Cory's Birthday Movie Celebration: Destroy All Monsters!

1968 monster mayhem

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A posse of alien chicks invades earth by unleashing the collective of monsters imprisoned on Monster Land. Some astronauts have to find a way to defeat them. Rawr!

That's right--the tradition of honoring reader Cory's birthday in the cheapest way imaginable is continuing. This year, I've picked what I believe to be fifth on his favorite Godzilla movie list.

This is a movie very obviously made for children. There's nothing wrong with that, and that's better than the cartoon I thought it was going to be with a first scene involving a rocket blast-off. All of these movies are a little goofy, but this one just feels goofier. I think it might be the heavy narration, especially during the first part of the movie. When the narrator said "a place called Monster Land," I again thought that I was watching a cartoon. I am glad that he introduced all the monsters though. I didn't remember their names later on though, except for the ones I'd already seen in the other movies. I'll tell you one thing about that narrator and his description of Monster Land. There's a whole lot of science going on there. Also making this whole thing so goofy that adults should be embarrassed for liking it (No, I'm not talking about you, Cory, because that would be a terrible thing to do on your birthday.): a scene where Rodan eats a dolphin; a scene where Rodan humps another monster, dryly, I assume; a doctor's suicide with an obvious dummy and the longest scream I think I've ever heard in a movie; the 1999 laser guns that make pew-pew-pew sounds; the dubbed voice of this old guy; and another dubbed voice that is supposed to sound French, I guess. One of the scientists says "the monsters look cute" at one point, and that might be part of the problem. Some of them are a little too cute. Despite the goofiness, this is almost wall-to-wall action. And I liked seeing the monsters in new locations with some familiar landmarks. The miniature stuff is well done although the movie's pretty much done with urban settings by the midway point. Some of the miniatures are complex and even having moving parts. And they're grander in scale, probably because they needed to make room for ALL monsters. The city does look a little devoid of people though, a little lifeless. Maybe at this stage in this series of movies, people knew the signs and found safe locations when they knew giant monsters were on their way. This is packed with monsters, probably too many! I still don't care much for Rodan, but I did like the spiky guy and the long guy. Son of Godzilla? Well, I just don't know about him. His voice is really silly, and he shoots smoke rings. I enjoyed the alien monster tadpole things, but the "burning monster" which turns out to not even be a monster at all is about the lamest thing ever. Oh, and Ghidorah and his trio of heads makes an appearance. They really weren't kidding with the "all" in that title! Of course, the star of the show is Godzilla, and he gets his moments. One series of scenes has some guys running from Godzilla in the woods, and I'm pretty sure some of the shots inspired shots in Jurassic Park. My favorite Godzilla moment comes early, a scene where he does a crotch chop move like that bowler Pete Weber. With the same lively music I've come to expect from these Godzilla movies and barely a slow moment, this is a fun and entertaining giant monster movie. Especially for children!

Happy birthday, Cory!

Ju-On: The Grudge

2002 J-Horror movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Ghastly shenanigans in an apparently haunted house.

No, I have not seen the American remake of this or one of the other Ju-on movies. I didn't know this was a sequel until after I watched it. I'm not sure what I'm missing (if anything) by not watching the first two. This is six connected short stories that aren't even displayed in chronological order. I'm not sure why movie makers do that. I consider myself of average intelligence with maybe a slightly above-average movie IQ, and I had trouble making connections between the stories. I had trouble remembering who each character was supposed to be though, and that probably has more to do with being American than anything else. I mean, if Kirk Cameron was in this, I would be able to recognize and remember him and know how he was attached to other characters in this thing. I ended up liking the structure even if I didn't know why it was necessary. I think it added a little mystery to the proceedings, and a bit of mystery injected into this kind of creepiness was a natural fit. This movie--and again, it might be because I didn't watch the other Ju-on movies--kind of leaves you hanging about what is going on and what has previously gone on, adding to this chilly, semi-surreal flavor. The imagery's enough to grab you, but there are more than enough effective jump-out-and-scare-you moments. Sound effects are also used effectively. I may have thought this was scarier than it was because of the use of kitties. I think I prefer my horror movies to end completely hopelessly. Who wants a happy ending for a horror movie? This one definitely ends bleakly enough, probably so they can make a dozen more of them. And like all good horror movies, this is one that scares you on levels you don't even understand.

Dead Leaves

2004 anime mayhem

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Your guess is as good as mine, even if you've never seen or heard of this movie. A guy with a television for a head and a a feisty gal wind up imprisoned on the moon where they befriend a guy with a golden penis drill. They try to bust out.

You've probably heard somebody, probably while watching a classic like It's a Wonderful Life, say, "Well, they don't make 'em like this anymore." I almost got the exact opposite feeling while watching this and actually said out loud, "They didn't make 'em like this ever." Nobody was around or I would have been made fun of. This is hyper-frenetic nutsiness, the kind that can only come from the Land of the Rising Acid Flashback. It's loud and seizure-inducing (not that I experienced any) and includes, as I mentioned, a guy with a television for a head and a guy with a penis drill. It's a comic book, complete with harsh lines and onomatopoeia, splashing out of its pages and getting all over your pants and walls. If your imagination isn't broken, go ahead and look at that poster up there. Then, imagine it all coming to life and moving really really fast. No, faster than that. Add a crazy assortment of odd-looking characters, several broken laws of physics and/or comic sense, a very strange sense of humor, and a golden penis drill. There you go. Wait, make it all move a little bit faster. Now, there you go. You've pretty much seen the movie. The storytelling's a mess, and if it was any longer than the 50 or so minutes that it was, I'm not sure I would have gone to sleep that night and woke up the same sane man that all my readers know and love. And, I have to confess that I felt a little tense while watching the whole thing. My nutsack shriveled, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. But you know what? I really enjoyed almost every second of this thing. It's creatively fervent, unapologetically wacky, and unquestionably unique. Absolute insanity! Penis drill!

Emperor Tomato Ketchup

1971 blockbuster

Rating: no rating

Plot: In a land governed by children, kids run around abusing adults and drawing X's over things.

The only thing I really knew about this movie is that the band Stereolab grabbed its title for one of their album titles. I'm not sure what it's about. It's a frenzy of worn black 'n' white shock images, a lot involving children doing things they're not supposed to be doing. I'm sure director Shuji Terayama is saying something here, but it's going to be next to impossible for most viewers to see it through some really shocking visuals. The imagery invited Holocaust comparisons and thoughts about censorship and totalitarian governments, but none of it was cohesive enough to make a point that a dumb guy like me could fully grasp. No, I'm the type of viewer who's content in being entertained by a scene of a little person emerging from a hole while wearing an army helmet and what appears to be a diaper, running to another hole where he extracts a chicken that he takes an ax to, an act accompanied by a too-loud screech and some scattered applause. There's no real dialogue, but there's some words thrown in (found sound or stock sounds, I assume), none of it that I could understand because I don't speak whatever language it's in. There are also some words that appeared in white on the screen that I wouldn't be able to read even if I could read German. The music is nice if not all over the place. Like many foreign avant-garde productions, I'm missing way too much context to fully appreciate this or even understand it. This might have loads of interesting ideas but it's distracted by its own imagery.

Note: There's a 70-something minute version of this and a much shorter 20-something minute version that I'm guessing only shows the highlights. Like a Michael Bay movie with just the explosions maybe.

Cory's Birthday Movie Celebration: Godzilla vs. Destoroyah

1995 monster movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Godzilla's having an allergic reaction and develops a nasty glowing rash. It's painful, and he decides to take his frustration out on the architecture. Meanwhile, some scientists invent themselves a new kind of crab that threatens humanity. Godzilla's son, Godzilla Jr., shows up, a little upset because dad hasn't been attending his t-ball games. A bunch of fire happens, and the Japanese Al Gore starts telling everybody that the world is going to either blow up or melt. They combat the inevitable with ice tanks and ice planes while more fire happens. Then, almost shockingly, there's even more fire!

Fire! This is the type of movie that can burn you if you get too close to it. I mean, just take a gander at that bitchin' poster there! What the hell is this movie called, by the way? Cory called it Godzilla vs. Destroyer which seems to be what the characters in this are saying. IMDB has it as Godzilla vs. Destroyah while most other sources seem to add the extra O. I think the title screen had the extra O, too. I'm pretty sure this movie is the victim of a typographical error, and those, as you know, can be more deadly dangerous than Godzilla.

I think this is the third time that I've watched a Godzilla movie on Cory's birthday which, if you think about it, is actually the lamest present imaginable. I'm going to start doing this for other people. Oh, it's your birthday, Dad? I'll watch that time travel movie with Superman. For my brother's birthday, I can watch Amelie. For my wife's birthday, I can pop in First Blood. No cost to me and I get to watch a movie. Anyway, happy birthday, Cory. Last year, I goofed and picked a random Godzilla movie that wasn't one of his faves. This year, I grabbed one that he actually likes.

This movie is almost as good as its poster up there with all that fire and smoke. Of course, we all know that there's no way a movie can be as good as that poster. The world would melt. The big guy looks extra menacing in this since parts of him are glowing orange. He also looks extra pissed, right at the beginning of all this before the giant explosion that precedes the title screen. That explosion is there to foreshadow more explosions. It seems the people in charge of this 90's series asked themselves, "What is missing from those original Godzilla movies?" and answered it with "Extraneous explosions!" It all matches the explosive mood that Godzilla seems to be in at the beginning of all this. He even shoots flames from his mouth that are capable of making water explode! I thought maybe I had missed something from a previous movie. I mean, why's he so irritable? Luckily, science is used to explain it all logically--Godzilla's got a power reactor for a heart. I think E.T. had something similar going on, but it didn't put him in a terrible mood. The special effects in this thing are a little fancier than the older movies, for better or worse. Some are pretty bad though. Near the beginning, you've got a couple shots with Godzilla behind the city, just dwarfing the buildings, with people in the foreground who could easily see or hear the monster not reacting at all. The big ice plane often looks like a toy, and some of the cars look even worse. For the most part, however, the special effects are pretty cool with stuff turning all orange and explode-y, unfortunate fish decomposition, Godzilla slithering around on the surface of the water all Loch Nessy. The mini-Destoroyah don't move all that smoothly or realistically, but I liked watching them. In other Godzilla movies, the giant things are menaces to whole cities or all of humanity and the destruction is mostly in long shots. Here, these little guys let us see some hand-to-crab-leg-and-blue-steam combat which I think makes the terror a little more personal. Or at least intimate. There's a scene with a woman in a car that reminds me of Jurassic Park or something with some very real tension and a camera filming as close as the scared victim is. The little Destoroyah guy even has an Alien-esque mandible extension that, to me at least, made the whole scene with the woman in the car seem a little dirty. One goofy special effect that I really liked--when that blue steam hit the soldiers battling the mini-Destoroyah, this little swirly thing appeared on their chest before they perished. If you have to have a monster kill you, you might as well die in a psychedelic way. It took a while for the action in this movie--well, after the initial pissed-off Godzilla scene, of course--to get going. I got a little bored with the people parts of the movie, and there was a little too much science going on. Once the dangerously radioactive Godzilla shows up again and that ice plane has to get involved, it's pretty much non-stop explosions though. That scene with the ice plane, despite it looking like a toy, was fun, and I'm happy that director Takao Okawara was able to find the coolest fucking guy in Japan to pilot the thing. The fight scenes that make up the last thirty minutes of the movie are pretty badass although explosion and white flash heavy. I still have no idea how all the mini-Destoroyah combined into one giant one, but I'm glad there weren't added scenes with scientists explaining it to me. Some spewing liquid was an added treat. Apparently, Godzilla's fire not only makes water explode but can make Destoroyah regurgitate egg yolk. Things even get a little emotional at the end with a touching father-son reunion. But of course, that's nearly destoroyahed by the two chicks in the helicopter describing what is happening. That was commentary that I didn't need. Godzilla's eventual meltdown, almost like a reptilian Wicked Witch, was downright grotesque and surprisingly moving. And a final shot with a zoom through all this smoke and destruction to a shot of Godzilla Jr. was terrific. There's also a great score that reminds me of the 60's Godzilla scores just like it should. Well, except for the repetitive rousing numbers for the scenes with the ice plane and ice tanks. Those were pretty lame. Despite this movie's flaws, this is a really entertaining action movie. I do think I prefer the older ones though.

Two more little things that I liked in this movie: 1) There's a character named Commander Asshole. Well, unless I heard that wrong. 2) There's a scene with a guard in an aquarium where he is whistling "Singin' in the Rain" and stops to say hello to a fish. I wouldn't mind seeing a prequel about this guy and his relationship with the one fish out of all the fish in the aquarium that he interacts with.

My spellcheck told me that destoroyah is not a real word.

I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK

2006 quirky love story

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Cha Young-Goon's family has a history of mental problems. She becomes convinced that she is a combat robot and has to be committed. The doctors desperately try to get her to eat something, but she just wants to lick batteries and watch her toes light up. She meets a masked kleptomaniac who steals her panties and tries to trick her into eating.

There's a pair of moments in this one that touched me like nothing I've seen in any other recent romantic comedy. I can't give specifics because I wouldn't want to spoil this for any of my 4 1/2 readers, but one of them involves a cork and the other involves a door. There's another scene with a yodeling Japanese guy that also nearly made me weep. As did the line "A cat is, above all, a furry animal," a bit of dialogue that probably is funnier in context. This has a free-flowing cuckoo vibe, and people will call it a Japanese One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a movie that some people refuse to even watch because it beat an inferior Jaws for Best Picture. The craziness is movie craziness with an asylum that wouldn't actual exist outside of the screen. You get characters with silly mental disorders probably used for comic purposes. They color the movie but don't really serve any real purpose, at least regarding the plot, until another kind of touching moment that takes place in a cafeteria. You get a guy who walks backwards, a woman who can only look at people in a mirror, and a variety of other characters humorously sick in their heads. I liked how this one was filmed, flamboyantly and with almost a French whimsy. It breezes on by, and although it's never really all that profound (it is, after all, a romantic comedy), it's a cute little story with some beautiful visuals. I might be in the minority here, but I prefer this one to Chan-wook Park's Oldboy.

Meatball Machine

2005 science fiction movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Aliens infect humans and transform them into beastly robotic fightin' machines. They meet, they fight, and then the victor gets to eat the loser. One nondescript guy tries to either save the woman he loves by destroying her or prevent his own destruction.

This might be the first movie on this blog that has a scene where a woman is violated by tentacles. I've been looking for a movie with a good tentacle rape scene so that those with that particular fetist (apparently, there are loads of them) will stumble upon my little blog. I've now got Hunger Games fans, women's prison exploitation aficionados, and tentacle rape fetishists covered, and I'm feeling pretty good about the future of shane-movies.

Meatball Machine won't be mistaken for a good movie, but it does have its visually interesting moments, all done very cheaply--spaghetti wire shaking, junkyard costuming, phallic jello. The monstroids (have I coined a word?) are cool, and the violence is splattery if you're into that sort of thing. I couldn't care less about the plot or characters, and the filthy atmosphere, though intially kind of cool, grew tiresome. So did the climactic battle scene which I'm pretty sure is still going on. A tacked-on end scene that attempted to explain everything that happened was really dumb. It's almost like the makers of this wanted to make a movie only so that he could call it Meatball Machine, neglected to tell the audience anywhere in the movie why it was called Meatball Machine, and added an ending just to throw those words in there sometime.

Somewhat reminiscent, by the way, of Tetsuo, the Iron Man.

Hellevator: The Bottled Fools

2004 elevator movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: In a futuristic society where people get around via elevators, a Japanese school girl (I have to occasionally throw words like "Japanese school girl" together so that more people will find my blog when searching) gets in trouble not only for smoking but for accidentally blowing up a bunch of people. She enters an elevator which turns out to be the titular hellevator when a criminally-insane rapist and a criminally-insane terrorist who, for whatever reason, talks backward enter.

I was very intrigued during the first twenty minutes before stuff started happening. That first chunk of movie was a series of surreal vignettes, stylishly dopey with some cool sound effects and cheap effects that reminded me a little of Brazil or Tetsuo. There were zip-zipping businessmen and a robot dog brain, and instead of the weird horror movie I figured I was going to see when I popped this in, I was starting to wonder if this was a weird half-assed parody instead. The one-setting thing works while things remained odd and random. Once the criminals enter the story, things are still interesting, probably because one is just great at playing a violent twitching, screaming, and licking lunatic and the other talks backwards. Once a real story develops, it loses steam, and although it was still consistently entertaining, the never-changing setting began to feel a little claustrophobic. Several twists and grainy flashbacks later, I was more confused than interested in what was going on. I'm going to give director Hiroki Yamaguchi bonus points for doing an awful lot with not very much at all and for displaying some filthy creative spirit, but I wish the story and its characters were a little more interesting.

If I have a worst title pun of the year award, I don't see anything beating this. Hellevator? I'm not even sure why anybody would want to admit they saw a movie called Hellevator.

Fish Story

2009 movie without a single fish

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Oh, snap! A comet heading straight for earth threatens the existence of all life on our feeble little planet. Thankfully, a Japanese punk band recorded the titular rock song back in the 1970s. Wait. What?

A second viewing might make large chunks of this seem superfluous, but it was so much fun watching everything come together that I don't mind. I was sold from the beginning with an old guy in a motorized wheelchair pushing over some bikes with his cane before a shot showing the ominous fireball. There's an obligatory Bruce Willis allusion, paranormal record collectors, end time prophets uttering things like "Even if today is the last day of the world, I will still plant my apple trees," fruit tort faux pas, apple pie kung-fu, and a funny nod to The Karate Kid. The real one--not the one with Will Smith's daughter. This is a sharp little movie puzzle, and I'd like to check it out again to see what pieces I may have missed. That song ain't half bad either!

Oprah Movie Club Pick: Gamera vs. Guiron

1969 turtle superhero movie

Rating: 5/20

Plot: As rumors of unidentified sort-of hovering objects swirl, a Japanese kid and Beaver Cleaver stumble upon an abandoned space craft constructed from cheap cardboard and what appears to be pieces of discarded stoplights. The ship takes off with the lads inside, leaving a whiny homely girl behind. While she tries to convince Mom that the boys did indeed fly off in a spaceship, the boys have landed on the tenth planet in our solar system (sorry, I didn't catch the name) where they watch some goofy monsters fight and are forced to endure the annoying voices of the planet's only inhabitants--two gals wearing capes. But these girls have a plan for the boys, and Gamera (a friend to children apparently) is needed to save the day.

Kent picked a classic for our first Oprah Movie Club pick of the year. There's one other Gamera movie on the blog, the superior but not nearly as much goofy or fun Gamera the Invincible. This one begins with some gross effects that look like they could serve as the backdrop for a really cheap Pink Floyd cover band, probably one called The Vegetable Men, and then makes us wait a while before we see any monster-on-monster action. The worst dubbing I think I've ever heard is enough to keep things entertaining though. It's not just the poorly-chosen voices for the characters either. No, there's something terribly wrong with the pacing in the delivery of the lines, almost like that guy from the "Hooked on Phonics" commercial who could barely get through a story about a train is reading everything. The child actors are irritating, but there's an adult actor who actually makes them look like master thespians in some early scenes where they're together. His name is Kon Ohmura, and I'm not sure how he Konned his way onto a movie set, but he's in another Gamera movie and a few other things. His character here (Goonjob? Coonja?) is there for comic relief, just like the rest of the movie, and Ohmura's wonderfully Torgorific as he's threatening to shave the children's heads [Spoiler Alert: That's foreshadowing!] or even just standing around. That's right. Ohmura's the type of actor who can't just stand there during a scene without being a complete distraction. That's talent, folks.

Finally, we get a Gamera sighting when the kids leave the earth's atmosphere. A nearly endless Gamera/spaceship race brings the action hard. You also get a close-up of the inside of Gamera's mouth (Do you ever get to see a close-up of the inside of Godzilla's mouth?) as he, I'm pretty sure, attempts to make out with the ship. But the best action sequence is the superbly realistic scene on that tenth planet between a metallic birdy thing and what I thought was a monster with three-fourths of a dolphin for a head but what actually turned out to be a monster with a knife for a head. Didn't find out until later that the latter was the menacing titular bad monster in this movie. It's not much of a fight. Guiron repels a cheap-looking yellow beam and dismembers the metallic birdy before doing a Jabba the Hutt impression. It's pretty badass and kind-of gruesome for a monster movie intended for children. But honestly, Guiron is so dumb looking that it's hard to take any of it seriously. He could have been raping my grandmother, and it wouldn't have seemed all that bad.

When our hero gets to the planet (because he's a friend of children, and there are children who need savin'), he gets beat up pretty good by the villain. He even bleeds some green stuff. He recovers later on, of course, probably because the producers of Gamera vs. Guiron weren't finished demonstrating their complete disregard for all things logical. First, the heroic turtle is on his back at the bottom of a lake and can't get up no matter how much the boys yell his name or how much he struggles. But then a giant rock hits him in the chin, a development that inexplicably gives him strength. The two battle again (hence the "vs." in the title), Gamera repeatedly racking himself and nearly teabagging Guiron before doing some gymnastics and, as one of the boys explains, "dancing go-go." I love it when Japanese monsters dance. The good guy wins, there's an improbable spaceship repair and some of the worst blue screen work you're likely to see this week, and we eventually get to a happy ending. It's really only happy because we get to see Goobjohn again.

I enjoyed the cheapo set design of the alien planet. It looked like a muted sci-fi train set. The interiors were probably borrowed from another cheap Japanese science fiction movie, and I'm sure the only requirement the casting director was looking for with the child actors was that they were well behaved enough to not run around and accidentally knock down a cardboard wall or two, an act that would have likely cost the studio tens of dollars. As Guiron tries to get to the children and destroys the building their in, large rocks fall all around and even on the children. They don't seem to harm the boys though thankfully, and that makes just as much sense as rocks falling from the ceiling of a building that looks to be made entirely of metal.

It all ends with a nice message about how the world could be a nice place without traffic accidents, the same thing Al Gore's been preaching for years. He probably saw this one actually. I don't know about you, but I was slightly aroused because of the squeaky-voiced alien chicks, even when they were threatening to "eat their brains raw." And you've got to dig the cutesy music. What is it with Japanese children's movies and irritating and inane sing-a-longs?

Horrors of Malformed Men

1969 malformed men movie

Rating: 16/20

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

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

Cory's Birthday Movie Celebration: Godzilla vs. Mothra

1964 monster movie

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

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

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

Ringu

1998 Japanese horror movie

Rating: 15/20

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

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

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

Oprah Movie Club Selection for May: House (Hausu)

1977 Japanese coming-of-age story

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pistol Opera

2001 Suzuki movie

Rating: 12/20

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

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

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare

1968 Japanese monster movie

Rating: 14/20

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

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

Ichi the Killer

2001 cartoon yakuza movie

Rating: 10/20

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

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

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

Departures

2008 death movie

Rating: 16/20

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

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

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

King Kong Escapes

1967 King Kong movie

Rating: 7/20

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

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

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

Warning from Space

1956 Japanese B-movie

Rating: 14/20

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

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