Gamera the Brave (2006)

directed by Ryuta Tasaki

Japan

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This movie retcons the Heisei Gamera trilogy as well as pretty much everything else since vs. Gyaos and places us in a version of 2006 where Japan has not seen a kaiju event since Gamera sacrificed itself to defeat Gyaos 30 years prior. The main character is the young son of someone who was himself a boy when that happened, and it's clear that Gamera and stories of Gamera are something that is deeply woven into the pair's lives. Going back to how things were pre-Heisei, children are once again central to this film. This is a coming-of-age story, but to me, it feels like there's a lot here that was intended for the parents watching over their kids' shoulders as much as for the kids themselves.

That being said, though, this also feels more explicitly "for kids" than earlier Gamera films. I think the reason for that is because everything is cute. This movie, being less than 20 years old at time of writing, is more in line with modern tastes and sensibilities than the films that first introduced us to Gamera. I have no problem with cute, and I was in love with the teeny-tiny baby Gamera who we spend most of the movie with, but I think that the insistence that everything made for children has to be in some way cute or stylized is a thing that has come about since Gamera made its debut. In the Showa films, there was not necessarily a lot of cuteness, but what there was was things that were complex and interesting and colorful and made you (if you were a child) want to be in that world and explore it. There's not a lot that's different from our world in the Brave, other than the kaiju. I can't speak for every child, but when I was young, I didn't only want to see things that were adorable, I wanted to see things that made me think in ways I'd never thought before; puzzles and scenarios that felt fresh and new. Something like the kids exploring the Virasian spaceship in vs. Viras and encountering the Virasians themselves, who have glowing eyes and can combine into one giant form, would have felt fresh and memorable to me as a kid. Little bitty hovering Gamera baby, while it is incredibly important and adorable and I loved it, would have felt to kid me like anything else from any other property aimed at kids.

Treatise on adorableness over, with apologies. So one of the things I really liked about this movie is that despite definitely being aimed at a young audience, there's still layers to it. The child protagonist finds a Gamera egg that hatches in his hands, and he takes home and begins to raise the infant Gamera that comes out of it. He gives it the nickname that his mother, now deceased, gave him - Toto, short for Toru. So he identifies himself with this poky creature that is small, doesn't have parents (well, Toru has a good father, but he's quite busy), and needs help getting around. This is something I haven't specifically seen that often: A child personally identifying with Gamera. He gives it the parenting that he wishes he could have had from his mother. The baby of course grows rapidly to abnormal size for a turtle, and it becomes apparent that this is not just a regular turtle, this is a Gamera. Using a kaiju in this instance as a role model is really interesting and works really well: That this creature who's so small can grow into something that can protect and defend other people and the planet is an uplifting message for any insecure young child.

This is where the coming-of-age aspect comes into the film. At some hard-to-define point, external events force the turtle to cease being a small, innocent, helpless creature and propel it into becoming Gamera. To me this felt like a really strong parallel to the moment - often impossible to perceive until afterwards - that a child becomes an adult. This also was one of the things where it felt like the heaviness of it was reserved for the adults watching. To a child, it would still be tragic to see your beloved pet having to go off and do something else without you, but to an adult who has watched or is anticipating watching that moment come for their own children, it carries more weight.

And I think the biggest place where that dual message for both parents and children comes in is at the very core of the film. Toru obviously cares deeply for his Gamera. He doesn't want to let it go, because he knows what his father told him happened 30 years ago, that Gamera died in sacrifice to save humans. As Gamera grows, Toru struggles with the fact that someday it is going to leave him and he's not going to be able to protect it anymore. He loves Gamera and he knows the world needs Gamera, but selfishly, understandably, he doesn't want it to die. You want to let the thing you love grow and see it live a full life, but that comes with the qualification that it will be in danger most if not all of the time.

But this is also an extremely chill film. There's a real summer-y, casual vibe to it. I got the feeling of being a kid on summer break and not really having anything more pressing to do than run around with a bug net. Time feels stretchy and weird and you live in a place that's safe enough (or as a kid, you don't see any danger) for you to just play in the sun all day. The film is so light and airy that I almost didn't like it at first after watching the darker and more urgent Heisei trilogy, but there is so much heart to this that I eventually saw how it is as good as those films, it's just different. As for the suits, which I always talk about, I liked them but wasn't wowed by them. There's something interesting about how visible the humans inside the suit are here compared to the way they were almost entirely hidden in the Heisei films, and how it means that the actor has to put in more work towards actually performing instead of just animating the suit, but despite that I wasn't enamored with the design of either Zedus (a very forgettable semi-aquatic dinosauroid with no backstory) or the refurbed Gamera and its cowlike eyes. 

I think this is the most complaints I've had about a movie I would still say I loved. It's hard not to be won over when something feels as authentic as the sequence in the end where a relay race of children hands off the object Gamera needs to get its second wind back in its fight against Zedus. I should have watched this at a different time, like possibly some time after the potency of the Heisei trilogy had left my system, and with different expectations.

The Blob (1958)

directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr.

USA

86 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I don't know how I've made it this long without having seen The Blob. I have remained fairly unaware of the particulars of it - excepting the blob itself, of course - and therefore I was absolutely unprepared for it to have a jazzy, peppy theme song about the blob playing over the opening credits. I'm very surprised that more is not made of this, because in the world of theme songs for horror movie monsters that have lyrics about the monsters themselves, this might just be the best one. Who wouldn't want to listen to a lounge-y '50s pop song about a blob?

I have to assume that this took at least some small inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft's "Color out of Space". The blob itself may not be as incorporeal as the extraterrestrial force in the story, but it is an extraterrestrial force, and it's amorphous and weird enough that nobody can quite describe it except to call it a "monster". In fact, now I'm thinking of it, I don't think anybody even attempts to describe it; they just stammer and say things like "it's huge, it's getting bigger, it's eating people". The foreignness of the blob renders all classical descriptions of life inapplicable. But anyway, the opening scenes of the film remind me of nothing so much as Lovecraft's "blasted heath" - the meteor coming to rest on the property of some poor dweller in the countryside and him becoming its first victim, the visual of it sitting in its own crater and then transforming when disturbed, it reminds me a lot of Lovecraft but with a stronger visual component.

After the first victim gets blobbed and is transported to a doctor we then are inundated with late-'50s youth culture. Steve McQueen's character, Steve, and his maybe-girlfriend Jane (Aneta Corsault) end up in a poor excuse for a drag race with a couple of the town ne'er-do-wells - these guys will eventually get their redemption and be an important part of the effort to make the townspeople aware of the blob, but for now, all they're doing is trying to see who can drive backwards to a red light faster. There's a bit of whiplash between what we just saw of the blob and the normalcy of a bunch of teenagers doing teenager stuff, but I think it works somehow, because the audience knows that while these characters are preoccupied with their own silly stunts, there's somebody lying on a cot somewhere getting eaten alive by an alien lifeform. The knowledge that that is happening in the background makes us want to grab every character by the shoulders and tell them to get the hell out and stop racing their huge clunky cars around.

But as far removed as this specific strain of youth culture may be to us today, this movie takes pains to situate itself in something that feels like reality. There's a horror movie playing at the town's theater and it seems to be the main source of entertainment for a lot of the teens ("teens"). We should make note of the fact that this movie exists in a world where everyone is familiar with horror movies: It lends a sense of realness to it, like when characters in a zombie movie immediately recognize that they're in a zombie outbreak, just like the ones in the movies, except for real. But The Blob's vision of an alien invasion in a world that is already used to watching horror movies is scarier than that, because this isn't a zombie, it's something nobody has ever seen before and, as I said, they don't even have the words to describe it. A group of people sitting down to watch a horror movie in a theater when a werewolf or a zombie walks in would just be kind of corny, but the people sitting and having a good time watching horrors from what they think is a safe remove, only to be confronted with something huge and inexplicable, is much more potent.

The blob itself is just awful. It remains awful 65 years later. On a personal note, I have a strong texture aversion to things like Jello, yogurt, custard, semi-solid foods like that. I think this may have given me more of a full-body revulsion whenever the blob was onscreen than was intended. It made me want to throw up. I could not stop imagining it in my mouth, touching my skin, all over my body - there's a disturbingly tactile feeling to the blob, granted to it by its nature as a physical, non-CGI object, and it's so enduringly creepy that I totally understand why this traumatized a generation of kids. There's just something so unwholesome about it. It looks like it smells bad. It has no face, no appendages, nothing we can relate to, it's a being of pure want that can't be stopped. We don't know its motives, we don't know where it came from, and we can't kill it. This is a picture of an overconfident humanity being confronted with something that makes us realize our place in the food chain of the universe.

But the thing that makes The Blob a great movie is only in part the actual blob. The thing that makes this a great movie is that it's handled so well and so evenly when compared to other teen screams of the time. Steve McQueen delivers a remarkably naturalistic performance; I totally believed that his character believed there was something roaming around town that was deeply frightening, and his frustration when no one will listen to him is palpable. He doesn't outwardly panic, but you can tell in the way his voice catches when he asks one of the stubborn policeman if he looks like somebody who's lying or somebody who's scared stiff that he really is scared stiff. The horror of this movie is half in the blob and half in trying to get people to believe you about something that sounds completely ridiculous but that you know is real.

(I also really love how insistent the movie is on making sure we know the first victim's little dog is okay. There are so many moments when it leaves the screen and we think for sure it's done for, but every single time, somebody will bring up the dog afterwards and say they saw it running off down the street looking terrified or something. I'm glad that the dog makes it through okay. I think he might now be one of my favorite dogs of film. He's just a little guy. And he's a slippery one to have evaded the blob that whole time.)

When I think about horror movies from the '50s, most of them have a monster that's at least somewhat conventional - it's not that there were no weird monsters, but the movies that were really out there with their creatures are not typically the ones that have gone down as cultural phenomena - except The Blob. Usually it's vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's Monsters, things that we're familiar with; it must have been that sense of the unknown that has kept this movie so compelling for the last 60+ years. But again, the incredibly unique monster design is only a facet of what makes this movie so good; the rest, it owes to tight scriptwriting and empathetic, believable performances. And my god, what a terrifying ending. My one nitpick is that, as other reviewers have said, it could use a little more blob.

Get 'em All (1960)

directed by Eizo Sugawa

Japan

87 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm not very familiar with Eizo Sugawa's other films, apart from by name, but it seems like this one is not one of his more well-known works. Despite that, I still had been wanting to see it for a dog's age, and I was very excited to have stumbled upon a crowdfunded fansub. I was not going to review this, but I liked it so much that I feel like I have enough to talk about for a whole review. It should be noted, also, that the screenplay for this was written by the great Shuji Terayama.

Although it shares many conventions with other Japanese noir (and noir-adjacent) films of the Showa era, Get 'em All stands out in a couple of ways. It is hard to call it strictly a crime film, because the "crime" that is hinted at repeatedly and never quite fully brought into light happened at some shadowy time in the past. It's more apt to call it a revenge film, but what I think it really is is a character study and a commentary on the self-absorbed nature of society. It's nuts to look up the lead actor, Hiroshi Mizuhara, and see that he was only ever in a handful of films over a relatively short period of time, and nothing that had any kind of breakout, international success. He plays his character, Kyosuke, with a quality that I mentioned recently in my review of Nope: We get to see him before a tragedy occurs, and despite the fact that the bulk of the movie takes place after the tragedy, it's the entirely different personality he had beforehand that strikes us. You see him go from seemingly not knowing or caring much about the world beyond his family and immediate surroundings to being wholly disaffected, passively (sometimes actively) homicidal, looking like a shell of a person.

The gist of the plot is that Kyosuke's brother was part of a group of seven men who at some point in the past robbed a bank and got away with a huge amount of cash, which they stash in an empty grave but, upon trying to retrieve it, find gone. Out of all of them, Kyosuke's brother gets pinned with the blame and is killed in a way that's staged to look like a car accident. Unintentionally, Kyosuke stumbles upon his brother's gun, which fired a single bullet during the robbery - a bullet that, if traced, could bring every single person who was in on the robbery down. From then on, all of the remaining robbers are focused on two things: Who has the gun, and who has the cash.

Nobody in this movie seems to feel empathy or be connected with reality in any way that goes further than their own momentary entertainment. No character embodies this better than Kyosuke's sister-in-law, who, immediately after her husband's death, openly and shamelessly takes up with Kyosuke instead ("I can't mambo with a dead person"). Nothing fazes her, life is just dancing and playing and having fun, nothing is ever serious. In a way, this is how every character goes through the world, except instead of being motivated by having fun, for most of them, life - although framed, in this narrative, as one huge game - is a game to be won through being the worst, the most ruthless, essentially the last man standing, with cash in hand. As juxtaposition we see groups of children playing in the streets in ways that are almost uncivilized: A boy kicks around a dead pigeon, a group of kids noisily play cowboys with (...mostly) fake guns. The pigeon motif is actually really interesting because the pigeons are used, I think, as a symbol of the characters' lack of empathy towards other creatures. At a pivotal moment in the film, Kyosuke stops the same boy from stealing someone else's pet pigeon, and after he runs off with it, you think he's just going to let it go - but he doesn't, he shoots it. Kyosuke using the gun on the pigeon opens the door for him to be able to use the gun on other humans. His goal becomes tracking down his brother's associates and killing them all, not caring which of them was the specific one driving the car - all of them are complicit in his eyes, except, strikingly, his brother.

What I liked most about this is that despite a somewhat short running time it still manages to give most of its characters enough background that they feel like disparate people living disparate lives, not just a group of homogeneous shady crims. Tatsuya Nakadai's character is almost (almost) uninvolved in the crimes but still serves as a vital framework for the whole film. He's a former boxer who retired after a leg injury some time in the past and kind of watches the proceedings as an outsider, but proves that he knows what's going on better than anyone when he confronts Kyosuke at the end, telling him that none of this meant anything, none of it was real, "We all had a nice dream. You had fun playing with your pistol." That's what Get 'em All is, in a nutshell. People putting on an act as something bigger, but ultimately none of it lasts, nothing means anything. There's a really strong strain of pessimistic nihilism that runs through this.

This reminded me a lot of Tai Kato's masterpiece I, the Executioner, although the key difference is that the whole motivation behind the main character of Executioner's revenge is specifically that the victim he's avenging was not close to him. But I think that they're similar in that they present a cruel and morally decayed world, where widows move on from their husbands' death in the blink of an eye, where children play with dead things and pretend to kill each other. Personally, when I think "Toho crime movie", what comes to mind first is the Ankokugai films, and this is totally unlike those, although it's contemporary with them. There's also a really cute cat, who fortunately survives everything. Reviewers seem unanimous in their love for Demp the cat.

Dogora (1964)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

83 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This is a very overlooked kaiju movie, having fallen into relative obscurity and thus being known mostly by people who are already into that kind of thing. It did receive an English dub, with the revised titles of its international releases referring to Dogora variously as a space invader, space monster, space octopus, or some kind of monster "from the swamp". You can thank Italy for that one - I guess space is a swamp now. My personal favorite is West Germany, who dubbed this "Phantoms Against Gangsters". It shifts the focus of the film off of Dogora and onto the human side of things, but that's not entirely unfair, considering that this is a two-pronged oddity of a film.

I have to say right out of the gate that this is one of my favorite kaiju movies because it's so dissimilar from others. It's half a diamond heist film, half a monster movie, and that makes it unlike anything else. The world it's set in is so mundane and everybody is so deeply concerned with themselves and their little human schemes, and when clearly supernatural events start happening, they're noted, but eventually just kind of abandoned so that people can go back to doing crimes. This is a bit like Ishirō Honda's later film All Monsters Attack, where the backdrop is a dismal, industrialized urban wasteland, a place where adults go through their dreary lives ignoring any and all unusual circumstances around them, but in the middle of this concrete jungle there still exist strange and weird happenings - only, in All Monsters Attack, the strange/weird happenings are all in the mind of a little boy. In Dogora, it's reality. What I'm trying to say is that this is a theme Honda revisits several times throughout his filmmaking career: A city where the people are so caught up in their own lives that they either don't notice or don't give sufficient weight to fantastical things around them.

If there's anything wrong with this film, it's that it's a little bit talky. That ties into what I just mentioned about how all the human characters have blinders on and are involved in their own schemes all the time, so it's kind of part and parcel of the storyline, but it does make it drag a bit in its short running time. There are two main factions at play as far as the human side of things go: The jewel smugglers, a group of six or seven (?) who launch various plots to steal various burlap sacks full of diamonds, and a few guys from the local police who try to stop them. Hopping between sides is Robert Dunham as someone who's ambiguous about how much he knows and who he really works for. The main cast is way too big for everybody to have a specifically defined role, but somehow it works - had the diamond thieves been two or three people, there would have been some vital quality lost. Even though you don't get background on every single one of them, just from the way they acted around each other and the roles they took during heists, you get the impression of them all having different places within the gang. It feels like there's more backstory than is ever revealed onscreen. Meanwhile, the police are your standard police - Dunham is the wild card, but I didn't find him that interesting even so.

But while the thieves are thieving and the police are thinking up ways to catch them, things are happening all over the world that defy logic. People and objects are levitating into the air, large structures are being chopped in half by some invisible force, and huge amounts of coal are sucked into the sky. There is a sense that society is destabilizing by bits and pieces. The scale of these events varies; sometimes it's small, human-sized: In genuinely one of the funniest non-sequiturs I've seen in a kaiju film, the perennial drunk salaryman floats horizontally down a sidewalk before being accosted by cops. Other times it's colossal: Cars being whipped into the air and buildings dissolved, television satellites colliding with unknown objects and being swallowed. Dogora the organism has a slew of powers that seem hard to pin down and very dangerous, and that, coupled with its bizarre, amorphous form, make it a favorite kaiju of mine.

I love Dogora as a creature. Only a very scant handful of other creatures in kaiju media have ever been like it, certainly not before this and very rarely after it. For someone who is so in love with suitmation and the physical process of having a person playing the monster, it's a little ironic that one of my favorite kaiju is basically a plastic bag with strings attached to it. But I would still argue that the creation of Dogora was a peak that the genre has yet to reach again. You may point out the practical effects as not being up to the standards of today's film industry, and you'd be right, but the level of technology doesn't matter when the broader end product is better than anything we could be making right now. The shots of Dogora undulating in the sky like some uncanny sea creature transplanted into the heavens is not exactly going to be mistaken for documentary footage, but the image of it - just the sheer aesthetic, the way it looks - is more striking than anything else could be. Dogora is not a Godzilla with its feet firmly on the ground, stomping its way through a city. Dogora isn't something your house could be trampled by. Dogora is a phantom, a visitation, an utterly alien and incomprehensible force hovering just far enough away that we can't touch it. It has no eyes to look into, no facial features, and its limbs seem useless, not used for grabbing like an octopus or squid. That the military eventually does logic their way into figuring out how to destroy it almost feels like a cop-out. Dogora is such a bizarre and unclassifiable creature that shooting missiles at it and seeding it with poison feels like going after Godzilla with a flyswatter, but somehow it works anyway.

(I should also note that Dogora is not actually a plastic bag, that was a little exaggeration on my part. What it's really made out of is soft vinyl, a material that was relatively new at the time, not yet put into use to manufacture all the Ultraman figures on your shelf that cost more than a month of your rent.)

My goal here is really just to make more people aware of this oft-forgotten film with one of my most favorite kaiju in it. Dogora got a few token cameos in video games and some mentions in manga and novel adaptations of the Godzilla franchise, but never appeared physically in another film. I think you can only do something like this once and then it loses some of its mystique. But this one instance of everything coming together to make a perfectly unsettling, visually striking creature who happens to interrupt a jewel-stealing plot exists as a gem in Toho's colossal back catalogue.

The Sadness (2021)

directed by Robert Jabbaz

Taiwan

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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(I wrote this review shortly after this movie came out in May of last year, and I was very enthused about it at the time, but now, revisiting it, I feel the need to rework it slightly. Especially knowing that the director has stated he was not interested in the political dimensions of the film and only wanted to show gore - that goes against, and somewhat spoils, my image of the film. I'm beginning to think most of what I got out of this movie was in spite of the director's intent rather than because of it. I also have read criticism of this as being an empty, try-hard portrayal of violence for violence's sake, and I think there's a point to that. But I do also remember how much I liked the movie the first time I watched it, and so I'm keeping a lot of my enthusiasm intact, although taking it with a grain of salt now.)

I was extremely excited for this one based off of the strength of the fan response; it seems like all I hear is talk of it being the most brutal film somebody or other has seen. But I was also trying to tamp down my expectations, because essentially the same thing happened surrounding The Medium when it came out, and that was a disappointment and a half. However, in this case, The Sadness lives up to the hype. It achieves its brutality specifically because it does things differently from other films typically hailed as ultra-gory masterpieces, and I'll talk about why that is in a moment. It is possibly the engine behind the success of this whole film.

I've reviewed a few horror movies with elements of contagion or viruses, released in the past year or two, that I've taken pains to not shoehorn as being "Pandemic Films" - it's impossible to say at this point how movies concerning covid are going to age, considering that we're still in the pandemic, but usually I don't want circumstances that were taking place at the time of a film's release to be inseparable from my overall impression of it, because someone could be watching said movie in 50 years and have no clue what it felt like for me to watch it in 2020. But The Sadness is a pandemic movie. It's inextricable from the current situation we're in. I say "we", but vitally, this movie is from Taiwan; East Asian countries have had a drastically different and unique experience of the pandemic from what I in the West have. The market on covid films here is oversaturated with stuff that has titles like "Flurona Mask Shark Zombies" and usually these films build off of denial of covid and making fun of perceived hysteria rather than the deep fear and uncertainty that The Sadness has as its backbone.

Although I think there's more blood in this than I've seen in any movie in recent memory, the gore is not non-stop. It's restrained to sudden bursts of almost transcendent violence that the characters have to try desperately to avoid; these little islands of annihilation that they bike and run and fire-extinguisher-to-the-skull their way out of. It felt like there was just about a 50/50 balance between these truly impressive feats of human depravity and moments of genuine calm and even real tenderness, and that was why, when things got bloody and violent, it felt just awful. It's crucial that The Sadness gives us times like the first fifteenish minutes, wherein we see how the two main characters care for each other and live a quiet, peaceful life together, or scenes where the female lead goes to fairly exceptional lengths to help rescue a total stranger from a train. These scenes of normalcy show us that there is another state of being than the unhinged violence caused by the film's covid stand-in. And it really does reflect something of what it felt like to just be entering the pandemic: I still could remember what it was like to eat in a restaurant, I could remember being physically close to people, but then I would check the news and see things like Italy getting absolutely decimated in the early days of the pandemic and the contrast between the memory of safety and the new reality in front of me made me feel doomed. The Sadness manages to somehow be both visceral and ominous at the same time. That isn't easy to pull off.

I was also so in love with the practical effects in this. They have a shiny, more-real-than-real quality to them, and again, they're not overused - the infected don't mutate to a point where they don't resemble humans or where they look like the walking dead, instead they acquire a genuinely disturbing uncanny valley quality with big, soulless black eyes and a permanent rictus grin. There is so much blood and so much violence, but it's not constant, and that's why it's great. The film as a whole presents enough depth (and even a slight bit of satire) that it diverges entirely from the "what if covid, but it made people zombies" genre that is rapidly accruing films. The depth comes from the fact that it's heavily implied that the infected are kind of "locked in" to their bodies, that they might be fully aware of the abominable acts they're committing but unable to stop themselves, which is potentially the most horrifying thing I've heard about in any pandemic movie thus far.

I'm also really interested in that cartoon that was playing on TV accompanied by what sounded like a public service announcement from someone in the late stages of infection. If anything about this movie disappointed me at all, it's that that was never fully explored. Because it implied that either someone out there retained enough agency and cognitive ability to animate, edit, compose music for, and broadcast a cartoon depicting the horrible depravity they wanted to inflict on society due to the virus' effect on them, or it implied that someone out there had knowledge enough of what was coming that they had that cartoon ready to go before the pandemic even began. The origin of the virus isn't really important to the plot of the film, but what the cartoon implies about it is something I was left wondering about.

To me, there's a perfect level of violence that this movie hits and goes no further. Some of it feels deeply personal and that's why it's so unsettling. The female character is stalked for a good portion of the film by a guy who wouldn't leave her alone on a train, and it just felt so real, so relatable to have this guy following you who you can't get rid of and you don't know what he's going to do to you. That coupling of the real - both on a personal level and in the broader sense of this being about a pandemic and made during an actual pandemic - with the speculative is why this is such a good horror movie. I'm very glad to finally see a new release that didn't let me down, and it blows my mind that this is a debut film for Robert Jabbaz.

Nope (2022)

directed by Jordan Peele

USA/Japan/Canada

130 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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It took me a long time to get around to watching this - its theatrical run was while covid was even more of a significant risk than it is now - and I had to contend with rampant spoilers in the meantime. I spent a lot of time scrolling really fast past gifsets. I thought I had seen some things about it that constituted major spoilers, but as it turned out I had done something that I don't know if everybody else does or just me: I'd seen very tiny details from a film and constructed a whole story around them in my head almost unconsciously, leading me to believe I knew the plot, when in reality the actual film was totally different. This is one of those movies where reading about it pales in comparison to seeing it, so I'm going to discuss spoilers freely and recommend that you skip all this and just watch the thing. I also must say: I used to live around this part of California and it kind of is just like that. I would not at all be surprised if there were aliens living out there.

We kind of "cold open" into Daniel Kaluuya's character, OJ, witnessing his father's death in front of him in circumstances that are almost impossible to explain. A nickel, apparently shot at high velocity, embeds itself in his brain, killing him. We also see a house key embedded in the side of one of his horses, the implication being that some extremely high-speed hail of small objects fell over the ranch the night OJ's father died. This is a bizarre occurrence and a perfect way to start off the film, because it doesn't actually reveal anything about the plot or the creature that will come into play later, but still primes us for something utterly strange and new.

I think Kaluuya does an incredible job playing his character for the simple fact that there's a palpable sense of him being a different person before his father's death and after it. And when I say "before", I mean in the literal two or three lines of dialogue he has at the beginning of the film. It's nothing short of impressive how he manages to convey such a change in personality that even though I only saw his "before" self for a very scant amount of time, I was still conscious throughout the rest of the film that the version of him I was watching seemed different. His performance is subtly physical and he conveys the sense of somebody who is uncomfortable in the public eye, somebody more suited to his horse ranch, to the solitude of being with his own family, with his horses. Keke Palmer as his sister, Emerald, is almost the exact opposite, but her performance is just as good, she's so cool and easygoing that it feels like there's no wall between the viewer and Emerald as a person.

This is a movie about cycles of consumption. It's about seeing and being seen. Nothing embodies this better than Steven Yeun's character, Jupiter. A former child actor, he sets up an apparently successful Old West-style theme park experience in the California desert with his wife and children. But in the past, in his role on a fictional late-'90s sitcom called "Gordy's Home", he was witness to an incredibly disturbing trauma that should sound at least somewhat familiar because it is taken from a real-life event that I think probably lives rent-free in the brain of everyone who's read about it. Gordy was a chimpanzee, and as Jupiter tells it, one day one of the chimp actors portraying him "reached his limit". Jupiter does not go into the gore in his own recollections, but we see in flashbacks - and we know from real life - that this was nothing less than total carnage, leaving a woman permanently disfigured, and possibly more people dead in the fictional account of the event. We see Jupiter hiding under a table, watching everything, probably eleven years old at most. And we see how this shaped his life to come.

I don't think I've ever felt like I could understand the psychology of a character more, not by having it explained to me but simply by their actions, than I did with Jupiter. A word repeated throughout this film is spectacle. Jupiter constructs his entire life around being the spectacle, taking what he witnessed and internalizing it. Early on in the film, he tells Emerald about how the Gordy's Home incident was made into a Saturday Night Live sketch, and he tells her with reverence - not a hint of bitterness, not a hint of trauma, it is genuinely the highest honor to him that his ordeal has been turned into comedy fodder. Because it keeps him in the spotlight. As long as what happened to him is consumable, he doesn't have to look directly at it. He can instead frame it as the spectacle. He becomes the spectacle as a defense mechanism, because if he makes himself into something to be consumed, he is immortal as long as there are people to consume him. But it can't last forever. You can beg and plead to be seen, to be looked at, but as we'll see repeatedly throughout Nope, you can never, ever be the one doing the looking. Jupiter tells the SNL story while sitting in front of a commemorative T-shirt from Cape Canaveral, which of course includes the Challenger on its list of shuttles.

Race is not absent from this movie's concept of who is being seen and who is seeing. In fact, I think it's at the center. I know there are probably elements here that I'm not even aware of because I'm viewing this as a white person. Nope builds itself around a sequence of images strung together by Eadweard Muybridge of a horse being ridden by a jockey, often hailed as the first motion picture (the images shown in the film are not his first horse film, but a later, presumably better-looking sequence). The jockey - a Black man - is lost to history, almost definitely intentionally. In Nope, an identity for him is created, a Bahamian named Haywood, and OJ and Emerald's family are his descendants. So this is not only a movie about movies, about seeing, about consuming and being consumed - it is inherently a movie about the Black experience of being consumed. The story is the same from before the beginning of Hollywood through to today: white audiences will eat up simulated Blackness, will go wild for stories about cannibals in the jungle and caricatures of everything they fear about Blackness, but should that Blackness look back, should they be confronted, everything becomes chaos.

This is represented in the Viewer. A creature that consumes everything that beholds it, a giant eye (or what looks like an eye) scanning the landscape for what it perceives as encroachments upon its territory. By its very existence it is looking, but if you look back, it devours you.

The absolute genius of this is that not only is it an allegory for media consumption and race in Western filmmaking, it is also a deeply scary movie. It is horrific in a different way from Us or Get Out, in that its horror is actually, legitimately not of this world. It's also drastically less humorous: Peele's previous two films were similarly allegorical and serious, but there were moments of levity in them to be sure. Nope is practically a vacuum of humor (although that TMZ guy eating shit on the bike was pretty funny). The Viewer is really just ghastly: this unknowable, massive thing that watches you and refuses to be watched in turn, scooping people up whole and then flying around broadcasting their screams as they're being consumed alive. It's ghastly as an entity and it's also ghastly because nothing I just said about it couldn't technically be said about the machinations of the movie industry when you're an actor of color.

This is basically a perfect movie. If I had to find anything at all I disliked about it - and this really is the smallest thing - the interstitial title cards bothered me. They looked stock somehow, like a template that comes with a video editing software or something. Apart from that, it nails everything it tries to do. Seeing the Viewer unfold to its full, nearly incomprehensible form was breathtaking. OJ's final ride, with the best use (I guess one of the only uses) of Exuma ever put to film. Emerald's Akira slide (I cheered). And when he thinks he's not coming back, OJ's "I'm watching you" gesture to Emerald is deeply, deeply meaningful: In a world where everyone begs to be seen, where everyone is concerned with seeing the latest spectacle and becoming the spectacle themselves, in a "look at me" world, with that gesture he's saying "I'm looking only at you". Not "see me", not "I want to be seen". "I see you".

Deadman Inferno (2015)

directed by Hiroshi Shinagawa

Japan

108 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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