Gamera vs. Viras (1968)

directed by Noriaki Yuasa

Japan

81 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Masao and Jim are two boy scouts who have little in the way of personality other than that they love to play pranks. After a cold open (and a really potent title card drop) that establishes the alien invasion plot and shows us Gamera trying to stop it, we spend some time watching the two boys pull a fast one on their scout leader and some scientists with the end goal of getting them to let the kids pilot a submarine - if they can break it, then they're the only ones who'll be able to fix it, so the adults won't have any choice but to let them pilot it, right? It works, and after a disorienting ride, the scout leader and the head scientist turn the sub over to the boys, who use it to have a little race with Gamera. I really liked this part because if you think about it as coming chronologically after the cold open, it implies that Gamera fought with the Viras aliens, lost, came back to Earth to recuperate, and still made time to have an underwater race with a couple of kids and let them drive their mini submarine around his legs. What a champ.

But through a series of accidents, the boys end up abducted into the Viras mothership, and, by their quick thinking and Gamera's brute strength combined, have to figure out how to thwart the invasion.

The sequence of events where the boys rig up the submarine so that they're the only ones who'll know how to pilot it also establishes a theme that will run throughout the entire movie, and to an extent throughout all Gamera movies: adults do not know what they're doing, and most of the time they just get in the way. Kids in Gamera movies are treated as if they alone are capable of seeing the world in a way that adults just can't, and that's why I like these movies so much. They treat a child's perspective as a valuable and unique thing, not something of lesser value than an adult's way of navigating the world. I've read that this was something Noriaki Yuasa fully intended of his Gamera films - that adults know nothing, and children know everything.

When you think about it, the Viras aliens in their separate forms are an extension of the ignorant adults at the beginning of the film: they never let the kids get away with anything cool (their ship's replicator refuses to give them weapons), they try to make the kids do what they tell them to, they treat the kids like obstacles and want them to get out of the way. I like the individual Viras aliens, even though their combined form is one of my least favorite Gamera enemies. They're all wearing surgical scrubs for some reason. I have this weird idea that when they were observing Earth, they picked up our television signals, saw people in surgical scrubs cutting open, mutilating, and dealing apparent massive violence to other unconscious, helpless humans, and decided that wearing scrubs would be the best way to convey to humanity their intent to subjugate them by force.

This was made during bad financial times for Daiei, and has a third of the budget of its predecessor, Gamera vs. Gyaos. The film makes great use of what original material it's capable of concocting, but it does grind to a halt when the stock footage interlude hits. But aside from the stock footage, there is some real beauty to this. I was, even on this second viewing, still enraptured by the design of that spaceship. It's really something else, and not only is it aesthetically interesting, it's also technologically impressive: it can rearrange its segments and jettison damaged sections in response to an attack. I mentioned in my review of vs. Guiron that one of my favorite things was how the interior of the spaceship just has painted wooden floors, giving it this tangible, realistic feel, and I feel the same way about the interior of the Viras ship too. It looks like a big art exhibit.

I had a lot of fun with this one. I think it's one of the lesser-appreciated Showa Gamera movies, but I enjoyed it. I will say that it's a very uneven movie, though, and while the opening is a grand old time, it does struggle to regain its footing after the lengthy stock footage sequence, and never quite gets to the high point it hit at the beginning. It's still worthwhile for the art design if nothing else - these movies are so well-crafted that there's a timelessness to them that transcends their heavy 1960s aesthetic.

Famous Monsters of Filmland "Godzilla vs Bionic Monster" Special

I'm not sure that full photos of this article have ever been posted online, so let's take a look at the July 1977 issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland. This is a "filmbook": a quick recap of the events of a film intended for people who haven't yet seen it. I've seen these done for older Godzilla movies in magazines like G-Fan since, for most of the franchise's history, a lot of it was wholly inaccessible to English-speaking fans. That isn't the case here, though: this issue is promoting CinemaShares' U.S. re-cut of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, retitled Godzilla vs. Bionic Monster.

This issue pre-dates the lawsuit Universal Pictures brought against CinemaShares, alleging that the title was too similar to their TV series The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. This is obviously a little ridiculous, but they do pun off of it in the filmbook, so there may have been some merit to the suit. The film was retitled Godzilla vs. Cosmic Monster afterwards.

Some highlights:

• Whoever wrote this may not have seen the film directly as they describe King Ghidorah being the one to attack Fake Godzilla instead of Anguirus.
• The article has a generally positive outlook on the film, which is surprising considering that it's an American review of a '70s Godzilla movie. It does lean into the "check out those ZAAANY monsters!" angle, but to be fair, the movie is kind of just like that.
• "Hey guys, should we credit the original director or any of the cast or staff?" "Nah, don't worry about it."
• Repeated references to Godzilla as being 21 years old, disregarding the original film in favor of King of the Monsters. I don't like that, to say the least.
• Excuse you, that's space titanium, not just regular titanium. Professor Miyajima didn't become a leading expert in the distinguished field of space titanium studies for you to disrespect it like that.
• King Seesaw.
• "At this point he could no doubt rip it clean off with one huge yank. But Godzilla is not a Yank, he is a Japanese." 🤮

Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Preface: True Story of the Ghost of Yotsuya (2014)

directed by Kōji Shiraishi

Japan

71 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I've mentioned before that I'm a big fan of Yotsuya Kaidan and I love to see how it's handled through all the different adaptations of it that there are. I have not seen very many modern adaptations, however (Over Your Dead Body excepted, which is one of my favorite horror movies) and especially not one done in a found-footage style by possibly Japan's finest found-footage director.

I've reviewed at least one of these Senritsu Kaiki File movies before, so I'll run through the basics of the series pretty quickly: the setup is that there's a team who investigates videos of apparently paranormal phenomena that are sent in to them by viewers, but where this series differs from other ghost-investigation found-footage (besides Shiraishi putting his usual spin on it, which I'll get to later) is that the leader of the team is genuinely unhinged, and his crew seems to stick with him largely out of fear. This is... not quite played for laughs, but there's definitely some kind of absurdist humor going on here.

The paranormal video that the team is sent in this film comes from another film crew who were in the middle of making a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation, but believed they'd provoked Oiwa's spirit because they didn't perform the proper purification ritual that's necessary to do before putting on a Yotsuya Kaidan production. (Note: I don't know if this is actually a thing.) The video is kinda bogus: all it is is what might be a floating head behind an actress wearing gyaru makeup. The team investigates the actress who was in the video and gets chased away with a knife when they find her, and then they look into another crew member from the art department, whose house also seems to be haunted. It becomes clear that none of the locations they visit is the problem, though - the problem is that Oiwa's spirit has attached itself to Ichikawa, co-host of the show.

I gotta say this really feels like The Ichikawa Movie™. Ichikawa undergoes a grueling exorcism to attempt to remove Oiwa's spirit from her, during which time she becomes possessed by it. Chika Kuboyama's performance in this scene gave me the impression that this was something she'd been holding back this entire time and only now was she given the chance to actually do some acting. It's kind of amazing.

I wouldn't recommend this for someone purely interested in the Yotsuya Kaidan connection, because it doesn't really focus that heavily on the play or its backstory, but what it does instead makes it even more interesting. The film posits that Oiwa is a fictional character who has been brought into a physical existence by the collective imagination: one of the film's more genuinely creepy moments is a surprisingly low-key interview with a scholar who elaborates on how a ghost story that is believed by enough people can gain the power to manifest itself in reality. But the film then takes a left turn and says that Oiwa is just a puppet, that there's something older and more terrible using her as a kind of conduit to enter our world. As always, the metafictional element of this series allows for some really fascinating explorations of the nature of ghost stories and how they influence reality, but you do have to put up with Shiraishi's quirks in order to enjoy it.

I have no trouble with said quirks, because I've already been a huge fan of Shiraishi's for a long time, but... the best way I can put it is like this: imagine you have a friend who is really, really good at telling scary stories. He has a huge repertoire and he's excellent at creating atmosphere, and all your friends get really into it whenever you're sat around a campfire or whatever listening to him tell a story. No two of them are the same - he has a great talent for inventing new stories. But every story ends with your friend talking about how there's a parallel dimension that's filled with worms. The things he has to say about the worm dimension are as creepy and engaging as the preceding story itself, but the worm dimension is always there. Some of your friends don't mind, because they find the worm dimension to be an interesting topic, and your friend is so good at telling his stories about it that it's hard to find fault. But some of your other friends just go "ugh, he's going off about the worm dimension again."

That's Kōji Shiraishi. You have to put up with the worms to watch his movies. They are always there. Always.

Juukou B-Fighter (1995-96)

directed by Shinichirō Sawai, Kaneharu Mitsumura, Tarō Sakamoto, Hidenori Ishida, Katsuya Watanabe, Osamu Kaneda 

Japan

1272 minutes (52 episodes, 1 movie)

4 stars out of 5

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The first handful of episodes of Juukou B-Fighter did not do much to endear it to me. Some toku series hit it out of the park right away and then stagnate in the middle, but others - like B-Fighter - take a minute to get into their groove. It's particularly egregious here for some reason, though - it almost feels like the series was rushed to get on the air, and the characters were written with a total lack of personality until the show had a more solid footing. I doubt that this was actually what happened, but for a few episodes you really do get the vibe that the show is just kind of putting itself out there unfinished. Fortunately, this wears off. 

The main cast of characters is made up of three partners, Takuya, Daisaku, and Mai (played by Daisuke Tsuchiya, Shigeru Kanai, and Chigusa Tomoe, respectively), who are gifted the ability to transform into armor-plated heroes by the collective power of the world's insect population, and their leader Professor Mukai (played by Takashi Sasano). There is a cast change after episode 19, when Reina Hazuki leaves and Tomoe Chigusa takes over the role of Reddle. What's interesting here is that even though Reddle's suit actress is the same for both characters, she develops an entirely new set of mannerisms and body language when it's supposed to be Mai in the suit.

As with the vast majority of tokusatsu, the villains are way cooler than the good guys, although the balance here is a lot more even than in, say, Super Sentai, where nearly every team (at least in the Showa series, which is mostly what I've seen) is, and I apologize for saying this, boring as hell. B-Fighter uses the typical setup of an extremely powerful leader - Gaohm - and their generals, in this case Schwartz, Jera, and Gigaro. Gigaro's a nothingburger, but Jera and Schwartz make up for it by being super cool in terms of design and personality, and I personally liked Schwartz a lot because I thought it was interesting that he's a computer virus ported into a humanoid body. (Schwartz' VA also puts in a little extra effort the way Reddle's suit actress does when Schwartz is upgraded mid-series and from that point on his voice fluctuates between deep and gravelly and his previous maniacal cackle.)

Far and away the best thing about this show is the character and creature design. Everything here looks so perfect. Some episodes are like a non-stop parade of incredibly awesome costumes. Unusually for a tokusatsu series, the "monster of the week" format is more like "monster of every couple of weeks", and this makes the ones we do get feel that much more special. Gaohm's generals deploy monsters regularly at first (and, like everything else, they are visually stunning to a one) but then that kinda dies off and B-Fighter is mostly either fighting the generals themselves or foiling various plots they've put into motion. I didn't realize immediately that the show had shifted away from the monster-focused format I've been so used to, and I enjoyed it a lot.

A big part of the plot towards the latter quarter of the show is Takuya's rivalry with his artificially-created twin, Black Beet. Gaohm uses Takuya's DNA to create a fighter who is a perfect clone of him, and Black Beet, being possessed of a fully-formed intelligence, struggles with his existence as a being inherently dependent on another being. He becomes obsessed with killing Takuya even though they are so closely linked that pain inflicted on Takuya becomes Black Beet's pain as well. In the end his pursuit of independence costs him his life, but really, that was the point - freedom in death, because freedom in life was impossible.

If there's anything I don't like about the show, it actually involves Takuya's fight with Black Beet. When Takuya first finds out Black Beet is his clone, he feels unworthy to be a B-Fighter and leaves the team for a while. The team is framed as being unable to continue without him; since they're not all together, they can't fight at full power. But in the finale, when the stakes are considerably higher (like, "Earth is actively being swallowed by a black hole" higher), Mai and Daisaku tell Takuya to go finish his battle with Black Beet while they save the entire Earth. If B-Fighter can't battle a bunch of monsters without having all its members assembled, how is it that they manage to destroy a black hole when they're one man down?

But that's the smallest of nitpicks for a show that is otherwise really stellar. I could go on much further about specific things that stuck out to me - Gaohm's existence as essentially a sentient cancer and his bitterness over being ignored fueling his apocalyptic rage, Guru's stunning suit acting, the villain infighting towards the end, the... uh... the mpreg episode... but I'll end my review here with a hearty recommendation that you check the series out. The whole thing is worth getting invested in just for the last two episodes, which constitute one of the best toku series finales I've seen thus far.

Crazy Big Adventure (1965)

directed by Kengo Furusawa

Japan

107 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Hey, they got the Shobijin in this thing.

I've reviewed a few Crazy Cats (and Crazy Cats-adjacent) movies over on my other blog, but this was the first one I've seen that had real English subtitles. I'd always been surprised that none of the Crazy Cats movie seemed to have been subtitled, but it turns out at least one or two of them are floating around out there with subs. Shouts out to Joey.

There isn't much plot to speak of, but we have some of the Cats playing cops and some playing robbers: Hitoshi Ueki plays Uematsu, the world's most unbothered counterfeiter, and Kei Tani plays Tanii, his inventor/assistant/future brother-in-law. Hajime Hana and Hiroshi Inuzuka play Hanai and Inui, cops assigned (by Tora-san's Masami Shimojō if I'm not mistaken) to investigate a global counterfeiting ring. Ētarō Ishibashi, Senri Sakurai, and Shin Yasuda are less important, background characters.

Uematsu isn't directly involved in the counterfeiting ring, but when his buddy Tanii invents a forgery machine that can reproduce bank notes almost perfectly, he accidentally gets himself roped into it after he tries to run a random note through the machine and realizes that the note was itself a forgery, meaning somebody else out there has access to an even better counterfeiting machine. One of the funniest things about this character is how utterly he lacks a conscience, and how casual he is about it - he doesn't give a rip about whether or not it's illegal to forge money, his only focus is on getting enough money to marry his fiancé (Reiko Dan, underused). Unfortunately, since he's about to expose the international counterfeiting ring - which is just one part of a world domination plot by an underground network of Nazis - the criminals begin pursuing him across Japan.

The movie basically frontloads with plot and then lapses, for the majority of its running time, into one lengthy chase scene. This is where the fun is. The cat-and-mouse game between Uematsu (sometimes Tanii) and the criminals (also the police) goes on for so long and becomes so convoluted and cartoonish that you can't help but laugh about it. At one point Uematsu hops into a truck full of goats to escape the cops, escapes the cops, loses the truck, ends up dangling from a bridge, falls off the bridge and onto a horse, loses the horse, regains the horse, and outruns the counterfeiters' goons. At another point he falls into a truck carrying futon mattresses. The whole time he's just having a ball, constantly cracking wise and, more often than not, singing.

Which brings me to my next point: Hitoshi Ueki has such a magnetic screen presence that he is half of why this movie is so fun to watch. Even Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay, which was a total mess that barely qualifies as a movie, is watchable because it has Ueki anchoring it in the lead. I don't think he's even technically the "frontman" of Crazy Cats - as far as I know that's Hajime Hana, as the band is sometimes called "Hajime Hana and Crazy Cats" - but he's probably the most fun to watch of all of them.

It is mildly terrifying that all of Ueki's stunts seem to have been real. There are obvious places where you can tell they're doing at least the barest minimum to make it safer, such as when Uematsu is clinging to someone's car and if you pay attention you can tell they're actually going really slow despite the edited-in screeching tire noises, but for the most part he is genuinely hanging off of buildings and riding on top of trucks and whatnot.

Crazy Big Adventure also looks great due to that Eiji Tsuburaya secret sauce, with surprisingly detailed sets and some moments of really cool miniature work. Watching '60s Toho movies is like chicken soup for me, and this is the studio and all of its talented artists at their best. I like when it gets meta at the end: Crazy Cats the band performs a 10th anniversary concert at Uematsu's wedding reception, and some of them are in the audience watching themselves onstage. Having seen three and a half movies out of a very plentiful film series isn't exactly a great sample size to base sweeping judgements off of, but I think I'm getting an idea for when the Crazy Cats movies hit their stride and when they seem to fumble it a little. Crazy Big Adventure is an example of a time when everything goes right; they hit all the notes and the end result is a really fun wild ride of a film.

Super Legend God Hikoza (2022)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

70 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Me? Reviewing a tokusatsu movie that's less than 40 years old? Strange but true!

So this is one of those lower-budget tokusatsu movies that are made specifically to promote tourism to a smallish town. Kawasaki's managed to spin a whole movie out of the "local hero" concept, but with an added history lesson: the backbone of the plot is Aichi Prefecture's hometown hero (I use this term facetiously, aware that it doesn't begin to convey the nuance of a historical figure who has been respected and remembered for something like 500 years), Hikozaemon Okubo. Okubo served sengoku-era shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, and while he was a real person, it seems like his place in history was largely cemented by storytelling, which eventually evolved into kabuki theater and now into a movie with basically a super sentai mecha in it.

The basic story is... well, it's basic, alright. Hundreds of years ago the guardian of the town of Koda fought against an evil monster and was victorious, sealing himself into the form of a wooden doll to be uncovered when the cycle inevitably repeated and the evil rose again. At the same time, there's a team of scientists working on technology that harnesses latent psychic energy, two of whom find the Hikoza doll and transform into God Hikoza when they both hold it together. God Hikoza becomes the darling of Koda, spending a good five minutes doing stuff like shilling for onsen, driving schools, welding shops, and restaurants, and shaking hands with the mayor.

They have four suits in this thing and all of them are more or less great. The shark person felt unnecessary and looked oddly mole-like rather than shark-like, but the weird golden fish creature was aces. As for God Hikoza, I love me a henshin hero who has to go through stages - think Inazuman - so I think it's very cool that Hikoza has a less powerful form, which it takes when only two people are combining, and then a final form that takes four people to achieve. (The final form is essentially Muteki Shogun from Kakuranger.)

I really admire how this movie can be so self-aware without verging (at least to me) into self-parody. We all know what kind of movie this is, we know what to expect. There's no pretentiousness here because the movie knows it wouldn’t be able to get away with it. The actors seem very aware that they're playing a role, and even when their performances feel awkward or unpolished, it all works with the overall vibe of the movie. It's just a super casual viewing experience. A high tolerance for fun is required. You kind of get this feeling from watching older tokusatsu TV sometimes, but now there's an added layer of self-referentiality.

I have to say also that this feels very restrained for Kawasaki, which is to the film's credit. A lot of his earlier works try too hard to be funny all the time, but Super Legend God Hikoza is fun to watch precisely because none of its goofy charm feels forced. It's not a perfect movie, but it's a good time. Also, I'm pretty sure they got Masato Shimon to do the theme song, which is kind of insane.

Son of Godzilla (1967)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

85 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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Son of Godzilla, despite being a bombastic, colorful, and incredibly well-made movie, was apparently disliked by audiences enough that Toho considered ending the series afterward. This was the height of the kaiju boom in Japan: as I mentioned in my Space Monster Wangmagwi review, 1967 saw every major film studio produce a kaiju movie. But every bubble must burst, and the burgeoning success of Ultraman and Ultraseven signaled a shift towards television that would leave film studios struggling to raise theater attendance. For now, though, this is Toho at the top of their game.

Visually - and sonically, Masaru Satō's score is genuinely one of the best soundtracks ever put to film - this movie is such a delight. It was filmed on location in Guam (you can tell because everybody is really tan), so there's no shortage of jungle scenes that are more convincing than anything achieved even on one of Toho's reality-defying open sets, but it's the miniatures that shine the most here. I love the cohesive look of it all. There's something about the brightly-colored structures the scientists live and work in that almost feels a little... dreamlike, perhaps, like an idea that a child might have of what doing science is like.

The editing and compositing here is some of Toho's finest, I believe. This is my fourth rewatch of the film, and it seems like lately when I've been rewatching Godzilla movies I've really been taking notice of the way scale is achieved. I'm thinking about a scene where Godzilla blasts one of the Kamacuras with his atomic breath and a piece of it goes flying off and lands, flaming, while the tiny-in-comparison human characters flee. The optical printing is remarkably well done here, and shots of puppets - small in reality but made convincingly huge - superimposed over the jungle landscape look great. The creative editing even extends to the human story too: I love that scene after the weather balloon experiment fails spectacularly where we hear Fujisaki narrate everything that's gone wrong on the island over a montage of floods and storms, and then it cuts to him writing about it in a journal. That was just such a unique way to structure a narrative moment meant to immerse us further in the environs of the film.

I recently read an article talking about the way science has been used throughout the Godzilla series that I thought was really interesting, and it highlighted this movie in specific and how it has a very different view on the use of science to assert mastery over nature than a lot of previous films. In short, while doing experiments does give rise to monsters - Kamacuras and Kumonga - and cause the weather on the island to go haywire, the thing that stops all of that is just doing more science. The solution to messing things up through your experimentation is to experiment harder. This is a strikingly optimistic viewpoint in contrast to the often dismal opinion of scientific interference with nature that many Godzilla films hold, although if you think too hard about what the people on Solgel Island are doing, they do still seem a little arrogant: it's for the greater good, but they are wrecking the ecosystem of an island which had up until then been in balance, and that includes the other living creatures on it. Kamacuras is as much a product of man's meddling with nature as the original Godzilla was, but Kamacuras is portrayed in a far less sympathetic light than Godzilla.

I will admit this is not my favorite Godzilla suit, but Hiroshi Sekita's performance makes me not care about how the suit looks. Sekita was chosen instead of Haruo Nakajima - Godzilla's default suit actor, pretty much - because he was taller than Nakajima and the film's producers wanted to create more contrast between Godzilla and Minilla. I can't source this because I don't recall where I read it, but apparently Sekita would speak to Minilla while in the suit (either out loud or in his head), narrating what Godzilla would be saying to his son: instructions on how to use his atomic breath, admonishments on venturing into dangerous parts of the island, et cetera. There is consistently so much effort put into bringing Godzilla to life as a character. I will talk about this until I'm blue in the face because for so long bad dubs and a lack of attention caused the Godzilla series to be regarded as "goofy rubber monster movies".

I understand how jarring this movie must seem when you consider the idea of Godzilla as a bringer of misery and pain, as he had been in his first two films (and would be again). But to me the thing that's so, so fascinating about Godzilla as a character, and why he has proved so enduring, is this: there's what Godzilla is - a stand-in for the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, depicted as such with varying degrees of fervency depending on whether you're going off Kayama's original idea for him or Honda's interpretation - and then there's what you do with him. In large part, this transition away from Godzilla as a force of terror and dread was due to Toho recognizing that their biggest audience was children, and so the people who made movies like this maybe did not necessarily want to make them this way - but they did. Godzilla as a cultural icon survived this long precisely because he has changed, and will continue to, but at the same time, there's always been a core concept that has remained throughout all of his iterations. There's no denying that there is a solid idea of What Godzilla Is, but, conversely, it also must be recognized that there's a What Godzilla Can Be.