Barbarian (2022)

directed by Zach Cregger

USA

103 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm fairly certain that this is still in theaters as of the time of this writing, and the only thing I've seen anybody say about it is that it's "good but overhyped". I've somehow managed to avoid 100% of whatever hype for this is out there, so I'm not sure what the overall response has been, and I'm not sure if I'll be going against the grain when I say that keeping myself in the dark for this made me see it as a really excellent, unexpected horror film. I would highly recommend not looking at reviews or even watching trailers if you're planning on seeing this.

We start out thinking we probably know where the story is going: A woman arrives at her Airbnb to find it's been double-booked, and although us viewers have alarm bells going off about the whole situation, after some deliberation she decides to stay in the house anyway with the man who had already been renting it out. The casting of Bill Skarsgård in this role as well as his name being fairly highly billed was a great choice, because we've seen him be incredibly creepy so many times that we may, perhaps subconsciously, be expecting to see him be creepy again. Little things are off about the house itself, besides the obvious risk of a single woman staying in the same house as an unfamiliar man, and at any minute it seems likely to crescendo into the reveal of him as a killer. It also, strangely, seems like we might be headed for a meet-somewhat-less-than-cute scenario, as the two temporary cohabitators are actually having a nice time and getting to like each other, but it's hard to tell if this is deliberate misdirection or not. All we know is that something is wrong about the house, and although we think we know from genre conventions what it is, we can't be certain - until we are.

In short, what this movie does and why it is so effective is that it presents us with situations where our nerves are instinctually on edge, like seeing a single woman and a strange man together, and then it says "Oh no, you thought that was what you had to be afraid of?" It's not so much that it leads the viewer towards thinking the wrong thing, with red herrings or false starts; it's more that it makes us feel like we're already unsafe and then shows us that things can always get worse. Like, you trap a spider in a jar and then look slightly to your left and there's an even bigger spider, and you only have one jar.

Barbarian is also incredibly good at establishing a creepy atmosphere by reeling things out so slowly and with such care for pacing that I could almost imagine the plot as a physical line that kept branching out further and further. And further and further and further. Nothing whatsoever is as it seems in this film, there's always an underground beneath the underground, always something worse no matter how bad things have already gotten. As we see the main character descend into the space beneath her rental, the sense of unease mounts and mounts until it's almost unbearable. She just keeps finding more doors and passageways and it would almost be funny if it wasn't so thoroughly terrifying - it's labyrinthine, this cavernous space under the house, and like many, many things in the film it implies a length of time spent down there that only gets more disturbing the longer you think about it. One of the scariest moments in the film for me wasn't even a moment where anything bad was happening - it's when Tess is exploring the tunnels with only very scant light to guide her, and Keith, who she's gone in after, suddenly comes crawling out of the dark on all fours. Again, he's actually the one in trouble, there's nothing sinister about him in the end, but seeing something that wasn't immediately identifiable as moving like a person made me almost jump out of my chair. And then when he says that they have to get out because something "bit me" - just awful. That's about where things start taking a sharp downward turn and don't stop.

I wanted to call this movie "relentless", but the truth of it is that it does quite frequently relent, and that's why it works so well. There are three major transitions over the running time of the film, and each time, the sudden shift into something completely different is so jarring that it feels like whiplash. We go from the absolute depths, a dark and horrible cavern where goodness and light go to die, to watching some chucklehead singing in his fancy roll-top car. The timing is comedic, but in the moment it doesn't feel comedic; all we can think of is what we saw just moments ago. This happens again closer to the end of the film, when we get to see some backstory on the house, which leads me to another thing I thought was really impressive about Barbarian: That it does the same thing over and over and manages not to feel stale. It never lets us get used to things becoming steadily worse. I had the pleasure of seeing Hereditary in theaters when it first came out and I remember feeling the same way during that as I did during this; I actually laughed out loud at one point because I was just thinking "How much worse can it get?"

I think it's also important to note that this is not a strictly realistic movie, and I don't think it was trying to be. It has the trappings of the horror genre and it dials up the intensity on many things that simply would not be that way in real life (I.E. I don't think inbred people actually look like that, nor can they rip people's heads open with their bare hands). It's good that it does these things, it's good that it puts us in these situations that beggar belief, because when a horror movie is not going to involve supernatural events, it sometimes feels like it has to lean more towards gritty realism, and more often than not the end product is a movie that is just gory and brutal but not scary, not creepy. This is all of those things and it's even a little funny, in a dark way. It's not content to have viewers sympathize with Tess, who as far as we know is entirely innocent, it also has to give us A.J., the aforementioned chucklehead(/rapist), who we really kind of hope gets dragged off into the darkness while he obliviously tries to figure out if he can include the chud tunnel under his house as extra square footage. Again, I really don't know what most people think of this, so I could be making myself look foolish by having enjoyed it and been so receptive to its twists and turns while everybody else is calling it lazy and uncreative, but I genuinely thought this was a great film. As a last note, the title makes a whole lot of sense if you know the supposed etymology of the word "Barbarian", and I thought that was a brilliant small touch as well.

Actually, there is one last thing I want to talk about, and it happens at the very end of the film. I just thought that there was a very compelling parallel between how A.J. keeps invoking excuses like "I had no choice! It was me or you!" to justify actions that he takes where there is indeed a choice [the choice to not be a massive asshole] and what Tess has to do to defend herself. Her act was a real case of "me or you". If the film has been successful at impressing the horror of what was going on beneath the Airbnb on its viewers, then they really should feel at least some kind of sympathetic response to Tess' attacker. I think there's a real deep tragedy in having no choice other than to kill someone who is so far beyond being culpable for their actions due to the circumstances of their birth and life.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

directed by Eugène Lourié

USA

80 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Although it's more than good enough to stand on its own merits, this movie is often known for being at least part of the inspiration for Gojira. Visually, the unnamed titular beast (it's just kind of "a dinosaur", not too specific) does bear a very strong resemblance to Godzilla, especially in the head, though the body is much more Komodo Dragon-ish and certainly not bipedal. The story itself also shares similar themes, but I am forcing myself not to compare the two overmuch as I am too biased to do that fairly. I will try to talk about this on its own.

There's also a direct link to Gojira in that the creature here is awakened and perhaps mutated by atomic testing. The film opens at a research base in the Canadian arctic, and the stark black-and-white does nothing to remove the stomach-churning grandeur of the nuclear explosions. In fact, there is something interesting about seeing the clouds and debris in black-and-white, because it blends so well with the already monochrome landscape of the arctic that in some way the effect is to make it look like part of nature, instead of what it is, which is the opposite. Seeing mushroom clouds in vivid, angry reds and oranges the way they're usually depicted clearly demarcates them as something manmade, but setting them against a landscape where everything is so white as to blend the horizon into the skyline makes it so that the mushroom cloud could easily be the flume from a glacier calving or another natural event in the arctic.

The scientists are quite pleased with themselves after conducting a successful test, and much is made of humanity's evolving grasp of science. I can't say this film goes too deep with any kind of statement about hubris or taking responsibility for our actions, but I do love the underlying message here: We get too full of ourselves, too proud to be uncovering the last secrets of science, thinking we know everything that's out there, and now look what's coming up over that hill. The dinosaur is a physical representation of the unmapped areas of our knowledge and the fact that no matter how comfortable we get, we can't predict nature's course, especially once we start messing with things like nuclear energy. I think the terror here is supposed to come more from the possibility of an undiscovered, ancient lifeform that could wreak havoc on our civilization, as opposed to the possibility of a new superweapon we could invent that would wreak havoc on our civilization, but sometimes that's nice. Sometimes we do just want to see a dinosaur wreck things.

I knew, of course, that this was a fairly old film, but it still surprised me that it's so... quaint, for lack of a better term. I think a lot of what I expected out of it simply didn't exist yet at the time this had been released. Much of the genre conventions were indeed invented by this film and would go on to be developed further later. I wonder how many films at the time had done scenes of large crowds in a city running in mass panic as buildings around them were destroyed by some monster. But the thing I wasn't expecting was that 99% of the action is restricted to the last twenty minutes or so. The main character, a scientist who narrowly escapes a brush with the dinosaur at the beginning of the film, returns to the States and spends the majority of the film trying to convince people around him to believe what he saw. Very few do, and even those willing to go along with him are doing just that - going along with him; half for fun, half out of genuine scientific curiosity. Nobody really takes anything seriously except for our protagonist, who for his part is quite earnest, charming, and softspoken about his wacky dinosaur tales. Until the latter part of the film, nothing has much weight. The jolly older paleontologist who agrees to go diving for evidence to support the protag's wild claims remains lighthearted as he descends in a diving bell to his death. People go about their lives with no inkling of the giant thing advancing down towards them.

It's to be expected from something of this era, but there really is a dearth of women here. If I recall correctly there were three with any kind of speaking role: One was a secretary of some kind, another was a nun, and the most important role played by a woman was the paleontologist's assistant, who is the only person to put stock in the main character's story, and encourages him to look into it further. No women are in this film who are not in some way in service to a man (possibly excepting the nun, but, well... I'm not going to get into theology here). I know a lot of people would say that there's no point in complaining about something that's been and gone already, but I do think it is important to acknowledge the gender inequality in films like this and how it still pervades cinema today, lest we slip back into a situation where women are not onscreen unless they're doing something for a man.

I've somehow gotten this far without talking about the practical effects. Pioneering, ahead of its time, a masterpiece; this and much more has already been said but I could say it again and it would still be deserved. The dinosaur really looks almost more like taxidermy in some scenes than an artificial object. I swear that when it roared I could see its sides expanding from its breath. Another thing we're not going to go into here is how much our image of dinosaurs has progressed since this film, except to say that this is probably a fairly inaccurate dinosaur, but that doesn't even matter to me because although it might not look like a "good" dinosaur, it looks like a real creature. It doesn't just have an appearance. It has a personality. I looked at it and it felt like it had interiority and a will of its own the way I would watch lizards in the pet store when I was a kid. Its movements are incredibly well choreographed and animalistic, and the detail in its skin and face doesn't lack much if anything at all. This really is the movie that set the standard, the one that everybody would try to imitate.

There is a beautifully sharp print on archive.org and I would go so far as to be a little snobbish and say that if you can't find this in good quality, maybe don't watch it at all, since the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion practical effects are the highlight of the show and it would be doing them a disservice not to be able to see them perfectly clearly. You can kind of take or leave the story because to be honest it is a little bit dull, sort of a standard "oh no a monster is coming - but we can firebomb it and then we'll all be okay!" situation, but again, that thing hadn't been done to death the way it has now. I think this is an important film in the history of practical effects and is, generally, also just a fun watch anyway.

DeepStar Six (1989)

directed by Sean S. Cunningham

USA

105 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I think I might have mentioned before that I'm strangely fond of big mainstream sci-fi films (especially SF/horror hybrids) from the late 1980s and 1990s. I'm not quite sure what it is about them, because I normally favor indie film most of the time, but a lot of movies like this have an inherent competency to their production that I don't find in mainstream film today. I try to avoid being a purist and/or curmudgeon as much as I can, but cinema is one area where I think that the adage "they don't make 'em like they used to" is absolutely true, and I don't care how it makes me sound. Today's blockbusters and those of the late 20th century may be the same in that they're intended to make money and fill seats, but older movies just feel like they have more soul to them because you can tell that they were made by hand instead of by an overworked computer-effects team figuring out how to make actors talking to green-screened ping-pong balls look authentic.

So it's no surprise that what stuck out to me most about DeepStar Six is the practical effects. There's surprisingly little creature in this feature, at least up until the final act, but the miniature work used on the undersea bases and equipment is no less impressive, both internal shots and external. I love nothing more than a good analog-era space (or deep sea) ship console with as many knobs and switches as you can fit on there. I'm fully aware that the dated look of the base's and the submersibles' internals is not intentional and that it was simply the level that technology was at at the time, but I still find it significant that the set designers chose not to look forward in time and create an environment that was more futuristic than recognizable. They didn't make everything sleek, lightweight, and transparent; they didn't imagine how technology might look once improved upon. They used CRT televisions; monitors that still have "degauss" buttons next to them. This is equipment that (generally - there is of course some embellishment, but it's not unrealistic) would be familiar to audiences at the time. The film takes existing technology and applies it in such a way that it still sparks the imagination without depicting anything "new".

A lot of time is spent watching the crew go about their operations in the deep-sea base, so it's good that the miniatures and internals look so believable. Your mileage may vary, but I didn't find myself getting bored in this time before things started to significantly go downhill, since the cast seems to work well together and have been well-chosen for their roles (except for Nia Peeples, who was getting on my nerves because for some reason she sounded like an audiobook narrator on fast-forward). There's a large enough group in the base that interpersonal conflicts are not too much of a focus; one or two members don't get along, but infighting isn't a big thing, thankfully. I think it was recognized that this was not the type of movie where watching people bicker among themselves would be at all beneficial to the sense of tension or fear. For whatever reason, it stuck out to me that the women among the crew seemed to have the least to do with one another - I don't know if this was a deliberate choice to counteract the stereotype of women being competitive and catty, but it almost felt like an Alien situation where the characters weren't written with an assigned gender until an actor was found for that role.

Sean S. Cunningham is probably best known for Friday the 13th, which is interesting because in a lot of ways this movie really does follow the slasher format, just underwater, and with a huge prehistoric bug as the killer instead of Jason. People get picked off one by one, but in a subversion of the tropes that Friday the 13th would set out for slasherdom forevermore, the people who have sex are the ones who survive. And for a while it's actually things unrelated to the creature that claim lives: Mechanical failures, accidents of timing, etc. In my opinion it adds to the mystique of the creature that the fallout from it barely brushing against the human sphere is so devastating, even well before it makes a physical appearance. McBride's drastic act at the end to kill a single creature might feel like overkill, but with the damage it did to one deep-sea base, it's not hard to imagine the ramifications if that creature had managed to escape to the surface and the world at large.

And oh boy, what a creature. Again, this is where older movies have the upper hand against the modern. There are CGI-based monsters that I am tremendously fond of, and that I feel exist as fleshed-out entities thanks to the lore surrounding them (the creatures from the A Quiet Place and Cloverfield films, just to name two), but few, if any, computer-rendered monsters achieve that sense of physicality that a practical-effects monster can. The thing in DeepStar Six feels - and looks - like an animal, a predator, a living thinking being with a will and intent that stalks the crew, yes, like a serial killer picking them off. There are scary things about a creature that is not intelligent, operating solely on instinct and god forgive anything and anybody that gets in its way, but there are also scary things about a creature that is cognizant of its surroundings, and our arthropod friend marries both aspects. Ultimately its instinct to follow light is its doom, but despite it being enormous and looking unwieldy when contained in the confined space of an airlock, it also is able to be stealthy and elude a room full of humans who are actively looking for it.

I don't know what else to say about this movie, really, other than it just feels like something that hits all the right beats. It's not unconventional at all and delivers an ending that is predictable and safe, but from beginning to end I was never bored even though I watched this because I wanted to watch a monster movie and the monster takes up maybe 10% of the running time. I'm not sure what the audience reaction was to this at the time, and it's entirely possible that people could have lamented how contentless modern sci-fi was in the same way that I am now, but if anything came out today with even remotely the same level of technical mastery behind the effects, that released widely instead of being relegated to art-house cinemas or streaming services, I would be blown away.

Black Cat Mansion (1958)

directed by Nobuo Nakagawa

Japan

67 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I have not seen as many bakeneko movies as I should, so I decided to watch a few of them this month to fix that. This particular one is directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, who's best known for Jigoku, which is regarded as one of the best Japanese horror films of all time, but he's also a prolific director of other horror and mystery titles (as well as some episodes of Ultraman Leo, which is... weird). At a little under 70 minutes, I was thinking I wouldn't have enough to say about this to warrant a full review, but to my surprise Black Cat Mansion is so good that I do have some things I want to talk about.

I was immediately taken in by the first post-opening-credits scene because I was honestly not expecting anything about this film to be so creepy in such a specific way. A review that I had glanced at mentioned Hammer horror, and so I was set up for something gothic and maybe slightly overwrought, but above all not truly creepy - just an embellished, deliberately showy type of horror, which itself is enjoyable, but is not what I saw. We watch masked doctors slowly wheel a presumably deceased body across the frame as the camera drifts up stairs, down a hallway, and towards an office, its field of vision illuminated only by the circle of a flashlight beam. This is so arrestingly eerie that it feels like something out of Silent Hill. And none of this is ever brought up again - the doctor from this scene is one of the main characters, but we don't see him actually practicing in a hospital setting outside of that first scene. So that whole sequence was almost like this non sequitur that let me know I was in for something with some real atmosphere.

After that, the film begins with a husband and wife in the process of moving to a derelict mansion, belonging in some distant way to their family line, that had sat abandoned for some time. The wife has tuberculosis and has to relocate to somewhere with a better climate. There's no kind of overly dramatic "I hate it here, this house is scary" whining like there usually is in horror movies (the myriad of them) that start when a family moves into a new, old house, but the wife obviously doesn't like it, and for good reason: It is scary. The shoji screens are all broken, it's covered in cobwebs, and everything looks out of place. It's still standing, and the shell of it is supposedly sturdy, but it's a place that from the first glance you can tell is filled with bad emotions and troubled history. The film is too economical to spend a lot of time on giving us any kind of elaborate tour of the house, but the shots that we do see are enough to establish the hauntedness of the mansion.

The entire reason why I wanted to review this film is because I'm obsessed with the camerawork and I want to talk about it. For many scenes, the camera doesn't remain static as the actors perform in front of it in a confined space, like a stage play. Instead, it drifts around fluidly, as if it's floating in midair, and the viewer watches the backs of the actors' heads, voyeuristically, like we're unwilling co-conspirators to the ghosts that haunt them. The "monster POV" shot is by no means unconventional or rare in horror cinema, but the slow and methodical way the camera moves around the frame, subtly fluctuating height between head-level and looking down on the actors, adds something deeply sinister.

Despite its scant running time, half or more of Black Cat Mansion is taken up by a period-piece drama that explains the macabre history of the mansion. This diversion into history is so important that, in the opening credits, the cast is actually broken up into "Present Day" and "Historical Drama". The historical drama is no less interesting than the present-day situation, and this is where the excellent camerawork and cinematography comes in again: While the present is either in black-and-white or a muddy, nearly monochrome greyish-blue, the parts of the film that take place in the past are in vivid color. This is an absolutely fascinating choice because I'm used to the past being depicted in black-and-white to get the message across that it is the past - but the message here is that when a story is told over and over again it becomes somehow more real than real, all the details become sharp, the colors bright and lurid. The modern-day characters trudge through the screen bogged down by health problems and a looming cat spirit, but in the past, people were ruled by hatred, desire, anger, and vengeance. In the world's tensest game of gō, the camera pushes in and moves back, pushes in and moves back, rhythmically, giving the scene a feeling of stress in a physical way instead of just letting the actors carry the whole of it. This kind of inclusion of the motion of the camera into the overall framing of the film is really inventive and not something I see often at all.

There is a sense of deep gothic horror to this that makes it all just so ghastly, I love it. The story of what happened in the house is such classic horror stuff because this is classic horror. You see in this a ton of tropes that would be carried through to Japanese horror in the present. Spoilers for a 64-year-old movie: Someone getting murdered and then walled up in a house, his mother cursing the family line of his killer for all time, transmitting the curse down the ages through the grudgeful spirit of a cat - that's all so good. It's not a complicated story and it's not hard to understand it or see where it's going, but it's executed so well, so artfully, and with such a real feeling of weightiness and proper drama that it hits in just the right way. Like I said, I haven't seen many bakeneko films yet, but I think this is probably one of the better among them.

Savageland (2015)

directed by Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, David Whelan

USA

81 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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To kick off October, I decided to rewatch something that became one of my favorite horror movies immediately after I saw it for the first time. Despite the love I have for it, I only ever managed to see it once until now, because it was hard to find for several years after its release, even though it was decently popular at the time. I still feel the love I had for it the first time around, but I did see something about it that bothered me, which I will address in this review. That being said, I do still feel comfortable calling this a five-star film.

The story Savageland tells is of a very small fictional town on the U.S.-Mexico border called Sangre de Cristo, where in a single night all 57 of its inhabitants were slaughtered by an unknown force, save one migrant worker living just outside town who escaped the bloodbath. This might not technically be a found-footage movie, since its presentation is mostly as a collection of interviews and graphics explaining the events, but the most crucial parts of the film (the interview with the survivor, Francisco Salazar, and his photographs) are literally footage that was found, so I suppose you can call it that. Salazar is quickly blamed for every single thing that happened in the town that night, despite the fact that it would be physically impossible for one person to commit every murder and in as brutal a fashion as we're told it happened. He describes uncanny, unnatural things; people dying and then coming back to life as inhuman creatures. But all evidence pointing to his innocence is deliberately dismissed in favor of the convenient explanation that someone who the police want to paint as a violent criminal is indeed behind everything.

Racism is one hundred percent the core of this film. It is unapologetic about the way it depicts the attitude of southwestern white Americans towards the perceived plague of "illegals" moving up out of Mexico. Salazar only gave a single interview, which was not widely disseminated, if at all, during his trial, and we're told he became catatonic from trauma afterwards. So all of the inferences given by the white interviewees about his motives, his physical abilities, his psychological profile, the minutiae of what supposedly happened that night - all of this is invented, the projection of a terrified white populace on a brown face who they see as their enemy.

Savageland is no simple racial allegory. It is also the story of an event which, isolated from all context, is one of the most deeply unsettling things I've seen in a horror film. A clearer, less biased picture of what Salazar went through on the night of the killings unfolds throughout the film, aided by maps of the route he took as well as his own photographs of the event. You can tell that the people who made this film must have had a completely fleshed-out scenario in their heads, and a lot of detail and planning went into making this feel like a real recounting of something that happened in a real place. The film itself was obviously made on the cheap - I'm pretty sure stock photos were used for a lot of the pictures of the victims and other instances where a name and face was needed but not a live actor. But at least they had the money to buy the stock photos without the watermark. And when it's important, like the pictures of Salazar as a child, you can also tell that they do actually use childhood pictures of the actors. The rough edges fit with this as an unpolished, "the truth must be told"-type documentary, and really it's the concept that matters here, not the aesthetic.

To me, absolutely the most integral part of this movie is Salazar's photographs. They made a deep impression on me the first time I watched this and I never forgot them. I'm not sure I can explain why they affected me so much. During the night, Salazar had a camera with him as he ran through Sangre de Cristo, with which he got 36 shots that, combined with his single interview, show what was really happening while he was supposedly on a murderous rampage. We are told early on that he was a photographer, and not just a casual one but someone with a dedication and a focus on the odd and macabre; pictures of roadkill frequently come up and we're given an anecdote where he apparently took a picture of a sandwich a friend dropped on the ground. This is important to establish because we know that he already had an eye for strangeness, and it gives us more of an idea why he might have held his camera so close during such an unbelievable experience. The white-majority media of course tries to turn this against him as well, saying that entirely normal photos he took of the daughter of a family he was close to were somehow evidence that he was a pervert, even though the pictures are totally innocent.

So, the photos. We as viewers know they are obviously photoshopped, but it doesn't matter. They have this surreal, hallucinatory quality to them. You know that joke about how pictures of Bigfoot aren't blurry, it's just Bigfoot itself looks like that? That's the feeling I get looking at Salazar's photographs. I feel like if I were witnessing what was depicted in them, all the motion blur and artifacts from the film would be there in real life. Like there's something so awful in them that the eye can't choose any one thing to focus on. They show people bent into forms that leave humanity behind and begin to shift into something demonic. Glowing eyes, teeth like shards of glass, distorted expressions, grasping arms tearing people apart. Every single photo in itself is some of the best horror artwork I've ever seen. There are no cliches here, just a singular expression of complete terror that I've really never seen achieved.

I'm very emphatic that this is not a zombie movie. Salazar tells us that the things in his photographs are people he knew who were dead but walking. But the bits of context we glean through forensic reports and Salazar's interview and photographs point to something that, I feel, goes far beyond what a zombie outbreak has ever been depicted as on film. One of the interviewees keeps saying that something "moved through" Sangre de Cristo - I particularly like that as a description of what happened, because it puts in mind this force that came over a whole town, something otherworldly, that drove them all to cause such chaos. I realize that this may come off as a little corny but I think about the Bible passage where Jesus casts a demon into a herd of pigs and they run themselves off a cliff. That's what this felt like. Just evil in a way that horror film doesn't usually show it. "Something primal and horrible" is how it's described. "It was like hell". Even Salazar didn't witness the full scope of the pandemonium, but we learn from forensics that whatever the non-affected townspeople were seeing was so horrible that some of them chose to jump off a water tower rather than endure any more of it.

Now... I didn't see this the first time I watched the film, and I don't even want to talk about it because, selfishly, I don't want anything to put a damper on one of the best and scariest horror films I've ever seen. The exact cause of the town tearing itself apart is never elaborated upon, but there are hints, in the form of further reports of unexplained, supernatural violence spreading "north" as well as a border patrol agent saying that he sees increasingly strange things, that imply that the source of the phenomenon is indeed somewhere in the south. I think at one point they even try to imply that some of the wounds on the undead bodies may come from having ripped themselves apart scaling the border wall. I really just hate this in a childish and petulant way. I don't want this to ultimately be a story about dark forces from the evil, mystical country to our south overtaking red-blooded American life. With all it has to say about racism and how viciously, unflinchingly real its depictions of racist media and police are, I don't want the end message to be "but something evil came up out of Mexico anyway". I would love to hear the filmmaker's intent here because I'm left wondering and it is unpleasant.

But just the story of that one night in Sangre de Cristo, the documentary evidence, the sheer ghastliness of it, that on its own is one of the most unique and horrific scenarios behind a horror film that I've yet seen. The soundtrack by :zoviet*france: does wonders for it. The acting all feels authentic as well; the spirit of everyone who is interviewed being just regular people is captured perfectly. I hate that I now have qualifications when I call this an incredibly good movie but that's just how it is. I would still recommend this to anybody who likes horror, but I would recommend knowing that there's questionable things about it too.

Fiend Without a Face (1958)

directed by Arthur Crabtree

UK

74 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This movie belongs solidly to the mid-20th-century "nuclear paranoia" subgenre, which is one of my areas of interest not only as it pertains to genre cinema but in general. Although many non-genre films were made that deal with anxiety over a nuclear future, it must be said that combining that with the concept of some awful mutated creature makes for great cinema. I think I was mostly watching this because I had some vague notion that it would be similar to Toho's The H-Man - with some radiation-mutated human as the killer - but it turns out it's more like Secret of the Telegian instead. More on that later (with spoilers for a 64-year-old movie).

Like many horror films you've undoubtedly seen, Fiend Without A Face starts off when a military base gets a little too comfortable doing nuclear-power tests in a small, rural community. The locals try to bring up the damage being done to their livestock from the noise and their suspicions that more may be going on, but are mostly dismissed, and anyway, at the same time, people are turning up dead in the woods with bizarre wounds that no one can explain. Their brains and spinal cords appear to have been sucked out through a small puncture wound in the base of the skull, leading one scientist to coin the term "mental vampire". Later, we the viewers witness some of the attacks that leave these mutilated bodies behind, but we don't yet see the killer - it's invisible! We watch a poor farming couple get sucked dry by some unknown force, helpless before a terror they (and we) cannot see! I am surprised at how unsettling this movie manages to be even before it explicitly shows us its titular creature. It should be mentioned that this is in the Criterion Collection, which I found to be a bit strange, but Criterion is nothing if not known for occasionally throwing out titles that make at least some subset of film fans think "well, that's a bit strange".

At 74 minutes, I do struggle a bit to come up with things to talk about, and the movie itself seems to struggle a bit to even reach that running time. There is a romance inserted between who we might call the "main" military character and a local woman whose brother was killed by the "fiend", and to me it felt awkward, with a very stiffly-acted scene where he walks in on her fresh out of the shower serving as our signal that something's going on between these two. I can't criticize romances too much even though I generally find them to feel very shoehorned-in most of the time, because on the other hand the characters would feel pretty inhuman and shallow without something like that. I guess a silly, trite pairing like this one is better than everybody acting like robots, and it also is a good showcase for tropes of the time. Nothing is ever shown, all modesty is preserved, but it's remarkable how the context of the film and the time period it was released in somehow makes seeing a woman totally covered up in a towel feel more scandalous than if she had been partially or fully nude.

I'm pulling out the L-word (Lovecraftian) to describe this film, because I feel like the story itself ticks some of the boxes: Creatures that are incomprehensible to the human mind and drive witnesses insane, latent mental powers running wild, things with tentacles, etc. A distinction should be made here that when the creatures drive a person insane, they do so in a purely physical manner (I.E. removing the brain stem and turning a person into what really is an awful spectacle that is fairly offensive and probably wouldn't be filmed today), not via some inherent quality of their appearance as is typical for Lovecraft. They are very goofy-looking on their own, and without background would be pretty laughable, but the concept behind their creation is layered with so many individually disturbing elements that it still works. After quite some time has passed, the force behind the mysterious deaths is found not to directly be the military's experiments but the experiments of a lone scientist working to enhance his own brain power, who accidentally unleashed a physical entity (an armada of them, actually) that fed off of the nearby radiation. Or at least that's what I got out of it, anyway. There's one big exposition dump that provides most of the backstory and then everything after that is just assumed. I have to say, though, even on their own without any backstory I still do love the fiends. There's something about how often the image of an ambulatory brain with spinal cord attached pops up that I really love - it's strangely endearing to me that humans have looked at our own anatomy and thought "I bet if a brain could move, the spinal cord would be like a little tail" not just once but multiple times.

I think where this movie excels is in its marriage of giving backstory on the creature with showing the creature on screen. It does the right thing in immediately showing us how gruesome the killings are, establishing that first before we fully know what's going on, and then giving us some explanation for it more slowly. This way we're hooked, and the movie has more freedom to kind of do whatever it wants because, wow, we've already seen an invisible force suck some folks' brains out. Like the confused, terrified farmers, we'll pretty much accept any explanation for that after we've seen it happen a couple times. And although this all is rooted in what we would now call bunko science, it reflects fears of the time. I do not in any way want to laugh at or minimize horror films that arose from fears of as-of-yet difficult to understand concepts like nuclear energy. The military acts towards the locals the way I think a lot of people would act towards this film today - "we're not dropping atom bombs on them, it's just tests for clean energy, why are they so worried?" Movies like this are important because we have to remember the actual dangers of these kinds of things; we can't get complacent just because we think we're at the top of our game with regards to scientific understanding of nuclear power.

I can't really tell what tack the movie itself is taking on that front, to be honest - the military are presented as at least somewhat responsible, but the way they lament the public always blaming everything on them seems a little too "poor, pitiful trillion-dollar superpower" to be fully serious. In any case, the final explanation shifts the blame mostly onto a single individual, whose actions, granted, wouldn't have been possible without the nuclear tests going on nearby, but the end message seems to be that none of the actors involved really knew what would transpire.

This is getting longer than I intended and so I'll stop here, but this is overall an interesting movie. Maybe not the best thing if you're looking for something truly macabre for your Halloween parties, but there's still a sense of dread to it that lingers. It isn't terribly deep, and the science isn't up-to-date if that's something that bothers you; it even just invents a field of study - "sibonetics" - whole cloth. I still enjoyed it and its fiends. They make a sound that is very horrible and I would love to know how it was achieved. To me it sounds exactly like a person undergoing liposuction, but that was not invented until a couple of decades later, so I assume it's some other medical procedure or possibly just something getting sucked up through a tube. We care about the important stuff here at the film review depot.

Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995)

directed by Shusuke Kaneko

Japan

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I've been watching the Gamera movies in chronological order, which I have heard for some reason is not the ideal way to go about doing that. But I continue anyway, which means this is the first of the Heisei Gamera movies I've seen, and the first after the lackluster Gamera: Super Monster. Maybe I answered my own question there - maybe the reason why it's not great to watch these chronologically is because it makes certain movies look great by comparison to others. But, frankly, this is a good movie any way you choose to watch it.

There's something so special about franchise films that arrive many years after the last installment and take a fresh approach to their subject matter. It had been 15 years since a Gamera movie, if you can even count Super Monster as "a Gamera movie", so people that were children when they watched their last giant turtle adventure were now young adults. It is definitely palpable that the intended audience for Gamera had shifted during that absence, as Guardian of the Universe doesn't have any really young kids in it the way all the previous entries had. But youth is still presented as something important and unspoiled, a vital source of input in a country full of adults too concerned with bureaucracy and self-defense to stop for a minute and look at what's in front of them, and realize the whole planet doesn't just belong to them.

We start off watching a ship hauling plutonium run aground on a mysterious floating atoll, which piques the interest of (of all people) an insurance representative, who begins an investigation and thus kicks off the whole film. We're also quickly introduced to the film's main antagonist, in glimpses: It's Gyaos, and not just one but a whole clutch of them, much smaller than Gamera but making up for it with their numbers and sheer viciousness. Gamera's perennial enemy is given some very interesting characterization here, and I especially enjoyed the ambiguity of them as a species that comes into play later; the way they're sometimes referred to as birds for simplicity's sake, but also that it's made very clear that they're not birds. They're something much worse.

There is a real sense of adventure to the beginning of this and actually to the whole of the film from start to finish, and I think that makes it appealing to people of all age ranges. By shifting up in maturity a little, it doesn't exclude any of the feeling of wonder that the previous entries had. This is a timeline where no one knows what Gamera is, and it's interesting to observe how different it is from the very first Gamera film released, in which none of the characters knew what Gamera was, but neither did the viewers. The first Gamera was quite bleak despite ultimately being a story of a creature who was confused, scared, and too big for its own good; possibly this owes a little to the stark black-and-white it was filmed in, so Guardian of the Universe being in color inherently makes it feel different, but I also think it just reflects the ongoing march of kaiju cinema and the growing familiarity of the filmgoing public with giant monsters that the initial reaction to Gamera in this film feels so much different.

As usual, the human characters are not too important compared to the kaiju. Some may find it hard to suspend their disbelief or find the whole "inexplicable psychic teenager" plot a bit wishy-washy, but it's a good representation of the need to learn about and explore the things you don't understand instead of rejecting them. The plot concerning an ancient civilization and a predestined battle between Gamera and the Gyaos legions is somewhat unoriginal but still, I felt, really engaging somehow, with its message about science run amok and doom that can be learned from. The human characters that are there are very good - it's especially nice to see a scientist who is a young woman be taken seriously throughout the whole film, and that she has basically the second-most important role behind another very young woman who happens to be psychically connected to Gamera. Having both a scientist and a psychic here feels like it represents the marriage of an intuitive and a rational viewpoint on nature, and the way that it doesn't always have to be one over the other.

I was surprised at how much this film tackles the same kind of bureaucratic running around in circles that is done in response to a national catastrophe that Shin Godzilla did. I particularly liked when a newscaster reports to the terrified public that a bill has been introduced to designate Gamera as a threat to the nation and assures them that "it will be debated with utmost importance". I can think of no less comforting words to hear during a disaster than "your government is thinking it over". The military response in kaiju films is usually misinformed at best and malicious at worst, but they really make you think the JSDF are jerks here. Gamera is quickly decided to be the enemy and all hell is unleashed upon it while it's trying to help us in our hour of need. The strike on Gamera in front of Mt. Fuji is deeply upsetting because of the truly wounded cry it lets out when fired upon, and there really is no more succinct image of helplessness than a turtle flipped over on its back. This is what we do to our savior in our ignorance and ineptitude: Even an 80-meter (that's 262 feet) creature trying to help us momentarily gets knocked back by human weaponry. Having that one point where humans actually manage to hurt Gamera felt like a crucial inclusion to the film because it shows that despite being small creatures, singularly, humans can come together as a powerfully destructive force if we go down the wrong path.

I have to talk about the suit design. Of course. I don't know much about Gamera and have been deliberately keeping it that way so I can be surprised by these movies as I watch them, and as such I'm really only familiar with the Showa-era Gamera suit. The updated design is very nice indeed. They have abandoned all pretense of making Gamera look even slightly like it could be quadrupedal - something achieved perhaps not on purpose thanks to how the suit actors bend and struggle under the weight of the shell, looking like at any minute Gamera could drop back down to all fours - but honestly the suit does an incredible job of hiding any trace of the human form inside it. I was not focused on where the actor's head might be the way I unconsciously am during other kaiju media. Gamera really looks like a creature here as opposed to a fabricated object. And Gyaos, my god, they really made them into disgusting little things. Covered in slime and brainlessly violent, replicating at speed, and did I mention slimy? Some of the smaller ones are puppets, but the Super Gyaos that Gamera fights at the end is played by Yumi Kameyama, who was the first (known) woman to play a kaiju*.

This really is everything you could want out of a kaiju movie. The pacing is good, a lot better even than many Godzilla films, and there's a satisfying balance between plot and pure action. I kept feeling like this movie was way longer than 95 minutes because so much goes on during it that it just feels like something you would sit and watch for 2+-hours, and I mean that in a very good way. The franchise may have stumbled a bit after Super Monster, but I don't think I can say it was fully a bad thing that it took such a long hiatus (due in part to Daiei's bankruptcy) because this is a breath of fresh air. I can only imagine watching this with a distance of 15 years between it and the last Gamera film, as opposed to just a few days the way it's been for me.

*technically, Jennie Kaplan as Pigmon (!) in Ultraman Powered was the first woman to play a kaiju, but as a non-Powered fan that fact makes me mad and I don't like to acknowledge it.