Schmollywood Babylon

Haze (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2005)

The older I get the less I wanna see dark, cynical, brutal, sadistic movies. I have nothing against them, absolutely not - but I've seen everything by now and I know all too well how to kill a human, or scare the shit out of someone, at least in the movies. But one thing that strikes a chord in me is Japanese cinema, which also is the country behind some of the darkest, most brutal movies I ever seen. A nice counterpart to the wealth of wonderful, awesome pop culture in form of giant monsters, superheroes and splatter comedies. One director I’m slowly discovering is Shinya Tsukamoto. I’ve seen the first two Tetsuo films, Hiruko the Goblin and now Haze.

Me and my mates in exploitation adventures, Jason and Jocke, tried to watch it this weekend (during our tradition “Geekend in the Woods”), but the sunshine was so strong Sunday morning it was virtually impossible to see anything - just the sounds of a moaning and hyperventilating Shinya Tsukamoto, who also plays the lead, got through to us. So I gave it another spin today, in the comfort of my own dark “cavepartment”. An YES, I could see something! In the faint light of a source only there to make us see the shadowy face of Tsukamoto, scared shitless.

Tsukamoto wakes up and finds himself in a dark, cramped space. He have lost his memory. It’s very dark and he can’t hardly see anything. It’s wet, built of what seems like concrete and the stench is horrible. At first he panics, tries to find investigate the surroundings, but it’s not until he calms down and starts crawling he finally get to see what’s happening. Body parts, screams. Something is going on in the darkness. Finally he meets a woman who is in the same situation as him, she tells him what she remembers and slowly they start to piece together the puzzle and try to solve this horrible, gruesome mystery.

The first thing that came to my mind was Rodrigo Cortés’ 2010 sleeper hit Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds and a coffin. And a snake. Now, I can honestly say I liked it. It worked for me, it was a nice, intimate melodrama of terror. I guess it’s possible to say now, after it first become darling of all critics and the audience, then transformed into “overrated” because it just turned too popular and now it’s back in the family again. And there’s something very Buried-ish over Haze, or the correct thing is that there’s something Haze-esque over Buried! We have a man in dark, tight place, trying to save his own life. Haze is mostly built around close-ups, which makes it even more claustrophobic than Buried and the set-up is a lot more satisfying.

Personally I love when there’s no clue what’s going on. There’s one thing to push the limits like Lost, and make one good idea hundreds of hours long, and Tsukamoto knows this. He teases with weird details, hardly visible in the darkness, that might or might not give a clue to what's going on. By focusing on sound and music he creates a brutally eerie and creepy atmosphere, and when the end finally comes you both feel relaxed… but still very uncomfortable. He also introduces a woman during the last third, which brings more tension, more drama to everything. You get a sense that she’s been experiencing the exact same thing as him, which makes the set-up even scarier. What the hell is going on?

I’m well aware this movie isn’t for everyone. It can be frustrating for someone not familiar with Japanese short movie horrors and the works of Tsukamoto and his colleagues. The length, something 40-ish minutes or so, is a great asset. It never turns boring or resorts to filler material. Haze is just what it is and nothing more or less. A brilliant piece of relentless Japanese cinema!

Wolfguy: Enraged Lycanthrope (Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1975)

It might be wrong, but I think my first Sonny Chiba experience was when watching Toho’s 1979 classic G.I. Samurai, aka Sengoku jieitai aka Timeslip aka Day of the Apocalypse (the last one was the “Swedish” title) and I fell in love instantly. Oh, not that I find him attractive or something like that (he’s not a bad looking man, but just not my style), but as an actor and persona. I fully understand he was a superstar during 20-30 years in Japan, and in the rest of the world mostly known for his highly entertaining Streetfighter films (I love when he slaps a guy in the back of the head and the eyes pop out! Poetry!). And you remember how the producers of some big budget Hollywood action film bragged about doing something that NEVER had been done before, using x-ray effects in a fight scene - but that’s something Sonny did years ago, in Yukio Noda’s 1977 uneven but fun Golgo 13. So Sonny is the man, in every way possible. It’s rare with someone who both is a competent action star AND can act.

This brings us to the utter madness called Wolfguy: Enraged Lycanthrope, produced by the greedy bastards over at Toei - who’s so expensive no one can afford licensing their titles. That’s sad, because Wolfguy is AWESOME! First of all, “wolfguy”? Love that. It’s… a bit slacker, a bit pothead-smoking-silliness just in the title. With that out of the way, lets take a look at the story.

Now, let me get this straight: I’m not totally sure I got everything right here, but I THINK Sonny is a journalist, going undercover - as a cop or gangster or something. I’m not sure. The movie begins with him chasing a man who suddenly stops and literary getting ripped apart by an unseen tiger-force. Yes, a superimposed tiger. Blood and gore. Fun, fun, fun. We slowly learn that Sonny is a werewolf, from a werewolf family (in a couple of surprisingly touching and powerful flashbacks, not sure it they’re shot for this film or borrowed an earlier Toei production). This makes him more or less invincible when there’s a full moon nearby (even during the day, so I guess it’s something very special with him)! That bad thing is that the yakuza wants him to work with them, and they can offer a lot of money - but of course, Sonny refuses! Danger ahead!

Wolfguy: Enraged Lycanthrope is a very fractured film. It can really decided if it’s a gangster melodrama, a horror film or a martial arts flick. It opens with a bang, gore and violence, wacka wacka guitars and gorgeous nighttime shots of Shinjuku, then kinda slows down while Sonny investigates this strange curse killing people (the one with the tiger), kicking butt from time to time, and then it ends with a truly bizarre sequence where… I won’t say, but it’s cool. The last half hour reminded me of First Blood actually, but years earlier.

So is it any good? Oh hell yeah! I loved Wolfguy! It might be one of my favorite Sonny Chiba flicks from now on, even if it’s far from perfect and ends pretty abrupt (I get the feeling that a sequel was planned, but nothing came out of it). What makes it worth watching and awesome is the mix of genres, the gore and violence - and in the middle Sonny with those big puppy eyes and a sadistic grin on his face as he breaks limbs left and right.

Wolfguy: Enraged Lycanthrope is a prime example of far out, semi-psychedelic Japanese genre cinema. It’s just a damn pity the only way to see it is through a TV-rip and with fansubs. This is a film that deserves a HD, widescreen, uncut (the TV-print is uncut, but still…) release from Arrow Video - for example. They did a great job with the Stray Cat Rock box, so why not give Toei a try and make them release some goodies for fans all over the world to enjoy? I would buy them without hesitation!

The Inugami Family (Kon Ichikawa, 1976)

The first books I read as a kid was Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five books and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. Soon I was reading Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, G. K. Chesterton and Arthur Conan Doyle among others. But Christie was - and still is - my literary god. Some might see her - and the others - like easy-reading material, written for the masses and serving the same masses a primitive form of satisfaction of being intellectual. That could be it, I don’t deny it, but it doesn’t mean it’s not brilliant writing. Christie had a dark streak in her, which is very evident especially at the end of her career, giving her main characters more and more depth. Curtain, the 1975 (but written 30 years earlier), is a great example of this. Many years it lead me further into the world of detective stories, to what Agatha Christie’s works was called in Italy: Giallo.

But when it seems you’ve seen all gialli and read all books by Christie, what’s left? Japan of course, even if I only been able to glance at the surface of what’s been made in the genre over there. Rampo Edogawa is probably the most famous mystery writer, but then we have Seishi Yokomizo who wrote a series of books about detective Kosuke kindaichi, many of them being made into films. But only two of them - what I have discovered - has been available with english subs: Village of the Eight Tombstones and today’s Japanese cinema classic; The Inugami Family.

When family patriarch Sahei Inugami dies it sets off a chain reaction of melodrama and his lawyer asks famous detective Kôsuke Kindaichi to join him when he’s gonna read the last will and testament of this old man. The will is carefully constructed so it will anger more or less everyone in the family, but still give them a small chance to get some money - if someone dies. After the screaming and crying is over the scheming begins, and much of it revolves around the mysterious man sitting with a rubber mask on his disfigured face. Is it really Sukekiyo Inugami, the grandchild of old Sahei, or someone pretending to be him? His mother claims it’s her son, but who can you trust in this mess? It doesn’t become much easier when someone starts killing the guests, and it’s up to Kindaichi to solve the mystery of the Inugami family…

Director Kon Ichikawa seemed to have been a pretty laid back man, or maybe more lacking of drama himself, which quotes like “I just make any picture I like or any that the company tells me to do.” and “Films are films. If you don't understand that, then you start filming lies.” - I like that way of thinking a lot. Don’t be an asshole seems to be have been his motto. He did dramas, comedies - and during the 70’s a string of murder mystery based on Yokomizo’s novels. The most famous of these is The Inugami Family, so popular he even remade it himself before his death.

What I like about The Inugami Family is that it takes its time. This is a slow movie looking at it on the surface, but packed with so much intrigue it’s hard to actually tell what’s happening if you’re not watching it very carefully. There’s family secrets, love affairs - straight and gay, jealousy, twists all the time, murders, red herrings - all in a slow pace set in a beautiful small town somewhere in Japan. I can see how Ichikawa got attracted by the story, it’s basically a movie about greed, about the stupidity of man. You don’t see many nice characters here, polite, but almost everyone with their own agenda. Detective Kindaichi is the only really nice person, almost fumbling himself to the solution. Everyone likes him and respects him, even if they all know he’s there to put at least one of them in prison.

There’s nothing bad with The Inugami Family, the movie I mean, it’s a beautiful piece of cinema - combining the tranquility of the Japanese countryside with the gory murders of the giallo and the overly complex intrigue from western detective writers. There’s ounces here and there of very dark comedy, when they find one of the last bodies for examples, and the surprising sensibility of our hero. Never have a lead detective screamed so loud after finding a decapitated head!

The Inugami Family is on my top ten of perfect Japanese films. I just wish someone could release all of his Kindaichi movies with english subs!

Prophecies of Nostradamus: Catastrophe 1999 (Toshio Masuda, 1974)

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! 

Terror of Mechagodzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1975)

It was exactly six years since I saw and reviewed Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla swan song Terror of Mechagodzilla, a direct sequel to Jun Fukuda’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, I movie I have no memories of at all - even if I know I’ve seen it. But that seems to be the thing with most movies Fukuda been involved in. The man can’t tell a story and always fucks up the proud tradition of Japanese kaijus by making them even more silly than they deserve. I usually say this is the first Godzilla I saw, but it’s a small lie. I think my first one was Son of Godzilla or Invasion of the Astro-Monsters, but Terror of Mechagodzilla was somewhere during the same weekend. So don’t worry. Son of Godzilla didn’t taint my taste too much.

After all the silliness Toho delivered to the poor Japanese audience it feels like Honda wants to take back part of what he created once and for all. It’s still - on the surface - a silly film, involving aliens taking control over Titanosaurus and, once again, Mechagodzilla, to take over the world and literally wipe Tokyo from the face of the earth. But Honda and screenwriter Yukiko Takayama takes a darker path involving a sinister, almost incesteous, plot involving a mad scientist, Dr. Mafune and his daughter Katsura - who happens to be a cyborg, transformed to that by the aliens. We’re talking dark characters here, far from the light-hearted style. The mad scientist, played by legend Akihiko Hirata, finds himself and his work hijacked by the aliens and filled with revenge against mankind himself he tries to help them - but there’s this deep understanding that the main reason why he’s doing this is because of his daughters situation. The movie itself is more violent - including several deaths, some of them bloody, and cyborg boobs. Two boys are also stomped by Titanosaurus, which makes the film a lot more cynical and dark than it already is.

Sorry for my rant here. It’s a bit difficult to write down the story, but it’s a good story - compared to what Fukuda and his colleagues did. The reason why this movie came to exists is by itself pretty interesting. Yukiko Takayama was a young fresh screenwriter from the school The Scenario Center when she heard that Toho had a story-writing contest to come up with the sequel to Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka liked the idea and told her to write the script - and amazingly enough they changed very little. This was also the heart of the script and what was most important for Yukiko, or as she put it once: “My original version of the script focused on Katsura Mafune, the girl who had been turned into a cyborg by aliens from outer space. Even after she had been altered, she had emotions. As long as this idea was not removed from the script, I didn't care all that much about what was done with it.”

One thing Yukiko was disappointed with was how the finale was done. Originally Tokyo was suppose to be totally destroyed, but due to budget issues that part of the story was moved to a smaller town outside Tokyo and the action was less than it was suppose to me. This doesn’t mean it’s not spectacular! The scenes of destruction is very impressive and when Mechagodzilla blasts the city into tiny, tiny, tiny pieces is fantastic. We’re talking some big, fat, brutal explosions here. The action is overall quite good and Honda feels inspired. It’s violent, gritty and totally over-the-top.

I still consider Terror of Mechagodzilla as one of the best films in the long line of Godzilla-adventures, but the strongest part of it is the story and actors. Which once again proves that if it’s well-written you easier can buy budgetary problems. Yukiko and Ishiro brought darkness back to where it belongs, in the Japanese cinema soul.

Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014)

I’m really breaking my own rules here by reviewing a blockbuster, mainstream, Hollywood production with a 160 million dollar budget. But hey, we’re still talking about fucking Godzilla here. GOJIRA! King of the Monsters! Gigantis! ...Eh, well, at least in one movie. This monster gave birth to the first nick I ever had on the net, and still uses from time to time, Fredzilla. So the big G means a lot to me. Sometimes I wonder if it was just pure coincidence my boyfriend call himself G and uses an email combining the words G and Force (quoting Wikizilla: “G-Force is an organization featured in the later Heisei era Godzilla films.”) without having no interest whatsoever in Godzilla or Japanese genre cinema.

It was sixty years since Toho unleashed Godzilla on the Japanese soil and since she’s been destroying cities all over the world, meeting new friends like Rodan and Mother, but most of all fighting alien-controlled giant monsters like Ghidora (Mr Wobbly Neck as I prefer to call him), the always silly King Caesar and the criminally underrated Titanosaurus. The best foe, I would say, is MechaGodzilla - which is equal to Godzilla - but with more missiles and killer beams. Yeah, sixty years bringing havoc and being enemy and friend - and now he’s back in the second American Godzilla movie made so far, the one from 1998 is something we all should put in a bag and drown like a bunch of unwanted puppies. But we wouldn’t do that with puppies, I know. But that American Zilla… ouch. It still hurts.

Gareth Edwards is probably a more mature director than Roland Emmerich ever was (even if I have a soft spot for both 2012 and White House Down - no haters please!) and proved with his Monsters that he could create a unique and human view on a monster invasion. The question is of course if he could do the same with a movie with this budget and with a studio breathing down his neck like that dirty uncle your parents made you stay away from. Well, he kinda made it. Kinda. There’s one single big problem with Gareth Edwards Godzilla - and that’s something every fancy movie critic and their moms have brought up the last days: the characters. The characters are completely flat. The human characters of course. When the movie is owner we know nothing about them and we really doesn’t care.

You might think a person like me who enjoys trash, who loves exploitation and silly movies wouldn’t care about characters - but they are the most important thing in a movie like this. If we have no one to root for or get annoyed over or whatever, almost everything else around them loses its power. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Cranston and Elisabeth Olsen - no one of them are and actors, but they have nothing to work with. There’s no reason for doing what they’re doing. Ken Watanabe, I like him and he almost manages to deliver an interesting performance - but once again, his work is undercut with boring, boring dialogue. Juliette Binoche’s part is so small, but could have felt important - but no, it just doesn’t work. I can’t put the finger on why this part of the film sucks, because if there’s something Hollywood can do is to create characters you easily can care about. They don’t have to be über-advanced or special in anyway, but they work. Not here.

Alright, enough with the whining. Godzilla is still a very impressive movie. It’s serious, but injects a few silly details here and there which I like a lot. Godzilla herself looks like Godzilla should look like, and not like some wimpy t-rex wannabe like in Emmerich’s version. This is a big fucking monster, with leathery, old skin, clumsy feet and hands like rubber-gloves. Like the Japanese Godzilla, but more like a real animal. The MUTO’s, the two creatures appearing first in the movie, was a lot more fun than I thought they would be. They have a good story, good chemistry and looks quite freaky when they start stomping around. Yeah, the monsters feels a lot more well-developed than the humans, which I’m eternally grateful for. With them having charisma there wouldn’t be any more at all.

Edwards makes the movie like Jaws and Alien, you see very little of the big G before the big impact at the end. Don’t worry, you’ll see action and monsters - but like in Monsters it’s mostly in the background. I don’t mind this, really. It’s a good thing, but I think Edwards and the screenwriters took this concept a bit too far. Because Godzilla is no mystery. We all know who she is and we know what she can do. When the final battle finally happens there’s some spectacular sights to behold, but still… I would have preferred it to be a bit longer, a bit more wide shots of the city when the creatures fight. Godzilla makes a few moves and uses his nuclear breath, and the MUTO’s are aggressive creatures, trying to beat her up as much as possible - but I wanted more. So much more.

Still, Godzilla is a fine movie. It’s a good movie. The action is insane, the monsters are cool and you care about them. The special effects are sensational. The 3D sucks because there’s not 3D effect at all, but it didn’t bother me. I sincerely hope this will be a blockbuster so it will generate a sequel - a sequel which will be better, have more action and most of all: have better characters.

Let’s hope for the best. But one thing is true: Godzilla is back, she’s the king of the monsters - as a sign at the end says, and she fucking rules. Long Live Godzilla!

The Living Skeleton (Hiroshi Matsuno, 1968)

The only bad thing with The Living Skeleton is that it only have dead skeletons. There’s not one single living skeleton in it. So prepare for a shock if you’re into living skeletons. But jokes aside, this is a friggin’ awesome Japanese horror movie, with a few familiar touches connected with later western movies, but still original and far from having any rip-offs. Yeah, why I’m bringing that up is because some people says it’s very similar to John Carpenter’s The Fog, but except a ship, a little bit of tiny fog and a revenge story - they’re nothing alike. I would recommend those who thinks so to watch Amando de Ossorio’s Night of the Seagulls instead. It’s more similar to 2002’s Ghost Ship actually, but enough about that.

The ship Dragon King is hijacked by pirates and everyone aboard is killed during a massacre, among them the young couple Yoriko and her doctor husband. The ship officially disappears. Cut to a few years later. Yoriko’s twin sister Saeko is suddenly contacted by her sister, who’s aboard the ship - now a ghost ship - and somehow acts like the instrument for her revenge! One by one the pirates are killed in violent fashion - but is it through supernatural forces or through the rage of Saeko?

The Living Skeleton is a stunningly good and quite pulpy horror film with an amazing revenge-twist. It’s hard to fully describe this piece of art to those who haven’t seen it. The black & white cinematography is haunting, resembling a mix of the early German horrors to the Noir of the fifties - and with it’s introduction of the pirates - actually just gangsters/thieves - and the revenge motive, this IS a horror Noir set in Japan. The idea of the skeletons attached to the bottom of the sea is very cool - and also very corny, because they look extremely unrealistic - but like with all good stories and with a good imagination, it works better than you first can imagine.

I also love the characters - the baddies, who you might consider to be the main characters (even if Saeko is very important), all very unsympathetic, but somehow human in the middle of all the dread. They never, considering the subject, feel unrealistic. They’re greedy fuckers who wants to earn a quick buck. The pulpiness becomes even more evident during a “sensual” stage show, right out from a Mondo film. If this was a book it would have been one of those cheap pockets with a sensational cover.

The gritty atmosphere starts off quite shocking with the massacre, but it actually becomes even darker over the course of the movie, with some brutal deaths - including a knife in the eye, a person getting crushed and death by acid! But it works because the story is good, and even now when I look back I’m not totally sure if I’ve seen a movie with a supernatural twist or not. But whatever you prefer, The Living Skeleton is a very twisted and violent horror-thriller - including a beautiful twist I didn’t got until it happen.

This is one of those few movies that’s truly one of a kind and Criterion should get a hug, a kiss and maybe even a blow-job for releasing it in such a beautiful package together with The X From Outer Space, Goke and Genocide.

And yes, to be clear: The Living Skeleton is a masterpiece. One of my faves from now on. You can always trust the Japanese!

The X From Outer Space (Kazui Nihonmatsu, 1967)

Everyone wanted in on the Godzilla and kaiju-craze, from Toei’s Gamera to Nikkatsu’s Gappa - but lets not forget Shôchiku’s The X From Outer Space, a kaiju which had eluded me for a number of years. It’s always been a favorite of my buddy Jocke, but I kinda wanted to wait until I could see it in perfect quality and in a legal way with good English subs. Finally Criterion, of all companies, released it in a wonderful box in 2012 - and two years later - I’m quite slow - I finally bought it, not just for The X From Outer space, but also for the other films in the box. I might get back to them later on this blog, cross your fingers.

To say this film delivers a competent, thought-through story is to claim Chuck Norris is an intelligent, charismatic and talented action star - not at all, of course. But where Chuck just feels like a child molester, The X From Outer Space feels like fucking Superman in comparison. Not sure why, but a gang of swinging Japanese hipsters is going on a trip to space, accidentally finds some slimy, strange alien spore - which they of course takes aboard. Like all not-so-smart scientists they bring this fucking thing back to earth where it starts to grow and finally becomes the super-corny space-chicken Guilala! And Guilala is fucking angry and hungry and just wanna eat some energy! What shall our heroes do? Take a drink and look hip to the sound of sixities jazz? Yes, of course, but also develop “Guilalaium”, something Guilala can’t resist - but also is highly dangerous for our new favorite gigant monster!

The script is a mess and most of the stuff that’s happening just happens without much explanation. Have you ever seen Ultraman or any similar Tokusatsu show? Those episodes is like Kaiju films compressed into 22 minute long short movies - and imagine one of those episodes drawn out to a feature length movie. That’s how to describe The X From Outer Space in a pretty accurate way. This is of course awesome, because when Guilala finally attacks - almost 50 minutes into the film - it never holds back and becomes one of the most spectacular, miniature-bashing Kaijus ever made. It never comes up in the quality of the Godzilla movies, or the second Gamera, but it looks gorgeous and delivers a couple of spectacular action sequences.

On of the best and coolest - maybe in the whole Kaiju history - is when Guilala is chasing a truck carrying Guilalaium, stomping right behind it, reaching out to try to grab the stuff. It looks terribly cool and the effects are awesome. Like an early version of the T-Rex chasing the jeep in Jurassic Park. There’s more interesting details like this, making the effects more alive and less detailed.

Guilala is a bit too contrived design-wise to be 100% effective (Godzilla and Gamera, to name two monsters, are very effective just because they’re so simple), but the suit and mechanics is well-made and less stiff than many other, more famous, monsters from the same time in Japan. High on cheese and entertainment, The X From Outer Space is a Kaiju well worth rediscovering!

Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964)

I’ve seen Kwaidan for the first time ever and it was a life-changing experience. Produced by Toho and directed with a sensitive hand by Masaki Kobayashi, based on the American writer Lafcadio Hearn’s 1904 collection of Japanese folktales; Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. It’s interesting how I often, while researching Kwaidan, came in touch with the shame of calling it a horror film. Many, many people out there seems to have problems calling it what it really is, probably because it’s such a huge classic, a perfect example of true cinema - and they just can’t accept its a horror film (or several smaller, because it’s an anthology). I pity them, of course, because Kwaidan is true horror - very subtle horror - but horror. I mean, no one ever doubted James Whale’s Frankenstein films to not be horror, or maybe Dracula with Bela Lugosi. Horror is all around us and it comes in different shapes. Sometimes with a chainsaw and sometimes with a cup of tea.

In the first story, The Black Hair, tells the tale of a man divorcing his wife and leaving town, finding a new wife - but later regret this and many years later goes back to his first wife - a very nice and loving woman, only to find himself trapped in something way more scary. The second story is The Woman of the Snow, where a young woodcutter gets stuck in a snowstorm together with his older colleague and sees him get killed by a female ghost. Later the young man sees a woman with a similar face, falls in love with her and builds a family together. But he has forgotten a very important detail… the third story is Hoichi the Earless, a blind musician with a speciality to sing a certain saga of songs. But his friends are worried he’s playing music for ghosts and tries to protect him. The fourth story is In a Cup of Tea, where an unfinished story about a man seeing faces in the liquids he drinks somehow makes the author of the story cursed himself.

Kwaidan is close to three hours long but feels like a breeze This is SO good. It’s beautiful, very well-told. It has one of those scripts which uses the only necessary to tell the story and that makes it feel so sharp and focused. I collegue of mine would use the word “crisp”, and I think it’s a perfect word. There’s nothing you don’t need here. I would even say it’s a bit scary. A couple of times the hairs on my arms stood up and the stories captivated me like few other ghost stories. Kwaidan literally means Ghost Stories, which is a very fitting title. I find it very interesting how later films in Japan, such a Ringu, Ju-On, One Missed Call etc - belonging to the J-Horror genre - is part of such a long and fine tradition. Some people might think these films are new and trendy, but they’re all a part of the legacy of ghost stories. In Kwaidan you will see many similarities with modern Japanese horror, from female ghosts with long black hair, hair that comes to life and attack people, lots of revenge-theme of course - and interestingly enough, In a Cup of Tea, reminded me a lot of Ringu, but instead of a TV and a videotape there’s a kettle of water or a cup of tea.

Kwaidan is one of the best movies I ever seen. It’s a stellar horror classic, maybe one of the best ghost movies ever made. As an anthology film it dares to be a bit abstract, more beautiful than maybe logical sometimes. But it always keeps its shit together, something you don’t experience every day. If there’s one single movie you should watch in your life or bring to a deserted island or what ever (maybe a bit scary with a movie like this on a place like that!), Kwaidan is THE film.

252: Signal of Life (Nobu Mizuta, 2008)

Since the disaster all over Asia in 2004, when a Tsunami hit and claimed countless victims, several water-based disaster films have been produced in that area of the world. India gave us Dasavatharam (and also Dam 999, but I haven’t seen it yet), Thailand the extremely bad Tsunami 2022, South Korea the not-bad-at-all Haenduae, China the okay-ish Super Typhoon and in 2008 it was Japan’s turn with 252: Signal of Life, which deals with a tsunami hitting Tokyo. Sure, there’s also Japan sinks from 2006, but it deals with so many different disasters - it’s their version of 2012 and also a new version of the book that was made into the Toho masterpiece The Submersion of Japan.

I’m an emotional man and that’s also what makes me ticks when it comes to big, expensive mainstream movies. If they don’t affect me emotionally I get bored. It’s somehow easier watching soulless low budget movies because they can offer so much else - fun actors, violence, creative filmmaking etc. But a movie with a 250 million dollar budget and delivering zero on the emotional scale is completely worthless all the way through. That’s why I like watching Japanese blockbusters. They’re big on everything, EVERYTHING, to the border of being boring and visually cold, but the emotions are always there.

In 252: Signal of Life a tsunami strikes Tokyo and we follow a bunch of survivors - including the hero, a former fireman who quit because of a mistake that killed a colleague, an inventor who invested the last of his money into a new form of water cleaner for a tropical fish tanks, a South Korean illegal immigrant, a young doctor who can’t work because of his father’s depression and of course deaf little girl. They’re all trapped deep down in a subway station, not in use, and now they need to survive everything from water, loss of blood… and of course themselves. At the same time we follow the heroic rescue team above, who against all odds stays in the middle of the storm to save lives!

This film doesn’t deliver anything new at all actually. It’s an orgy of cliches, reused since the sixties and earlier. I mean, what is a disaster film if not a monster film without monsters? There’s buildings crumbling, massive amount of water killing people and of course the human drama in-between. Oh, and hail. Big fucking hail. This is the second time I start watching it and the first time I actually watched it all the way through.The first time it didn’t get me stuck. but somehow - maybe I’m in a better mood today - it went easier. The human drama is excellent, if a bit predictable, and the special effects is quite fine. You buy the characters and you buy their problems, which often is quite rare in modern disaster films. Just the idea with the tropical fish tank cleaner is good and even if it’s not mentioned, you can almost guess that the inventor have a much bigger invention on his hands than he ever could imagine. But it’s never said out loud, which is cool.

The special effects are mostly digital but works fine. The panic scenes down in the subway is excellent and haunting, tragic and chaotic. It reminded me of the nightmares I’ve had being stuck deep down in the Estonia ferry, where there’s no chance you’ll survive. As always it’s the human tragedies who carries the disaster scenes, and as always it works. Even if I love the huge scenes of destruction in 2012 it’s so big and so impersonal it more becomes “fun” than tragic, and this movie avoids it without ruining the fun of seeing thousands of people getting killed as silly, mainstream entertainment.

252: Signal of Life is no masterpiece, but it works as a good disaster film. And that’s not bad at all!