POWER UP

 

Our hero / nemesis enjoys a much needed burst of cosmic energy in the excellent Heisei Era Godzilla Vs Mechagodzilla 2 (1993). Spoiler: Mechagodzilla gets his metal arse kicked (eventually).

JAPANESE CINEMA 101

 

From Terrifying Girls Highschool: Lynch Law Classroom (1973)

WADE IN THE WATER

 

'The Face Of Another' (1966) is a rather grim Japanese sci fi psychodrama about disfigurement, loss of identity and revenge. Towards the end of the film, a hitherto marginal character walks slowly into the sea. As someone who almost drowned as a child, I know it isn't exactly an easeful death, but it has elements of poetry, as demonstrated in this beautiful sequence.        

GAPPA GAPPA HEY

 

In Gappa (1967), a scientific expedition goes to a remote tropical island in order to assess its value as a holiday resort. While there, they find a massive egg in a cave. When what they think is a previously unknown lizard hatches out of it, they take the baby creature back to Japan for study. 

The stolen infant's parents (actually more bird than lizard, and with the ability to breathe out blue fire) are understandably furious, and fly to Tokyo to regain custody. What follows is brutal, costly (the Gappa seemingly destroy half of the Japanese air force) and totally deserved, and although there is time for a happy ending, it's a close run thing. The moral of the story: don't nick other people / animals / species kids. It's astonishing how obvious that is, of course, but we're talking about humans. so it still needs saying.

HUM GENTLY AND HIDE COOL MIND IN MY BACK

 

From Big Magnum, Kuroiwa Sensei, d. Kazuhiko Yamaguchi (1985)

Big Magnum, Kuroiwa Sensei has all of the subtlety of a big budget episode of Rentaghost starring Cannon and Ball. A big talking teacher in a cowboy hat tries to bring order to an unruly school with a 44 Magnum, although he turns out to be a snivelling coward who wears a nappy. Later on, the mantle is taken up by a weedy bespectacled guy who, after extreme provocation, becomes a leather clad vigilante super hero. After triumphing in a big Western type fight that has elements of Mad Max, he flies off in a private plane to tame another school. It's all based on a very popular Manga series, so it must make sense to someone.

Anyway, when the insufferable 'kids' of the school aren't causing mayhem in class, they are at a local nightclub, body popping and breakdancing to a bland and boring new wave J-pop disco band where most of the members wear WW2 German uniforms. 

MEET THE MONSTERS

 

There are many undeniably great sequences in cinema. The continuous take from the beginning of Touch Of Evil, for example, or the pillow fight in Zero De Conduit, even the opening sequence of Up.  These all fall short, however, in the face of a minute in the short Japanese film Kamen Rider Vs Ambassador Hell (1972) in which TEN men in rubber suits  fearsome monsters suddenly appear on a snowy mountain top and introduce themselves one by one before launching into a battle with our motorcycle riding hero and his secret agent sidekick. 

Despite their bravado and obvious enthusiasm for a fight, the monsters get their scaly posteriors kicked in a disappointingly brief period of time. It's a shame, as I was really rooting for them, particularly Mushroom Morgue.

Additional: what would have been the ultimate smack down if Zanjioh and his pals could actually do more than posture and shout...

They'll be back, and they won't have learned a thing.

TENSE AMBIANCE

I was struck (unlike that dinky target) by this sequence in the 2011 Japanese film Schoolgirl Apocalypse, particularly the subtitles. Despite what you might reasonably suspect from a Japanese film about young women, there's nothing prurient about this film, in which awkward schoolgirl Sakura has her life turned upside down by murderous zombies (are there any other type?), then has to battle against them (and self-doubt) in order to survive. Naturally, her aim improves very quickly indeed.

PSYCHEDELIC SCHOOLDAYS

School In The Crosshairs, d. Nobuhiko Obayashi (1981)

I've been watching a lot of Japanese genre films* lately. They can occasionally be lurid, and are sometimes obviously driven by dramatic conventions that I'm not particularly familiar with. They veer between tasteful restraint and hyperbolic fantasy. There is lots of shouting, screaming and the metallic quivering and wet thunks of sword blades slashing at flesh. It's good value, and there's lots of it: dozens of mad movies about yakuza gangs, delinquent girls, women in prison, travelling samurai warriors, groups of kooky kids trying to find their own way in a mixed up, often dangerous world. 

School In The Crosshairs has an awful lot going on, and calls to mind a haphazard mix of Grease, The Omen and drugs. The story of a high school infiltrated by evil aliens who install a fascist prefect system, it was directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, perhaps best known for horror comedy film Hausu (1977), a film that has wormed its way into the vocabulary of film hipsters all over the world. I don't say Crosshairs is a superior film, but it's just as much fun, and deserves to be better known. 

* I don't actually know what genre School In The Crosshairs is.