It’s the last flickering hours of 2014, a year with many disasters on a national and international scale. The neo-nazi (but all the liberals tend to forget this) party is the third biggest party in Sweden and even if the left won it’s hard to say if they will have any real power. We’ll see. I’ve been focusing not so much on reviewing movies but instead watching them, taking it a bit slow with the writing. I’ve been working a lot, but now - as the freelancer I am - I’m between projects and I’ve been watching so many films I can’t even count them. I’ve been revisiting some classic directors like Argento, Fulci and Bava - but also choosing a lot of stuff from my shelves I haven’t seen yet.
The last film of 2014 is a film I never seen before. I’ve been staying away from it because I wanted to see it on good quality, but I just couldn’t wait anymore. Prophecies of Nostradamus: Catastrophe 1999 came one year after Toho’s biggest hit in years, the truly powerful and smart Submersion of Japan, one of the best best disaster films ever made. I have it on two different DVD’s, the blu-ray, the remake (or new adaptation of the novel it’s based upon) and the novel itself, in a rare Swedish edition. Oh, and I have the spoof made by Minoru Kawasaki, The World Sinks Except Japan. I’ve heard there’s some Manga based on the this story also, and a terribly expensive TV-series aired the same year as the movie I’m gonna focus on from now on.
They’re a bit similar actually. The same atmosphere of dread. At the same time hopeful but also an emotional disaster for all the characters involved. Prophecies of Nostradamus bases it’s story around the prophecies of the gentleman in the title, which could be seen as a bit sloppy considering the bad rep he have. But this was the 70’s and everything was possible, and it’s a cool idea.
It tells the story of one man, the always brilliant Tetsurô Tanba, a man who always seemed very smart and radical considering his past (his father was the emperor’s physician and Tetsurô later became a spiritual leader beside his acting career), who firmly believes in the prophecies and tries to convince the government that they need to do something, they need to stop pollute the earth and destroy the nature for the sake of money. The world around them is coming to a paradigm shift, and now time is running out to fix it. Some stuff happens in the film and some stuff is theories submitted by Tetsurô’s character, Dr. Nishiyama.
And so we see the world ends, in every way possible - from earthquakes and floodings to radioactive mutants and cannibals! This is the bleakest disaster movie ever made, one that only could have been made in Japan during this time.
It’s a lot of talking heads in Prophecies of Nostradamus, but not as much as Submersion of Japan. Not saying this is a bad thing, I love talking heads if they have something good to say - and both of these films have that. The strongest point is that the filmmakers are taking it serious. How much I love Mark Robson’s Earthquake I still consider it a daytime soap compared to the Japanese counterparts, where it really never becomes exploitation. When people die is Prophecies of Nostradamus we feel it, they’re just not a stuntman in a wig in the background.
Nostradamus is also, for a disaster aficionado like me, a dream come true. Most of the disasters we leared to love in movies are present here and with the usual skills from the miniature department of Toho it looks fantastic. It also have some very impressive, almost poetic, visual effects bordering to surrealism. The up-side-down city for example, or the three suns in the sky - a phenomena “created by light interacting with ice crystals in the atmosphere”, to quote Wikipedia. It becomes disturbing towards the end when we witness the only surviving creatures on earth after the big finale… and I can understand the film at the time and later on caused some controversies - especially for a country who twiced have been slapped with a nuclear bomb over hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Prophecies of Nostradamus: Catastrophe 1999 have a couple of cheesy moments, but it’s more connected with the time it was made - in Japan in the 70’s - than the story or filmmaking itself. This is how it was written and done and it’s friggin’ awesome. I really like my disaster films without humor and as a serious look into what we’re doing with our earth, the madness of mankind. The laughter might get struck in the throats of some people, but that’s what a movie like this should do.
I’ve seen the uncut, original Japanese version, and I wish - I WISH - Toho could just set it free, make a documentary about it, explain the history behind it and then let it roam the earth once again. Before it’s too late.
Have a good new year dear readers, and remember to check out Schmollywood Babylon on YouTube!
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