The Last Killer (1967): Slow, ponderous, but not as weighty as it would like to be Spaghetti Western about George Eastman making a crash-course as a gunfighter and professional killer to be able to avenge his murdered father. Boredom ensues, though I can't say the film is actively bad.
Sector 7 (2011): Generally, contemporary South Korean filmmakers seem to be much better at making big budget genre movies that aren't dumb as rocks than their US counterparts, so I did go into this monster on an oil rig movie with certain expectations to be entertained. Alas, Sector 7 is a proper catastrophe of a movie. It's a plodding mess, dumber than you may think possible, full of clichéd non-characters who do things too idiotic to even accept in a monster movie (it really is that bad), hideous "comic" "relief", actors working on valium and a monster that looks a lot like that from The Host but (of course) worse.
The whole affair has a SyFy monster movie vibe, with all the crappiness that entails, just with a higher budget.
The Gibbering Horror of Howard Ghormley (2005): Fortunately, this brilliantly creepy piece of Weird filmmaking (shot on Super 8, no less) that is available to watch on YouTube in two parts here and here, gives me the opportunity to end this on a positive note. Director Steve Daniels uses the rawness of Super 8, editing and staging that at times remind me of Eraserhead and Weimar expressionist films, and a pretty fantastic soundtrack and sound design to create a nightmarish mindscape I found utterly irresistible and properly conducive to feelings of actual dread.
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2 comments:
The only two recent Korean monster movies that I know of are The Host (which I enjoy) and Reptilian, which I possibly should rewatch but current memories have it stored in the "so bad it's pretty damned bad" category. I have been interested in some other source to a kaiju fix now that both Godzilla and Gamera franchises seem to be played out but outside of getting some old Ultraman series action, haven't had much luck.
Well, there doesn't actually seem to be much kaiju action going on in Asia right now. There's a Japanese TV show based on Daimajin - called Daimajin Kanon - that's getting fansubbed, and another one looking at giant monsters from below named MM9 (unfortunately only available with very auto-translated looking subtitles), but apart from that (and outliers like Death Kappa), Japan has gone quite silent about kaiju, as far as I can see.
Some of the old Taiwanese attempts at GM's that are coming up through the grey market are quite promising, though. I can recommend "War God".
And well, if you're looking for Asian monster fare of the tokusatsu type, there's always the two Garo shows - if you can cope with J-Drama type acting.
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