davidmvining Reviews

Battle in Outer Space (1959)

Starring: Special Effects...in SPACE!!!!

[6/10 · 3 May 2024]

Ishiro Honda returns to the cinemas with another big, special effect spectacle ala The Mysterians. I'd say that this is a step down from the previous film, not having the same kind of narrative verve (the modest amount that The Mysterians demonstrated) and is more of a straightforward sci-fi adventure. That could work if, again, there were characters of any depth to be had, the kind of lynchpin necessary to bring audiences into an adventure. But, alas, the script by Shinichi Sekizawa is just too thin to accomplish that.

Alien ships attack a Japanese space station, destroying it and causing a panic in the upper-echelons of the world governments. In addition, strange weather events dealing with cold are doing terrible things like lifting entire bridges off the ground, sending trains to crash in the valleys below. There's a surprising amount of time trying to explain how cold temperatures lessen gravity (nonsense), the sort of science deification that is sadly constant in Honda's science fiction films which mixes really badly with the fact that the science itself is, well, nonsense. Anyway, the film is better when it just accepts nonsense without trying to explain it, like when Dr. Ahmed (George Wyman) gets remote controlled by the aliens, turning him into a saboteur. What's the science behind that? Doesn't matter. It just happens. That's better.

Anyway, the governments of the world decide that the only action is to send up two rockets to the moon, where the alien radio signals are originating. The first is commanded by a Japanese commander (Minoru Takada), and the second is commanded by Dr. Richardson (Len Stanford). The inclusion of the American commander is interesting mostly because he's barely in the film, but he gets prominence near the beginning and the end, like some sort of half-thought-out sop to American audiences and distributors who were eating this stuff up at the time. It sort of reminds me of the common practice these days of including minor Chinese characters in big budget films like The Martian to appease the Chinese market and funding.

Anyway, the actual main character is probably Major Ichiro (Ryo Ikebe), the Japanese commander's second hand man. He seems to be the focus, but this is such a plot-heavy film with hardly any sense of character that it doesn't really matter. He's strong, professional man in the middle of special effects. There's also his love interest (I guess) Etsuko (Kyoko Anzai) who accompanies the team to the moon. The only real bit of actual character work goes to Iwomura (Yoshio Tsuchiya) who gets controlled by the aliens (intermittently, only when they actively send commands). He's the navigator, instructed to sabotage the mission at certain points (but never the best times to completely destroy the ship because plot), and he feels guilt at his lack of command of his own actions. It culminates in a nice moment in the first of the two action spectacular finales that doesn't quite seem to make the most sense, but it's fine.

That leads me to the actual appeal of this film: the special effects. Like most of Honda's films in this vein, the main attraction is Eiji Tsuburaya's model work, and there's a lot of it here. This was obviously an expensive film at the time (probably a reason for the sort of prominent and out of place American character, a potential necessity of funding), and Tsuburaya throws a lot at the screen. The rocket launches, the alien base on the moon, the extended fight on the surface, the counterattack on Earth, it's a lot, and it's genuinely fun. There's a lot going on, and it's inventive and just a joy to watch.

So, the plot is threadbare but functional, an excuse for special effects. The characters are threadbare and don't take up too much screentime (except the early scenes when scientists try to explain stuff which is...please stop). However, the film has its focus on what it does best: models doing action and science fiction things. It's a clear line through the action from one beat to the next, and the characters almost never get in the way. It's an expensive film of modest narrative ambitions, but it manages those with flare and fun.

I mean, it's not quite good, but it's decently amusing for long stretches.

Mothra (1961)

Decently entertaining

[6/10 · 3 May 2024]

The first kaiju film from Honda that actually feels like it owes something to the original King Kong, Mothra was Toho's efforts at appealing explicitly to the female part of the movie-going audience. You see, Mothra is a girl this time. And there's singing. Other than that, it's pretty typical of this era in terms of kaiju action. The character work is thinner than it needs to be. The action is big and brash and fun. There's an effort at a different kind of movie for a while because Honda already seemed bored of kaiju movies when he started making them. It comes together in a decently entertaining package that doesn't quite work totally but is a somewhat fun time while it lasts.

A ship wrecks in a storm off the coast of Infant Island, and a rescue operation finds four survivors on the coast. This is remarkable considering the levels of radiation there due to atomic bomb testing (yup, there it is). They attribute their survival to a juice that the locals gave them, initiating an effort by the Japanese government to try and organize an exploratory and scientific team to see what's going on in the island's interior. They invite the involvement of the Rolisican government. What is Rolisica? It's a combination of how the Japanese say Russia and America, but mostly it's just a thinly veiled America (the movie ends in New Kirk City, not Kirkcow). Anyway, the Japanese government wants Dr. Shinichi Chujo (Hiroshi Koizumi) to be part of the time since he was part of the Rolisican government's previous expedition. There's a bit where he's shy about having his picture taken by two reporters, Fukuda (Frankie Sakai) and Michi (Kyoko Kagawa). It leads to nothing other than a reveal of stubble on his face, though.

The expedition is led by Clark Nelson (Jerry Ito), a Rolisican who's obviously not trustworthy from the moment we see him. I think the film is perhaps most interesting during the actual expedition. It's like a natural adventure where professionals go into a strange new place and discover strange new sites. There are strange plants, strange rock formations, strange words etched into rock. All of this is given a lighter tone by including Fukuda who sneaks on board the ship as a cabin boy and gets accepted as part of the expedition as long as he promises to not write about it (any excuse to keep these characters around, it seems). The central strange sight is a pair of diminutive princesses (Yumi and Emi Ito).

One of my biggest problems with the film is how a bunch of the elements never seem to come together into a cohesive whole, and Nelson becoming greedy at the prospect of becoming a stage producer with these little princesses is probably the biggest example. According to the dialogue, he's actually a meteorologist. I mean, it's a leap that the film never tries to bridge. He's just evil and wants to put the princesses on stage (this is where the connection to the original King Kong is most apparent). There's also a weirdness where there was obviously a late editing choice to get Nelson kidnapping the princesses at a different point, but not that different. It seems like, originally, he just went back at night while the ship was just off the coast and picked them up, but the film puts the scene after they get back to Japan. I suppose it's supposed to paper over the idea that he'd have the princesses without anyone noticing on a closed ship for days or weeks (I'd imagine there are deleted scenes around it), but it's still weird to see it play out.

The film then focuses on Nelson's successful efforts to make money off the princesses singing, but they are telepathic and singing back to the other natives of Infant Island (all regular sized for some reason), a song they use to wake up the titular Mothra. We get lost in some business of Chujo, Fukuda, and Michi trying to convince Nelson to let the princesses go. There's also a bit about coming up with a material that will block their telepathic powers that Nelson ends up using to hide the fact that he's fleeing Japan for New Kirk City. All this time, Mothra steadily awakes.

Now, in terms of the monster action (Eiji Tsuburaya is always the star of these), this is interesting because it's the first in Honda's filmography where the monster has multiple forms. The first is the larval stage, erupting from the giant egg, swimming across the sea, and heading towards Tokyo, the last place she sensed the princesses. She causes destruction, the Japanese defense forces unable to make a dent in her thick skin, until she gets to the Tokyo Tower and forms a cocoon. Her life cycle for such a large monster is really fast, but monster movie. Let's get on with it.

I would just say that monster action happens with Mothra developing her wings, flying across the world, and leveling a good part of New Kirk City, but there's an extra bit in the resolution where Chujo recognizes a similarity between one of the prominent symbols found on the island and a cross on top of a church, haloed by the sun. Normally, if you do this sort of thing, especially with one of the most recognizable symbols on the planet, you're doing it to draw some sort of comparison. I was reminded of the 1976 version of King Kong which had a visual comparison between the World Trade Center in NYC and some large rock formations on Skull Island. That felt like coincidence and a direction to look for Kong. This, though? It feels like there's supposed to be some kind of intended meaning. If I were being generous, I'd say it's an implication that Christianity is right in some way, but this is a Japanese film written by Shinichi Sekizawa who never seemed to put meaning into his films one way or the other. It just ends up feeling random, but the use is so prominent. It's the second big thing in the film where stuff just doesn't come together in ways that it feels like it should.

Anyway, the monster action is inventive and good (also adorable, I love miniatures). The character work is thin but functional except for Nelson who has some logical leaps in characterization. It looks good, moves quickly, and has some nice sights along the way. It's decently entertaining as it plays out, but it really could have used a rewrite.

The Human Vapor (1960)

A hidden gem worthy of reappraisal

[8/10 · 3 May 2024]

Well, this is a surprise. I did not expect to so thoroughly enjoy The Human Vapor. A curious mixture of film noir, The Invisible Man, The Phantom of the Opera, and even a soupcon of His Girl Friday, this genre-bending horror film from Ishiro Honda is his most effective and entertaining film since he got stuck in the science fiction ghetto. A lot of credit has to go to the script by Takeshi Kimura who had written some of Honda's better science fiction fare over the previous few years, so it's nice to see that Honda's confident filmmaking supported by a script that mostly gets things right.

A bank robber is foiling the police, namely Detective Okamoto (Tatsuya Mihashi). The robber gets the money, leaves no trace of his presence (including fingerprints or footprints), and vanishes from the car crash scene during his flight. The car crashed near the house of semi-retired Noh dancer Fujichiyo Kasuga (Kaoru Yachigusa) where her live-in, elderly servant Jiya (Bokuzen Hidari) insists no one has been seen in or near the house other than the two all day. Okamoto tells his suspicions that Kasuga must be involved somehow to his girlfriend, the reporter Kyoko (Keiko Sata) (her scenes seem to be influenced directly by Howard Hawks' newspaper film) and his superiors at the police station. So begins the film's feel of film noir as Okamoto trails Kasuga, a femme fatale, and investigates seemingly disparate paths towards one mystery. It's quiet with a bit of tension that feels appropriate for the opening of a noirish mystery and thriller.

There's also a surprising reticence to jump into over-explanations of nonsense science. In fact, we don't even get an explanation for the bank robberies until halfway through the film. Honda and Kimura show a really strong amount of restraint before jumping into Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects, establishing character to build the story upon. I suppose the only complaint I have with this opening is that the relationship between Kyoko and Okamoto is too thinly drawn, like it needed one full scene of them being romantic instead of buddy-buddy. It's a small part of the film since the romance is more of a character-based subplot than the main story, so it's easy to forgive. However, there's a moment late in the film that relies on the relationship that doesn't hit as well as it should.

It takes until about halfway into the film before the man responsible shows up, Mizuno (Yoshio Tshuchiya), whom the newspapers end up calling the gas man since he can literally turn his body into gas at will. His demonstration to the police is interesting because if you take the perspective that this is a science-fiction film, it's frustrating because the police should know the rules that weird things are gonna happen, right? Except they don't know that, so it's this weird moment where we have to push aside all of our knowledge of movies to accept perfectly acceptable actions by police. It's not really a criticism, just an observation.

Anyway, I love Mizuno as a bad guy. The inspiration from The Invisible Man extends well beyond just the use of empty suits walking sometimes. It goes to how Mizuno acts and the reasons behind it. There's a mad scientist bit, Mizuno being the victim of Dr. Sano (Fuyuki Murakami) and his experiments shown in a brief flashback (with mercifully no effort to explain the nonsense science), which is a tie to James Whale's film, but Mizuno also has a line about how he's no longer human. He doesn't need to follow human morality which is exactly the sort of madness that plagued Claude Rains' character, derived from the eponymous character in Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse films. It doesn't extend in dialogue beyond that, but it provides the foundation for his actions and madness.

His plot, though, is to fund the comeback by Kasuga to the stage, stealing the money and giving to her to put on a large recital that should cost at least ten million yen. There's a plot to try and capture and kill the gas man who can filter under doors at will, introduced by another minor scientist character who gives no real detail on it (mercifully), allowing greater focus on our characters as we go to the ending. The real emotional core of the film ends up being Kasuga (making the underdevelopment of the relationship between Okamoto and Kyoko slightly less important), and it's a surprisingly strong culmination of her and the overall story.

So, I have some small issues with a couple of character moments. The other is Mizuno's affectation towards Kasugo is more implied than shown (there's a moment where Okamoto announces it when he first meets the guy that feels off), but otherwise this film is really, really good. It's an homage to classic Universal monster movies, film noir, and Howard Hawks that manages to feel alive on its own. This is, I think, deeply underappreciated. It's really good. I'm a fan.

Varan (1958)

Dull retread

[4/10 · 3 May 2024]

What if Ishiro Honda made a cheap Godzilla ripoff for Japanese television that was quickly recut into a feature length motion picture? Would you believe me if I told you the result was not very good? That it does nothing to set itself apart from the movie it's copying? Well, as can be said for pretty much every Honda monster film, the special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya are the star, even if Varan himself ends up looking like Godzilla's brother from another mother.

A pair of entomologists go into what is called the Tibet of Japan, a remote region in the inner mountains of the nation, where a butterfly only known to live on mainland Asia has been found. Does this butterfly have anything to do with the inevitable monster? Nope. We do get a knowing wink at the audience when one of them says that it's too early for monsters as they drive out from the small village, so that's nice, knowing that Honda and his writer Shinichi Sekizawa are savvy enough to know not to reveal their monster too early. Anyway, the pair are killed in mysterious circumstances, mostly after they feel an earthquake that isn't an earthquake. This sends the sister of one of them, Yuriko (Ayumi Sonoda), to their lead professor, Dr. Sugimoto (Koreya Senda), and attaches herself to the expedition to investigate what happened. The investigation seems to be one person, Motohiko (Fumindo Matsuo), until Yuriko joins which then convinces Kenji (Kozo Nomura), another entomologist, to join. So, that's weird. Anyway.

They go to the village, learn that the locals worship a god named Baradagi, and insist on investigating despite the warnings. They end up chasing after a small boy who is, in turn, chasing after his dog, and awaken the wrath of Baradagi. Of course, there are efforts to properly categorize this monster, labeling him as Varanapode, hence the name Varan, which is de rigeur at this point in these films, but thankfully it doesn't last too long.

However, the film jumps right into the whole, "Japan must use all of its terrifying military might to destroy this thing that was being all alone and isolated until scientists stuck their nose in a place they were told not to go." You know, for a genre of films that almost deify scientists, it's the scientists who start most of the problems. The overall theme is, however, a plea for responsible science, but the scientists who start things never seem to learn a lesson and often are strategizing how to create larger weapons (never nuclear) to defeat the thing that they started. It's weird.

Anyway, irritating Varan just leads to him deciding to fly away (he has flying squirrel-like wings which seem insufficient for flight, but whatever, at least we don't have 3 minutes explaining it), and he heads towards Tokyo. The military has to get on alert to fight it off, and we have our standard look at how conventional weapons have no effect. They must come up with another weapon! Well, good thing that Kenji has developed an explosive that burns twenty times hotter than TNT! (But no nuclear, remember, nuclear burns a whole lot hotter than that.) They have to use it! But it isn't effective! They have to find another way!

Seriously, this is just rote. There's nothing particularly interesting about anything that happens. The characters are, again, threadbare, having something close to stories around them that are mostly ignored (Kenji and Yuriko become an item, I guess, not that it matters). The plotting is just standard giant monster stuff. The highlight is, once again, Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects. Sure, Varan is essentially Godzilla with some fleshy stuff under his arms, spikes along his spine, and the ability to crawl on all-fours, but he's decently realized and looks pretty good on screen. The destruction is always nice to see, the embrace of miniatures making it all the more adorable, and there's a good amount of it towards the end.

It's just that there's nothing else of interest to really talk about. The story around it isn't so much horribly handled as just boringly repeated. The characters are largely just there. The performers do what they can, but they have so little to do that they don't really make an impression. At least Varan himself looks decent as he stomps on tiny buildings.

That's something.

The H-Man (1958)

Good monster, underwritten gangsters

[5/10 · 3 May 2024]

Moving away from giant monsters for a moment, Ishiro Honda brings Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects skills on a smaller, perhaps more effective, scale in service to a monster movie disguised as a gangster film. It's a curious mix where we get Honda's now expected over-explanation of scientific nonsense in combination with underwritten characters who never feel terribly distinct. The spectacle is on a much smaller scale and with less screentime, leaving these thin characters to fill in the gap which creates a less enticing overall genre experience. I mean, it basically functions as it lurches from one bit of special effects to the next, but at least the special effects are pretty good.

Misaki (Hisaya Ito) is running through the rain with a parcel of heroin when he suddenly gasps in pain, shoots downward, and vanishes, his clothes left behind. The police are baffled at the happening, the investigation being led by Tominaga (Akihito Hirata). They are approached by Dr. Masada (Kenji Sahara), a specialist in radiation, who has a theory that Misaki was dissolved because of radiation from H-bomb tests off the Japanese coast. At the same time, Tominaga is watching Misaki's girlfriend, Chikako Arai (Yumi Shirakawa), a lounge singer who purportedly knows nothing of Misaki's work with organized crime smuggling drugs.

So, this being a Honda science-fiction film, the scientist is definitely going to be right, dragging the civilian authorities towards the truth, and the film is going to take a good amount of time laying out why all this silly nonsense purported to be science is right and true. I just don't understand this need to try and prove to the audience that men being turned into gelatinous monsters who crawl up and down walls and turn people into water (or other monsters, it's just a bit unclear) when it's so obviously nonsense. I mean, it's part of an effort to scandalize H-bomb testing and atomic power in general, but by putting such weight onto stuff that's obviously not true about what radiation does feels counter-productive to the point. It desensitizes the audience to the dangers of nuclear power rather than sells them an actual case. This is why combining silly genre thrills with serious points about the world is a tricky balance to pull off.

Anyway, most of the movie is actually about the investigation around Misaki that touches on the organized crime angle. It's honestly not great. There's no strong sense of anyone in the organization, so the investigation feels half-hearted. It ends up focusing on Uchida (Makoto Sato), another low-level gangster who pretends to be eaten by the monster, leaving his clothes behind, and going after Chikako because he desires her. Since Dr. Masada and Chikako had grown close during the investigation, it provides what little character-based thrill is in the film, but none of the character-based stuff is terribly well-done. But, at least it's there. There's something. It's not great, but it's there.

The highlight is the monster itself. Filmed inventively using upside-down sets from all angles to simulate movement along with a weird ghostly image at heightened moments, the monster is surprisingly effective for being just a glob of goo that snakes around on the ground. It's helped in no small part by the actual visual of the bodies dissolving when attacked. It's quite gruesome in a non-gory way, and it's very effective. Honda saves the visual for later in the film, not giving it away too early, which would have been a great thing if what filled those early minutes were effective storytelling. But, it's, at best, moderately functional storytelling that precedes that reveal.

So, I wouldn't go so far as to call it bad. It's interesting to see Honda squeeze in another genre into his monster movie, implying that he had some desire to work outside the realm that his producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, was forcing him into all of the time. The monster stuff is really good. There's a flashback scene to the shipping tanker where it all started that's decently well-done. However, the gangster stuff is massively underwritten, the characters are paper-thin, and the overall plot is nothing terribly exciting while the thematic point is degraded to the same level of silliness as the science that "explains" the monster. It's a mixed bag, but Honda has made worse. There's some halfway decent entertainment to be had in this film, but only halfway.

The Mysterians (1957)

B-movie fun

[7/10 · 26 April 2024]

Up until the final ten minutes or so, I was a bit more mixed on this science fiction effort by Ishiro Honda. It's silly but doesn't realize it. It's got that singular obsession with dull scientists that Honda has included with every monster movie he's made so far. It's both underexplained and overexplained at the same time. But, with ten minutes to go, a character is reintroduced in a narratively interesting way, and it pushed my appreciation up just a bit more. This, reportedly the personal favorite of Honda himself from his own work, is a small gem from a shaky and uneven filmography.

In a small village at the base of Mount Fuji, astrophysicist Ryoichi (Akihiko Hirata) insists on doing his research despite no seeming reason for it at that particular place, causing confusion in his friend Joji (Kenji Sahara), his sister Etsuko (Yumi Shirakawa), and his fiancée Hiroko (Momoko Kochi). Before we get time to settle on these questions, though, presented during a local and colorful festival, the forest surrounding the village is consumed in flames. A few days later, an earthquake eats up the entire town and, supposedly, Ryoichi himself who stayed behind to further investigate. Out of this hole comes a giant dome, populated by the eponymous Mysterians, an extraterrestrial race that come from a planet Ryoichi had theorized was once in between Mars and Jupiter. The translation around celestial phenomena seems to be not great, but I think it's supposed to have once been the Asteroid belt. The subtitles say that it was original a star, which would make no sense, so I think it's really just a translation issue and not that Honda and his screenwriter, Takeshi Kimura, think that asteroids come from stars.

Anyway, the Mysterians come with a message that they only want three square kilometers of land for their own, and Japan is having none of it. They immediately set out to attack. One of the issues I have with the film is how we are expected to assume that the Japanese efforts are just. I think it may just be a "defense of the homeland" sort of thing, but there isn't even that kind of explanation given. No one says, "Not Japan! Go to China and displace those dogs," or anything. It's just, the Mysterians show up, and it's time to fight them. And fight them the Japanese forces do, helped not at all by the fact that the Mysterians' first appearance is a giant robot that comes crashing out of a mountain and causing havoc (put in to take advantage of that whole Godzilla craze for giant things stomping on stuff that Honda started with Godzilla).

The regular joy of these Honda monster/science fiction films is the special effects, and it's obvious that Honda had a good budget to play with here. The miniature work is very good, and there's a lot of it. Special flying ships. Lasers. Rolling antennae that shoot big beams of tech that are definitely not nuclear powered (it's an assumption going in at this point that Honda makes non-nuclear, at best, movies, if not outright anti-nuclear, necessitating often ridiculous leaps in new technology for characters to use). But, aside from some brief negotiations, television broadcasts from Ryoichi saying that the Mysterians are truly peaceful and humanity should do what it can to appease them, and some high-level discussions in the military and civilian government (including some international discussions with the UN) about what to do, the focus of the back half of the film really is those special effects.

The talk is mostly just excuses to use new-looking technology to try and explode things, and I do get a kick out of it. It honestly wasn't enough to save the film overall for me since pretty much the entirety of the human-side of the storytelling was dull, but I was having a decent enough time. And then, Ryoichi's friends sneak into the Mysterian base, and we get a reintroduction of a character who finally provides the rationale for the Japanese people to uniformly oppose the presence of the Mysterians, and it was a nice narrative effort to provide some small levels of complexity and even what one might consider a plot twist into things. Well, let's just say that I appreciated that a lot more than the inventor of the oxygen destroyer killing himself at the end of Godzilla as an effort to appease the guilty Japanese conscience.

So, it's colorful fun that almost doesn't have enough to come together as a whole but pulls it off in the end. It's not anywhere close to Honda's best film (I have to assume that Honda was talking about his science-fiction output when he called The Mysterians his favorite, purposefully separating them from his melodramas and war films because those are regularly far superior). However, in terms of his science-fiction work, it's a bit more thoughtfully crafted and comes together decently well. Also, I always get a chuckle at seeing Takashi Shimura in a film like this. It's so beneath him, but he was a contract player at Toho and was game for anything the producers assigned him.

Be Happy, These Two Lovers (1957)

Wonderful, Ozu-like melodrama from Honda

[8/10 · 26 April 2024]

One of the last times Ishiro Honda would find time in his schedule of making monster movies to make something small again, Be Happy, These Two Lovers is the smallest film that Honda had made. It's more in line with the output of Yasujiro Ozu than anything Honda had made up to that point. It's also a wonderfully accomplished little family melodrama about two young people who marry despite their parents' objections and the travails of an early marriage. The focus on character is clear and precise, laying the groundwork for a marvelous bit of pathos by the end.

Hisao Wakao (Hiroshi Koizumi) works in the sales department of a fishery. One day, his branch manager, Nishigaki (Takeo Oikawa) asks him to marry his daughter, a girl he's met once. The same day, he receives a letter from his mother (Yuriko Hanabusa) telling him that she's arranged for a marriage interview with another girl. In response, Wakao walks up to Masako (Yumi Shirakawa), a girl in the office, invites her to a movie, and tells her his predicament. He loves her, and she is quick to return the feeling. The problem for Masako is that, after the death of her older brother, her father (Takashi Shimura) has become extremely protective of his two daughters, the older of whom, Chizuko (Keiko Tsushima), married Toshio (Toshiro Mifune) against her father's wishes.

Wakao's insistence on pursuing the desires of his heart with Masako instead of any potential benefits to his career by marrying the branch manager's daughter, an offer that goes to Nakajima (Yoshifumi Tajima) instead, is the defining choice of the film, and everything else feeds from that. The first half is defined by Masako's father trying to exert his will on her, Chizuko and Toshio offering what help they can, and the central pair going against every outside word to do what they want for their happiness. It ends with their wedding, and I've never gotten choked up hearing the Bridal Chorus by Wagner during a wedding scene, but the way Honda has it develop, with Toshio started it on his horn and it developing from there plays just right.

The second half of the film is on the two trying to make their way, on their own, in their troubling few weeks and months of their marriage. It starts with Wakao seeing the potential promotion go to Nakajima. He ruminates with Kosugi (Hirota Kisaragi), the section chief forced to move to Osaka to make room for Nakajima to become the new section chief in Tokyo. At his going away party, Kosugi decides to take a swing at Nakajima for his insolence at the whole situation, an altercation that Wakao gets in the middle of leading to him giving up his position at a time when there are 700,000 unemployed men in Japan. There are communication problems since Wakao doesn't want to tell Masako of his shame. Money grows increasingly tight. Their relationship continues to strain as it becomes obvious to Masako that Wakao is hiding things from her, including his frustration with the overall situation stemming from his decision to marry her.

The film's resolution is such a wonderful collection of events as the two look through their situation, get advice from Chizuko and Toshio, and reach a life-affirming place that feels wonderful as it plays out. Really, this is the sort of thing I was looking forward to when I decided to check out as much of the work of Ishiro Honda I could. I had this feeling that his real worth as an artist was in these smaller movies, and it pains me that I cannot find more of them. Lovetide, People of Tokyo, Goodbye, A Young Tree. These are the films I wanted to discover most, especially as a contrast to the monster mashes that defined Honda's career. If Be Happy, These Two Lovers is any indication, there's a wealth of artistic merit that Toho is simply letting languish in their vaults.

But that's a larger narrative.

The narrative here in this film is intimate, small-scale, and wonderfully realized. The central performance is Koizumi as Wakao, and he gets a lot of space to play his restrained emotions well. Mifune's part as Masako's brother-in-law allows him to charm his way through his scenes. Shimura has a surprising harshness as Masako's father as well. Honda films everything cleanly and intelligently, and, despite the obvious comparisons to Ozu, films far too actively to ever be confused with the quiet Japanese master.

Still, the overall package is a delight. A clear-eyed melodrama with restrained, Japanese form, Be Happy, These Two Lovers was a very good little discovery in the middle of a career that pushed in a very different direction. Honda was much more than monster mayhem. Now, though, that we're going to have nothing but monster mayhem for most of the rest of his career, let's make it good monster mayhem.

Rodan (1956)

Take out the categorization. Leave the monster action.

[6/10 · 26 April 2024]

The most basely competent of the kaiju movies spawned from the first Godzilla film's success and in Ishiro Honda's output within that genre, Rodan does the basics of monster movie mayhem well enough. The middle act sidelines the action for a weird reason, though, but Honda's first color film is a decently entertaining look at another giant dinosaur waking up in the bowels of the earth to wreck havoc upon the unsuspecting people of Japan.

Where I admire the film most is in its first act. There's a very conscious effort at building tension and mystery that starts from a surprisingly human place: two men who don't like each other at work fighting. The workplace is a coal mine in the hills of the Japanese countryside, and the two men are Goro (Rinsaku Ogata) and Yoshi (Jiro Suzukawa). Things get heightened when Yoshi gets found dead in the mines and Goro is nowhere to be seen. Obviously, the immediate thought is that Goro gave Yoshi the slash across the head that killed him, and the film becomes something of a murder mystery for its opening ten minutes or so. Of course, we all saw the poster going into the theater. We know that this isn't just some little drama about two miners who dislike each other. There will be a giant flying monster at some point, but Honda and his writers are interested in building up the situation.

The investigation leads to huge larvae that kill more workers, breaks out of the mine, terrorizes the little mining village, and attracts increasing attention. The one worker who survives the attack is Shigeru (Kenji Sahara), one of the mine's engineers. He lives but has complete amnesia which drives us headfirst into the complete drag of a second act. As the creature grows to full form, gaining the name Rodan while it sprouts giant wings and flies at supersonic speeds, we're mostly watching Shigeru try to regain his memory. Why? Because Dr. Kashiwagi (Akihiko Hirata) needs to properly categorize Rodan as Meganulon. Why is the middle act so completely obsessed with this? Why do we spend any time at all beyond a quick scene designed to give this large slice of silliness a modicum of realism (the need for realistic explanations around giant monsters in giant monster movies always confuses me)? Why does everything seem to completely stop while Dr. Kashiwagi goes over bits of information pulled from random witnesses, including a picture taken of a wing and a talon, to try and properly categorize the creature? It's such a dud of an act, and it takes at least twenty minutes.

However, it's just a stopping point until the actual mayhem gets unleashed. Sure, Rodan (well, technically multiple of them) are flying around, causing some havoc, but the film has spent most of the previous act watching Dr. Kashiwagi look at pictures in books while Shigeru shivers at the sight of his fiancée because he can't remember anything. However, with the categorization question solved after Shigeru regains his memory and we get a flashback to his discovery in the mines, all out monster destruction happens. Sure, we can see the wire holding up the Rodan costume as he tears down buildings or fights off planes from the Japanese Self-Defense Force.

It's big. It's gawdy. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but there's a lot of booms and I like it. This is the purpose of monster movies, and Honda along with Tsuburaya deliver it all with clarity and style in Honda's first feature film with color.

I wonder if the need for the categorization chapter is because there "needs" to be a human element. One day, I'll find a kaiju movie that is literally nothing but kaiju and their antics, but it was never going to happen at this point in history.

That's not to say that it's impossible to make compelling human characters in a kaiju movie. However, Rodan doesn't accomplish it with what it presents. The amnesia thing is fake (all amnesia in fiction is fake, and writers should never use it ever), and the categorization stuff is boring and serves no purpose. However, the film does start with the conflict between the two miners which is a fascinating little way to bring us into the story. I liked that quite a bit.

So, it doesn't quite work as an overall package, hindered massively by its dull as dishwater middle, but the opening and close are surprisingly strong. I'd throw it on again for a light entertainment now and again.

Jû jin yuki otoko (1955)

There's some decent monster action, at least

[4/10 · 26 April 2024]

Ishiro Honda, fresh off of making Lovetide instead of the first Godzilla sequel (Godzilla Raids Again), was given a similar task by Toho: another monster film. Instead of a giant reptile tearing up major Japanese cities, Honda directs the story of a slightly larger ape-like monster in the Japanese mountains. This isn't exactly a huge step up in the monster genre, being a confused combination of three storylines inelegantly woven together in ways that make the whole point of the film muddy at best. I get the sense that this script was thrown together very quickly, the production rushed, and no one was particularly invested in the exercise.

A mountaineering club is coming back from the mountains after an adventure that has left them shaken. They get interviewed by a journalist, and we get the whole thing in flashback (it's a structural decision that I don't think contributes anything to the film). Anyway, the club had gone into the mountains months previous for skiing when one of their group, Takeno, disappeared with mysterious large tracks marking where he went. The winter weather was too much, though, and the club returned after the spring thaw to look again. This group is led by Professor Tanaka (Nobuo Nakamura) and features most prominently Machiko (Momoko Kochi), Takeno's sister, and her lover Iijima (Akira Takarada). At the same time, another group, led by Oba (Yoshio Kosugi), are animal trappers looking to find the mysterious animal and bring it to a circus.

So, this would be enough for a story. Two opposing groups looking for the same animal with completely different purposes. However, instead of just some lonely yeti in the mountains who may or may not have a young Japanese student prisoner for months, we also get the introduction of a remote, isolated, and primitive village that calls the yeti the Old Master. This is honestly just one major subplot too many for a simple monster movie, and the plight of this remote village in competition with the rest of the story, especially the fate of Takeno, being the actual focus. It seems odd to say that the fate of a village is less interesting than the fate of a single missing student, but considering the point of view of the story and the general focus, yeah, it is.

And point of view is just a shambles here. The story is being told by the students who have their own recollections and the journal left behind by Takeno, but they're telling bits of the story that they never saw, mostly around Oba and his men. Without the flashback structure, this doesn't matter at all. With the flashback structure, it's weird and makes pieces that should fit together easily enough at a basic level no longer fit together. It's also a relatively minor complaint with the film.

The bigger complaints I have are about how isolated the three stories are from each other. The two that are the most connected are between Oba's men and the village through the young woman Chika (Akemi Negishi) since Chika actually leads Oba to find the yeti and the yeti's son. This action leads to the yeti being very mad and tearing up the village itself. However, the mountaineering club is completely disconnected from it. Hard cut all of this out and, well, you get a 40 minute movie. However, it would be a clear series of actions of the club getting into the dangerous valley and finding their way to a cave where the yeti resides. It still wouldn't be a smooth action because they do follow the village fire to get there, but heck, it could be just a random fire.

The other problem inherent in the film is that there are just so many characters in the limited runtime. Oba has henchmen who get attention. The mountaineering club is more than the three characters named. The village has an elder. And then there's the journalist on top of that. All of these characters have to compete for screentime with monster action and some beautiful photography of the Japanese mountains.

That being said, the monster action is...decent. It's not great like the attack on Tokyo in Godzilla, but the yeti itself looks decent (its face having a surprising amount of articulation), and the action around it has some skill. That's helped in no small part that even though the script is a mess, Honda can still frame things nicely and gets some good compositions pretty consistently, especially at the attack on the village.

Apparently the film is some kind of embarrassment for Toho not because it's kind of terrible but because its portrayal of the mountain people is supposed to be a manifestation of the Burakumin. It's supposedly kind of racist at this point. Honestly, it should probably be more ashamed because this was a rushed product that completely wasted a high quality talent like Honda to take advantage of a quick fad poorly. But it looks decently and the monster action is fine. That's not much, but it's not nothing.

Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

Lowered ambitions

[5/10 · 26 April 2024]

Ishiro Honda was off making Lovetide (a film that I cannot track down) when Godzilla became such a smash hit in Japan, leading Toho Studios to rely on the talents of Motoyoshi Oda (as well as returning special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya) to execute the quick and dirty sequel to their unexpected success. Gone are the pretentions of any of this silly kaiju action meaning anything, replaced by basic, largely unremarkable character work in between monster action. The lowered ambitions work in the film's favor to some limited extent, especially in comparison to the previous film. I mean, it's not a good film, but it's fine.

Some time after the death of Godzilla in the seas off the coast of Japan, Shoichi Tsukioka (Hiroshi Koizumi) works as a pilot helping fishing vessels find their next quarry when his fellow pilot Kobayashi (Minoru Chiaki) crashes on a small island. Rescuing him, they witness another Godzilla fighting a giant monster called Anguirus. After a brief cameo by Takashi Shimura to recap the previous film's "science" (including film clips!), the authorities of Japan have to figure out how to deal with continued attacks from the giant monsters living just off the coast. They settle on using flares to attract the monsters out to sea whenever they show up.

What is both kind of interesting and also a dead weight on the film is that the little character beats just keep going (save for one important instance). Shoichi is sort of engaged to the boss's daughter, Hidemi (Setsuko Wakayama), and in the face of a renewed Godzilla threat, they still have their little romance. Kobayashi is loveless and wants love, so he wants to keep looking for his ideal girl. I mean, life goes on even in the face of impending doom, but the tonal contrast is sometimes quite striking here.

Godzilla approaches Osaka, and the plan to drive him away from the coast works. It works, that is, until a random group of prisoners being transported in a prison van overpower their guards, run off, steal another car, and run into the fishery where they cause a massive explosion during the blackout, attracting Godzilla's attention and starting the destruction all over again. It's a weird distraction and overcomplicated way to get the fishery burning with a worker accidentally dropping a cigarette and lighting something on fire would have done just as well.

The whole thing ends up attracting not only Godzilla but Anguirus as well, and the two fight. It's part of the film's behind the scenes trivia that the cameraman on the special effects unit undercranked rather than overcranked the camera, making the monsters move faster than normal rather than slower. I suspect that Tsuburaya simply didn't have the money to reshoot because the images of the two monsters quickly slugging it out is silly rather than having great scale. It's probably a reason later Godzilla films did the same thing, especially when they got sillier. So, the model work is still really good, the costumes look really good, but most of the time they move wrong.

The best scene in the film happens after the destruction of Osaka with the characters who work at the fishery trying to clean up the office and move on with their lives. They're positive and determined to be strong in the face of the damage (a marked contrast to the previous film where extras were shown waiting outside government offices demanding handouts), but it ends by going too far and concentrated for too long on Kobayashi talking about how he's going to go to the other office in Hokkaido and look for a wife, causing that tonal clash again.

The final fight with Godzilla happens on his island after Shoichi finds Godzilla's hiding place on another remote island (I assume it's another remote island), and the finale is a special effects extravaganza of models and miniatures. I mean, I really like miniatures. They're adorable and fun. The solution ends up making not the most sense (trapping in Godzilla in ice doesn't seem like it would work since he has, you know, atomic fire breath, but whatever, gotta keep him around for another sequel).

So, the character stuff is halfway decent, though it often clashes with the special effects. The special effects are mostly good, but filming the fight undercranked makes it look silly. It's a mixed bag, but it's a straight monster story that works sort of. Not great or even good. But it's sort of decent.

Godzilla (1954)

Godzilla is great! Everything else is pretty much terrible.

[4/10 · 26 April 2024]

Just for the record, yes, this is the original Japanese version, and no, I still don't like it. From a filmmaking perspective, I see a lot to like in Ishiro Honda's importantly formative kaiju movie, but from a storytelling perspective, I just cannot get involved. It seems to be built like a procedural in the vein of Fritz Lang's M, but it's silly randomness in pursuit of a solution to a problem helped none at all by the fact that there's arguably no main character. There are small snippets of efforts at character-based storytelling, but they're all under-formed and easily dismissed by the film itself in favor of thin-diatribes about the danger of H-bomb testing.

A mysterious force is drowning ships at the same spot in the sea off the coast of Japan. Local legend deems it to be an ancient monster they call Godzilla. To investigate a potential land impact, the Japanese government sends Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura) whose daughter Emiko (Momoko Kochi) is formally engaged to the recluse scientist Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) but spends all of her time and has affections for Hideto (Akira Takarada). This quartet is the closest we get to main characters, and they're all so thin, their little dramas so uninteresting, and the film's focus on them so irregular as to make them no more than side-characters, at best. It creates this weird space where we get these little bits of character drama (none of which work) in a film that's more purely a procedural that should be about professionals doing professional things to overcome a problem.

The problem is, of course, that not only does Godzilla exist, but he keeps encroaching further into Japan, wrecking destruction as he goes. After Yamane's (curious and thin) conclusion that we must accept that Godzilla was awoken by the H-bomb testing (without ever mentioning America), we get another little sliver of a theme in the form of Yamane wanting to preserve Godzilla while everyone else around him wants to destroy Godzilla because, you know, Godzilla is causing massive destruction. I mean, I get it. Yamane is a zoologist who studies animals, and Godzilla is a big animal from a different time who, on top of it all, survived H-bomb blasts. But, on the other hand...tens of thousands of dead people. I guess my bigger problem isn't the logical leap but the fact that it only gets brought up a couple of times (if its not actually the point, then why bring it up at all) but also has so much emotion tied to it. Yamane actually kicks Hideto out of his house at one point for having the opinion opposite his.

Anyway, with Godzilla rampaging (the destruction of Tokyo is honestly just outright great and easily the best thing in the film), the Japanese people are getting desperate. Their only salvation is the creation of a super-weapon made by Serizawa called the oxygen destroyer, a...something that he puts into water, destroys all of the oxygen and then...turns animal matter into just bones. It's silly, to be honest. Throw in the fact that the film half-heartedly adds in the little drama about Emiko wanting to leave Serizawa for Hideto in the mix, despite the fact that there was never any effort on the film's part except a couple of lines of dialogue to show that they were an item at all. It's unpersuasive drama told at a moment when the focus should be on the effort to kill Godzilla.

In the context of Honda's career, especially the thematic focus across his work, Godzilla is a conscious and marked departure. His previous two films (Eagle of the Pacific and Farewell Rabaul) were the works of a defeated nation facing its status as loser in a major war it started. Godzilla, the first fully fantastical film of Honda's career, takes a decidedly different path. It's really not hard to read the film as a reaction to the bombing of Japan in general (the images evoke the firebombing of Tokyo heavily) but also the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically (the blame of the H-Bomb for waking Godzilla as well as at least one direct mention of Nagasaki's bombing cement this). Contrast how there is a solution to the manifestation of atomic power in the form of the oxygen destroyer, and you've got a fantasy response to the power that defeated Japan in WWII. Throw in the fact that the knowledge of the oxygen destroyer gets, itself, destroyed, and you've got a model of the ideal Japan: smart, powerful, and responsible. Surely not the kind of nation that would Rape Nanking.

All that said, really the highlight of the film is the special effects. Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya had been effectively using miniatures for several years since the landslide in The Skin of the South, and this is their best use of the model work in their collaborations yet. It can't quite get past its reality of being miniatures, but it's still effective especially considering the stark contrasts that the two create in the black and white photography. It's almost dreamlike in its portrayal of destruction on a mass scale that obviously touched on the recent memories of the Japanese people. It's scary and effective. That the film uses so much is to its credit because when Godzilla isn't on screen, the film is dull as dishwater.

So, its thematics are thin and sometimes incoherent. Its personal dramas are half-hearted at best and kind of dumb. The special effects are great. It's also this weird alt-fantasy where Japan wins WWII by using a weapon of mass destruction against atomic energy responsibly, a marked contrast to the ideas behind The Skin of the South where nothing could be done against nature and one must merely endure. I really don't think this works, but Godzilla does stomp real good.

Saraba Rabauru (1954)

Ishiro Honda's best film

[10/10 · 19 April 2024]

This is obviously meant as a companion piece of Eagle of the Pacific. Where the earlier film told the story of the Pacific War from the Japanese and leadership perspective, Farewell Rabaul tells the story of the same theater of war from the grunt perspective. Well, not quite grunt. More like lower officers, the pilots of the Imperial Navy. More than the earlier film, though, Farewell Rabaul is the story of a defeated people, a nation that lost a massive war so totally that there's no denying it, a military so thoroughly outmatched in terms of industrial might that its perception of total dominance was dashed so completely in a way that killed millions of its young men to prove it. The package that Ishiro Honda and his trio of writers tell this story is so well done and involving, that this might be one of the best films about WWII.

In the country of Papua New Guinea is a small village called Rabaul where the Japanese had an air base from which it attacked American ships and planes after the Battle of Midway (it's actually featured briefly in Eagle of the Pacific). At this base is a small naval air command led by Captain Katase (Rentaro Mikuni) and his second in command Captain Wakabayashi (Ryo Ikebe). Katase gets injured in the opening mission, leaving sole command to Wakabayashi who has gained the moniker of Captain Oni (meaning devil) for his harsh treatment of his men, mostly in pursuit of their focus on their missions rather than the chances of life or death. That opening mission sees thirty planes go out, about a dozen come back, and carrying reports of having met over 100 American planes in response. It's obvious from the start that no matter how good the Japanese pilots may be, they're outmatched from a mechanical point of view. The core of the film is Wakabayashi's personal journey in how he views the Imperial efforts at war against America.

He starts as much of a true believer as anyone else, at least on the outside. It's obvious that despite his talk about focusing on the mission, though, he has inner misgivings about how things are playing out. I was reminded of the botched romance in The Skin of the South as we watched Wakabayashi go through a romance here with the nurse Sumiko (Mariko Okada) where Wakabayashi won't say anything to her about his feelings. This being a Japanese film, there has to be a character with deep feeling who never mentions it, and the combination of Wakabayashi's feelings for Sumiko and the path he takes regarding Japan's involvement in the war perfectly mesh for him. It's a strong example of multiple aspects of a story coming together to feed one thing at its heart: silence.

The Japanese pilots are plagued by their own personal Red Baron whom they call Yellow Snake based on the painted image of the animal on his plane. Wakabayashi suspects that Yellow Snake must be a pilot of deep experience in order to take apart his pilots in their Zeros so easily. There's even a nice scene as Wakabayashi tries to talk one of his newer pilots through instructions on how to save himself after he has his fuel tank punctured, but the young pilot simply panics and falls to his death. Wakabayashi is also contrasted with Lieutenant Noguchi (Akihiko Hirata) who is more outwardly emotional and even wants to go back and try to rescue a fallen pilot who may be alive behind enemy lines, something Wakabayashi refuses outright.

The turning point is when they capture Yellow Snake (Bob Booth), an affable American who only joined the military after Pearl Harbor less than two years prior and had been a refrigerator salesman. Despite his good nature and even excitement at meeting Commander Oni (why the Americans would have the same nickname for Wakabayashi as the local New Guinian girl who hates him is unclear but whatever, that's tiny), Wakabayashi cannot bring himself to even look the man in the eye. The Japanese are being defeated by amateurs with the might of the American industrial complex behind them. In addition, Yellow Snake outlines how Japanese military tactics are antithetical to life itself, wasting life so easily, an accusation that comes right before the idea for Kamikaze flights in the Zeros to make up for lack of bombs comes to him from his superior officers. Life becomes important to Wakabayashi in a way that he had forgotten. The rest of his actions through the rest of the film aren't so much outright insubordination, but they do urge him into action to preserve life where he could in situations where he would have previously just let death happen.

Also, there's a sequence that if it wasn't inspired by the rescue sequence in Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings (or Ceiling Zero since they're essentially the same film), I'll eat my hat.

The emotional reality of the film may be a step or two removed from actual reality (the idea of Japanese pilots treating a captured American pilot so nicely seems...slightly farfetched), and there's definitely an ex post facto element of trying to get the Japanese people to forgive themselves for what they did in the war by providing idealized portraits of what it was like. However, within the context of this idealized portrait of a loyal yet conflicted soldier of great skill, Wakabayashi is a compelling subject. He is a Japanese ideal, and the tragic path he ends up taking towards the end is both heroic and sad at the same time.

Honda films remarkably well whether in the local bar, the officers' quarters, or in the sky. His use of model work (actually done by Eiji Tsuburaya) is effective and combines well enough with real footage (the biggest difference being the quality of the filmstock used, the war footage being mostly done with very grainy 8mm film) while keeping the action clean. The actors are very good as well, and they might be the best performances in a Honda film so far. Ikebe is the cornerstone that film is built on, and his quiet reserve just gets to me.

Honestly, I completely loved this film. I do think it might be one of the great WWII films. It's quietly emotionally resonant, a fascinating portrait of a defeated military force, and a look at the brotherhood of the skies, a subject I always find so compelling on its own. It also touches on the impermanence of life during war making Farewell Rabaul potential double-feature fodder not just for Eagle of the Pacific but also Only Angels Have Wings and even John Ford's They Were Expandable. Honda made an absolute gem here, and that Godzilla completely overshadows it is unfortunate. Farewell Rabaul is the superior film Honda made in 1954.

Taiheiyô no washi (1953)

Hagiography and history lesson, done quite well

[8/10 · 19 April 2024]

I wonder if the portrayal of Admiral Yamamoto in Ishiro Honda's Eagle of the Pacific represents an ideal for the Japanese dealing with their country's legacy after WWII. Honda makes a hagiographic portrait of the man in the years leading up to the outbreak of war with America, the debates about the Tripartite Pact, and the two major engagements that defined Yamamoto, Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway, through to his death by American pilots. It's almost as much a history lesson as it is a portrait of a man, and the surprise is how well it works. I suspect strongly that the portrait of Yamamoto is too soft for who he actually was, but the effect within the film is still quite strong.

The film actually begins with an interrogation of a leftist assassin who made an attempt on Yamamoto's (Denjiro Okochi) life. It's an interesting quick look at the makeup of the higher levels of Japanese government from the outside, but we spend the next twenty minutes or so as we watch the Prime Minister Konoe (Minoru Takada) try to form cabinets, keep them, and watch them dissolve over constant efforts to join the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. All the while, Yamamoto has been given a small position off to the side, admired by his men, but waiting for his retirement until he's given command of the Combined Fleet.

The ideal for the Japanese people would stem from Yamamoto's combination of sense of duty to his superior officers, repeated resistance to the war (for non-political reasons, it should be noted), and strong performance during the war. Essentially, the Japanese people could never deny being part of the war, but they could always say that they both opposed it and served admirably and nobly at the same time. It's a serious concern for a country accused of rather heinous war crimes, especially in Manchuria. This sanded down look at one of the better men in Japanese command, who died in pursuit of loyal service to his emperor despite his misgivings about the practicality of the effort, is a strong vehicle for that kind of self-congratulation masked as biography.

Still, despite my theory for how the Japanese people would consume this product, and the suspicion that Yamamoto was probably a bit rougher than this in real life (his wife and children are never even mentioned), I think it's a strong effort at hagiography, history, and war movie all rolled into one.

The height of the film is Pearl Harbor. It's built up to rather exquisitely with Yamamoto outlining his overall strategy in the war that he has insisted would rope in America for years (his political opposition insisting that the entrance into the Tripartite Pact would be purely anti-Soviet and not involve Britain, France, or America), and how Japan was simply ill-equipped to deal with a long war with the far superior nation's military and industrial might. It has to be a quick strike followed by appeals for peace, hence the attack on Pearl Harbor, hopefully crippling American naval power in the Pacific for a long stretch to give Japan bargaining power. All of this is very clearly laid out, and Honda does some very good use of miniatures to portray the battle, providing a surprising painterly quality to the action on screen. It should also be noted that there is a grand one American face in the whole film (a pilot at the Battle of Midway), Honda and his screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto feeling no need to provide other perspectives. This is a Japanese story, through and through, and I appreciate that.

The focus on Midway is probably the film's biggest issue. The portrait of the battle itself is actually quite good, emphasizing the confusion and paralysis that the lower commanders experienced as the plan that Yamamoto had laid out gets called into question because of facts on the ground (namely stemming from a call from a flight commander for a second bombing run on Midway Island itself). However, the problem is that Yamamoto is barely part of it. He sits in his command center on the Yamato as things collapse far from him, mostly without his knowledge. The Battle of Midway is an important biographical element to Yamamoto's life, but he honestly didn't have much to do with the battle as it was actually fought. Pearl Harbor happened according to plan. Midway didn't, so the plan becomes less important to the telling, putting the focus more firmly on the lower commanders who did make the decisions that day.

Anyway, the film ends nostalgically and quietly as Yamamoto marches straight towards his own death, a combination of what seem to be orders to end his own life and the American effort to use their knowledge of Japanese codes to take out one of Japan's most valuable battle commanders.

So, I found the portrait very compelling, save for the Battle of Midway because Yamamoto was pushed to the side for a long stretch of the film as events played out without his involvement. Other than that, it's a compelling look at a good man. Whether the film actually aligns with how the man actually was in history is not for me to say. I imagine it's knee deep in the truth, at least. Still, I was involved. It looks good. It's well acted (Toshiro Mifune has a small role as a pilot, which is nice to see). The miniature work is quite well done. It's really quite good.

Nangoku no hada (1952)

An overstuffed romance undermines an otherwise accomplished melodrama

[6/10 · 19 April 2024]

Ishiro Honda's second feature film is a marked step down from his rather accomplished melodrama and freshman picture, The Blue Pearl. Also taking place in a remote corner of rural Japan, The Skin of the South, tries a similar balance between local flavor, concerns, and romance, but fumbles the last part rather starkly. Really the story of a Cassandra trying to get the people of a small community to see the future that only he can see, it suddenly becomes an overbusy romance for a solid third of the film's runtime. It's inelegant, at best.

In an impoverished corner of Kagoshima, Ohno (Hajime Izu) leads a small research group into the soil composition of the mountain above the village. Poised with his research and the recent example of another village that was wiped out by a landslide, Ohno has to convince the village to not only stop deforesting the mountain but also to relocate the village completely. This effort on Ohno's part, mostly captured in his interactions with Nonaka (Yoshio Kosugi), the developer who has hired a large number of hands to do the deforestation work. This dance between them, trying to influence and even manipulate the village locals and elders is the most interesting part of the film.

Where the film stumbles is in the aforementioned romantic angle. There are four primaries in it (a minor character even calls it a love square), Ohno, his assistant Takayama (Shunji Kasuga), the local girl Keiko (Harue Tone), and the new research assistant Sadae (Yasuko Fujita). Essentially, Ohno and Sadae fall for each other when Sadae shows up, but they don't do anything about it. Takayama loves Sadae, but he doesn't do anything about it. Ohno is also infatuated by Keiko who has a tragic background (involving a rape and the death of her parents) that has left her mute though enigmatic at the same time. In addition, Sadae's uncle shows up with a suitor who happens to be the man who raped Keiko. The vast majority of all of this, including little interactions around Sadae defending Keiko to some degree, happens just after the halfway point in a concentrated dose of storytelling that seems so disconnected from everything else. The business man having nothing to do with Nonaka, for instance, makes it stand apart.

The Cassandra element comes back for the final act, and I was honestly not sure if Ohno would be shown justified in his fears or not. Of course, I could have asked if the promise for special effects was going to follow through or not. It's also where all of the characters get moments either heroic or tragic depending on who they are. It's a spectacular little finish to the film, and it takes on a curious message in the end.

There's one very minor character with a single line of dialogue in the whole film. At a village meeting, he sets aside all of the concerns people have and said that there's no competing with Nature, that if Nature decides it is time for the mountain to collapse, then there is nothing that humanity can do about it. It's also noted, that the special effects of the film show that landslides can happen even in places where no deforestation have started. It's ultimately a portrait of humanity's impotence in the face of Nature's power. That does seem to be the central motif and theme which is why the whole romance angle unsatisfies so much. It just feels like random romantic offshoots in a story that's not about anything. I suppose that Takayama and what happens to him could fit in, but it's a stretch and minor since Ohno is the main character and his romantic pulls are surprisingly weak in general.

Anyway, it's a mix. It doesn't really work as a whole because of the romance which dominates a large section, but the Cassandra elements work decently especially when combined with the mostly implicit ideas around the power of Nature. The special effects stuff is also quite nice with some good use of miniatures that I always appreciate and that Honda would become well-known for. There's nothing wrong with any of the performances, and Honda keeps his nice eye to retain visual interest throughout. But, it also just feels like too much squeezed into too small a space.

The Blue Pearl (1951)

Melodrama and Tourism in one, done very well

[8/10 · 19 April 2024]

Ishiro Honda followed the typical route of a Japanese director in being an assistant director for several years before receiving his first assignment. Most notably, he did second unit work on Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog before Toho gave him his first chief directing job on The Blue Pearl, a small melodramatic love triangle given remarkable quality through its specific focus on a small slice of rural Japanese life and its traditions, helped in no small part by Honda's already well-practiced and quality eye for visual compositions. The Japanese model that was effectively an apprenticeship model seems to have been a good one.

Nishida (Ryo Ikebe) is the new schoolteacher and assistant at the lighthouse in the Ise-Shima region of Japan. He immediately attracts the attention of Noe (Yukiko Shimazaki), the best ama diver in the small village Nishida is now to call home. At the same time, a young woman who had grown up in the village, Riu (Yuriko Hamada), fresh from Tokyo with the clothes and accessories to get the local girls jealous of her new look and the young men slavishly following her and her obvious sexuality. That's a remarkable contrast to the traditional ways that women attracted men in the village: by being the best ama divers. Ama divers wear the largely sexless outfits of impoverished Japanese, but they provide most of the village's income through the finding of abalone.

The titular blue pearl is part of a local legend (most likely invented for the film or source novel by Katsuro Yamada) where a local ama diver was promised to a foreign groom who turned out to be a Dragon God. She died by jumping into a well, and she became incarnate in that pearl that no one has ever seen. As the chief of the lighthouse (Takashi Shimura) explains, it has a central message of keeping the ama divers marrying local men which also helps protect the local economy. This gets mentioned only a few times, but it's part of what gives the film a certain uniqueness. It's extremely tied to the location, down to its culture. It infuses people's actions and reactions to events. It creates a distinct flavor to what is essentially just a rather simple melodrama.

The actual plot follows as Nishida grows to like Noe, Riu rankles at the expectations put on her by the village and her own inability to perform at the same level as the rest of the ama divers, as well as Riu's insistence on just causing pain to the best ama diver, Noe, by stealing her man, an effort that Nishida resists. That plotline, in isolation, is handled well enough. There's the general Japanese layer around modesty and shame that feels like a more generic narrative approach (for Japan). The characters are well written, informed by their backgrounds and living conditions and desires, but what really drives them is the culture around them. And this is where the layers of information the film places onto the action really pays off.

When Riu decides to go off from the normal diving to find the pearl, it makes sense. We know why she does it. We don't need a reminder. We just need a quick line of dialogue about how she's swimming in the direction of the pearl. When Noe makes her final decision, haunted as she is in the end, it also makes perfect sense and provides the final bit of tragedy to the whole thing. It comes together to create this, in the end, surprising sense of tragic beauty around the film's action that, for most of its runtime, was mostly just a run of the mill melodrama in an interesting setting.

I need to note the visuals as well. If this film is famous for anything other than being Honda's first film (it's not famous at all, to be honest), it's because Honda used underwater photography for the first time in a Japanese feature film (he'd done some in a documentary a few years earlier as well). There's a certain Malick-like quality to the underwater photography since it has no natural sound and Honda chooses to heavily use poetic music (by Tadashi Hattori) overlaid on top. It works really well. However, more commonly is this practiced approach to composition that he can't quite manage in the underwater scenes. I had assumed that Kurosawa's ability with composition was unique to him at the time because of his background as a painter, but Honda has similar command in his first feature. Compositions have three-dimensional qualities with strong emphasis on balance. He can move the frame and go from one nice composition to another. He's showing real quality from the beginning regarding the physical qualities of putting together a film.

So, this is a gem, mostly forgotten by the world because to the world, if they think of Honda at all it's about Godzilla. Well, this is the reason I wanted to discover Honda. Not the walking, fire breathing nuclear bomb metaphor, but his command of smaller films and more human emotions. It's nice to see that I'm not disappointed from the very beginning.

Survival of the Dead (2009)

The best neo-western...set in Delaware...starring Irish Characters and zombies you'll ever see!

[5/10 · 19 April 2024]

Well, it's not nearly as bad as Diary of the Dead. In fact, I'd call this George Romero's best zombie movie since Dawn of the Dead. That's honestly sad. Taking a minor character from the previous film and making him some sort of proto-protagonist in the middle of a familial feud that doesn't actually involve him, Survival of the Dead doesn't really work, but it's not nearly as much of a disaster as what Romero had been putting out over the previous few years.

Sarge (Alan van Sprang) leads a small unit of military officers a few weeks into the zombie apocalypse. After stealing all of the supplies from the college students of Diary of the Dead, he encounters some good ole boys in the woods who have decapitated a group of zombies, leaving their moaning heads on pikes. This is overwrought stuff, recalling the emotionally unmoored yelling predominant in Day of the Dead. Thankfully, though, it doesn't last long, the group killing all of the good ole boys and picking up Boy (Devon Bostick). This exists in comparison to the opening on Plum Island, off the coast of Delaware, where we see the exile of Patrick O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) by Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) over the question of what to do with the recently undead: kill them or preserve them in the hope for a cure.

So, this opening points to a major issue with Romero's dealing with the undead in his work since Day of the Dead. There has been this on-again, off-again effort to make the zombies sympathetic which contrasts wildly with the glee with which Romero films the killing of the undead. It's this real whiplash between efforts to use them for pathos reasons in one scene followed immediately by something like Sarge blithely shooting a flare into a zombie, which bursts their head into flame. He then lights his cigarette with the fire before kicking him off a boat. Were we supposed to sympathize with that zombie? Or were we supposed to just clap along with the violence? Romero is trying to have his cake and eat it too.

So, the army group heads to a port where O'Flynn has set up, sending out an internet video (that the internet still works more than a month into a zombie apocalypse either shows that the internet is super resilient or that the apocalypse isn't that bad) that attracts people with promises to Plum Island which end up being a trap. There's a shootout leading to the stealing of a barge, and O'Flynn ends up on the barge, acting as guide to Plum Island for the army group. The actual meat of the film is when they reach Plum Island. This is really a western filled with Irish characters set on an island off the eastern coast of Delaware (probably the best of its class!), and it's about two families at war with each other. The business of getting Sarge and his men to the island is really just because Romero had plans on making this the first of a trilogy that were probably going to star Sarge and however many of his group survived.

The conflict between the O'Flynns and the Muldoons is decently built with this emphasis on Muldoon trying to find a way to get the zombies feeding on something other than humans to try and save them. Romero films largely outside, and he takes in the sights well. There's a nice image of a zombie girl riding a horse that looks good but ends up making no sense when Muldoon tries to get her to eat the horse. If she's been riding it for weeks, why would she suddenly start eating it? I dunno.

Anyway, it's a decently put together series of events that work a bit better in isolation than strung together. It entertains basically enough while never really coming together as a complete film. Sarge and his group are out of place in the film's actual story. The zombies may be rehabilitated idea is underdone. O'Flynn has twin daughters (Kathleen Munroe), but the existence of the second is hidden for about half the film for some reason even though the first is in the opening scenes. There's also another overarching concern over cash that is so out of place if the world has actually collapsed, Romero apparently not understanding that the value of currency would vanish in a world where the government no longer backs its fiat money with its ability to tax since, you know, it's collapsed. I mean, cash is a great MacGuffin, but it doesn't work when cash has no value. In addition, it just gets forgotten for more than half the film. It's weird.

So, it's not good. However, it's decently performed (a huge step up from Diary), it looks surprisingly good, and it has some entertaining individual moments. Romero has lost all ability to make his films about something, and his efforts here are embarrassing. Still, as a neo-Western filled with Irish characters set on an island off the eastern coast of Delaware, it's not terrible.

Diary of the Dead (2007)

Romero's worst film

[2/10 · 12 April 2024]

This movie is just pure trash. The found footage subgenre is pure trash. Romero has long lost his charm, and even here, where the thematic point isn't as stupidly obvious, he can't create interesting characters. On top of that, he chooses the format of found footage which is anathema to tension and drama. Throw on top the continued fact that zombies are terrible monsters, only made scary by characters acting stupidly, and you've got a recipe for a long, tedious exercise in an old man trying to understand a world changing underneath his feet.

Narrated (extremely flatly) by Debra (Michelle Morgan), a film student at Pitt who has survived to a certain point after the start of the zombie apocalypse. She and her boyfriend, Jason (Joshua Close), were part of a senior project to make a horror movie short. Their monster was a mummy played by Ridley (Philip Riccio). Their leading lady was Tracy (Amy Lalonde). Their professor is Maxwell (Scott Wentworth). Their makeup man is Tony (Shawn Roberts). There are a couple of others, but I'm not trying anymore. Anyway, the zombie outbreak spreads while they're in the forest making their movie at night, and they return to Pitt to find it deserted. I mean...why? The University of Pittsburgh is in the middle of the city. If the outbreak were huge and everyone was turning into zombies, wouldn't Pittsburgh be overrun and they wouldn't even be able to get to the dorms? See, this movie is dumb.

Anyway, the film turns into a road picture as they take an RV through the Pennsylvania countryside, mainly heading towards Debra's parents' house, and trying to figure out what's next. The problem is that the characters are thin, we never get into their heads, and the whole zombie apocalypse thing is played out to such an extent that watching character struggle to figure out the rules is tedious. Imagine having characters spend twenty minutes arguing over the rules of vampires, and the vampires are just straight Draculas. Throw in the fact that these long-takes are filled with padding, characters moving from one place to another and lots of empty space, and you've got a recipe for making a film's opening real boring.

The ironic thing about the film is that Romero's propensity for shoehorning thin points into his films is here, but it's all done through Debra's voiceover. No one actually talks about it. And yet, it's a series of points that are largely disconnected from each other. The most common refrain is about how old media is being replaced by new media, but it's awkwardly presented at all times. There are others about the fallen nature of humanity (Romero's deep misanthropy is definitely not absent) and race relations, but, again, it's all razor thin and unsupported by the actual narrative which is a simple monster movie done poorly.

There's a bit in a hospital, Debra's parents' house, and it ends at Riley's large mansion. Everything is dependent on characters being stupid, not understanding zombies at all, and petty little arguments fought while the dialogue is delivered flatly by actors who don't seem to have any direction from their director at all.

I will say, though, that there are a couple of kind of hilarious moments sprinkled in. One is definitely intentional. The other is not. The first happens when they come across a remote farmhouse where lives a deaf Amish man, Samuel (R. D. Reid). He saves them by throwing a stick of dynamite at a trio of approaching zombies, and, in perfect comic timing, holds up a sign with his name on it while a spray of blood moves past the camera. I guffawed out loud. The second sees a small zombie thrown against a wall by an arrow in comical fashion. I don't think it's intentionally funny, but I still laughed.

It's dumb. It's boring. It spends way too much time covering ground everyone already knows. It's ugly to look at. It's beset by the worst trappings of the found footage genre (no one puts down the camera for any reason). In fact, there are several moments where we can see the other camera in a shot and watch as the cameraman prioritizes getting the shot rather than running for their lives from a zombie feet from them. It's dumb.

If not for the handful of guffaws, I'd say it has no worth at all. But, I did guffaw at least twice. Maybe it was only twice.

Land of the Dead (2005)

Just cause there's gore, that doesn't make it good

[3/10 · 12 April 2024]

This movie is real dumb. I know that zombie movie fans love their gore. While this film does have some quality gore, you have to get through terrible metaphor, poor storytelling, and atrocious dialogue for over an hour to get there. This honestly doesn't feel like it's the work of Romero. The minimalist filmmaker who made Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead with tight focus and an eye for subtle characterization has been replaced by the overbearingly obvious and angry old man who made Day of the Dead. Throw in the fact that this world makes literally no sense, and you've got yourself a bad time, a long stretch of drudgery until zombies start eating people inventively.

Years after the zombie apocalypse has torn apart society, Paul Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) rules Pittsburgh with an iron fist by...never leaving the highest levels of Fiddler's Green, a massive skyscraper. Doing his bidding is Riley (Simon Baker) who's going out into the smaller towns around Pittsburgh for one last supply run before he retires (ugh). His lieutenant, Cholo (John Leguizamo), is a hothead who has been selling liquor at inflated prices to secure enough money to join Kaufman in Fiddler's Green.

And right off the bat, we see the problem with zombie movies: zombies are terrible monsters. They're slow, dumb, and easily killed. There is no reason why a zombie apocalypse should be allowed to spread at all, much less to consume the world. However, giving the film the idea that the apocalypse spread too fast to stop until they reached this stalemate where the last of humanity is secure behind walls and rivers while the zombies fester about outside without any need to eat and just keep going forever (violating the laws of thermodynamics, but whatever), the zombie numbers can only go up with every human who newly dies. Their numbers can't grow geometrically anymore. They wander around mindlessly, easy targets to a militarized force. So, why isn't there an effort to wipe out as many as possible, clear out sectors, and retake the world? It doesn't have to be top down, it can be bottom up. The good ole boys who had no trouble in Night could clear out small towns and live.

And then you get to the vision of Pittsburgh. There is absolutely no industry in the city. All the people do is either wander the streets as poor people who wander the shops in Fiddler's Green. There's no production. There is only the reclaiming of canned goods from outlying towns and a healthy selection of vice to keep the people down. It makes just this side of absolutely no sense unless it's about the metaphor of America under a regime that uses fighting a force as an excuse to suppress the freedoms of its people. So, the world makes no sense, but it's a metaphor. Ugh. I hate symbolism. You can't critique it because it's a metaphor. Whatever.

Anyway, the actual story is about an armored truck. Cholo is mad because Kaufman won't let him into the club, so he steals the truck, including missile launchers, to destroy Fiddler's Green. Kaufman sends Riley to take back the truck (he designed it, in a meaningless detail), and Riley brings his best friend Charlie (Robert Joy) and a prostitute who was sent to die in a zombie pit for...reasons, Slack (Asia Argento) on the mission. If the film were just the mission, it might have been okay. It's not Romero at his greatest, but it's decently built enough with clear goals and clear action. However it, like pretty much the whole film, is beset by awful dialogue that spells out the most basic of things for the dumbest of audience members. Were you unable to figure out that zombies are transfixed by fireworks? Well, good luck for you, it's explained, explicitly, even though it's painfully easy to figure out. All of these stupid little bits of dialogue explaining easy to understand things, from beginning to end.

At the same time, Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) is a zombie who has evolved to some sort of level of problem-solving and leadership, leading an increasingly large horde of zombies towards Pittsburgh with Fiddler's Green functioning as a beacon in the night to attract them. Another hit against the film regarding its world-building is the lack of security around the city. Let's just say it's inconsistent. There's an early scene where we see the electric fences designed to stop them, but the river itself is barely guarded. Has humanity really gotten to this point and not realized that zombies can just walk through the water without dying? That seems like a major question that would have been answered very early and prepared for.

So, it's not guarded because if it was guarded then the ending wouldn't happen. It's stupid people being stupid because plot, except it's at the core of the film's worldbuilding. It's hard to engage with the simplistic story when everything around it is dumb. Real dumb.

At least the extended bits of action and gore are quality. That's the thin entertainment of the film's final act, even if nothing leading up to it made any sense or was at all compelling in any way. Also, Romero has a good eye, especially around the approaching zombie horde. It looks pretty good from time to time, is what I'm saying.

This movie is stupid to its core. It doesn't work as a story. Its characters are uniformly dumb. The situation makes no sense. It all falls apart the second you think about it at all. Hiding behind metaphor is a terrible defense since the text still needs to work even when there's intended subtext. Again, the gore is decent, though.

Romero should have chosen to try and keep funding something else rather than just giving into making another zombie movie after the success of Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead.

Bruiser (2000)

Sometimes, straight to video is the right decision

[5/10 · 12 April 2024]

It took eight years for George Romero to put his next film together after The Dark Half, and it ended up going straight to video. That's just kind of sad, but the film itself is honestly just not very good. It's got an interesting idea and visual at its heart, but the storytelling is so loose and unfocused, missing pretty much every moment it should in order to work, that it honestly kind of feels like Romero just gave up at a certain point early in production. Like, he didn't film enough or, by the time he got to the editing bay, he was just cutting the film down to its shortest length possible to get some kind of release. It's got some effective moments and the broken thematics are interesting to a certain extent, though, so it's not a complete waste of time. That's something.

Henry (Jason Flemyng) works at the magazine Bruiser, owned by the outrageous Russian émigré Milo (Peter Stormare). Henry has a dissatisfied wife, Janine (Nina Garbiras), with whom he lives in an unfinished mansion that is getting no work done on it because Henry is constantly low on funds. His investments, managed by his friend Jimmy (Andrew Tarbet), never seem to pan out as well as he would hope. His progress in his career at Bruiser is being stymied, perhaps in no small part because he has a friendship with Milo's ex-wife Rosie (Leslie Hope). Janine is getting tired of the whole stalled upward momentum situation, and she decides to have an affair with Milo at a barbeque he organizes for his employees. At this barbeque, Rosie has everyone make molds of their faces and paint the subsequent masks made. Henry and Janine have a fight going back home, Henry goes to bed angry, and he wakes up with a white mask permanently plastered to his face. Well, it actually is his face since it bleeds when he cuts himself trying to take it off.

So, what's this all about? Well, there are some lines of dialogue here and there that attempt to explain it. The earliest is Henry saying to Janine that she stole his identity from him. The dramatic focus is that he's a nobody, and the mask is a visual representation of that nobody-ness. Essentially, as the film plays out (and especially once we get to the resolution), it feels like the mask, the central visual motif of the film, feels underthought out.

What it's all supposed to be about is this central character of Henry standing up for himself, in the end. However, that gets so murky with the amount of violence he commits. He kills a fair few people for a variety of reasons, and it never feels like the people he's killing have gone nearly far enough to deserve death. Essentially, this makes Henry the bad guy, but as the film goes on, Romero obviously wants us to sympathize with him. He's a tortured soul who's been beaten down by the world. Granted, I've never actually seen Falling Down, but I do know that Michael Douglas was confronted with the idea that he had become the bad guy through his wonton criminality. That realization never comes to Henry in Bruiser. In fact, I don't think the film realizes that he's become such a monster.

A great highlight is his first kill. He's just woken up, and the housecleaner comes in. We've never seen this woman before. She's not pre-established at all, not even in dialogue with other characters. She immediately starts stealing little things like some silver from a box and money from his pocket. Henry smashes her head in. Is this justified? Not really. Does the movie make him out to be a bad guy? In the moment, it's unclear, but as the film goes on, the housecleaner is never mentioned again. He's also never really made to pay for any of this. He honestly feels like the "understandable" bad guy, a guy driven to violence by bad things in his life but ultimately needs to be taken down because he's causing damage to people who don't deserve it.

So, this is a portrait of a beaten down man who turns bad. Fine. I guess. Except, I really don't think Romero realized what that was. I think he took it in a more generic horror direction of spooky looking man goes killing people. He has said that it's not really a horror film (I'd agree), but instead it's a portrait of a man. I get that, but he's so unlikeable and honestly not that interesting. The character work on Henry feels razor thin to support something like this. I actually didn't get the sense that he was terribly beaten down in the opening act. He's a bit dismissed by Milo, but he credits Milo for his career, which seems to imply that it's strong, and his wife is very good looking. It's only at the barbeque that things really seem to unravel.

Anyway, Henry works through the people who have wronged him, and it crescendos at a metal masquerade. This is probably the best the film is from a primarily surface point of view. It's got a lot of color, motion, and events as the police hunt down Henry while everyone is in a mask. Henry tracks down Milo to exact his final revenge. Rosie is in the center (another bit of underdeveloped stuff is some dialogue here and there implying that Rosie and Henry loved each other once, but it goes nowhere). It works from a visceral point of view, but it's still the finale of a confused, empty film about a man who should be viewed as a monster.

The central visual of Flemyng in that white mask is interesting. The kills are quite well done. The finale is rather grand in its busyness. However, it's confused and truncated narratively. It doesn't really work. It's hard to believe that this is the result of Romero's eight year period in the cinematic wilderness. Sure, he'd been shopping stuff around and trying to get stuff made for all of it, but this is what gets made? I really feel like something just fell apart during production or editing. Honestly, it deserved to go straight to video.

The Dark Half (1993)

Romero does King fairly well

[7/10 · 12 April 2024]

George Romero finally got a chance to direct a Stephen King adaptation, and it's one of his least well known. Still, the deep misunderstandings of his raw materials in Monkey Shines get pushed aside with a much more competently assembled sense of horror and mystery in The Dark Half. I haven't read the book, so I can't tell if the relative gauziness around the actual nature of the threat is simply inherited from the source material, but while it does leave open questions, they're not big enough to derail my enjoyment of the film overall.

Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton) is a novelist who, as a child, had a vestigial twin removed from his brain after a series of headaches that became debilitating. As an adult, his financial success is owed to his pseudonym George Stark, the name he puts on novels about the hard-boiled detective Alexis Machine. After three of these things, he's ready to set aside the mantle of Stark, a decision that his wife, Liz (Amy Madigan), wholeheartedly supports because Thad seems to become Stark when he's writing the Alexis Machine novels. They organize a small publicity stunt of "burying" Stark in their hometown of Castle Rock in the Beaumont family plot, and then the murders begin.

What's interesting about the unfolding of the plot and mystery is that it seems so obvious what's going on, and it's all a misdirect. I don't get misdirected much, so when the film led me down the road of Thad being the killer for a long time, a lot longer than it probably should have been able to do in retrospect, I admire that. The murders are all targeting the people who were responsible for the "death" of George Stark. First is the photographer of the spread that appeared in the magazine, bringing the situation to the attention of the Castle Rock sheriff, Alan (Michael Rooker). The crime scene is odd, though. Thad's fingerprints are all over the truck where the photographer died, but Thad has a pretty solid alibi of being in New York when the murder took place.

The whole thing is that a manifestation of George Stark, risen from the grave spot where the fake ceremony took place, and he's going to kill everyone preventing Thad from writing more books under the name of George Stark. What exactly is Stark? I think I have a decent enough conception of what he is, but the story has some particular moments where the reality of Stark and Thad against each other feels a bit unclear.

Another little issue I have is that it's a bit overlong, drawing out the action a bit too much especially in the second act after we've figured out the connection between Thad and Stark. It drags a bit, is what I'm saying.

However, the third act is very solid stuff. Stark, having evaded the police and made mincemeat of his targets, decides that the final action is the kidnap Thad's family, Liz and their twin babies, at their cabin in Castle Rock. It's a tense and extended sequence, and a very nice encapsulation of the image and motif of sparrows that had been going through the film since the opening sequence. They have that connection with a darker, wider magic that King adapts from his Lovecraftian roots, and they have a gruesome part to play in the resolution of the action. I kept thinking of the silliness of the similar kind of sequence that ended Monkey Shines, where the threat was so unthreatening that it descended into some kind of camp that the film never played up. Here, however, the ending is gruesome and kind of terrifying, with a solid grasp of tension that builds into real horror. I kind of loved the final twenty minutes.

Another issue, though, I have with the film is the presence and actions of Sheriff Alan. He's pretty obviously there to give the audience a clear look at the status of the investigation, but his immediate connection to Thad and family as friends leads to the point where he's constantly just letting Thad go when he has every reason to just take him in under suspicion, at the very least. This could have been fixed with Thad in lockup for a night and Stark killing while he's there, but there was a greater need to obfuscate the relationship between Thad and Stark, I guess.

Anyway, the plotting and bloated nature of the middle act aside, I was pretty entertained by The Dark Half. It's well performed, especially by Hutton who has something of a ball as the dual sides of the same man while everyone else around him is perfectly adequate to their tasks. Romero continues to blend into a more generic filmmaker than he had been in his penniless Pittsburgh days (though he still films this around Pittsburgh), but he does it well. Gone is the build of entire sequences through guerilla filmmaking made cogent through the editing bay. He's more content to take longer shots and let actors do their thing uninterrupted, and he does it well.

I think this is one of the better King adaptations. It's certainly better than Pet Semetary, Romero allowing the film to feel like an actual series of events in a narrative form instead of a series of highlights. He was pretty good at this whole moviemaking thing.

Two Evil Eyes (1990)

Pretty good pair of shorter horror films

[7/10 · 12 April 2024]

George Romero and Dario Argento teamed together to make a pair of short films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories. Out of the two, I think that Romero comes out better of the pair, having a generally strong sense of story and character, but both are a bit overlong and drawn out. Still, as little ditties in their respective wheelhouses, they're entertaining entertainments.

The first is "The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar," directed by Romero. It centers around Jessica (Adrienne Barbeau), wife to the elderly and dying Ernest (Bingo O'Malley). Ernest is being hypnotized by his doctor, Dr. Hoffman (Ramy Zada) into agreeing to wealth transfers to Jessica that she will share with Dr. Hoffman after she secures the funds, allowing them to run off together. Ernest dies, and they make a decision to hide him in the basement freeze that I think is because they need time in order for the paperwork to go through and secure her fortune of three million dollars. It's hard to imagine how all of this would go down unless Dr. Hoffman is going to be allowed to declare death later without any oversight, but this feels like the trouble of adapting a nineteenth century story to the late twentieth. It's weird. Just handwave it away and move on.

Anyway, the meat of it is how Ernest doesn't seem to actually die, continuing to talk in a raspy voice even without any vital signs and locked in a freezer for days. This is where the film works best, as a claustrophobic look at guilt and paranoia that pulls both culprits down, escalating in horror and action in a way that's ultimately got the kind of visceral quality that was missing from Monkey Shines. It's more traditional horror than Romero got to be known for with his zombie films, but he handles it well enough.

The second story, "The Black Cat," is Argento's, and it starts with a dead woman having been cut in half by an axe on a pendulum (cramming in another big Poe reference right there). The crime scene photographer is Rod (Harvey Keitel). Rod has an ambition to be taken seriously as a photographer, but all of his material is of the same variety of dead bodies. His girlfriend, Annabel (Madeleine Potter), adopts a black cat, and there's a good amount of talk about how witches and black cats were burned, giving black cats collective memory of the crimes committed to them (it's an Argento movie). Rod hates the cat, strangles it while taking pictures, Annabel finds out, gets real mad, and prepares to leave him.

Over the course of what might be months but seems like days, Rod gets his pictures published in a book, Annabel tries to leave him, and Rod goes mad, killing her and putting her body in a wall in their house. He tries to establish that she's still alive by going on a vacation with a dummy of her and telling people that she's sick, trying to push off investigators of her missingness until it all crescendos with a gruesome mix of Poe irony and Argento's efforts at Hitchcock mixed with Hammer Horror with bright colored gels.

Again, both are overlong a bit, but I have less of an issue with that in Romero's story than in Argento's. As we get into the forty minute mark of the latter, it really does begin to drag. However, Argento does allow a standout dream sequence for Rod where he witnesses a witch burning in the seventeenth century that is the dramatic reenactment of some earlier dialogue about cats and witches being burned.

So, the two stories are pretty good. The Argento story feels more distinctly like his work than Romero's, but Romero was in the middle of a transition of styles towards something less guerilla and more traditionally refined. They have different strengths and weaknesses. Stylistically I give the credit to Argento, but from a more purely horror point of view, I prefer Romero's entry. There's help from the actors, not a bad actor in the bunch, all doing the yeoman's work necessary to sell the stories. The best of them is probably Keitel because he's just kind of great in everything, but Barbeau does good work as the increasingly harried woman suddenly haunted by a living dead man.

So, it's an interesting little film, an anthology of two where both go a bit overlong but are effective enough as they are. As an experiment and smaller project to get Romero working again, it's a nice reprieve from poorly conceived adaptations of lesser Stephen King-like material. At least it understands horror decently well.

Monkey Shines (1988)

Small monkeys are NOT scary?!

[5/10 · 12 April 2024]

Trying once again to leave the zombie picture behind, George Romero spent years trying to get different projects off the ground, most notably an adaptation of Stephen King's Pet Semetary that never came to fruition. He did eventually get his next film moving with this adaptation of the novel of the same name by Michael Stewart. It has a certain King-esque feel to it, taking something normal and what should be benign and giving it evil import, but there's something deeply off about the execution that takes it from intentionally terrifying to potentially campy. I'm actually kind of surprised that it's not held up as some sort of camp classic, to be honest.

Allan (Jason Beghe) is a law student and track athlete who meets a tragic accident, getting hit by a truck on a run that leaves him paralyzed. His doctor, Dr. Wiseman (Stanley Tucci) fixes a broken vertebrae, but it still leaves Allan relegated to a wheelchair that he operates by a joystick with his mouth. His girlfriend, Linda (Janine Turner), leaves him for Dr. Wiseman. His best friend, Geoffrey (John Pankow), works in a university lab where he injects serums derived from human brain tissue into monkeys, and he decides to protect his prime pupil from Dean Burbage (Stephen Root) by having it trained by Melanie (Kate McNeil) as a helper for Allan.

The first act of this film is surprisingly sedate and focused on Allan dealing with his new life. Removed from his normal levels of activity, the film functions on a portrait of Allan learning how to live again in a new way. It's a series of lows that he has to work through, including a suicide attempt only saved when Geoffrey shows up in the nick of time. It's a character piece that lays a very solid foundation for what is to come: Allan becoming completely reliant on and attached to the monkey, named Ella.

If the film had left the relationship between the two as kind of weirdly attached, Allan relying on Ella completely as she does things around the house at elevated levels because of Geoffrey's experiments, there would have been a nice clarity to the story that is replaced by more literal vagueness and potential telepathy between the two. So, while Allan and Melanie are getting close after Linda left him, he's also having visions from Ella's point of view as he sleeps. It crescendos when Allan gets a second opinion on his condition suggesting that he's not actually paralyzed, sending him into a rage, and Dr. Wiseman and Linda dying in a fire at her cabin, an event he witnesses from Ella's point of view.

So, we're left with questions around how injecting brain matter into a monkey can create telepathic connections with a human who is never injected. It's gauzy and feels unnecessary, trying to bring metaphysical horror into a film that honestly doesn't need it while just kind of confusing things along the way. However, that's less of an issue than the actual physical horror on display.

A small monkey with increased intelligence and attachment to Allan terrorizing him? Makes sense. It can even be scary since Allan can't even lift his arm to defend himself. Ella overpowering both Geoffrey and Melanie? There's a reason most of these interactions are done in very tight closeups because the few times that Romero pulls the camera back for wider shots, the size disparity becomes so blindingly obvious that it really does step towards camp. Neither Geoffrey nor Melanie should have any trouble when tussling with a small capuchin monkey, especially for as long as they do. Out of curiosity, I wondered how the horror was sold in the original trailer, and that leans much more heavily into closeups than even the film itself. The marketing team knew that the horror of the final act was a joke, and they did their best to hide it. There's more focus on a monkey toy clapping cymbals than the actual monkey in the trailer.

And that's honestly where the film falls apart. Your central horror is unclear and just not terribly scary. No matter the character work done, which is decent to good, the third act simply doesn't work on the visceral level necessary and obviously desired. It's easier to imagine these sorts of late scenes working better in novel form, but the transition to film was obviously misjudged. At some point in pre-production, Romero should have realized while looking at capuchin monkeys that they weren't actually going to be terribly terrifying. Replacing it with a larger monkey, or even a small ape, might have diverged from the reality of how helper monkeys work, but it would have made the horror work better, at least.

There are also signs of the film being a fair bit longer, especially around the university politics angle with Dean Burbage simply disappearing from the story at a certain point, the butting of heads between him and Geoffrey coming to not a whole lot. Linda also feels deeply underserved, like she had more scenes, especially before Allan's accident.

So, Romero settled on a project he probably settled on, included elements that just made things a bit more confusing, and couldn't sell the horror in the final act. Still, his surprising acuity with character (evidenced nicely in films like Knightriders) helps the opening act of the film work well and hinges along in the second act as things get less clear from a plotting/horror point of view. It's a mixed bag that doesn't really work, but it's got some charms early.

Day of the Dead (1985)

Romero gets bored with zombies and turns his ire on humanity

[3/10 · 9 April 2024]

I do not understand the reappraisal Day of the Dead has gotten in the years since its release. It is...not a good movie. Like, at all. It's bad. Characters are threadbare in all the wrong ways while they posture heavily. There's no real story. The world-building makes no sense. It was an effort by Romero to, as he put it, make the Gone with the Wind of zombie movies, but his grand budget of seven million dollars was slashed in half and he had to quickly rewrite everything in order for it all to take place in a bunker. Considering the final product, I really don't think the full budget would have saved the film. At least Tom Savini made the most of his budget to create some great blood and guts, infrequent as they are to watch.

The zombie apocalypse has ravaged the world to desolation, and a small group of scientists in Southern Florida are working to find some kind of solution to the end of the world. They are protected by a small group of military officers, and the two groups, from the start of the film, are at each other's throats, gesticulating wildly and screaming to the rafters. There's no effort to get to these characters on any real level which, to be fair, is exactly how Romero treated his characters in the previous two Dead films. However, those two were tightly focused on a specific problem (making it through the night in the first and securing the mall in the second) while this has no real problem to work through. It's gauzy in its point, whether it's to domesticate the zombies, find a cure for the issue, or flee the decaying situation for somewhere else.

The two heads that butt most frequently belong to Dr. Sarah Bowman (Lori Cardille) and Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato). She insists that they must keep where they are, using Rhodes' men to acquire "samples", and continue the research led by Dr. Logan (Richard Libert) whom people call Frankenstein. Logan's central efforts are around Bub (Sherman Howard), a zombie who has been conditioned into minor non-aggression and recollection of past behaviors. This result, presented with surprising import, is the same thing that was handled with off-hand comments in Dawn of the Dead. Sure, this is an incredibly loose franchise, but it's weird when a subsequent entry makes a big deal about something established so simply in a previous entry. Shaun of the Dead handled it better, to be honest.

Now, performance. I hate every single performance in this film. Yes, even Joe Pilato. It's ultimately a writing problem at its base, but every performance is so dialed up to the max from the very start while the characters are written so thinly. It's a very bad combination that prevents any kind of investment. Contrast that to how the core four in Dawn are portrayed. They have no real backstories or anything, but they're clearly drawn in the moment and given opportunity to demonstrate who they are in different types of situations. Here, everyone is just constantly screaming at each other. It feels like a much more Hollywood approach to character filtered through Romero's insistence on keeping things amped up. It's obvious from films like Season of the Witch and Martin that he could write characters well, so this isn't something innate to Romero's output. It's a specific approach that he attempts in certain kinds of films, and it simply didn't work here.

On top of all that, there is no real story here. Again, the stories of the first two were centered around specific goals and tasks, but here, there's nothing. There are the scientific efforts (mostly just the conditioning, the actual effort to find a cure is never more than mentioned once or twice), the talk of Rhodes to leave, and then just basic survival. The only part of these that has any real meat is the conditioning, but it goes nowhere and even gets actively dismissed by the film itself when its final act becomes a shootout and our good guys are popping zombie heads along with the bad guys.

Now, the talk by Rhodes about trying to leave the base for somewhere else is where Romero's vision of a world gone zombie simply collapses. The idea that Rhodes can't come up with one place, not one place in the whole country, where there might be more resources than an underground bunker outside the Everglades is ridiculous. A world where zombies suddenly outnumber humans 400,000 to 1 would be immensely rich in resources from ammunition to food to medical facilities on a per capita basis. I get the distinct sense that Romero hates the military with a passion, but the idea that a captain can't come up with the name of Patrick Air Force base is ludicrous. Also, Dr. Fisher (John Amplas) mentions the idea that DC would have secure facilities. It's incoherent.

The only real bright spot of this film is Tom Savini's gallery of the grotesque. The zombies in this film are great from beginning to end. Even Bub, the least decayed zombie in the film, has a certain believability to it. However, most is in guts spilling out of body cavities, exposed bone and muscle, and even the first zombie we see clearly has no jaw with a tongue that just falls out of its head. I'd go nowhere near far enough to say that the makeup and creature effects are worth the price of admission, though. They're simply too infrequent across the whole of the film while uninteresting people yell at each other and occasionally muse about how humanity is a failed species that needs to be replaced. Romero's misanthropy is honestly not very compelling.

So, it's just kind of miserable. No one performs well. Pilato is probably the best of the bunch, but he's just yelling and chewing scenery unmoored from any character or narrative concerns. Liberty is just the worst, feeling like he's in a campy 50s scifi movie instead of this grim bit of misanthropy. It meanders forever without a plot. Its point is thin. At least the gore is quality, I guess.

Creepshow (1982)

A mixed bag, but entertaining enough

[6/10 · 9 April 2024]

George Romero and Stephen King were good friends and found a way to work together beyond King making an obnoxious cameo in Knightriders. They also have a shared love for the EC series Tales from the Crypt. So, without actually paying for the rights, the two came up with an imitation anthology series. Heavily inspired visually by Dario Argento's brand of giallo cinema in Italy (and probably in no small part by Romero's large affection for the work by The Archers on films like The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann), Creepshow is like most anthology films: a mixed bag.

I'd say that there are two good tales in this collection of five (six, if you include the wraparound). Those would be "Something to Tide You Over" and "The Crate". The first is about a rich man (Leslie Nielsen) who kidnaps his wife's (Gaylen Ross) lover (Ted Danson), buries him up to his neck in the sand of a beach at low tide, watches him drown from a camera, and then get haunted by the two lovers after they have both died the same way. It's a simply story told decently well with some nice tension supported by Nielsen's committed performance. The other, the longest of the stories, is about a professor (Hal Holbrook), his unbearable wife (Adrienne Barbeau), and another professor (Fritz Weaver) who finds a mysterious crate in the empty halls of the university. That crate contains a mysterious monster from the Arctic (complete with John Carpenter's The Thing reference) that kills and eats everyone, leading to Holbrook to taking advantage of the situation by finally living up to his fantasies and murdering his wife by feeding her to it. This has that same feeling of tension with a nice bit of black comedy thrown in. It's not deep, but it has a nice ironic twist at the end that's not the least bit unpredictable.

Those two are really the best of the bunch, and they're fine, effective little bits of campy horror. The rest are a step lower, and I wouldn't go so far as to call any of them good, not quite. "Father's Day," the story of the Grantham family is heavy on exposition, too many characters, and an ironic twist that doesn't seem to connect all that well. Because it relies so much on exposition to outline who everyone is in the family, it doesn't really move for a long stretch. The ghoul out of the ground is really neat, though, and when it does get moving, it has some decent thrills. "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill", anchored by an off-the-wall performance from Stephen King himself, feels alternatively one-note and unfair, taking the titular character, an unintelligent, well-meaning guy who just wants to take this meteor to the Department of Meteors for enough cash to cover his debts, and ruthlessly insults him while leading him down a terrible path. The final story, "They're Creeping Up on You," feels like it's supposed to be all performance from E. G. Marshall, and he does his mighty best to take this effective one-man act as far as it will go. It's another instance where it's pretty one-note, but at least Marshall is playing a terrible person who gets what he deserves. Also, the final look of bugs erupting from him is...gruesome in all the right ways.

Anthology films are hard because you have to tell a variety of stories, and they all have to hit. There's a decent variety here, though two ghoul/zombie stories isn't great. However, there's a certain sameness to the ironic feeling between the five. The wraparound is probably the most different with a son rebelling against his father because his father doesn't like that he has Creepshow comics.

It feels more like an experiment and a good time for Romero and King. The vast stylistic differences between this and the rest of Romero's work, with heavy use of lighting gels in key high pitched moments along with less realistic performances, informs this as something separate withing Romero's filmography. It's something of a ditty, a quick work done to almost just entertain themselves. That it comes out pretty decently is quite nice, but, really, most of these stories could have used some rewrites.

Knightriders (1981)

A gem ready for reappraisal

[8/10 · 9 April 2024]

There's something key in understanding an artist when they take up a project after a big success. Dawn of the Dead was the film that finally got George Romero out of debt and the ability to command decent budgets, and what did he do with that success first? He made a kind of goofy retelling of the Arthurian legend with knights on motorcycles that's still deeply earnest in its depiction of its characters. It was already obvious from films like Season of the Witch and Martin that while he was working in horror-adjacent areas, Romero wasn't really interested in staying there. He was trying to move out. With Knightriders, Romero left horror behind completely, and it showed that he could have been so much more than the zombie guy. Honestly, I loved this film.

King Billy (Ed Harris) is the leader of an anachronistic society touring around the Pennsylvania countryside as a traveling renaissance fair with the centerpiece being the jousts (just like all renaissance fairs). The only difference is that these are done from the seats of motorcycles instead of horses. It seems that some people can't get past the silliness of the sight of people jousting from motorcycles, but I got past it pretty quickly. I got past it because the characters are remarkably well written and performed.

The center of it all is Billy, the guy with a vision of another life tied to a time long-since past. Around him is his Guinivere, Linet (Amy Ingersoll), his Merlin (Brother Blue), his Morgan le Fay, Sir Morgan (Tom Savini), and his Lancelot, Sir Alan (Gary Lahti), among others. What's interesting is that, among the very large number of little subplots that play out, no one ever defines what it is about the life they live under Billy that attracts them so much, what keeps them going from small town to small town with little pay and not much more than each other. That gets explained through the sense of community that Romero draws through these people. There are conflicts. There are disagreements. However, these people really do seem to like each other. For instance, probably the central plot thread is Morgan trying to beat Billy in the arena because he wants to be king (rules of the society laid out clearly), and the physical conflict is hard and even bloody. And yet, when it's over, Billy wins through the defense of his other knights, they still smile at each other genuinely. It's a community greater than any conflict of visions.

As alluded to earlier, there really isn't much of an overriding plot through the whole film. It's more of a swirling series of subplots that revolve around a central idea: the community finding meaning away from modernity. It's an echo of Clint Eastwood's Bronco Billy. The subplots are around a small town deputy sheriff lording over them, Alan getting a girl, Julie (Patricia Tallman), as Linet looks at him longingly from afar. They encounter a promoter, Bontempi (Martin Ferrero), who wants to up their profile and get them better gigs (this ends up manifesting as the central disagreement between Billy and Morgan). Alan even goes away for a few days to reset.

My only real problem with the film is that it feels massively cut down. At two and a half hours in length, that seems like a weird complaint (most people seem to think that it's too long, not too short), but Romero's initial cut was reportedly seventeen hours long. Now, I could imagine a very large bulk of that being motorcycle joust footage, but it's obvious that he was pursuing the lives of all of his characters. He had to sacrifice a bunch to get it down to a manageable length. The biggest example seems to be the character of The Indian (Albert Amerson) who appears halfway through the film and becomes this silent disciple of Billy. I really feel like there was more to introduce him, perhaps connecting him to Billy from afar before. Considering how important he becomes in the film's final moments, his introduction feels so shortchanged.

The resolution is this fight for the crown, and it's built on all of the character work that Romero had crammed into the film up to that point. It's exciting to watch. The action is clear (Romero's secret weapon is his very strong ability to build sequences through editing), and the finale is heartwarming. And yet, the film keeps going, following Billy afterwards, and it's wonderfully affecting.

The core of the film is related to the cores of both Season of the Witch and Martin, the idea that believing in something unreal still allows the power of that unreal thing to manifest within a person. This time it forms in an ideal, the ideal of this kind of anachronistic, courtly life built on physical combat and everything around it. That's what Billy was trying to recreate, Camelot in the wilds of Western Pennsylvania, and in the rejection of modernity for something more tangible and real, he found something that connected him to other people in a genuine way.

I also really get this sense that Romero was making a film about his own career up to that point. The efforts to make the weird, little movies bumping up against the zombie movies that gave him his only commercial successes that he poured his craft into but feel more distant from the man himself. Knightriders was his next effort at being genuine, following his own path instead of the compromised places that the rest of the world wanted him to go.

I honestly loved this film. I do think it suffers slightly from being cut down (an extended cut at three hours is something I'll always want and will never see), but it's this wonderful portrait of anachronism and meaning. It's filled with very nice performances (Savini is surprisingly very good). Romero's editing around the action sequences keeps things interesting. It's just an all around entertainment. That it failed commercially is potentially the saddest moment of Romero's career. He was so much more than zombie movies.