The Discarnates (1988)

Original title: Ijin-tachi to no natsu

TV movie writer Hidemi Harada (Morio Kazama) has been having rather a hard time of it at the beginning of the movie. He might be very successful at his job, but he has just gotten divorced, his relationship to his teenage son is basically non-existent, and he has reached the point in life where one takes a good long look in the mirror and can’t lie to oneself anymore about one’s flaws of character or conduct. He’s also thinking a lot about the past, especially the loss of his parents when he was just twelve years of age.

Harada has moved into a nearly empty apartment building, where only one other apartment appears to be rented out. The inhabitant of that apartment, a woman we’ll later learn is called Kei (Yuko Natori), would really rather get to know Harada very closely, but her first, weird, nightly attempt at throwing herself at him is harshly rebuffed by him.

A summer night or so later, Harada ends up in Asakusa, the quarter of town where he spent his early childhood when his parents were still alive. Here, he meets his father (Tsurutaro Kataoka), looking the same age he was when he died, and acting as if their meeting were a completely normal occurrence. Invited home to what looks a lot like their old place, Harada is also reintroduced to his mother (Kumiko Akiyoshi), also looking very lively and very young.

Because spending time with these two brings back an amount of happiness he can barely remember ever having felt, Harada returns to spend time with the couple again and again. At the same time, he also starts on a romance with Kei, who has some curious hang-ups about showing him her breasts, which he respects in a way you’d not at all expect from Japanese man in the 80s.

It would be a happy time all around, if not for the fact that Harada’s typically good health starts to fail rapidly. Why, looking in a mirror, he looks rather like one would imagine one of the walking dead.

One of my movie plans this year has been to watch more of the body of work of Nobuhiko Obayashi beyond the glorious Hausu, and by now, it has become clear that thematically rich insanity is only one of the strains of Obayashi’s work. Another one is that of a knowing nostalgia, a nostalgia that is perfectly clear about how memories are constructed and re-shaped into stories we tell ourselves, yet treated in a way that’s also not willing to simply discard these stories, or their impact upon one’s life, as foolishness.

If he wants to, Obayashi can be a deeply controlled director, and so much of The Discarnates consists of dramatically heightened yet precisely observed scenes of human interaction; until very late in the film, where a short yet wonderful freakout is accompanied by some choice Puccini, the supernatural is suggested through colour scheme rather than special effects. Specifically, the colours of the world Harada steps into with his parents are, like the colours of remembered childhood, richer, more intense and warmer – certainly, this is what the idealized happiness of the past must look like (though Obayashi prefers sepia tones for this sort of thing in many of his others films).

Eventually, the film does take on darker shades, when melancholia and guilt become dominant shades and textures, but these, Harada (eventually) and the film accept as an organic part of the world, and the way it shapes people. There’s nothing cruel about Obayashi’s treatment of Harada, here or anywhere – like Harada, he’s conscious of failings but also believes in growth, and a kind of change that is strengthened by being rooted in the past instead of eternally living in it.

So, like much of Obayashi’s work, this is a film about growing up, just this time around the growing beyond we do in adulthood, when we’re lucky.

Inferno (2005)

History (it may be archaeology or anthropology, the subtitles aren’t all that great) student Saeki (Ema Fujisawa) has strange dreams about a young boy that she believes must be connected to an incident in a part of her childhood she has no actual memory of. When she was six or seven years old, she visited family in a small town mostly populated by descendants of some of those families who pretended to convert to Buddhism during the late 16th century’s persecution of Christian missionaries and converted populations in Japan but secretly kept to a form of Christianity.

During the visit, Saeki mysteriously disappeared together with a little boy named Shinichi. Saeki just as mysteriously reappeared again, without any memory of what happened, but Shinichi had never been found, dead or alive.

On her return – the family members have died years ago – Saeki soon encounters disgraced – for some apparently crazy theories the subtitles can’t cope with – archaeologist Hieda (Hiroshi Abe), who is very interested in the area and its traditions. They quickly learn that there’s a hidden hamlet somewhere deep in the mountains whose population has never converted to mainstream Catholicism as the other hidden Christians did once it was possible, and who have some rather peculiar ideas you won’t even find in most collections of apocrypha, particularly about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In their version of the myth, Adam shared his position of being the first man with a certain Jusher, and there were two trees with forbidden fruit: the good old Tree of Knowledge from which Adam – here seduced to it by Jusher instead of Eve – ate, and the Tree of Life, whose fruit gave Jusher and his descendants eternal life but also eternal suffering as well as a decided lack of knowledge.

The people in the curious hamlet, it is said, are descendants of Jusher, and have the mental state of little children.

What this has to do with Saeki’s disappearance years ago, or the fact that children of a certain age in the area are apparently spirited away only to appear sometimes many decades later at the same age they disappeared at, isn’t exactly clear, but there are certainly very curious things happening in rural Japan.

Actually, even having watched Takashi Komatsu’s Inferno – apparently based on a manga by Daijiro Morohishi – I’m still not clear about the whys and wherefores of this aspect of the plot, and how it fits into the heretical Christianity of its concepts.

Until the final act, I actually expected the film to explicitly explain fairy lore to be the basis of Christian ideas about hell and its inhabitants in a more Machenesque way, but it eventually shifts its interest fully onto an alternative form of redemption. Perhaps ill-advisedly, for the material really could have used more room to breathe than the ninety minutes of movie it got, not to speak of a special effects budget that could have better coped with the visionary elements of the climax. Though the very minimalist approach Komatsu takes in the end is actually rather memorable and successful in putting a big idea into a form affordable to the production.

While I’m on the film’s problems – this has all the visual calm of classic J-horror, but doesn’t quite manage to find the visual interest someone like Hideo Nakata would have added to long, long scenes of characters talking ever more complicated exposition at each other. Despite its runtime, this is a very talky movie, but then, much of what happens in the last act needs the film’s concepts and ideas explained in detail to work at all. And it’s really the ideas that shine here: being the kind of guy I am, I’m of course all for the elements of Inferno that treat fairy folklore like a good piece of weird fiction; yet I’m also very fond of the film’s treatment of Christianity as a mythological canon you can play around with. Cultural appropriation can be kind of awesome.

Which is more than enough for me to heartily recommend Inferno. It’s a deeply flawed film, but it is also so very, very interesting and resonates with so many of my interests.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)

Original title: Baron Prásil

Landing on the moon, an astronaut (Rudolf Jelínek) is greeted by the men who came there before him: the protagonists of Verne’s “De la Terre à la Lune”, Cyrano de Bergerac, and last but not least the great Baron Münchhausen (Milos Kopecký) - as he’s called here in Germany. It’s Baron Prásil in Czechia. Because they don’t need silly science stuff like space suits, the gentlemen assume our astronaut who very much does need one, to be a proper moon man.

Münchhausen decides to take the young man under his wing and show him the wonders and adventures of Earth, which indeed he does. Once there, Münchhausen also insists on getting in a love triangle between the men and Venetian princess Bianca (Jana Brejchová), though none of the young people is actually that into him.

All of this really doesn’t describe the beauty, wonder and utterly unbridled imagination of Karel Zeman’s version of the Münchhausen material – here mostly based on Bürger and particularly Doré’s illustrations to Bürger’s narrative. Technically, this is a mixture of live action and all kinds of animation you could even imagine in 1962, at once naïve, deeply aesthetically constructed, real and unreal thanks to the many ways Zeman mixes special effects techniques and real people. The film is ever shot like a moving paean to the human imagination and filled to the brim with a sense of wonder that should make every viewer a child again for at least an evening.

The characters are of course, not surprisingly given their placement in a series of beautiful and bizarre tall tales, archetypes without normal psychological depths, but from time to time, whenever he finds space between a dozen sight gags and coming up with sights no human being has beheld before on a movie screen, Zeman does hint rather heavily that archetypes are archetypes because they have quite a bit to say about the unchanging parts of the human psyche. Just because young lovers aren’t original or deep does not mean a pure and naïve idea of love isn’t real or important.

But really, if there ever was a movie that exists just to be experienced instead of interpreted or talked to death film school style, it is this one.

Trompe l’oiel (1975)

aka The Broken Mirror

There are strange thing happening in the life of Anne Lawrence (Marie-France Bonin), who usually spends her working day restoring paintings in the Belgian mansion where she lives with her husband Matthew (Max von Sydow). She’s four months pregnant now, but she suffers from more than just wobbly hormones. Some time ago – the film loves to be vague, so I couldn’t tell you if this means a week or four months – Anne just disappeared for a day or so, returning without a memory of what happened to her, or what she did during that time. When she reappeared, she was clinging to a painting picturing a woman being devoured – well, at least pecked at – by a bird of prey in front of a body of water. Now, Anne doesn’t even want to look at the picture.

Anne has fallen into a grey depression, leaving Matthew struggling to connect to what she feels or wants, spending her time working or walking very slowly and randomly through the streets of their town. She feels as if somebody is watching her – a man is indeed standing in the window of the mansion opposite all day – and has feelings and impulses she doesn’t understand, as well as difficulty discerning between reality and dream, things and metaphors.

There appears to be something less obscure going on as well, for someone is sending her – of course vague – anonymous threat letters, and there’s an indelible sequence where Anne is being threateningly followed by a slow driving car.

Eventually there will be an explanation for the more actual elements of this, though the symbols and metaphors of Anne’s inner state, you’ll have to make sense of yourself.

Though, to my eye, the final sequences do suggest a childhood trauma connecting to Anne’s father, his hunting habits, sexuality, and death that should make Freudians very happy, if one feels the need to interpret the mass of symbols and metaphors Claude d’Anna’s waking dream movie offers.

I’m just not that kind of viewer, so while I’m perfectly able to do that sort of thing to a film, I’m really more interested in the way d’Anna creates the world of colour, shape and mood, with sudden blares of orchestral music Anne inhabits, that is only broken by scenes of arthouse style psychodrama between her and von Sydow – can’t hire Max for this kind of European arthouse/weirdness project and not let him stretch these specific actorly legs – and some painfully realistic feeling scenes between Anne and her mother (Micheline Presle) whose love presents very much like hatred.

There’s a languid, sometimes a bit stilted quality to proceedings, the haziness of dreams and altered states of mind, a wandering quality very appropriate to a film whose protagonist spends her free time wandering as well. In the film’s later stages, this languidness makes way for proper surrealism and quite the final shot, with little of any day-to-day reality to hold onto.

Presented differently than in the language of weird arthouse (the kind of arthouse movie that’s weird fiction minus the pulpiness), you could have made a giallo out of some of the material, adding a handful of murders and some sex, but d’Anna clearly cannot approach his material in a manner as comparatively straightforward, so instead throws Anne into loops of obscuring gestures.

This does obviously make The Broken Mirror a film whose attraction is much based on a viewer’s mood and patience – seen in the wrong state of mind, this will be like watching paint dry – but when this kind of film hits, it can take a viewer to a special place more straightforward fare will not be able to reach (and is not aiming for), a place that’s beautiful, a little disquieting, and somewhat confusing.

Red Sonja (2025)

Having directed the surprisingly good Solomon Kane adaptation, MJ Bassett has some form with Robert E. Howard adaptations, though this, of course, is based on what Roy Thomas unleashed when he brought the historical adventure character of Red Sonya of Rogatino into Conan’s Hyborian Age in the comics, where she soon acquired a chainmail bikini, and many, many more adventures than her historical counterpart experienced.

It is also, alas, yet another damn origin story, so if you hoped for watching a movie featuring the character you actually like, you’ll have to make do with Sonja – adequately if not wonderfully embodied by Matilda Lutz - as an occasionally ultra-violent eco terrorist orphan with a horse buddy until the epilogue that promises a sequel we’re never going to get anyway. Our main villain (Robert Sheehan) consequently plays like the fantasy version of a tech bro, at least half of the time. The other, actually more interesting, half of the time, he has a tragic backstory that will turn out to be closely connected to that of Sonja, because contemporary scriptwriters (the credited guilty party here is Tasha Huo, though I suspect diverse hands being involved in about a thousand versions of the script) just can’t help but overexplain and overconnect.

More interesting is the villain’s unhealthy co-dependent relation with his main henchwoman (Wallis Day) who has her own trauma to carry – something the script decides is so important, it starts to get weird about it in the climax. Or really, what one calls a climax, for the film decides to put its worst battle at the end of the movie and to then peter out with endless amounts of dialogue and character business, some of which is at least vaguely interesting, all of which goes on way too long and sits at the wrong damn place for the kind of movie this is. But then, sensible structure really isn’t the script’s strong suit. The narrative timeline is a total mess – just try to understand how long the film thinks Sonja is with the gladiators – and there’s little sense the film understands how dramatic arcs work.

What saves this Red Sonja from being just an inconsistently and technically badly written movie and makes it one that’s actually still entertaining enough is mostly Bassett’s quality as an action director, if you can ignore that unfortunate final battle. In those scenes where they commit, there actually is the kind of thrill and excitement, perhaps even a bit of blood and thunder, I expect from a film about a Robert E. Howard, Rascally Roy character.

Ghost Killer (2024)

Passive and more than a little alienated college student Fumika Matsuoka (Akari Takaishi) goes through life with only the minimum required amount of enthusiasm. She likes to introduce herself with “just another college student”, which might be the purest expression of non-suicidal youthful ennui possible. Her life takes quite a turn when she picks up a bullet casing on her way home.

Suddenly, Fumika finds herself haunted by the ghost of murdered assassin Kudo (Masanori Mimoto), one of those near-mythical super-fighters doing that kind of job in the movies instead of the boring psychopaths of real life. When she invites him in by giving him her hand, Kudo can even possess Fumika and pilot her body. Kudo believes that he might be able to pass on if Fumika lends him her body to kill the people responsible for his death, which might be preferrable to having a middle-aged dead guy hanging around you for the rest of your life.

Fumika, a woman of a generally non-murderous disposition, isn’t into the idea of lending her body for bloody vengeance at first, but after Kudo helps her out with some toxic masculinity problems that turn out to be not completely unrelated to his former business, his vengeance might also save her life.

Kensuke Sonomura is the action and martial arts choreographer of the rather wonderful Baby Assassins movies, but his own directorial efforts until now suffered from scripts too bare-bones even for action movies. Getting Baby Assassins writer/director Yugo Sakamoto to do the scripting honours and teaming up straight action actor Mimoto with half of Baby Assassins’ leads in form of Takaishi finally brings out the best in the guy – turns out Sonomura’s love for intricately choreographed and highly technical martial arts fights also mixes wonderfully with Sakamoto’s sense of humour and humanity when Sonomura’s the man on the director’s chair. There’s a sense of human stakes here Sonomura’s earlier films lacked for me. As in the Baby Assassins films, Takaishi’s style of expressive acting is a wonderful foible for the more limited talents of a great action actor/actress in this regard, while she is by now able to show off some pretty great on-screen action chops as well, though the film does shift to Mimoto’s body for about half of the action.

Pleasantly, and frankly surprisingly, given how Japanese films often go, there are no attempts at sexualising the relationship of the main characters – in fact, the early victims of some righteous ass-whupping are the only creeps of that sort on screen here. In fact, one of the ways the film justifies the increasing violence is by showing us an action-movified version of the kind of crap women all too often have to go through in real life.

While the action is as fast (and I mean fast), furious and regular as one would hope for, and the jokes as well-timed as expected, the emotional beats are just as important to Ghost Killer, so these characters in their somewhat absurd world and situation feel believable  and real enough to care about. And even though Kudo is quite the bad-ass, this isn’t the case of a Steven Seagal bully “hero” – there are physical and emotional stakes here that turn this into more than a pure action display.

Three Shaw Brothers Wuxia Make A Post

The Silver Fox aka 玉面飛狐 (1968): You can read many, if not most, wuxia as tales of family tragedy, and there’s little more tragic than a Dad who dresses up like a Chinese Phantom of the Opera while mourning your lost Mum and training you as his budding supervillain assistant. Despite this, our heroine Ching Ching aka Silver Fox (Lily Ho Li-Li) does appear to prefer roguish tricksterdom to more po-faced vengeance (until the climax, of course), which leads to a number of delightful scenes of Ho crossdressing as her own, imaginary brother, complex poison and antidote schemes, and many a moment of her and her romantic angle/theoretical enemy flirting by attempting to outwit one another. All of which does make a curious contrast to the more Gothic trappings of the film’s final act, but certainly doesn’t make those any less fun.

The only minor let-down is that director Hsu Tseng-Hung isn’t quite as fun a director as his material deserves.

Village of Tigers aka 惡虎村 (1971): Speaking of not quite as fun, for large parts of its running time this Yueh Hua (who is Elliott Ngok?)/Shu Pei-Pei vehicle about a bland attempt at framing an honourable martial artist for murder as directed by Griffin Yueh Feng and Wong Ping is about the most middle of the road wuxia film imaginable. There’s nothing exactly wrong with the movie: Yueh Hua is as always perfectly serviceable, Shu Pei-Pei convinces in a rare action role, and everybody involved is an experienced professional who was made this sort of film well for a decade or two. The choreography is fine, as well. Yet there’s also very little that’s actually interesting, or weird, or truly fun, or truly involving.

Until, that is, the climax arrives, and things turn into an actual battle between two opposing martial artist forces that’s so great, it seems to come from a totally different movie.

Dragon Swamp aka 毒龍潭 (1969): And with this Lo Wei movie, we’re with the wuxia at its most fantasy-adjacent, full of things like giant lizards, rubber masks that can literally make Cheng Pei-Pei look like Tung Li, green-glowing swords and the kind of complex worldbuilding that suggests you’ve somehow stumbled into the third novel of ten of a generation-spanning fantasy epic. Once the confusion settles, enjoyment can’t help but set in at the mix of increasingly imaginative fights, high emotional stakes and pure imagination. Further attractions are Cheng Pei-Pei in a double role at three different ages, Yueh Hua (him again) being very upright, and Lo Lieh in one of his not completely evil villain roles – which I always prefer to his total bastards, as much as I enjoy those.

Three Films Make A Post: Their thoughts can kill!

Scanners (1981): This is sometimes treated as one of the lesser movies in David Cronenberg’s incredible run as a director from 1977 to 1996, but there’s so much to love in this version of the 70s conspiracy thriller as seen through the eyes of Philip K. Dick. Performances that are spot on or so weird they actually are spot on exactly because of their weirdness (Stephen Lack), a plot that starts in the realm of semi-plausible spy-fi but drifts further and further into the realm of the outright surreal, and a direction whose by now proverbial cool eye is all that stands between the material and utter, screaming lunacy. Plus, exploding heads are inherently cool (unless it’s your own head exploding).

Closed Circuit aka Circuito chiuso (1978): This Italian TV movie by Giuliano Montaldo does overstay its welcome a little, so that its turn from the locked room murder mystery to the outright fantastical doesn’t hit quite as hard as it could in a more concentrated form, but there’s much to recommend it: a clear love for the cinema experience of the time grounded in an ability to actually show the way cinemas at this time and place worked procedurally, a cast that has fun with the range of characters (all with secrets that have nothing to do with the case, of course) on offer, and the joy of seeing that most mock-rational of genres (as much as I have grown to enjoy golden age style murder mysteries, their ideas about logic and reason are utter nonsense) break down into the realm of the kind of fantasy that admits it is one.

The Kingdom of Jirocho aka Jirocho sangokushi (1963): This is the first film in the second cycle of films Masahiro Makino made about yakuza boss Shimizu Jirocho (Koji Tsuruta) – a real historical figure that had turned into something of a folk hero, and the embodiment of that most ridiculous of ideas, the good yakuza, honourably helping solve problems wherever he goes. This is really all set-up, showing the first meetings between Jirocho and the core members of his clan, but it does its business in such a light-handed and fun way, I hardly missed the presence of an actual plot.

Makino, apparently well-known for being a quick worker, clearly isn’t a sloppy one. Rather, there’s a lot of camera and character movement here, so much so, you’re never surprised when the protagonists break into song, as they regularly (though not quite regularly enough to call this a musical) do. There’s a joyous quality to the whole thing, unexpected from a film that finds a director repeating a greatest hit.

For fans of 60s/70s Toei ninkyo eiga – as I certainly am – there’s the additional joy of encountering a lot of the usual character and side actors, as well as a very very young Junk Fuji as a flirtatious bar maid (and alas not the female lead).

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)

A Spanish coastal town that harbours quite a number of British expats, between the wars. The local lush living is dominated by beautiful Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner). Every man wants to destroy himself for her, every woman hates her (secretly or loudly), yet Pandora is mostly bored and disenchanted. Even when she convinces a race car driver to push his self-built vehicle into the ocean to prove his love, or gets her very own love suicide going, this only provides her with some flickering excitement for a minute or two. She’s not only lacking in human compassion but also all deeper human connection.

Things change when Hendrick van der Zee (James Mason) arrives om town on his yacht, and a mythic pull develops between these two. The old tale of the Flying Dutchman might have more truth to it than most people would expect.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’s director Albert Lewin was a very successful Hollywood producer, first for MGM, then for Paramount. From time to time, he directed a movie himself. These aren’t the films of a dabbler, but of a director and scriptwriter very consciously aiming for art in a deeply earnest and just as deeply bourgeois manner that should make them pretty much unwatchable in their serious, classics-quoting way. Yet somehow, this member of the educated classes showing off his education didn’t just strain for art but actually manage to reach it, perhaps in spite of himself.

Case in point, and Lewin’s best movie as far as I know, is this incredibly ambitious concoction of bohemian melodrama, ancient Greek myth and somewhat more modern European legend. Often, Pandora feels like Powell and Pressburger – this is nominally a British film - at their most melodramatic seen through the lens of Hollywood with arthouse aspirations.

There’s a sensually languid quality to the film’s look and feel that stands in stark – and pretty magical – contrast to its literary and (sometimes too) knowing dialogue, its allusions to culture and cultural detritus, and its palpable love for all manner of cultural production – be it music, Shakespeare, the poetry of Omar Khayyam or Ava Gardner’s face (though the last might be the point where culture and languidness meet). The film’s straining for the mythical qualities of Pandora (very much an embodiment of the old hat of the destructive force of female sexuality that makes quite a bit of European bourgeois culture rather awkward) and the Flying Dutchman is often a visible and palpable effort but it is that uncommon kind of strain that eventually reaches and envelops (is enveloped by?) what it wants to touch, until the overload of allusion and emotion becomes magical and hypnotic.

Part of this magic most certainly lies in Jack Cardiff’s lush photography and Lewin’s fearless – of ridicule, of too much emotion, of the wrong emotion, of overload – direction, but there’s also the brilliance of the performances that hit the unreal notes the material needs again and again, and the willingness of Lewin’s script to go to places scripts (certainly not one written by big shot Hollywood producers) in 1951 simply didn’t go – neither in theme, nor in eroticism, nor in frank honesty about the harshness of mythic love.

Elements here leave me uncomfortable: the film, like its male characters, seems unable to admit to the existence of a kind of love that isn’t based on destruction, death and sacrifice; Pandora’s commitment to being the belle dame sans merci is disquieting, particularly in a film that so clearly wants us to find her tragic. Yet, like with all capital-A art Lewin’s film is in dialogue with, feeling uncomfortable with it isn’t an argument against it.

Tokyo: The Last War (1989)

Original title: Teito taisen

1945, before the H-bombs are dropped on Japan. Despite loud scepticism from the military leadership, spiritual leader of Japan – so says the voice from the off and who am I to disagree – Kanami Koho (Tetsuro Tanba, of course) plans to send out a wave of bad spiritual energy through radio waves to kill the Allied leadership. Instead of doing that, he awakens Yasunori Kato (Kysusaku Shimada), apparently actually the embodiment of Tokyo’s masses of angry dead from the last thousand years.

Kato’s thing is still destroying Tokyo, and he’s still ridiculously powerful. The last surviving member of the Tatsumiya family, Yukiko (Kaho Minami), isn’t really prepared to fight her ancestral enemy, but she at least slips into the role of protecting a little blind orphan girl Kato shows quite some interest in.

There must have been several novels taking place between those that made up the material for Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis and the eleventh entry in Hiroshi Aramata’s clearly insanely ambitious Teito monogatari series, so there are no returning characters here apart from Kato, and there’s no time spent on getting us up to date on anything that happened in between the movies.

Having said that, The Last War is actually a much less sprawling thing than its epic predecessor, and where that movie simply had no air to stop and breath, this one appears to thinly stretch out too little plot for nearly two hours.

There’s a ponderous quality to the film that is a bad follow-up to the merry insanity of the first one, and where Last Megalopolis was a wellspring of crazy special effects, much of what happens here is people making constipated faces to suggest they are using their psychic powers, until some mild explosion occurs. This gets a little better in the film’s last third when at least a mild sense of the grotesque settles over proceedings, but for a film whose conceptual design is credited to H.R. Giger, whose effects are by Screaming Mad George, whose – possibly not so – assistant director is Hongkong’s prince of the batshit insane Ngai Choi Lam, and whose action is directed by Philip Kwok, it’s all pretty harmless.

The film as a whole feels as if were trying to replace Jissoji’s extremely personal, strange yet maximalist sense of aesthetics, but doesn’t appear to know with what, until all that’s left is the sort of bland professionalism that doesn’t make for a bad movie, but a woefully uninteresting one.

Director Takashige Ichise never directed a feature film before or after Tokyo: The Last One, and concentrated on a successful career as a producer – first as Toho’s man for international co-productions, then as one of the architects of the J-horror boom – and really, this too often feels like the film a producer would make rather than that of a director.

Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988)

Original title: Teito monogatari

Yasunori Kato (Kyusaku Shimada), a horrifyingly powerful, deathless onmyoji who looks as if he stepped right out of a Suehiro Maruo manga, has a burning desire to destroy Tokyo.

Beginning in 1912 and continuing through the next decade, he makes various attempts at awakening the vengeful warlord Tairo no Masakado, whose head is buried somewhere below Tokyo to protect it, but who’d destroy everything around him once awoken. Kato’s main enemies are the good – or at least not batshit insane – onmyojis of the Tatsumiya line. As Masakado’s descendants they are, ironically, also the ideal mediums to wake up the grumpy old sleeper if controlled by Kato.

In a myriad of side and parallel plots we witness the plans of cigar-chomping millionaire Shibusawa (Shintaro Katsu) to drag Tokyo into the modern age via the dubious magic of urban development, listen to scientists and mystics espouse wild theories and just as wild exposition and witness a city changing at lightning pace.

It’s all rather confusing, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that this is an adaptation of several volumes of Hiroshi Aramata’s influential “Teito monogatari” series of fantasy/horror/weird fiction. A body of work which has alas not been translated into a language I speak or even dabble in. Basically, this often feels like several seasons of a modern streaming show pressed into a two hour runtime, with frequent leaps in time and space, and subplots and characters that disappear before you can blink.

I suspect full comprehension of the film would need a better understanding of various aspects of Japanese philosophy and religion than I have as well as actually having read the books.

It’s all very Lynch’s Dune in this regard, and even though this approach certainly isn’t the most obvious approach to filmmaking, one might even call it somewhat perverse, I can sympathize with a film just not wanting to compromise with its audience in any way whatsoever. Either you’re getting on board, or this thing is simply going to roll over you.

At the time this was made, it was apparently one of the highest budgeted Japanese movies ever produced, and you can indeed see every yen spent on it on screen. While the plot – and the clearly huge amounts of philosophical and social subtext – can fly over a Western viewer’s head, one can’t argue with the intense visual power of the film, full of memorable shots that do more for the emotional understanding of the film’s content than another hour of detailed plot or characterisation, its intense aesthetic mixture of historical authenticity and late 80s neon, nor the way its star-studded cast (including favourites like Katsu and Shimada, the incredible Mieko Harada, Jo Shishido and dozens of other Toho stalwarts) fills the underwritten characters with life by the sheer power of their presence. Well, returning to the subtext, even I understand that this is very much a film about the pace of the changes to Tokyo and Japan in the first three decades of the century, and the toll this took on the national psyche, the difficulty of reconciling the traditional and the new without falling into insanity and sick dreams of empire.

That this is portrayed, among other things, via duelling magicians, wonderful stop motion creatures, and a steam-driven (I believe) robot just makes the whole thing even more wonderful, obviously.

Responsible for this astonishing, overwhelming film is Akio Jissoji, well known around here as a director at home in pink cinema, arthouse about matters sexual and spiritual and tokusatsu TV – if I had actually seen more of his stuff, he’d be a patron saint around these parts, that much is clear.

Even having seen perhaps half a dozen of his films (and a few tokusatsu episodes), it’s clear that Jissoji managed to get his personal handwriting and a focus on certain core interests into whichever kind of project he worked on – Last Megalopolis certainly isn’t some disinterested work for hire bit, but something created with full artistic focus and passion.

That I have the feeling I’ve barely understood half of it, and even less of the intricacies of its plot, doesn’t make Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis less of an achievement.

Three Films Make A Post: Turn the darkness into light

The Secret of Kells (2009): I dare say there’s not exactly a load of animation out there that is highly influenced by the art of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts. It doesn’t fit too many narratives, I assume. Yet where would this be more appropriate than in a tale about a mediaeval illuminated manuscript?

Directors Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey made some interesting choices in other regards, as well, often slipping into the – to the modern eye strange – mindsets of their protagonists, while appearing to make a film that’s philosophically at once pagan, Christian and modern humanist. Which most of the time makes for a narrative full of surprising details, even when it hits a lot of the tired old Hero’s Journey beats. It’s also so damn beautiful I probably wouldn’t even criticize it (much), if it were only the Hero’s Journey stuff.

The Flowers of Evil aka Aku no hana (2019): This adaptation of a much loved manga and anime feels nothing at all like what you’d expect from a Noboru Iguchi film. If that’s a good thing or a bad one depends on one’s tolerance for melodramatic, pseudo-intellectual teenage bullshit with a wee bit of sexual deviance included taking the place of absurdist gore as an expression of all possible human feelings.

Mine isn’t terribly high, so I very quickly lost patience with these particular characters, their small town malaise and their inability to read Baudelaire without drenching their books in dramatic rainfalls; your disgust with misuse of books may vary.

Nightmare aka Nattmara (1965): Apparently, not only Jimmy Sangster over in the UK found himself thinking about what to do with the Hitchcock model of what we’d now call the domestic thriller. Arne Mattsson over in Sweden certainly thought along the same lines as Sangster with this tale of gaslighting. The resulting film is at times beautiful and moody, painfully obvious, crude and elegant, with a curious idea of how to time plot revelations running into moments of deep intensity.

Thus, the whole thing feels rather disjointed, though it is never without something interesting happening on screen.

Night is Short, Walk On Girl (2017)

Original title: Yoru wa Mijikashi Arukeyo Otome 夜は短し歩けよ乙女

The Girl with Black Hair (Kana Hanazawa) walks through a very long Kyoto night that somehow encompasses all seasons of the year in turn. She’s walking in an attempt to follow her fate, which to her seems to mean to have as many interesting experiences as the night can throw her way. As it turns out, there are going to be a lot of them.

Parallel to that, the Girl’s Senpai (Gen Hoshino) is trying very hard to be noticed by her, though in the most obtuse way possible. He’s attempting to “accidentally” bump into her as often as possible, until she must believe it’s fate, and clearly, they are meant to be. The alternative of simply talking to her is obviously much too bizarre to even contemplate.

The adventures of these two lead through drunken debauchery, debate clubs, the dance of the sophists, a night second hand book market, guerrilla student musical theatre performances and much more, as well as encounters with one of the most wonderful casts of eccentric weirdoes anime has to offer. Both our main characters may very well learn something about the world and themselves, the difference between egotism and love, as well as the problems with walking on without noticing what one leaves behind.

However – and fortunately - one of of the strengths of Masaaki Yuasa’s very non-traditional looking anime is how little this feels like a film about characters learning valuable lessons, but rather like one that treats life as an adventure and as a wonder. You can and will learn things along the way, but the way’s the thing.

This is a film that delights in the strange, surreal and the outré, throwing so many gags and ideas at the audience it should become overwhelming and rather random. Yet, the film never falters under the weight of its overboarding imagination – every random aside, every random idea is actually a part of a well-constructed whole, but one so deep as well as broad, you’ll hardly believe it.

There’s such as sense of joy and discovery running through the whole of Night is Short - a feeling of wonder, the air of the kind of night that indeed feels as if it could and should go on forever. Consequently, I found myself feeling happier and happier the longer this particular wonder went on.

Even better, the film carries such a lovely, compassionate heart below the loving strangeness, the funny asides, and the bizarre ideas, some genuine insight into kinds of loneliness and how it can end, joy is the only proper reaction to it.

Three Films Make A Post: It's High Noon at the end of the Universe.

Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983): To get out of the way what every write-up of this one, however short, must contain: there’s nary a metalstorm in Charles Band’s film, nor is Jared-Syn destroyed.

Most probably, there’s just no time in-between the attempts to squeeze tropes of the western, post-apocalyptic exploitation and the kind of magic you encounter in space operas into some kind of script-shape; there’s also surprisingly little time for actual fun visible on screen, and even Tim Thomerson and Richard Moll seem to sleepwalk through the affair. For a “one damn thing after another” kind of film, this feels curiously bland and uneventful – if ever “meh” was an objective, palpable quality, Metalstorm achieved it.

The Sea Wolves (1980): Speaking of bland, Andrew V. McLaglen’s war as a boy’s own adventure for old men movie does share that quality on a much higher budget level. Despite the presence of Gregory Peck, David Niven and Trevor Howard – all past their prime but usually still perfectly able to carry a dumb adventure movie – there’s a foot-dragging and disinterested quality to direction, script and acting that makes the whole “war as adventure” angle particularly problematic: after all, shouldn’t a movie doing that sort of thing not at least do it in a way that’s actually entertaining and exciting to watch?

Roger Moore adding his usual old man every woman wants to screw shtick to proceedings does nothing to improve things either.

Look Back (2024): But let’s end on a positive note. This sixty minute anime by Oshiyama Kiyotaka (who not only directs but is also responsible for production, character design and co-scripting) is an utterly lovely thing – a heartbreaker that earns its central moment of sadness, as well as a film about a complicated female friendship (or let’s be honest here, Lesbian love not named such to not scandalize certain people) that doesn’t attempt to come-up with a clear-cut answer to anything, and a film that doesn’t use its moment of magic to heal all things broken.

Trenque Lauquen (2022)

Apparently, it helps for a piece of arthouse slow cinema to come from Argentina if it wants my buy-in. Who knew?

Anyhow, if you can make time and mind space for 250 minutes or so of various characters (particularly those played by Laura Paredes and Ezequiel Pierri) in various timelines very slowly being drawn into various kinds of (non-violent) obsession with various mysteries and secrets – including love letters hidden in old books, the disappearance of a woman, an uncategorized specimen of flower, and a monster/child/who knows you’ll never get to see – you might just become as riveted as I found myself.

The slowness, here, turns out to be patience, a willingness to let things develop in their own shape and tempo. Which doesn’t at all mean that director Laura Citarella eschews increasing the tempo when it fits her, probably mysterious, plans. As well, there is a willingness to keep some of the film’s mysteries unsolved, or rather, to admit the ambiguity of leaving space for an audience’s interpretations.

On the way to that not solving of mysteries, the film moves through phases and stages – practically lineated in chapters in a gesture that seems rather more inviting than slow cinema often is – where the focus shifts from different protagonists, to different obsessions, and different kinds of beauty, finding much in small actorly gestures, nature, and the town of Trenque Lauquen and its surroundings, testing and exploring different kinds of connections between people.

There is also a strain of weirdness running through the film I found particularly enticing, perhaps more Magical Realism than the versions of the fantastic I’m most fond of. Some reviewers have found a comparison to Lynch here, but Trenque Lauquen lacks an interest in, or perhaps does not believe in, the deep and uncomfortable darkness that always rears its head with Lynch. Rather, this film’s weirdness feels kinder and more compassionate, with little risk for the characters to fall foul of an uncaring universe or moving into the wrong metaphysical hut for some decades. It’s not such a cosy world, though, for there are still human passions, foibles and dramas.

Not being Lynchian, mind you, is not a weakness. Citarella’s much too interesting a director and writer to need to take on other people’s world views, and has one rather singularly her own.

The Spine of Night (2021)

Having ascended a mythical mountain, the – always very naked – swamp witch Tzod (Lucy Lawless) converses with an armoured figure (Richard E. Grant), the guardian of the last bloom of a blue flower growing there. Tzord tells of the rather disturbing developments in the human world below during the last centuries, leading to flashbacks that start with her own kidnapping and eventual death and will lead into the rise of a near-godlike conqueror.

For its first fifteen minutes or so, Phil Gelatt’s and Morgan Galen King’s The Spine of Night appears to a be nothing more than a highly competent homage to the poster children of rotoscope animation, Fire & Ice and Heavy Metal. I’ve never been a true connoisseur of that animation style, though I do like these two core texts more than just a little. Frazetta and Sword and Sorcery, or the French school of comics art not beholden to the ligne claire are things irresistible, independent of the form they are presented in, after all.

So, I’d probably have been quite happy with it, if Spine had only been the violent and nudity-positive bit of animated sword and sorcery its beginning promises. It doesn’t take long, however, until it becomes clear these filmmakers have deeper and more complex interests than making a film in the style of things they clearly love and admire. Instead of the more typical heroic/anti-heroic tale that seems to be set up, the film soon broadens its scope to become a much more epic tale, spanning centuries, with characters that would be the heroes and villains of most other movies of this kind coming into and out of the plot as parts of the grand tapestry the film is weaving. Most of them have pasts and futures the film only hints at, suggesting a world full of interesting, mysterious and large lives in ways I find deeply satisfying. Worldbuilding by suggestion, by leaving out explanations to get the imagination of an audience going has gotten rather out of style these days, but when treated as carefully and thoughtfully is it is here, it does fire up at least this viewer’s imagination as little else does.

The Spine does take this approach not only to characters but the world it takes place in as well – the gorgeous and fantastic character and background design is highly suggestive, and manages to make rule of cool elements feel like more than just that – true parts of its world that don’t need to be explained.

On a plot level, this takes elements of sword and sorcery and the cosmicism/cosmic horror that has been an important part of this style of fantasy since its beginning and turns it towards the mythic. In a film that also features a creation myth in which classic rotoscope takes on the shadowy qualities of shadow puppet animation, this is rather obviously a conscious decision, a – successful – attempt at taking the outlook of the pulpier arm of the classic weird tale and emphasising its philosophical contents without having to lose the blood and the guts (there’s a lot of that on screen here as well), or the beauty and terror of existing in a cosmos that cares not one whit about you.

Philosophically, this is a film about the question of how to live with this idea of an at best uncaring cosmos, a place where human strife and achievement is essentially pointless, and where even gods are of no actual import in the greater scheme of things - of how to look into the void and not become it. Thinking about this does involve exploding a god-like wizard after he has been fought by armoured skeletons, so there’s a wonderful mix of completely unexpected thoughtfulness with the stuff the film sells itself on – no cheating the audience off what it came to see (or hear – the dialogue is perfect for what the film tries to do, as well) around here.

None of what I’ve just written, alas, quite captures how The Spine of Night actually made me feel watching it, the elation I got from watching a movie that’s sword and sorcery as imagined by Frank Frazetta covers, a fantasy tale that is as mythic as it gory, as much a part of the landscape of horror as it is of fantasy, and a wonderful bit of cosmicism with generously added trippyness. But that’s how it goes, sometimes.

Three Films Make A Post: "This is the story of the world's secret that only she and I know."

Weathering with You aka Tenki no ko (2019): This is certainly one of Makoto Shinkai’s lesser films. There’s always a fine line between being emotional and being emotionally manipulative when you like to go for heightened emotional stakes like Shinkai’s anime tend to do, and here, he’s sometimes stepping over that line into obvious attempts at pushing audience buttons. Particularly the last act is simply too melodramatic, so much so its emotional loudness hinders the emotional impact it could possess if it were only holding back a little.

That doesn’t mean this is a bad film. There are certainly quite a few moments of great beauty here, as well as some insight into the teenage psyche – it’s just that the film as a whole doesn’t come together as well as those Shinkai movies that surround it, a great director sometimes being his own worst enemy.

Hell Hole (2024): Whereas this shot in Serbia body horror monster comedy by the Adams Family (minus Zelda Adams) is a downright disappointment. Gone is nearly all of the personality of the family’s other films, the idiosyncratic yet/and awesome decisions to use the weirder approach whenever possible. Instead, we get what once would have been a middling SyFy Original, full of obvious jokes, lots of feet-dragging disguised as dialogue sequences, and very little else beyond the basic competence filmmakers in the lowest budget end acquire over time when they don’t give up.

I wouldn’t be complaining if this were actually a good traditional body horror monster movie with a bit of bite to it. Alas, it feels as if the filmmakers were just ticking boxes on a list of monster movie tropes.

Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters (2019): At times, Gilles Penso and Alexandre Poncet’s documentary about the great special effects artist Phil Tippett (whose creations certainly made my childhood as much more interesting as Ray Harryhausen’s did for Tippett) also feels a bit like the directors are ticking boxes on how to structure a biography-driven documentary. But then, you get to the next bit of interview with Tippett or one of his peers, and you are struck by the sheer single-minded love these people have for Tippett and the art of hand-made special effects, and can’t help but mirror that feeling right back at them.

The film never manages to acquire an actual thesis about Tippett or his world. Thus, it never turns into the kind of documentary you’d recommend even to people who aren’t terribly interested in their subjects. There is, however, quite a bit to say for the film’s willingness to let Tippett and his peers simply speak about their lives and times, and work.

The Primevals (2023)

After Sherpa kill a rampaging yeti in Tibet, a tiny, not quite official expedition, lead by Dr Claire Collier (Juliet Mills), goes on the look-out for more of them. Apart from Collier, the group consists of retired big game hunter – as well as owner of one of the best names imaginable – Rondo Montana (Leon Russom), long-time yeti-believer and male lead Matt Connor (Richard Joseph Paul), anthropology student Kathy (Walker Brandt) and yeti hater (and local guide) Siku (Tai Thai).

There’s more than a curious yeti rampage or two going on, though, and soon, the expedition lands in the middle of (Edgar Rice)Burroughs country.

Apparently mostly shot in 1994, this labour of love directed by special effects expert David Allen (who died in 1999), was left unfinished on the shelves of Full Moon pictures. Years after a crowd-funding campaign to finish the film, it has finally been released.

And it is very much a film made with someone exactly like me as its ideal audience in mind. There’s an immense sense of love on screen for a lot of the best things in life: Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation, pulp adventure in the spirit of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Doug McClure adventures, the 80s adventure movie boom, the Shaver Mystery (or similar fun Fortean matter), and Nigel Kneale read as pulp.

All of these things come to life again on screen here in a way that’s obviously pretty nostalgic, but also realized with the kind of enthusiasm and craft that transcends mere nostalgia to turn this not into a copy of the tradition but a genuine, breathing part of it.

Sure, one could nit-pick that the film’s portrayal of non-Western cultures isn’t great, the acting doesn’t always hit the mark completely – though Mills in the scientist role typically reserved for a man is great, as is Leon Russom talking about the eyes of dying giraffes – and that there’s a little too much monster-less slack between the incredible Sherpa vs yeti start of the movie. However, all of this is counteracted by the sheer joyfulness of the project, its lack of self-conscious irony and all the love and care that has been put into every second on screen. Not bad for a movie that nearly wouldn’t have existed in finished form at all.

Litan (1982)

Nora (Marie-José Nat) awakens from a nightmare that may very well be a vision of the future in which her boyfriend, two-fisted – and very appropriately named - geologist Jock (director/co-writer/auteur Jean-Pierre Mocky), appears to die – among other, less straightforward things. This sends her racing for Jock through the streets of the curious little town of Litan, where they are temporarily living so he can do some rather explosive geological work.

Today is a particularly strange day in the already strange little town, for it is the festival of Litan’s Day, when its occupants roam the – often fog-shrouded – streets in masks, a (masked) brass band plays wherever and whenever, and everyone acts extra weird. I’d call it the Lesser Festival of Masks.

Apart from the already rather strange festival, there’s something stranger still coming, and soon, peculiar behaviour will turn obsessive or violent, the dead seemingly taking possession of the bodies of most of the living in town.

Sometimes, Jean-Pierre Mocky’s piece of fantastic (in the French sense of the “Fantastique”, so heighten your brows with me) cinema Litan can become a little too self-consciously weird for being surrealist’s sake for my tastes, channelling the misguided arthouse energy that brought us things like Fellini’s beloved parades.

Fortunately, that’s only happening in a couple of scenes, and for much of its running time, this is a wonderful exercise in dream moods and dream logic, taking place in a location where reality just doesn’t seem frayed at the edges but already half dissolved at the beginning of the film. Which would explain Nora’s actually prophetic dream rather well, if you want to apply some kind of story logic to a film that thrives as much on that of dream and metaphor as this one does.

Mocky creates the peculiar world of the film in often striking images that turn a very real location – most of the film was shot in an actual small town in the Auvergne that must be strikingly beautiful in its way – into a disorienting labyrinth where metaphors and symbols crash into elements of pulpy genre cinema in a way I have only ever encountered in French cinema. There is certainly a kinship to Jean Rollin here, while parts of the film play out as an outsider’s pick of elements of horror cinema from Romero’s Crazies – whose knitting lady would have felt right at home in Litan – to folk horror like The Wickerman, and the mad science and masks of Eyes without a Face. It’s just all filtered through a very individual, singular eye, as it should be.

Because this is a French movie, it is also rather discursive, so Mocky is certainly never hiding his ambition of speaking about capital letter concepts in capital letters. Love and Death, are the director’s main interests here, specifically, as well as the rather more complicated than we typically assume borders between Life and Death. The results of this discourse are rather ambiguous, but then, that is rather the point of film like Litan (possibly of life).

The Girl in a Swing (1988)

Alan Dresland (Rupert Frazer), a dealer in antique ceramics, leads a somewhat boring, placid life. Stuck up in a very British kind of way, he doesn’t really seem to have much of an actual life beyond working upper class “responsibilities”. That changes when he travels to Denmark on business, and finds himself in need of some clerical help fluent in Danish, English and German.

A business friend lends Alan one of his secretaries. Karin Foster (Meg Tilly, with an accent so painful, it actually adds to the inherent weirdness of the character she’s playing) is very beautiful, somewhat reticent, impulsive and exactly the kind of woman Alan is bound to fall in love with, what with her tendency to quote German Romantic poetry and swoon at classical music in a most spellbinding manner while looking like, well, Meg Tilly.

For reasons only known to herself, Karin genuinely reciprocates Alan’s feelings, and after a two week courtship, he proposes marriage, despite the fact that Karin is clearly keeping secrets, telling him nothing of her past. She insists on getting married in England, so she need not produce her friends nor family. She also does not want to get married in a church.

Still, the couple’s early married life is full of fine, if a bit weird, companionship and sex that reaches from good to transcendental, and Karin charms friends and family as much as she did Alan.

From time to time, the shadow of Karin’s undisclosed past rears its ugly head – there’s a recurring motif of drownings, as well as the metaphorical shade of a child.

That latter part will become increasingly intense until it turns into a proper haunting.

There’s a languid quality to Gordon Hessler’s darkly fantastic The Girl in a Swing that isn’t exactly conducive to a solidly paced narrative. But then, I don’t think a solidly paced narrative is something this adaptation of a novel by Richard Adams actually aims for. Rather, much of the film is about creating a specific, allusive as well as elusive, mood, influenced by the (early, despite the Heine quotations) German Romantics, the Greek myths, and a very Greek idea of tragedy. In fact, there’s a properly pagan heart hidden in rather a lot of scenes here that Hessler puts in dialogue with his film’s more Christian elements (again, very much in a way the German Romantics would have understood).

All of this does sound rather fantastic, and is certainly a mood and idea space fantasy/fantastic cinema doesn’t explore all too often, or at all. However, in practice, Hessler isn’t quite good enough of a director – or scriptwriter – to turn a concept into a movie in a consistently effective manner. The languid eroticism can feel pompous and overloaded with symbols in a way I find deeply bourgeois (or really, the German version of bourgeois, bürgerlich), aiming for a depth and complexity of feeling it doesn’t quite manage to reach. As beautiful as all the beautiful shots of Meg Tilly’s (beautiful) face are – and as much effort as she clearly puts into embodying a character that’s purposefully difficult to grasp – that isn’t quite enough to realize the greater ideas about sexuality and repression, guilt and forgiveness, and so on Hessler is aiming for.

Despite these failings, I can’t help but admire the film (and not only Tilly) for trying for this heightened tone, for the classical and Romantic allusions, even for the callousness with which it treats the reveal of the reasons for Karin’s feelings of guilt, for an attempt at resonance with cultural lines movies in 1988 just weren’t thinking along at all.