Tokyo Videos of Horror (2012)

Original title: 闇動画 Yami Douga

POV horror is apparently not just the great Koji Shiraishi’s obsession, but at least until the end of the 2010’s, there was a proper little cottage industry in Japan churning out cheap POV horror series for the DVD/streaming (or however you consume this stuff in Japan) market. Yami Douga – like the 25(!) other films in the series - was directed – possibly written, depending on the sources – by Kazuto (or Kazu, again depending on the source) Kodama.

Structurally, the films in the series consist of a number of found footage segments where the meat of the small supernatural horror tales is intercut with interview footage of generally one of the surviving characters, or simply a character who acquired the footage we’re seeing. Ghosts and ultra cheap CGI ghoulies appear in the background and are pointed out, rewound to and checked out in slow motion.

Contentwise, the tiny tales stand with both feet in the realm of Japanese creepypasta and J-horror traditions. There’s the tale about the couple shooting fireworks at the beach who are led to the corpse of a dead kid by its ghost; the tale of a man lured into cursing himself through a ritual on a grave out in the boons and who is then accosted what may be rokurokubi, and so on and so forth. The whole affair has its creepy moments, where the low res footage – often made even lower res by exhaustive use of pixeling out of faces, signs and so on –, the simplicity of the tales, how much they are of a specific time and place, and the general awesomeness of Japanese ghost (and yokai, and so on) lore combine rather wonderfully. At least wonderfully enough to charm someone like me who really likes this sort of thing. From time to time, there’s also a grand carnivalesque hokiness on display, when the film counts down from ten so one can run away screaming/close one’s eyes/fast forward away to the next segment before it shows something mind-blowing and haunting (or so it says). William Castle would be so proud, particularly when said mind-blowing thing is a cheap and cheery CGI effect of dubious provenance.

The final tale is quite different in tone, however, and seems to aim more for a bit of Guinea Pig nastiness, though Yami Douga doesn’t even have enough of a budget to pull the gore off properly. Here, a pregnant woman is mildly – for this particular genre – abused by yakuza, drugged, and then made to commit suicide on camera. Eventually, the camera lingers on a tasteless but unconvincing foetus until the instant grudge karma gets the yakuza off-camera, while we continue looking at the rubber thing for half a minute or so, with yakuza screaming in the background and some grudge-y CGI vapours rocking around the foetus. All of which rubs badly against the good-natured creepiness of the other segments but does suggest that Kodama likes a bit of variety, which can only be a good thing in a series this long and simply structured. I also can’t help but admire the chutzpah needed to go for the final shot of the story.

Three Films Make A Post: A Disgrace to Criminals Everywhere.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998): After more than two decades, I’m still not sure if I exactly like Guy Ritchie’s debut movie, but then, I’ve been known to have problems with movies whose main characters are all arseholes and idiots, particularly when  the film they are in appears to loathe them (see also, Thor: Love & Thunder). What has endeared the film to me from the perspective of today is how insanely it is of its time: starting with the piss-coloured non-colour scheme, the showy editing, the post-Pulp Fiction ideas about coolness, and certainly not stopping with its very specific kind of digressive storytelling. As a time capsule, this is about as pure as it gets, and when the inevitable late 90s revival is coming around, this will be one of the aesthetic core texts.

Infinity Pool (2023): I was a great admirer of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, but this sometimes body horrific critique of the late-capitalistic mindset which is here exemplified in extreme hedonistic exploitative tourism doesn’t work too well for me. Often, it appears to be rather too in love with exactly the things it wants to criticize, but my main problem really is how little I found myself caring about anything and anyone in it going through their surrealisted-up version of rich people problems: Alexander Skarsgård’s doing his by now usual “weak man” shtick without ever finding a note from which to empathize with the guy, and Mia Goth’s ultra femme fatale is certainly riveting to watch but also empty of any nuance or humanity. The only actual identifiable human being, Cleopatra Coleman’s Em, is shelved relatively early, and from then on out, the movie is all about rich people being surrealistically horrible. The rather more interesting elements of the film concerning Philip K. Dick-style identity problems never really go anywhere interesting, so I found myself a bit bored by a very well shot film that uses the most obvious metaphorical systems in the most obvious manner.

Re/Member (2022): What would we be without time loop movies? Because you can time loop anything, Eiichiro Hasumi’s example of the form unites some typical YA business with ghosts and the fascination of Japanese pop culture with weird rules. Which does at least lead to a bit of originality, for there are very few movies about a group of teens bonding while time-looping through the experience of searching for the body parts of a dismembered little girl while being hunted by a monster.

The character work is very much like you’d expect in a Japanese teen movie, and Hasumi does tend to lay it on a little too thick in melodramatic sequences, but on the other hand, there’s also a sense of playfulness and fun on display when it comes to changing up the ways in which a group of teenagers might be ripped to pieces, farting around with game rules, or making third act twists entertaining.

Short Film Friday: Echoes in the Ice

In short: Carmen Comes Home (1951)

Original title: Karumen kokyô ni kaeru

When her theatre closes for renovation, artistic dancer – or as most people would call her, stripper – Carmen (Hideko Takamine) and a dancer friend of hers return to Carmen’s old home in the country for a visit. Being a bit of a flake, as well as a someone who is clearly herself so totally, it becomes as admirable as it can be ridiculous, our heroine causes all kinds of chaos. She also opens up old family wounds in her deeply conservative father – Carmen herself, bless her, is clearly over that sort of thing – and does cause some hormonal troubles in parts of the local population.

When it came out, this comedy by Keisuke Kinoshita was an immense hit. In part, this is certainly because it was the first Japanese colour feature film. It never looks and feels like the first, though, for Kinoshita uses colour as if he’d been doing it all his life, studied what it’s good for in filmmaking, and is now calmly applying what he learned with the calm assuredness of a man who has worked in colour for ages. So visually, this is a pretty astonishing movie that makes wonderful use of the contrasts between natural country colours – this was mostly shot on location – and the joyous, colourful, artificiality of Carmen’s wardrobe and makeup.

The humour hasn’t aged quite as well, of course, so there are some stretches in the film that were probably very funny indeed when this came out but now simply feel old-fashioned and aged; at other times, things still work quite well, particularly whenever the film has its fun with the contrasts between Carmen’s overblown, paper-thin personality and her less flashy surroundings.

Pleasantly, particularly with this kind of material, the film doesn’t have a judgmental bone in his body: it sees and makes fun of the folly of Carmen as well as the conservatism and boringness of her former peers, but it does so in a way that lacks mean-spiritedness. Kinoshita is very willing to point things out and laugh at them, but he’s not here to humiliate anyone. In fact, whenever the film turns more melodramatic, it shows respect for the emotions of both sides of any argument, with less interest in one side being right but in people finding a way to live with one another despite their differences. Which is so much the opposite of 2023, I’m nearly becoming nostalgic for a world that never actually was that way.

Layer Cake (2004)

A man (Daniel Craig) whose name we’ll never learn, let’s call him XXXX like the credits do, works as a new style drug distributor. He abhors guns, isn’t a fan of violence and aims for the professionalism of a modern business man. XXXX isn’t quite as stupid as he sounds, so he does employ ex-soldier Morty (George Harris) as his right hand man. Morty’s good for looking threatening so that things don’t turn violent, though he’d be perfectly capable if push came to shove. XXXX is not planning on staying in the business for very much longer – his retirement nest egg is basically complete. We never learn if the new school business drug lord retires to Spain like his elders would, alas.

Retirement is dangerous in the crime business, of course, and even more so in movies, so it’s not going to come as a surprise to the audience when our protagonist’s life turns rather more exciting and complicated than he likes it. At first, things seem harmless enough. The local mob boss Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) just wants to enable a little business deal between XXXX and one of Price’s old pals, a man going by the moniker of The Duke (Jamie Foreman); also, XXXX is supposed to look for the wayward daughter of another old associate of Jimmy. Both of these things appear easy enough on the outset, but quickly, XXXX finds himself embroiled in layers of intrigue, is hunted by a Serbian assassin, learns some hard truths about the people he trusts as well as his actual position in life and on the food chain. Why, things will get so bad, there’s a good chance the only place he’s going to retire to is an early grave.

Matthew Vaughn’s feature debut Layer Cake is a very fine film situated in the British arm of the post-Tarantino tradition. In its approach to gangsters and its idea of coolness it is certainly also influenced by the early films of Vaughn’s old cohort Guy Ritchie, but lacks the latter guy’s vulgarity. The dialogue – script by J.J. Connolly based on his own novel – is tight, clever, often funny and rather more ambiguous than it at first appears. Which also goes for an intensely layered and constructed plot that manages to be complicated but also tuned like clockwork.

One of Vaughn’s great achievements here is how easy and pop he makes Connolly’s complicated script with a dozen moving parts look, providing a film that by all rights should get bogged down in exposition with an quick and clever flow, and elegant forward momentum.

Apart from being a great, post-modern (at least in the sense that it knows and thinks about all the tropes of its genre and stands in dialogue with them) gangster movie, Layer Cake also works rather wonderfully as a deeply sarcastic critique of the kind of modern businessman XXXX aspires to be, someone who believes doing morally wrong things in a professional way somehow keeps the responsibility for his actions away from him, but whose veneer of civilisation is pure hypocrisy once push comes to shove and he loses his illusions about his own importance and rank on the food chain. At the same time Vaughn never makes the mistake of turning XXXX completely unlikable – for one, there’s Daniel Craig’s patented charisma (bottled by some aftershave company or other, or so I’ve heard) but there’s also the fact this guy is loyal to his friends to a fault, and for all his sins, wouldn’t stab anyone in the back who hasn’t stabbed him before. Which is important, for otherwise, why would the audience care about him?

In short: Paranormal Surveillance Camera (2012)

This is the first entry in a long series of apparently quite successful Japanese POV horror films. This one was – if you believe the IMDb credits, which is always risky – directed by Yuji Ichinose.

As its title suggests, Paranormal Surveillance Camera consists of various scenes supposedly taken from the many real surveillance cameras all over Tokyo, with a couple of “witness interviews” occasionally strewn in. As one can imagine, this aesthetic approach to found footage at its rawest does not lend itself to cinematic luxuries like plot, drama or characters, and none of these things do manifest magically.

Instead, the film is mostly set up as a kind of supernatural mini “Where’s Waldo”s, where we are shown a very quotidian scene from Tokyo, only for the - typical for Japanese POV horror of this style and probably the “real” documentaries it’s built on - combination of narrator (Suzuki Tomoharu) and captions to slowly reveal the creepiness hidden in backgrounds, mirrors, as well as sometimes the foreground, via suggestions where to look, slow motion and blurry blow-ups of details. For all its basicness, and the general lack of direct threat to anyone but one’s eyesight the ghosts appearing on screen present, there is a certain frisson to some of Paranormal Surveillance Camera’s episodes thanks to an effective sense of how to time the simple reveals. Mostly, this works in its cheap yet cheerful way because the small visual puzzle every single scene is feels well-constructed, presented with some thought to formal structure and how to time shocks, even if the shock is only the viewer’s realization of “oh! There’s the creepy thing this time!”.

Which is actually pretty cool once you think about it.

Music Monday: Lighting Up Edition

Chess Boxing Matrix (1989)

aka Chivalric Tornado

aka Labyrinth of Death

aka Vampire Strikes Back

Original title: 小俠龍捲風

Seven hundred years before the start of the main narrative, a character that appears to be called Sword God or Sword Master but is very clearly female (Ti Yu-Neung), traps one Evil king (who is indeed as not very nice as his name promises) in some sort of magical contraption that also connects him to a family of jiang shi. After a thousand years, the jiang shi will apparently be purified and allowed to go on to something better.

Because watching people squirm below movie laser shows for a thousand years would get a bit boring eventually, the jing shi and Evil king are freed three hundred years too early. Evil king, not surprisingly given his name, does start in on a new reign of terror, subjugating random weirdos with his laser shooting eyes. His first goal is to get ahold of the little boy of the jiang shi family, for the Sword God has deposited some sort of magical sword in the bad guy’s heart that only the little boy can melt or something.

A group of, mostly kid, heroes does come together to fight Evil king and his minions, while the jiang shi child says “pa-paaaaaaa” a lot.

This bit of Taiwanese martial arts/wuxia/what the hell madness may or may not be meant as a piece of children’s fantasy – the humour and the protagonists suggest as much – but one can’t help but worry about what any child would make of this series of fights, fights, laser shows, non-sequiturs and utter weirdness. Probably art.

For most of the time, this grown-up viewer had only the slightest idea of what was going on, who any of these people were, and what the hell they thought they were doing – a state of affairs certainly not helped by the sort of classic Hongkong and Taiwanese subtitles that seem to have been written by someone who does understand neither Mandarin nor English. Though, to be fair, I don’t think getting more detailed exposition would make this thing more explicable, seeing as how director Wang Chih-Cheng doesn’t like scenes of people talking for more than twenty seconds, and basically runs from one fight full of cheap and cheery visual effects of the good old drawn on lasers and other colourful explosions type to the next, with characters popping in and out of places and scenes seemingly at random. Most of the time, things are very weird indeed, so weird that stiff-armed jiang-shi kung fu and the running “gag” in which Mother Jiang-Shi gets sexually aroused during various fights hardly register on the strangeness scale. A lot of this comes so fast, so furious and with so little sense of control at you, it becomes hard to even describe much of that stuff without becoming reduced to making infantile noises.

So let’s just say that this movie contains a scene where a little boy jiang-shi plays torero (complete with a little red cape) against a gentlemen in a costume which at once suggests a ram and a train (what with smoke coming out of the ears and from the horns), only to get rudely interrupted by an evil tree person. If that doesn’t scream quality, I don’t know what does.

But seriously, while Chess Boxing Matrix makes not a lick of sense, is of dubious taste and has all the dramatic instincts of, well, a ram, it is a pretty incredible experience when a viewer is in the right mood; specifically if that mood is one where you only want to look at lots of backflips, Taiwanese people jumping and kicking non-stop for ninety minutes, and whatever weird flourish the filmmakers come up next to make one minute of non-stop fighting distinguishable from the next, all shot and edited with a violent hatred of anything ever standing still.

Three Films Make A Post: A Rian Johnson Whodunit.

RRR (2022): It’s a little wonder the kind of mainstream critics who’d usually spit on an Indian mainstream movies the same way as they do on a Marvel flick seem to have seen the light for S.S. Rajamouli’s latest. It’s probably the cartoonish (yet certainly not un-earned) anti-colonialism, whose treatment of Big, Serious Themes is just as enthusiastically maximalist as everything else in the movie, be it manly friendship or turning historical figures into the mythical equivalent of superheroes. The musical numbers (apart from the flag-waving post-movie sequence that really takes things too far in the nationalist direction for my tastes) are awesome (in all meanings of the word), as are the fights scenes, the melodrama, the CGI (realism can shut it),  and the oversized personalities. If this doesn’t grab you already simply by the virtue of being EVERYTHING at its loudest, but also most charming, then just look at how Rajamouli paces this thing, as if a three hour runtime weren’t a marathon but a damn sprint he – clearly as heroically made as his characters – can keep up for so long without even the slightest of efforts.

Glass Onion (2022): Full disclosure: I don’t actually like Knives Out, despite my huge admiration for everything else Rian Johnson has made. I found it unpleasantly smug in the way certain parts of the “progressive” side of US politics can look from over here (where their reactionary counterparts simply tend to look like fascist assholes), and wasn’t impressed by it never giving a character a second dimension if one was available. This one here, with the same basic politics, does everything right, grounding snarky politics in actual characterisation and much more complex relationships, which does tend to make one’s politics much more convincing. All the while, the film keeps the ease with which Johnson has always juggled plot, humour and a sharp visual eye. The cast is doing fantastic work as well. Hell, even Daniel Craig has toned down his “Southern” accent from rage-inducingly obnoxious to terrible (which is of course the traditional note the detective in a Christie-style traditional murder mystery has to hit).

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022): This tragical comedy about the end of friendship, boredom, depression, places and people that drag everyone in and around them down, as well as the one woman who gets the hell away by Martin McDonagh is the wonder everyone says it is. Funny and sad at the same moment, this shows what are foibles in most of us turn big and toxic in its characters, self-destructive and violent in ways that are grotesque when you think about them but also feel completely natural and logical.

In McDonagh’s usual style, there’s much space left for the actors –particularly of course Kerry Condon, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson – where lesser films aiming where McDonagh does might bury them under mawkish or too knowing dialogue.

Short Film Friday: Swumpwater

In short: Danger Stalks Near (1957)

Original title: Fuzen no tomoshibi

The not terribly well off Sato family has very publicly won a very pricey camera. They’re not planning on using it to take photos, but are hoping to sell it for quite a bit of money. After all, husband Kaneshige’s (Keiji Sada) wages as a shoe seller and Yuriko’s (Hideko Takamine) housewifing are not bringing much money in when the couple takes care of their son and Yuriko’s mother (Akiko Tamura) who is of course living with the Satos. Not out of love or duty, mind you, but because Yuriko and Kaneshige hope to inherit a neat sum of money from her.

There’s also some business about Yuriko throwing out a lodger (type: modern woman) and hoping to acquire a new one; Yuriko’s sisters coming for money and to give unwanted advice; and a whole horde of other people – boyfriends, prospective boyfriends, delivery people and craftsmen, running into and out of the house as if it were a train station.

All of which rather disturbs the plans of a trio of young hoodlums (one of them a very unwilling one) watching the house to find some time when it is not too full of people to rob it.

This comedy is not usually seen as one of the “big” films of its director Keisuke Kinoshita, but going in not expecting much, I found myself pleasantly surprised. The film is very easily – and obviously – readable as a critique of a way of life where every human interaction turns into a transaction as well as a bit of a send-up of the idea of perfect, harmonic and somewhat traditional family life. As such, it manages to avoid preachiness or the sort of whiny sentimentality that could come with this territory all too easily.

Instead, Danger Stalks Near (certainly this week’s nominee for film with the least fitting title) is a rather joyful affair. There’s a palpable love for heaving one farcical development on top of the other, Kinoshita timing each ever more improbable development with the directorial version of a winning grin, as well as a kind of loving snarkiness that doesn’t feel very 1957 at all.

There’s a flow to the film that reminds me of the best screwball comedies, the film dancing from scene to scene, embracing absurdities and taking the mores of its time not seriously in a very serious way. The actors seem to have quite a bit of fun as well. Particularly Takamine (one of the favoured actresses of many a director of this phase of Japanese studio filmmaking) projects so much enjoyment in what she’s doing, it is sometimes easy to forget how unpleasantly materialistic she and everyone around her actually are. This doesn’t damage the film’s point, but rather puts a human face on it, and leaves this a funny instead of a judgemental movie.

Yakuza Wolf: I Perform Murder (1972)

Original title: Ôkami yakuza: Koroshi wa ore ga yaru

A handful of men from the Yakuza group of Izumi (Koji Nanbara) are murdered in brutal and particularly ruthless fashion. Izumi suspects a rival gang of the killings, but in truth, it is his past coming to roost. A couple of years ago, Izumi’s gang wiped out the Himuro group, and Boss Himuro’s son Gosuke (Sonny Chiba) has now returned to take bloody vengeance on his father’s killer, even though he never wanted anything to do with the yakuza life before. Gosuke’s mood does not improve when he realizes that his enemies also raped his sister and then sold her into a life of drugs, slavery and prostitution.

So it comes as little surprise he’s willing to do absolutely anything to destroy the man responsible for his family’s ruin, be it heating up the cold gang war between Izumi and his enemies, kidnapping his enemy’s teenage daughter, or ramming a knife in the back of whomever he deems more useful that way.

This is pretty early in Sonny Chiba’s transformation from more prospective matinee idol and action comedy role actor to the ruthless yet typically awesome bastards he would go on to play for large parts of his career. His Gosuke comes out fully formed already, committing brutal and sometimes genuinely vile acts out of his lust for revenge and a clearly destructive sense of honour, and only getting away with the audience sympathy for it because he’s Sonny Chiba and because his enemies are even worse. Visually, Gosuke is styled very much as a Spaghetti Western hero, predominantly Django, and Chiba plays him as a brooding, glowering presence who doesn’t communicate in the expected angry, dramatic shouts and grunts but speaks quietly, softly and monotonously, like a guy who holds on to control of his manner tightly and lets his violence shout for itself. It’s an effective approach to the role that makes Gosuke feel even more frightening, suggesting a man who could stop his violence when he actually wanted to, but simply has given up trying -  if he ever wanted to.

Apart from its protagonist’s visual styling, Yakuza Wolf is full of other obvious parallels to Italian Westerns, apparently coming full circle with influences particularly Kurosawa had on cinema in Europe and the United States; and thanks to this visual style, it is pretty clear that its director Ryuichi Takamori does mean Italy and not Yojimbo in the scenes where Gosuke plays one Yakuza gang against the other; let’s not even mention a climax where our hero has two ruined hands and guns his enemies down thanks to a home-made gun track. Morally, this is of a piece with the more extreme of the Italian western, showing the kind of nihilism I find best interpreted as an expression of intense anger at the state of the world.

As a director, Takamori isn’t one of the best doing this kind of material in Japan. It’s not that he’s not technically accomplished – you simply didn’t make studio movies in Japan if you weren’t – he’s just not quite as artful or intense, as good at putting subtext in pictures than the best of his peers at the time were. He’s still quite able to direct a series of scenes of carnage highly effectively and does make much of Chiba’s physical performance; just from time to time, particularly in the scenes that have most to do with less action-heavy yakuza cinema, things decelerate just a little too much, with scenes that suddenly don’t seem quite in rhythm with the rest of what we see. In other moments, particularly in the scenes that bring the traditional exploitation values of really uncomfortable sex into play, Takamori becomes nearly brilliant. Particularly the phantasmagorical scene in which Gosuke finds his psychologically destroyed sister in a sex dungeon is incredible, like something out of a nightmare – even before she, clearly not recognizing him, offers him a breast and asks him to sleep with her.

Obviously, these particular aesthetic pleasures are not meant for everyone.

In short: Love Letters (1983)

Anna (Jamie Lee Curtis) is an up-and-coming young radio DJ for the arty crowd. When her mother dies, she discovers a cache of intense love letters from a man who certainly isn’t her a father (Matt Clark), what with their total lack of passive-aggressive sentimentality turning into drunken abuse. Anna can only assume her mother was having a decades-long affair (and who could blame her once you’ve met her husband?).

When Anna meets the considerably older (and uglier) photographer Oliver (James Keach), she feels intensely drawn to him. The feeling’s mutual as well, even though Oliver is married with kids, and they begin an intense affair. How much of this is Anna trying to repeat her mother’s love affair as her psyche’s way to help her grief, and how much proper attraction is anybody’s guess. Anna for her part becomes increasingly obsessed with this man who only ever is as much in love with her as his convenient and pleasant for him.

One of the strengths of Amy Holden Jones’s Love Letters, the film she directed right after Slumber Party Massacre (and which is still produced by Roger Corman, though you wouldn’t really think so watching it) and before she mostly scripted family friendly affairs, is that it never drifts into the misogynist sensationalism of something like Fatal Attraction, which it prefigures in many ways. The film always teeters on the edge of turning into a thriller and Anna into an interesting and complex thriller villain, but Holden Jones holds it back in admirably controlled ways, turning this into a wonderfully intense drama that goes deep into the head of its protagonist. Much of the film is using Anna’s specific troubles to explore the feeling of being a young woman, the concrete, seldom directly expressed yet all the more stifling expectations for and threats to a young woman’s inner life, as well as the shittiness of guys who really should know and be better.

Curtis graces the film with a particularly strong performance, convincing us of the intensity of Anna’s doubts, obsession and grief without going over the top yet also without underplaying.

Music Monday: Light Lighting Edition

In short: The Lake (2022)

A huge – or not quite so huge - reptilian (amphibian?) creature emerges from a lake to terrorize a small community of farmers. Might there just possibly a connection to the strange, large egg a child has found and is now carrying around with her?

Quickly, the villagers escape to the nearest town, but it too is soon attacked by one or several monsters. The authorities, our main farmers, a cop with a dead wife and an estranged teen daughter, and two Chinese scientists who pop in irregularly in a way that suggests the film is earning some Chinese production money with them, and the town’s population run around like chicken with their heads cut off. For reasons that will only become vaguely clear later on, at least one of the characters has an empathic connection to one of the monsters.

After a strong and moody beginning that suggests this to be a competently made, traditional monster movie which wants its kaiju cake but also its man-sized monster ice cream, Lee Thongkham’s The Lake breaks down completely. There’s no sense of progression to the plot, and the editing and writing is so unclear, you’re often not even sure which of the numerous characters is actually in a scene with whom, who is at the other end of town. Often, it is even unclear how big the monster carnage is actually supposed to be.

To make matters even less engaging, the film rips off whole scenes (even including camera positioning) from films like Jurassic Park and The Host, but without anchoring them in its own narrative (such as it is) at all. It ignores the weaknesses of its special effects and often appears to go out of its way to point their flaws out, making them look much worse than they actually need to be. If you told me there wasn’t a professional editor involved in this mess at all, I’d straight up believe you.

It’s a bit of a shame, too, for the film appears to have a decent enough budget; there just doesn’t seem to have been anybody involved in its production able to make good use of it.

Three Films Make A Post: On the other side of death, on the other side of regret, on the edge of mystery…

Children of the Mist aka They aka They Watch (1993): This Showtime TV movie by John Korty turns Rudyard Kipling’s delicate story “They” about the loss of a child and grief into melodramatic pap, and also features the least frightening child ghost I can remember seeing; it doesn’t help that it makes overdubbed owl noises.

Nobody involved really seems to want to bother putting effort in: Edithe Swensen’s script turns everything into a cliché, Korty mishandles melodrama and ghosts alike, and the actors mostly seemed to have checked out mentally. Vanessa Redgrave gives a non-performance quite below her usual level, and I’m not even sure what Patrick Bergin thinks he’s doing at all. He’s certainly not acting like anyone who has encountered a grieving human being before.

The Other Side of Hope aka Toivon tuolla puolen (2017): This Aki Kaurismäki movie about a Syrian refugee looking for his sister and a place to be, and a former salesman’s increasingly absurd attempts at running a restaurant does cover similar ground to Le Havre, made six years earlier. This one isn’t quite as optimistic about the kindness of the working classes anymore (shitty racist Nazi types have arrived in Kaurismäki’s world, though never unopposed), but it is also not as hopeless about it as it could be. There’s still solidarity, compassion and kindness to be found, as well as the small happinesses that keep us alive. Formally, this breaks up the heart-breaking story of the Syrian Khaled (Sherwan Haji) with Kaurismäki-style shenanigans, which never feels like the cop-out it could be, but like the statement of a guy who doesn’t really want to put a divide between tragedy and farce. Which sometimes means that the farce helps the character from the tragedy survive (see also, curiously enough, Ladyhawke).

The Scythian aka Skif (2018): Rustam Mosafir’s sort of historical adventure movie is quite the thing. Always willing to turn everything – non-plausibility, fights and men’s friendship, betrayal, and general craziness – up to eleven, this often feels like the grandchild of cheap Italian sword and sorcery movies in its wild abandon, just made with more money, and most probably talent. There’s little scepticism towards warrior cultures and manly men doing manly stuff on display, of course, so if you can’t or won’t cope with these things, this is just going to make you angry. On the other hand, the film also has an anti-imperialist streak a mile wide, clearly coming down on the Barbarism side on the Howard Barbarian versus Civilisation scale while it’s at it.

It’s also simply a great, riveting piece of adventure filmmaking full of clever and fun set pieces, craziness and awesome manly bullshit.

Short Film Friday: The Chair

In short: Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge (2007)

Original title: Negatibu happî chênsô ejji

One night, disenchanted teen Yosuke (Hayato Ichihara) stumbles upon the rather surprising event of a beautiful teen girl we’ll soon enough learn is called Eri (Megumi Seki) fighting a pretty obvious metaphor for grief, depression and loneliness in form of a large, hooded guy wielding a chainsaw who appears to drop down from the moon. Yosuke is instantly smitten and fascinated by Eri, and starts to accompany her on her nightly fights against Chainsaw Guy as her awkward, tea-fetching, sidekick.

Of course, they get closer to each other, what with them both being movie teens in a dangerous situation suffering from alienation and grief – Yosuke for a “courageous” buddy who got himself killed doing idiot teenage things, Eri for the whole of her family, though Yosuke will take ages to figure that one out.

When it comes to teen coming-of-age movies/romances with obvious central metaphors, you could do much worse than Takuji Kitamura’s Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge. In its tropes and ideas, it is a very standard post-2005 Japanese treatment of its material, somewhat lacking in originality or depth, and clearly built for a teen audience more than for an old fart like me.

While it is a little direct for me, and Yosuke’s idealization of his suicidal dead friend does get annoying rather quickly if you’ve have seen kids from your own childhood die exactly the kind of stupid death that guy did, there’s nothing wrong at all with the movie. Seki and Hayato are as cute as their audience needs them to be and happen to be perfectly capable actors, the script flows nicely, and Kitamura’s direction is generally competent, sometimes even a little stylish.

I think the story Negative Happy etc tells would have had more emotional impact told from Eri’s perspective rather than Yosuke’s – her story’s simply more interesting than his – but it’s still something I would probably have eaten up at the right age, and can still respect for what it is now.

Devil’s Temple (1969)

Original title: Oni no sumu yakata

Japan in the 12th Century (I believe). Thanks to twists of fate caused what I think are the violent upheavals between Heike and Genji, a former noble (Shintaro Katsu) has moved into a burned out temple in the mountains close to Kyoto. Initially, he had only dwelled there with his wife Kaede (Hideko Takamine), but some time ago, the former prostitute Aizen (Michiyo Aratama) wormed her way in. When most of the film takes place – there’s a somewhat confusing time jump in the first act we don’t need to reproduce here - she’s psychologically and sexually dominating the man who now goes by the name of Mumyo Taro, wallowing in every depravity and act of violence he commits. And since he is now a rather horrifying bandit, there’s quite a bit of that to go around.

Kaede still believes there’s something about her husband worth saving, and does a lot of quiet and not so quiet suffering in hopes of enabling his better self. The situation will come to a head when a priest (Kai Sato), carrying a golden buddha statuette, arrives and begins an attempt to save the souls of these three people caught in their own private hell on Earth.

Going by the description I had of Devil’s Temple, I assumed this would be one of Kenji Misumi’s always wonderful chanbara films with an added element of the supernatural. Even though there is a bit of sword play, this isn’t really a movie about swords or samurai morals, but rather an intense religious and psychological drama. Not being a Buddhist and from Germany too boot, I’m not exactly the ideal candidate for this sort of film, so it does say something about its strength that I found myself riveted by most everything that happened on screen.

Misumi’s filmic language is as intense and moody as it ever was here. A mix of complicated long shots and more intimate set-ups – there’s some incredible editing and use of close-ups, particularly in the climactic seduction of the priest by Aizen – creates a sense of tension as well as, curiously enough, evokes a feeling of archetypal clarity and precision. With this, its focussed presentation and its briefness (only 76 minutes runtime!), Devil’s Temple often feels like a folktale or religious parable brought to emotional life.

The acting is of a heightened and theatrical kind that here only strengthens the emotional and psychological intensity. Katsu is a massive, glowering physical presence like you’d rather more often see from Shintaro Katsu’s brother, the great samurai actor Tomisaburo Wakayama, while Takamine avoids all whininess in a character that would in lesser hands be nothing but whining, and Aratama projects a larger than life aspect of lust – for sex, for destruction, for domination – that feels frightening and inhuman as well as unpleasantly attractive.

Even though the film’s emphasis is on a Buddhist interpretation of what is going on with the characters, it also knows a thing about domination and the kind of sexual relation that feels perverse even to a viewer who doesn’t really believe in the perversity of sex at all. Misumi portrays the power relations between Aizen and Taro with immense brevity and precision, evoking depths, and leaving the audience to look into them.

Of course, seen in 2023, you could interpret the whole film as an expression of male fear of female power and female sexuality where only women like Kaede, who suffer and persevere through their suffering without ever actively asserting themselves, are seen as living like a proper woman should, and where Taro’s responsibility for his own deeds is all too easily forgiven. It wouldn’t be a wrong way of reading the film, exactly, but I do believe it would really be beside the points Devil’s Temple is making about the human heart, Buddhist concepts of Evil, and the devils in our minds.

In short: Jeruzalem (2015)

Rachel (Yael Grobglas) and Sarah (Danielle Jadelyn), two young Americans, are on a trip to Israel. Initially, they were planning on going to Tel Aviv, but a fresh acquaintance, globe-trotting hottie Kevin (Yon Tumarkin) convinces them to accompany him to Jerusalem instead. There’s some decent multicultural partying to be had, but apparently, the city also harbours one of the three earthly gates of hell (as you know, there’s one in Louisiana), and those are going to swing wide open, because it’s apocalypse time.

Turns out the beginning of a demonic possession apocalypse is not the best time for a vacation. At least, Rachel’s Google Glass films everything.

For yes, this is indeed a POV horror film, just one that exchanges cameras and the usual “why are you filming!?” for stupid hipster tech. From time to time even to good effect: the traditional stumbling around in the dark in the final act certainly feels more natural with camera glasses than with an actual camera, and the final, surprisingly cool, shot only works with this set-up at all.

In other regards, Doron and Yoav Paz’s (here working as The PAZ Brothers) Israeli horror film aims big for its low budget, going for the apocalyptic effect of Cloverfield. It’s not as good as its older sibling in spirit, but there’s a quality of scrappy enthusiasm surrounding this film even when it falls back on very typical zombie apocalypse tropes which makes up for many a minor flaw. It also makes good use of Jerusalem as its setting, using a handful of locations to create a sense of place that of course fits its story nicely. Characters and acting are nothing to write home about, yet they are also consistent and never drag the film down.

Jerusalem is helpful for the film to fall back on where many a backwoods-set POV horror piece begins dragging its feet: it is an uncommon setting for horror, and the directors/writers are doing their best to use this to their advantage.

Music Monday: Constellations Edition

Magnificent Warriors (1987)

aka Yes, Madam 3 (though there are other movies going by that title as well, because what Zombis are to Italy, the Yes, Madam films are to Hongkong)

Original title: 中華戰士

During the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Chinese secret agent/whip-wielding adventurer and pilot Ming (Michelle Yeoh) is sent to a town in Bhutan to make contact with one Secret Agent 001 (Derek Yee Tung-Sing) who has been stationed there running the local “town lord” (that’s what the subtitles call him) named Youda (Lowell Lo Koon-Ting). Youda is trying to stem the tide of Japanese activity there by the power of cringing and delays, also cringing delays. Up until a couple of days ago, this has worked out well enough but now the Japanese commander General Toga (Matsui Tetsuya) is putting on a bit of a reign of terror to soften up the population for the building of a poison gas factory. Ming’s job is it to evacuate 001 and Youda. Obviously, various complications ensue, just starting with the fact that our heroine’s aircraft lost all its fuel during an unlucky hit in an air battle just before she landed.

It takes a bit of time for Ming to actually make contact with Secret Agent 001, for a pigeon related incident means she believes a Wandering Conman (Richard Ng Yiu-Hon) to be him, at least for two or three scenes. The Conman, if he starts following the better nature he repeatedly seems to have, might come in handy as an additional partner, at least. 001 for his part doesn’t actually want to be evacuated but plans sabotaging the Japanese factory for good; the more pliable Youda only wants to bring his girlfriend, the particularly dubiously named Chin Chin (Lau Chin-Dai).

Of course, this is not going to be a movie about a group of people running away, but one about a group of very different people coming together (One China-style, because, well…) kicking the invaders’ ass. And getting a lot of people killed in the process, but that’s par for the patriotic course, whatever patria it is you’re sending people to their deaths for.

In its final third, David Chung Chi-Man’s Magnificent Warriors does lay its patriotism on a bit thick for my taste, though it has to be said that Imperial Japan’s as good an enemy as you get when you want to get patriotic without turning unpleasantly nationalistic, particularly from a Chinese perspective. Thematically, the patriotism is also well connected with some unexpected character growth, where cowardly as well as courageous Youda grows thanks to his patriotism, and the Conman connects it to his unexpected to himself growing wish of making the lives of people in general better. Which is more complex character work than you usually get or expect from these films. I certainly appreciated it.

At the very least, Chung doesn’t really let that patriotism get in the way of the typical maximalist joys of this phase of Hong Kong action cinema. There are quotes and little nods towards Hong Kong and Western cinema aplenty here, but every borrowed bit is twisted and turned in ways you only get from this particular part of cinema, at this specific time. So there’s some joyful hinting and nodding towards Indiana Jones in Michelle Yeoh’s character, but she’s wielding her whip a lot more artistically, keeping off a whole horde of men; while also kicking them in the face, of course. And as anyone going into a Michelle Yeoh movie from this phase of her career knows, there’s little more joyful than watching her kick guys in their faces.

Joyfulness is the watch word for Yeoh’s work this early in her movie career as a whole. While she’s sometimes still a little rough around the edges when she’s emoting melodramatically, she is such a joyful presence throughout, always looking as if she were born to kick faces, shoot machineguns (grinning gleefully), save orphans and fly planes. Like a woman doing exactly what she wants to do in a way nobody else could, and loving every second of it.

And even though Chung isn’t one of the great stylists of his era and place, his straightforward filmmaking style never gets in the way of letting his actors and stunt people do what they do best. He seems to interpret his job as a responsibility to not let a moment of insane stunt work – just look at the prologue, the dogfight, the climax or every damn minute of the film – or joyful abandon they deliver go to waste, and he fulfils this responsibility perfectly.

Three Films Make A Post: In the Arthouse, there are no taglines

Le Havre (2011): I’ve always had a fondness for the films of Finnish master of the absurd deadpan and delicate emotions often hidden behind a façade of the farcical Aki Kaurismäki, though I haven’t really followed him for some time. This one’s a pretty special film, positing the kind of individual solidarity between the white European working class and refugees that leads to solidarity and genuine kindness instead of burning refugee centres. From today, that’s a rather optimistic view of these things, but Kaurismäki makes it convincing by underplaying everything sentimental in a way that reaches genuine emotions exactly by not making a big thing out of them.

Good Morning aka Ohayo (1959): When people recommend Ozu movies for beginners to the man’s body of work, they do tend to go for the (quietly) emotional wringer of something like (the incredible) Tokyo Story rather than this comedy about a small neighbourhood, and the the sort of quotidian problems, wins and loses movies have their trouble making interesting for anyone but film critics. The film includes many of the director’s thematic preoccupations, especially his much favoured generational rifts, but treats them in a decidedly non-quietly-heart-breaking manner. It’s not that Good Morning lacks the emotional depth of Ozu’s more obvious movies, it is just lighter in its approach, and therefore in its emotional pressure on an audience. It also features rather more fart jokes than you’d probably expect, and is all the better for it.

Osaka Elegy aka Naniwa ereji (1936): I have seen rather fewer Mizoguchi movies than those by Ozu, apart from the obvious ones for a guy of my tastes (so Ugetsu and that hammer to the head made film, Sanjo the Bailiff). Watching an comparatively early film by the director like this drama with comedic elements about a telephone operator becoming the mistress of her lecherous boss to help her family out of various troubles only to become ostracized for it doesn’t quite bring up great revelations to me, though I do see the quality and individuality in Mizoguchi’s approach; his long shots and ability to build emotion in a style nearly completely eschewing close-ups is damn impressive. Just one thought (and by the rules, one thought is enough for a “Three Films Make A Post” entry into this blog): if this were an American movie made at about the same time, this would have become a screwball comedy, where the sexual elements of the plot wouldn’t have been quite as clear, but where our heroine would have gone to some kind of happily-ever-after.

Short Film Friday: The Quiet Season

In short: Knock at the Cabin (2023)

My relationship with the films of M. Nigh Shyamalan has been long, rough, and one-sided, resulting in quite a few annoyed write-ups by me. With most directors, I’d simply have given up on their films or shelved them for a later decade (once our AI overlords abolish work for anyone but robots), and spared my imaginary readers some suffering. Thing is, on a technical level, Shyamalan has a second great film in him, he’s just not interested in making it, apparently.

Instead, we get this incredibly offensive hymn to literal sacrifice, a film that masturbates on the altar Abraham has dragged Isaac onto, and doesn’t even leave in the biblical get out of jail free card, I was only kidding, buddy. For Shyamalan, apparently worse than the godhood of the Old Testament, insists on his sacrifice. Which results in a film that exults in fulfilling the random whims of an ill-defined godhood for no reason whatsoever, instead of saying no to what the film can’t even bring itself to call a monstrosity. Ideologically and morally, this is complete opposite of the Paul Tremblay novel it supposedly adapts, by the way, and while I’m not actually much of an admirer of the writer’s body of work, that has rather more to do with his concept and execution of ambiguity rather than his books getting hot and bothered at bending the knee to abuse and monstrosity (because they do the opposite).

Apart from its moral bankruptcy (and when do you find me complaining about a film’s morality?), and some bizarre ideas (the “four human qualities” are apparently malice, nurture, healing and guidance, whatever that’s supposed to mean), the film suffers from another problem as well: namely, while I approve of Shyamalan’s decision to for once eschew his beloved, idiot, plot twist in the end, thus we get a film where everything that happens in it is laid out right at its beginning, and is indeed happening as advertised, which really isn’t how a narrative is supposed to work, last I checked. Given this, the film feels drawn out and draggy, shambling to its enraging foregone conclusion with little dramatic tension, however dramatic the score by Herdís Stefánsdóttir swells.

That this thing wastes a great performance by Dave Bautista only adds further insult to injury.

In short: The Outwaters (2022)

I’m back from that rather unpleasant viral intermezzo. Normal service resumes here.

A quartet of young people travel to the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video. Since the film starts with screams from a 911 call, and the footage we are about to see is marked for internal police review, we know the trip is not going to work out too well for anyone involved.

Writer/director/lead actor/cinematographer/editor and so on Robbie Banfitch’s POV horror piece is certainly not going to be for everyone. The film’s second half is in turns too abstract, too weird and too lacking in any clear explanation not to rub at least half of the film’s viewers the wrong way; if this gets to you, on the other hand, it’s going to get to you deeply.

To nobody’s surprise, I find myself belonging to that latter half of the movie’s potential audience, and was thusly completely riveted once the film left its solid indie-naturalistic scenes of character building and turned into a mixture of freak-out and experimental filmmaking with a bit of the old gross-out included for good measure. I believe The Outwaters’ mix of shaky cam, dark scenes lit by only a tiny camera light that helps to obfuscate, obscure and suggest things the film’s budget certainly couldn’t afford, and sudden bursts of bright desert sunlight is about as close as you can get to the old Weird Fiction dream of portraying something (or some things) incomprehensible to human senses. As such, and if you can cope with the overload of strange, organic, noises (Banfitch is his own sound designer, as well, and he’s pretty brilliant at it), shaking frames, blood and things man was clearly not meant to know, this turns into an incredible, nightmarish trip where bodies, time and space dissolve into something you can barely understand. To Banfitch’s particular honour, all of this feels strange and trippy in the best way, but it also seems absolutely controlled, suggesting a director who really knows what he wants to do, decides to go for it in his own peculiar way and absolutely realizes the kind of film he is aiming for.

Given how close to each other The Outwaters and Skinamarink (we could of course also add We’re All Going to the World’s Fair as a somewhat different sibling here as well), another very Weird horror film using techniques more often seen in experimental filmmaking and creating a truly uncanny mood, have come out, I am hoping for a bit of new trend in indie horror that uses the potential of atypical filmmaking techniques to create a mood of the weird, the horrifying and the inexplicably freakish. If not, we’ve already gotten a handful of fantastic movies out of the possible trend, which is all one can ask for, really.