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HALLOWEEN HAVOIC VI!!!!!!


Brian Fowler

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Funny enough, the other thing I really enjoyed were the visuals.

The director, Karl Freund, specialized in that sort of thing. This is a guy who probably had more influence on the visual look of both film and television than practically anyone I can name; you literally gotta go straight to D.W. Griffith to mention anyone who invented and popularized more shit than Freund. Firstly, he helped invent the brilliant, shadowy look of German expressionism in his work as a cinematographer on movies like Metropolis, The Last Laugh, and The Golem. Then he single-handedly created the traditional look for Universal horror movies (and thus, all gothic-style talkies) with his work on Dracula. And THEN he went to work in the early days of television and shot almost every episode of I Love Lucy, creating the multi-camera style of set-based television shooting which is still used on sitcoms, talk shows, and news shows to this day.
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In unrelated news, Dragon and I are no longer friends.

We'll always have badass teen girl protagonists.

But yeah. On one hand I'm a terrible target audience for this. On the other hand, I've watched silent film era Hitchcock and dug it so that can't be it alone. I enjoyed Karloff's stuff if it helps, but mostly I feel like they pinned the emotional weight on the worst actors in the film and it suffered for it.

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Just for the record - searching "Loved Ones Hot Goth Girl" was quite the dicey proposition

 

the_Loved_Ones_Goth.jpg

 

IMDB is your friend, old man. 

 

Just search for the movie, discover that the role of Mia was played by Jessica McNamee, and then do a search on "Jessica McNamee""Loved Ones." 

 

You are much less likely to run into an image cache that will get you fired.

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Oh it is the eve of the Eve of evil. What's Halloween without vampiric activity?

Film: Only Lovers Left Alive

Chosen by: Jingus

I was hesitant about picking this one, cuz many would argue that it's barely even a "horror movie", much in the same way that the same director's Dead Man was barely even a "Western". It's mostly just people having calm conversations, and the (very minimal) violence and scares are mostly kept offscreen. However: it may not really be trying to scare us, but if not for the existence of Let the Right One In, I'd call it the single best vampire film of the 21st century. This movie makes it feel like the subgenre finally grew up and started dealing with adult shit, rather than the usual portrayal of vampires as dumb angry horny emo teenagers. TILDA SWINTON AND TOM HIDDLESTON PLAY AN IMMORTAL VAMPIRE COUPLE. And play them like rock stars. If you do not experience a rush of blood to your genitals upon reading those sentences, then I weep for your lack of a soul.

Reviewed by: Lacelle

This movie was interesting, it kept my attention & that's no small accomplishment in this smart phone era. It tells the tale of vampires in modern times and I believe it does a terrific job of showing the audience how vampires would behave. This was my first exposure to Tom Hiddleston plays Adam and he really came across like a moody, pretentious asshole and I don't mean that as an insult. His character called for those things and he delivers them in spades. Tilda Swinton as Eve just looks the part, you could buy this premise but the main takeaway from this movie is how captivating Mia Wasakowska as Eva is in her limited screen time. I was expecting her to return and when she does not, I can't help but feel disappointed. Talking about disappointment, that ending, wow. Jim Jarmusch is a director who can make some quality, fascinating stuff or some stuff that just tests your patience this movie really walks the line and I don't know if I would recommend it but I wasn't bored so it was time well spent.

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We're not done yet children of the dark

Film: Inferno

Chosen by: Curt McGirt

Every fan immediately says that Suspiria (or Deep Red, sometimes) is their favorite Dario Argento film but for me his masterpiece is Inferno. God of Cinema Mario Bava did some effects and second unit work and unquestionably propped up the film while Argento was suffering from a bout of hepatitis. Still, it's the story, the dark mystery of the Three Mothers, inscrutable and absurd as only Argento and Daria Nicolodi can manage to create, that is the pull for me. It drops you down the well and you figure your own path through it, through submerged and between-the-floorboards spaces.

Reviewed by: S.K.o.S.

My assigned movie was Inferno. There are several movies by that name, including one coming out next year with Tom Hanks, but I assume we're talking about the 1980 Inferno by Dario Argento.

This is the second part of a trilogy involving the Three Mothers, who are three ancient, powerful creators of witchcraft. The first movie in this trilogy was Suspiria, and the third was 2007's Mother Of Tears. I've mentioned this before, but I'll say again that I tend to stick to more recent movies, and so I've never seen anything by Argento. Could've seen Mother Of Tears, was very aware of it when it came out, but everything I heard said that it wasn't good. I suspect whoever picked Inferno was thinking that most of us would've seen Suspiria, and we could do a compare/contrast thing in our review, but nope, not me. My only exposure to giallo are recent tributes like Berberian Sound Studio and the movies of Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani.

In this movie, we're dealing with the Mother of Darkness, who makes her home in New York. There's a book in the movie, called The Three Mothers, that pretty much sets out the mythology for us. A woman named Rose gets her hands on a copy of it, and manages to follow clues given in the book to get into the sewers near her apartment, go underwater, and release a corpse, in what seemed to be a scene taken from that big jump scare in Jaws. That seems to set off a malevolent being who apparently wants to seize all copies of this book and kill anyone who knows anything about its contents. Rose has to call her brother Mark, who lives in Rome, and get him to come to New York to help.

Really, though, the plot is pretty thin, just an excuse to have a bunch of murder set-pieces. A character ends up on their own, walks around for a bit, everything's very quiet, then they get surprised and killed. You could nitpick the plot, or the acting (which isn't helped by the Italian tradition of recording the dialogue in post-production - English dialogue dubbed in even though the actors are speaking English) but that'd be beside the point.

Actually, I felt like there were almost not enough characters in the movie to be killed, like we were in actual danger of dropping to zero people left and just going to a test pattern for the rest of the movie's runtime. I'd almost like to have some sort of graph showing each character's introduction and how long they lasted. It was like they were introducing new people just so they could die. By the third act, secondary characters that you didn't necessarily think you'd see again were being brought back to be killed.

There were definitely a lot of stylistic touches going on here. I feel like I've heard something about the use of the color red in Suspiria (or am I getting confused with Deep Red?), but here, there seemed to be a recurring theme of blue and lavender lighting, certainly not in every scene, but often enough that it was noticeable. My favorite kill was probably the lunar eclipse one. It was cool to see some original black leather glove/knife in the air shots. Also, a lot of those kills were messier than I was expecting. Like there's one with a sort of guillotine where I would've expected the victim's head to come straight off, but the blade just sort of lodges in the neck.

It was pretty good on the "this movie is 35 years old" sliding scale, still scary (although jump scares are always going to get me) and good to see for historical purposes.

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SKOS: Cool, glad to introduce you to Argento. Now go watch Suspiria! (and Tenebrae)

 

There are many more things I love about Inferno than the storyline: the gorgeous actresses, the ridiculous soundtrack from Keith Emerson, the individual setpieces for each murder, I could go on. It's just great, and I forgive any lapses/complete absences of logic it has, because that's just the world it inhabits. 

 

I still haven't sat through all of Only Lovers Left Alive but the end was really, really good. It sucks that every other time it came on satellite was at right about the same point. Should probably just rent it. 

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Rise up my zombies, it's early morning feeding time. Happy Halloween

Film: A Cat In the Brain

Chosen by: The Mad Dog

"one of Lucio Fulci's final films and is notable for self-reflexively summing up his career."

Reviewed by: Jingus

A CAT IN THE BRAIN (directed by Lucio Fulci, 1990): 6/10

"But I make horror films! If I made films about love, no one would buy a ticket!"

One thing I should make clear, right up front: that score, much like this entire film, is ONLY for serious fans of Italian director Lucio Fulci. If you don't even know who the guy is: don't bother watching this movie, period. If you've just seen Zombie, you probably wanna go back and catch two or three more before attempting to tackle A Cat in the Brain. This is the ninth one of his pictures that I've seen, and even I felt like I was still missing out on a few points (the guy directed over fifty films in his career, after all). It is a love letter to aficionados of Italian exploitation cinema, and it has very little patience for noobs.

Now, how to describe the film's plot... or, ahem, "plot". Okay, in a nutshell: legendary horror filmmaker Lucio Fulci plays legendary horror filmmaker Lucio Fulci. While working on his latest movie, he starts having startling visions of various horrifying images: people getting murdered, sleazy joyless sex, monsters, all kinds of rough shit. He goes to a psychiatrist to try and get some help, but it doesn't take; Fulci is hallucinating more and more often, seeing awful things that bear an uncanny resemblance to much of the content of his films. And then real dead bodies start turning up, matching the people from his visions...

...okay, I am leaving out one bit. This is technically a SPOILER, but it comes so early in the film that the movie is practically spoiling itself: the psychiatrist is the real killer, and has hypnotized Lucio into believing that he's the one committing these crimes in order to cover up the shrink's murders. But this plot thread is treated in an almost contemptuous manner. The hallucinations began before the evil shrink started trying to drive Fulci mad, and the eventual "climax" actually takes place completely offscreen. The movie palpably feels like it wouldn't even care to give us this real-world excuse for what's going on, except that movie viewers tend to demand at least a LITTLE coherence from what they're watching.

And believe you me, "little" might be too large a word to describe the total amount of coherence on display here' even by Italian horror standards, a LOT of this makes no fucking sense whatsoever. The film made a lot more sense once I did some research and discovered it was basically a clip show. Fulci, in a move that Roger Corman would admire, decided to take various bits and pieces of his recent films and stitch them together with some new footage in order to make an entire other "original" picture. (One of the actors was quoted bitterly saying that he didn't even know he was appearing in this new movie, and wish Fulci would've paid him.) The highlight-reel nature of the film makes itself known in the sheer volume of the exploitation content: this is easily the single goriest film that Fulci has ever produced. Yes, I know how ambitious a claim THAT is, but the movie seriously never goes even three minutes without showing us yet another incredibly graphic murder. Add in a deeply uncomfortable amount of gratuitous female nudity, and it's pretty easy to see why this film was hounded by censors all over the globe; hell, it was banned in England until 2003.

But even though it often feels like a demo reel for makeup effects, the film's overall effect (once again, for fanboys only) seems to have something a lot sneakier going on. The movie isn't just horror, it's also a really dark comedy; but the comedic bits are presented with such a straight face that it would be easy to miss that fact. The jarringly upbeat music track contrasts harshly with the imagery onscreen, which is a trick beloved of hacks and masters alike, but it works pretty well here to indicate that we're not supposed to be taking this too seriously. After all, Fulci portrays himself in the worst light possible: he's presented as an overbearing asshole and a lecherous creep, a guy who's just as insane as the content in his work. That's pretty ballsy to do, in an era when celebrity self-parody wasn't terribly popular. And hell, he not only beat the "meta self-aware horror flicks" trend to the punch by several years, but he did it in a much more raw and masochistic manner. A Cat in the Brain has a hell of a lot more to say about Lucio Fulci films (much of it surprisingly negative) than New Nightmare had to say about Wes Craven films.

Finally: even in his decrepit later years, Fulci is simply an incredibly talented filmmaker. I've always thought he was better than most of his contemporaries; in this case, "most" basically meaning "everyone except Mario Bava and Michele Soavi". (Notice how I DIDN'T mention Dario Argento? There's good reason for that. Perhaps the most overrated director in history.) Fulci instinctively knows how to frame a shot in order to best get the point across. He's not a terribly fancy filmmaker, he doesn't mess around with much decorative cinematography or go all Scorsese with ambitious move-the-camera-all-over-the-set shots. He just figures out what he needs to do for the scene, and accomplishes it. Add that to a good sense for pacing the editing and a great sense for sound mixes (the mediocre dubbing here actually helps the film's overall feeling of being deliberately stagy and not-quite-real), and he's a legitimate artist who deserves to be recognized for a lot more than just constantly showing women getting stabbed in the eyeballs.

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I must reiterate for the record: don't watch A Cat In The Brain unless you're VERY familiar with the work of Lucio Fulci. It seriously won't make any damn sense at all to non-fans. It's got no patience for outsiders.

And hell yeah Curt, make sure to catch Only Loves Left Alive sometime. It's seriously the best vampire movie since Let the Right One In, a grown-up film which treats the idea of nocturnal immortality with some pretty deep thought in the "okay, what would this really be like? What would that do to a person, psychologically speaking?" department. And oh yeah, HiddleSwinton is a celebrity power couple so goddamned beautiful that the mere act of observing their elegant comeliness might send one into a fit of melancholy weeping, mourning the intraversible distance between one's own claylike flesh and the star-stuff which makes up the celestial bodies of these towering new gods who walk among us mortals.

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The night of evil roles on! The blood flows! The screams are real!

Film: The Prophecy

Chosen by: Exec producer

SEE! A Horror Spectacle of Spectacular Horribleness!

FEEL! The utter lack of Tension and Suspense!

HEAR! Snippets of mediocre Funk!

PONDER! A Monster Message Movie that is the Ridiculous to Gojira's Sublime!

SNICKER! At the Lead Character's Cluelessness of his Wife's Condition!

TRY! Not to LOL at the Savage Camp-Site Attack!

MARVEL! At a film that didn't end John Frankenheimer's Career!

FREE! Your mind and Enjoy Prophecy (1979)!

Reviewed by: nate

The Prophecy

Not to be confused with: “The Prophecy” (1990), starring Christopher Walken.

(USA, 1979; R)

Horror

Paramount Pictures; 102 min.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Starring: Talia Shire; Robert Foxworth; Armand Assante; Richard Dysart; Kevin Peter Hall, as “The Mutant Bear”

Tagline: “The monster movie”

Sandwiched between “Black Sunday” and “The Challenge,” John Frankenheimer unleashed “The Prophecy,” a film about the bane of comic books and 1980s Troma films … toxic waste! Man’s wonton pollution of our fair Mother Earth takes center stage here, making for a “save our planet” parable akin to “On Deadly Ground,” or “Godzilla,” or those commercials with “Iron Eyes” Cody. However, you will find no elbows broken, no Japan stomping, and no weepy Native Americans. Nope, all that lies ahead of you is doo-doo butter. Your investment in the message of the film – “Save the Earth!” – may vary, depending on how effectively you are inspired to improve your attention to our environment by the possibility that, one day, pollution may spawn a shit-kicking mutant bear named Katahdin (and I had to look this up to get the spelling right, and now I can’t keep my brain from turning it into “Kardashian,” which is probably the worst act the beast afflicts for the sake of its sheer existence). More on Katahdin in a minute.

The acting is serviceable at best, although you can probably tell which tree provided the wood that would be the foundation of Armand Assante’s acting; whenever he was onscreen, a small part of me wanted him to bust out the camp that was his in “Judge Dredd,” but it was not to be. Oh well, maybe in whatever Asylum mockbuster he’s destined to star in down the road.

What’s really on display here is the cinematography; this isn’t a bad looking film. There are some very nice shots of the locations, and the mise-en-scene is laid out pretty well. The story, such that it is, is enough to put the characters where they need to be. Of course, good horror is often as much about human drama as it is whatever supernatural or bestial or sinister protagonist thrown into the mix. There were several missed opportunities in this tale, the most glaring for me was how the fate of Maggie and her unborn child was mishandled. Into this tale of polluted environs, mutant animals, birth defects, and general genetic mayhem wrought by big industry, I didn’t catch even the slightest hint that Maggie – a pregnant accompaniment to husband Rob – was concerned, much less affected, by what exposure to this toxic field would potentially do to her kid upon delivery day. The suggestion of either positive or negative fate for mother and child would have been a more satisfying (and daring, I’ll add) denouement than the ham-handed set-up of a possible sequel that would never come.

Which brings us to … Katahdin, the mutant bear. Jesus Harold Christ, Katahdin is a hoot. This ain’t a bear to be fucked with. Unfortunately, the design of Katahdin proves a sacred truth of the horror film, that less of your monster is more. When confined to the shadows and the unseen, Katahdin is the unseen horror. When he is finally seen … fuck; it looks like melting shit on a stick. Still, for the set pieces where Katahdin does the dirty deeds (and the scene where Katahdin happens upon a camper zipped tightly in a yellow sleeping bag … said camper, instead of exiting the bag, hops away looking every bit like the “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” bananna … and, when attacked by Katahdin, fucking EXPLODES! … must be experienced), there’s one fine sequence where the mutant bear and his prey are pursuing and evading, respectively, each other, and the tension is probably as good as the entire movie gets. But the final verdict simply puts Katahdin on the scale at a rating lower than that big bastard in “Grizzly;” and that fucker needed a rocket launcher to do him in. Ah well, Katahdin gave Kevin Peter Hall his first job (acc. to IMDB), so we can’t be too mad.

If this movie were a waste of my time, I’d be pissed. But it was a fun way to kill some time, and typically, that’s not the worst thing to expect from movies like this.

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Film: Housebound

Chosen by: JR Goldman

(No explanation sent)

Reviewed by: Curt McGirt

Okay, there a few things I need to explain about this.

1. This movie is a New Zealand horror-comedy about a tweaker/drunk who has fallen into the clutches of seemingly a haunted house because she was put on house arrest.

2. I relate to this in ways I don't think you need to be explained about (it doesn't involve meth, thank fuck)

3. One of my favorite films is Dead-Alive, AKA Braindead.

4. Whoever selected this is going into the next life, if you are a Buddhist, is as a happy dog. Mine is as a pathetic, angry squirrel, scrounging for whatever nuts hit the ground.

I don't mean this to say I hate the movie. I love it. I love the main actress, who in another caveit, is one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen, and an incredible actor to boot. The film is stellar -- it's funny, it creeps you out when it has to... shit, it's just funny. But it hits home. Going back to your folks hurts. Living with them too long hurts. This one did me in. I hope nobody has the same reaction to my pick.

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Film: Extraterrestrial

Chosen by: Lawful Metal

It's horror! It's not found footage! Good take on unoriginal story and well told except for the anal probe scene. I'm pretty sure the producers made them put it in so they make it the hashtag. Didn't expect much and was rewarded with a much better finished product than they probably thought they would.

Reviewed by: Jingus (what, again?!?)

EXTRATERRESTRIAL (directed by "The Vicious Brothers" (yes, seriously, that's what the credits say), 2014): 3/10

"Fuck you! You motherfuckers! You aren't taking me! You fuck! Shit! SHIIIIIIT!"

Well that is just the WORST god-damned ending I have seen in recent memory. Seriously, motherfuck that ending. So glib, so smug, so thoroughly repugnant. It expects you to start crying at the chaotic unfairness of the universe, when in actuality I was bitterly snorting at the clumsy manipulation that the filmmakers were trying to perpetuate on me. No guys, I'm not an easy mark, I'm not gonna do the movie-audience equivalent of counting along with the ten punches in the corner. If you want to try and pull of a Shakespearean Tragedy Finish in your cheap horror movie, you better earn it. And this was not earned.

The plot of the movie is basically Cabin Fever except with aliens instead of germs. Five young adults travel to a cabin in the woods. (And the multiple contrived excuses it takes to get them all out there are just hilarious in their desperate flimsiness.) We've got Final Girl, Final Girl's Boyfriend, Oblivious Stoner, Unbearable Douchebag, and Unbearable Douchebag's Out-Of-His-League Girlfriend. Absolutely none of these people are given any traits beyond what I've just described. They speak in Expositionese instead of English. They're flatter characters than a jobber on the mat after taking Yokozuna's banzai drop. The only real humanity in the film comes from the welcome presence of Michael Ironside as a nutty survivalist, and Gil Bellows pouring five gallons of depth and pathos into a one-gallon bottle of The Haunted Local Lawman. They're good enough to drag the movie's rating up to a 3; but sadly, those two aren't in the movie nearly long enough to make much of a difference.

Have you seen Signs? Or any Evil Dead movie ever? Or Alien OR Aliens? Or more than two episodes of The X-Files? Or any of various "alien abduction" flicks like Communion or Fire in the Sky or even Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Or Night of the Living Dead? Or The Matrix? Then congratulations, you've seen almost every second of Extraterrestrial, because it lazily steals a whole buncha shit from all of the above. Except for the part where we actually see someone anally probed to death, of course. If you wanna see someone anally probed to death, and have been historically frustrated by the lack of fatal anal probing in modern cinema, then this is the movie for you. But even if that sounds fun; trust me, it ain't. It's not meant to be funny, it's directed in a fairly straightforward manner, but it isn't even graphic enough to be a memorable gross-out moment.

In fact, why is this movie so oddly not-at-all-graphic? It's rated R, but I'm not sure why. If you removed half of the cursing and about five seconds' worth of gory footage, this is easily a PG-13. It's a very soft R, all things considered. But that fits pretty well, in a movie which often doesn't even seem to be trying. The UFOs are the same old flying saucers and the aliens are the same old "grays" that we've seen a million times. The special effects shots are very limited, for the most part; except for one too-little-too-late glimpse inside the alien mothership, all the (obvious and cheap) CGI is spooned out in such tiny doses that it's obvious the filmmakers are trying to stretch out a couple dozen different effects shots into an entire scifi "epic". A few of the visuals are blatantly recycled and used multiple times. And half the fx work occurs during Found Footage Moments (yes, this is a part-time found footage movie, ARGH) so that the dark shaky low-quality footage can hide the parsimonious nature of the video trickery.

Finally, nothing about the aliens and their actions make any damn sense. There's an inevitable Government Conspiracy subplot which tries to explain some of it; and fails, spectacularly. The aliens brutally attack, abduct, torture, and murder people because... uh... because, that's just what movie aliens do, I guess. There's never any plausible reason given. And their methods make even less sense; as always, the grays are depicted as conducting their terrestrial invasions while naked and unarmed. Their entire range of tactics seem limited to "hand-to-hand combat" and "death ray from orbit", with nothing in between. The worst part comes when one of the aliens suddenly reveals that he has Professor X's psychic mind-control powers, and can make humans do horrible things to each other; but this only happens one time. Why one time? That like when Godzilla '98 proved capable of breathing fire, late in the movie, but then never did it again. DON'T DO THAT! Either have them USE this ability in a consistent and interesting manner, or just don't do it at all. What a waste.

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So, as it stands, the only other review I have left to run (unless I've idiotically missed something) is my own. There are a few people who haven't written them. If you can, get em in, and I'll be back in the late night to bring the horror.

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And the night closes, bloody and grim.  The spirits go back to rest another year.  The evil sleeps, but it does not die.

 

Film: Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorrah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!

 

Chosen by: Jingus

 

Godzilla. Kaiju picture. What do ya need, a road map? This one is especially noteworthy for just how damn heelish and mean Godzilla is. He really goes out of his way to stomp on people in this one, and is generally portrayed as a 500-foot-tall serial killer. So much so that Ghidorah is actually a babyface in this one, believe it or not. It's a fine antidote to all those "Godzilla is friend of children!" films that clogged up the franchise in the 70s and mid-90s.

 

Reviewed by: The Creature That Runs the Havoc

 

In the 90's, Godzilla's long time cheap knock-off Gamera suddenly had a run of three straight classic movies, better than anything the Big G himself had starred in in years.  These three movies (Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, Gamera 2: Attack of the Legion, and Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris) were directed by Shusuke Kaneko, also known for Death Note amongst other things.  When the Godzilla Millennium series was rolling, it became just a stated fact that every fan of Daikaiju Eiga wanted to see Kaneko direct a Godzilla movie.

 

Lets back up.  The Millennium series was the second major reboot of the Godzilla franchise (1998 DOES NOT FUCKING COUNT!)  In this case, the conceit was to throw away continuity between films, with each being basically just a standalone Godzilla picture, with no bearing on one another.

 

So, enter Kaneko.  He brought to bear many of the same things he had on the Gamera series, steeping his giant monsters in mythology and mysticism, and providing fucking great giant monster fights.  In a weird twist though, he returned Godzilla all the way to his roots as a nasty monster that was not here to help, was not a friend to mankind, but rather was a killer and destroyer.

 

So we turn to guardian monsters to fight back. For these opponents we get the most likely choice in Mothra, and then two highly unlikely choices, for two wildly different reasons.  Baragon is, with all due respect, pulling from deep off the Toho bench.  Not so much the B-list as, like, the F-list.  But then there's the weirdest choice of all.  King Ghidorah.  Probably the nastiest, evilest of all Godzilla monsters, here repurposed as a heroic beast.  The easy question of why is answered with "Toho said so."  (Kaneko actually wanted Anguirus and Varan instead of Mothra and Ghidorrah, but Toho wanted people to buy tickets.) 

 

Does it work?  In some ways, God yes.  It's probably the best action film in the whole franchise.  In other ways, oh fuck no.  I mean, seriously, Ghidorrah is the good guy?!?  And the new Godzilla mythology Kaneko cooked up is only slightly touched on here and there.

 

But in some ways, the answer is...  Maybe?  This is the darkest Godzilla movie outside the original. It's the nastiest and most violent, period.  Is that a good thing?  I don't really know.

 

Ultimately, the dream pairing of the "guy who made Gamera cool" with "The giant monster that is already cool" is good, but it falls short of the expectation that set.  It's not nearly as good a movie as the Gamera trilogy, nor the very best Godzilla films.

 

Score 7/10

 

Recommendation:  Worth watching, but for God's sake watch the Gamera trilogy.  Revenge of Iris is seriously my favorite Daikaiju Eiga after the original Gojira.

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