegs does it very right - it front-loads with these types of scenes, giving us a lot of shots of Harker within her quiet house or her workplace after dark, but it also introduces horror into that environment, giving us the feeling, for the rest of the film, that the environments we think could be a refuge might actually harbor demons.

I've seen a few people saying that Satan is not a scary enough villain. I'm one of those people, but I also don't think that necessarily has to effect the way I feel about Longlegs, because even if I don't think Satan is scary (because I don't think he's real), I can still accept and become absorbed in a movie where the people in the movie think Satan is real, or where Satan actually IS real, within the context of the story. It's like watching haunted house movies when you don't believe in ghosts. And again, this is a thing that I think Perkins probably payed attention to: depicting a full-frontal Baphomet holds no surprises; there's no real scares to be had in black metal imagery. So instead he has these hints of something terrifying and otherworldly peppered throughout the film. There's one split-second shot of a silhouette against a glass door that stood out as one of the best moments in the film, to me.

I'm not sure how I feel about the way Longlegs really does seem to move further into the supernatural and weird as it goes on. I realize the irony of saying this about a movie that posits that Satan is real, but the whole plot element with the dolls failed to land in my eyes because it feels like it just goes too far out. It's too complicated. There's too much left unexplained. "Everything happened because Satan" is a simple explanation, but it's one that makes sense because it's been done before. Expecting me to accept some kind of weird metaphysical transfer of energy into a series of creepy dolls that somehow have mind control powers and can be used to allow Satan to infiltrate people's homes and drive them to murder each other is just... no, actually, no thanks, that's weird, I don't want that in my otherwise fairly grounded horror movie.

I disliked Gretel & Hansel on everything save for an aesthetic level for much the same reason as above. It could have been a really solid The Witch-style folk horror, but Perkins does all this weird stuff with it that leaves it feeling more fantastical than I feel suited its premise.

I've always like Maika Monroe, and though I was doubtful of casting somebody as recognizable as Nic Cage as the villain, I think what they do with him is really interesting - putting him in such heavy facial prosthetics that you can't really tell who he is lets him lend his inherent Nic Cage-ness to a character other than himself. I think that was a good choice. I guess your enjoyment or non-enjoyment of Longlegs boils down to how much of it you want to take seriously, because there is a lot in it that cannot be taken seriously at all. Overall, it's alright. Watch it in a vacuum without having seen any previews or read any reviews and you will probably get more out of it.

Event Horizon (1997)

directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

UK, USA
95 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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September is well underway, and as we all know, September is just a long pregame for Halloween. So I wanted to revisit one of my favorite horror movies, which I somehow haven't seen in eight years. Not only does it hold up as well as it did the last time I watched it (with the exception of the CGI, which continues to age like milk), I might have actually liked it better.

This is such a heavily visual film. So much of the information it wants to give the viewer is conveyed not through scenes where the human characters strive to figure out what's wrong with their surroundings but through those surroundings themselves. While we're onboard the rescue ship Lewis & Clark, we have an inkling of the sense of foreboding that surrounds the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of the Event Horizon, but it isn't until the crew actually boards the Event Horizon that we feel the full weight of its menace. Even before it went to Hell, the Event Horizon must have been an intensely discomfiting place for its crew to inhabit. One wonders if it always looked like that or if being in Hell changed its architecture on a fundamental level. It looks like a huge Gothic cathedral floating through space; remarkably cruciform, apparently captained by a man fluent in Latin.

The design of the ship's core cannot be anything other than an intentional nod to the idea of a "biblically accurate angel". It is three concentric wheels orbiting each other around a central mass, covered all over with spikes and orbs of light. There's a scene fairly early on where one of the rescue crew ends up in the chamber alone while they're all still surveying the ship, and all three rings of the core turn directly to him and lock into place - it's like it's looking right at him.

I actually feel like the area where this movie fails is with the dialogue. It doesn't feel like the language used can match up with the visual and psychological impact of the rest of the film. Lines like the ones from the aforementioned crew member who, after being corrupted by looking directly into wherever the ship's black hole drive sent it, would talk about the "dark inside of [him]", just feel trite in comparison with what the movie is trying to tell you in a big-picture sense. Even Weir's monologuing frequently falls short of describing everything that is implied by the film's concept.

That being said, high-concept science fiction movies like this oftentimes let character development fall by the wayside, but thankfully this one doesn't. The cast plays off each other perfectly, and they assemble to create a ship's crew that feels like an authentic crew, like seasoned sailors who know what they're doing and are not as enamored with the idea of the film's futuristic science as modern viewers, to whom it is fiction, would be. And - most importantly - they seem to care about each other as human beings. I appreciated Captain Miller about ten times more on this rewatch: he's extremely competent, always in control, but not unfeeling; surprisingly for such a stoic, no-nonsense spaceship captain, he's also one of the most vocal proponents of something being direly wrong with the Event Horizon. He takes what his crew experiences at face value even when they themselves don't, because he respects them. And for some reason I noticed this time that he was married. He wears a wedding ring. Only a few of the rescue ship crew are afforded backstories, but I found myself thinking about the idea that Miller had family back home, and never spoke of them.

I think this movie is extremely good at operating on multiple levels of horror. There is the basic concept of a ship that goes to hell and comes back demonically possessed, which is shown to us in every inch of film, basically, but then there's the real blood and guts of it - and that is restricted to only a few key moments. I always like to include the link to this Imgur gallery that shows frames from the film you wouldn't be able to catch without pausing it repeatedly (although if you are at all averse to graphic imagery, including imagery of a sexual nature, please don't view it). Had we been seeing things like that constantly, the film would be nowhere as scary as it is. As Weir says, hell is just a word. But while he follows that up by saying that reality is far worse, I would argue that - as a film viewer - what we can cook up in our imaginations is even worse than that. That's why I like that the movie respects its viewers enough to let us think about the implications it presents to us without having to be shown them at every corner.

I just really love this one. It's one of those movies that, to me, doesn't feel like anything else, and nothing else feels like it. It has its cheesy moments here and there (any time it attempts humor is just... really, really bad) but it's such a vibe. I wish it was three hours long.