Wife to be Sacrificed

1974 Japanese drama

Rating: 9/20

Plot: An ex-husband put behind bars by his wife escapes, kidnaps his wife, and gets his revenge.

It's unlikely that Masaru Konuma made any pleasant movies. This wasn't pleasant or entertaining although I imagine the target audience might get a kick out of some scenes and the creative use of lit candles. Things start cruelly and maintain it throughout, and that's pretty much all you get--just meanness. If there was any drama at all to the story, it might work, but this seems less like an attempt to tell a good story and more of an excuse to bust the kinkometer. There's very little style to transform this from smut to art. I did like how it was almost entirely sans music until for a pooping scene. That made me laugh. This was not a good movie, and you shouldn't even think about watching it, you pervert.

The Karate Kid, Part II

1986 sequel

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Following the events of the first movie, Daniel and Mr. Miyagi travel to Okinawa to see the latter's dying father. While there, the old guy reunites with an old flame and a guy who wants to kill him. Then, some guy wants to kill Daniel!

I read a novelization of this before I saw the movie and thought, "Oh, man! Daniel LaRusso in a fight to the death? Miyagi schooling the Cobra Kai guy, the 'Drum Technique'! This is going to be rad!" Because that's how I talked when I was twelve. I said things like "rad," short for "radical" which is short for "Hey, girls! You should probably just avoid me." Then, I saw the movie and was pretty disappointed by the whole thing. My favorite part probably was at the beginning where Miyagi is dodging punches and making a fool out of the guy. This was the first time I've seen this since then, and it's really not a terrible sequel, definitely one that could have been a lot worse. I'm glad they tried something completely new. Putting the characters in Okinawa gives them new context, and I really did like how both Daniel and Miyagi were developed by the experiences. I like how Miyagi is given a little more context. The stuff from the first movie where Daniel snoops around while drunk Miyagi snoozes was a start, but this gives the character a lot more background, kind of like the Star Wars prequels did for Yoda. Or like the opposite of that. I liked Daniel's new love interest who a twelve-year-old Shane would have chosen over Elizabeth Shue if either of them would have been the type of gal who would be attracted to a scrawny doofus who went around calling things radical. Most disappointing for me was that the Drum Technique ended up so stupid. I mean, looking back realistically, I guess the Wax On/Wax Off thing is also kind of lame, but it at least seems like something that might work. The Drum Technique looks like it would be predictable and therefore easy to defeat. I bet even Will Smith's daughter would have no trouble beating up a forty-three-year-old Ralph Macchio--his age when this movie was made, I believe--when going up against the Drum Technique. Surely that ripped guy--Yuji Okumoto--could take him out. Okumoto's character sure was a nasty guy, but what a body! There's a scene where he took off his shirt, and I very nearly forgot all about Elizabeth Shue and became a member of the Boy Scouts of America right then and there. Danny Kamekona played Sato who is supposed to be just as nasty but who is hard not to laugh at because he sounds like a freakin' Muppet. How did the other actors keep a straight face whenever that guy talked? I didn't watch any outtakes or a blooper reel or anything, but I imagine there was a lot of this:

Kamekona, as Sato: Miyagi, I wait long time for this. No tricks tonight, or tomorrow, everything gone. Their homes. Their church. Everything! Gone!
Morita and several extras: [bursts of laughter]
Kamekona, breaking character: Come on, guys. We've been trying to shoot this scene for over four hours.

I also thought the tsunami or whatever kind of storm happened in the movie was a little too random, the sort of thing that could only happen in a movie. Later, I learned that Okinawa has a tsunami every other day on average. Also disturbing: No reprise of the Joe Esposito song, "You're the Best Around," a song that almost always motivates me to feel like being motivated to do something. Overall, this isn't an embarrassing sequel at all even though it doesn't quite feel as good or have even close to the drama of the original, ironic since the titular kid could actually die instead of just lose a trophy. And I don't come close to tears or pump either of my fists even once!

Eventually: The Karate Kid, Part III, a movie I have never seen.

Shane Reviews the Greatest Movies Ever Made: Tokyo Story

1953 movie

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Old people visit their children and grand-children and are indirectly told to go be old someplace else.

Like a lot of Japanese movies, this is a very wise movie. And quiet. In a way, it seems even quieter than Sunrise, the silent movie I watched in the Sight and Sound list top ten. It's not a movie that wows you exactly, but Ozu does manage to grip you emotionally. The quiet direction, simple dialogue, and complete lack of anything that anybody would mistake as action almost force the viewer to reflect. Ozu's camera shows his characters almost exclusively in shots two or three feet from the ground which gives this an interesting perspective. I'm not smart enough to know why he does that or what effect it has on the viewer. My guess: Ozu had a tripod incident in which he broke off part of one leg, had to shave off a few inches from the other two legs, found that they were still uneven, shaved off a few more inches, etc. until he was left with a tiny tripod that all the other directors probably made fun of behind his back. Well, the jokes on those other guys because I liked the look of this! I also like how the camera never moves. Well, it moves once, almost shockingly, at the one hour and one minute mark. As I said, Ozu gives us lots of time in this movie to reflect. Characters will leave rooms, but the camera lets us know that the room they left continues to exist for a few moments. It forces us to think about what the characters just said to one another. Adding to the reflective tone are Ozu's transition shots of pretty much nothing--a hallway and a window with wind chimes, a clothesline with white clothes, cloud, factory pipes, a boat. The dialogue is simple, and although the actors don't get any big moments to give them a chance to show what Acting with that capital A looks like, they're all good. Of course, the old couple are at the center of things, and they play human beings so perfectly. Chieko Higashiyama is terrific just because she has to sit there have more than one character call her fat. Chishu Ryu, who starts all his lines with an Um or a Yeah or a So, is stunning in the way he holds in all these emotions. They're really beautiful performances. Their dialogue is all so very simple. It's a lot of the unsaid things that mean a lot more than what is said, along with all these moments of silence. Glances between characters, especially, say so much.

One moment stands out in this, and it's a moment with some levity. I love how characters on a bus bounce together, almost right to the goofy accompanying music. It's a scene that would probably be more appropriate in a Tati movie.

This is a terrific movie. Don't get me wrong. It very well might be perfect. However, I wonder if it would even be in my personal top-15 for Japanese movies.

Funky Forest: The First Contact

2005 Japanese insanity

Rating: 15/20

Plot: I don't know. I think there's an alien invasion that leads to dancing. No, that doesn't sound right. "I don't know" seems a lot more accurate.

I certainly didn't think I was enjoying this behemoth of a movie--two-and-a-half hours of random insanity. There was choppiness, a pair of neo-and-Japanese Laurel and Hardy guys who kept popping in and out, dialogue that was so boring and pointless that I had trouble keeping my eyes open to read the subtitles, and some of what I'd refer to as mild weirdness. And then came So-and-So's dream, a sequence that involves a weird shirtless dancing demon, automatic weaponry, some red space-suited goggle girls, a big-breasted pink cartoon alien thing, a seaweed-covered Volkswagon, and a whole lot of sweet dance moves. Then, it calmed down again with a few more episodes in this episodic mind-warper, gave me a break with an intermission, and then threw "Wanna Go for a Drink?" at me, a segment that involved The Shorty Trio!, navel invasion, a yellow-furred man, rump-shaking, and the birthing of a tiny chef. Well, perhaps a picture would put this in your mind a little better:

Only there's no little chef yet because he comes from that television-looking thing. And I know you're looking at that picture, maybe for a third time, and thinking to yourself, "Yeah, but that's probably the only part of the movie that's worth watching." But you're wrong! Because there's also this:

That! There are a few sequences with these fleshy things that look like that might have been pulled straight from the pages of a William S. Burroughs book. One of my favorite scenes is "Youth Classroom" where some kids play these sorts of things as instruments. Oh, and you know what? The movie also has this:

That! Which I'm sure is making you wonder why I'm only giving this movie a 15/20 because any movie with that has to be one of the greatest movies ever made. Add that to the fact that this will likely win both my Dance Moves of the Year competition in my end-of-the-year blog post (a dance at a singles picnic that I would have watched twice had this movie not been two-and-a-half hours long--that scene also uses one of my favorite phrases--"Sausage fest.") and quite possibly my favorite musical moment of the year in what I can only assume is the titular funky forest, a piece that's got dueling synthesizers and violin throat singing. Stunning stuff. This is a sloppy movie that bored me in chunks and thrilled me in others. I also felt like I was missing out on a lot of satirical content or something because I'm not from Japan. Still, I liked enough of this to be really glad I stuck with it.

This movie contains Snickers product placement.

The Street Fighter

1974 Sonny Chiba movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: The mafia attempts to recruit the titular bad ass to kidnap a woman who just inherited a ton of money from her rich father. Terry, however, does not like the mafia and decides to protect her instead. Meanwhile, a pair of siblings keep trying to kill Terry for revenge. Lots of skull-smashing and nut-rippage ensues.

Despite the most famous scene in this in which a punch is shown in x-ray in order for the audience to see the actual denting of a skull, and despite a scene where Sonny Chiba's character does castrate a guy with his bare hands, this is nowhere near as violent or as bloody as I always imagined it would be. In fact, I've always wondered if I've just caught abridged versions of this every time I've watched it or something. I generally prefer old-school kung-fu movies that take place a long time ago more than the ones with contemporary settings, but this is an entertaining martial arts movie, mostly because of the faces that Sonny Chiba makes right before or right after he's nutsack-torn or skull-squished or eye-gouged somebody. Chiba's facial expressions and strange posture give him some charisma, and he's got the perfect face for the type of anti-hero he plays in these things. The fight scenes aren't terrific. The most challenging one-on-one match-up he has is with a rotund gentleman, and nothing about that makes any sense. The climactic fight aboard a ship is good and involves some cool stunts. And it's mostly accompanied by cheesy 70's electronic-y sound effects and funky music, especially the great title track which made me want to dig up Dolemite and show off a few of my dance moves. You know, put my weight on it.

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell

1968 space vampire movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: After the sky turns red, a plane crashes in the middle of nowhere. Space-age bloodsuckers launch a fiendish attack that dooms the entire universe! Ok, so I ripped that off directly from the above poster. What's going to happen? The makers of Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell are going to sue me?

Bonus points for a sweetly bleak ending. Oh, and another bonus point for the cool title. I don't know where "Goke" comes from because, as I recall, that name isn't mentioned in this one at all. The titular hell is actually just generic outer space, too. There is some body-snatchin' going on though, so I guess it's all good. This is a weirdo horror movie from Shochiku studios, and although its plot, characters, or really anything else aren't anything special, there's a strangeness to the proceedings that keeps you interested. Start with the effects. The shot of the airplane swimming through this red sky are really cool even if they make you think the color's all messed up on your television which makes you wonder how you even change the color on these new televisions. There are glowing orbs, forehead gulches, and cheap avalanches. For such a simple plot, there sure is a lot going on. None of it makes much sense and all of it is pretty goofy, but for a movie that isn't bad enough to be funny or good enough to be really stand out from similar movies about body-snatching or vampire aliens, this is actually fairly entertaining. It might be worth it for the Blob-esque face attacks that leave slightly embarrassing facial scars alone. And it does have that stunning ending that puts a morbid capon all the goofiness.

Tarantino borrowed a shot from this for Kill Bill Vol. 1.

Monster from a Prehistoric Planet

1967 monster movie

Rating: 5/20

Plot: A magazine mogul wants to take a volcanic island and turn it into a resort spot called "Playmate Land." After exploring the island, scientists bring back a baby monster and bring it back home. Its parents get pissed off and come looking for it, destroying all kinds of architecture in the process. Can they reunite the destructive monsters with their offspring before it's too late?

From Wikipedia: "In the scene where the Gappas rise from the ocean into a city, one of the Gappas was carrying an octopus in its mouth, hoping to bring food to its missing offspring, assuming it was found (this scene was meant to be humorous)."

I was wondering about that. I completely missed that the makers of Gappa: The Triphibian Monsters or whatever the hell this movie wants to call itself were trying to be funny. I did wonder why one of the monsters had what I thought was a squid hanging from his chin. I thought it was like a waddle or something that helps distinguish between the male and female monsters, but it was shot off awfully easily by one of the toy tanks. I apparently assumed incorrectly that this was unintentionally funny. The two-monsters-destroying-miniatures mayhem wasn't terribly done, but there was nothing special about it. The other effects were mostly embarrassing. There's a volcano on "Playmate Land" that made me laugh every time I saw it. I've seen science fair volcanoes that are more realistic than that one. Speaking of that island, I can't figure out the title of this movie at all. First, there are multiple monsters, not just one. Second, nothing about the island makes me think it's prehistoric. There's an English-dubbed tribe there. The bearded leader of the tribe (Bumon Koto in his only role) is very good and says, "Are you Japan people?" at one point, and there wasn't a Japan in prehistoric times. And third, the monsters aren't from a planet. They're from an island, one that some guy wants to name "Playmate Land." Oh, that guy's model of "Playmate Land," complete with little plastic animals and a recording of bird sounds, might have been the best special effect of the movie. The characters certainly say "Playmate Land" enough, and if I had seen this previously, I could have invented a drinking game where I drank a shot every time somebody said "Playmate Land" and ended up completely smashed and weeping by myself instead of just soberly weeping by myself. But maybe the endless repeating of "Playmate Land" was part of the intentional humor of Monsters from a Modern-Day Volcanic Island or whatever the hell this movie is called. There was a character inserted into this mess who was obviously there for comic relief. He was irritating, the Jar-Jar Binks of Big Bird Things from Playmate Land. Those bird things are more goofy than menacing, by the way, and the bird noises they make are just grating, really some of the worst noises that I've ever heard. And I work with middle schoolers! Sometimes, they sound like a bird in a lot of pain, sometimes they sound like a human being imitating a bird in pain, and sometimes it just sounds like a stylus being moved across a record really repeatedly. The dialogue--poorly translated, I reckon--is equally painful.

Guy: Look at this. A lake under a volcano.
Girl: Are we dreaming?
Guy: [grabs girl's arm] We're here. See.

I will say this about this movie. The reunion with the baby at the end is one of the most touching moments in the history of guys-in-rubber-giant-bird-costume cinema.

Good Morning

1959 comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Two boys in the Japanese equivalent of suburbia want a television to watch obscenely-hefty scantily-clad men bump bellies. The parents refuse, so the two brothers take a vow of silence which, because they don't understand how annoying children are, they believe will be some sort of retaliation. The neighbors gossip, and a lot of people fart.

Seriously, what's with all the farting? This movie has more farting than all three Shrek movies combined. I'd like to think it's Ozu's shrewd way of proving his point that television "will produce 100 million idiots." Only it's not television. That's wonderfully prescient though, isn't it? If you've seen any clips of Japanese television floating around the Internet, you've probably noticed that it's like one giant fart joke. That's not a bad thing, of course. Neither is the reply of the parents to a visit from their kids' teacher--"Please use Spartan methods. We don't mind." Wow! What a beautiful thing that would be to hear, like a golden ticket for teachers. This is a charming little story despite all the flatulence. It's more charming than humorous anyway. The kids are likable enough, and I like how the story, though not all the way seen through their eyes, is from this naive perspective. There's an innocence there that allows you as the viewer to discover things about the adults in this story. And about a rapidly-modernizing and Western-izing Japan. Don't get me wrong because there's nothing heavy-handed here at all. It's about as light as an American 50's sitcom; in fact, I half-expected Beaver Cleaver to walk out and fart. If I didn't know any better, I'd think Ozu was making fun of Western civilization a little bit. It's a deceptively simple little comedy. My favorite thing about it is how a touching second story sneaks up on you by the end and makes you realize that Good Morning was kind of about something else all along.

I believe this is the only Ozu movie on the blog. I might rectify this by declaring this the Summer of Ozu! Who's with me?

P.S. I may have just farted. LOL!

Tokyo Gore Police

2008 gore police movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Ruka, a witness to her father's head explosion, overcomes tragedy to become the main mutant-killing cop. Those mutants, known as "engineers," have the ability to turn their injuries into weapons, and Ruka and her po-po buddies have to find out who is behind their creation. Meanwhile, she tries to figure out who was responsible for her father's murder.

Well, this was hard to take seriously. You're five minutes in and you've already got an exploding head, a decapitation, a severed arm that grows back as a slimy chainsaw arm, a guy who gets a chainsaw arm to the mouth, a fight with chainsaws. You have to wonder: Did this movie shoot its proverbial wad too early? How can anything top this? Well, hold on to your scalps, motherfucker, because this is a wild ride down a bloody slip 'n' slide. I was unsure whether or not I was liking this movie and actually had to watch it in a few installments. Around the time a character I didn't recognize Michael-Jacksoned his crotch and ended up at a party where people are wearing inflatable costumes and gas masks and the entertainment is a urinating chair woman and a snail girl, I realized that this is my kind of movie. My kind of party, too! I sighed and realized that I would eventually, when my stomach could handle it, watch all of Yoshihiro Nishimura's movies. I figured that Meatball Machine was one of those, but apparently there are a bunch of people in Japan making movies like this which once again makes me wonder what is wrong with the Japanese. H-bomb dust is the only explanation that makes any sense to me. Since I watched this movie in fifteen installments, I found it almost completely incomprehensible. But its cheap style--lots of askew camera work, assaults on at least two of your senses, a rhythm inspired by shaken baby syndrome--keeps you enthralled, and the mathematical part of your brain has all kinds of fun trying to figure out what the budget for "red squirty stuff" might have been. There are some goofy satirical moments in this with some commercials that ironically seem to poke fun at the masses' need for violence--including a Wii-type game where you slice a guy up--and some commercial propaganda about how nice the police are, but this is either too silly or too completely insane to really make any kind of point. You really can't watch the scene where a guy [SPOILER ALERT] gets his penis bitten off by a woman whose legs later turns into a giant alligator (or crocodile) mouth and take things seriously for the same reason that somebody trying to film my honeymoon to release as a sex tape wouldn't have been able to take things seriously. I'm sure the actor who played the guy who gets his penis bitten off read all the way to the part of the script that said "And then the guy walks in with his new giant penis gun," stopped reading, and said, "OK, I don't need to see anymore. I'm in!"

That penis gun puts us all to shame.

If you're ever in the right mood for something like this, I'm kind of worried about you. But this will definitely be your cup of whatever that red squirty stuff is if you are.

13 Assassins

2010 samurai movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Based on the board game Candyland, this concerns the titular assassins trying to carry out a plot to kill Lord Licorice. The evil lord of the Candyland domain gathers Plumpy, Mr. Mint, King Kandy, Jolly, Queen Frostine, Gloppy the Chocolate Monster, Gramma Nutt, and about two-hundred other warriors to try to stop them. Lots of gingerbread men get sliced.

I'd almost like to see a four-hour director's cut of this or something. The size matters when you're talking about samurai, I guess. You can really take it in three separate chunks--the assembling of the thirteen, a romp through the forest to get to Lord Licorice et al., and a 45-minute slicin' and dicin' marathon which ends with a body count that is about as high as you're likely to see in a film. That third section is about perfect. There's the calm before the storm with this ominous haze, the fortified nowhere town that looks like a crazy version of a Mouse Trap, a child urinating. If it wasn't for the goofy CGI flaming bulls, that part of the movie would have been perfect. You've got the samurai bloodbath pornography if you're into that sort of thing and enough continued character development and emotional depth to make it not completely meaningless. Those first two parts? Well, there's an attempt at character development with the first third, but it really didn't do much for me since I couldn't distinguish the characters from one another anyway. There are also some training scenes that I liked and could have used more of. The second third is nifty, working almost like a buddy-buddy-buddy-buddy-buddy-buddy-buddy-buddy-buddy-buddy-buddy-buddy movie, and they pick up the thirteenth "assassin" who winds up being the most intriguing character. But you know that this is just a prelude to the aforementioned samurai bloodbath pornography, and that's the real reason why you popped this in anyway. You wanted some Takashi Miike mayhem--necks sliced through, limbs flopping all over the place, folks disemboweled, nipples punctured. Other than a difficult-to-watch scene featuring a woman with no arms and legs, this is tame for Miike, and the violence is approached in a more human way, especially during a scene where a character kills for the first time. Miike's surprisingly (to me, at least) made himself an old school samurai picture. Well, the hari kari is awfully squelchy. And the bad guy, a dude who isn't really named Lord Licorice, is a little more ruthless than you'd normally expect. I loved that character, not just because he said cool things like "Does daddy monkey have hard bones, too?" (I wonder if that's poorly translated or actually what he said) but because of his reaction to the attack on his life. My favorite scene--the lead assassin makes a fish and hook analogy to describe how they were trapping the army of seventy. When the army turns out to be two hundred, he says, "The bigger the fish the better," and this one guy's reaction is like "Dude, that analogy just ain't working for me anymore." Anyway, good samurai flick.

Oprah Movie Club for March: Paprika

2006 anime

Rating: 15/20 (Mark: 12/20)

Plot: Some fiend's stolen a dream machine, and it's up to a scientist and her titular alter-ego to save humanity. Or something like that. Honestly, I wasn't nearly smart enough to figure out what the hell was going on here.

But I liked what I was looking at! This stretches the elastic boundaries of what animation can do, dips deep inside the old noggin, scrambles things around, and leaves you baffled but aesthetically pleased. I thought the story was frustratingly incoherent, but that might not be the movie's fault. Then again, my brother's reasonably intelligent and was also confused, so maybe it was the movie's fault. He's not seen Inception, a film that seems to have borrowed a lot of this one's ideas--Jello floors, elevator rides through the subconscious, frog musicians. I have seen Inception which might have given me an advantage although I did have an extra obstacle in trying to avoid thinking about Leonardo Dicaprio. The guy's just dreamy. On second thought, I'm not sure there were frogs in Inception. I think part of the problem for me (and again, keep in mind that I'm a dumb guy) is that I had trouble understanding the motivations of most of the characters. There's a character we never really get to meet who befuddled me, and the villain's logic never really made much sense to me. But again, I did appreciate the manic creativity and goofy surrealism, and cartoon nudity always is good for a bonus point or two. I don't see how there could have possibly been enough room on a storyboard for all the ideas that show up on screen here. You get walking refrigerators, giant headed guys, butterfly girls, talking dolls, musical animals. The screen's just filled with this stuff, and even though a lot of the imagery was redundant, I looked forward to seeing that parade. As much as I enjoyed the cartoon visually, however, I hated it aurally. The soundtrack, other than the cute and unhinged parade music, was irritating. A lot of times, I watch a movie like this (Synecdoche, New York; anything from Czechoslovakia; You've Got Mail) and think that if I just watched it a second time, I'd understand it all a lot better. I think I could watch Paprika a dozen times and still not figure out what was going on.

OK, what other Oprah Movie Clubbers got a chance to see this one? What did you think?

Oprah Movie Club Pick for August: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

1985 biopic, apparently in four chapters

Rating: 16/20 (Mark: 15/20)

Plot: It's the rockin' good times of the titular author, Yukio Mishima, a man all messed up in the head because he was forced to rub his grandmother's legs as a young boy. This weaves three of his stories/plays and his parallel life events before describing the details of his last day when he commits suicide after his buddies make fun of his Harry Caray impression. Or something. I really don't understand this culture at all.

This is one of the more challenging biographical movies you're likely to see. It's conveniently broken into four chapters, three which attempt to blend biography and Mishima's literature and one which matter-of-factly reenacts the man's final act. And by "convenient," I mean "not really all that convenient at all" since it's hard to connect the dots with the fragments of this guy's life. The styles and colors vary--the beautiful black and white of memory, the lavish and almost gaudy colors in the staged literature excerpts, and the realism of that final day. I don't think too many people will watch this and not think it's all beautifully filmed, the individual chunks of Mishima's story told in visually stunning ways rich with symbolism. My man Philip Glass's pulsating score adds to the experience. Striking. But for me (and maybe this is just because I'm a dumb guy), it was hard to put some of the pieces together, and there are times when it got a little boring. Mishima and his contradictions are hard to get your head around in this. He's a writer who doesn't believe in the power of words, a married homosexual, a guy with convictions that really aren't all that clear. All the actors playing Moshima do a fine job, especially Ken Ogata (the last Moshima) who also did a great job in the The Pillow Book where he played Ewan McGregor's penis. This is a pretty and intense movie, and it's a very good movie if you're in mood for a really complex story about a really complex guy. It's just not completely satisfying.

Trivia: Philip Glass only used two fingers when composing to score for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.

The Human Centipede: First Sequence

2009 entomologists delight

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Two women get lost in the woods after their rental car breaks down, and they wind up drugged by a sadistic doctor who, along with another poor guy, wants to use them to make the titular pet monster. None of the three are too happy about it.

I watched this because it was highly recommended by my brother who claims that it's the third best horror movie of all time. I'm honestly not sure it's a horror movie and laughed (inwardly, because they'll commit you if you laugh out loud at this sort of thing) more than I was scared, sort-of enjoying it almost as a black-psychocomedy. Most of the fun comes from the brilliantly comic performance of German Dieter Laser as Dr. Mengele or whatever his name is. Like a German Christopher Walken, he's got this face that would make most people think, "I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't drink water that this guy offers me." When he's working to cover his tracks, shooting somebody while the victim is pooping, opening a door, lethally injecting somebody with an evil stare that seems like that might be the actual cause of death instead of the injection itself, saying "Bite my boot!", or doing a chicken impression, Laser never fully convinces as creepy exactly but is 100% entertaining. My favorite scene is when he's explaining the impending surgery to the three future sections of his centipede and uses these rudimentary drawings. I also liked that the cinematographer's name was Goof de Kooning. I wish the other actors in this were a little better. They played things straight, screaming and ruining their mascara with copious tears, and although I can't imagine this being any good if they had played it any other way, the performances clashed with the comic tones. This movie wasn't nearly the gross-out fest I feared. It's actually about as tame as a movie with people's mouths being surgically attached to people's anuses can be, I think. I wouldn't call this the third best horror movie ever and I'm not going to rush out and see what will inevitably turn out to be eight or nine sequels, but I'm not totally disappointed that I watched this.

Seriously. Goof de Kooning.

Anybody want to go trick or treating with me dressed as the Human Centipede?

Battle Royale

2000 cult classic

Rating: 15/20 (Mark: 18/20)

Plot: Forty-two students are transported to an island, given a random weapon (firearms, paper fans, nunchucks, tasers, etc.), and instructed to kill each other off. Their old teacher, "Beat" Takeshi Kitano, is there, too. I think there's something like this in the "No Child Left Behind" act.

My favorite thing about this movie: I busied my brain trying to guess how a pair of binoculars and/or a pan lid were going to come into play, and then nothing ever materialized. Battle Royale gets some points for effort. People who don't like it will tag it with a violence porn label. People who do like it will talk about it as a satire of the Japanese educational system and how society demands that children compete against their peers. And maybe I'm just desensitized to this sort of thing, but I didn't think it was all that violent. And I didn't think the satire--muddled and missing a few pieces--added up to much. There are a ton of characters in this, but the ratio of interesting characters to uninteresting ones is a problem. I liked the teacher (and Kitano [Zatoichi in the 2004 version of the blind swordsman movie]is always pretty awesome) and the crazy girl (Chiaki Kuriyama--Gogo in Kill Bill Volume One) and maybe the mean kid who doesn't get any lines. The others, including the rest of the forty-two children, aren't really memorable. I'm not sure I'm willing to sacrifice the quantity and variety of violent acts by limiting the amount of characters, but there sure were a lot of characters to keep track of in this. And, as you can probably guess, they all looked almost exactly the same, which made any subplots or connections between the characters kind of confusing. I did like that this movie wasn't afraid to show not only all those scenes of Japanese pop idols dying tragic deaths but also showing it all with a healthy dose of black humor. The action's paced well, and I liked how this explored the varying psychologies of children put in traumatic situations. This definitely lost a point because of the sickeningly melodramatic score. I have no problems watching a kid with an ax sticking out of his head stumble around on a television screen. However, I have no tolerance for bad film music.

Tetsuo, the Iron Man

1993 mind warper

Rating: 16/20

Plot: The titular man accidentally runs over a guy who likes to stick metal rods into his legs. Later, metal starts growing from him including an awesome penis drill. He begins to become more metal than man, and not only will it hurt his relationship with his girlfriend, it might ruin his entire life.

"You want a taste of my sewage pipe?"

Like Eraserhead at twice the speed, a comical nightmare, or vile outsider art, this is very likely the strangest movie I've ever seen. That's saying something. There's not much dialogue in this, something else it has in common with Eraserhead, but at one point, a character says, "What's going on here?" and then, while breaking into tears, "What the fuck is this?" I can imagine that the majority of viewers would be thinking the same exact thing, and honestly, a lot of them would also probably feel like crying. I give it bonus points for sheer audacity, but there's also a thrill in the innovative camera work and effective imagery and atmosphere. Director (and star) Shinya Tsukamoto manages to create something that uniquely creates these moods that you really have trouble labeling. It's foreboding and troubling, but always with some dark humor built in. I'm not familiar with anything else he's done, but with what I'm guessing isn't much of a budget, he auteur-istically brings his wacko vision to life. Chases with lobster-clawed women, rocket heels, metal phalluses, metallic chewing noises, chipmunk laughs, hulking metal men, robot porn. It's demanding stuff, a movie a lot of people wouldn't be able to watch much of, but if you're in the right frame of mind and enjoy the wildly experimental, this could be your favorite movie ever.

Cory, don't watch this one. I'm putting it on the anti-five list.

The Happiness of the Katakuris

2001 black comic musical (with claymation!)

Rating: 14/20

Plot: The titular family lives in the middle of nowhere, operating a bed-and-breakfast that nobody visits because the dad heard that a new road was going to be constructed that would be great for business. The family's far from happy. The son's got a criminal background, and the daughter is recently divorced. But their luck changes when they actually get a customer. Then their luck changes again when the customer commits suicide. They decide to cover it up. Soon, more customers arrive and wind up dead. Apparently, that's a problem. They sing about it!

This one starts with a woman in a restaurant eating soup. She finds a demon thing in the soup ("Waiter, there's a demon in my soup!") and the whole scene morphs into claymation. The demon steals her uvula and flies off. Eventually, a bird gets involved and the grandfather of the family throws some firewood at it from an absurd distance and hits it. Then, we get to meet the Katakuris. I've got no idea what the demon or the woman's uvula had to do with anything. This is the second Takashi Miike movie I've seen in the last couple weeks. He's the type of director who needs to calm down, have somebody gift him a funnel, or hire an assistant to throw cold water in his face every twenty-three minutes or so. This is a wild ride, not really letting up after the scene with the uvula-thieving demon, and the mashing together of genres (the Sound of Music meets Dawn of the Dead description on the poster is appropriate) is almost unnerving. But in a delightful way! You can go into this movie expecting the unexpected, but Miike will be a step ahead of you. It's like he's discovered the 3-D equivalent to "unexpected," and uses it to attack the viewer as he also assaults with tacky color, gross imagery, gross sound effects, and tacky musical numbers. You know how you sometimes come across a video clip of footage from a Japanese game show and you watch it and think, "Everybody in Japan must be nuts!"? This is the movie equivalent to that. Nothing's right about The Happiness of the Katakuris. It's unapologetically dopey and covered in a few thick and raunchy layers of cheese. The music really is terrible, dated Japanese pop with embarrassingly terrible lyrics. You really have to sort of endure the musically numbers. The onslaught of that with the gross-out imagery and the seemingly random metamorphosis into claymation is enough to make you dizzy. But again, it's in a delightful way! The humor's black, absurdly black, and if you can't laugh at death, this probably isn't the movie for you. As unhinged as this is, it all manages to keep things together for an (expected?) feel-good ending. This definitely isn't for everybody. In fact, it's probably not for very many people at all, but if you think you might be the type of person who would like a movie where one of the first five words in the script is "uvula," you might want to give it a shot.

My Neighbor Totoro

1988 animated feature

Rating: 18/20 (Emma: 14/20; Abbey: 15/20)

Plot: A professor and his two daughters move into an old country house to be close to the hospital where the matriarch of the family is convalescing after a long illness. A neighbor boy warns that the house is haunted, and the girls do spot some creepy dust mite-ish spirits before they quickly scurry away. Once the girls feel more at home, they aren't seen anymore. They also meet a big fluffy bunny thing named Totoro, their neighbor, and a bus/cat hybrid. The girls try to adapt to a house without a mother in it.

Delightful! This has got to be one of the most accurate depictions of children's feelings that I've ever seen. Or maybe it's an accurate look at difficult moments from the point of view of children. My favorite thing about this is how it doesn't focus on the negative stuff that's going on, but on the details that take the characters away from that negative stuff. The titular Totoro is simple but iconic, and I can't imagine anybody watching this movie without wanting to go for a ride in the cat-bus. The animation is beautiful, and the story, although honestly there's not much of a story here, drifts along so softly that you just want to cuddle up with it. There's the best adjective I can use to describe My Neighbor Totoro actually--cuddly. I love everything about this movie, including the songs used for the credits. Cuddly and delightful!

Zebraman

2004 superhero movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Teacher and big-time loser Shinichi spends his nights perfecting a Zebraman costume, his tribute to a thirty-year-old television show that only aired for seven episodes but that he is nevertheless obsessed with. After meeting a new friend, he starts to develop actual powers. Just in time, too, since aliens are trying to blow us up. Can Zebraman stop them in time or will the little green guys kill us all?

This usually doesn't trip me up, but the special effects in Zebraman, especially the computer animated stuff in the final third, fill the screen with such ugliness and ineptitude that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Almost literally. I finished this movie, and it felt like I had eaten bad special effects. A ludicrous and incoherent climax combined with those awful colors, swirls of runny action, and garbled bombast stomps all over all the good stuff from the first two-thirds of the movie. And there is a lot to like in the first two-thirds. I always like Miike's sense of humor, here not quite as sick as in some of his previous work, and the almost-but-not-quite satirical quality kept me asking, "Is this for real?" Broken down, it's a pretty straight comic bookish superhero tale though. There's a lot of heart, a
likable protagonist, and an off-kilter funk that gave this a unique flavor, even when scenes showing the original Zebraman television show reminded me of the Power Rangers, and the low-key moments clashing with goofy action sequences reminded me of Big Man Japan. But then Miike makes us watch absurdly cartoonish bobbleheaded aliens and green newborns, and it all just gets gross. I'm probably aware that the grossness is intentional, but it didn't make it any more fun to watch. This was a great idea, but one poorly executed.

The Manster

1959 science fiction horror film

Rating: 11/20

Plot: A crazed Japanese scientist is experimenting with human evolution in his secret laboratory conveniently located next to a burbling volcano. At the beginning of the movie, he has to kill off one of his mistakes, a killer ape man who was formerly the scientist's brother. Screaming in a cage, is a disfigured woman who was once the scientist's wife. As the scientist wonders who will be the next subject for his experiments, an American journalist wanders in to conduct an interview. The scientist asks him a few inappropriate questions, drugs and injects him, and sends him on his way. Instantly, the journalist's personality changes. He starts cheating on his wife and refuses to return home. Eventually, he starts noticing some physical changes as well, specifically the appearance of an eyeball on his right shoulder. It's not good.

The movie's also probably not good, but I enjoyed this little sucker. The intro is striking--bathing women, the appearance of a hideous ape man, a splash of blood, and the scientist's mutated wife (like a character from Freaks) screaming and shaking the bars of her cage. It all looks cheap but effectively creepy. It almost makes the next forty minutes or so a complete let-down as the filmmakers made the unwise decision to have some sort of plot and fail to maintain that level of creepiness, but it all picks up again when the guy unveils his shoulder eye, an area which eventually sprouts a head. It's one of those movie images that somebody watching this movie isn't likely to forget. I also really liked the build-up to that scene where theremin (or was that a saw?) music would play whenever the guy looked at or touched his shoulder. To be fair, the story in that intervening forty minutes is fairly interesting. I liked watching the journalist change psychologically before the physical transformations happened, possibly a metaphor for the "monsters" that men can become when they give in to temptation, drinking too much or cheating on their wives. This was a very B, Japanese/American co-production, and although the cheapness almost bleeds from the screen and the acting (especially Tetsu Nakamura, undoubtedly "acting" in a language he's not entirely comfortable with) is no good at all, they do quite a bit with very, very little. The Manster, also known as The Split and Doctor Satan and (most boringly) The Two-Headed Monster, is worth checking out.

"Oh, Snap! I'm not supposed to have an eyeball there!" (Note: Not an actual line from the movie.)

Gammera the Invincible

1966 big monster movie

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Russian planes carrying nuclear bombs are shot down. This wakes up Gammera, a prehistoric turtle who eats fire, has the ability to fly, and destroys things. He's made of rubber.

The ensemble cast here just might be the worst ever assembled. And it's not the dubbing (although that is ridiculous) because the worst offenders are the American actors. The characters in this one somehow manage to be goofier than the monster, a giant rubber turtle that can scoot through the skies like a flying saucer and spew fire. There's the Japanese photographer who can't figure out what to take pictures of without being told. There's the Christian Eskimos who warn the Japanese visitors about a giant prehistoric turtle for absolutely no reason. And just the name "Gammera" spoken by Eskimos makes dogs bark and children scatter. There's the general who butchers his lines so badly that when the other characters in the room are shown, they all have expressions like they're expecting the director to yell "Cut!" and start over again. Then, the senator in the room impossibly ends up being worse! There's a dopey child actor, a kid so obsessed with turtles (of course) that his teacher is threatening to expel him from school. But standing above them all is the scientist Dr. Contrare who is shown debating another scientist on a television program. Bad acting is bad acting, and in a movie like this, it's often difficult for a bad actor to get his performance noticed. But Alan Oppenheimer's performance stands out, a crochet needle in a haystack of awful performances. You'll see Alan Oppenheimer's name as a nominee for the Torgo at the end of the year. There are some dazzling special effects in this movie--burning planes, toy boats, flying Gammera. There's an explosion described by a character with the "only a nuclear bomb can create an explosion like that" even though it looks like a cheap firecracker. And I never knew that train cars full of gas sound just like gun shots when they explode. The monster itself isn't too bad. He apparently likes children, enough for me to suspect that he's a pedophile. He doesn't seem like a very intelligent monster although he doesn't have any other weaknesses. As one scientist so expertly opines, once Gammera is on his back, he can't get on his feet again. Really? I could have been a scientist if that's all it takes. The destruction of the miniatures is entertaining, and I really like one terrible transition from an attack of an airport to a bunch of kids dancing to a rock 'n' roll song with lyrics that go "Gammera! Gammera! Gammera!" I'm easily entertained though. It all ends rather stupidly and then finds a way to end again more stupidly by throwing the words "Sayonara Gammera" on the screen.

Watched on the big screen at school with frequent interruptions from colleagues.