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Animation Movies Shorts

Flesh Of God
(Carne De Dios)

Director – Patricion Plaza – 2022 – Argentina, Mexico, Columbia – France 16+ – 21m

*****

When a travelling monk falls prey to a fever, the folk remedy administered by an old woman causes him to experience bizarre hallucinations – from the 2023 Annecy International Animation Festival in the Official Competition section

(Warning: not suitable for work or for those of a sensitive disposition. Potentially offensive to religious i.e. Christian viewers. Also, spoilers.)

In a prologue, a young girl races through a field of crops but runs into a monk, who squishes the mushrooms she’s carrying in her bag with his foot, feels her face and checks out her teeth before she flees.

Some time later (or perhaps some time earlier), the profusely sweating monk falls off on his donkey beside his walking guide and wakes in a nearby hovel, or it might be a church, tended by an old woman muttering unintelligible rituals as she attempts to heal him. The perpendicular bars of the roof’s sole window form a makeshift cross on which hangs a Christ figure, but when mushrooms resembling the ones trampled at the start are placed in the initially reluctant monk’s mouth, glowing sprites exit his body and enter the Christ figure, which assumes a monstrous aspect and attacks him.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The H Man
(Bijo
To Ekitai-ningen,
美女と液体人間)

*****

Director – Ishiro Honda – 1958 – Japan – Cert. X – 86m

The H Man (lit. Beauty And The Liquid People) was scripted by Takashi Kimura, who, as Jasper Sharp notes in the accompanying booklet, wrote monster movies for Honda where the monsters were liquid, gas (The Human Vapor, 1960) and mutant man-mushrooms (Matango, 1963). All these can be read as the elements constituting the clouds – or mushroom clouds – of nuclear bombs dropped on Japan or tested near it.

Yet after opening with nuclear explosion stock footage, the film swiftly morphs into a police procedural in which various characters mysteriously disappear… [read more]

Over at All The Anime, I review Eureka!’s Ishiro Honda Blu-ray double bill of The H Man and Battle In Outer Space.

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Features Live Action Movies

Battle
In Outer Space
(Uchu Daisenso,
宇宙大戦争,
lit. The Great Space War)

*****

Director – Ishiro Honda – 1959 – Japan – Cert. U – 90m

Battle In Outer Space is one of those films that paints on a bigger canvas and sacrifices character development in favour of big-screen visual spectacle, brought to life with state-of-the-art special effects. According to Kalat, the film owes much to the bigger Hollywood 1950s SF feature film films made in colour. These include not only films by former Puppetoon animation creator George Pal such as The War Of The Worlds (1953) and Conquest Of Space (1955) but also This Island Earth (1955) and Forbidden Planet (1956).

Honda’s film wades straight in to alien war scenarios… [read more]

Over at All The Anime, I review Eureka!’s Ishiro Honda Blu-ray double bill of The H Man and Battle In Outer Space.

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Ishiro Honda
Double Feature
The H Man
(Bijo
To Ekitai-ningen,
美女と液体人間)
and
Battle
In Outer Space
(Uchu Daisenso,
宇宙大戦争)

The H Man

*****

Director – Ishiro Honda – 1958 – Japan – Cert. X – 86m

Battle in Outer Space

*****

Director – Ishiro Honda – 1959 – Japan – Cert. U – 90m

Alongside the standalone release of Mothra (1961) comes a double bill of two more Toho science fiction movies directed by Ishiro Honda with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya: , The H Man (1958) and Battle In Outer Space (1959). The Toho studio is associated more with monster movies than any other genre, notably Godzilla (1954) and Mothra. The superior entries in this cycle tend to be the ones they directed, including the initial 1954 film which ticked all the right boxes to prove a massive success.

When no-one at Toho was quite sure what had made Godzilla work, the pair collaborated on a number of different SF films before everything came together on Mothra. The H Man is a monster film dressed up in gangster trappings while Battle in Outer Space is an epic with space stations, flying saucers, rocket ships, an alien moon base and alien mind control… [read more]

Over at All The Anime, I review Eureka!’s Ishiro Honda double bill Blu-ray.

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Mothra
(Mosura,
モスラ)

Director – Ishiro Honda – 1961 – Japan – Cert. PG – 101m

*****

Giant moth attacks Tokyo to save fairies. Someone had a meeting about that.

You’d be forgiven for assuming Mothra (1961) a typical Toho monster movie in which a giant moth attacks Tokyo. Yet the film single-handedly redefined the genre much as the original Godzilla film defined it.

With a typhoon moving towards Japan, sailors abandon ship near Infant Island where Rolisica – an amalgam of Russia and the US – has recently tested nuclear weapons. Rescued survivors are tested for radiation sickness but no symptoms found. Two members of the press, reporter Zenichiro Fukuda (Frankie Sakai) and photographer colleague Michi Hanamura (Kyoko Kagawa) sneak into the team of scientists to take pictures and ask questions, learning the natives gave them red juice to drink. They report back to their editor (Takashi Shimura).

Clark Nelson (Jerry Ito) leads an expedition to Infant Island to find a jungle like Pathé’s for King Kong (1933) with man-eating plants, hostile natives and two telepathic, singing Shobijin (lit: ‘small beauties’) about a foot tall… [read more]

Full review at All The Anime.

Blu-ray available from Eureka!

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