Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons (2013)

Journey to the West is one of the great works of literature in Chinese culture, a story so ubiquitous that its characters are instantly recognizable, which in turn allows them to be placed into new contexts and new interpretations while maintaining the mythical qualities that made them so captivating in the first place. Hong Kong director Stephen Chow, who gained international acclaim for slapstick martial arts classics like Kung-Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, aims for reinterpretation with his own take on the story, producing a genre-hopping epic full of the brilliantly-staged action and comedy that are his trademarks, and essentially acts as a completely original prologue to Journey to the West. That doesn’t mean that it feels like a film inaccessible to those who haven’t read the novel, nor does it lead to a plot whose conclusion feels necessarily preordained—instead, Chow, co-director Derek Kwok, and their crew of co-writers provide new depths to the book’s central characters, giving them full, humanistic arcs that demonstrate the spiritual and moral power of perseverance, forgiveness, and humanity, and how even monsters deserve a second chance. For a film that contains all the spectacle one expects from a big film—and the combination of Chow’s style and a recognizable story made it the highest-grossing film in China’s history at the time—it’s also very intelligent and emotionally engaging.

The Great Buddha Arrival (2018)

This is a rather unusual proposal, something that sits between a fan film and a historical restoration project. The Great Buddha Arrival was a 1934 film directed by Yoshiro Edamasa, in which the Amida Buddha statue found in Shurakuen Park in the city of Tōkai got up and took a stroll. Although images and newspaper advertisements describing the film exist, The Great Buddha Arrival itself was lost during World War 2, leaving it a phantasmal presence in the history of Japanese cinema. It holds a particular fascination for tokusatsu fans, not only because the base concept sounds a lot like a proto-kaiju film, but because Edamasa was the mentor of tokusatsu effects pioneer Eiji Tsuburaya, directly connecting the film to the legacy of giant monster cinema.

Wanting to celebrate that connection, and in some way bring Edamasa’s movie back from the void, independent studio 3Y Film crowdfunded a new short film based on The Great Buddha Arrival (made at roughly the same time as Howl From Beyond the Fog, the crowdfunded kaiju film I wrote about previously), completing production in 2018 and gradually adding additional footage over the next two years to build it up into the sixty-minute “Final” version that you can find on streaming services right now. Directed by Hiroto Yokokawa, the 2018 Great Buddha Arrival is a unique little experiment, at times a mockumentary, a genuine documentary, and a narrative film, existing in a reality where the original 1934 film exerts a mysterious influence on reality. Being made by a studio that specializes in distributing fan films, it also plays up the kaiju legacy angle by filling almost every speaking part with veteran tokusatsu film actors, including several of the remaining members of Ishiro Honda’s stable going back to the original Godzilla.