Author: weltraumbesty

né kevin pyrtle. this website is mine. i write sometimes about whatever.

Village of Doom 「丑三つの村」

This article was originally published at Eiga-Bouei, a short-lived Japanese cinema project of mine that has long-since bit the dust. It is republished here, with minimal alterations, to coincide with Unearthed Films’ announcement of Village of Doom‘s North American blu-ray debut.

Young Tsugio INUMARU (Masato FURUOYA) is a perennial invalid, and something of a pariah in his rural village. It’s the late 1930s, and at a time when the rest of the village’s young men have been enlisted into the Imperial Army the sickly Tsugio is safe at home with his only family – a doting grandmother. Tsugio’s self-education and perceived arrogance only complicates his relationship with his fellow villagers further, isolating him from all but Yasuyo (Misako TANAKA), a young woman his own age whom Tsugio adores. But Tsugio’s relationship with Yasuyo is emotionally fumbling and physically unconsummated, a point of frustration for a young man in the throws of sexual development. Complicating things further is Tsugio’s stringent nationalism, which defines his social interactions and finds him constantly and inevitably falling short of his own expectations.

An unexpected outlet for the young man’s frustrations arises within the village’s female population, particularly those whose young husbands are at war. Several of the wives contrive clandestine relationships with the weak (and presumed harmless) Tsugio, whom they find a convenient tool for alleviating their own loneliness. Tsugio wastes little time in adapting to his new lot in life, but the charm of it all is short-lived. Determined to serve his country along with the rest of his generation, Tsugio subjects himself to a physical examination so that he might enlist in the army as well. The results are disastrous. The cause of the young man’s ongoing illness is tuberculosis, an incurable disease in Tsugio’s time and one which had claimed both of his parents years before.

Word of the diagnosis travels quickly, and Tsugio finds himself ever more at odds with his fellow villagers. Upon witnessing the brutal murder of a transient misfit by a gang of his elders Tsugio tries to do the right thing, but after reporting the crime to a local authority he is derided and ostracized instead. The women of the village close their doors to him as well, disgusted and fearful of what his disease might mean for them. Only Yasuyo remains in support, but this too is fleeting – when she is ushered off to an arranged marriage by her family Tsugio finds himself alone once more, and his fervency and frustration begins to transform into something far more disturbing. As his rage against his fellow villagers grows Tsugio quietly plots, secretly arming himself for a vengeful assault on all those he believes have wronged him.

Late one evening his plan is put to action. He cuts the electrical lines into the village and returns home, where he ritually transforms himself into something less than human – a do-it-yourself demon with a pump shotgun at his side and a pair of flashlights strapped to his head. As the village sleeps Tsugio descends, systematically eliminating the families he deems to have transgressed against him and finding empowerment and purpose in the bloody destruction of those who had so long denied him.

As shocking a film now as it was upon its release in early 1983, lauded pink film director Noboru TANAKA’s Village of Doom is an unconventional and unsettling exploration of one of present society’s most persistent bogeymen – the mass shooter. If Tsugio’s influences and actions feel disturbingly true to life (especially in a era where the crimes and character of his all-too-common modern analogues are dissected ad nauseam by a voracious 24-hour media cycle) it’s with good reason. Despite altering names and taking a degree of dramatic liberty with the subject matter (as had Nozomi NISHIMURA’s eponymous 1981 source novel) Village of Doom is a broadly accurate retelling of the infamous Tsuyama Incident, which occurred in a rural village in Okayama in May of 1938. Indeed, Village of Doom‘s protracted and controversial reenactment of the event earned it the ire of Japan’s censorship board – the Eirin deemed the film to be unjust and cruel on the whole and restricted it in theatrical release with a rating of R-18, the equivalent of an X from the MPAA.

One can forgive them for finding the film a tactless affair – it is, and deliberately so. Director Tanaka was best known then as now as the talent behind some of the very best of Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno series, and he brought the same transgressive sensibilities to his first (and unless I’m mistaken, only) production for Shochiku. In retrospect Village of Doom seems a logical progression for the studio, which had been going against its own trademark style (and with excellent box office results) since the middle 1970s. Their highly publicized and very successful 1977 adaptation of Seishi YOKOMIZO’s much-loved mystery novel Village of 8 Gravestones thrilled audiences not just with its lofty production value, but with fountainous bloodshed as well. Coincidentally or otherwise, one of that film’s most famous scenes plays as a deliciously grim invocation of the Tsuyama Incident (from which Yokomizo’s novel, which began serialization in 1949, drew contemporary inspiration). Shōhei IMAMURA’s violent biographical drama Vengeance is Mine continued the trend, casting top talent Ken OGATA as an ex-con fraudster who murdered his way across Japan nary a decade prior. That film won praise from critics and audiences alike, topping Kinema Junpo’s top-ten list for the year and sweeping most of its annual awards categories.

There’s a lot of similarity to be had between the Imamura film and Tanaka’s, which premiered four years later, most having to do with the historically-grounded subject matter (whether through intent or by happenstance, Shochiku’s advertising art for both is strikingly similar). Village of Doom separates itself largely along exploitative lines (More sex! More violence!), with Tanaka playing the gruesome eventualities of his story to the outrageous, subversive hilt. Indeed, the enduring shock-factor of the film lies less in its violent content (considerable in a film built around the slaughter of nearly three-dozen people) than in the unexpected manner in which Tanaka portrays it. Despite the true crime overtones Village of Doom plays a lot like some of the other action sagas of the decade, replete with hissable baddies who go against the moral righteousness of a just hero and are summarily suppressed in bloody fashion, with one-liners to spare and a triumphant power ballad to tie everything neatly together.

Of course the hero in this case isn’t an ex super-soldier blackmailed into action or a Vietnam vet pushed too far by prejudiced yokels or Rowdy Roddy Piper laying a smackdown on an alien invasion, he’s a real-life mass murderer responsible for one of the most infamous crimes in Japanese history. To that end Village of Doom seems almost calculated to incense those who rail against violent media as murder fuel for the world’s disgruntled loners, indulging as it does in an almost mythic glorification of an actual atrocity. It’s a coup for director Tanaka, who deftly hijacks established heroic conventions for his own nefarious purposes and leaves audiences in the uncomfortable position of rooting for a man they know will be responsible for terrible things. That so many of Tsugio’s attacks amount to little more than gruesome misogynist wish fulfillment only heightens the internal unease, the viewer’s innate thirst for cinematic justice conflicting with the abject horror of the action unfolding on screen. We can be frightfully permissive just so long as we’re provided a satisfying dénouement, a fact Village of Doom lays bare. Rarely has a film left me feeling so uncomfortable in my own skin.

Credit director Tanaka for that, but also star Masato FURUOYA, whose gaunt, tall physique (he measured a lofty 188 cm, or roughly 6 ft 2 in) was a perfect physical match for the alternately meek and menacing Tsugio. A sometimes collaborator of Tanaka’s and a fellow veteran of Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno revival, Furuoya capably carries the film, which unfolds explicitly from the perspective of his character – without his ability to render Tsugio so sympathetically much of Village of Doom‘s unsettling potential might well have been lost. Though Furuoya necessarily commands the bulk of audience attention Shochiku provide a typically strong stable of familiar talent in his support. Prolific stage, film, and television actor Izumi HARA was already well into the fifth decade of her career by the time of Village of Doom‘s production, and appears here in a hefty role as Tsugio’s grandmother, while Isao NATSUYAGI (Village of 8 Gravestones) is suitably unpleasant as a seedy village headman. Yasuhiro ARAI (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters) is best known for his extensive and ongoing career in television, and appears as Tsugio’s disaffected loafer buddy Tetsuo – a youth aimlessly biding what time he has left before the army drafts him off to an untimely demise. Misako TANAKA (Roar of the Crowd), Shino IKENAMI (Devil’s Flute), Kumiko OHBA (House), and Midori SATSUKI (Blade of Oedipus) take turns as Tsugio’s varying love interests (his beloved Yasuyo and a trio of ill-fated housewives respectively), and gravure photo shoots of the four in (and to varying degrees out of) costume were a significant component of Shochiku’s promotional push for the film.

While attendance figures are hard to come by it’s safe to say that Shochiku were pleased with Village of Doom‘s performance, and continue to profit from its reputation. The film has been a staple of the company’s Best of… series of video releases since the days of VHS, and was recently reissued in a restored Blu-ray edition. Nothing sells quite like sex, violence, or controversy, and Village of Doom wraps all three into a package that’s far more alluring than most of us would care to admit.

Emergency! Emergency! Accident on module Antares!

In the opening act of Bruno Mattei’s oft-maligned 1980 zombie opus Hell of the Living Dead (né Night of the Zombies né Zombie Creeping Flesh né Virus) a cell of violent eco-terrorists demand the dismantling of the HOPE project, a global humanitarian effort that has established HOPE Centers throughout the third world. It may have taken a while, but between 2003 and 2011 their demands were met.

Sort of…

Hell of the Living Dead, being a co-production between Mattei’s Beatrice Film s.r.l. and Spain’s short-lived Films Dara, spent a good deal of its production shooting in and around the city of Barcelona, with many of the exteriors (and, likely, interiors) from its first and final acts completed at the central termica del Besos complex; a sprawling electrical plant on the delta of the Rio Besos that doubles as the film’s Papuan HOPE Center.

Hell‘s opening image, an ominous wide-angle shot of an industrial facility at dusk, is a view northward from the southwest corner of original Besos plants I and II (the latter in the foreground), a pair of 150MW conventional steam turbine groups that were in operation from 1967 (1972 for II) to 2003. Images from around the time of filming are hard to come by, at least in my hunting, though a brief documentary report – Inauguracio de la Central Tèrmica del Besòs, dir. Joan Capdevila Nogués (available at archive.org) – does show a similar angle of Besos I, circa its official inauguration in August of 1968. That film is the source of this article’s header image.

The Besos I and II facilities were deactivated and dismantled beginning in 2003, a year after the 400MW Besos III and IV groups went on-line. Their demolition was completed in July of 2007, with the felling (by 30 kilos of Goma-2 explosives) of the grouping’s 394-foot-tall chimney.

In the background left of that same opening shot, looking uncharacteristically small, is a veritable symbol of 20th century Catalonian power generation, las tres chimeneas – then the central termica de Sant Adria. This trio of 350MW generator groups was practically new at the time of Hell of the Living Dead‘s production, having been brought on-line (from back to front in the image below) in 1973, ’74, and ’76, and appear occasionally in the background of the picture. One notable telephoto shot of them, seen through some lamp posts, appears late in the film.

It’s a shame they weren’t utilized more by the production, as their brutalist concrete construction is monolithic and imposing on a whole other scale from Besos plants I and II. At a height of 200 meters – 656 feet – the structures tower over the surrounding urban landscape of Sant Adria de Besos, and have become iconographic in the 50 years since they were constructed. Rendered obsolete by the activation of Besos V (an 859MW capacity combined cycle plant) in 2010, fully deactivated by 2011 and initially slated for total demolition, the town hall of Sant Adria de Besos (with considerable popular support) instead opted to preserve the three chimneys as a piece of the area’s unique cultural and industrial heritage.

Though Besos I and II are long gone and the three chimneys have stood long enough to have become nostalgic local iconography, some irony arrives by way of the Mattei film and the less charitable aspects of the plants’ own histories. The HOPE Centers of Hell of the Living Dead are said to have been constructed for the betterment of the third world nations they inhabit, but this is just a smokescreen. In the world of the film they are instead the machinations of an insidious multinational conspiracy to resolve the perceived crisis of overpopulation through mass extermination, an experimental program in mad science that aims for genocide and births the apocalypse. After a critical failure in one of its modules leaves its workers dead, dying, or worse, the Papuan HOPE Center spews green clouds of noxious gas out into the surrounding countryside, poisoning all who dwell there and raising the dead to eat the living.

By grim contrast central termica del Besos I and II and, especially, the central termica de Sant Adria were locally notorious in their own time for their pollution of the city around them. While towers I and III were converted in the 1980’s to also burn natural gas the central chimney of Sant Adria, which ran only in times of peak demand, burned fuel oil. In the ’00s Sant Adria II became synonymous with ferrous “black rain” and with the persistent soot that afflicted nearby property, a fact that inspired official investigation and forced the plant’s closure in 2002. There are few images to be found online of it as it was known then, when it was often marred black by the oil it burned. It feels appropriate, if a bit hyperbolic, that it be immortalized as a source of deathly zombifying emissions in a cult horror picture.

A tour of central térmica de Sant Adria del Besos, from 2008 (when facilities I and III were still operating), is below:

Cleans and shines, then dries in five minutes!

An unnamed housewife is expecting a few friends over for bridge, but her floors are scuffed and time is short!

Such is the dilemma presented by ‘Nick of Time, a brisk 30 second ad spot produced by Cascade Pictures of California, Inc., at the behest of Wisconsin-based SC Johnson for their “push button floor care” product, Pronto. The solution to the problem in this case is foregone, of course. After all, Pronto “perks up floors fast!”

I have no date for this production, though the late 1960s / early 1970s are suspected (any later than that seems highly unlikely, given the aesthetic aspects). The film is printed to reliably faded Eastmancolor, and is the only 35mm currently in my possession that retains its original head and tail leader. It is in relatively good condition, though the inconsistent fading has led to significant flickering in playback.

Continuing on from my efforts with the Il Mostro Invinibile trailer, I scanned this significantly shorter subject (under 750 frames, leader excepted) using a Pentax K-70 DSLR mounted with a HD Pentax-D FA 100mm macro lens, with the Valoi easy35 again serving as my film carrier. I still like this combination a lot, though I’ve had to isolate the camera and the carrier from one another; the easy35mm is intended to attach directly to the camera lens, but the seemingly insignificant play between the two as the film is wound through is enough to cause the lens to drift out of focus.

Workflow from there was fully lossless via Adobe After Effects. The raw .PEF captures were converted directly to lossless AVI at 24fps. Subsequent stabilization and grading was also done in After Effects, with final tweaks done in Kdenlive and final export (to x265 at 92mbps) done with AVIDemux. Sound was again captured at 48khz/24bit using AEO-Light 2, though it suffered from some clipping in places. This was remedied using Audacity.

I actually undertook this project twice over the past week. Results from the first pass were unsatisfactory, a combination of ill focus (lens aperture set too high) and my own forgetfulness – there’s a lot of slightly out of focus dust visible in my first scan, as I neglected to dust my backlight beforehand. Rookie shit, etc., though easily enough remedied by just scanning the film again. The learning curve from my first scanning effort has certainly paid dividends: Scanning this print took less than an hour in both instances. Practice, practice, practice.

I’m very happy with how this project turned out, all in all. The commercial itself, old-fashioned as it can seem 50 years after the fact, is quick on its feet and assuredly made. To set up and pay off a story, however simple, is no mean feat with half a minute of runtime at your disposal. You’ll find the finished project below, with additional versions (including my initial attempt, leaders and all) available in my bonus playlist.

Film Scanning, Fool’s errands and Flying Turtles

Sometime over the holidays I acquired a 35mm film print.

Sometime over the holidays I decided to scan it.

I did not decide to have it scanned, mind. No. That would have been sensible. Instead I decided, despite my near total lack of experience in this regard, to scan it myself, using the off-the-shelf photography gear already at my disposal: a Pentax K-70 DSLR camera (with HD Pentax-D FA f2.8/100mm macro lens affixed), a nice Oben tripod, and the Valoi easy35 (a contained lightbox and extension tube setup with a simple “gate” that allows for perf-to-perf overscanning).

While I had zero experience working with motion picture film prior to this project, analog film is not alien to me. I have plenty of exposed, developed, and scanned medium format and large format negatives in my history, as well as the odd roll of 36exp 35mm here and there. This print, a trailer running 2 minutes 12 seconds, amounts to roughly forty of those full 35mm rolls, or a little over 200 feet of total film. It’s a lot of film, to be sure, but nothing outrageous. It felt doable.

And it was. Though it was also, inevitably, a huge pain in the ass. I intended this project as a bit of a proof of concept, a step towards a larger project that I may try to tackle in the near future. I’m quite pleased with the end result, room though there yet is for grading, restoration, etc. It worked, dammit, and it honestly didn’t take that long.

The film:

The print in question is an Italian theatrical trailer for the 1968 Japanese children’s tokusatsu feature Gamera vs. Deep Space Monster Viras, which went straight to television in the United States as Destroy All Planets. The film follows a pair of boy scouts who find themselves in the middle of an alien invasion by the squid-ish denizens of planet Viras. With the armies of Earth helpless against the Virasian’s super-science it falls upon Gamera, guardian of the Universe and friend of all children, to set things right.

Gamera vs. Viras was a cheap film. Very cheap by studio standards. Production studio Daiei had suffered from rampant over-spending for most of the ‘60s, when it attempted to break into foreign markets with several lavish 70mm period epics. As recently as 1966 the Gamera franchise had been seen as A-budget material, but just two years later the studio was struggling. Daiei had already lost one of its key stars (Shintaro Katsu, who left Daiei to form his own company in 1967) and was soon to lose another (superstar Raizo Ichikawa, who passed tragically in 1969), and was in desperate need of a turn-around. A turn-around was not forthcoming.

It was in this environment, with a budget slashed to a third that of the previous year’s Gamera vs. Gyaos, that Gamera vs. Viras was made. As a feature it suffers from the obvious constraints. Locations are limited, and interiors even more so. There are significantly fewer special effects setups than in past efforts, and director and special effects supervisor Noriyaki Yuasa (The Little Hero) is obviously stretched thin. As a result the film runs short, just 72 minutes. International versions, in keeping with distributor-mandated feature running times of an hour and a half, were saddled with an extensive stock footage replay of the major moments of the past two Gamera films, a slogging montage that runs a full 18 minutes.

The film is, to be blunt, a mess, but it’s also full of imaginative details… the Virasian’s psychedelic mala spaceships, their crews of abducted / possessed human beings with psychically-controlled detachable limbs and flashing yellow eyes, and a central villain who absorbs his crewmates and grows to kaiju proportions. Gamera’s bizarre space-age charms are well in evidence, and the effects that bookend the feature, though brief, are well done.

As a feature Gamera vs. Viras almost inevitably falls short, pitched as it was against the cost-cutting machinations of a studio in decline, but it cuts a damn fine trailer.

The Trailer:

In Italy Gamera vs. Viras was marketed as The Invincible Monster (Il Mostro Invincibile), and “il mostro generoso” Gamera was re-christened King – the same distributor, Distributori Europei Associati, also released 1969’s Gamera vs. Guiron (under the highly litigible title King Kong contro Godzilla), and one assumes (the posters have no distributor listed) they were responsible for 1970’s Gamera vs. Jiger ne Kinkong L’impero dei draghi as well. Viras was in distribution there for a while it seems, and plenty of memorabilia in evidence of its various issues and reissues is available at any given time at online auction.

To which specific release my trailer print belongs is unknown – the earliest would have been in 1969. It has no distributor marks, but carries the first-run title (the film was eventually retitled Ai confini del mondo: Il Mostro Invincibile). While several cuts are missing from the head and tail, which accounts for the short running time of 2:12, the trailer otherwise follows the continuity of the one produced by Daiei for the film’s domestic release and was obviously cut from a clean element of the same.

Audio likewise follows the Daiei trailer, but is fully dubbed with Italian narration and dialog, and is mixed over a clean version of the trailer’s original music and effects. It includes sections of both versions of the “Gamera March” produced for the film (vinyl 7” promotional releases of these were issued each year from 1968 to 1971 as tie-ins with those years’ Gamera adventures) as well as a selection of recycled cues from Tadashi Yamanouchi’s score for the previous series entry, Gamera vs. Gyaos.

The trailer and its monophonic optical audio were printed to Kodak Safety Film, which hasn’t aged especially well in its 50 plus years. Several sections are warped or stained, the perfs are brittle and in some sections broken, and the image has shifted powerfully to the red throughout. Darker sections can look quite blotchy, and there is significant print damage. It is not, at least by my estimation, in any kind of traditionally screenable condition.

The Scan:

I scanned each of the trailer’s three thousand one hundred and seventy-three frames by hand at a resolution of 5600×4000 (including perf overscan), with my camera set on a 2-second delay to ensure stability. I began with the standard Valoi easy35 mat, which cuts off most of the film perfs, but found the results too difficult to work with, forcing a re-scan of around a third of the print. This process took around fifteen hours, which were divided across four or five days. I ran pixel-mapping on my camera regularly (every five hundred frames or so) to mitigate the issue of dead pixels.

From there my workflow was entirely digital, and aside from the final grading and export (which were done at ‘Scope matted 4k, 3840×2160) all work was done at the capture’s native 5600×4000 resolution.

The full list of software, a mix of mostly free / GNU public video applications, is as follows: AVIdemux (for initial image sequencing and later transcoding), Adobe CC After Effects (used to stabilize the images in-motion), Kdenlive (for general editing and grading), AEO-Light 2 (a lossless audio extractor for archival optical film soundtracks), and Audacity (used to trim head and tail of the audio).

I can’t recommend any of these tools enough, though I wish I could have managed an open source solution instead of After Effects. Blender is promising in this regard, though my tests were unsatisfactory – marred, no doubt, by user error. Fusion has been recommended as well, though for the moment irresoluble dll errors have prevented me from using it.

Once the initial scan was complete the full digital workflow took around fifteen hours, again spread over several days. The scanning process, which invariably results in geometric inconsistencies from scene to scene and often frame to frame, required a lot of work to correct, though that process was easier than I anticipated. After Effects’ “warp stabilizer”, set to merely position, rotate, and maintain scale, was invaluable.

I opted for a what-you-see approach to the process, eschewing any restorative work (dust removal, noise reduction, spot repair, etc.) beyond an effort to bring back some of the trailer’s original color. Matching Daiei’s comparatively bright and saturated trailer (as shown on the Kadokawa blu-ray of the film) was impossible owing to the deterioration of my print, which improves marginally in this regard as one nears the end. I have, of course, archived my scans of the film and the original sequences of the same, in case I get bored someday and decide to revisit this project with a more reparative mindset.

The Results:

Shared below are the end product (x264 encodes from my UT Video originals) in two flavors, one showing the raw output with After Effects stabilization and the other the complete color corrected and cropped trailer – a full playlist for this project is here. I opted to show more of the frame rather than crop accurately to theatrical ratios, which leaves the title element off-center the few times that it appears. Subtitles are provided in English via Youtube Captions, and were translated from an AI transcription of the trailer’s audio.

They aren’t perfect. Banding is evident in places, a combined effect (I suspect, at least) of camera limitations and the shear amount of adjustments that went into correcting the heavily shifted color. The image also isn’t as stable as I’d have liked, which is down to limitations of my current setup. It is what it is: A first attempt, with plenty of room for improvement in the future. And in that respect I’m quite proud of it.

This is by no means the end of my efforts to scan 35mm motion picture film, though I’m definitely going to take a break. Most of the work detailed above was done at my standing desk, and while having the completed trailer viewable on any screen (instead of stuck in a box someplace, as it has been for the last half century) is very rewarding, it does nothing to ease my back pain.

Ciao.

A Storm Zone 「暴風圏」

After the unexpected death of her father in an automobile accident, care-free Misako (Junko KANŌ) is appointed the unlikely president of the family’s prominent shipping company. Despite her inexperience Misako puts forth great effort to learn the business and gradually gains the trust of both her direct subordinate Takeshi (Kenji SUGAWARA) and the many blue-collar workers the company employs (she eats ramen with the drivers and entertains the dispatchers at her home), but trouble is brewing. Misako has been appointed to fail by a hostile board of directors, who scheme to use the new president’s lack of business savvy against her and take over the company.

Independent of the board, suave outsider and nightclub-operating entrepreneur Fujikawa (Hideo TAKAMATSU) is also plotting to take the company, by buying up shares and finding ways to put the firm ever further in his debt. With Misako’s back to the proverbial wall Fujikawa makes an ultimatum – pay up what you owe in five days or lose the company for good. Worse yet, he wants Misako for himself as well!

Just as a desperate act is needed to rescue the company, and Misako’s family legacy, from an almost certain demise an unusual opportunity arises. A construction firm is in need of hazardous help – a dynamite shipment to their current site, a dam project nestled within a treacherous mountain pass. A powerful typhoon is threatening to wreck the project with landslides, and only a shipment through the worst storm in modern Japanese history can save it! Misako’s firm takes the contract and puts its best drivers to work, but Fujikawa won’t let the company slip through his fingers so easily. He heads out along the storm-swept mountain roads, intent on sabotaging the shipper’s efforts by any means necessary.

One of several typhoon-centric features to be produced and released by Daiei at the turn of the decade, 1959’s A Storm Zone is a handsomely mounted suspense drama whose only failing is a lack of distinguishing characteristics. In practice it reminds of any number of studio productions of the time that, through no real fault of their own, have since fallen by the wayside. The convoluted screenplay, the combined work of the prolific Takeo MATSŪRA and director Kunio WATANABE, features as many dramatic ups and downs as one could hope for from such a tale. It also packs some unexpected prescience. Just two months after the film’s release Japan would be struck by the Ise-wan Typhoon, a major peace-time disaster that left thousands dead and prompted a complete overhaul of the country’s disaster response apparatus.

The disaster element may prove A Storm Zone‘s greatest draw for modern viewers, but anyone jonesing for obscure special effects thrills is encouraged to look elsewhere. Daiei’s accomplished (and in this case uncredited) effects artisans constructed a large scale mountainside and a handful of scale shipping trucks for the storm-whipped finale, but setups are few, and serve entirely as incidental support for the human action. The last-ditch demolition – an event that will make or break Misako’s company – is indicative in that it plays out entirely off-screen. A Storm Zone instead opts to show a series of close-ups of the battered cast with the sound of explosions ringing in the distance, a final (and effective) suspense-ratcheting device to keep audiences guessing.

Typical of Daiei productions of the time, the cast is a hefty mix of star power and contract supporting talent who perform precisely as well as would have been expected of them. Second-billed star Junko Kanō carries the picture as Misako, the care-free socialite who finds herself thrust into a situation well beyond her experience. Kanō was a prodigious talent at Daiei for her brief career, appearing in more than fifty productions (!) between 1957 and 1963, and it’s easy to see why. She stands up well against the considerable demands of her role here, which puts her through the usual dramatic ringer (romance! intrigue! suspense!) and a little song and dance as well – they certainly don’t make them like this anymore. Kanō retired young, with her star power at its peak, out of concerns for her own health. Studio lighting had begun to take a toll on her eyesight, and the increased wattage required for color photography (which was becoming increasingly common at Daiei) was only exacerbating the situation. The actress made her exit after 1963’s 「風速七十五米」 Wind Velocity 75 Meters (another Daiei storm drama, appropriately enough), but remains popular more than half a century on. Her films still enjoy theatrical revivals from time to time, and are the recipients of frequent home video reissues as well.

Other notable appearances include rising talent Jirō TAMIYA, who secured a lofty billing (third) for his charismatic supporting turn as one of the company truckers. Tamiya is also the recipient of what minimal special effects flash A Storm Zone has to offer – his truck rolls into a gully during the climactic final act, and summarily explodes. Career heavy Hideo TAKAMATSU lends a tasty mix of suave and sinister to the scheming Fujikawa and provides a nice counterpoint to top-billed good-guy Kenji SUGAWARA, who emerges as the film’s requisite hero during the typhoon finale. The rainy roadside fistfight between the two may well be the highlight of the picture. Standout among the supporting players is Jun TAZAKI, a frequent heavy best known to Western audiences for his many appearances in Tōhō special effects films, and who takes a substantial turn here as the brusque, boisterous and often inebriated driver Kawakami. Tazaki takes to the blue-collar role with a delightful enthusiasm, gleefully needling his boss and sticking up for his younger colleagues when things get tough. His Kawakami is the most colorful and viscerally engaging character A Storm Zone has to offer.

Veteran director Kunio Watanabe was in the third decade of his long career by the time of A Storm Zone‘s production, having entered the industry as an assistant director in the latter 1920s, and he takes to the material with confidence, if little flourish. The style is relatively dry throughout, but punctuated with wrought melodrama along the way (an obvious, ostentatious score from popular composer and pianist Eiichi YAMADA accents the latter perfectly). In the end A Storm Zone‘s brand of corporate intrigue thrills is never especially compelling (though they laid some of the groundwork for better iterations at the studio, like Yasuzō MASUMURA’s 「黒の試走車#映画」 Black Test Car), but in Watanabe’s hands the film still makes for a capable entertainment.

「暴風圏」 A Storm Zone is available on Region 2 DVD from Kadokawa. The release features a nice widescreen transfer for the film and includes a trailer as well as a gallery of production stills, but offers no English language support.

Forgotten artifacts of the Space-Age: ‘The X From Outer Space’ in the Philippines

Presented today are a set of curiosities; five lobby cards dating from the theatrical release of Shochiku’s perennial kaiju cash-in The X From Outer Space. Details are scarce, unfortunately. X saw its first domestic Japanese release in March of 1967, at the height of the Apollo-inspired space craze, but it was in regional theatrical distribution for the next couple of decades. Where the Philippines release falls on that timeline is, at least to the author, unknown.

Further complicating matters is the text that appears on several of the cards, much of which appears to have been deliberately lopped off at some point. The title iconography remains, as does the format hype for the color ‘Scope feature – here it is presented in ‘METROCOLOR’ and ‘Super Ultra Dimension SCOPE’. While the latter is a nonsense rebranding of the film’s generic anamorphic production, the former suggests the involvement of MGM (or at least an MGM film lab) at some point in the process.

The cards themselves are in rough shape, obviously theater-used and well aged, with plenty of tears, crinkles, sunburn and foxing. The most interesting is presented first, an image which was ‘colorized’ at some point in the process. The garish neon hues aren’t especially convincing, but they do lend the image a peculiar aesthetic. The rest are monochrome, each marked with a bit of hand-written script. One retains a tantalizing, indecipherable remnant of the further text that was cropped from these cards.

Short Story: So long as I be fed

Author note: The short story that follows is a horror of roughly 2400 words, finished in March of this year. It has sat in storage since then in proper submission format, just in case I ever developed the requisite gumption to send it some place. Thus far I have not, so here it is instead. I’m a bad judge of whether it’s ultimately worth a shit or not, but it holds an important distinction in my life regardless: it’s the first piece of fiction I’ve been able to finish since the pandemic began and everything in life went topsy-turvy. Publishing it here is a step toward putting those years behind me, so much as can be done, and getting back to the creative life I dropped somewhere along the way.

Debts are owed to my departed friend Todd, the seafaring works of Melville, Richard Chase’s Grandfather Tales and its folk yarns of old Scratch, and Michael Stanley’s 1985 film Attack of the Beast Creatures (inspiration really does spring from the strangest of places). Thanks are also due to my wife, who served as editor through the drafting process and has at least as much time invested in this as I do. Her patience for my prose is commendable and my writing would be senseless without her. Well, more senseless.

I hope you find something to enjoy in this, and that maybe it makes you feel bad in a genre-appropriate sense. Whatever the case, thank you for reading. I promise the introduction will be shorter next time.

Here’s to better things.

~~~

So long as I be fed

~~~

He was cold, and he was hungry. By God, he was hungry.

They’d run out of things to burn more than a month ago and had since passed their nights in a desolate and misty gloom, and though his eyes failed him in that darkness he could feel the fog which ever enveloped them. It nipped at his exposed toes and fingertips, taunted his parched flesh, and left his fraying slacks in a perpetual state of waxen tackiness. The time he could not tell, but he knew that morning was well off yet. He’d slept short and fraught and ill, and doubted that he would sleep again.

She was sleeping, and the other one as well, yonder in their earthen corner. He could hear them breathing, weak and shallow and harried. “I can’t sound much better,” he thought, scratching at his chest and feeling at his own ribs. The fat and sinew about them had perished bit by bit, day by day. He felt as though he were a stub of candle, aware as he was of his own progressive withering, and at the end of his brief and blackened wick danced but a sliver of blue-red ember. His exhaustion had become total. His humanity was near to snuffing. None of them, he thought, were long for this world.

But even in that mortal tiredness his hunger welled monstrous and implacable within him. What he wouldn’t give for a turtle’s egg or a mushroom or some sprig of herb. Even a worm, by God, culled from the same ruinous earth upon which he wallowed, would suffice.

But food there was none.

Aye, that island held no food–nor anything else–for him, nor for his companions, nor for anyone who might chance upon it. No fair hills rose from its black beaches of volcanic sand and pumice, and its barren interior sheltered naught but a few patches of lichenous gray scale. That, proving inedible, they had left to flourish as it might. It was a bedeviling place, an unholy place. No green thing grew upon it and it offered no succor to mortal things. As he sat in that impenetrable dark, ravenous and weary and disturbed, he wondered: On which of the seven days had God raised this abortion in its abject barrenness? And might instead this place be of the other’s making, diabolical and bespoke for just those few who, as he, had found it?

He counted back the days. Seven weeks, aye, perhaps two full months. “So long as that,” he thought, “since our ketch was beached upon this waste.” Four of them there’d been aboard, making for Boston from Charleston. He, the first mate, hired along with the captain to pilot the ship at the behest of her owners, who were to join them. They had cast off in fair weather and with no ill tidings, yet early the next morning, not far off Hatteras, they’d been overtaken by fog, and the ship had been caught in an inexplicable current. Their instruments failed them, and as well the wind, and from that moment by the Fates alone had their courses been charted.

On the evening of the third day of their estrangement they’d been grounded on bleached coral, and there before them, an inky blotch within the fog, lay that cursed island. None knew whence they had traveled to reach it, for the fog had not lifted since first it had appeared to them, and still it had not. The island could have been anywhere, yet it felt no place at all. Would that they had never ventured upon that nothingness. “Better to have been lost in the belly of the Atlantic,” he thought, “but by wisdom or chance or devilry, here were we cast away instead.”

Some they’d had of food, at first, dry stores for a week that they’d stretched some five times past that expiration. But then, their mouths were fewer than they might be. The captain had been felled on their first day beached, poisoned as he partook of the island’s only spring–a grim blessing that had left them three. Him they had buried in the rough middle of those wasted acres, near the spring that had spelled his doom, with a small piling of stones to mark the grave. In the days that followed they had searched well, and torn those dead acres asunder, but for their stores alone, the island was found wanting for all sustenance.

Of water they’d had more. The bottles had perished quickly, aye, but trickles then they pried from the laden air with some tarpaulins salvaged from the broken ketch. It was little, but it was reliable, and it had been enough. That water alone had seen them through the exhaustion of their stores and they were, each of them, grateful for it in kind.

But the days without food had grown too many, and his hunger was a mountain in his twisted guts. “What I’d give for a turnip, a moldy apple, or meat. By God, meat!”

He’d given no consideration to meat in a week or better, but in a flash it became his singular preoccupation. “Aye,” he thought, “a sliver of bemaggoted butcher’s refuse would be as prime steak to me now. What I would give…,” he thought again, his tongue lapping dry against his grubby teeth.

His home back in Charleston? “Aye, that.” His wife, perhaps grieving. His child as well. Already he could scarcely remember them… their names… his own name…

What of a finger? That could be arranged easily enough.

“Tsk, so little ambition.”

What of a hand, then? Nay an arm! “Aye!” But for a full belly those, too, he could offer gladly.

“My toes, too. And legs!” he thought with a strange exhilaration. “The devil whittle me to stumps just so long as I be fed!”

“…to stumps?” spoke the other.

“Another?”

The other continued:

“But of what good, really, stumps,” it said too clearly, “or to me, your arms and legs.” 

“Aye,” he replied.

“Or your home, your woman, your child for that matter. Would you offer me the moon as well? None of them hold any purchase here.”

“Aye,” he said, in sad agreement.

There was a pause, and when the other continued it was in brighter spirits.

“But what about that?” it hissed. “Yes, that you do have.” 

“Aye.”

“And you, stranded here and dispossessed and very near to your doom. Yet unknown to yourself, even now you cling to it. And I ask you: Of what use could that lowly scrap of essence be to you now?”

His addled mind held no rebuke. “Little enough, aye.”

“It is burden alone, now.”

“A burden? No, not a burden. I lived well and clean and with fair enough luck until now, and my few transgressions weigh as pebbles, not as stones. No, not a burden,” he repeated. “Still, you would have an arrangement?”

“Yes.” The other drew out the word, and there was a hunger of its own behind it.

“Then an arrangement you may have, but for a suitable price, only! This is no thing to be cheaply parted with.”

“No, no! A fair price you deserve. A fairer price yet shall you have.”

He nodded, and continued:

“Then listen you well. If I am to die on this island, let it be so. I’ll partake of that spring and be quick about it! But if I am to live on, by your strange grace, then let me at least be satisfied. I would be fed, and fed no mean pauper’s supper, aye. I’ll give not my soul just to suffer then mere scroungings. A feast I would have, such as this place has never seen–a feast such as will never be seen here again. Aye, to part with such as that I would have fine drink and finer company and meat, damn you, real meat.”

“And damned in kind. That’s your price?”

“Aye. That is my price.”

The words rang confidently in his mind, but fell from his dry lips in a hoarse and airy mumble. And even as he spoke his answer the other voice was gone.

Then came a pricking and a pain. He snapped from his deluded imaginings to find he had been biting at his nails. There at the tip of his index finger sat a wound, where his teeth had wandered and cut too true. He wrapped it in a scrap of cloth, and his taste was all salt and iron.

How long had he been lost to his own thoughts, he wondered, sucking at his finger. The first faint light of morning was settling upon that gloomy place, and bit by bit he could see. She there, and the other one too, they lay sleeping yet. And beyond them, in the distance yonder…

Eyes?

Indeed, it were eyes. Two of them. A pair of luminous pinpoints dead ahead of him, green-yellow like a cat’s, though squint as he might to what they belonged he could not tell. Whatever it was, it was there. Some mortal creature now walked this island where none, save themselves, were to be found.

And as he looked upon it there began a sound, a hiss, a word, musical and light upon the air. And at its beck he found himself moving, crawling, dragging himself on arm and knee, towards those brilliant eyes. She and the other one, their frail breathing receded at pace behind him. Soon the foggy stillness about him was broken only by the sound of his own flesh, scrabbling ’cross sand and pumice, and by that beguiling and alien word.

At length all fell to darkness. A cave, perhaps, or some other pit. On and on he crawled, ever deeper into that dark, until his forearms were skinned and bloody and his slacks fell to tattered shreds. And the eyes, they grew. Not in size, but in number. Two pairs, then three, then a dozen and more. There seemed a thousand unblinking stares, all dead ahead, and he soldiered onward to the purpose of the word.

Then the sound was halted. He ceased his somnambulic progress, and found himself in the presence of many small things. He could see them ill but they were small things, aye, no more than a foot tall. A goodly number stood about him in a rough circle, and though to him they might be hidden he knew that many more yet stood beyond them. They spoke in halting and unintelligible gurgles and smiled, or he supposed they smiled, exposing several rows of diminutive and well-honed teeth. Their form suggested newborn children, to which they were comparable in form and size. But these creatures were lithe and stood well enough on their two legs, and were far older, he felt, than he. They wore no clothing, no jewelry, no ornaments of any kind, and their eyes were piercing and feral and bright.

In earlier times he might have been frightened, but the word had soothed him to subhumanity. His potential for fright was a past and fallen thing, lost among the other trivialities of his former self. His present was a void of hunger and weariness, and no humanity any longer dwelled there.

Towards that void one of the small things now stepped, and then a tankard was in his hand. It was crude and small and cast of heavy iron. With it he scooped from a basin that was set before him and from it then he drank. Shortly another small thing approached, and carried with it a bundle of small morsels. One of these it placed upon his lips–Meat! Such meat, indeed, as he had never tasted. It was sickly and sour and suffused with the brine of the sea, but sweet and oily and fat was it also, and he was a long time chewing upon it. When at last he had swallowed it, and followed it with strong drink, another was placed upon his lips, and thus for long hours he feasted. The things about him gurgled in their strange voices and grew excitable and danced, until the day fell to gloom again above them.

Then the food was exhausted and the tankard emptied, and the small things turned from him and slipped back from whence they came. He fell upon his back, full and warm and content, and for the first night in many he lapsed into a dreaming sleep. In his dreams there was no fog, and a moon rose above the island that was so full and yellow that it blotted the lesser stars from the sky. Fell moonbeams lit upon those few acres of black sand and volcanic slag and he saw himself there, fattened and round and with eyes that blazed with moonlight.

When he woke he found the fog had indeed been lifted. For the first time the full brilliance of dawn was upon him and his island. He looked to the sea and saw naught but rippling gray and breakers of white foam and an uncertain haziness of horizon. And in the warm providence of that morning nothing of the dream could he recall, save for that resplendent yellow moonshine and the gnashing of his own teeth.

And thus he found himself, belly full and distended, and naked save for the tatter of elastic at his waist. Somewhere close a spring bubbled, casting its foul waters out in a narrow channel towards the sea. At his feet lay a small tankard, caked in rust and earth and cast in ageless iron. Beyond it was an upturned grave. And to his side they lay, she and the other one both, now dead and scattered and derelict.

His thoughts were few as he stooped for the tankard and began heaping earth back into the grave, to cover the denuded bone there. When that job was done, and the captain laid again to rest, he set to digging two others, and what remained of his mind began to wander:

To small things, now vanished. To a price fairly paid.

And even as he went about his works he began to feel it again within himself, subtle and embryonic and growing:

Hunger.

~~~

Gamera vs. Barugon – Motion Picture Herald back cover ad (April 27, 1966)

This full-page ad, which appears as the back cover for the industry publication Motion Picture Herald’s April 27th 1966 issue, dates from just a few days after Gamera vs. Barugon‘s domestic release in Japan. No mention is made of an available English track (as Daiei did for some available features), though one was produced and has been presented on some video editions.

The film follows Barugon, loosed from its giant gemstone egg by treasure hunters, as it lashes out against the cities of Kobe and Osaka and comes into conflict with the giant monster Gamera. Gamera vs. Barugon debuted in Japanese cinemas on April 17th, 1966. Shortly thereafter American International Pictures’ TV imprint released an abridged English version straight to US television as War of the Monsters.

Motion Picture Herald was a trade publication primarily for exhibitors and owners of theater chains, and was in publication from 1931 (when it was consolidated under that banner from a number of other trade publications owned by Chicago-based publisher Martin Quigley) until 1972.

Godzilla Minus One 「ゴジラ -1.0」

For the thirtieth time in nearly seven decades* Toho’s greatest contract player has risen from the murky depths of the western Pacific to haunt not only the domestic Japanese market, but the humble regional American multiplex as well. The franchise truly springs eternal with Godzilla Minus One, the first film to be distributed in the United States under the reformed Toho International banner and the first of the series in my filmgoing life to see this wide of a distribution. The latest frolic for the king of the monsters has hustled up quite the collection in its 2,300+ screen opening weekend, netting just south of $12 million over those three days. It may not be Marvel money (though even Marvel money isn’t really Marvel money anymore), but for a conservatively budgeted foreign series that has struggled since the 1990s to find any real theatrical foothold in this country, it’s not a bad take at all.

* This does not include Toho’s triplet of futuristic animated features, Legendary’s various Monsterverse properties or Roland Emerich’s ill-received 1998 outing.

The film, to borrow Toho’s own enigmatic catch copy, takes both Godzilla and Japan “into the minus”, back some nine years from the events of the original 1954 film, to the final days of the war in the Pacific. There we are introduced to Zero pilot Koichi Shikishima, who feigns engine failure to shirk his suicidal “special attack” orders and makes a landing at the Imperial Navy’s remote outpost on Odo Island. Shortly thereafter he and the field mechanics stationed on Odo are set upon by a large and violent dinosaur-like creature, a mysterious rover of the deep sea dubbed Godzilla by island legends. Given the opportunity to fight and possibly kill the monster with his Zero’s 20mm auto-cannons, Shikishima instead chokes, with results both immediate and deadly for his compatriots.

A few months later the war is over and Shikishima has returned to Japan, where he scrabbles together a living in a shanty town that has sprung up in the firebombed ruins of metropolitan Tokyo. At the market he encounters Noriko Oishi, a young woman who has turned to petty theft to support the orphaned baby Akiko, whom she has taken into her care. Two years pass. Shikishima and Noriko live together in a state of co-dependent platonic inertia, caring for the now-toddler Akiko. Wracked with survivor’s guilt and unable to move on from the trauma of the war, Shikishima takes on the well-paid and dangerous work of sweeping sea mines along the Japanese coastline. Meanwhile Noriko, unsatisfied with her dependence on Shikishima and the lack of progress within their relationship, finds an office job in Tokyo’s bustling Ginza district.

Unbeknownst to anyone a legendary creature is lurking. Grown to massive size and imbued with untold destructive potential and cancerous regenerative capabilities by an American undersea atomic experiment, a monstrous Godzilla sets its sights on Tokyo just as it is beginning to rebuild.

While plenty of series entries have been set in the future, both near and far-flung, director and screenwriter Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One is the first to set itself entirely in the past, and it anchors itself assuredly in the aesthetics of the immediate postwar period. The shanty towns and street markets of decimated Tokyo are intimately and convincingly realized with practical sets, while the broad streets and brick-and-concrete modernity of Ginza and the surrounding details of the recuperating mid-1940s metropolis are lovingly rendered with visual effects (by Shirogumi Inc., under the supervision of Yamazaki and the direction of his long-time collaborator Kiyoko Shibuya). Likewise for the vehicles of the period, a mix of practical and VFX iterations of decommissioned warships, commuter trains, and the film’s humble mecha highlight, the experimental fighter plane Shinden. Even Godzilla’s mutation is tied to a specific historic moment by way of a visual effects reconstruction of the Crossroads-Baker atomic shot from the Summer of 1946, the radioactive contamination from which was so widespread (and decontamination strategies so lacking) that plans for a third shot in the Operation Crossroads series, Crossroads-Charlie, were abandoned.

Curious in its absence, then, is an obvious political perspective. Comparisons to Shigeru Kayama’s highly political writing for the first Godzilla (the serialized novel of which was recently translated and published in English) are perhaps unavoidable, given the parity in setting and subject and the degree to which Yamazaki derived inspiration from the 1954 film, but such comparisons inevitably fall flat. Godzilla Minus Zero, despite the potentiality of its setting, is deliberately shorn of any complicating elements. Yamazaki writes any American involvement, and indeed the whole of the occupation of Japan, out of the film with a montage in faux-newsreel style (the stylistic sibling to the opening of Gareth Edwards 2014 Godzilla), and makes reference to contemporaneous Japanese politics in only the broadest of strokes. There is fertile ground yet for anyone wishing to explore Godzilla through the lens of the postwar Japanese experience, and from a variety of socio-political perspectives. Yamazaki’s film is not that, though in all fairness it isn’t trying to be.

Despite the emphasis on period trappings Godzilla Minus One feels every bit what it is — the first Godzilla film of the post-Covid era. A film in which a community surrounded by and engulfed in deathly circumstance comes together in defense of life and the future. To that end Yamazaki deliberately culls the film of many traditional kaiju eiga trappings – politics, politicians, military engagement and boundary-pushing super-science. There are no Doctors Yamane or Serizawa here, no professor Tadokoro to read a new book and learn so much, just an assortment of private citizens with past experience of dubious applicability from their tenure in the Imperial forces. Military responses to Godzilla’s arrival are anemic and ineffectual, futile efforts by a defeated and decommissioned service that serve only to antagonize the monster in their brief appearances. Government bureaucracy, the major focus of Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s 2016 hit Shin Godzilla, is absent entirely. “Just like the government to keep secrets,” becomes a common refrain as the civilians of Godzilla Minus One realize they’ve been left to their own devices to resolve the impossible crisis before them.

That Yamazaki reserves the film’s small cynicisms for the powers that be after nearly half a decade of living under varying degrees of pandemic mismanagement seems fitting enough. He has otherwise crafted the most sentimental Godzilla in decades, if not the entire history of the franchise — an accusation I levy with no pejorative intent. Godzilla Minus One suggests that the most potent weapons available to us in our ongoing battle against entropy, tragedy, governmental shortcomings and universal ambivalence are hope, friendship, family and community. There’s a lot to admire in that after several of the worst and most isolating years of many of our lives. If ever there was a moment for Godzilla to be defeated by the sheer indomitability of the human spirit, it was this one.

Despite a preoccupation with special effects, which first attracted Yamazaki to filmmaking nearly four decades ago, I feel that it’s in ground-level human melodrama that the director has always found the most success. Godzilla Minus Zero is no exception, reflecting the deft hand the director has demonstrated with such material from the very beginning. Shikishima makes for an immediately compelling and relatable protagonist, stunted in his waking life and haunted in his dreams by the death he feels he should have suffered in the Pacific war and psychologically unable to escape the wartime that was to live in the future that is. Godzilla, then, becomes the metaphorical embodiment of Shikishima’s unresolved trauma and guilt, his unshakable fatalism, and the literal death that awaits him in the theater that claimed so many of his comrades. There in the depths it lurks, and like an untreated cancer it festers and metastasizes, the threat of its catastrophic revelation omnipresent and ever growing.

As one fatal thread binds Shikishima to Godzilla, and death, so another binds him to Noriko, and life. She builds an unconventional family with Shikishima and their adopted daughter Akiko, a curious nuclear unit of alienated individuals in a city where only isolated survivors remain. The community around them soon becomes their extended family — Shikishima’s congenial co-workers become like doting uncles, while his older neighbor Sumiko, her own children lost in the same firebombings that claimed Shikishima’s parents, gradually takes on the role of adoptive grandmother.

It’s enough, along with Noriko’s support through his darkest moments, for positive desires to take root in Shikishima once more. But just as hope buds within him Godzilla surfaces anew to raze Ginza, reducing the emblem of Postwar Japanese prosperity to rubble and ash and atomizing the National Diet Building. And so Shikishima finds himself once more at a crossroads, with Noriko literally pushing him towards life even as a deadly confrontation with Godzilla seems inevitable…

I’ll admit to not being entirely conducive to what Yamazaki, et al, were doing with Godzilla Minus One when I first saw it. It’s been a rough year for me, for reasons that have nothing to do with the mental health issues I’ve written about elsewhere or the lingering frustrations of the Covid-19 pandemic, and I suppose I wanted, consciously or otherwise, a film that reflected that frame of mind. Godzilla Minus One, steeped in nostalgia and optimism and punctuated with lovingly produced theme-park action sequences, does not. With a few days’ hindsight and a good deal of thought, whatever resentments I initially held have softened and my appreciation for the film has grown, to the extent that I may go for another screening before it exits my local cinema this Thursday. To put that in its proper perspective, Godzilla Minus One is the first film I’ve seen in a theater since 2016. Wanting to see it twice is high praise.

In many respects Godzilla Minus One has sought to differentiate itself, especially from the franchise’s more recent past. It is the antithesis of the excellent Shin Godzilla, which is probably exactly what it needed to be to follow in that film’s considerable cultural footsteps. Yamazaki presents a comparatively simple story with good characters, a digestible moral throughline, and a show-reel worthy selection of genuinely spectacular kaiju set pieces, and does so in a manner that honors the long-passed golden age of Toho tokusatsu production while confidently treading its own path — no mean feat, that.

Yamazaki has been public about his desire to have another go at the Godzilla franchise now that Godzilla Minus One is in release. Despite whatever reservations I’ve had about his work in the past (and there have been plenty, going all the way back to Returner in 2002) I think Toho’s executives would be stupid, bordering on irresponsible, not to give it to him. Good job.

Where coast guard crews still take their leave
quite listless in the sun…

“Great record, a lot of angst in it. We were certainly feeling a lot of pressure to come up with the second installment in our saga. It was written around touring and all the pressures of that. That was our first exposure to the actual nuts and bolts of what it was like to be recording artists. Once you’ve actually made a record and have had it released, there’s a lot of angst there and I think that’s reflected in the music – there’s a lot of tension.”

– Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser

“The second record was a blur. We did it in about two or three days. And I remember I screwed up a drum fill in ‘Hot Rails to Hell.’ So I overdubbed the whole drum track from start to finish, and of course I didn’t have my old drums to listen to either, just the guitar. It’s a wild track. It’s really loose, and it was like one take.”

– Albert Bouchard
both quotes from Agents of Fortune: The
Blue Oyster Cult Story (Martin Popoff, 2016)

I would be remiss if I let the day pass without saying anything about Tyranny and Mutation, the second long play from Long Island’s Blue Öyster Cult, released on this date 50 years ago. Born out of the blitz of touring that followed the band’s self-titled debut in ’72, Tyranny and Mutation is big and weird and far too busy for its own damn good. It also might be my favorite album… not just from the BÖC catalog, but from anyone.

A dig through my vinyl crates will check that math out. I own four copies of this on vinyl alone, including a pair of first-run pressings (one of them the elusive quad mix), with a fifth on the way. That doesn’t include the copy I have in digital hi-res, the pair of CD reissues I grew up with, or the cassette of it I ran into the ground. That last point is key. I don’t just own a lot of copies of Tyranny and Mutation… somehow I manage to listen to them. All of them. This one is in rotation a lot, and I find it creeping in between the wealth of new listening I do at least a couple of times a month.

But why this album? That’s a little harder to shake.

I did a lot of general band-geek shit as a kid. I was in the school concert band from junior high until I graduated, in the jazz band for the last four of those years, took elective music theory courses, and somehow had enough bandwidth left to play horrible five-string bass in a misguided alternative rock outfit (don’t ask – our recordings are, to the benefit of all mankind, lost). Somewhere somehow in the middle of all that Blue Öyster Cult became my band. I fished for their CDs at the local Camelot Music and an increasingly barren Circuit City, cut their tracks to tape for friends, and was just generally insufferable about them in the way teenagers are usually insufferable about things. I even dug a trio of old LPs out of a dusty thrift store crate and ran them through one of my aunts’ nigh-derelict turntables. I’m sure they sounded as awful as the speakers I blasted them on, but who cares. Those records are lost, long since melted in my parents’ attic. I still miss them.

Sometime after high school the Öyster boys and I lost touch. I don’t really know why. Times change, I guess, and tastes change with them. I skipped college. I got jobs, got into Nine Inch Nails and neoclassical, got the hell out of my hometown and got married. Tyranny and Mutation was nowhere to be found in that time. In retrospect I probably could have used it. But the CDs got sunburned and broken and went out with the rest of the garbage during one of our half dozen apartment moves. I miss those, too.

Cut ahead a few years. My wife got a job in tech (she has since recovered), and we moved to San Francisco, right off Haight, into an apartment that cost us a good used car a month to rent. Those were strange times, aye, and in those strange times the boys and I were brought together again. Six months after we landed in Haight the plague years hit. My wife and I were sitting in an Indonesian place (Lime Tree for those curious. Hit is up. It’s fucking great.), our phones buzzed and the NBA was cancelled. One of us said, “I guess this is fucking serious.” For the next year and a half we queued for groceries and fretted over toilet paper and were shocked at the beleaguered insanity of this country and the world at large, and our entire lives were packed within a three hundred square foot second story apartment with an ant problem and a $35k per year price tag.

To be direct, I started to lose it. My problems with bipolar disorder did not begin during the pandemic, but they were certainly amplified by it, and to a degree that become terrifying to me. What once was manageable was suddenly anything but. At the worst I became alien to myself, unfixed, unrecognizable, with little recourse but to curl up on a cold laminate floor and wait for my brain to kick back into the familiar. Like I said, they were strange times. (And for anyone reading who has found themselves in similarly strange times… It’s scary, and it’s awful, and I feel you. Help is awesome, and it’s out there, and you should absolutely try to get it. ~weltraumbesty)

Around the same time, and in no way as a cope (for Covid lockdowns and my mental illness and my loud, inescapable neighbors), I got deep into buying and playing records. Like… obsessive deep. Since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve accumulated around six hundred of them, not including a significant pile of 7″ singles, and a small horde of tables and cartridges with which to play them. It was, to be perfectly honest, a problem, one clearly driven by my stress and mania, though I am eternally grateful that I did not settle on a more destructive preoccupation. The positive offshoot of all this is that I started to listen to a lot of music, most of it entirely new to me. I got into classic gangsta rap and cloud hop and post punk and electro pop and thrash and death and West Coast stoner rock and god knows what else, which was as richly rewarding as you might expect.

At the height of that mania I rediscovered Blue Öyster Cult, and I also rediscovered Tyranny and Mutation.

Tyranny and Mutation is not a particularly well regarded album, even from the Cult’s own catalog, and it’s not really difficult to see why. It’s a messy kind of a record, a real tangle of styles and influences that actively tries and largely succeeds at being abrasive and unapproachable. This is supposed to be dangerous music after all, leather clad and full of guitar distortion and chants of “Lucifer the light!” It must have fit the bill well enough at the time. The band certainly played the part of transgressive rockers, draped as they were in the trappings of occult fascism for their early cavalcade of live performances. Never mind that it was all a work, perpetrated for the kind of shock publicity you’d expect from a label pitching the band as a domestic answer to Black Sabbath. The band grew tired of the schtick quickly enough, dropping it well before achieving mainstream success with 1976’s platinum seller Agents of Fortune, but some of the reputation must have stuck. As late as 2001 my assistant high school band director was shocked to find me trading cassettes of their stuff with friends, and made a fervent effort to sway me from their “devil music”.

If he were to listen to it I suspect he’d have found this album, at least, to be more irritating than it is damnable. Early Blue Öyster Cult has a certain structural aggressiveness to it, a fact of which Tyranny and Mutation is highly emblematic. The album is all hard angles and staccato grooves and bright, crunchy electric guitar, its accessibility compromised by an incredibly busy stereo production (this was, after all, one of Columbia’s inaugural quadraphonic efforts) that, rife as it is with dropped notes and boozy pseudo-synchronization, can border on the unprofessional. And that’s without considering the album’s slate of more or less forgotten B sides, a comparatively downtempo selection of weird-out tracks that are steeped in obscure lyricism and prone to off-beat stylistic diversions.

To be short, Tyranny and Mutation is a strange fucking album.

It’s also fucking great, an album that sparks with experimental energy and verve in a way that no other album by BÖC does. Tyranny and Mutation blisters and bruises and boogies and bops. Its staccato guitars duet and fight and slice like razors at either extreme of the stereo channels while the mixer overloads with track on track on track of bass and synth and drums. It’s a tactile tour de force that flirts with half a million musical genres, from the inscrutable masturbation-as-ritual hard bop proto-speed epic 7 Screaming Diz-Busters to the hefty gothic doom-and-gloom triptych Wings Wetted Down to the drugged-out and disturbingly affirmational psych-out O.D.’d on Life Itself.

And on and on. Teen Archer is a lyrically reductive and dizzying bit of psych-rock while The Red & the Black refines prior album cut I’m on the Lamb but I ain’t no Sheep into a classic hard rock showstopper. Its raucous wall-of-sound opener is brutal, iconic, a classic bit of metal musicianship still worthy of homage, and a hell of a way to jumpstart a record. Hot Rails to Hell delights in its surf-boogie blasphemies while Baby Ice Dog lurks, sensually suggestive and elusively jazzy, bookended with a set of baying dogs (“Freeze on!“). All along the way the cuts pile atop one another, impatient and intractable, until Mistress of the Salmon Salt (Quicklime Girl), a deliciously grim closer that dabbles in occult urban legend and diabolism.

All that’s fantastic, of course, and certainly part and parcel of why I love the thing so much. But it goes beyond that, to something more immediately personal. When I look back to that tiny fucking apartment and see myself waiting there, low and troubled on that fucking floor, I also see myself reaching for my earbuds and, for whatever reason, listening to this album. Tyranny and Mutation didn’t fix me by any means. To suggest that would be absurd. But somewhere in its abstract angularities and emotional vacillations and shear overwhelming texture I was able to find a bit of myself, and at a time when, reasonably or not (definitely not!), I genuinely felt like what was me might be lost forever. I am very happy that the worst of those strange days appear to be behind me. My love for this record remains.

Happy 50th Tyranny and Mutation.

After Last Season (dir. Mark Region, 2009)

A murdered medical student returns from beyond the grave to stop a serial killer from murdering again during a psychology experiment held by two current medical students on the grounds of the medical research corporation at which they intern. Also, a folded towel, a ceiling fan with two bulbs missing, four sheets of paper taped to the siding of a house and a hand-written note about a dormitory’s new recycling bins. The disease is in its beginning stage. The signs of the disease are minimal.

It is difficult to know where to begin when speaking of After Last Season, an inscrutable multimedia work that might charitably be described as a movie. Intended by all accounts to be a more or less straight forward genre film, After Last Season is instead defiantly bizarre, from its obscure modern art opening through to its prosaic final line, “We have a room next to the living room.” It is not an easy piece of media to classify.

A confounding lack of anything resembling traditional production value inevitably dominates first impressions. After Last Season was financed on the (very) cheap (despite a quoted final cost of as much as $5 million, the initial shooting budget is said to have amounted to around $40,000) and shot, against all fiscal reason, on 35mm film. Indeed, the union cast, crew, and raw stock and camera rental must have eaten up most, if not all, of the film’s initial resources. This is implied heavily by the final product, in which most of the sets are dressed (where they are dressed at all) in loose sheets of printer paper, cardboard, and off-the-shelf white tablecloths. Some interiors are filmed in real homes with no observable effort towards staging. One repeated mid-film exterior offers a truly quizzical compromise: a view of the side of a home, utterly ordinary save for the four pieces of blank paper that are conspicuously taped to it.

One might well ask why, but neither the film nor its makers are offering answers.

The writing, also by Mark Region, is meandering and obscure. There is no obvious plot, no particular narrative direction. There are characters, but they spend the majority of their appearances embroiled in generalized small talk (“I’ve never been to that town, but I’ve been through it.”) that rarely touches upon the events of the film. Sometimes things happen: A woman walks through a hallway. A man lies on the floor, stabbed. An FBI agent gets an MRI scan as part of his treatment for Parkinson’s disease. A pair of medical students learn about the differences between dopamine blockers and SSRIs. A ghost tries to pick up a backpack.

The story, near as I was able to glean from my pair of viewings, is as written above: A murdered medical student returns from beyond the grave to stop a serial killer from murdering again during a psychology experiment held by two current medical students on the grounds of the medical research corporation at which they intern. Whether or not this is what the film is about is impossible for me to say, and the telling of these elements is, as with the rest of After Last Season, non-traditional.

The focal point, such as there is one, is on medical students Sarah (Peggy Mcclellan) and Matthew (Jason Kulas, who continues to act and currently moderates the film’s facebook fan page), who appear to be in residency at a hospital (though Sarah contradicts this during a phone call with… someone?… later in the film), under the auspices of Dr. John Marlen (the late Scott Winters), and also intern at the Prorolis Corporation, a medical technology company. At the hospital, Sarah and Matthew take in a low-key lecture about schizophrenia, its treatments, and the diagnostic application of MRI exams (the MRI machine, prominently featured and brutally constructed of cardboard and tape, deserves a supporting credit on its own). At the end of this Dr. Marlen makes an offhand remark about a particular patient who believed she heard the voice of a dead man. This is perhaps the only example of the film making an obvious, observable attempt to set up a future plot element.

Within the hallowed brick and cardboard halls of the Prorolis Corproation Sarah and Matthew conduct a pair of psychological exercises. The first appears, initially, to be central to the plot: through a pair of experimental chips Matthew is able to see Sarah’s thoughts, as prompted by a questionnaire. As the exercise progresses Sarah’s visions (related via several uncut minutes of rudimentary CGI) become more clarified and complex, and are invaded by the mysterious, obscured figure of a man who may be responsible for a spate of recent homicides. The pair witness, through Sarah’s mind, an attempted killing in a nearby home, and are then attacked in their conference room by the same knife-wielding man – now invisible. Matthew screams: “The chair! The chair next to the wall!”

…and then snaps awake. The prior exercise, the chips, the visions, the killer, all were but a dream. Sarah stands by, bemusedly perplexed (I sympathize), and after some small talk the real experiment, a decidedly non-fantasized question / answer exercise, begins. Sarah asks Matthew what sort of car he’d buy, what he’d change about his actions over the last forty-eight hours, whether he flies in his dreams. A commotion outside their meeting room disturbs them, and the killer is revealed to be very real indeed (albeit not invisible). He stalks into the meeting room, knife held awkward and high, only to be cursorily dispatched by a flying folding chair. An invisible presence speaks. It is Craig (actor and professional stand-in Gregory Seymore), the disembodied spirit of a young man stabbed sometime before. Sarah and Matthew know his name. I do not know how. The three speak about Craig’s experiences, his death, and he demonstrates the difficulty he has interacting with the physical world. “The bag is too heavy. I can’t hold onto it. I can lift the ruler.” And then, Craig is gone.

In the aftermath Sarah and Matthew go back to their regular lives, the former assisting at the hospital, the latter continuing his research at the Prorolis Corporation. A coat falls off the wall behind Matthew, suggesting (or maybe not) that Craig may still be there. An FBI agent, the Parkinson’s patient from the beginning of the film, talks on the phone to… someone?… about why the killer, now locked in ‘Cell 1’ at an undisclosed location, was at the Prorolis Corporation. The wife of Dr. John Marlen shows her friend, a patient at the hospital (we see two of her appointments in the infamous MRI room), around their new home. They talk about a new strip mall, and the friend looks at a few family photos (each turned, curiously, to face a wall). It is revealed that Craig was Dr. Marlen’s son, a promising medical student cut down by the killer well before his time. “We have a room next to the living room.” End.

What does it all mean? I have no idea. Region offers a horde of connecting threads – an FBI man who gets an MRI at the beginning of the film returns at the end to interrogate the killer, an invisible killer appears in a dream before the killer is subdued by an invisible ghost, Matthew screams about a chair in his dream before the killer is subdued by one, Sarah’s roommate operates the MRI machine, a woman recovering from a neurological injury is friends with the mother of the ghost – but they coalesce less into a story than they do a Pepe Silvia thought board. Efforts to derive meaning are further undermined by an overwhelming emphasis on seemingly meaningless trivialities. A friend of Sarah’s roommate is found to be allergic to shrimp. Matthew talks on the phone about a town known for its hot mineral springs. Craig’s mother explains her home renovations. A sign states that a dormitory has new recycling bins. It goes on and on and on.

Further complicating matters is the trifecta of direction, cinematography, and editing (the latter credited not to Region, but to Vincent Grass, who has no further credits). From statements by the cast themselves we know that Region gave very little in the way of direction during the film’s week-long shoot, and did no more than a single take for most scenes. Relying on individual takes is ludicrous from any film production standpoint, but all the more for a shoot done on film, where lab errors or accidental exposure can easily leave you with no footage to fall back on. I can only imagine that, with so much of his initial funding tied up in raw film stock, Region might literally have been counting the feet before his budget ran dry.

Whatever his own reasoning for his peculiar, nigh negligent methodology, the results are very much on-screen. The cast present as what they are – actors at a loss for context, performing with little direction and often without their scene partner, trying their best to “get it right” in a single take. The camera is confused, unfocused, erratic. It lags badly behind the actions of the ill-marked cast and frames them thoughtlessly against the paltry backdrops of exposed brick and cardboard and blank paper. Some, though by no means most, of this could have been mitigated in editing, but here again After Last Season stumbles.

If someone were to tell me that Region put every frame he shot into the final cut of this film I would be hard pressed not to believe them. Actors flub lines and restart their takes, stand idle before the “Action!” call, and wonder in a visible, confused silence at whether a take is over or not. On-set discipline appears to have been non-existent. During one dialogue scene an offscreen someone noisily stands up, walks off, and casually slams a door behind them, a disruption Peggy Mcclellan tries, and fails, to ignore as she continues her performance. In the opening scene, someone farts. It’s all just there, uncut and unfiltered and pasted together with strange unpeopled detail shots of ceiling fans and signs with arrows pointing nowhere and thermostats and floor lamps and refrigerator doors and shelves… Rarely, if ever, has a finished and theatrically-released film tried so little and failed so spectacularly to communicate itself.

After Last Season is often prefaced as “the worst film ever made”, a designation I can’t really agree with. I feel that qualifying it as such ignores some of the truly awful, genuinely harmful things that have been created since motion pictures first began. This is no Triumph of the Will level humanitarian slight, it wasn’t produced by a sexual predator, no one died in-process due to lack of oversight. And yes, I am a pedant.

That said, After Last Season is absolutely one of the worst-made films ever, and anyone looking to argue otherwise would need some shocking proofs in their corner. There are plenty of films out there offering their variously deficit productions to bemused niches of “bad movie” fans, but few offer them the near total dereliction of filmmaking responsibilities that this film does. Whether embarrassed by what he made or genuinely hurt by the reception After Last Season received and continues to receive, both Mark Region and his feature have seemingly been removed from circulation. Poof. Like a ghost that has trouble carrying a backpack, they’re gone. The only home media release of the film (Region’s self-released dvd) is long out of print and vanishingly hard to come by, and it has appeared on no streaming services in nearly a decade and a half.

More’s the pity. After Last Season would likely never have been another The Room, shorn as it is of that film’s central maniacal hubris – the vanity of Tommy Wiseau is as accessible and exploitable an angle as can be had. But there is a hubris at work here all the same, of the naive sort that prevented Mark Region from realizing how deeply in over his head he was as a filmmaker even as the nitrogen started bubbling in his veins. After Last Season is terrible moviemaking in a rarefied sense. It is the one great work of a generational anti-talent; it is Mark Region’s philosopher’s stone. It is difficult and painful and wholly inexplicable, and it is perhaps the one film above all others that you, in your life, must see.

Double Target (dir. Bruno Mattei, 1987)

I suppose this would qualify as one of the lesser works to emerge from Bruno Mattei’s first Philippines period, which would peak the following year with the nigh-pornographic bicep-rippling gunplay of Robowar (and whatever bits of the maniacal Zombi 3 he directed). In fairness, Double Target is lesser than those perhaps only in that it hasn’t enjoyed the same notoriety as they in the decades since. VHS editions were scarce. A modern home video edition? Unthinkable. As with any Vincent Dawn joint, traditional qualitative assessments are hazy. Shake again later.

The film follows ex-military not-public television personality Bob Ross (Miles O’Keeffe, Ator l’invincibile) as he returns to southeast Asia to find the son he was forced to leave behind ten years prior, only to be roped into a covert state department mission to uncover whether or not selectively bilingual Russian officers (led by Bo Svenson, Walking Tall part 2) are raising an army of international terrorists in the jungles of Vietnam. Guest-starring are a hell of a lot of fireballs, sweat and squibs, with Donald Pleasance (Prince of Darkness) in the role of a wheezing senator with a silly name, and a walk-on appearance by l’Ultimo Squalo’s exploding torso.

Double Target is, in a grand failure of descriptive ambition, typically Mattei. Like a lot of his work it can feel a bit like film-by-algorithm, an irrational, feverish pastiche of recognizable yet alienated cinematic plunder that is all the more remarkable for its entirely human origin. That it exists at all is a testament to our ingenuity, like the moon landing or algebra, but instead it’s a movie about a sad dad who blows up stock footage of a shark with an underwater grenade pistol. Print it in gold and shoot it into fucking space. Our concerned galactic neighbors deserve to know.

Sad dad blows up much more than sharks here, of course. Though he briefly dabbles in hand-to-hand combat and traditional gunplay, Bob Ross predominantly paints in grenades – rocket propelled grenades, pin grenades… are there others? I’m no expert of the form, but if they exist then i’m sure he was painting with those as well. Road block? Grenade. Village taken over by hostile Russian assets? Grenade. Stuck at an outdoor lunch table with suspicious folks who are all wearing the same boots? Just trick one of them into opening a coconut with a machete, because you rigged the table with, what else? A grenade. Person, place or thing? If it’s a noun it gets a fucking grenade. Bob Ross will have his happy little clouds. I’m not complaining.

Action is one thing, but man, Double Target has heart as well. Sort of. I guess. Mattei and his usual co-conspirators (Clyde Anderson né Claudio Fragasso, Troll 2, and an uncredited Rossella Drudi) peddle a family drama that’s a little bit Commando and a little bit The Emerald Forest, only awkward and weird and full of close-ups that read like Ikea instructions. Ross is reunited with his boy in the early goings, but surprise! The kid hates him. I mean really hates him. Like, conspires with Bo Svenson and a platoon of Russians to capture and execute his father hates him. Harsh, man. The boy finally breaks after Svenson casts him in his way-off-Broadway production of The Deer Hunter, and soon he’s backstabbing bad-guy guards with a smile and calling Ross ‘Dad’. Phew. The kid’s alright.

Like a lot of Mattei’s work Double Target hangs on by the skin of its teeth, and only just at that. It would take a semester or two of masters level film seminars to cover all of its mismatched angles and discordant stock footage inserts, but I’m not here to drag the film. That stuff was structural by this point in the man’s career, key evidence in the theory of Vincent Dawn: auteur. Any critical dogging Double Target could inspire would be at least thirty-five years beyond relevant anyway. Besides, this is a picture where Miles O’Keeffe leaps from the roof of a three story building to escape a fistfight with VCP loyalists, tucks a roll on the sidewalk, and is fine, ya know? You can wonder if it’s good or bad all you want, but the movie doesn’t give a shit. It’s got places to be, irresponsible helicopter stunts to perform, and heaps of dubiously constructed private property to atomize.

Oh, and Donald Pleasance’s silly character name? It’s Blaster. Senator Blaster.

For fuck’s sake.