Category: film

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.

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.

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.

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.