David Vining's Blog, page 53

Matango

It’s the smaller films by Ishiro Honda since he got pigeonholed into the sci-fi/horror genre that I’m finding far more interesting than the bigger ones. This and The Human Vapor are missing the grand scale of something like Gorath or Rodan, but in place we get a stronger focus on character and atmosphere. That ends up combining with Honda’s strong technical skills, never in doubt even in his lesser work, to create more complete packages of genre thrills that simply work better overall.

I ...

King Kong vs. Godzilla

Now, the monster mashups begin. Godzilla’s first squaring off with another creature is the result of a script that originally pitted King Kong against Frankenstein’s monster that Toho got their hands on and retooled for their marquee monster that they were discovering they could bring back repeatedly without turning off their Japanese and American audiences. They also brought back the original filmmaker behind Godzilla, Ishiro Honda, though without his original writing partner, choosing inst...

Gorath

I never knew that Ishiro Honda made a prequel to Moonfall. Okay, this is slightly less stupid, but it’s still pretty stupid. Also, I much prefer miniature effects to CGI, so this has some charm to it in overdelivering special effects. This isn’t near the top of Honda’s science-fiction oeuvre, but it does provide a nice platform for Eiji Tsuburaya to showcase his skills on some kind of weird ideas.

A star, named Gorath, has been noted as heading towards our solar system, and the crew of th...

Mothra

The first kaiju film from Honda that actually feels like it owes something to the original King Kong, Mothra was Toho’s efforts at appealing explicitly to the female part of the movie-going audience. You see, Mothra is a girl this time. And there’s singing. Other than that, it’s pretty typical of this era in terms of kaiju action. The character work is thinner than it needs to be. The action is big and brash and fun. There’s an effort at a different kind of movie for a while because Honda al...

The Human Vapor

Well, this is a surprise. I did not expect to so thoroughly enjoy The Human Vapor. A curious mixture of film noir, The Invisible Man, The Phantom of the Opera, and even a soupcon of His Girl Friday, this genre-bending horror film from Ishiro Honda is his most effective and entertaining film since he got stuck in the science fiction ghetto. A lot of credit has to go to the script by Takeshi Shimura who had written some of Honda’s better science fiction fare over the previous few years, so it’...

Battle in Outer Space

Ishiro Honda returns to the cinemas with another big, special effect spectacle ala The Mysterians. I’d say that this is a step down from the previous film, not having the same kind of narrative verve (the modest amount that The Mysterians demonstrated) and is more of a straightforward sci-fi adventure. That could work if, again, there were characters of any depth to be had, the kind of lynchpin necessary to bring audiences into an adventure. But, alas, the script by Shinichi Sekizawa is just...

Varan The Unbelievable

What if Ishiro Honda made a cheap Godzilla ripoff for Japanese television that was quickly recut into a feature length motion picture? Would you believe me if I told you the result was not very good? That it does nothing to set itself apart from the movie it’s copying? Well, as can be said for pretty much every Honda monster film, the special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya are the star, even if Varan himself ends up looking like Godzilla’s brother from another mother.

A pair of entomologists g...

The H-Man

Moving away from giant monsters for a moment, Ishiro Honda brings Eiji Tsuburaya’s special effects skills on a smaller, perhaps more effective, scale in service to a monster movie disguised as a gangster film. It’s a curious mix where we get Honda’s now expected over-explanation of scientific nonsense in combination with underwritten characters who never feel terribly distinct. The spectacle is on a much smaller scale and with less screentime, leaving these thin characters to fill in the gap...

The Mysterians

Up until the final ten minutes or so, I was a bit more mixed on this science fiction effort by Ishiro Honda. It’s silly but doesn’t realize it. It’s got that singular obsession with dull scientists that Honda has included with every monster movie he’s made so far. It’s both underexplained and overexplained at the same time. But, with ten minutes to go, a character is reintroduced in a narratively interesting way, and it pushed my appreciation up just a bit more. This, reportedly the personal...

Well, that’s not something you see everyday

Quentin Tarantino has just completely shut down preproduction on his newest movie, The Movie Critic.

As has already been noted by others, he sort of did this with The Hateful Eight a decade ago after the script leaked online, only to claw it back after a live-read that seemed to reinvigorate his passion for the material. Will The Movie Critic follow the same path? No idea.

But still, it’s not all the time that you see one of the handful of filmmakers who can just walk into any studio e...