Horrors of Malformed Men

1969 malformed men movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A guy wakes up in an insane asylum with no idea who he is or how he got there. Clues surface, including a beautiful folk song that he links to an island. He assumes the identity of a dead man and sneaks his way on the island. And what's on the island? [Spoiler Alert!] Malformed men! Oh, snap!

Artistic trash, surface B-grade horror but with arthouse sensibilities that makes it the type of thing you should watch in your basement while stroking either your goatee or your girlfriend's goatee. It's sort of a Dr. Moreau as David Lynch would see it if he watched it through goggles he ordered from a Japanese pornographic comic book. It's also got this surreal noir flavor, a bizarre nightmare mystery that is likely only completely unpredictable because you won't be able to keep the characters straight and be confused anyway. All kinds of psycho-psychological stuff going on here; the characters who survive the experience will need years of counseling. I wonder if any of this malformed man business has to do with the bomb droppings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When this movie eventually gets to the island where the deformity is on full display, things get really interesting. Probably because that's where the mad scientist character played by Tatsumi Hijikata boogies onto the scene with moves that would anticipate the most demented chunks of the disco era. You get the impression that his fingernails could kill you. Haunting and perversely poetic, it's horror that doesn't necessarily scare you as much as it troubles you. Not for everybody--a lot of people would probably just want to wake up from this nightmare by popping it out of the dvd player. I thought it was a treat of grotesque visuals though and enjoyed it despite a clunky story and characters I couldn't keep track of.

Cory's Birthday Movie Celebration: Godzilla vs. Mothra

1964 monster movie

Rating: 13/20 (Dylan: 2/20)

Plot: A big storm washes a giant multi-colored egg ashore. A greedy land developer purchases said egg and attempts to exploit it for profit. Creepy miniature twins come from an island to retrieve the egg which they tell everybody a hundred times is really important to the people of the island. The greedy guy refuses and ends up waking up Godzilla from his hibernation. He goes on his typical destructive rampage, and Tokyo has to depend on a giant moth and the contents of the egg to save them from making all the buildings fall down. Spoiler: Silly string or caterpillar ejaculate saves the day!

A warning from the Japanese against being greedy. Or a warning about nuclear weapons. Or maybe it's a warning about being greedy with nuclear weapons. At any rate, once you get to the part where you see what nuclear testing did to that island with that lame giant turtle puppet and the red people, you'll be convinced to get rid of your nuclear weapons immediately. This seems to be an especially colorful and weird entry in the Godzilla canon, and it left me with some questions. First, why dub in broken English? "Look out there! It's gigantic monster egg!" It makes all the dialogue ridiculous which, I'lll admit, is actually part of the fun. Second, why can Godzilla knock down giant concrete buildings with one or two paw swipes while he can barely do any damage at all to a greenhouse or an egg? Finally, where did the Japanese military get so many giant nets? I liked that, by the way--Plan A: Electrocute Godzilla; Plan B: Throw giant nets on Godzilla and then try to electrocute him. I like those creepy singing twins, by the way. With their first appearance, some characters hear their voices speaking in unison and decide that they're spies. What? Spies? They'd have to be like the loudest spies ever, wouldn't they? I also liked Godzilla's first appearance in this--undulating ground and a phallic tail thirty-two minutes into the movie. You also get a Japanese guy sporting a Hitler stache. But the quality of these Godzilla movies is probably based on the scenes of monster wrastlin' and architectural destruction. The big battle (not to be confused with the final battle) is a whole lot of weird close-ups and jittery camera work. Mothra perhaps isn't the most formidable foe for Godzilla. He's too fuzzy, and flapping-hard and expelling chalk dust didn't do much for me. Dig the close-up of Godzilla's pissed face when he first spots Mothra flying toward him though. The actual final battle is all perverse caterpillar flailing and attacks with silly string. Mothra was kicking Godzilla's ass for most of that first big fight but couldn't finish him off. And then he's done in by silly string? Dylan liked the music in this enough to give it a 2/20. The song that played during the giant net drop sounded really familiar to me.

Ringu

1998 Japanese horror movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Japanese teenagers trying to rent Jigoku from their local video store are accidentally given a copy of Japanese remake of Jingle All the Way with Japan's versions of Sinbad and Arnold Swarzeneggar. They quickly learn their mistake but feel drawn to the video and watch the entire movie. One of them had already seen the American original Jingle All the Way and kept pompously talking about how the Japanese remake isn't nearly as good. The phone rings, and a week later, they all die.

I was really disappointed to discover that this movie doesn't have a single Hobbit in it.

This doesn't have the glitz and glam of the remake with Naomi Watts. I actually think that works to make the story eerier. The menacing soundtrack and scratchy sound effects add to the experience. Ringu (and The Ring) has one of those movie moments that will forever be famous; the problem is that you can't watch it for the first time twice. It doesn't take away from the power of the scene or anything, but it's a bit watered down by appearing in two different versions of the story and being spoofed in one of those Scary Movies. It's been a while since I saw the remake, a movie I also liked, but this one seems quieter, more reflective, relying more on characterization and setting a realistic sinister mood than on traditional movie scare tactics. I think I prefer the video in the Hollywood remake, but the one in the Japanese version is sufficiently creepy. And watching either one of them over and over for an hour and a half would be better than watching Jingle All the Way once. But seriously. No Hobbits? That's a little misleading.

Oprah Movie Club Selection for May: House (Hausu)

1977 Japanese coming-of-age story

Rating: 16/20 (Mark: 16/20)

Plot: Gorgeous isn't too happy about her father remarrying following the death of her mother. She writes a letter to her mom's sister and invites herself and some friends over to her house (the titular house) for the summer. On the way [Spoiler Alert!] they purchase a watermelon. Soon after their arrival, one of the girls disappears. More and more bizarre and possibly supernatural things start happening to the girls. A suspicious kitty lingers.

Some Hausu trivia: The Japanese studio Toho asked director Nobuhiko Obayashi to make a film like Jaws. As George W. Bush would say--"Mission accomplished!"

The second half of this film is likely exactly what Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel had in mind when they invented movies way back in 1929. It starts off like an after-school special though, albeit an artsy-fartsy after-school special directed by a guy who really wants to be an Artist with a capital A and isn't shy about using every stylistic trick in his bulging back of tricks. Before the manic free-for-all Evil Dead-like horror/comedy that everybody who watches this movie will remember (the part with homophagous pianos, demented kitties, killer chandeliers, disembodied heads, dancing skeletons, mouthy eye sockets, menstruation symbolism, inexplicable bananas, aunts retreating into refrigerators, etc.), you get a gaggingly-colored "dull" melodramatic coming-of-age story, but even with that, there's a sense of foreboding and enough wackiness that you know, even if you weren't warned beforehand, that somebody would be eaten by a piano later in the movie. The dvd special features told us that Obayashi started with commercials, and with Hausu, it seems like he wanted to regurgitate every single stylistic trick he'd learned, presumably because that's what American Steven Spielberg does. It reminds me of when I took Vernon to Palestine, Illinois, for their Labor Day weekend rodeo events and we decided to raid the cabinets and refrigerator and dump every ingredient we could find into a cup so that we could dare each other to drink it, probably because that's what we imagined our hero Steven Spielberg did during his spare time. We drank it, and it was disgusting. A majority of people partaking in Hausu might also think it's disgusting, mostly because the images, although the aforementioned tricks used to create those images are familiar, aren't anything the typical viewer is used to. This is weird even by Japanese standards, and you never have any idea what to expect next. I mean both of those as compliments, by the way.

I'm still wrapping my head around what it all means. You've got some pretty obvious symbolism throughout (ripe watermelons, blood, bananas [I guess?]), and the horror, even though it's too comically over-the-top to actually be horrifying, seems to represent the horrors in a young girl's life as she has to deal with changes. My theory: The girls (intellectual Prof, creative Melody, athletic Kung-Fu, hedonistic Mac, sweet Sweet, imaginative Fantasy, and pretty Gorgeous herself) are all chunks of the same young girl, a young girl who discards of various aspects of her personality as she blossoms into womanhood. So what do you think, Oprah Movie Clubbers?

My prediction, by the way: This will be a bit more devisive than Do the Right Thing.

Pistol Opera

2001 Suzuki movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Pretty much the same as Suzuki's Branded to Kill except with a female protagonist and a lot more color. "Stray Cat" is ranked third in the hierarchy of assassins and needs to kill "Hundred Eyes" in order to reach the top. There might be a pay raise involved.

This one just didn't sit right. It's a very colorful movie and I'm a sucker for colorful movies, but the colors in this felt more like plastic supermarket colors to me. The characters were just kind of there, mingling with all those colors as they tried to shoot each other, and I just didn't have any interest in anything they were doing. What they were doing actually made very little sense, and although that's just fine (maybe even the norm for a Seijun Sukuki flick) if the visual and the style are cool enough to make it all worthwhile even as complete nonsense, this one didn't quite offer enough. The final ten minute climactic fight scene (predictably against the exact person I figured would be involved) is visually stunning, indeed a sort of opera sans songs. There's a poetry to the surreal backgrounds, stagy color usage, and character movements, and I'm glad I stuck around to see it finish up. But really, the trailer for this, one that I remember as making Pistol Opera seem like it would be a solid ninety minutes that looked like that final ten minutes, is the only thing you need to see. You'll understand the plot just as much, and you'll still have time to watch a better movie, like Branded to Kill or Tokyo Drifter.

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare

1968 Japanese monster movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A vampirish demonoid is awakened from the dead and begins biting people on the neck, taking over their bodies, and denounce Buddha. Frog Man doesn't like it much and hops off to find his fellow monsters including Jabba, TV-Belly Man, Two-Faced Woman, Potato Man, Neck Girl, and Fat Yoda. They investigate and see about expelling the rubber man from the premises.

Well, my favorite monster didn't even make the poster. When I first saw him, I thought, "Hmm. That looks like an umbrella with an absurdly long tongue." Then another character called it an "umbrella monster" and I peed myself and had what can only be described as a religious experience. It's goofy stuff, perhaps even goofy by Japanese standards, but it's shot pretty well, contains an adequate amount of cool atmospheric settings, and does well at creating this weird mystical world. Maybe I wished it didn't have the comic overtones or wasn't so much for children, but this is quickly paced enough and so stuffed with goofy rubber monsters that I can forgive it. The snake-necked woman effects were fun, and I've already mentioned my favorite monster (the umbrella monster). But this isn't about individual monsters. This is about filling the entire screen with goofy monsters and pretending it's perfectly normal. The bad guy could be a little more engaging. I liked how the producers didn't seem to think biting people and stealing their identities didn't seem evil enough and decided to have him say "You suck, Buddha!" to make him the epitome of maleficence. Fun movie, and I'm thrilled that there are two more Yokai Monsters movies out there for me.

Ichi the Killer

2001 cartoon yakuza movie

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Ultra-violent and sadistic killer Kakihara hunts for his missing boss Anjo and the three million dollars that must have gone with him. Along the way, he tortures various people in various ways before running into the titular killer. Showdown! Get me the aspirin!

Every time I see a Takashi Miike movie that I don't really like very much, I feel a little bummed. In fact, most of the time I spent with this sickeningly flashy and nauseatingly violent movie was spent feeling bummed. The characters should be more interesting, the gross violence should have some kind of point, and the movie shouldn't have given me such a headache. It's loud and modern stuff, and instead of getting an actual story with a multi-layered conflict between Ichi and Kakihara, you get excursion after excursion. There's guys hanging by the skin from hooks, hot grease dumped on naked backs, and nipples sliced off. At one point, and in a space of about a minute and a half, you get to see a guy cut in half vertically, blood spewing comically from a staggering woman's neck, and a guy pierce his own face with a metal rod thing. The Japanese love that kind of thing, I've heard. I wish it all added up to something, but Ichi the Killer just felt like a completely empty and very long two hours. [Insert joke about how this movie made me feel like Kakihara was torturing me here.]

I did learn a little something though--not only do the Japanese love watching movies with nipple slicing, they also love Kentucky Fried Chicken. Despite Miike's attempts to shock the puke out of me, the appearance of a grinning Colonel Sanders was the sight that shocked me the most.

Departures

2008 death movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: After Daigo's orchestra is disbanded, he and his wife move to his old hometown where he takes a job with a travel agency. It's not a normal travel agency though because the destination is the afterlife and his clients are dead. He learns the trade from the boss and tries to cope with life's changes. When his wife finds out exactly what his new career involves, she's pissed. Oh, snap!

So I kept thinking about how much I liked the performance of Tsutomu Yamazaki, the older gentleman who played Daigo's boss. He seemed familiar, and since I've seen my share of Japanese movies, I figured I'd likely seen him in something before. Turns out he played the truck driver in Tampopo, one of the first movies I recommended to reader Cory who recommended this to me. In a lot of ways, this reminds me of Tampopo (also known as Dandelion apparently); it's very Japanese, delicate to the point here it almost seems breakable and alternating between very humorous moments and some poignant scenes that make you cry. I enjoyed watching the rituals, and both actors (Yamazaki and Masahiro Motoki as the main character) do a good job with the minute details involved with preparing the dead bodies for burial. Watching Daigo's growth in this is a beautiful experience. He makes some startling decisions at times in this movie, and it's neat how as he gets more and more involved with death, he develops a better understanding and appreciation for life. It all builds to a revealing and touching climax that I thought manipulated very effectively. This is very foreign film, Foreign with a capital F, and the pacing was difficult for me, a fan of Ghostrider. I can't imagine many American filmmakers who would show this many scenes of a guy playing the cello outside. Departures handles the idea of mortality and the emotions involved with the death of loved ones as well as any movie I've ever seen. The sheer amount of death in this movie, a body count rivalling the Kill Bills, should make this the most depressing movie ever, yet it manages to be really uplifting. Lovely stuff.

OK, that comparison to Kill Bill is a huge exaggeration. This barely has any kung-fu at all although there is a pretty bitchin' scene where the couple battles a killer octopus.

King Kong Escapes

1967 King Kong movie

Rating: 7/20

Plot: Some people with their own submarine venture to Kong Island for reasons that I can't remember, and discover that the King himself is alive and kicking. And beating his chest. Naturally, he falls in love with the only female on the submarine. Meanwhile, a guy who you know has to be evil because he's got a cape builds a King Kong robot because he wants to extract something precious from the depths of the earth. When that doesn't work, he decides to kongnap the titular hero and use him.

This is quite the ridiculous slab of Japanese funk, but I'd much rather watch this movie than either the 1976 King Kong or the Peter Jackson remake. It's worth the price of admission (free if you shove it down the front of your pants and run out of the store like I did) for the shots used to show that Kong is enamored by the girl. He wiggles, rolls his eyes, and quite frankly, looks like he's masturbating. Which begs the question--is there a movie that features King Kong jism? Is there a movie called King Kong Jism? What about a (probably pornographic) movie called King Dong? What about a band called King Kong Jism? This movie's got a little something for everybody with the exception of bodies looking for the aforementioned jism. Hey, there's another great band name--Aforementioned Jism. You get some wonderful dubbing. And by wonderful, I mean absolutely horrible. A lot of the characters sound a little like John Wayne. You get some rikongilous fight scenes with guys in goofy suits, including a T-Rex thing that does this goofy drop-kick thing. And that King Kong robot? Hell, yeah! You get some terrific dialogue. "Don't sink the ship" and the poetic "He's an oriental skeleton, a devil with eyes like a gutter rat" spoken about the bad guy whose name just happens to be Doctor Who. You get plenty of irritating sound effects if you're in to that sort of thing, and a whole bunch of shots meant to show perspective, shots designed to prove that we're not just looking at toys in a bathtub but that somehow make things worse. It's all pretty stupid, but at least it's never dull.

I just looked it up. There is a porno parody called King Dong. There's also a Chinese restaurant called King Dong. And a variety of other websites. There isn't a movie called King Kong Jism though.

Warning from Space

1956 Japanese B-movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Starfish aliens from the planet Pyra travel to our planet to warn us of impending doom in the form of a runaway planet on a collision course with ours. But they're giant starfish, so nobody sticks around long enough to hear the warning. The aliens have to figure out another way to get the message across before it's too late.

I pretty much declared this to be the greatest movie ever made after the early appearance of the starfish aliens which are a little cheaper looking than the cover above might indicate. I really enjoyed the no-budget affects in this one. There's a trippy transformation from starfish to Japanese pop singer, the ominously approaching scorching fuzz planet, and streaking spaceships. There are also some good visuals when this turns into a near-disaster film, Planet R's proximity to ours causing intense heat and flooding. An evacuation of Tokyo scene was also really well done. This is an early color film, the first color Japanese sci-fi flick actually, and the colors in Warning from Space are sort of sickly or primitive. But like black and white science fiction from the time, the weird color actually gives this a little flavor. The story, admittedly lifted from at least two sources, is interesting although there are some moments that are definitely slower than others. Solid funk from the Japanese!

Wool 100%

2006 Japanese weirdness

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Two sisters live in a cluttered house. They don't do much other than go on daily treks to dig through people's trash in order to add to the clutter. One day, they bring home a musical doll and several balls of red yarn. That night, a girl appears and begins to disrupt their lives, using the yarn to make an oversized sweater before screaming, unraveling, and beginning again. The past starts to bleed into the present.

More evidence that the Japanese are nutty. This is a movie with a different tone, a pace that would likely frustrate Westerners, and a surprising bit of mindblowing visual flair in the middle. The latter, a startling animated sequence, is too good for words and such a contrast to the subdued tone of everything that sets it up. It's brilliant. Minutes later, the audience is treated to a kind of low budget puppet show, tiny hands manipulating wooden dolls in a doll house. There's a wonderful simplicity to the whole thing. I do think this movie has some problems when it attempts to get a narrative going. But the characters are intriguing. The setting, before they de-clutter anyway, is one of those that gives your eyes a reason to wander over every inch of the screen. And the quirkiness is refreshingly original. This is not for many, but a handful of freak magnets will find this rewarding.

Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster

1964 monster mayhem!

Rating: 15/20

Plot: All kinds of stuff going on here. There's an assassination plot involving the princess from some anonymous country, a princess who, following her leap from a plane, decides that she's a Martian. You've got a giant, red-glowing, sometimes-magnetic space rock. There's some minuscule fairy twins who speak in unison and are BFF's with a phallic giant moth creature. Rodan and Godzilla reemerge and have trouble getting along. And a new threat to earth--a no-armed, three-headed, flying thing with terrible breath--needs to be stopped. Man, do the Japanese know how to bring it or do the Japanese know how to bring it?

What badass monster-on-monster-on-monster-on-monster action this one has! It took a bit of time to get to the monster fracases, but luckily, all the stuff involving the human characters was interesting enough to sustain. The other Godzilla movies I've watched had me really missing the guys in suits throwing rocks at each other and pushing each other around, but I actually enjoyed the parts of the plot involving the human characters. I really liked the main bad guy, a guy so bad that he never removes his shades. The bad guys, by the way, might be the worst "killers" (that's what they're called repeatedly) in movie history. I don't believe they succeed in coming close to killing anybody in this, do they? I'm not even sure they could hit a wall with a bullet if a wall happened to be their target. The princess is cute while the fairies (too little for me to use my "little person" tag) and the peripheral characters, mostly because of the terrific dubbing, cracked me up. I wish I had a pair of miniature fairies to keep me company actually. But the monsters are the stars of the show here, and in this one, you get four of them--Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and the title villain. I'm still most impressed with the special effects that make Ghidrah work (still not sure how that happens actually), but it's a lot of fun watching Mothra wiggle around, Rodan pecking at Godzilla's head, and Godzilla getting angry and throwing a hissy-fit. The fight scenes were thrilling and hilarious. There's a wonderful scene where Godzilla and Rodan are playing volleyball with a rock, one of those scenes that starts stupid, goes on for far too long, keeps going long after any human being would think it could possible go on for, and finally becomes almost a religious experience, a work of dadaist art. Fist pumps may have been involved. I also really liked the score. One question though: How could the end of this movie actually have been the end of the movie? Ghidrah, a threat to destroy earth, flies away with his tail between his legs because he's got Mothra web all over his face? That really does him in? Seems like he could go wash that off and be back five minutes later to continue the fight.

Cory recommended this bad boy.

Ponyo

2008 fairy tale

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: 14/20; Dylan: 5/20; Emma: 12/20; Abbey: 15/20)

Plot: An animated version of the trippiest episode of The Golden Girls. Dorothy, Blanche, Sophia, and Rose are caught shoplifting make-up from a Walgreens and spend the night in prison. They meet a drug dealer named Ponyo behind bars, and once they're all back on the outside, the girls after paying a small fine and promising to never do it again and Ponyo on a technicality, the girls score some hallucinogens which they ingest by a dumpster. Ponyo says, "Enjoy the dope, ya old bags," before riding off on a scooter. Dorothy, Blanche, Sophia, and Rose begin to hallucinate. Blanche mistakes Rose for a scorpion and stabs her seventy-four times, later claiming that it was in self-defense. Dorothy walks into the sea, mistaking herself for a mermaid, and, because she's not really a mermaid, drowns. Sophia flees, eventually winding up in Tokyo. Ponyo is never heard from again.

I just don't get the logic of Miyazaki's worlds. The world these characters inhabit doesn't obey any of the laws that hold the real world together, and the narrative progression doesn't always make complete sense. Plot holes? More like plot canyons. You'll walk away from Ponyo with something that almost looks like a completed puzzle, but then you'll check your pockets and find fifteen (maybe sixteen) more pieces that you didn't realize you had. And how did the puzzle pieces get in your pocket anyway? You didn't put them there. It must have been an evil wizard, you figure, and then you laugh at yourself because there's no such thing as evil wizards. I don't try to completely understand any of these Ghibli studio movies, at least the first time I watch them. I just let the evil wizards in through the crevices and permit them to tickle me. As with other Miyazaki cartoons, there are some environmental themes, lovely animation, and surreal touches. And like the others, it seems to be told from the perspective of a child, almost to the point where you feel like you're missing things as an adult or even peeking in on a world you're not necessarily supposed to peek in on. The settings are beautiful, especially the unnatural underwater scenes filled with creatures (and colors) that don't really exist. I also liked most of the characters although I was never sure what was going on with Ponyo's father or the grumpy old woman. And I really like the anthropomorphizing of the water during the tsunami scene. I have to go now because an evil wizard is going to try to hide my car keys.

Tokyo Zombie

2005 zombie comedy

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Two knuckleheads who spend their work hours practicing jujitsu instead of actually working accidentally kill their boss and bury his body on Black Fuji, a giant mountain of trash and other buried murder victims. I'm not sure why exactly, but the dead on the trash mountain start coming to life and biting people. The two knuckleheads try their best to survive the zombie epidemic.

OK, Tokyo Zombie. You got me! I told myself a few weeks ago that I was done with zombie comedy movies, but you told me, "Hey now, Shane. Give me a chance. I'm from Japan." I said, "I don't know, Tokyo Zombie. I think the world just has too many zombie comedies, and I've got better things to watch." But Tokyo Zombie said, "Japan, Shane. Japan! You like Japan. I'm quirky. My comedy's dark. I'm hilarious!" I said, "Oh, I just don't know." Tokyo Zombie persisted, and I finally gave it a chance. Fooled! Other than getting to see the Japanese Rick Moranis and a twenty minute scene involving a guy ripping the head off a Howdy Doody toy, there was nothing to see here. Stylistically, it reminded me a little of Shaolin Soccer without all the cartoony special effects. The humor was dumb, lowbrow, and, worst of all, predictable. Tokyo Zombie and I won't be speaking to each other any more.