Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

84 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I'm a few days late, but happy birthday to possibly my favorite Godzilla movie aside from the original. This is one of several Godzilla movies (including the original) that I don't rewatch that often because it puts me in a bad mood every time I do. Rewatching it last night, though, I didn't have time to be put in a bad mood, because I was too busy thinking "Ah, this is the best movie ever made".

(Please read this review which sums up the movie in one paragraph better than I could if I wrote an entire book.)

While I think it's a masterpiece, Terror of Mechagodzilla had the lowest box office attendance of the Showa-era films. I tend to wonder whether the dour tone of the film had something to do with that. The previous year's Godzilla film, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, was one of the most bombastic, colorful, high-energy entries in the franchise, so to follow it up with a deadly serious, character-driven story where the monsters don't have any big funny moments - directed by master of melancholy films Ishirō Honda, no less - is a bit of an abrupt change of pace.

The film carries over a lot of plot elements from the previous film, the most central of which is an in-progress invasion by the Black Hole Planet 3 aliens and their most formidable weapon, Mechagodzilla, which they develop by abducting/coercing humans into working for them. The timeline of vs. Mechagodzilla is much more brief, however, and more traditional to the way these films are usually laid out, with the bulk of the story occurring in a linear fashion, and events unfolding as we watch the characters experience them. One of the intriguing things about Terror of Mechagodzilla, by contrast, is that the invasion had been going on in the background for a very long time: at least 20 years, as implied by the flashback of Katsura Mafune's accidental death and immediate revival by the aliens.

The thought I kept having while watching this film was that, on a surface level, a lot of what happens can be blamed on Dr. Mafune for being too stubborn to let go of an old grudge after being slighted by the scientific community. But despite this, despite him being written as a bitter old man who turns traitor to humanity as a whole, I can't do anything but feel bad for him. Both he and his daughter are manipulated at every turn by the Black Hole Planet 3 Aliens. He and Katsura are both victims. Watching this movie again I was struck by how abrupt the scene where Katsura dies for the first time is: the aliens don't give Dr. Mafune any time whatsoever to process it or even to find out who they are or what they want, they just immediately ingratiate themselves to his entire life in such a way that he's dependent on them for the continued preservation of the only thing really keeping him going - his daughter. To me - and this is a point I've never seen brought up before, so I'm probably wrong - it feels like Katsura's death had to have been pre-planned. For the aliens to be able to know the exact time that she would be electrocuted and be able to enter the scene right away as soon as she had died, they would have to have been watching. Using Katsura to manipulate her father was the plan right from the start.

The dub will let you forget this, and becoming jaded to kaiju movies in general will let you forget this, but the Black Hole Planet 3 aliens are incredibly brutal. There's kind of a cult indoctrination thing going on here. They insert themselves into Dr. Mafune's life and give him everything that he ever wanted: his daughter's life, the opportunity to prove himself right to his detractors, and access to what he wanted to research all along (Titanosaurus). Meanwhile they see him as so disposable that one of them uses him as a human shield without a second thought. (I remain salty that the English dub cuts out the part where he gets shot.) We also see that they abduct other humans for slave labor and cut their vocal cords. These may be, in name, the same aliens as the previous film, but the air of sinister coolness that Kuronuma had is replaced here by pure evil.

I'm still going. This is my review, I can make it as long as I want.

I would be remiss not to talk about Tomoko Ai's performance as Katsura, because she really is what holds the movie together; she's the most sympathetic character and the one who we're rooting for the whole time. She was at this point a very young actress with not a lot of experience, she had been playing a semi-regular role on Ultraman Leo prior to this and as the story goes she ran over while still in her uniform from that show to try out for the part of Katsura. She's really good at conveying that Katsura still has human emotions despite being a cyborg, but that those emotions are deeply buried. I love one specific moment after Katsura is resurrected for the second time, where Ichinose is tied up in the control room and Katsura gets up to adjust something on a panel in front of him; when he begs her to see reason, she says "Be silent", but why did she get up in the first place? Did that one knob really need to be fiddled with in that exact spot that would put her right in front of him?

I also want to talk about Akihiko Hirata's performance in this because I think he knocks it out of the park. I continue to maintain that he wasn't given enough roles where he got to actually act. (You all should watch Saga of the Vagabonds or Farewell Rabaul or something.) He adopts a specific set of mannerisms for this role that make the fake glasses and mediocre old age makeup they put him in forgettable. It's hard not to compare Mafune to Dr. Serizawa, since they were both played by Hirata - bookending his appearances in the Godzilla series - and in a lot of ways I feel like the stuff Mafune gets up to is exactly the kind of thing Serizawa would have been afraid would happen to him: Mafune's weakness is exploited by an interloper who seeks to use research of his for destructive purposes. I can see a reading of Mafune as an older version of Serizawa whose staunch refusal to let his invention fall into the wrong hands wavered after life treated him poorly.

So, yeah, this is a contender for my second-favorite Godzilla movie. Above all, the way I feel about this movie is that it is just phenomenally well-made, easily on par with anything and everything that came after it. Tonally, it's more akin to one of the Heisei films, like vs. Biollante or vs. Destoroyah. Every inch of this movie looks incredibly good. That first shot of Titanosaurus from below, set against the backdrop of a bright and sunny sky, is an all-timer. There's something sad about the way the film ends on a shot of Godzilla wading off into the sea when you consider that this was really the end of "old Godzilla": the series would return from its hiatus, and is still going strong even now, but everything would be different. This movie just means so much as an achievement in the series' history that I cannot understand why anybody wouldn't consider it one of the best.

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.

Noroi: The Curse (2005)

directed by Kôji Shiraishi

Japan

114 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is going to be less of a review and more of a small treatise on why this is one of my favorite movies ever. I've seen it many times, but it had been much too long since my last viewing, so I decided to kick off the spooky month with it. Even though I know everything that's going to happen, there's still something so potently creepy about Noroi that keeps me coming back. Nothing ever gets explained or becomes clearer to me than it was the first or second time I watched it, but there's a magnetism to the film that makes me not care.

Shot in a faux-documentary format, Noroi opens with a short introduction by the cameraman, who ostensibly picked up his friend's film project after his disappearance. As I touched upon in my review of 1998's Ringu, much if not all of the overall tone of Noroi has to do with the presence of analogue media. In the U.S., at least from my own memories, VHS was pretty moribund by 2005, but it's held out far longer in Japan, and there's not a single disc to be found in Noroi. Everything is circulated on VHS tapes, sometimes containing footage that was transferred to them from some even older format like film. The physical object is integral to creating the effect of a cursed film, and although interesting things have been done with the idea of a curse attached to the more intangible domain of the internet, to me nothing will ever be scarier than the perennial haunted VHS tape.

It's not the tapes themselves that are haunted in Noroi, but much of what we see relies on literal "found footage" - recorded TV broadcasts that show authentic paranormal activity, that were incorporated into the finished product presumably by the cameraman to provide a clearer picture. Something about these television segments hit me harder this time around than the previous times, I think just because I was paying more attention to them - the variety TV shows and awkward, half-finished interviews are not the filler between more important moments, they're some of the most important moments in establishing the dread-filled atmosphere of the movie. There is something so powerfully unnerving about the thought of chancing upon genuine paranormal footage on late night TV, being one of only a handful of people who are both awake and watching whatever no-budget variety show is on in the ungodly hours of the morning, and being rewarded for that with actual recordings of unexplainable events. Ghosts caught on film by ghost hunters can be compelling, but what's much scarier is what happens in Noroi: a stumbling-upon, a rabbit hole, an uncovering of connected events that lead to a terrifying and unknowable whole.

One of the more interesting things I was picking up on during this most recent watch was the character of Hori, the psychic, and how his role complicates the plot. I'll get to that in a minute, but first I feel the need to provide some context. This is definitely a movie that has become much more famous than the person who made it; although Kôji Shiraishi is one of my personal favorite directors, Noroi is by far his best-known work and many people who are familiar with it are not familiar with his other films at all. So Hori's rants about "ectoplasmic worms" might read as nothing but the obsession of a severely mentally ill person to anybody who's unfamiliar with the rest of Shiraishi's output, but the concept of these worms, and of intangible creatures that exist all around us but are not visible to the average person, is something that comes up very frequently in his films. Because I had this in mind while I was watching Noroi, I was automatically giving a weight to what Hori was saying that other viewers might not. His talk about the worms has nothing - and I cannot believe this is the first time I'm actually realizing this - to do with the overarching concept of Noroi as a film, the Kagutaba ritual and the sacrificed embryos. But I believed that what he was talking about was a real part of the plot because I knew that Shiraishi was no stranger to involving it in the plots of his other work.

And I still choose to believe that, to be honest, because another thing that happened since the last time I saw this is that I watched From Beyond. I instantly made the connection between the creatures only visible to a jacked-up pineal gland that Lovecraft introduces in that story, and Stuart Gordon elaborates upon in that film, and the ectoplasmic worms that only Hori can see. Even though it is difficult to draw a connection between the worms and Kagutaba, I think the Kagutaba ritual is in some way an interpretation of or an explanation for the presence of other-dimensional creatures that the people of the flooded village became involved with.

Even though I'm a fan of everything this director has done, there's no question that Noroi stands alone. There's a reason why it's become so famous, divorced from his other output, though it's all pretty good to great. This is one of those movies that is its own entity. It's unembellished, the interviewees are soft-spoken and awkward, and no one is particularly "likeable" in the typical sense. The characters only exist as pawns in the cyclical, consuming course of events just under the surface of reality. But although it may seem shabby and unrehearsed, a ton of work had to have been put in to make the film look that way. Certain sets, like the interior of Hori's apartment and the possessed woman's hideout, were so crammed full of clutter that you almost miss the fact that somebody's job was to set all of that up from scratch. There's also a fire stunt at the end that is genuinely insane and upsetting to watch, but again, your brain reads it as so authentic that it takes a minute to remember somebody had to do that and get paid for it. I said I'd explain why I love this movie so much, but I really can't, when you get down to it - it's just one of those things with an atmosphere all of its own, that never gets old no matter how many times I watch it.

(Fitting that my first post of October should also be my 666th post - to me, at least; I've got some drafts you wouldn't know about that bring the post count up a bit. To you, though, number 666 will be coming soon.)