I Knew Something Was Up When I Saw 16 New Posts On My Dashboard

I knew something was up when I saw 16 new posts on my Dashboard

Congratulations to Takashi Yamazaki and the entire effects time that worked on Godzilla: Minus One. It's amazing what they managed to accomplish with that low a budget, they definitely deserve that Oscar.

I only wish it wasn't confined to the technical awards gulag, but at least it cleared house once more at the Japanese Academy Awards.

This is one of those things that haunted me in the leadup. The only explanation I can think of is that Skull Island Great Apes exhibited insular dwarfism. Even then Kong must have had an abnormal growth spurt after the 70s for some reason. Of course the real reason is that Jordan Vogt-Roberts had a certain vision of how big Kong should be that wasn't compatible with a future fight with Legendary Godzilla, and Adam Wingard proportioned all the other Great Apes with a 300 foot Kong as default. It doesn't help that scale has never been Wingard's strongpoint.

Having an existential crisis over Zuko from GxK being bigger than Kong was in the Skull Island movie, proportions and all.

I did find it pretty funny that Showa Gigan's chubby hooks were able to slice cleanly through buildings like an anime sword. While I felt one of Gigan's roar effects was a bit overused, I really dug the overall style of the movie and especially the Rob Roy style ending.

Not to be an insufferable nerd, but the live action Godzilla vs Gigan short is just better than the Gigan Rex short. Thats not to say Gigan Rex is bad. Not at all, Its a terrific film and there's a lot to love about it, but it just does not hit as hard for me.

The sets, the performances and suits, the lighting, the city destruction, the long shot- the live short all feels so crafted, it fills that empty spot in my vfx loving soul that reliance on cgi has carved out. It had me trembling with excitement.

Shigan

The Japanese fiscal year does start on April 1, and that was also when Toho announced Shin Godzilla with Hideki Anno.

It's not too late for then to announce Shin Gigan

I’m really digging how this recaptures the style of older zombie films.  While focus is often put on slow vs fast Zombies, this cuts deeper by giving its zombies mournful moans over the more modern focus on rabid snarls.  It also doesn’t fall into the usual pitfalls of making the zombies easy targets for the heroes to slaughter en masse, instead making them a persistent threat to disempowered protagonists.  This is all wrapped up a lovely nightmare logic all to often discarded in the modern fixation on “realism”, with the robot becoming zombified and the classic undead pilot reveal ending.  A lesser show would have settled for the pilot revealing a zombie bite and then turning but Space Dandy went all in and had the zombie fly the helicopter from the start.  The only thing it was missing was the old favorite “person turns towards camera to reveal zombie half of face, to the surprise of character that had clear line of sight on said zombie face prior to the reveal” gag.

I’m glad tumblr’s video size limits are generous enough that I can make you watch just the entire six minute zombie hospital sequence from Space Dandy with no dubs or subtitles so you can enjoy the alien designs, retro 80′s horror soundtrack, and the bounty hunter fight animated by Masaaki Yuasa (best known for kaiba and devilman crybaby) !!

lol @ this thing somehow being a zombie and also wearing one of the mercenary hats

While I haven't read the novel myself, I remember reading that the original Mr. Hyde was actually closer to the Garwolf, in that Jekyll deliberately transforms into Hyde in order to act out his immoral impulses without fear of consequences, rather than it being purely involuntary like it is in many later tellings.

Who's your favorite of the classic universal monsters and why? (based solely on their portrayals in the universal movies, sequels and crossovers included, not their original book counterparts.)

The Wolf Man, because the character was both written and performed so well that he basically redefined what werewolves are in Western culture. None of the other Universal monsters can claim that impact, and since they never recast him, he also remains the most consistently well characterized and acted monster from film to film. Dracula and Frankenstein got their characters shaved down in sequel after sequel, but Lon Chaney Jr. made sure Larry Talbot was never less than his best.