Three Films Make A Post: Run for your life before they devour you

Halabala (2025): This Thai production directed by Eakasit Thairaat about an killer cop and a handful of idiots hunting a crazy killer in a haunted forest is a bit of a frustrating mess. It never can decide on a tone, wavering between Thai gore, psychological horror, ill-advised post-Tarantino-isms, and whatever else you can come up with. Whenever it actually hits on something creepy or interesting in a scene, it’s going to undermine it completely in the next; the climax is a particular mess, and a waste of a perfectly good monster suit to boot.

Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue (1992): This is the first of three unconnected Kamen Rider V-cinema movies. It is also the longest and the least artistically successful one.

It is actually a great idea to double down on the body horror element inherent to Kamen Rider as a whole – crossing people with bugs and all that – but the film doesn’t really commit to the horror for too long, finds itself not clever enough to rip off the relationship bit from The Fly properly, and shoots a third of its action scenes via bug vision, so the audience can’t actually see what’s going on in them. Which is a bit of a shame, for the rest of the action sequences are full of the great joys of direct-to-video action and tokusatsu. Hell, they could even afford a helicopter for the climax.

The film isn’t without its charms – Geena Davis should have had a foetus shooting golden light from her abdomen as well – but it’s also not as fun as the film you’ll see in your mind when you hear “Kamen Rider body horror”.

The Great Chase (1975): To avenge her father, race car driver and karate ace Shinobu (Etsuko Shihomi) has joined up with a secret government organisation. Her investigation, during which she also turns out to be a mistress of disguise (she does old ladies, dapper young men, and even older ladies from Cambodia) and a fashion icon (some of the costuming choices alone would be worth the price of admission), eventually leads her not only to the man who killed her father, but also the guy responsible for it: Bin Amatsu, who likes to rape women while wearing a furry suit (including a head), accompanied by loud classical music. Afterwards, he stuffs the traumatized victim in full plate mail, because why not.

So yes, this is indeed a Norifumi Suzuki movie, full of stuff that is as problematic as it is outrageously fun, as well as half a dozen cool fight showcases for the ever wonderful Shihomi, and a choice Toei funk soundtrack. It’s not his most extreme or outrageous Suzuki joint – Shihomi had certain standards – nor his most offensive but it is certainly still quite a bit of fun.

Three Films Make A Post: Those which change. Those which never change. And those that don't want to change.

Shin Kamen Raider (2023): Hideaki Anno’s version of good old Kamen Raider is the most bonkers entry into what we’ll probably just call the Shin Trilogy around here (even though New Trilogy isn’t exactly specific or sexy). It condenses a whole fifty episode plus season of the first Kamen Rider series into an updated thing of crazy beauty, taking place in a world populated with weirdoes only able to speak in a very Japanese version of High Pop Philosophizing, transforming weirdly.

The production design manages to evoke the cheapness of the early Kamen Rider without falling into the trap of pure nostalgia, and Anno’s direction pays homage, deconstructs and wallows in the hallmarks of early tokusatsu TV, all the while condensing what Anno clearly loves about the genre into a two hour package. It’s absolutely brilliant in its earnest weirdness, but also so specific to early Kamen Rider mirrored in the now I’m hard pressed to imagine an audience outside of core nerds and otaku. Which isn’t a bad thing for me, of course.

Older Gods (2023): Tubi originals don’t exactly have a high betting average, but David A. Roberts’ cosmic horror movie about a man’s encounter with the cult that killed his friend is rather an exception to the rule. It’s certainly a very indie and very cheap movie, but also one that uses that as an opening to do things - in tone, rhythm and style - nobody’d throw a couple million dollars at you to put into a film. The whole affair feels personal and individual, at times perhaps a bit too earnest in tone for contemporary tastes (not for mine, mind you), features some genuinely creepy cosmicist imagery and does its best to add some idea of redemption and freedom to a philosophical outlook on horror that's generally not made for these feelings.

I’m not quite sure Older Gods is completely successful at convincing me of its redemptive moments, but I certainly found myself respecting it rather a lot for trying.

Sky Pirates aka Dakota Harris (1986): Trying certainly isn’t something Colin Eggleston’s dire Indiana Jones rip-off with John Hargreaves as its Indy stand-in does. In fact, I have seldom seen a film that seems quite so disinterested in even trying to make a basically Italian rip-off league of “borrowings” from other movies interesting or fun in any way, shape or form. A film with this wild a plot of adventure, adventure fantasy and pulp tropes and ideas really couldn’t or shouldn’t be what Sky Pirates manages quite effortlessly to be: boring as heck.

Shin Ultraman (2022)

For some time now, the members of a government organization known as the SSSP have fought off one kaiju attack on Japan after another. The danger and weirdness of the attacks only seem to increase over time. Fortunately, a giant silver guy quickly dubbed Ultraman – there’s a running gag about a politico coming up with kaiju names on the fly - appears and begins fighting the kaiju.

As it will turn out, SSSP member Shinji Kaminaga (Takumi Saitoh) has died and somehow melded with the alien Ultraman, who now sees it as his responsibility to protect humanity from alien menaces while driving Shinji’s body, or a version of Shinji’s body. Ironically enough, Ultraman’s appearance might actually worsen the situation, putting a cosmic spotlight on our (self-)destructive species.

After doing their very clever and fun version of Godzilla (which I apparently haven’t written up here), Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno continue their renewal of classic Japanese kaiju and tokusatsu franchises. This time around, Higuchi is solely responsible for the direction, while Anno – who was apparently working on the eternal return that is his perpetual rejiggering of Evangelion – “only” directed, produced and edited. Tonally, this doesn’t lean quite as heavily on the political satire as the duo’s Godzilla movie did – though there certainly is some satire here – nor is the main story quite as serious. Rather, this one aims at being as fun as possible, throwing an astonishing number of monsters and fights and so much plot at the audience, you could make one and a half seasons of most streaming shows out of the material. There’s a sense of lightness to the film even once its plot escalates and it starts talking about the self-destructive nature of humanity and becomes something of a parable of the colonialist mind-set. With this lightness comes a willingness to take the silliness of its set-up seriously without being over-earnest, embracing the silliness without shame or irony.

It is also full of jokes that are actually funny.

The film is suffused by a palpable love of the original Ultraman series (and the franchise that became of it), not the sort of fanboy love that deems everything about the old material perfect and sacrosanct, but one that has identified which elements of the original it loves and then doubles down on them while being fully willing and able to discard those elements that were simply mirrors of its own time. Which to me seems like the obvious and best approach to this kind of project, avoiding slavishly tying oneself to elements that simply wouldn’t play to anyone but a tiny percentage of the most fanatic fans of a franchise, while also keeping the doors open for all kind of fanservice of the good kind, as well as people who might have been excluded from earlier iterations of the series. So why not make the original suit actor of Ultraman your mo-cap actor for this one? Why not have credits that show the SSSP minus Ultraman fight off half a dozen or so kaiju from the original show? But also why not give your female main character (Masami Nagasawa) actually something to do?

When it comes to the copious kaiju action, Shin Ultraman doesn’t falter, either. I’ve seldom seen CGI that not only shows such an understanding of what is awesome about suitmation traditions, but that also manages to integrate this knowledge (and some actual suitmation) this well, thus realizing kaiju fights that are inspired, awesome, dramatic and often also quite funny. And because the film is much pacier than basically anything else coming out right now, there are five or six big fights in here, one better than the next, until things culminate in the sort of psychedelic space shenanigans that reminded me of nothing so much as 70s cosmic Marvel comics, in form as well as in pop-philosophical subtext and heft. That, by the way, is one of the highest compliments I could make any piece of media.

Three Films Make A Post: Reap what you sow.

I Want to Go Home (2017): This sixty minute documentary by Wesley Leon Aroozoo about Yasuo Takamatsu, a man whose wife was swept away in Japan’s 2011 tsunami, and who is still diving nearly every week in the coastal town where he lost her in hopes to find her body is a quietly moving, respectful attempt at looking at the greater impact of the tsunami on Japanese society by focussing on the experiences of one man. Its treatment of Takamtsu is delicate, respecting the distances the man wants to keep yet still portraying some of the depth of his grief. There’s a quiet, gracious kindness on display throughout the film – by Takamatsu as well as Aroozoo – I found deeply moving.

What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? (2022): Despite a basic idea that seems readymade for clever satire or original meta-science-fiction, this tokusatsu comedy by Satoshi Miki suffers from a bad case of not knowing what it wants to be. It shifts between broadest comedy, slightly subtler stuff, and misguidedly shot earnestness in awkward ways I’d call amateurish coming from an inexperienced director, but can’t explain from someone who is as good at this sort of thing as Miki often is. Most of the time, the whole thing comes over as a bad attempt at shooting a parody of Shin Godzilla for idiots, which is just a sad waste of a good idea.

Petite Maman (2021): This shortish feature by the great Céline Sciamma is a rather wonderful bit of fantasy, as filmed by a director steeped in the French arthouse tradition who is always turning the visual language of it around to fit her own ideas and interests. Here, she takes on the experience of childhood, specifically a girl’s experience of childhood, putting the feelings of wonder, awkwardness, sadness, and confusion into patiently staged scenes that manage to be beautiful as well as meaningful.

It’s also a portrayal of the connections between mothers and daughters, distance and closeness, and as quietly touching a film as I’ve seen.

In short: Guyver: Dark Hero (1994)

Sean Barker (now played by the voice of Solid Snake himself, David Hayter) is still fused with the alien bio-armor called the Guyver. Despite apparently having destroyed the evil mutant thingies of the first film, the Guyver still pushes Sean into going out at night to commit bloody violence on more or less deserving criminals. Sean, not a killer at heart, feels very unhappy with a situation that doesn’t just put a lot of blood on his hands – certainly not all of it shed in self-defence or the defence of innocents – but now also costs him his relationship to movie number one’s love interest Mizky.

So he’s actually rather okay with following strange feelings, symbols on a cave wall, and a sensationalist TV report to an archaeological dig in a pretty attractive wooded mountain region. And wouldn’t you know it, the film gods have also put an obvious new love interest (Kathy Christopherson) in his way, as well as the realization that he might not have beaten his enemies quite as successfully as he thought. At least, there’s something really strange going on at the dig, what with a potential werewolf roaming the area, and way too much well-armed security hanging around. Oh, and a UFO right out of the third Quatermass film. Perhaps this is the right place to find out the truth about the Guyver unit.

The second and final Guyver film is directed by Steve Wang alone, Screaming Mad George having taken his particular kind of effects work and his co-directing skills wherever Screaming Mad Georges go. Consequently, the monsters in this one aren’t as awesomely grotesque as some of the best ones in the first film and follow more the standard rubber suit ways of tokusatsu. Which, mind you, is still a little grotesque and very nice to look at in action.

The film also loses the horrible humour of the first part, going for your typical dark superhero feel and heroic inner turmoil (was Zack Snyder taking notes?) without borderline racist characters wasting the audience’s time making horrible jokes. Hayter is also a huge improvement over Jack Armstrong. He may not exactly radiate charisma like the sun, but he has proper camera presence and is able to actually express the emotions the script asks him to express; plus, his moodiness doesn’t feel like a little kid sulking. Why, I found myself even liking this version of Sean instead of tolerating him. The villains are an improvement too, hamming it up nicely and given the Guyver more than enough reason for punching and elbow blade sticking.

Speaking of violence, the action scenes are excellent US tokusatsu with drive and the appropriate amount of imaginative silliness, and staged with the sort of sugar high energy this sort of action thrives on.


The film will be a bit too long and starting somewhat too slow for some, but I found myself enjoying its attempts at building its own mythology out of bits and pieces found in other pop culture nearly as much as the fighting, making the second Guyver movie by far the superior piece of entertainment. And unlike more than many a Japanese tokusatsu of the last fifteen years or so, Dark Hero never feels as if it puts selling toys before being an entertaining film.

In short: (The) Guyver (1991)

Trying to help out his crush Mizky (Vivian Wu), Sean Barker (Jack Armstrong) stumbles into the way of the plans of an evil corporation connected to ancient aliens using monstered-up people to do classical evil stuff like murdering Mizky’s father. During the proceedings, Sean fuses with an ancient organic battlesuit known as The Guyver, which will turn out to be very useful, kinda awkward, and a bit icky. Government man Max Reed (Mark Hamill) assists.

Quite a few of the people involved behind the camera – particularly co-director Steve Wang and the stunt team – of this Charles Band production would be or were involved in the US versions of Kamen Rider and various Super Sentai shows, so it comes as no surprise that this is very much an attempt at making an American tokusatsu (even with Japanese involvement on the production side). Since Wang’s co-director is special effects maniac Screaming Mad George, the monster design and some of the transformation designs (just watch what happens to poor Mark Hamill!) are often on the very grotesque and bizarre side with a bit of body horror thrown in. That’s most definitely one of the film’s strong points, as is the generally tokusatsu-level fighting.

Problems arise whenever nothing transforms or fights – Armstrong and Wu might as well not be on screen, so little about their performances is memorable, the dialogue is horrible throughout, and there’s a line of painfully unfunny humour running through everything. A particular low point in that regard is the character of Striker (Jimmie Walker), a borderline racist “black guy who randomly raps, even when he is transforming into a monster” caricature, someone involved in the production must really have liked, so often he pops in to make a viewer cringe, curse, or shake their fists at the screen.


On the positive side, there is a lot of transforming and fighting going on, so things never become completely unbearable. People like me will also be happy about the presence of Michael Berryman and a smaller role for that maddest of scientists, Jeffrey Combs, indeed playing a mad scientist, as well as dear old Linnea Quigley.

Past Misdeeds: Garo: Red Requiem (2010)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Makai Knight Kouga (Ryosei Konishi) is still protecting his part of Japan from the incursions of extra-dimensional evil beings known as Horrors. This time around, our hero has left his home city for some other unnamed Japanese city to hunt the particularly loathsome "Lord" (who just happens to quite clearly be a Lady) Karma (Saori Hara voiced by Kouga's TV show love interest Mika Hijii, for some reason). Karma resides inside of a mirror which can only be entered by others under very specific circumstances, and uses her victims' hidden desires (and a couple of freakish henchpeople owning a goth club) to lure them in.

The city in which Kouga is seeking Karma has its own protectors already: the experienced Makai Priest Akaza (Yosuke Saito) and his assistant Shiguto (Masahiro Kuranuki). For once,  both residents seem pretty okay with letting Kouga do his heroic loner thing. That's not the reaction of another Makai Priest, Rekka (Mary Matsuyama), who arrives just when Kouga does, with a chip on her shoulder and obvious hatred towards Karma in her heart. Rekka wants to kill Karma herself, the fact that she isn't bonded to a magical armour (it's not allowed for girls, you know, I suspect because of girl cooties) notwithstanding, and really, given that we'll later learn that Karma ate Rekka's father, it's a reasonable wish.

Obviously, Kouga and Rekka will come to blows, and it will take a series of cheesy speeches to convince the priestess that it's the job of all female characters in tokusatsu to cast spells (or - as in this case - play magic flute) at the main baddie from the side-lines while a rude, arrogant man with a very large sword does the main fighting, even when she has been shown to be quite good - though not so good as to embarrass the main character - at kicking peoples' asses.

Anyway, Karma is powerful enough for Kouga he actually needs the magical help, so it is a good thing that he's upgraded his interpersonal skills from "insufferable" to "just not a people person".

Despite my problems with its use of its female lead character, the (3D, but who cares?) theatrical feature following the "mature" (and pretty damn great) tokusatsu show Garo is an at times very entertaining piece of work, at least if you're willing to go with it.

Now, when you hear "theatrical feature", don't imagine the film's budget to be visibly higher than that of the TV show. The rather humble number of locations, the shooting style and the quality of the special effects should make the low budget nature of the endeavour quite obvious.

Fortunately, Red Requiem is still as much Keita Amemiya's baby as the original show was, and Amemiya is a director and creature designer with a great talent for milking low budgets for all the spectacle they are worth. After all, he's the guy who once used re-jigged cuckoo clocks as gigantic war machines in a movie, and it kinda-sorta worked.

Whether you thinks the quality of the CG effects helps or hinders Amemiya in his creative efforts will depend on your tolerance for extremely cheap looking CG.

I have made my peace with unnatural looking digital effects by now, as long as I like the concepts and ideas that are being put on screen with their help. Given my predilections, it would be pretty difficult for me to dislike the aesthetic the digital tech is trying to bring to life in Red Requiem's case. It's a strange, sometimes silly, sometimes cheesy, always very Japanese visual world, where classically Japanese style meets Western kitsch, mock-Gothic trappings, hack and slash videogame choreography and the free-form bizarre, until it becomes pretty difficult to decide on the appropriate reaction to it all. One could of course be an art snob and snort derisively, but it's just as fair a reaction to be charmed by the combination of the childlike and naive, the exploitative and the imaginative on display. (And yeah, there are some of Amemiya's trademark mime-alike monsters and someone with white wings, too).

Most of the not-so-digital action and the wire fu is quite good too. Konishi and Matsuyama are convincing at striking the appropriate poses, and Amemiya is still a friend of staging action sequences so that the audience is actually able to see what's going on. There are two or three moments of too obvious stuntman substitution, but I take a scene that's so clearly staged I can identify someone as a stuntman over one where I don't see what's supposed to be going on at all any time.

The acting's about like you would expect from a project like this. Konishi still doesn't move a facial muscle to do anything but scowl, but he is pretty fantastic at scowling by now, and everybody else plays his or her role a bit broader than contemporary Western tastes in acting styles would suggest (though Konishi would fit right in). However, the characters the actors are playing are pretty broad archetypes too, so I can't help but find these performances fitting. Certain characters are not meant to be portrayed naturalistically.

On the writing side, Red Requiem is clearly a step back from the comparative thematic richness of the show that spawned it, back into the safer territories of overlong speeches about heroism that take turns with emotional cheese. Still, I can't say I found myself getting too annoyed by it all, because there's nothing cynical about this aspect of the film, never a feeling that Red Requiem is going through the motions when it sprouts its not very clever philosophy. It's all honest heart-on-its-sleeve goodliness that takes itself terribly seriously, and while it seems proper to giggle about that, I won't blame it for being good-natured, silly and a bit dumb. See also, "(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding".


So, while I would have loved to watch a Garo movie that kept closer to the clever (or the exceedingly strange) parts of the show it came from, I had my fun with what Red Requiem has to offer, especially in its final third, when Amemiya seems to pull out all the stops and begins to bring anything on screen he could imagine and somehow squeeze in.

Past Misdeeds: Garo (2005-2006)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


A secret war is raging (at least in Japan). Creatures from the Underworld known as Horrors regularly creep through the cracks between dimensions to possess humans whose darkest impulses accommodate the character of the respective horror and use them to commit various atrocities. Fortunately, humankind is protected by the Makai Knights, warriors of mystical bloodlines who are able to use a magical metal known as soul metal. When need be, a Makai Knight can conjure up full body armour made from the material, but (because that's how it goes in tokusatsu shows) they can't stand being clad in the magical armour for long.

Garo follows the attempts of the perma-scowling Golden Knight Kouga Saezima aka Golden Fang aka Garo (Hiroki Konishi, now called Ryosei Konishi to confuse everyone as much as possible) to keep his territory (which might be the Eastern half of Japan or of Tokyo) save from the Horrors.

In the first episode, Kouga protects the artist Kaoru Mitsuki (Mika Hijii) from the attack of a horror, but can't prevent the dying beast's blood spattering all over her. Horror blood is quite insidious. It makes the person tainted by it a magnet for Horror attacks, and - as if that weren't bad enough - also kills the victim after exactly one hundred days in a gruesome and painful manner. By the laws of his order, Kouga is bound to kill everyone tainted thusly by the blood, but he decides to let Kaoru live and use her as bait for the various monsters of the week. Not that he's telling her anything of this, mind you.

Of course, Kouga's scowl and his absurdly abrupt manners hide a very soft core, and in truth he has a plan of trying to save Kaoru through an obscure ritual whose existence makes the whole "kill people who came in contact with Horror blood" rather problematic. Later on, Kaoru will turn out to be closer connected to the fight between the Makai Knights and the Horrors than anyone would suspect.

Apart from the secrets of Kouga's and Kaoru's pasts and family histories, and the monsters of the week, the show does (of course) also feature an equally scowl-prone rival with a chip even bigger than Kouga's on his shoulder, and a terrible conspiracy that might or might not have something to do with the three little weird girls working as Kouga's bosses.

Would you believe that everybody will learn something about showing one's feelings and stopping the damned scowling before the 25 episodes are over?

The Japanese TV show Garo is another project by master monster designer Keita Amemiya, who here is also credited as creator of the show and as its "chief director". I suspect that makes him something comparable to a very hands-on show runner for a US show.

Garo is the rare case of a tokusatsu superhero show that isn't made with a kid audience in my. Themes and tone of the show are comparatively mature (even if the emotional lives of the main characters aren't), there's even some thematically appropriate - dare I say "classy"? - nudity.

Amemiya's monster designs for the show are frequently quite brilliant, often mind-bogglingly bizarre and always completely in tune with the thing the respective monster is a metaphor for. The show's tone is often quite close to horror, with the hosts of the Horrors usually representing (and living out) the least pleasant impulses and feelings of humanity. In most episodes, Garo aims for a mood of the creepy and the bizarre, and hits its aim more often than not. Of course, there are a few other episodes. Two of them ("Doll" and "Game") have the sort of weird acid-dream quality only Japanese filmmakers still seem to want to achieve with their works from time to time, a few others are doing some rather interesting world building (that even comes together to build something like a coherent philosophy, though not exactly a deep one), and some others are doing their best to melodramatically explore the lead characters' inner demons.

The latter episodes are unfortunately the least successful ones. While the older and more experienced actors are as solid as can be, the young lead actors are ill-prepared for what the scripts ask of them here. Mika Hijii is probably the best of them; at least she's really getting into the melodramatics her character has to go through. Male lead Hiroki Konishi (and his "brooding rival" Ray Fujita, too) is often rather dreadful and at times doesn't even manage to scowl convincingly. I did have the impression that his acting improved a little over time, though. However, it is also quite possible that I just got used to him.

What Konishi and Fujita are quite good at, on the other hand, is physical acting and stunt work. Unlike many other contemporary tokusatsu shows, Garo has a lot of fighting going on when its heroes aren't wearing their stuntmen and digital effects enabling armour. At least half of the fights is actual screen fighting between the actual actors, and it is this aspect of the show where Konishi and Fujita shine. Both really seem to throw themselves into their fight scenes with enthusiasm, a certain verve, and even competence, and manage - with the help of Makoto Yokoyama's more than solid choreography and direction that knows the difference between intense and fast, and impenetrable - to make the non-suit fights memorable and exciting.

Once the suits are donned, the fighting becomes nearly all CGI all the time. Those CGI fights are an acquired taste. Where the choreography of the real life fights is oriented on martial arts cinema (with a dose of wuxia), once the armours are donned the fights begin to look very much as if they came out of a (good) hack and slash videogame (say Devil May Cry). After a few episodes of getting used to the show's very distinct two types of fights I started to enjoy the contrast between them.

Amemiya makes it quite easy to enjoy the CGI elements of the show. While everything in these scenes looks as artificial and unreal as it gets, the things it represents are frequently so imaginative and bizarre and would not be realistically achievable through practical means anybody could afford, that it would need someone much more curmudgeonly than me not to be charmed by them. How else could you witness a giant monster clown bleeding fireworks?

While a lot of Garo's basic elements are pretty generic, much of the show is pervaded by a palpable feeling of enthusiasm - for silly monsters, for metaphors, for melodrama, for the genre its working in, for the healing power of art, for fights and for batshit insanity - that makes it utterly impossible for me not to be excited about it. It's the type of genre work I like the most, working inside the clichés of a given style, but exploring how far a show can go while doing that.

The Japanese public was at least excited enough about the show to lead to a two part special/TV movie named Beast of the White Night or Beast of the Midnight Sun (that turned out to be a very silly, yet entertaining cheese-fest front-loading the show's fantasy elements and mostly eschewing the horror) and an honest to Cthulhu big screen movie, Garo: Red Requiem that came into Japanese cinemas just at the end of this October. You'll sooner or later hear from me about the latter, I'm sure.

Three Films Make A Post: Entombed for eons - turned to stone - seeking women, women, women!

Her (2013): The really surprising thing about Spike Jonze’s film for me is how little of the simplistic “oh noes, the modern world is so alienated” piece its set-up might threaten is actually in it; this is not beholden to any cult of authenticity apart from that of human feeling. It’s also a perfect portray of loneliness, and longing, and sadness, and oh, by the way, it’s also a mainstream (in the broader sense of the word) SF film that isn’t ashamed of having more than two brain cells to rub together, not exactly expanding on what written SF has thought about its themes and props but putting it on a human level as good as anything I’ve seen or read in a long time.

There’s also a pervading sense of joy as well as of quotidian strangeness running through the film, some fine performances in particular by Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson and Amy Adams, and an absolutely perfect score. Why, the film’s so good I’m even pretending not to notice it doesn’t seem to know what an OS is.

Cutie Honey (2004): Between remaking Neon Genesis Evangelion again and again and again, Hideaki Anno somehow found the time to direct this live action version of Go Nagai’s sleazy yet wondrous magical girl manga/anime, turning down the sleaze quite a bit in the process – leaving only a lot of coy and pretty good-natured shots of Eriko Sato’s shapely behind – and surprising me by how enjoyable the result is when it should by all rights annoy me to kingdom come.

Anno manages to turn elements of the original into a crazy mix of pop-art, kitsch, the grotesque and goofy humour, somehow finding just the right mixture ratio to make the film work as something beyond mere camp. There’s a sense of fun, often actually funny humour and an exuberance surrounding the proceedings that does curious things with the film’s crazy and grotesque side, turning the whole affair into one of the more charming pictures you’ll see in whatever week you watch it.

The Serpent’s Egg (1977): This is generally treated as Ingmar Bergman’s Big Failure (yes, with capital letters) but I don’t agree with that assessment at all. To me, the film seems to do exactly what it sets out to do, show the Weimarer Republik as a sort of hellish state of mind, filled with increasingly bizarre elements like the onset of the insanity that would become the so-called Third Reich. The people in the film can hardly communicate with one another, their actors only given the choice to emote either with very emphatic lacks of expression or through over-heated hysteria, which is of course no communication at all.

The film’s an often unpleasant experience, slowly dragging itself along like any good economic crisis does, only waking up for moments of ever increasing unpleasantness, sometimes bordering on the sort of thing that the exploitation movies I talk about more often would indulge in, yet filmed with a palpable sense of revulsion those films can’t afford. Nobody ever said films about people getting crushed by the wheels of history should be a pleasant experience.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,german movies,japanese movies,sf,romance,drama,wtf,tokusatu,spike jonze,joaquin phoenix,scarlett johansson,amy adams,hideaki anno,eriko sato,ingmar bergman,liv ullmann,david carradine,gert fröbe

Three Films Make A Post: IF STARK TERROR WERE ECSTASY...living here would be sheer bliss!

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012): In my book, the good silly movies are often those that may know about their own silliness well enough, but still decide to treat their stupid (and possibly tasteless) "high concepts" with a face so straight and earnest, you can't really be sure they really do know how silly they are.

Case in point is Timur Bekmambetov's film with the self-explanatory title, the axe-swinging Lincoln and the very stupid yet entertaining action sequences. The whole thing treats seriously what can't be taken seriously by anyone, and is more like a comic book than most films actually based on comic books. Plus, there's an awesome moment where Mary Elizabeth Winstead suddenly does excellent dramatic acting as if this weren't a film about a vampire hunting Lincoln but about actual people, which is the sort of thing actors earn my never-ending respect with.

I was highly entertained by the whole thing, though your mileage may vary depending on your emotional closeness to the US Civil War and your tolerance for stupid ideas. When in doubt, just look at the title. If this sounds like the sort of thing you might enjoy, you probably will.

Skull Soldier (1992): Musician/actor Masaki Kyomoto attempts to sleaze up the the tokusatsu genre in a direct to video project written and directed by himself, with himself in the lead role. On paper, I could totally get behind adding blood and boobs to the Japanese costumed hero biz (like Garo would later do quite a bit more successfully), but unfortunately, Kyomoto is one of those Jennifer Lopez/Kenneth Brannagh "multi-talents" who does everything, but is not very good at any of it, proving that egos can be bigger than talents anywhere on the globe. Acting-wise, we're in the same territory as with the hair brigade in Hong Kong; direction-wise, it's verve-less crap; music-wise, pestilential soft jazz plays in the most inappropriate moments; and writing-wise, horrible comic relief drowns out the already not very exciting rest of the script.

Life's just too short to waste time on an ego-trip this boring.

The Thompsons (2012): The Butcher Brothers on the other hand clearly don't set out to bore with the sequel to their vampire movie The Hamiltons. The vampire siblings from the first part have gone on the run in Europe after a very unfortunate incident that left their bloody faces all over the news. In the more civilized part of the world, our sentimental vampires try to find others of their kind, and a little bit of help. When brother Francis (Cory Knauf) makes contact with a British country vampire family (with location shots at least in part actually shot in the UK for a change, and with actual UK actors that spare us the expected fake accents), things do seem to take a turn for the better, with peace and discipline promised by the family's elders, and romance for still brooding Francis by their mutant daughter Riley (Elizabeth Henstridge). Alas, it seems a bloodsucking monster family can't even trust another bloodsucking monster family anymore.

While the film does from time to time descend into scenes of very silly fang-baring and snarling like an even less convincing True Blood, this is for the most part a successful attempt at a) fleshing out The Hamilton's particular vampire mythology in a somewhat slicker film, b) philosophising about the nature of monsters and family, and c) spicing things up with blood and boobs in a much more effective way than Skull Soldier does.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,japanese movies,in short,action,horror,sf,tokusatsu,timur bekmambetov,masaki kyomoto,the butcher brothers,cory knauf,elizabeth henstridge,mary elizabeth winstead

Three Films Make A Post: DOLL DWARFS versus the CRUSHING GIANT BEASTS!

Amer (2009): Amer is a film I suspect I should admire quite a bit more than I do, seeing as it works as a visual and (in part) thematic homage to the style of Dario Argento in his prime, with a bit of Mario Bava and the giallo at large thrown in. Alas, the film is so heavily metaphorical and so incessantly technically perfect that it becomes tiresome to watch pretty fast.

All its visual beauty and technical accomplishment is put to work to overwhelm the audience with as many symbols for sexual awakening and repression as the directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani could squeeze into ninety minutes of running time, but an unrelenting barrage of pretty symbols is all their film ever is. There's really no good reason for this to be any longer than thirty minutes, which - incidentally - was about the point in the proceedings when my interest turned into impatience, because I had already understood what the film was trying to say and didn't need any further repetitions.

Vampire (1979): Speaking of tiresome, this US TV movie written by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll (both better known for their cop shows, and not showing much of a feel for horror here) does come to mind, too. Half mumbling cop character actors spitting out mock-naturalistic dialogue of the type beloved by professional TV critics and no one else, half a series of melodramatic declamations, the film goes through a lot of the suspected vampire movie motions without ever finding an original or just entertaining angle. I'm also a bit confused by its attempt to cast Richard Lynch of all people as a seductive vampire, but what do I know?

Garo: Kiba The Dark Knight Gaiden (2011): Finishing the trilogy of films I didn't much care for is this spin-off detailing the background of the big bad of the generally excellent tokusatu show Garo. Kiba suffers from the usual problem of gaiden (side-story) films in that it details things that were left vague in the show its spinning off from for a reason and doesn't do anything else of interest.

It's the sort of thing that only exists so that fans of the show can watch it, nod sagely and later start a message board flame war over some of its minor details, but isn't out to provide any actual entertainment, insight or a narrative that's interesting in itself.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: belgian movies,french movies,american movies,japanese movies,american tv,arthouse,horror,tokusatsu,richard lynch,keita amemiya

On WTF: Garo: Red Requiem (2010)

Remember Garo? The (probably) best Tokusatsu show of the last two decades or so was honoured with its own (3D) feature film last year, at least in Japan.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of the fansubbing community, we poor Western fans can finally watch and understand the thing, too. So I did. I report about my findings over at WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,tokusatsu,action,fantasy,reviews,keita amemiya,ryosei konishi,mary matsuyama,yosuke saito,other places

In short: Kamen Rider ZO (1993)

A guy (Hiroshi Tsuchikado) wakes up in a rather strange looking cave in the mountains. Someone informs him through the telepathic powers of an overly large grasshopper that he has to protect a little boy named Hiroshi from something called a "Neo Life Form".

Once our hero arrives wherever it is Hiroshi lives with his grandpa, a semi-mad scientist, he realizes that the voice in his head was just too right: a few nasty beasties are trying to abduct the boy, obviously not realizing into what a world of painfully whiny child-acting that would transport them. Fortunately for the sanity of monster-kind, our nameless hero can transform into a variation of the always popular Kamen Rider (what a surprise in a Kamen Rider movie!), and will spend the rest of the film enduring said whiny child-acting himself and beating (and, being a Kamen Rider, of course, kicking) the stuffing out of the nasty creatures.

The whole affair turns out to be the fault of Hiroshi's father, whose attempts to create a perfect life form went so pear-shaped that the best idea he had to correct the problem was to transform his lab assistant (our nameless hero) into a cross between grasshopper and human, obviously without the guy's consent.

Little Hiroshi sure is lucky Kamen Riders like children.

This is the first of the two short Kamen Rider features Keita Amemiya signs responsible for - the second one being Kamen Rider J - and it's also the weaker of the two by far.

The creatures and much of the strange bio-technological stuff that makes up that part of the backgrounds for the scenes of creatures mauling each other that doesn't consist of the usual empty factory buildings are as lovely designed and lovingly executed as one can expect from Amemiya, and the monster fights are fun enough if you like this sort of thing (and really, if you don't, no Kamen Rider show or movie will ever make you happy). Alas, the film makes it needlessly difficult to enjoy these elements by giving Hiroshi (and the gnome who plays him) way too much room for that most terrible of all mawkish and syrupy things - terribly executed child-actor melodrama. It sure doesn't help that the script spends so much time on Hiroshi that it either forgets to provide the Rider even with the most basic of motivations or forgets to inform the audience what that motivation might be. It's possible that leaving out the random J-Pop video clip right in the middle of the movie could have provided the time to go into the Rider's psyche for the two seconds of motivation I'm asking for here, but then as now, selling merchandise is much more important than providing a satisfying movie.

Anyway: if you just look at those pretty (and "green child-face in a big petri dish"-type grotesque, once Amemiya gets really going) monsters and the hitting, and go and make yourself some tea once Hiroshi begins to whine, Kamen Rider ZO is still watchable enough, just not as merrily insane or fun as the best examples of its superhero franchise.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,in short,tokusatsu,keita amemiya

In short: Kamen Rider J (1994)

Environmentalist photographer Kouji (Yuuta Mochizuki) has come to some unnamed place in the Japanese countryside to document (and presumably identify the reason for) the mass-dying of local animals. He meets an adorable little girl (Yuka Nomura) there, who seems at once quite taken with her new big brother figure.

But all too soon the reason for all those dying animals becomes clear - a bio-mechanical (and quite despicable) life-form known as Fog Mother has come to Earth to repeat with us what she did with the dinosaurs once. The time for her attack has almost come, she just needs to wait a little for her spawn to hatch. Then, it will the all-night Earth buffet can open. Oh, and of course, Fog Mother's children need some wake-up food. That's what adorable little girls are for, right?

So Fog Mother's hench-creatures kidnap the girl and push Kouji down a mountain. It doesn't look good for humanity or the future of adorable little girl-dom. Fortunately, some…people with roots deep underground (I'm not talking figuratively) revive Kouji and turn him into a new version of everyone's favourite insect-themed superhero on a motorbike, Kamen Rider J. And give him an incredibly creepy looking talking grasshopper as a guide.

With the help of his new powers of ecological motorbike riding and kicking monsters in the face, Kouji will have to conquer Fog Mother's trio of favourite monsters, free his little-sister-in-spirit, and do an unexpected Ultraman on Fog Mother's fortress.

This is another entry in my irregular and untitled series of write-ups on the body of work of Japanese creature designer and tokusatsu director Keita Amemiya. This time around, I've stumbled onto one of Amemiya's few contributions to Toei's humungous Kamen Rider mythos in form of a forty-five minute feature film (to be shown as part of a double feature), that were the franchises main outlets in this phase when there weren't any TV shows featuring the Rider. It's the director's last contribution to Kamen Rider as far as I understand.

Amemiya's talent for working with filmic shorthand without losing coherence makes him quite a good fit for this sort of low budget movie special. What there is of characterization is broad but effective enough to motivate the plot (and it's not as if anyone would ask the two human characters what the want anyway), and the plot in its turn is just present enough to make the series of fights and the monster design feel like part of a whole.

Speaking of monster design (very obviously at least in part also done by Amemiya), Kamen Rider J tends as far to the freakish side of tokusatsu monstrosities as possible in what is at its heart a franchise for kids. It's as if H.R. Giger had developed a sudden interest in classic Japanese art and decided to bio-punk that tradition up a bit, with the expected consequences.

As a whole, Kamen Rider J delivers exactly the thrills it promises, and is sure to put a smile on the face of everyone who is even faintly predisposed to like stuff like this.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,japanese movies,tokusatsu,keita amemiya,sf,yuuta mochizuki

Mechanical Violator Hakaider (1995)

Original title: Jinzo ningen Hakaida

Some rather dystopian future. A luckless bunch of thieves breaks into an old, locked down prison searching for valuables, but ends up awakening the android/robot/cyborg/whatever Hakaider, who's about as much of a morning person as I am and therefore kills them all.

Hakaider then grabs his motorcycle and makes his way to the city of Jesus Town, where a certain Girjev (overacted, somewhat effeminate, accessorizing with angel wings) lords over what he sees a paradise of order, but what is in fact a place where every dissent is destroyed through a silver psychopathic robot named Michael, masked stormtroopers and the judicious application of lobotomies.

Hakaider falls in with a small band of morally rather dubious revolutionaries against Girjev's interpretation of freedom, but making the guy's acquaintance and getting slaughtered all lie in the space of just a few minutes for the not very righteous few. Still, at least one of the freedom fighters, the comparatively pure-hearted Kaoru (Mai Hosho), has had prophetic dreams about Hakaider, so surely the kinda-sorta hero will go and do some mechanical violating on a certain bad guy's ass.

I don't seem to be able to get away from the works of tokusatsu specialist Keita Amemiya these last few weeks. Fortunately, most of his films are well worth a minor obsession, Mechanical Violator Hakaider being no exception.

As seems to be the case with all of Amemiya's feature films, he's obviously not working on a budget much higher than those of the tokusatsu TV shows he's spent a lot of his artistic life on here, so there are the usual tolerances against stiff (Hakaider) or overly broad (Gurjev) acting needed if one wants to get something out of the film.

While Amemiya's design sense, crossing the borders between kitsch and art, and arriving somewhere in the middle, is as wonderful as always, much of the futuristic production design has the look and feel of something a genius mad scientist put together out of normal household items in her garage (though there's nothing as extreme as the cuckoo clock battle robots from Mirai Ninja). It gives the effects the feel of something made by actual people instead of faceless design functionaries, so I tend to find this sort of thing charming and very human, but I know the film's obvious monetary poverty will be enough to make it nearly unwatchable for some without constant mocking.

As is also typical of Amemiya's work, Hakaider does some rather clever things within the bounds of its chosen genre. Most obvious is casting Hakaider as his film's hero, a character that was an enemy of classical tokusatsu hero Kikaider/Kikaida (depending on whom you believe either as a plain bad guy or some sort of anti-hero; I can't afford the overpriced DVD box of the show, so I'm going by hearsay here), and putting him against a robot that looks as much as a typical tokusatsu good guy as Michael does. Amemiya does the same thing with the white/black colour coding of good and evil, using mostly whites for the bad guys and their lair and black for the revolutionaries. So far, so obvious, but the director does take the deciding step further and also shows the revolutionaries (except for Kaoru) as violent egotists and even takes an empathic look at the victims of one of the scenes of Hakaider's awesome violence, complicating the usual bad guy/good guy affair quite a bit more than he has to.

Obviously, Hakaider is still mostly a film about that awesome violence, guys in spandex beating each other up and explosions, but to me, Amemiya's attempts at adding complexity make all the difference. Watching the movie, I also couldn't shake the feeling that the film's political side, sledgehammer-y as it might be, isn't some perfunctory stuff the director just threw into the mix to make his film more "mature", but based on actual anger about a state of things that's not so different from what is happening in the world right now. Except that the real world has a decided lack of robotic heroes or easy solutions through cathartic violence, but one of the beauties of genre cinema is of course that its problems are a lot easier solved than those of our world.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,keita amemiya,reviews,tokusatsu,sf,mai hosho

On WTF: Garo (2005-2006)

It looks like I just can't escape Keita Amemiya's work at the moment, so why not entertain the rest of the Internet with a piece about his "mature" tokusatsu show Garo, especially when the show turns out to be pretty great?

If you want to read more about it, my write-up on WTF-Film will enlighten you.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,ryosei konishi,keita amemiya,mika hijii,tokusatsu,reviews,horror,other places