A Ghost of a Chance (2011)

directed by Koki Mitani

Japan

142 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched this as part of a project I'm doing where I use a list randomizer to generate a random movie from my worryingly long watchlist and then I watch it, no matter what it is. A Ghost of a Chance had been sitting on there for a while despite having a fun, quirky premise, most likely because it's just shy of two and a half hours long, and who has time for that. But I'm thankful to whatever algorithm is behind list randomization for picking this, because I really loved it. If nothing else, it is worth watching just for Hiroshi Abe tap-dancing.

Eri Fukatsu (lately of the smash hit Suzume, but she also has a lot of other credits, including the adaptation of Parasyte) plays a sort of not very good lawyer named Emi. She's just a little uncoordinated and seems new to the game, but hers is the kind of profession where you need to be taken seriously, and she decidedly is not. She takes on a case where her client is accused of murdering his wife, and his alibi is that at the time he was staying at a remote inn in the mountains, and could not possibly have been responsible for the murder as he was getting sat on by a ghost while it was occurring. Yeah, right. The prosecution jokes that the only way that alibi would fly is if Emi could get the ghost to come to court and give testimony.

So she does that.

I'm not sure what exactly she was looking for when she retraced her client's steps to the inn, because at this early point in the movie she was as dismissive of the existence of ghosts as anybody. The whole thing was a last-ditch endeavor to save a client who had little chance of a fair shot and, in the process, save Emi's downsliding career. Although the innkeeper is at first reticent, Emi ends up staying in the same room as her client, and as soon as she falls asleep she is confronted with the reality that her client was telling the truth: The inn is haunted by the ghost of a general from the Sengoku period, who sits on her and immobilizes her in exactly the same way he did to her client according to his alibi.

I have not personally seen the popular TV series Ghosts, but I'm going to use it as a way to try to get people to watch A Ghost of a Chance, because I feel like if you like that, you'd like this. The ghost and the mechanics behind his existence as a ghost are the funnest part of this movie. Rokubei seems like a chill guy. The samurai stuff was four-hundred-aught years ago. Nowadays he just wants to hang out and smell some cheeseburgers. He knows he's dead, and he knows that only certain people can see him, which is unfortunate for Emi's hope of getting him in front of a judge to give testimony, but will come into play later. He's fairly up-to-date on world events because the inn has a television, and furthermore he can actually leave his inn, but he has to, like, take a taxi or whatever, he doesn't exactly have superpowers. The real joy of this film comes from watching all the other actors play off of a character who is not supposed to be visible: This is a classic bit, and it absolutely is still entertaining to watch everybody thoroughly ignore an actor who you, as the viewer, know in real life is just somebody standing there. I appreciated that they didn't CGI Rokubei into being ethereal and have gags where people stick their hand through him or something like that. It's harder for the actors, but much more satisfying to watch.

I was going to say something about how sometimes a gimmick can carry an entire film, but after watching this for a while, it really doesn't feel like a gimmick, it's more of just... an idea. There's an introductory period where we're being shown, as I said, the mechanics of ghosthood in Rokubei's specific situation. This is where we get all the funny stuff like Emi looking crazy to outsiders for apparently conversing with nobody, and Rokubei occasionally scaring the living daylights out of random passersby who can see him (again, only a select few). After that, the movie proceeds apace. It continues on, plot having been established, and really gets into how exactly getting a testimony from somebody who doesn't have a physical body - and getting the living to believe that testimony - would work. They do some "ghost hunting 101" stuff to prove Rokubei's existence to the jury, like taking stereotypical blurry ghost photos of him and at one point coating him in magnetic sand so people can see his silhouette, and eventually settle on providing him with a harmonica that he can blow into for "yes" and "no" answers. The judge is surprisingly amenable to this, but in fairness they do go to fairly extreme lengths to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that his court is, in fact, temporarily haunted. At one point Emi's boss even dies. ("This is not good", his ghost says.)

We the viewers know from the beginning that the client is not guilty, because we saw the people who really murdered his wife, and he wasn't one of them. But the film deftly keeps the specifics of it out of our sight until the final act. It isn't all just ghost stuff - Emi does still have a case to win. Various monkey wrenches keep getting thrown in the legal works, with maybe the most interesting of them being that the prosecution can fully see Rokubei, but is just pretending he can't, because it makes more sense to dismiss your opponent as obviously playing some kind of prank rather than validate her and risk losing the case, not to mention establishing a paradigm-shifting legal precedent. This is why the movie is two and a half hours long: It needs all that space to prove it's not just a one-trick pony.

Toshiyuki Nishida - who has also had the honor of being Kosuke Kindaichi at least once - plays Rokubei so perfectly I can't imagine anybody else in the role, but Fukatsu also plays Emi with an understated skill that I'd be remiss not to mention. Hers is an interesting character, because she's earnest but lacks self-confidence and real-world experience. I think it's a little difficult to act like somebody who is as genuine but also as un-self-aware as Emi is. And you really get a sense of her growth as a businesswoman from the start of the film to where she ends up - seeing her confidently slam-dunk the case at the end of the film is immensely satisfying. Her relationship with Rokubei changes subtly throughout the film as well: He starts off rather bluntly calling her "onna" (woman) and ends up calling her "hime" (princess), despite her protests.

I watch a lot of samurai stuff, so this whole idea tickled me. There's also something really funny about Toho, purveyors of arguably some of the best samurai films ever made, making fun of themselves a little in something like A Ghost of a Chance. Personally, I really enjoyed this. I thought it was well-rounded and never felt like it was using its unusual premise as a crutch. There's so much more to it than just what I've described in this review, and I'd love for others to check it out.

Salyut-7 (2017)

directed by Klim Shipenko

Russia

106 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I watched this for Yuri's Night/Cosmonautics Day. Usually my picks for the occasion tend to lean more towards the imaginative, science-fiction side of things, but I think this was a good choice since it's basically nothing if not a spotlight on cosmonaut heroics, and there are portraits of Yuri Gagarin in the background here and there, as any good Russian space film that knows its history will have. This is definitely one of those movies that feels like it's a very conscious of being A Movie™, a feeling which is difficult for me to describe but entails a sense - more intrusive than usual - that everything you're seeing is embellished to perfection and choreographed for maximum entertainment value. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because we all like to be entertained, and Salyut-7 absolutely achieves that factor, but it loses a little relatability in the process.

This is a movie that's based on real events, but is highly fictionalized outside of the basic fact that a rescue mission to the drifting, uncontrolled Salyut-7 craft really did occur. You can of course find all of this on Wikipedia, but in short, the Salyut-7 space station experienced a malfunction in an electrical sensor that determined when batteries needed charging, leading to it losing power, going wildly off-course, and becoming uncontrollable from the ground. There were no people in the station at the time, but the way things were going, it would eventually crash somewhere on Earth, and without power no one had any control over where that would be. Two pilots, Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh, were sent up on a ridiculously difficult mission to dock with Salyut-7 and bring it back under control. Wikipedia's article is fairly terse on this subject, but they did, amazingly, manage to dock with an out-of-control, freely rotating object, apparently using handheld laser rangefinders, get inside, and conduct the repairs needed to bring the station out of its frozen state and back to something a little more manageable. Ironically, the station did eventually end up undergoing an uncontrolled reentry in 1991, and crashed somewhere in Argentina.

Dzhanibekov and Savinykh are our two protagonists, with Dzhanibekov arguably being the main focus. At the beginning of the film, he's banned from further missions after an incident during a different emergency in space where he sees something inexplicable, claiming that "angels" visited him during a spacewalk. This is really fascinating because it bookends the film. Both him and Savinykh experience the same phenomenon during their isolation together while repairing the Salyut-7. Such a small thing actually ended up being possibly my favorite detail of this film, because I love the way the film just allows this event to let lie, doesn't explain it, just gives room to this impossible, supernatural event as a way of letting a sense of the miraculous remain in a story set against the rational, reactionary backdrop of the Cold War. The bureaucrats try to manage Dzhanibekov's experience, try to suggest factors that contributed to his seeing something that wasn't there, but the beauty and mystery of space refuses to be explained away.

This looks, on the surface, very much like one of those movies of a kind that you've certainly seen before where the achievements of one or two people are valorized above a greater whole. Most of the time I have no stomach for this viewpoint, because it ignores the fact that singular heroes almost always have a pool of other people surrounding them during their time of heroic deeds. But this time I feel like the portrayal was mostly fair. The team back on Earth, calculating exactly what it'll take to dock with the rogue station, guiding the cosmonauts, and contributing math and ideas to the effort, is incredibly important here. At the end of the day, it's true that there were only two people in that ship, that they had support and training from back home, but there were two sets of hands alone that accomplished the actual mechanics of docking with the station. But it's also true that they couldn't have done any of it without mission control. Both cosmonauts are still alive, with obscene amounts of medals and awards and both with planets named after them. Dzhanibekov went on to go into politics, photography, and, uh, attempting to circumnavigate the globe by balloon, apparently, and is now only 80 - I know, "only" 80, but when you watch movies like this for some reason you always imagine the people in them to either be dead or like a hundred years old.

Most of Salyut-7's appeal is visual. All of the CGI used to accomplish what would be a pretty dead movie without it is more than up to snuff. If nothing else about it grabs you, the sheer power of the EVA scenes will grab you. I don't think there's anybody out there who has seen a movie involving a spacewalk scene and not gotten sweaty palms - it's that feeling of being totally unmoored, attached only by the thinnest of tethers to a huge object that is itself floating through space controlled partly by you and partly by what people thousands of miles away are telling you to do. It's horrifying, and when the cosmonauts are cast against the looming Earth or the rising sun, it's also horrifyingly beautiful. You can't have a good space movie without that sense of terror and beauty, and Salyut-7 is up to the task, cinematography-wise. There's one scene that's going to stick with me, of the fire in the ship that leaves Savinykh injured: Dzhanibekov watching from outside, helpless, as his friend is trapped in what rapidly becomes a corked bottle full of fire. This is one out of many fictionalized aspects of the film; there was no such fire onboard the ship, and a lot of what happens to make the repair and return of the cosmonauts seem nearly impossible was just invented wholecloth. But man, watching it makes you feel. All in all I don't have much of a problem with the invented details because you can look all this up and find out easily what really happened - I see this movie as kind of a metaphor for heroics more than a record of real things, a way of saying how difficult the repair mission was and telling its story in a more sensational way.

So this is a fun movie that you probably shouldn't watch if you'd rather watch a space documentary because it doesn't have all its facts straight (on purpose). It's a movie - it makes stuff up so that you'll have a good time watching it. My favorite part of the film is when the two main characters are discussing why it is that cosmonauts, despite being such manly men, always seem to have daughters, and they both conclude that it's because girls are cool.

Orphan (2009)

directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

123 minutes

Canada, France, Germany, USA

3 stars out of 5

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This movie came out right around the time I started to be allowed to see movies other than Disney or Pixar stuff as a kid, and so I was peripherally aware of it as something that was also playing in many theaters that my family went to. It was one of those movies that seemed to be known mostly for its twist, and not necessarily in a good way; the reception was a mixture of making jokes about it and... well, making other jokes about it. Nobody really seemed to be taking it seriously and I had no idea up until recently whether or not it was actually a good movie. The sequel that came out not too long ago had me intrigued, so I decided to finally watch the first one and find out what its deal was.

Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard play a married couple whose lives hit a stumbling block after the stillbirth of their third child and the wife, Kate, going through recovery from alcoholism. An accident is also implied to have happened in the past involving their younger child that is blamed on Kate's alcohol abuse, but this is not really relevant to the plot at large. We see the two of them go through the process of trying to adopt a child until eventually they find Esther, a girl (supposedly) from a Russian orphanage whose parents died in a house fire, and are immediately smitten - she seems perfect; this reserved, quiet little girl who likes to paint and wear old-fashioned, pretty dresses. We the viewers, of course, know what's going on, and even if we somehow have managed to avoid being spoiled and don't know exactly what's going on, the tagline "There's something wrong with Esther" gives us a big hint that all is not as it seems.

Watching this with knowledge of the twist allowed me, for a minute, to elide over the fact that the whole backbone of this movie is kind of based in ableism. I won't go on about it too long, but when you watch this knowing that there is actually something wrong with Esther beyond the generic disturbed-child horror tropes, you're a little blind to the fact that in many ways this is a movie where our fear of the kid in question relies on behaviors that autistic kids tend to exhibit (dressing oddly, having unusual speech patterns, behaving differently from other children their age, not fitting in at school, etc). A lot of us are thankfully not phobic or bigoted enough to see it, but when, say, a horror movie contains a character who has autistic-coded behavior, but is made out to be a murderer or otherwise a criminal for reasons separate from their apparent autism, the end message is not "they wrote this person to be so obviously evil for other reasons that their evilness has nothing to do with their autism". The end message is that non-autistic people are afraid that autistic people secretly ARE that devious and dangerous. There's a subset of people who are frightened that kids who act differently like Esther will also end up being like Esther in the way that they abuse and harm other people.

I dismount my soapbox. The first thing I noticed about this movie is that it's ugly in that way that horror was throughout the first decade of the 2000s; that Saw-Hostel-Midnight Meat Train-House of Wax style where nobody wears any colored clothing at all and everything seems to be coated in ash and dirty snow. It's very industrial, stripped-down; there seems to be a rejection of the idea of cinematography in favor of presenting an atmosphere that communicates through blunt force that life is harsh. This aesthetic is not as severe as it is in other movies I can think of, and it's not distracting, but it's just kind of something where I thought "oh look, it's that mid-to-late-2000s drabness" and moved on.

Without a doubt the thing that makes this a watchable movie at all is Isabelle Fuhrman's performance as Esther. When you're a kid, you always feel older and more mature than you really are, and then when you do get older, you realize you had no idea what it was actually like to be an adult. Children on film, when they're in roles that require them, for whatever reason, to act more maturely than kids their age usually do, end up like the peripheral child characters in Orphan: annoying, not even through any fault of their own but because mean, vindictive lines such as those given to Esther's bullying classmate sound contrived and cringe-worthy when written by an adult to be spoken through the mouth of a child. It's too easy to become aware of the artifice when we're watching movies with children acting out scenarios written by adults trying to imitate what children are actually like. Absolutely none of that applies to Esther. At no moment whatsoever does she feel like a little girl, even - and especially - when she's pretending to be one. Furhman was 10 at the time, and everything about her line delivery and body language just says "tiny adult", not "child pretending to be an adult". It's really, really impressive for a child to be able to deliver a performance that breaks through that feeling of separation between adults and children and have adult viewers (or at least this adult viewer) feeling like they're looking at somebody their own age, even when they're not. Isabelle Fuhrman rules and it's so awesome that they got her back for the sequel. I don't think anybody else could have handled "child pretending to be an adult pretending to be a child" as well as she does here.

I should mention that Vera Farmiga also does a great job in her role and further saves this film by not matching her husband in typical horror movie parent obliviousness. Her character seems to have a depth and interiority that Sarsgaard's character does not. It's interesting to me that we never see her stillbirth presented in a realistic manner but instead our only view of it is as a horrific, trauma-warped memory that opens the film and is never shown again. Having that be our only window into what happened to her centers the film around her point of view rather than looking at her entirely as an outsider.

The pacing is fairly decent - I don't believe movies need a "reason" for their length, but I admit that the fact that this movie is over two hours long had me wondering about it a bit. I generally trust Jaume Collet-Serra as a director and aside from the color palette (which was really just how a ton of media looked at the time) I think this is a perfectly competent film. Despite everything going for it, though, this feels like a three-star movie at best. It's mid. It's maybe the most mid a movie has ever been. And it's so weird for a horror movie - in my brain I don't even necessarily categorize it as one, but I don't categorize it as not one either. It's just kind of, there's horror, and then there's Orphan. The scenario is horrific, yes, and the film uses horror tropes, but it mostly does its own thing in its own inscrutable, grungey, late-2000s way. It kind of falls apart if you start thinking about it even a little bit in that way that tabloid headlines do; it's meant to be entertaining and make you go "wouldn't it be horrible if..." but not explore that concept too deeply.

War of the Gargantuas (1966)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

88 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This is basically a sequel to the previous year's Frankenstein vs. Baragon, but mostly just in a continuity sense. The lab dedicated to studying Frankensteins from that film is carried over into this one, but neither the specific Frankenstein from the earlier film nor Baragon are referenced. So I guess it's more of a spiritual sequel; one that works with a lot of the same ideas, but is largely separate. But, like Frankenstein vs. Baragon, there's a deep sense of empathy for the mutated humanoids referred to as "Frankenstein/s". This is a very, very Ishirō Honda movie in that respect, as well as in other respects I'll get to later in this review. I just rewatched this last night, and while this particular movie isn't a case of me revisiting something I had previously maligned (I liked it the first time and will always like it), I do want to update my review a little.

So what is a Frankenstein? This film's conception of said creature is entirely different from the Western idea of Frankenstein's Monster and I really love that. There are no references to the Shelley story here at all and the term "Frankenstein" is essentially just used as shorthand for an enormous, human-ish or humanoid creature who typically owes at least some of its existence to science. In the case of the first Frankenstein, he grew to inhuman proportions from eating a discarded heart that was being experimented upon; in the case of these two they're just kind of lab escapees - so the science rule isn't absolute, but it seems like to be a Frankenstein means you have to have been touched by the hand of humankind in some way, and not for the better. The two Frankensteins in this film, named Gaira and Sanda, are something between brothers and clones, one formed from the cells of the other, but vastly different in personality and emotions.

The two giant monsters are by far the most human creatures in this film. In fact, I had trouble staying engaged with it at times because the actions of the human characters turned my stomach. Even for Ishirō Honda's tendency to make kaiju films with philosophical angles to them, this one goes quite far in establishing the humans as the bad guys. Aside from the Frankenstein research people, humans don't even attempt to understand or humanely capture either of the gargantuas/Frankensteins at all. We're explicitly the side who's responsible for the most suffering and destruction because we're the only side capable of truly understanding that we're doing it and continuing to do it willingly. That first lengthy fight scene between the military and Gaira, where they not only shoot masers and bombs at him, but also electrify a whole river, causing him to fall in and be shocked into near-unconsciousness before he's carried away by his brother, is genuinely really upsetting. There's a relentlessness to the military movements in this that feels elaborate even for kaiju movies. When the army shears off and burns the top of what looks like an entire forest just to rout out Gaira like a trapped animal I felt sympathy for him as if I was watching somebody slaughter a deer for a trophy. This movie mostly is about watching the military advance with an inhuman coldness towards their goal of destroying both monsters; the military action takes up the majority of the running time. This is why I said this movie feels so trademark Honda: there's a sense of direness and absolute dead seriousness all throughout that doesn't let anything but tragedy feel like the inevitable outcome.

Despite never having any spoken lines, Sanda and Gaira have an incredibly compelling drama unfolding between them throughout the course of the film. One of our first introductions to Gaira makes it very clear that he eats people. Maybe the only funny (if dark as hell) moment in the film comes when he scoops up a lady, chews on her, then spits out something she was carrying. Even before the human-eating becomes explicit, he's shown messing with a boat and generally scaring the wits out of everybody, which of course means that the government and the military's first response is to figure out how to stop and destroy this creature - but thankfully the research lab, and its scientists who have firsthand experience that proves that a Frankenstein can be a gentle, harmless creature if raised with love, is there to provide a tempering voice. Not that it's heard by the factions attempting to destroy Gaira, but it is at least there so us viewers don't feel completely alienated.

I want to talk about the sets and the suits because I feel like even though this is not one of the more well-known of Toho's Showa-era kaiju films, both things are some of the best examples I've ever seen from the studio. Both Sanda and Gaira are the kind of creatures that my brain accepts as just being what they are. With a lot of kaiju suits, your mind kind of unconsciously goes to the air and sight holes in the neck, the seams, where the actor's head would be, basically there's always a sense of the suit being an object no matter how good it looks. Sanda and Gaira are things I look at and I don't see a human in them, I just see them. The suits were evidently constructed by layering material over a regular boilersuit-like garment, instead of basing it around wetsuit material as was normal for suits at the time, and this gave them a level of maneuverability that allowed for much more human body language and movement. The masks were similarly made of layered material over life casts of each suit actor's face. Haruo Nakajima is, as always, the best, and Hiroshi Sekita, in the Sanda suit, plays his respective Frankenstein equally as well. But I also want to talk about the miniatures because they are mindblowing to me. The Hanada airport scene, one of Gaira's first forays onto land, is genuinely one of the best miniature sets I've seen in tokusatsu of this era. There's a moment where Nakajima in the Gaira suit just books it across the runway and I've been thinking about that ever since the first time I watched this film because nothing else looks like that. The sense of scale is perfect - the Frankensteins are not taller than the buildings around them, so instead of looking unstoppable in the middle of a city, there's a feeling of them being lost and confused in a world that they don't fit into.

Sanda and Gaira's relationship is by far the most memorable thing about this film, story-wise. The humans are important for their role in nurturing a Frankenstein into a well-adjusted being, but as usual, it's the monster stuff that really matters. Sanda is the one who has been around humans and understands a little more of how to behave, and as soon as he finds out Gaira's habit of eating humans, he's horrified. He tries to kill Gaira for this, but - although, again, neither of them speak - you really feel his sense of anguish about this, the panic that drives Sanda to do it, and his regret. Both creatures are connected to each other in a way that goes deeper than a familial bond. Gaira is a tragic creature because he was shaped by the environment of deprivation that he grew up in, and even though neither are human, there's something you can empathize with deeply in seeing Sanda watch this other part of him go down a path that can only lead to destruction. Sanda trying to urge his brother away with very human body language when he knows he's walking right into the military's zone of conflict towards the end of the film is another thing that affected me on my first watch.

There's also a bunch of other stuff that goes on here, but it's comparatively a blip against the brother-on-brother violence and emotional turmoil. There's an octopus for like five minutes at the beginning that makes it onto some of the film's posters despite not even being remotely relevant to anything. There's a lounge scene where a woman sings genuinely one of the worst songs I've ever heard not just on film but like, ever, and is then snatched by Gaira. (I'm told that Devo recorded a cover of this song.) I guess I can see aspects of this film that people might deride, and its tone of total seriousness at all times can feel a little impenetrable, but I just... I feel like everything works together, it's all just as it should be, and I'm really surprised this isn't a more popular film.

Nezura 1964 (2020)

directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

Japan

53 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is quite a short movie - it's not even as long as the 53 minutes it claims to be. There's maybe ten minutes at the end that is made up of credits and other stuff. I would, however, highly recommend sticking around for that ten minutes, because the "other stuff" consists of behind-the-scenes shots that show the cast and crew having a great time, and also Mach Fumiake looking really beautiful and singing the film's theme tune, as well as another song by the immediately recognizable Akira Kushida over the end credits, which was a surprise. So basically this is a film that just keeps on giving right up until the very end.

I'd been waiting to see this for a long time, and it was as exciting to finally watch it as I'd hoped, with the added bonus that I had somehow been geared up for a cynical comedy and ended up watching something far more heartfelt. The film itself gives you some context in the opening, but to recap: During the monster-movie boom in the mid-20th century, Daiei Studios, not yet having come out with their biggest hit, Gamera, was planning to make a movie called Giant Horde Beast Nezura. ("Nezura" is a kaiju-ified version of the word "nezumi", which means rat.) The film's monster concept was to use literal live rats that were brought in off the street and were going to be filmed (hopefully) rampaging through detailed miniature city sets, and then eventually there would be a giant rat creature and other actors and all that usual business too. As one might expect, this didn't go so well, with the rats being city rats and infested with fleas and sickness; eventually production ceased and the rats were incinerated per an order by the city health department.

Nezura 1964 is a faux documentary that focuses on the crew behind this planned film, specifically how everyone put a ton of hope and effort into a project that eventually crashed and (literally) burned. It is comedic, but ultimately the sensational headline we all know about that one weird monster movie where they were gonna use live rats falls by the wayside in favor of an exploration of just plain human nature - the nature of humans to do what we love, and to feel bereft and devastated when that's taken away from us by circumstance. And if you pay attention you'll see that "haha why did they use real rats that was stupid" isn't the point, the point is also that this was all happening at a time when focus was shifting rapidly and drastically away from feature films and onto television - a change that led to the birth of the Ultra series, but meant a lot of concepts for kaiju films never got out of development.

If the faux-documentary angle sounds familiar to you, maybe you've also seen The Great Buddha: Arrival. The concept of that film is in many ways the same as Nezura 1964, but The Great Buddha: Arrival is a meta-love letter to a lost film and a treatise on the importance of memory as a practice of keeping things alive, and Nezura 1964 is... well, I just watched it, so I need some time to digest it, but like I said, it's a movie about people who are invested in making movies putting their sweat and tears into an endeavor that fails. The lead "actor" from The Great Buddha: Arrival is also the lead actor in this film, and the rest of the cast is made up of a bunch of other people you'll recognize from various other toku series, specifically a lot of Gamera folks.

So, is the movie itself good? Very. It's pretty bare-bones, there's not a lot to it, but what makes it good is not even necessarily how it feels to watch it - even though it is fun and I liked it - but the fact that there's a director who is making these movies with a cast and crew who are as passionate as he is about preserving the idea of lost or unmade films that are as special and important to the history of this particular area of cinema as are the films that did get made. (He also did Hedorah: Silent Spring, which is great fun.) I think this one looks a little bit more polished than The Great Buddha: Arrival, but it's not supposed to be, since it's framed as a documentary shot in the early 1960s. There's not as much of a meta element here, which is fine, Great Buddha called for that and this one didn't, but it's still fascinating as an exploration of fiction and that liminal space inhabited by things that got so close to existing that the idea of them is still out there in the world even if they aren't. And the rats are so cute! A big part of why Nezura failed was because the crew couldn't rile the rats up enough to look menacing. And they really, really aren't, they just look adorable. I presume the crew of this film sourced them more ethically than they did in the '60s.

The Lake (2022)

directed by Lee Thongkham

Thailand

105 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This was something I was peripherally aware of for a while and interested in as an up-and-coming giant monster movie, but I didn't know too much about it aside from having seen someone claim it was "scarier than The Host". Also, I love that super generic tagline: "A Monster Will Rise". It certainly does! If all you get out of this is "scary giant monster movie", though, then I feel like you may have missed its underlying message - which, ironically, is also the case with The Host.

A voiceover narration at the beginning of the film provides us with some context about the world all of this is taking place in - that is to say, our world. The appearance of a monster is very much tied to the general unbalancing of nature, of climate change and the human sphere rapidly falling into chaos due to our own actions. Whether or not it's stated outright, this kind of thing is implicit in many, many monster movies: the monster as representation of a failing of things we've taken for granted about modern life, as a visual and physical indication that it's all falling apart. After a spectacular introduction to our monster, which I will address further later in this review, we start off on a farm (side note: more goats in this film than expected) where a little girl finds an unusually large egg and, unthinking, removes it from the water, causing its kin to come looking for it and venture into the middle of civilization where their presence wreaks havoc.

This movie is way more personal about its monster-on-human violence than a lot of monster movies dare to be, especially when the monster in question is huge. But to be fair, the huge one isn't the only monster here; there's a second, closer-to-human-sized, mostly bipedal creature who is the one that does most of the up-front killing. It's really brutal: we watch the characters flee from this creature as it flings other people aside ruthlessly, smashing them with its tail or its claws, carving its way through all of the farm workers until eventually the main-ish characters manage to escape to a hospital, telling their story about what they've seen (and not being believed at first, as is par for the course). The violence of this smaller monster initially raises some questions about what seems to be the core message of the film: how can we see ourselves in something that is mercilessly gouging its way through humans? But that's the truth of the whole thing, isn't it? I feel like this isn't a movie where the point is that humans vs. monsters is a one-sided battle; the monster isn't supposed to be a poor, misunderstood, helpless creature (although we do relentlessly misunderstand it), it's supposed to be like us, and we're like it. We're capable of senseless violence, sometimes to protect our own young, sometimes for no reason. So this movie is not asking us "You've just seen this monster kill all of your coworkers and your children, but please, have some sympathy for it", it's asking us "What parts of yourself do you see in what this monster is doing?" Are we ready to face that?

(Or maybe it's asking us none of this, and this is just extrapolation. But if I can't interpret art then what is art for? And what am I for?)

Okay, so let's talk about some good-looking monsters. I was extremely impressed with the first look we get of The Lake's lake creature - it is beautiful, rain-soaked and lumbering, huge and unaffected. The influences on its appearance are clearly all over the map, from aquatic creatures to dinosaurs to other monsters from other monster movies (can you feel the self-control it's taking me not to reference Godzilla in this review?), and in some frames, not in all of them, but in some of them, it looks so plausibly like a real creature that it gave me one of those moments of awe at the state of modern CGI. Unfortunately not all of it is that good, and I have a feeling that those early shots of the big monster are only as convincing as they are because of the pouring rain and darkness masking some of its rougher edges. I have to say I didn't care for the smaller monster nearly as much as I did the bigger one, and this is where you see a lot of the things that CGI can't quite smooth over, because you see it in daylight, moving at a much quicker pace than the big monster. The big one looks so real because its movements are so slow that it doesn't have the opportunity to look fake; there's not many actual life-forms that lumber around at that size, so we don't have a frame of reference to compare it to and think "boy, that looks nothing like a real animal". We're used to seeing stuff run around, and we're not as used to seeing stuff lumber, so it's easier to get away with faking lumbering. The smaller one runs and lopes and is far more motile, and looks less convincing because of that. In my opinion CGI hasn't gotten to the point where it can imitate a real creature's walk cycle perfectly - there's always something that looks unnatural, either too smooth or too jerky. I also just like the idea of a huge monster doing damage more than a littler one getting up close and personal. But the "up close and personal" is kind of the point of this film.

There's a couple of different human characters throughout this and none of them really feels like the "main" one. The one who gets the most focus on his personal backstory is (unfortunately) the cop and his recalcitrant teenage daughter. Cops with recalcitrant teenage daughters are a constant across all forms of media from all countries, and although the injection of a personal angle in a movie where most of the characters don't go beyond the surface level is probably a good thing, I was still bored by this because I see it too many times. Another thing this movie does more than expected is that thing you see in monster movies sometimes where they dedicate a few seconds to a totally clueless bystander's reaction just for comic relief: a guy with earbuds is oblivious to the carnage around him, a woman gripes about the "traffic" as people run and scream past her car, a couple snipping at each other get distracted by the huge beast about to crush their car. It's funny, and I wouldn't say The Lake overdoes this, but... it kind of gets close.

I will admit I don't fully understand the ending. I think I get the vibe, and it's something I love to see in monster movies - alternative solutions to a life post-monster than just "kill it real hard" - but if you asked me to explain it to you, I couldn't. Honestly, this movie feels like it ends around minute 80. What was happening then seemed so final that I was beginning to wonder if maybe this was just one of those movies that have ridiculously long end credits. The brunt of the film takes place over a very small slice of time, one panicked day or portion of a day when a bunch of people experience something weird and impossible, and then there's about 20 minutes of aftermath. It's interesting how the official police line is just to deny that anything happened, and it's also interesting how the film itself doesn't fully demonize anyone for this - there's no real individual human failure here, the end message is just a kind of whole-scale realization that humanity is looking at nature wrong and that this is going to come back and bite us (literally). The police chief who cements the official story that nothing happened is not necessarily a bad person, he's just doing the only thing he thinks is right; he's got family, he's seen horrific things, and this is his reaction. Our cop dad disagrees with this so much that he quits, but it's not a moment of hard feelings, just an irreconcilable difference. Faceted, measured stuff, not the knee-jerk macho yelling you expect out of cops.

There's stuff I didn't like in this and stuff I liked a lot but overall I think it's good because it's a new direction for a monster movie to go in. I would not expect anything less from Thailand's movie industry, which has produced some iconic horror films as well as multiple filmmakers who have pioneered and changed cinema in a more experimental direction. I recommend this but not if you're just looking to get scared. You have to think about it too.

Ghost Man (1954)

directed by Motoyoshi Oda

Japan

73 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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So this was a treat: A fairly early Toho film that I wasn't aware existed, fully (if a little roughly) subtitled and in decent quality if you don't mind your audio being a bit crunchy. And just look at that poster. There's not a lot of names in this that most people would probably recognize, although Motoyoshi Oda is perhaps best known for directing Godzilla Raids Again*, and this whole movie is based on a Kōsuke Kindaichi mystery. Kindaichi's actor, Seizaburō Kawazu, has a lengthy filmography including multiple solid gold Toho classics, but his role in Ghost Man is essentially next to nothing as Kindaichi doesn't even show up until halfway through the film. Haruo Tanaka, an extremely prolific actor who worked for around 70 years, is also in a supporting role as one of the more interesting of several fairly unremarkable characters.

The film opens with a brief scene of a mysterious three-fingered man escaping from a mental hospital. It's par for the course for this era, but there's no nuance in the film's portrayal of mentally ill people or mental hospitals; this character's status as an escapee is used as shorthand for his evil and dangerous nature. The general public is aware of this incident through newspaper articles concerning the worrying escape of the so-called "Ghost Man" from a local asylum; we then learn that sometime after this event, a spate of murders has begun to occur in which the killer targets young, beautiful women working as nude models and poses them for disturbing photographs after killing them. This has the members of an art/photography club that hires out a group of young women as nude models understandably worried. This club is where the central characters of the film (aside from Kindaichi, but again, he's kind of a secondary concern here) are all located. The real action kicks off when that same mysterious, three-fingered man visits the club looking for a model on behalf of his unseen employer. Unaware of the Ghost Man's appearance, the club lets an (incredibly frightened) model go home with this man to a predictable result.

I want to talk for a minute about the role of women in this movie because there is something interesting about it. I'm in no way claiming that this is progressive or feminist, but I did find it unusual that all of the women we see in this film work in a profession that's generally looked down upon - as either nude models or, later in the film, strippers. There's nothing lewd whatsoever here, even the strip show we see later in the film is very, very classy and modest, and doing work like this that would usually be dismissed as immoral or desperate is... for lack of a better term, it's presented as art. It's also presented as work. These are working women who talk about having to feed their families, and they're good at what they do, but they take jobs that they know put them at risk because they need the money. None of the women are central characters but they are all important characters, always present. Which leads me into my next point.

There's just a ton of people in this movie. Other reviews I've seen have remarked on this as well and it's totally true; this movie has a huge central cast. I guess this isn't relevant to the plot, but it gives the whole of Ghost Man a unique feeling. At one point after everyone has sufficient evidence to be concerned about the wellbeing of the first model who goes missing, four guys from the club and the other four models all pile into the 1950s equivalent of a soccer mom van and go investigate the Ghost Man's creepy old house. In any given scene in this movie there will be at least eight people, and most of them are silent, so the camera's not constantly jumping between them and it's not hard to follow or anything, but really the only time there's a single person focused on is when someone is getting murdered. There's a feeling of safety in numbers - especially with the women - that reinforces the sinister, dangerous tone of the whole film.

There's honestly nothing much that stands out about this movie, which is not surprising considering Raids Again is probably the Godzilla series' weakest point, but I have to say it's one of those things that I knew wasn't outstanding but enjoyed watching very much anyway. It hits all the typical beats for a mystery in which the suspect is completely unknown and motivated by a bizarre obsession, but it's also just a tiny bit darker than I expected it to be. The Ghost Man, his face wrapped in bandages, is somehow not as aesthetically imposing a figure as he's meant to be, but the way he works in the shadows and produces unsettling photographs of women he's done terrible things to makes him genuinely menacing. There's a scene where he's sitting in some dark corner of an attic flipping through a scrapbook of his "works" and it's very effective. His henchman is not particularly interesting, aside from having been played by an actor who was actually missing some fingers, and really seems to be there as a delivery vehicle for a twist that was, similarly, not particularly interesting. But if this movie lacks depth in its characters, it at least makes up for that by having a boatload of them to choose from.

That's about all I can say about this. I liked it. The lighting is really interesting and the film has that "seedy underbelly" feel despite its steadfast refusal to overtly characterize nude modeling and dancing as a shameful profession. A lot of movies might have relegated the models, who are present in all steps of the investigation - it's their lives at risk here, anyway - to the background, a pool of meaningless characters to be picked off, but this one doesn't do that. I do wish this got more recognition, because a lot of '50s Toho films tend to fall by the wayside in favor of their biggest hits from that decade.

*I am dying to see his film "A Texan in Tokyo", which is apparently about "a Texan visiting Tokyo [who] takes medicine that gives him strength".