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.

Deep Dark (2015)

Although very different in execution, Deep Dark reminded me a lot of previous subject Splinter: both feel like short independent films that were expanded into feature length (it won’t surprise you to learn that writer/director Michael Medaglia’s only other credits are for short films), and both rather knowingly hinge themselves on the novelty of their intentionally strange central monster. Splinter used this as a vehicle for pure, undistilled horror filmmaking, while Deep Dark is aiming for more of a comedy-horror, although it never goes that far in either direction. It’s also attempting to spin a sort of dark modern fairy tale, one set in the absolutely-not-overused-at-all world of modern art, and with the freedom from traditional logic that would allow, the biggest question becomes just how hard it pushes into the strangeness of its own premise. The answer to that is “just hard enough, sometimes.”

Bad Milo! (2013)

This really brings me back to when I voraciously read movie websites ten or so years ago—I distinctly remember reading about Bad Milo! when it was new, as it’s the exact sort of high concept, mid-tier film that those websites loved to give attention to, with a real “ha ha can you believe this?” vibe. That felt like the beginning of a time when bigger names in Hollywood were trying to half-jokingly reach for the schlock heights usually left to disreputable, low-budget movies—and it usually begins with a premise that, on paper, is meant to sound incredibly stupid. Most reviews from relatively mainstream sources would begin with that premise, either to say “it certainly lives up to it!” or “it turns out to be more than that!”, and in either case the rest comes off as a slightly bewildered spiral around the gravity of the premise. It’s not hard to see why: just saying “a monster comes out of man’s butt” will automatically make you think it’s a gross-out parody, and the cast of comedy veterans would lend to that view. But, in fact, Bad Milo! is not a parody, and turns out to be rather sincere in many places—which is something that works for and against it.

Howl From Beyond the Fog (2019)

As a crowd-funded kaiju project (reaching 150% of its goal in 2017 and guaranteeing credits full of bizarre nom-de-plumes), the thirty-minute short film Howl From Beyond the Fog is already marked as something fuelled by fan passion, but it has even deeper historical roots that further illustrate that. Director Daisuke Sato had worked on the suits and models of the Millennium-era Godzilla films and Gamera the Brave, and his main collaborator on both the effects and the cinematography was Keizo Murase, whose credits include…well, almost every single Toho and Daiei kaiju movie I’ve written about on this site (as well as Yongary and The Mighty Peking Man), usually as the one sculpting the suits—obviously, they are two veterans of this style of film, although they also chose to go a slightly different direction this time by using puppets to portray the human cast alongside the traditional man-in-suit and miniatures. The choice of story is also very much a nod to the history of giant monsters: a re-interpretation of Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story “The Fog Horn”, a melancholy tale of a gigantic marine reptile who mistakes the titular sound as the call of another of its kind, which was sort of co-opted into the 1953 Eugène Lourié/Ray Harryhausen monster film The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (the original title of Bradbury’s story), which in turn served as the inspiration for Toho to produce the original Godzilla. I don’t think there’s any greater signal of passionate fandom than going all the way back to one of the source texts of the genre (Sato even directed another short film based on the story in 2007), and this not only uses it as the basis for its imagery, but also for the tone and atmosphere, creating a giant monster that is much more sympathetic than most of the ones that directly followed “The Fog Horn.”

The Bay (2012)

So, how exactly did we get a found footage monster movie from the director of Rain Man? According to the backstory, Barry Levinson was tasked with directing a documentary about the ecological problems of Chesapeake Bay, but not unlike the creatures at the heart of The Bay, the project mutated into something else entirely. It was 2012, right in the middle of the much-groused-about-at-the-time trend of found footage horror movies mostly instigated by Paranormal Activity (the producer of those movies, Jason Blum, is also a producer on this one), as well as what still felt like the early days of the mass adoption of camera-equipped smartphones—a perfect confluence of trends that inspired the idea of watching a disaster unfold from personal and media video footage, a collage of reactions and non-reactions from normal citizens, experts, and people in places of authority. The verisimilitude offered by this style of film might even bolster the real environmental issues that inspired the far more gory events in the movie! One could hope!

Of course, the other obvious inspiration for this movie comes from a place I’m sure we’ve all been to: finding out some random (maybe true?) fact on the Internet, especially about weird nature stuff. I imagine that most people only recently learned about Cymothoa Exigua, also known as the tongue-eating louse, probably from some listicle containing the same few photos of that oceanic isopod and its peculiar form of parasitism, where it sucks the blood from the tongues of fish until they shrivel up and fall off, and then replaces the tongue in the fish’s mouth. It’s hard to blame some writer for seeing those images and thinking “now, there’s a movie!”

Creature Classic Companion: It Follows (2014)

It Follows managed to crack a certain critical barrier among horror movies when it was released, garnering the kind of widespread praise that these things only rarely get. Not being a horror fan, but reading a lot of movie websites at the time, I heard a lot about it, and saw it held up as a new sort of innovative, self-aware (but not self-parodying) fright flick, one of the select few from the middle of the previous decade being touted. I can imagine this was at least partially due to it straying away from the found footage-focused paradigm that proliferated back then. I also imagine that it has to do with its efficient pitch, one with a primal meaning at the centre of it that still allowed for a depth of symbolism: a sexually-transmitted curse that puts you in the sights of a methodically murderous shape-changing entity, one that only the cursed people can see and that will not stop until you are dead or you pass it on to someone else…but with the possibility of it going back to you once its current target has been dealt with. It’s a gimmick for sure, one that comes with its set of rules—and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s a subset of horror fans who love rules—but it also intelligently plays with the fears of its adolescent target audience, and director David Robert Mitchell uses the camera to show all the the ways that the gimmick can sow paranoia.

Sweetheart (2019)

Continuing on a minor “modern monster movie” kick, here’s a movie that’s maybe not trying to be funny like Psycho Goreman, but also has a practical effects creature at its core. Sweetheart is one of those recent co-productions between Blumhouse, the house that Paranormal Activity built, and Universal, which in some ways means that this is a modern Universal Monster movie—and proper horror, too, and not some bloated spectacle like that Dark Universe nonsense. It’s an efficiently-made thriller with a fairly simple concept—a lone person marooned on an island with a monster—and is at its best when director J.D. Dillard (whose only other directorial effort is Sleight from 2016) lets the idea, the actor(s), and the atmosphere speak for themselves. With a very lean cast, this is one of those movies where there is very little to no dialogue for the first forty minutes (of eighty-two), which I feel like is so praised by online film critics whenever it happens that the whole thing has really lost any outré cache, but at least it’s appropriately used here and lends a feeling of simmering loneliness to those scenes. This is a story about rolling with the punches whether you want to or not, and it just so happens that many of those punches are being thrown by a seven-foot-tall shark-man.

Monster Multimedia: Hilda

One of those useless thoughts I’ll sometimes have when taking in something aimed at a younger demographic is asking whether I’d have enjoyed it when I was a kid, rather than the wan and decrepit skeleton beast I am currently. My youthful tastes were so contextual and arbitrary that I can never hope to have a definitive answer, but as someone who got really into reading about mythology and folklore in grade school (with, as I have mentioned in the past, their own ambitions of creating the ultimate bestiary of mythological creatures—I still have all my notes in a manila folder), and who then loved to see those stories and creatures I was reading about referenced in the wider culture (so I got to think “I know that one!”), Hilda endeared itself to me very quickly. Created by illustrator Luke Pearson (who has also worked in animation as a storyboarder on Adventure Time), Hilda began as a series of graphic novels, starting with 2010’s Hildafolk (sometimes titled Hilda and the Troll), carrying an adventurous and whimsical spirit that brings to mind both the work of Hayao Miyazaki and Tove Jansson (the latter can especially be seen in the clean, wide-eyed characters Pearson draws), reinterpreting and modernizing (mostly) Scandinavian legends in clever and often beautiful ways. In 2018, Netflix released an animated series adaptation, capturing Pearson’s art with its very smooth and colourful animation (and its ethereal soundtrack, with a theme song provided by Grimes), and expanding on the world presented in the comics, mixing direct adaptations of the books with original stories that fit the tone. I wrote briefly about watching the first Netflix season back in 2019, but after going through the second season that premiered last month, I have an even greater appreciation for the whole series, especially in the way it thoughtfully introduces all the fun stuff about folklore (the silliness, the scariness, the endless possibilities they present) to a new generation of kids.

Yamasong: March of the Hollows (2017)

Continuing on with our Tubi run, and if I end up being the Internet’s top source for reviews of independent puppet-based fantasy films, it is an honour I must humbly accept.

While Blood Tea and Red String, which I wrote about back in February (remember February? ‘Cause I don’t), was entirely stop-motion, Yamasong is mostly traditional puppetry, with movement that at times resembles a modernized version of the “supermarionation” of Gerry Anderson TV shows like Thunderbirds, mixing things up with computer effects (and a bit of stop motion.) You don’t see a whole lot of movies made in this way, by which I mean I have never seen a movie made in this way, so this is new and exciting for me. Like I probably said in my Blood Tea piece, there’s tactile nature of puppets gives the imaginative characters in a fantasy story a feel that can’t be replicated with any other medium, and even if they move in a way that doesn’t read as “natural”, it just makes the world seem all that much more removed from our own. That’s very true of this movie’s combination of puppetry and digital effects, giving all its characters a very unique and designed look (clearly meant to invoke an “eastern” aesthetic, which is complemented by Shoji Kameda’s score, which uses both traditional instruments and Tuvan throat singing), and making its world very dream-like in the way it embraces artifice—it also feels very appropriate in a story where about half the characters actually are artificial.

Rubber (2010)

I planned which movies on Tubi I was going to watch a while back, but by the time you read this, this one will no longer be available on the service. That’s always a possibility whenever you’re talking about streaming movies—there’s a non-zero chance that some or most of the movies I’ve written about in this subseries will be removed some day. Oh well! Here it is anyway!

Rubber is one of those movies I read about back in my cult movie website reader days, the kind of high concept film festival debut that got talked about a lot, even if it was only about the trailer (this is a similar context to how I first heard about Incident at Loch Ness.) It’s the exact kind of intentionally ridiculous premise that put daily news recaps and early social media in a tizzy: a killer tire! How droll! The sheer amount of slight guffaws at the basic idea of Rubber easily overwhelmed the contingent asking “How does this sustain a feature-length running time?” If there was one thing I remember from that era of film discussion, it’s that it sometimes felt like something that existed primarily as an elevator pitch was all some genre fans really wanted (see: Snakes on a Plane, Hobo With a Shotgun), and not many actually ended up really talking about the movie itself.