G: The Great Buddha Arrival (2015)

This is a curious movie. It is based on a 1934 movie of the same name, which is presumed lost in the bombings of World War II. It featured a giant Buddha statue standing up and walking around Japan. Yoshiro Edamasa, the director, used trick photography to get the images, and produced not the first kaiju flick, but almost certainly the first tokusatsu movie.

A video editor working on a program finds out about the possibility of a walking Buddha in pre-War Japan, which the video host claims the government hushed up. He manages to find photos of the incident (actually the only surviving pictures of the original movie) and starts investigating. He finds out that the movie was made by Edamasa to retell his experiences during the incident, but more troubling, the event was preceded by a wave of suicides and then the name “Hiroshima” crops up…

And so does something else.

Yep a Giant Buddha statue has stood up and is walking across the city. Needless to say, a lot of people turn out to watch this. The Buddha stops before a tower; a great chanting is heard, and the crowds begin to walk toward the statue, as if in a trance. And then the  horror starts.

As I said, it’s a curious beast. Partially a documentary, partially cosmic horror story. At a trim 50 minutes, it has no time to wear out its welcome. If fact, the only annoying thing was having to watch it on FreeVee, which only served to remind me how much I hate commercials during movies.

Overall, the hardest part was convincing myself that yes, there was an actual lost movie involved. Not some Larry Blamire/Blair Witch jiggery-pokery.

October 12, 2023
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: , , , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

F: Feed the Light (2014)

Sara (Lina Sundén) is a desperate woman who breaks into the Malmö Institute armed only with a knife and a set of lockpicks. She’s looking for her daughter, whom her recently-divorced husband has taken into the nondescript building. When the Chief (Jenny Lampa) mistakes her for a new hire, Sara finds that Malmo is much weirder than she thought; her job is to sweep up the sparkling dust that drops from the facility’s lights, because the dust “attracts vermin”. She also witnesses one of the other workers get covered with the dust, and the vermin – a swath of darkness – enters the worker’s body and he dies in an explosion of blood.

She enters into an uneasy alliance with the head janitor (Martin Jirhamn), who reveals that things can get even worse: the reason her cell phone was confiscated by the Chief is not because it would interfere with Malmö’s machines, but because the phones can be used to unlock the seemingly nonexistent door to Level Two. Sara has found her husband (Patrik Karlson), now significantly older, because he got lost in Level Two, where time can move… oddly. Level Two is where their daughter is now trapped.

And you do not want to go to Level Three. That’s where the Light lives.

Feed the Light is a fascinatingly low-fi tale of cosmic horror. The black-and-white presentation (except for the occasional burst of color, see the bloody demise above) is going to immediately make most cineastes think of David Lynch, and that’s an association that’s not far wrong, with demented behavior, existential dread and a trove of unanswered questions. It’s not as ultimately incomprehensible as Lynch, but it is as accomplished.

And it’s always good to find a movie that can turn a lack of a multi-million dollar budget into an asset, rather than a disadvantage.

October 11, 2023
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

The Hubrisween That Wasn’t: A

As mentioned in the last posting, I fully intended to do Hubrisween this year. I shouldn’t let what pitiful amount I did get done go to waste, so here goes. I’m also going to handle this in a different way than I originally intended, cuz I’m fickle that way

So.

A: AM 1200 (2008) is the directorial debut of David Prior, better known for The Empty Man and “The Autopsy” on Cabinet of Curiosities. Well, his debut as a fictional storyteller, he has some heavyweight credits on video documentaries on filmmaking. I can’t seem to find it streaming anywhere except YouTube and Vimeo – probably because it’s only 40 minutes long – and that is a shame. It deserves a wider following.

We meet our main character, Sam (Eric Lange) on the run. We find he acted on drunken advice from an associate at his financial securities firm (the always welcome Ray Wise), and made off with a bunch of money, resulting in the suicide of said associate. The increasingly paranoid Sam’s escape plan is apparently to drive as far as he can, continuing on into the night, until he falls asleep at the wheel.

Turning on the radio to keep himself awake, he finds he’s so far into the boondocks that the only station he can pick up is on AM 1200, an evangelical station, and that just barely. On that, he hears a call that there’s a medical emergency at the station, and if anyone is listening, please help. Sam realizes that he has gotten himself totally lost, there is no cell phone coverage out here, and oh, look – there’s that radio station. He looks down the dark, wooded path to the station and utters the deathless horror movie line, “No fuckin’ way” and drives on.

Only to find the road he’s on is a dead end. driving back, his overtaxed car finally craps out. In front of that radio station. Odd, that.

Well. Nothing left to do but go up there and see if they have a phone.

And thereby hangs the tale.

I really enjoyed AM 1200 the first time I saw it, and I enjoy it more every time I see it. Prior’s direction and visuals are both extremely assured, and he is able to conjure dread out of the simplest things. I tracked it down after seeing The Empty Man, hoping to find more cosmic horror done well, and boy was I rewarded. I wish Prior the best, I hope he continues in this vein for a long, long time.

Looking back over my archives, I see that when I link to YouTube on here, the file inevitably goes away. So hurry up and watch. Like I said, it’s only 40 minutes long, and far more rewarding than hate-watching another episode of whatever you young people are hate-watching these days

November 26, 2022
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: , , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment