The Watcher 10
Movie reviews for Godzilla Minus One / The Name of the Rose / The Lodger / Thanksgiving / Leo / Rabid Grannies / Pleasure Gardens / Lawnmower Man 2
Godzilla Minus One (Japan 2023, Takashi Yamazaki) ★★★★☆
Kamikaze pilot Kōichi defects from war and lands his plane at a military base on Odo Island, which is the same island from the very first Godzilla attack in the first movie from 1954. In the night, the base gets attacked by a dinosaur like creature, killing everyone except him. Ridden with guilt, he tries to live a new life in destroyed Tokyo, working as a minesweeper, when Godzilla reappears, enlarged by the U.S. nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll.
The new Godzilla starts out as a character driven drama about survivors guilt in japanese culture of honor and spends a lot of time establishing Kōichi inner conflicts, which builds up to the heroic quest to defeat the monster in his final move to make up for his supposed cowardness.
I wish the film wouldn't tell this story in such a traditional way, a story about restoring honor by sacrificing yourself for the greater good. Only at the very end it questions Kōichis true motifs, that his heroic defeat of the monster was not that, but the fight against his own inner demons. But it never really gets explicit to the point at questioning the practice of Kamikaze or sacrifice for war. All Quiet on the Godzilla Front, this is not.
But this is also not what you'd expect from a Toho Kaiju film. What you expect is ridiculous giant monster action and we get plenty, all of it enriched in nuclear explosion metaphors and embedded in a personal drama which in the third act takes a backseat for great battle scenes.
Its maybe the first character driven Godzilla movie, and it suits the monster well, even when i think the creature design is overall improvable. On land, the monster moves in a very tapping, stale way, which looks pretty slow and static, but this seemingly wants to contrast Godzillas fluid swimming movements in the ocean. Also, in water his head seems to be larger than on land, maybe because you can't see his giant legs. Besides from that, we get monumental destruction and ‘splosions, so those are not a biggy, and most of the action takes place in waters anyways.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great Toho Kaiju flick which both breaks and continues with the tradition of Godzilla movies by introducing character depth and telling a very interesting prequel story to the first two serious entries in the series from 54/55 (before the "ridiculous turn" with King Kong vs Godzilla in 1962), only to serve up the great monster action we were expecting. But I can't help to think about what film we'd have gotten if the movie would have consequently told its story as a character driven drama about survival and guilt in times of war and where the Kaiju takes a backseat. But also maybe that's asking too much -- we're not talking Oscar-baity arthouse here.
We get a mean and lean Godzilla that kicks ass and dips his toes into deeper waters, does so in a highly enjoyable way and is another improvement from the already awesome Shin Godzilla from 2016. If Toho continues on that path, who knows what great atomic blasts wait for us in Godzillas future.
The Name of the Rose (Fra/Ger/Ita 1986, Jean-Jacques Annaud) ★★★★☆
In 1327, after arriving at a monastery for a theological dispute between the Franciscan and the Benedictines, William of Baskerville notices a fresh grave and is asked to investigate the mysterious death of an illustrator. During his stay, more monks find death at the hands of the killer and the holy inquisition is requested to drive out the evil at work.
I had the chance to see one of my favorite historic dramas on the big screen, so i grabbed it. This film is by no means flawless, Jean-Jacques Annauds adaption of Umberto Ecos postmodern classic suffers from some technical problems like uneven, hastly editing, and some of the framing doesn't work. Because the movie goes for a highly realist depiction of medieval life of clerics, this also means that some of the shots are just washed up greys.
But therefore, we get some gorgeous indoor shots full of great details, a Sean Connery in one of his best performances as one of his most interesting characters, the most labyrinthic library ever put on screen which would make Borges proud, and last but not least Ron Perlman in one of his most career defining performances as the multilingual hunchback Salvatore and Valentina Vargas as the nameless rose. And when William of Baskerville puts out a scream of joy when he discovers the treasure trove of lost books in the secretive library, i felt so understood. I just love this moment.
Even when the movie is, compared to the multilayered and highly complex source material, a pretty much toned down version that got largely stripped from most of its semiotic excourses, where the study of symbols gets merely hinted at, and with whole dimensions of meaning just left out, we still get a rich, entertaining historic thriller for bibliophiles with some unforgetable shots.
An unforgetable and unique movie which holds up pretty well, based on one of the best books i ever read. I left the cinema with the smile of a booklover on my face, and there's not many movies which accomplish that.
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (UK 2023, Alfred Hitchcock) ★★★★☆
A serial killer named the Avenger kills young women in London, while a mysterious man rents a room from the Buntings. Their daughter Daisy is having a relationship with a policeman hunting the killer, but she starts to show interest in the new neighbor, who bears a dark secret.
The Lodger is Alfred Hitchcocks third feature film as a director, but is considered by himself as the first Alfred Hitchcock movie, and you can already see some of his handwriting in this early piece, from some innovative camera work to a great instinct for pacing and the inevitable dramatic climax.
Hitchcock worked as an art director and title designer before taking seat in the directors chair and you can see it all over the place in the great lighting, the set design and the animated intertitles i have never seen like that in a silent movie before.
The movie however lacks a bit of the punch Hitchcock would later develop in his more darker, serious works and this movie is a pretty tame mainstream murder mystery, more on the lighthearted than thrilling side, most of the time. But it sill works today and provides some good old fashioned entertainment that stays interesting beyond cinema historic reasons.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters feels too streamlined and flat at times with actionsequences that suggest stakes but then just resolve all too easy and fast. But it's entertaining, features a ton of cool new Kaiju and it has Kurt Russel.
Ahsoka Liked what they did with the villains, Thrawn pretty cool. Ahsoka herself is okay, don't like the makeup, and the script shows its weakness at the end when Thrawn escapes and they just return to some crab aliens and stay there where they belong or whatever, meaningless blah when actually they failed and should really really get back. Zombie troopers were stupid. I liked the witches a lot, and some of the fights were kickass, but also sometimes weirdly choreographed.
Thanksgiving (US 2023, Eli Roth) ★★★☆☆
One year after a bloody stampede at a Black Friday Sale, a killer goes around town, killing the surviving kids one by one.
After long last, Eli Roth made an actual good film. Don't get me wrong, it has its flaws, takes some shortcuts, and after a strong first act, it becomes just a pretty standard albeit decent slasher flick. But for a Eli Roth movie who gave us the torture porn classic of Hostel and the boringly stupid Cabin Fevers, this one actually borders on clever, which is a word i never expected to write in a review for a Roth-film. We don't watch Roth-movies for cleverness, we watch Roth for the blood and the guts, and Thanksgiving is not too short of those.
But it also takes a shot at subtext, delivering a message about consumerism. That message gets a bit lost and is burried in the second half of the movie, when its reduced to its pure slasher innards, but it's there nevertheless. On top of that we get some actual characters, solid camera work and a ton of top notch gore FX.
Thanksgiving might actually be Eli Roths best work until now and while i liked his underrated shot at the cannibal genre that is Green Hell, this one seems more balanced and thought out, being more than just a genre exercise. Maybe, one day, Eli Roth will deliver an actually very good movie, and i'll be there, howling at the blood and the guts and all of that.
Leo (US 2023, Robert Smigel, Robert Marianetti, David Wachtenheim) ★★★☆☆
An old lizard and his best friend the old turtle lifecoach a bunch of kids — and i got this new laptop, you know, and while fumbling around with it, i lost access to one of my harddrives, one with really a lot of movies on it, many rare exploitation flicks from the seventies i collected over the years from all kind of sources, all of them illegal ofcourse, and i kind of panicked and tested all my harddrives, one by one, if they showed some issues with the USB-cable or something but no, no, it was just that one drive, so i downloaded a bunch of analytics tools and run all of them, one by one, over all of my cool great 5TB harddrives full of cool great exploitation flicks and there it was, suddenly reappearing out of nowhere, not booted on the system level but it was there, and after reassigning new drive letters to all of them it booted just fine phew what a happy day that could have been but what can i tell you, ofcourse one of those tools was way too nerdy for me because i’m not really a techie and i had no clue what i was doing so instead of being at peace with myself, having managed to make all my harddrives run on my new laptop with some cool new drive letters assigned to them which ofcourse effed up my Plex library full of all those decidedly not-shiny gritty exploitation flicks from the 70s and 60s, but instead of not giving a damn, i had to not only reassign those letters so they match my old system just to figure out that Plex doesn't recognize them anyways, i also had to use that software which was way too nerdy for me to change the partition format of that one of my harddrives from exFAT to whatever and i kid you not: I could not change it back, i tried and tried, downloaded tool after tool and nothing helped and my harddrive not only did not run anymore which it did before, but i suddenly deleted half my drive so i changed the partition format again and now everything was lost, it even didn't format or anything, and because i am a very intelligent person, i ran that goddamn fucking nerdy software which was way too nerdy for me (a very intelligent person) again and tried to change the partition format again but only this time, i changed the partition format of another harddrive which then not only did not run anymore, but also didn't format until i found out that i had to convert the partition back to NFTS and then i was able to format the drives to at least mount them and then i found out that file recovery only gave me files in the style of 'recovered-file[02751].mp4' which would mean that i’d have to manually check and change the filenames of thousands and thousands of cool great not-shiny gritty exploitation movie files by looking at all of them and it was about that hour of the day when i started to cry tears of pain over my actually very shiny new keyboard of my shiny new laptop (it has an aluminium frame), i prayed to god in heaven to release me from the agony of unskilled nerddom, when the fucker said: Go watch a movie you idiot, and so i did, watched a movie, and i needed something lighthearted, nothing too funny, nothing seriously good, god forbid some drama or darkness, something mildly amusing, something that would not only make me stop thinking about the billions of millions of great cool exploitation flicks i just lost, all the dubbed and not dubbed italian spaghetti westerns of yore and all those 50s monster movies that are so hard to come by in a somewhat watchable quality, but also something that’d make me forget my own grandiose holy crap what-an-idiot idiocy — hardware-, software- and otherwise —, for an hour or two, something that would let me take a breath, make me smile again and reassure to me that everything is okay. It's okay.
Leo delivered.
Rabid Grannies (Belgium 1988, Emmanuel Kervyn) ★★☆☆☆
Two aunts at their birthday party receive a special gift from their satanist nephew whom they excluded from inheritance. With the whole family present in their big mansion, they turn into cannibalistic demons and eat them all.
Rabid Grannies is a kinda infamous belgian splatterfest released years ago on DVD by Troma in a cut version which (surprisingly for Troma) lacked most of the gore. Now they finally published an uncut version in HD including the pretty disgusting smashing arse scene. Deconstructed bloody buttocks never looked so good.
It's a pretty gruesome movie, but it's balanced by its comedic elements and it goes crazy pretty fast. While it can't keep it's pace from the first half of the movie, some of the splatter-ideas are still impressive enough today to keep gorehounds like me entertained.
Some of the acting is not exactly top notch, but you wouldn’t expect this from a movie like that. It’s a cool splatter fest, but not much else. Only for gorehounds, but those will have a good time.
Pleasure Gardens (UK 1925, Alfred Hitchcock) ★★☆☆☆
Patsy the showgirl gets married to a mean fraud who betrays her.
Alfred Hitchcocks directional debut is a stinker and, frankly, quite a bore. Not too much interesting stuff is going on here.
You can catch a glimpse of the future master of cinema still in training with some framing and a few of the cuts, but that's about as good as it gets and it is interesting solely for cinema historic reasons. Best thing about the movie is the puppy.
Lawnmower Man 2 - Beyond Cyberspace (US 1996, Farhad Mann) ★☆☆☆☆
Crazy virtual overlord Jobe is still alive, takes over the metaverse and wreaks havoc in the real world to achive global interface, or something.
I was in the mood for bad cyberaction from the 90s and boy, did Lawnmower Man 2 deliver. Nothing makes sense here. I mean, the first movie wasn't exactly a good movie, but at least it told a somewhat coherent story and the action sequences at least somewhat respected its audience.
Not so here where Job simply can do anything, stuff just happens at random and we haste from scene to scene with not much narrative fodder to glue them together. And all of that is told in remarkably bad looking CGI that even gets worse when you think about the fact that this movie was made three years after the CGI-milestone Jurassic Park.
Everything about this film is ridiculous, from the actors tumbling through the scenes to the nonsensical techology in which the superhot ultra Chip for their VR stuff looks like the Hellraiser cube except its a pyramid made of plastic. Jeff Fahey, not especially an actor known for his nuanced interpretations of character, got replaced by Matt "Max Headroom" Frewer who manages to do even worse than him, and we have a bunch of hacker kids running around pretending to be smart. The best actor in this film is a dog.
Interestingly, however, the film mentions some "iphones" at minute 64 and towards the ending, when Jobe in one moment morphs into various news anchors and his co-villain, it does remind you of modern mimetic AI technologies such as deepfakes. Which ofcourse is just a lucky accident, because nobody was thinking about anything while making this movie.
If you're into fun trash that looks colorful and very bad and that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but is so ridiculous it actually somehow manages to keep you entertained, then Lawnmoyer Man 2 kind of delivers. The film totally deserves its one star for this feat.
dude, you know the hardrive story might be life trying to tell you something: not to hoard (too much. unless you are planning a museum haha), looking forward to second season of Ahsoka (cool villainsin indeed) and that Godzilla movie, maybe Leo (but dislike for Sandler).