ENGH-SkreeeoOOoonk: A Retrospective on the Godzilla Series, Part 2 (The Heisei Era)

 
Welcome back to the A-List Retrospective on the Godzilla franchise! In case you missed it, Part 1 can be found here. Today we've got the Heisei series, which ran from 1984 with The Return of Godzilla and ended in 1995 with Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. It is the second and as-yet final continuous Godzilla series. From when the franchise returned to Toho control after the hiatus of Ț͉͓̮̱̤̏̊ͅh̸e̟̹̤͈͉̹̯̾̓ͯ ͚̟͙̗͎T̶̥̜͇̙̱̱ŕ͕̯͖ͫ̄̈́̀̉ī̡̜͙̹̼̥̅̏̋S̛̪͔t̼̯̖̬̿̒̀ͤ̎ͫ̄͜a̰̬͂̽̄r̢̓͐́̄̓͒ͨ ̒̔̾ͮ͡F̻̲̩̏ͥͅí̗͈̜͍̈́̾ͫͯļ̫͍͈̺̘̤̄̎̀̎ͅm̠̬̞͕̌̈̿̀̔, each film formed its own unique continuity. There were shoutouts to other movies, of course, and Final Wars seemed to incorporate all canon, with a special focus on the Showa series. The Heisei series for that reason alone is just as much of a romp as the Showa series, in ways both good and bad. It is a fun story to follow. Despite some weak segments, it has a nostalgic quality to it that makes me look forward to the pair of proposed continuous-canon series supposedly on the horizon via Toho and Legendary. But because its entries are fewer in number, it can end up being a hard thing to love. Yet, what can one expect out of Godzilla...? Let's answer that question--and learn it's not all so bleak!

Warning: As is the case for most of the posts on this site, there will be spoilers ahead.

Bloodstream (1985), by Michael J. Murphy

Not long after Shogun Assassin, here I am with another revenge movie. It's a much stranger revenge movie that its Eastern counterpart. It's made by the guy who made The Hereafter, which was kind of fun, but overly long. He then made Death Run, proving he was much more versatile--and badass--than he first appeared. Bloodstream was never officially released, though there have been bootlegs of it going around for some time, and I'm sure there's some company or another out there who will take your money for a DVD-R. There may be some movies that show up on here that are of a similar nature, in that they have not been formally released (see The Tony Blair Witch Project)--including some that were never entirely finished (such as Voodoo Swamp). Bloodstream's de facto underground status makes it an enthralling phenomenon to begin with, but the fact that it is also a great movie makes it two times the awesome.

Bloodstream stars Alistair, a filmmaker who makes a horror flick also called Bloodstream. His producer, William King, is a colossal dick. He tells Alistair his movie sucks and that he should just "get a proper job." He says "proper" because this film is British. If customers at work told me to get a "proper" job instead of a "real" job, I'd be somewhat charmed rather than offended and sad. It turns out, though, that King is pulling a hoax--he tells Alistair that he won't distribute the film but does anyway after ostensibly firing him. With the aid of King's secretary Nikki, Alistair dons a skeleton costume and sets King and his closest friends and family into line so they can be killed. The deaths are suitably awful, including chainsaw decapitation and a knife rammed down someone's throat. Because Alistair is a filmmaker this movie is about snuff films. Alistair slowly becomes obsessed with making his snuff film into great art...because as it turns out, those horror movies really are bad for you...

It's easy for me to compare this film to Skullduggery, a movie which I'm sure I'll feature on here at some point. Because Bloodstream does something that Skullduggery also does. Throughout the latter film, there are additional stories that parallel the course of the main plot. There is a D&D game which plays a role in the main character's killings, and a weird medieval prologue, as well as a poorly-made stage play, that toy around with what's going on as the main character does what he does. In Bloodstream, Alistair forms an obsession with horror movies, and indeed, at least half of this movie is comprised of scenes where Alistair smokes cigarettes and watches an endlessly entertaining string of fake monster movies. They don't explain initially that these movies aren't one film, and they don't explain that these movies are not Bloodstream. I assumed that Bloodstream was the slasher movie they show at the beginning, so I was confused when suddenly scenes from a mummy movie started cropping up. Sometimes there are reflections of the main plot with Alistair in the movies Alistair watches, just as Skullduggery's D&D game nods to what we're supposed to be primarily invested. But there's another mirroring in Bloodstream, and that of course is the title. This is a horror movie about a horror movie, and both movies have the same name. It's telling that the maker of the fictional Bloodstream demonstrates a severe hatred for the film distribution industry--and ironic, then, that the movie didn't make it to release in real life. Sad, too, that it never got that message out, or that the world got to see how marvelous the movie is.

A lot of the awesomeness of this movie comes from the fictional movies it shows off. There's a mummy movie, a werewolf movie (though it looks more like a were-skunk), and some sort of medieval torture thing where an evil court jester has a strip of rubber taped to his face. If each of these movies was a full movie within Bloodstream, I'd still watch it, even if it meant it was twenty-something hours long. So much care went into these interruptions, and it is probable that they were meant as padding. Maybe their briefness facilitates my enjoyment of them. It's hard to say. They fit well--I never felt like the dichotomy between clips and skull-masked slayings was unbalanced.

Then there's the premise. In our universe, two adults would not sit down and decide that the answer to being massively ripped off resided in dressing up as a skeleton and killing people. But here, it seems to be kind of a normal thing. Remember that Nikki is not insane, and she comes up with a lot of what Alistair ends up doing. I was under the impression that she had been the one to propose bone-man justice. And that's wonderful. In terms of realism, it's almost like a superhero movie, if superhero movies tended to feature the protagonist creating mountains of corpses.

Bloodstream is one of those slashers that fully satisfies my love of slashers. And I mean full satisfaction--like inhaling really, really good chocolate, or letting oneself sip straight from a two-liter of root beer. I am a sucker for unprofessional movies about masked killers, and the A-List--the actual list that fuels this site, that is--has tons of them. Long Island Cannibal Massacre, Nigel the Psychopath, and Ogroff have a sort of mystique that only a wide variety of bladed weapons and face coverings can supply. Maybe it's the comic fan in me, and I really do have a fetish for garish costumes. Who knows. I want you to watch it and get back to me, so I can see if I'm just a weirdo.

Maniac (1934), by Dwain Esper

Exploitation, as the impression of a genre, has always existed. Even before cinema became one of the big pillars of modern media, there was Weird Shit tucked away in the depths of history. Guillaume Apollinaire, regarded as a great hero of Western poetry, wrote 1907's Memoirs of a Young Rakehell, a porn novel where the hero's type as far as women go involves lots and lots of thick hair, all over their bodies, like werewolves. While hailed by some now as great art, there's also Marquis de Sade's 18th Century gross-out 120 Days of Sodom, a book which is madcap in its disgusting and traumatizing rebellion against literary and social conventions. I could go on and on, but I'm full of myself enough as is and so citing all of these references makes me look like a tool. Today we're talking about Maniac, a movie that was basically a '60s exploitation movie thirty years before the '60s. It joins Reefer Madness and Sh! The Octopus as Depression-era schlock that mercifully survived. I live for this stuff--this confirmation that there's always been this magic to the world. Today's film can be a great demonstration to friends if you need to defend your faith in the history of trash--should you have it!

Don Maxwell is a former impersonator who works for Doctor Meirschultz, a Santa Claus-looking motherfucker who apparently saved Maxwell from the law. Meirschultz is obsessed with, what else, bringing the dead back to life. When Maxwell bungles his attempts to fulfill his life dreams, the doc orders Maxwell to kill himself so that he can be the subject of the resurrection. It stands to reason that Maxwell kills his mentor and begins impersonating him, which drives him off the deep end. This leads to shenanigans, like injecting "super adrenaline" into a crazy guy, which makes him start spitting William Shatner slam poetry and kidnapping women. Then, someone eats cat eyeballs. Honestly, this movie is just shenanigans, or more truthfully, shenanigans and misanthropy. I was gonna say sexism, but then I remembered that men get the short end of the stick too. The wife of Shatner-guy reveals that she hated her husband and is happy that he's now an insane woman-grabbing zombie, and agrees to help Maxwell kill more people. An apparent sorority we meet is populated by boneheads who are given fake dubs to make them seem even dumber. But the male leads include a scientist who experiments on corpses, a serial killer, and a man who breeds hundreds of cats to take their skins. In the end, the cat of the eaten eye exposes a corpse walled up in Maxwell's basement, and it's off to cardboard-bars prison he goes.

Filled with random introductions of characters and subplot, Maniac is actually really exciting. It's a movie where the entire gimmick involves topping what we've already seen with something even more improbable. Most improbable of all is the possibility of sincerity behind the title cards, which give outdated medical advice concerning various manifestations of mental illness. These attempts at being intelligent as facades--as educational as the historical exposition in A Clockwork Blue. What's on display here are some forbidden boobs and an attempt to discomfort, an odyssey into the Real World of mental illness in the same way that Reefer Madness is a voyage through the Real World of marijuana. It is a farce, and I love my farces.

Furthering the notion of its duplicitous nature, it plays with dialogue in some fun ways. Meirschultz mocks Maxwell, using pronunciation that shoves all adjacent scenery into his mouth: "Youu, an AC-TOR?!? Once a HAM, always a HAM." He backs this up by foreshadowing Maxwell's destiny by saying, "Study under me, and someday, you too will be a great man." Yet these little meta jabs opposes the production value: this is all framed under the watchful power of home video-vision. Odd cuts, cramped sets, and obvious cue card abuse, along with unlikely statements ("Mr. Buckley is positively mad! He thinks he's the Orangutan Murderer from Poe's Rue Morgue!") make it both a fascinating and jarring movie to watch. There's a sense of real dread in how simple it is. There is barely any music and the acting is, as I've alluded to before, pretty barebones. But it is ambitious, and there are moments of cleverness and genuine originality. It is not a movie that plays by the rules, possibly because it couldn't afford to it. Glory to it for that, I say, because if it can pull off all of these elements I'm rambling about, that's an accomplishment. It shows heart on behalf of the creator. A desire to produce something that is at least entertaining, if not cathartic or good.

I should mention that it does end up imitating a number of classic horror stories. The stuff with the walled-up body and the cat doubles up with the Rue Morgue allusion to create a double Poe combo. At the end, Maxwell also talks about how Meirschultz's eyes made him do it, like "The Tell-Tale Heart." Plus, the orangutan-man's wife deciding to help Maxwell with his work made me think of Mrs. Lovett from the Sweeney Todd story. But it's not an adaptation--it's an echo. It's like a modernization of those stories, with borrowings from Frankenstein. I suppose it's no great feat for this film to be a product of a time when scientists raising the dead was a popular trope--though in my mind, this movie does it better than the Whale Frankenstein. (I'm sorry, but I always found the Boris Karloff films to be tedious...I much prefer Al Adamson or even Jess Franco if I have to.) I guess whether or not you like the echoes in Maniac, though, depends on whether you like references in general. If you think a movie should stand on its own without a literary legacy behind it, you may be opposed to it. Fortunately, it does stand strong on its own legs, and so even if you've never read Poe before, or you think he's overdone, this movie will move you in some way. Poe made and knew good tropes, and this movie inherits them even without prior information.

All in all, a cheap and creepy wonder. There's no reason not to give it at least one watch--it's in the public domain and on YouTube, and it won't steal even an hour of your day (fifty minutes!). It's madness within, madness without. Living proof that we humans have always had a knack for breaking out of our own heads.

Shogun Assassin (1980), by Kenji Misumi/Robert Houston

I know what you're thinking. How could I take a website dedicated to the review of trash movies and have it feature a review of Shogun Assassin, a movie critically acclaimed all by itself, being in turn made from the first two films of the 1970s Lone Wolf and Cub series, which was comprised entirely of films that were all critically acclaimed? Well, I'm going to follow the Rule of Fun and treat this movie rather like a trash movie. I've always viewed it as such ever since it made the rounds a couple times with one of my friend groups in high school. Shogun Assassin is such an outrageously violent movie that it inspires the sort of hilarity that one often finds in the creme de la creme of trash flicks. It's also dominated by a sense of The Weird that similarly plagues or brightens the types of martial arts movies one would find in the gutter. (Some of which I'll hopefully get to soon!) Besides, I'm currently doing a Godzilla retrospective, and Toho was responsible for the Lone Wolf and Cub films, adapted from the Kazuo Koike/Goseki Kojima manga of the same name. I assure you, everything will work out! Now grab your best baby carriage and get running. The forces of darkness are not far behind, and vengeance is a long journey ahead!

In medieval Japan, a samurai works for a shogun who begins to go insane with old age. He helps the shogun carry out increasingly violent purges of the old man's supposed enemies until the shogun turns his efforts inward, and has the samurai's wife assassinated. The samurai, now calling himself Lone Wolf, goes on the run with his infant son--who partially narrates the story, by the way. The shogun also narrates, but he sounds eternally constipated. Because this is a Toho movie the American dub actors didn't take it fucking seriously at all. They may not have been paid enough to. Anyway, Lone Wolf accepts assassination jobs for money, and eventually gets orders to kill the shogun's brother, Lord Kiru. Lord Kiru is protected by three brothers called the Masters of Death. On this quest, he has numerous run-ins with ninjas, which quickly reveal that a lot of the budget must have gone into the literal gallons of blood that spray everywhere in this movie. And that is the primary crux of Shogun Assassin--endless scenes of blades, spears, or claws ripping flesh till everyone is a blood geyser. Even the Cub's baby carriage is a weapon--it has hidden swords in it that cut people's legs off! And a lot of stuff in this film is white, too. It was designed to show off a ton of blood, and tons of severed legs, noses, ears--the works. Somewhere, H.G. Lewis is blushing. Guess what, at the end, the hero wins, and the bad guys end up in piles of chunks. It is a movie with two options: life and death. Some receive the former--most get the latter.

The gore of this film is certainly one of its big selling points. I don't want to dwell on it, but it really is incredible how much work they put into making this film so shockingly violent. People get vertically sliced in half, jugulars are hacked--basically, think of anything horribly brutal a sword can do, and a sword will do that in this movie. That's all I'm going to say.

It is not a very dialogue heavy movie, but when people do talk, it doesn't sound natural. I already sorta touched on that. It's a hard movie to take seriously, from a dramatic perspective, if people are talking in a scene. But again, it is nearly silent. Ambient sound usually replaces music, and what music there is, is pretty awesome. And fortunately, the actor dubbing Lone Wolf is pretty solid, though in all fairness I don't want to seem quite so hard on the dubwork by and large. But when your two narrators are as ridiculous as the ones in this film you do have to joke a little.

The final showdown in the desert is great. One of the Masters of Death, the one with the garden rake/Wolverine claw setup, ends up finding a group of anti-shogun rebels by stabbing the sand with his claws on a whim. It turns out the rebels, who apparently don't need oxygen, are hiding under bamboo mats underground. He lifts him up by the head, and throws him around, and then does that to three or four more guys. Each of the Masters meet their fates in the most overdramatic ways, each losing about a bucket of paint in the process. Life is cheap and immortals are real in this universe. Lone Wolf proves that.

My one criticism of the film probably is that Lone Wolf is basically invincible. Yeah, he gets cut once and develops a fever from the infection, but he basically just goes into a coma for a few hours and is fighting again minutes later. As any action movie fan knows, it is pretty great to watch someone driven by vengeance cut a lot of people down. But at no point did I seriously believe Lone Wolf would meet his maker. Still, the thrill of seeing him wipe out hundreds of ninjas (contrasted to the mere dozens of something comparably crazy like a Godfrey Ho movie) really makes up for it. That's probably why I'm talking about it on this site, in all honesty--it is not bound to reality. We are not expected to view Lone Wolf as someone with ordinary skills, and that's what makes it a great watch.

Shogun Assassin has paled to me somewhat over time, but also waxed in its power to draw affection from me as well. It is no longer as shocking or gratuitous as it was when I saw it as a kid--I've seen much more insane and graphic films at this point, to be sure--but it also will always have a special place in my heart as one of the awful but astounding movies I got to see with some of my favorite people. Things were simpler then--I didn't have my student loans, my tight work schedule, my anxiety over the struggle of career success. Watching it can take me back to a time when I could laugh easier.

Having returned to it today, I'll be feeling good for a long, long while. And it'll make you feel good too.

ENGH-SkreeeoOOoonk: A Retrospective on the Godzilla Series, Part 1 (The Showa Era)

Recently I've decided to try to expand my tastes, so that I can look at some of my old interests in new light. At the same time, the general theme has been one of pursuing things that have a reasonable connotative link to the stuff I already like. If you've been reading this blog so far, I think you'll feel like my recent watching of Showa's Godzilla series makes sense. Godzilla movies are archetypically bad, but obviously still have a non-ironic following. As we will see, both sides of this dichotomy are true--yeah, they fucking suck, but they are also awesome. This will be my look back on the experience of watching these films; Part 1 will concern what's called the Showa Era (1954-1975), while Part 2 will examine the Heisei Era (1984-1995). Part 3 will talk about the Millenium Era (1999-2004) and affairs beyond, with Part 4 discussing some of the other Toho films that tie in, like The Mysterians and Gorath.

In general, I'd also like to take this time to announce that a new column will be appearing on this site after I have another run of ordinary A-List reviews. But let's not worry about that now. It's time to find out the strengths and weaknesses of the one of the most influential stories of all time: that of the radioactive King of Monsters.

Warning: As is the case for most of the posts on this site, there will be spoilers ahead.