Indie Kaiju Film Roundup, part I

Today I thought I would do something different and gather together short reviews of a few independent(-ish) kaiju films. I'm keeping this exclusively to films under an hour in length, since anything longer would just get reviewed in a normal post. This is the first part in what I'm hoping will become a series.

Day of the Kaiju (2014), dir. Kazuhiro Nakagawa

Japan

30 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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As far as I can tell, this was sort of a calling card for its director, who went on to direct not many things thus far but very, very good things. He has directed two episodes of Ultraman Decker as well as the stellar Godzilla Day 2021 short Godzilla vs. Hedorah, and also received an assistant director credit on Shin Godzilla, which is the film with the strongest thematic similarities to this short. Nothing, I don't think, quite matches the feeling of Day of the Kaiju itself, which is why we desperately need to get this guy a film to serve as a solo vehicle for his own ideas.

This is a great one if you're into kaiju bureaucracy. It has a very similar vibe to Shin Godzilla in that a threat appears and immediately the people who have the most ability to do something about it (with their money, influence, etc) don't do anything about it, because they're too wrapped up in paperwork and planning and generally dealing with the idea of the threat rather than the reality of it. A kaiju washes up on the shore of a small town, which now has to deal with all the fallout from that, both economically and in terms of just not knowing what biological effect the creature could have, since such beings are so rare that there's not really established science around them yet. To this end, a marine biologist and another scientist are called in to establish that the creature is, for certain, dead, but the mayor and other officials don't care about if it actually is dead or not, they just want to be able to say it is so they can brush everything off and put the money where it needs to go. There's a great scene where one of them gets right up in the main character's face and goes on this paranoid rant where he basically claims that if they can't take care of the kaiju, then that means this will happen, and then that will happen, and then foreign powers will invade us!!!! Any artifice of caring about actual people is dropped in that moment and it becomes crystal clear that the appearance of strength and competence is more important than human lives.

This is not a great one if you're into actual kaiju. It's mostly a melancholy, slow-burning (as slow as a thirty-minute short can be) and very moody "what would happen" piece. But it hits that tone so perfectly, and is so introspective without ever getting pointlessly glum. There's even moments of humor here and there: At one point everyone crowds around a single tiny monitor to read the stats on the kaiju, and someone says "Should I get the bigger TV from the lobby?" but is shot down for no reason. I know that people are really eager to see films about the on-the-ground aftermath of a kaiju incursion, and seeing this expanded into a feature-length movie would satisfy those people really well.

Geharha, the Dark and Long-Haired Monster (2009), directed by Kiyotaka Taguchi

Japan

20 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This one is why I almost didn't call this an "indie" kaiju film roundup. It was made for television and aired on an NHK program, and many of the people who worked on it are names in the industry in some measure, working on Godzilla, Ultraman, Kamen Rider, Gamera, etc. There are also actors in this that you will definitely recognize if you watch tokusatsu. (I'm actually wondering if the director is related to Tomorô Taguchi, who is in this film, but it could be a total coincidence that they share a name.) But my aim with this post is mostly to highlight films that don't belong to the mainstream franchises, that people may not have seen, and this is that.

At only 20 minutes long, this film feels chaotic, but it does manage to get in a "the monster is us" monologue or two, and surprisingly, despite being referred to as a comedy, it actually felt pretty serious to me. But the high point is undoubtedly the monster itself: Although I could not see it that clearly because the film is not readily available in perfect quality (also, like the title says, it's dark), Geharha is an absolutely beautiful monster, combining the silhouette of a classic bipedal dinosaur-like kaiju with the relatively new idea of being absolutely covered in hair. The suit is gorgeous, easily the quality of something that would appear in an Ultra series. The sense of scale is also conveyed incredibly well, and in general this feels, more so than many other things I've seen, closest to what a typical Showa-era kaiju film would be like if it were made with modern resources but the same general aesthetic. Geharha has weird powers that make it more mysterious than your classic destruction beast du jour, releasing some kind of weird gas from its long hair and also seemingly able to literally wig-snatch any bystanders not otherwise killed by it. I would love, love, more Geharha lore, but sadly, 2009 was a long time ago, and development in that area seems fairly dead.

There's a preview at the end for a sequel that never got released and so serves almost as a separate short film itself, and we see from it that the sequel was going to get much more explicitly comedic. There are even more obvious references to Godzilla and Ultraman and in general it looked like it was going to be super campy and fun, and I'm sad that we never got to see it.

Yagon the Water Monster (2019), directed by Koyo Sugita

Japan

44 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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...And this is probably the most truly "indie" of all the films reviewed today. This was the director's student film at Musashino University and it shows in every single area of production. It's got a laundry list of problems: Incredibly visible green-screen, annoying public domain music, bad acting, jerky claymation, location shots where they clearly didn't have access to those parts of the campus so they just kind of hung around outside it, and more things I'm probably forgetting. But the thing is that I love it. I genuinely do. Not ironically. I think this is a great film. It's one of those things where you can visibly see the idea the director had for it even though they did not have the resources to flesh that idea out into a film that is what most would consider polished and perfect. It has something more important than polish and perfection. It has love, and it has enthusiasm. And it has a scientist with an eyepatch named Dr. Ashizawa. Hmmmm.

Basically this is about GMO gone wrong, where experiments in developing hardier and more bug-resistant rice crops accidentally create a mutant superbug that keeps growing and growing and becoming more murderous as well. A cast of probably university students and the one guy over the age of 25 who they could find to be in their film is summoned and equipped with generic fake guns and armor (actually, the body armor looks cool) to rout out the mutant water bug and destroy it, which proves far more difficult than it might seem. Because of the budget, presumably, Yagon is rendered with clay and wires rather than a suit, which does make it look pretty silly, and just in terms of design I'm not even that crazy about it (bug kaiju tend to not do much for me). However, the amount of screentime it gets makes me feel like the crew was very determined to show us their creature, where they could have easily hidden it behind lens flares and fake explosions, and I have to appreciate that.

I just feel like this film shows such creativity in how it is a fully realized story from start to finish that's assembled using less-than-ideal pieces. If this crew had a studio and more money at their disposal, they could make something awesome. 

The Phantom Carriage (1921)

directed by Victor Sjöström

Sweden

107 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched this as my pick for a New Year's Eve-appropriate horror movie (you can only watch New Year's Evil so many times), but I would encourage anybody to watch this at any time of year. I highly recommend tracking down the Criterion edition for the cleanest picture quality possible and also watching it with the accompanying contemporary soundtrack by Matti Bye - this is the version I watched, upon general internet consensus that it was the most appropriate to the film, even though as a Sunn O))) fan I would have gravitated towards the KTL soundtrack. You could arguably watch this with no soundtrack at all, in silence, but I would advise against that since, even though this is a silent film, even at its earliest showings it would have been presented with some kind of soundtrack.

The film opens with a woman, a worker at a Christian charity for the poor and homeless, lying sick in bed while her mother and a fellow charity worker attend to her. Through intertitles we're told that she doesn't have much time left. She knows this herself and begins desperately calling for someone named David Holm, which obviously upsets the people with her, although we don't yet know why. The sister at her bedside leaves to search for Holm, but with no luck, though she does find his wife, herself destitute and in rags. After a little while we are then presented with a group of three drunk men sitting in a graveyard together, waiting for the clock to strike midnight. One of them tells the others a story that will become the basis for the rest of the film and the meaning behind the title.

The man recounts how he used to have a friend, somewhat older than him and the rest of his peer group, who was educated at Uppsala and therefore regarded as a kind of authority on various things and a more mature presence among him and his friends; a generally upbeat and jovial personality who, every year, underwent a total change on New Year's Eve. Witnessing a careless bar brawl between our narrator and some other friends, he breaks up the fight and entreats them to be more careful, since according to him, whoever dies at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve becomes Death for the rest of the year, forced to drive his carriage and see to the reaping of freshly deceased souls. In a cinematic twist, we're told that this man's fears came true the year before, and he has been carrying out Death's duties ever since.

The film then goes into a sequence of showing us Death going about his work which is singularly one of the most striking things I've seen from the silent era. Death and his carriage are filmed using the double-exposure technique, so they float over the screen, half-transparent and ghostly. Incorporeal, they are able to tread over water and walk under the sea to retrieve the soul of one who has died by drowning. Death's first visit is to an unnamed man who commits suicide; I was very surprised by this because, while nothing remotely bloody is shown, I did not expect to see a film this early show someone committing suicide by handgun. It just feels incongruous with the time period - not suicide itself, but that specific method. As we'll see, this is an incredibly dark and somber film that does not at all shy away from topics of suicide, murder, addiction, sickness, and, of course, the master of them all, death. It's worth noting that this film was immediately banned by the Swedish film board at the time, but left intact and uncensored for reasons I'm not entirely clear on, but am thankful for.

Back in the present day, a police officer encounters the group of men in the graveyard and we find out that the teller of this story is none other than the David Holm the sick woman has been asking for. He refuses to move, which leads to another pointless scuffle that ultimately ends with Holm's death - right at the stroke of midnight. His soul separates from his body, and soon who else comes to collect him but his old friend, in robes, carrying a scythe. At first he believes himself to simply by injured and begs his friend to take him to the hospital in his carriage, but his friend cannot. "You know very well I am no longer among the living," he says. There's something interesting here about the portrayal of recently-deceased souls, that double-exposure technique used again to show them lifting out of their earthly bodies and becoming inhabitants of an in-between space. Still themselves, with all of their memories, but now lacking a physical form. From here on this film becomes a Christmas Carol-esque exploration of exactly where and how Holm's life went down a dark path that led to him, drunk and alone on New Year's, dying a sad death after a life of regret.

Now, I watched this as a horror movie, but the tone and message of this film would have been entirely different at the time of its debut. One of the things I enjoy most about watching silent films is that the people are in general not different at all from modern people. Their makeup is heavier as necessitated by the filming techniques of the time, their dress is different, but in mannerism and expression humans have generally always been humans. That being said, while I was able to watch David Holm's journey through his deepest regrets and miseries from a purely human standpoint, feeling sympathy for him just from the perspective of a person feeling bad for another person, the message this film intends to give is a pretty strong warning against drunkenness and a plea to turn to God and Jesus for your salvation. I do not in any way want to imply that this makes it less relatable. The personal turmoil shown onscreen and the moments of darkness resonate down the years regardless of their origin. But The Phantom Carriage comes from a time when the motive behind showing a story like Holm's would have been to encourage temperance and faith in God, and to show us what can happen when you become hopeless and faithless and neglect your responsibilities to family and society. That doesn't mean it can't still strike an emotional chord.

Oddly, it also seems like the film casts blame on Holm's wife for leaving him with their children, implying that standing by her husband is in some way more important than looking after hers and her children's safety, and that her leaving him is almost entirely responsible for him being in the state he's in, rather than his own actions. David Holm really is kind of a deadbeat when you think about it, but this film implores you to not think about it and instead view him as a person, not inherently good or bad, who has in him the ability to find his way back up from the depths of self-pity and depression (through God).

It's also interesting to watch this in a time of pandemic. The illness that ends up being the cause of Sister Edit's death was given to her by Holm, and the film implies that he contracted it just kind of through inevitability from his time being dirty and on the street. He is a consumptive and frequently coughs in others' faces in an attempt to bring his misery to them (successfully, in the case of the nurse). I think that Holm's disease is best viewed through the lens of metaphor rather than a literal desire to spread a contagion, though; he has become so full of self-loathing and bitterness that he wants to drag the whole world down with him, to see everyone with their healthy and happy lives that he envies and misses so much brought low by suffering the way he was. Despite all of this, despite knowing that getting too close risks contracting illness, the nurse darns his coat and tries desperately to befriend him, eventually falling in some kind of very upright and Godly love with him. Again, while to a modern viewer her sympathy and pure care for this ragged and jaded man does not need to have a motive beyond the sheer desire not to see another human suffer, at the time this would have been a template to the viewer for loving the poor and needy as an aspect of Christianity. Holm's eleventh-hour repentance when faced with the horrible consequence of his actions is a reminder that no person, no matter how far gone, is ever beyond salvation.

So, as I see it, this is not something to watch specifically for the purpose of watching a horror movie. While it has an extremely eerie atmosphere (practically any silent film does) and deals with very dark subject matter, it does not feel at  all like a film intended to frighten in the way that we would expect a horror movie to frighten us - it's more of a "scared straight" kind of fear, a "I don't want my life to be that way" fear. A "come to Jesus" moment, if you will. But I was absolutely taken by this film and the raw emotion it portrays, the way the actors are so un-self-consciously given over to their roles in a way that breaks from the stiff stage acting more common in American and British silent films of the era. The performances in The Phantom Carriage are far more fluid and messy than one would expect from this kind of film. While I did say that you could technically watch this with no soundtrack, the musical cues are of vital importance to enhancing the emotional highs and lows, and I would definitely recommend you find at least some kind of accompaniment. This was not at all a bad film to be watching as I crossed from 2022 over to 2023. I hope the new year brings us all excellent first-time watches and many happy returns from our old favorites as well.

Daikaiju Varan (1958)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

87 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I feel like this film tends to be overlooked both when considering the kaiju film canon as a whole and also when thinking about what kaiju themselves mean, and have meant, from the earliest instances to today. It feels wrong to start a review of a film that I love by mentioning an inferior version of it, but I think some of this overlooking might be because it received a re-cut into Varan the Unbelievable four years after its release that is widely acknowledged as completely awful (I've never seen it, but boy have I seen some bad dubs in my day, so I can imagine). Looking at Daikaiju Varan on its own presents us with a story that has a solid place in this corner of history.

The film opens with a shot of a rocket ascending into space. This is early days for kaiju cinema - Godzilla came out only four years previously, Rodan only two, but Toho had already put out several other kaiju films between those bigger names that are less widely acclaimed outside of Japan, and Varan is one of them. Godzilla, as we all know, is a movie that has its origins in the potential for new technology to do harm to humanity, and for humanity to do harm to itself by bringing about increasingly powerful weapons in response to any new threat. This is also largely what Varan is about, but with a little more nuance in some places and much less in others. As the rocket goes up, the narration brings us into the story by telling us what audiences at the time were undoubtedly all feeling in the backs of their minds: We are in a new age, we're reaching further and further out beyond our own planet, into space, inventing new things and uncovering secrets of the natural world that we never could have imagined just a few years ago. But what the narration doesn't talk about, and yet what the film itself will go on to show us, is that there are secrets in virtually our own backyard that exist and have existed for eons that we have been blind to.

I think that the presence of Varan as a creature is a message about how there is more than one way of seeing things. Even in the space age, the physical and "supernatural" world overlap. Varan is interpreted by the scientists who catch wind of it as an ancient reptile, living secluded at the bottom of a lake for millions of years. But Varan is also literally a god. Varan is worshipped as the God of Baradagi by the inhabitants of an isolated village where things that modern society has tried to move on from still exist - this is foreshadowed by the sighting in the village of a butterfly thought only to exist in Siberia at the beginning of the film. Varan is both of these things at once. I truly believe this is what the film itself intends to convey, even though its main characters all vocally take the stance that such things as local gods and rituals to appease them are nonsense that it's hard to believe anyone still puts stock in. I love this movie because it leaves Varan to exist on both of those levels: To be named, quantified, taxonified, and seen as Enemy #1, and to be placated, respected, prayed to.

This is a good movie to remind people that tokusatsu is not only monster movies and sci-fi. The term just means "special effects", and a lot - a LOT - of that is war miniatures. Tanks, planes, boats, weapons, all of that. This is an area that Toho had been extremely prolific in (I've seen a lot of these films - some of them are very good!), and it really shows in Varan. I can't stress enough how good the miniatures are. The military response to Varan's arising pretty much takes up the whole of the film and is nearly nonstop, with little room for considering implications the way it's done in Godzilla - although that is an element of this, and I don't want to overlook it. There definitely is a reluctance and fear about using more powerful weapons than anything created before on Varan, and I think the production restraints that I'll get into in a minute are a big part of why this is not delved into further.

I also want to talk about Varan itself, because as far as kaiju go it is under-appreciated. Haruo Nakajima is in the suit and gives easily as good of a performance as he did as Godzilla or any of the other many, many suits he piloted. (Katsumi Tezuka also filmed the water scenes, which should not be ignored because kaiju water scenes suck to do.) I love the design of Varan and I love how the camera seems to love it too: We get so many close-up shots of its face, and a lot of opportunity to study how distinctive and deliberate its sculpting is. It looks mythical, ancient, and unparalleled. Varan is intended to be reptilian, but its posture and bearing feel like something else entirely its own. Nakajima has said that he looked to real animals to inspire his kaiju performances, and that's definitely there in Varan, but there's also something more mysterious about it that I really enjoy. There was a big push to get Varan into the Heisei era in the initial drafts for what eventually became Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, and unfortunately none of it ever came to fruition, but it did produce some gorgeous concept art including this maquette which I've always thought was beautiful.

There's this really great moment where, after an already-significant barrage of attacks against it, Varan suddenly decides it's had enough of the village and literally spreads its wings to fly out of the lake and towards the wider world. Everyone stands by, stunned, because neither we the viewers nor any of the scientists or worshippers knew until then that Varan could fly. In the same way that the rocket presents laypeople unaware of just how advanced science had gotten with a new view of reality, a Varan capable of flight presents all bystanders with a re-alignment of where they are in, for lack of a better term, the food chain. There are many other "great moments" in this film, too many to individually mention, but I also love every time we get a close-up shot of Varan crushing a tank - such an explicit depiction of "modern" technology failing against nature and time.

There are also many faults to this, mostly due to a rushed production that was the result of those earlier films such as Godzilla and Rodan being such international hits. This was intended to be a three-part TV series (god, can you imagine?) but the time and budget were not there, so it got smashed together into one feature-length film. It is visually muddy in the way of even slightly earlier films, as it was filmed in black-and-white instead of color, but I personally tend to enjoy that, especially in genre film; it gives a feeling of melancholy and sometimes foreboding that color does not. I think the lackluster ending - the only part of this I really disliked - was more than likely also a result of the less-than-ideal production. I've heard that Ishirō Honda wishes he could re-do this one and I can only daydream about what this could have been like with even more resources and flexibility behind it.

Violent Night (2022)

directed by Timmy Wirkola

USA

112 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This is still playing in theaters at the time of writing, but I didn't see it in a theater due to the plague. I don't watch many movies that get a theatrical release, so it's always a weird experience to watch something on the small screen that I know was intended to wow a theater audience, with all the conceits that that entails - all the glossiness, the stuff meant to look good Huge with a capital H. Watching any blockbuster nowadays feels like how watching a 3D movie in 2D used to feel: You notice all the things that are meant to stick out, and they look awkward because you're not watching it how it's intended. Overall this movie has an über-polished vibe that I'm not used to seeing and am not big on. This is a personal opinion, though, and it's coming from someone whose perspective is super skewed - most of the stuff I watch is like 50 years old.

So those are most of my misgivings. I enjoyed this for the most part, and I appreciate how thoroughly it commits to the bit. This is a nearly two-hour-long movie; something I've noticed about Christmas horror films is that they tend to be really short, because there's not much idea to go around. The goal is usually to A. be a horror movie and B. be set near Christmas, and that's all. So the bar is not very high, but Violent Night still manages to inject creativity into an area that's getting fairly old. I do consider this a horror film, although it is stretching my definition a little and would more comfortably be called a plain old action movie. In my opinion, the level of gore in this and the specific nature of the gore fits better in a horror film than anything else.

There's not much about this that is particularly original plotwise. You could stick the storyline into any movie. A man comes back to his incredibly wealthy family's home (it's a compound, actually) for the holidays, with his wife and daughter in tow, but they get home-invaded by a large group of mercenaries who happen to know there's an absurd amount of cash in a safe in the basement. Really, you do not have to care about the plot at all. The only factor that's getting anybody interested in this is that it's a Christmas movie. I noticed that this does not feel like a movie for people who hate Christmas or one for people who love it, it just kind of is what it is, but it is that so emphatically that I appreciate it. It does have a little bit of that cliche "true meaning of Christmas" message, but it doesn't try to beat you over the head with it. It's not trying to move you over to one camp or another. It's just accepting that Christmas, despite being over-commercialized and exhausting, happens every year, and boy, wouldn't it be fun to make a movie with a bunch of gory fight scenes about it.

The real centerpiece of this is David Harbour's Santa. I don't know how I feel about Harbour as an actor in general or on a technical level, but one thing I do know about him is that I believe him in any and every role he plays. Maybe he does end up kind of playing a specific kind of guy a lot, but he plays that guy so well that he manages to bring his "that guy"-ness to Santa Claus and have it come off genuine. Violent Night's Santa is tired of it all, tired of bringing gifts to billions of ungrateful children, tired of the work, tired of having done the same thing for thousands of years. He doesn't mean to be a hero, but he gets drawn into the interrupted family drama going down at the compound and ends up being one anyway. I did get a little (okay, maybe a lot) tired of the juvenile humor; there's a lot of drunk jokes and shit jokes and just a very lowbrow tone that I don't think this movie needed. But again - Harbour does this all very un-self-consciously.

This portrayal of Santa is what makes the whole film stick out from others that have done similar things. Again I really feel like the key word here is "wholehearted". This IS Santa, and he's not just the jolly, perpetually smiling Santa on greeting cards and soda ads, he's an ancient, pre-Christian being who at some point was a man but is something different now. This Santa carries with him a deep history. We see this in brief flashbacks as well as in the extensive tattoos he has, which I thought were a really neat touch. Tommy Wirkola is Norwegian, so that kind of vaguely Scandinavian-flavored Santa is definitely done better than he would have been in a different director's hands, but I'm still not going to go into historical analysis. I'll just leave it at saying that I enjoy the nuance very much. Santa's costume echoes some of that nuance as well; again, it doesn't attempt to be a historical piece, but when you look closely there's something fine about it. It's made out of red leather, instead of cloth, and the fur trimming doesn't look cheap and ratty. It makes him look like he could be an unusually well-dressed department store Santa, or he could be the real thing, the thing that all other department store Santas are parodying. And of course there is the sledgehammer.

There's... not really much more I can find to say about this one, which is ironic for a movie that is one of the more original and interesting Christmas horror films I've seen in recent years. It was good but I can't muster up a lot of enthusiasm about it. A lot of the jokes fail to hit, or at least they did for me, your mileage may vary. Arguably the grossest scene in the whole film happens within about two minutes of the opening, so it weeds out the people who can't stomach its brand of humor pretty fast. Nobody in this is the kind of person you really care about except for the little girl, which is probably by design. It's visually smooth and spotless and in so many words just has that "big movie" feel, except applied to a subject matter that is fairly niche. I actually am surprised this is getting such a wide theatrical run. I have a feeling that few people are going to end up seeing this, despite its presence in so many cinemas, but you could do worse than this if you are willing to risk going to see a movie at this moment in time. Or you could watch Dead Snow. You should probably watch Dead Snow.

The Killing Tree (2022)

directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield

UK

73 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I wasn't planning on reviewing this at all but it turned out to be such an insane movie that I have to get my thoughts about it out in some format other than just a couple of notes. This will probably be a shorter review, mostly because you absolutely cannot take this movie seriously and therefore I don't have much real analysis of it to do.

The crop of godawful Christmas horror movies is one of the things I look forward to the most every December. I've gone through most of the Christmas horror considered to be "classics" and so every season I get to watch whatever brand-new trash people came up with over the past year. The vast majority of these films can be put into one of two categories: Either they're just bad and nobody tried to make them good; they're low-effort, low-rent affairs that look bad and feel bad to watch. Or they're bad, but the idea behind them is so bonkers that the end product is something like The Killing Tree. Before going into it, all I knew was that this movie was about a guy who gets reincarnated as a Christmas tree with a grudge, and as it turns out that's literally all it's about. At 73 minutes it's mercifully short and gets everything done that it needs to do. Basically: A man, years prior to the film, committed several spree killings along with his wife in the name of somehow bringing attention to "the true meaning of Christmas" in a society that they see as corrupt and full of sin. He is executed for this, and in the present day, his wife, grief-stricken and bitter, performs a ritual to bring him back to life and get revenge on the living relatives of those they both murdered, who are, to her, responsible for his death. For this ritual she apparently needs an object of "similar mass" to her late husband, and for whatever reason this ends up being a plastic Christmas tree. The ritual goes haywire somewhere along the line, and her husband ends up in the body of an animate, murderous Christmas tree. (I'd like to note that the first Christmas tree I found online at Walmart says it weighs seventeen pounds. Similar mass?)

The tree is far and away the best thing about this movie. I feel a deep sympathy for whoever was stuffed inside the tree suit because it looks like the most uncomfortable thing ever invented. As far as I can tell it looks like they took a morph suit and wrapped it in fake fir garland and lights until it resembled, very authentically, a Christmas tree that is shuffling around and complaining at people. You can't see a face hole or anything of the human inside the suit - the density of the foliage is quite impressive (certainly more than most artificial trees in real life). For more strenuous scenes, a CGI model is used, and it's not even worth mentioning how obvious it is that this is CGI; the pattern of the lights is completely different, they're not fooling anyone at all, I'm not even sure they were trying. We'll move on from that, it's not a big deal. The tree also has tentacles, for some reason, that I guess are extensions of its bark; it/he uses these to ambulate sometimes but mostly just to rip people in half. If nothing else, this movie is worth a watch for how whole-hog it goes with the concept of a sentient and hateful Christmas tree.

Other than that, it's... really not good. Surprisingly the acting is not entirely terrible, but the script leaves much to be desired, and you can't actually hear half of what anyone is saying in this movie. It sounds like they clipped everyone's mic to their socks. The main character is the daughter of two of the treeman's victims, still troubled by the murder of her parents in the house that she's living (and partying) in. The peripheral cast consists of her friends, all of whom get a decent amount of backstory for literally having nothing at all to do with the plot. I do commend this, because I think it would probably have been worse if the main character had felt like she existed in a vacuum with no other people around her, but I wonder if there might have been a slightly more subtle way to go about it. Each character is introduced along with their Designated Character Trait: One of them is a sex worker! Two of them are a couple! One of them is really weirdly insistent that one half of said couple is cheating! Despite all being friends, the main character really has a vibe of just wanting to be left alone, so the characters don't interact in much of a meaningful way. They just kind of all exist with their own problems.

This is a poorly made film in almost every respect, mostly in the pacing, which feels awkward due to the jumps back and forth between the present day and the past that don't feel necessary. Like I said, everything that doesn't take place in the past takes place entirely at a holiday party in what seems like an absolutely huge and labyrinthine house. There's serious issues with the audio, and the color grading changes so much from scene to scene that it feels like they had two different cinematographers who were feuding with each other about how the movie should look. The script is a meandering mess, and the villain falls victim to that thing where he spends so much time vocally relishing being evil and explaining all his evil plans that it leaves him open to attack while he's pontificating. His and his wife's motive for killing a bunch of people is never elaborated upon besides sort of a generic loathing for modern society. That's not the only thing about this movie that's disjointed and badly put together. But there's something I still really like about it. I can't quite pin down its vibe. I don't know if it's trying to play itself seriously and is just so bad that it looks goofy or if it was meant to be a little silly, but I liked it, or at least I think I did. I'm just grateful to see a new Christmas-themed horror movie that isn't somebody dressed as Santa killing people.

Skinamarink (2022)

directed by Kyle Edward Ball

Canada

100 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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When I started hearing about Skinamarink from places outside of where I usually check for information on upcoming horror, I didn't hesitate to see it as soon as I could. I've been severely out of the loop with recent horror, so I hadn't heard anything about it until I started suddenly seeing people call it the scariest thing they'd ever seen. You can tell that someone is a seasoned horror fan when they're talking about a movie that scared them and their tone is incredulous rather than matter-of-fact; that's what I was getting from the mentions of this movie that I'd read.

This movie is made in a way that is probably unlike anything you've seen before. The first thing you notice as soon as it begins is that the entire thing is shot with a grainy, fuzzy overlay, like watching something on an old CRT TV before the switchover to digital. (Old televisions do in fact play a part in this which I will try to address later.) The other two distinctive things about it are that it is (mostly - later in the film, the perspective gets looser and less concrete) shot from the perspective of a young child, which is in keeping with the fact that the "main characters" are both very young children, and that a lot of it is composed of just static shots. The camera doesn't "follow" the children around much; usually it's either filming from their point of view or sitting still while we see their lower legs walk across the frame. The visual fuzz combined with the growing darkness means that it's almost impossible to stop seeing things where there might not actually be anything there, creating patterns out of swirls in the static that can look like anything. This is definitely a movie that is situated at a specific point of time, because for viewers any younger than myself, their childhood memories might not necessarily be so tied to this kind of dated, grainy picture quality. If you're fairly young, your childhood pictures and videos might be in as good a quality as you could take on your cell phone today. It's a vanishing feeling, the way the warm, indistinct-around-the-edges aspect of home videos shot on camcorder somehow embeds itself in our memories of ourselves as children. Skinamarink captures that feeling and uses it to both comfort and disorient.

For a movie with such a simple idea behind it, where it starts and where it ends up are vastly different in tone. So what is it about? From what I've gathered, it was inspired by an actual dream that the director had as a child. At the beginning of the film the two child protagonists wake up to find that their parents are gone and their house has changed. The doors and windows are gone (also the toilet). As they explore the new topography of their house, other things begin to happen, increasingly unsettling and increasingly unmoored from familiarity. I think "familiarity" and its destruction is the most central tenet of this film, and is the reason why it's so deeply discomfiting. When the film begins, I had trouble feeling like I was going to be as scared by it at all, because personally I have a lot of nostalgia for my childhood, and the way things looked - the perspective of a small person, the grain of the picture, the warm light in the middle of the night when it's dark out and the only illumination in the house are lamps - made me think about what it was like to be a kid awake in the night. But the pleasure of that nostalgic feeling comes from knowing you are safe. Gradually, in Skinamarink, any hope of safety wears off until the once-comfortable home becomes something twisted and claustrophobic. A space that should be cozy becomes alien. Over the course of the film the lights grow dimmer until the kids are navigating places that they should be familiar with by flashlight. The scope contracts; eventually all that exists is what can be seen in front of you. The presence within the house tightens its grip until it feels like the walls start closing in.

I feel like without a doubt Skinamarink is much more deeply frightening when it is doing virtually nothing. The dimming of the light, the perspective of a child, the ultimate fear of your protectors being gone and then later reappearing but not acting like themselves - all of that is horrible enough. The second half of this movie is when it seems to think that isn't enough and begins trying to create a clearer picture of the thing inside the house. And it is a "thing", it is a boogeyman; it isn't just the sense of disorientation that's the only scary part of this film. Something is in the house with the children and it's doing things for no apparent reason. Whether or not a creature is more frightening to you than an unending general sense of unease is a matter of personal taste, and in the moment this mattered to me, but afterwards, now, thinking about the film, I really don't have a problem with anything in it. It's the same way when we first see blood and the implication that something physically traumatic is happening, instead of just creeping dread. Watching the film, I thought "oh, this isn't a film where there should be any violence, this has to all be implied and subtle" but now I see that all fears are sort of linked back to the fear of bodily harm, so the presence of blood is still in keeping with the overall atmosphere.

The use of public-domain cartoons and sounds also bothered me initially because it's something that always bothers me when I'm watching a movie and it's not otherwise brought up - I just feel like somebody sitting down and watching a Flesicher-esque cartoon and laughing at it like any children's show is an unrealistic scenario. It always feels really obvious to me when someone is using copyright-free sounds or images to get around paying royalties (even though I understand why they'd do that). Here, though, it fits. The stretchy, often disturbing quality of old cartoons works perfectly with how malleable reality feels in this film. Late in the film, one moment in a cartoon is played over and over, a Bugs Bunny ripoff shrinking itself into nothing with an up-slide sound effect. Something about that is so striking. Sometimes as a kid you're watching TV and you see something, just a line or a few seconds of animation, and it feels wrong somehow and stays with you for years. It could be a normal moment or scrap of dialogue, but you misinterpret it and it hits you in a particular way that doesn't let your brain let go of it. That's what that felt like.

As the film goes on it loses all semblance of narrative and becomes a collection of images of a house where something is very wrong. Dimensions don't make sense like they used to and all light gets swallowed up by what seems like a miasmic malignance. There are strong shades of House of Leaves. At one point the camera becomes seemingly trapped in a warping, endless, inverted closet along with a heap of toys, and the subtitle on the screen reads "576 days" - this I could not figure out, and it's still bothering me. Was that meant to imply how long the remaining child had been trapped in the house? It could not have been his age, because we can guesstimate (and we hear him say) that he's about four years old. That little detail was a curiosity that I would love to know the real meaning behind. I'm also not sure what the point was of including a conversation the kids' father has where we hear him talking about one of the kids falling down the stairs and hitting his head - was that meant to cast doubt on anything that happens afterward, implying that it could have been a hallucination? I certainly hope not, because that would be disappointingly cliched.

This is getting long, so to sum it up I'll just say that Skinamarink truly is incredibly eerie in a way that I don't know that I've ever seen a movie be before. Examining it is rewarding in that we can see references to earlier films and figure out why exactly it frightens us, but it's really something that, if you're seeing it for the first time, you have to sit and absorb and not let yourself think too hard about to get the full experience. It feels like watching a home movie that was shot inside of a nightmare. The intimate, personal nature of it, the universality of the childhood experience of having a bad dream that you wake up from and believe was true for a little while, brings this out of the realm of fiction to an unsettling degree. I don't think another movie in this style could be made again, but I would love to see where else this director goes. At the moment it's not available anywhere but the small screen, but I have heard that it is getting a limited theater release in January and I would highly, highly recommend everybody who can goes to see it that way. I watched this directly before going to bed (inadvisable!) and walking around my dark house afterwards felt so strange.

Legend of the Cat Monster / Reibyo Densetsu (1983)

directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi

Japan

95 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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