Creature (India, 2014)

Last Monday, I went vinyl record shopping with my nephew in the East Bay, and ended up in an Indian DVD shop on University Avenue, where the voluble sales clerk talked copies of Baahubali and Ek Tha Tiger into my hands. I was grateful for this guidance, because it had been a very long time since I had seen a Bollywood movie of even remotely recent vintage—since before I started writing Funky Bollywood, to be honest—and also because I ended up liking both films.

But there was one more film that I walked out of that store with, one that I had chosen myself by virtue of the cover alone, which advertised a CGI monster movie in which beauty-turned-scream-queen Bipasha Basu faces off against a horrific part dinosaur/part man. The film’s title: Creature (also known as Creature 3D, if you are watching it in 3D—or if you are one of the characters in the movie, who is experiencing the creature as part of their natural field of vision.)

Like its title, Creature is a pretty on-the-nose affair, as are most of Indian cinema’s first stabs at a particular genre, taking the modern day monster movie, as presented by Hollywood, and stripping it down to its basic machinations. All of the expected tropes and plot points arrive right on time, from the jump scares down to the ironically portentous dialogue (“I’m glad we honeymooned here, rather than in London or Paris,” says one newlywed immediately before being torn into pieces.)

All of this is woven into an engagingly slick little package by director Vikram Bhatt (Raaz) who, armed with a budget of Rs. 18 crore (roughly 2.7 million U.S. dollars), even comes up with CGI effects that rise above passable quality. This latter makes Creature a must-see for anyone (like me) who has ever made fun of Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani, a film whose only purpose seems to be to make Mega-shark vs. Giant Octopus look like Jurassic Park by comparison.

The creature in question bears a slight resemblance to Ray Harryhausen’s Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth, and benefits considerably from the obviously great care taken in designing its movements. This is a monster whose personal mantra appears to be “Always Be Hunting”. When he is stalking his prey, he moves in a slithering crawl that is almost sickeningly visceral, then breaks into a loping gallop when it’s time to strike. Less care was taken, unfortunately, with the sound design; we’ve all heard about the ingenious combinations of sound and technique that were combined to fashion Godzilla’s iconic roar. In the case of the creature from Creature, what we are obviously hearing is a gruff voiced man yelling “ROAR” into a microphone, perhaps with his hands cupped around his mouth.

The film also seems to be holding its nose a bit in its presentation of gore, but it does give us one shot of a severed leg and, in another scene, a severed arm. And, if it is at all possible to over-react to such a sight, the actors do their earnest best to pull it off.

Of course, in addition to special effects, Creature also has a plot, and that concerns Ahana Dutt (Basu), a fiercely determined young woman who, in the wake of a family tragedy, moves to Northern India’s lush Himachal Pradesh region to realize her dream of building and operating a “boutique hotel”. This, in defiance of everyone else’s characterization of the surrounding area as a “jungle”, she names the Glendale Forest Hotel, and true to that name, it is a very Western-looking, almost chalet-style construction that could just as easily be in Northern California as the Swiss Alps.

We join the Hotel’s grand opening party in progress, where Ahana meets and immediately makes googly eyes at Karan (Pakistani dreamboat Imran Abbas), a man who shows up with an acoustic guitar despite later claiming that he is only posing as a musician, even though he has just made that one acoustic guitar sound like an entire orchestra. This was in one of only four songs in the movie, just two of which are picturized on the actors. On the DVD, each of these songs is accompanied by a super title announcing where you can download them as ringtones (you stay classy, T-Series.)

Sadly, by the time of the party, we have already been privy to the two newlyweds and one hapless maintenance man being slaughtered by the creature. Ahana is soon privy to this, too, and as the killing continues, attendance at the hotel drops, leaving her prey to another monster, the profit-hungry bankers who threaten to repossess the hotel from her.

It has to be said that the best part of Creature is Bipasha Basu’s portrayal of the very well-written character of Ahana, an admirably rugged heroine who insists on taking the lead in every battle, be it against the monster or her creditors, all while fiercely holding on to her dream of entrepreneurship. In this way, Creature sort of comes off like a sci-fi retelling of Once Upon a Time in the West, in which, rather than Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale’s Jill must protect her ranch against the predations of Godzilla. Casting Basu against Imran Abbash in all his emo-ish frailty goes even further toward establishing her as a total boss.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, one of the joys of watching Indian takes on genre cinema is in seeing how the chosen genre’s tropes collide with the idiosyncratic traditions of Hindi cinema. Sadly, no such joys are to be had with Creature, as the film tamps down on its Indian-ness as furiously as Ahana tries to put a Western face on her endeavors in the hospitality industry, doing so in open defiance of the wilds that surround her. This is true from the locations, which could be literally anywhere in Europe or the Northern United States, to the dialogue, roughly 40% of which is spoken in English.

It is suggested that Ahana’s actions have unleashed the monster, and that it is somehow the personification of some past sin of hers. Is Creature, then, a cautionary tale about post-diaspora Bollywood’s ever-increasing Westernization? If so, what is the monster that has been, or will be, unleashed? Until we know the answer, Creature merely comes across as a slickly engaging, though pretty generic creature feature.

Nieng Arp (Cambodia, 2004)

It’s a wonder that any innovation at all takes place within the monster film genre, seeing as there is always a new generation of young viewers for whom all the old creatures can be trotted out and run through their familiar paces. And this is no truer for the United States than it is for Cambodia, where the horror thriller Nieng Arp became a surprise hit in 2004, running in theaters for a solid three months.

Nieng Arp concerns the folkloric beastie known to Cambodians as the Arp (or Ap), which will be familiar to 4DK readers as the Krasue from Thailand’s Ghost of Guts Eater, the “Flying Evil” from Taiwan’s Witch With Flying Head, and the Leak from Indonesia’s Mystics in Bali. If you are too lazy to click those links, you will be none the wiser—unless, of course, you are unable to click them because you are a levitating, disembodied head with all of your entrails dangling out of your neck hole, in which case you know what an Arp is, because you are one. Nieng Arp’s subtitles further put a bow on things by translating “Arp” somewhat awkwardly as “Bodiless Vampire.”

Our story gets under way when village girl Maya and her boyfriend are attacked by a trio of randy local hooligans as they walk through the forest at night. The boyfriend is killed and Maya is raped and left for dead. It is at this moment that an Arp just happens to fly by and “turns” Maya by dribbling some kind of goop inter her mouth from hers. Next, a subtitle appears telling us that 16 years have passed, and the fact that this is a horror movie made in the 2000’s is announced by the arrival of a vanload of boisterous college students from Pnom Penh, who are in the Battambang Province for a study tour of the area’s shrines.

This group is as lazily drawn as precedent would have you expect (the Fat Girl is pushy, constantly eats, and gets diarrhea—and there’s a gay guy named “Pompy”), but it has to be said that the purpose of their visit provides the film with most of its visual highlights. The lush, antiquity-strewn locations through which the group tours are indeed beautiful, even if they provide the impetus for some frankly enervating travelogue sequences. First-timer Kam Chanty proves himself to be yet another novice director who can’t resist the allure of a good stairway. Thus do we watch in real time as our little group fully ascends a steep hillside to the accompaniment of light pop rock.

When it comes time for the gang to seek out their accommodations, we come to a hostel overseen by none other than Maya, played by an actress whose likeness to Suzzanna cannot be mere coincidence. Maya shares the home with Paulika, her teenage daughter. Paulika is, by all appearances, a normal teenage girl, to the extent that one might suspect she is the victim of some kind of Marilyn Munster syndrome. Mom, meanwhile, keeps her head’s tendency to go airborne on the down low—until, that is, Satha (Sovan Makara), the hunk of the visiting group, starts to woo Paulika. In a turn of events that is almost Bollywood-like in its providence, Maya somehow divines that Satha is the descendant of one of her rapists--at which point no amount of pleading from Paulika, nor solemn intervention by the village monks, can stop her.

When it comes to reviewing Nieng Arp, I find myself with a bit of a dilemma on my hands. That is because I have a strong suspicion that, in the process of transferring the film to the VCD on which I watched it, a couple of the reels were placed out of sequence. Certain scenes on the second disc are clearly from earlier in the film, and set up events that have already taken place—with, at the time, mysterious causation. These might be intended as flashbacks, or some kind of Tarantino-esque experiment with fragmented narrative, but, if so, they are poorly realized. Then again, it could all be just an accident beyond the filmmakers’ control (in which case, they can register a complaint via the phone number that helpfully scrolls across the bottom of the screen virtually the whole fucking time). Who am I to judge?

What I will say is this: With its homemade, shot-on-video feel, crude special effects, and religious conservatism, Nieng Arp reminds me of nothing so much as one of those evangelical horror films made in Nigeria or Ghanna. You can gauge your likely reaction to it by just how much more of B14 or 666: Beware the End is at Hand you could watch than their trailers. Nieng Arp, of course, might have the benefit of making a little more narrative sense than those movies, were it the case that the time-shifting in it that I witnessed was unintentional.

Anyway, after a good bit of Maya chasing the terrified students through the forest and slapping the back of their heads with her intestines, she calls out to the ghost of the Arp who made her for aid. This cackling crone proceeds to inhabit the bodies of the kids one by one and make them murder one another. Among her victims is a girl named Prathana, who betrays a pre-existing evil streak by wearing a bootleg tee-shirt that says “MIGKEY MOOSE” on it.

The VCD of Nieng Arp wraps up with a blooper reel of the cast muffing their lines and breaking character to much hilarity. It’s charming, to be sure, but to my mind unnecessary to providing the film with a happy ending. I’ve elsewhere dedicated no small amount of text to grieving the tragic end that befell Cambodia’s cinematic golden age of the 60s and 70s. After the ravages of Pol Pot (whose name is evoked in Nieng Arp as yet another shiver-inducing bogey man), the revival of that cinema was fitful and protracted, with a few bright spots amid long periods of dormancy. One of the brightest of those spots was the success of Nieng Arp, which, along with a number of other low budget horror features, prompted an uptick in film production and theater attendance in the country. All in all, it’s a heartening example of how exploitation cinema, with all its commerce-driven perseverance, can sometimes tow a nation’s entire film industry behind it into safer waters.

El Chupacabras (Mexico, 1996)

As with Weng Weng, I assume that, if you don’t know by now what El Chupacabras is, it’s because you don’t care. That mythical creature’s currency as a pop cultural punch line is so long ago expired that to remind anyone of his/her/its heyday seems like an “I love the 90s” act of premature nostalgia. Back in those days, the creature was the impetus for any number of low budget straight-to-video/cable quickies from both sides of the border, including the film under consideration here, El Chupacabras. As an extra blast-from-the-past bonus, El Chupacabras also reminds us that, in 1996, The X-Files was very popular.

Given its obvious cheapie origins, El Chupacabras should be commended for the ambitious geographical scope of its narrative, which spans the Americas. The film opens in Mexico, where a rancher and his family are killed by a mysterious, unseen creature. From there, we head to Canada, where we meet Jorge Carrasco (bull-necked action star Jorge Reynoso), a scientific investigator with the U.S. government, who, when we join him, appears to be on the trail of bigfoot (who, I’m happy to say, makes a much welcome cameo). Also on Bigfoot’s trail is Duncan MacGregor (played by the film’s director, Gilberto De Anda), a world famous hunter whose catchphrase appears to be “fuck you”.

Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, reporter Amanda (Lina Santos) narrowly escapes death when she and her guide are attacked by another unseen creature while exploring a cave containing the skeleton of a strange, unearthly animal. And bringing it all home back in Mexico, police commandant Roman Hurtado (muscle-bound Miguel Angel Rodriguez in a very tight shirt) is, along with his on-the-job-and-off partner, a red headed lady forensic investigator (maybe Isabel Andrade?), trying to get to the bottom of the killings along with the attendant rash of livestock mutilations, all the while trying to keep a lid on rampant speculation that the legendary Chupacabras is to blame. Complicating things further is a crazy priest who shows up from time to time to shout something about “prophecy” at anyone who will listen.

If you, kind reader, have prophesied that all of the above far-flung characters will eventually converge upon Officer Hurtado’s small Mexican town in search of the Chupacabras, you are to be commended. But don’t be too hasty in investing in your own psychic hotline. El Chupacabras moves along at an energetic pace, driven forward by the momentum of its own predictability. There are many well worn tropes to be trotted out, after all, and dammit, we are going to race breathlessly from one to the next in order to get them all in. At the same time, the film does strive for extra credit with a couple of mildly interesting twists, including a red herring in the form of a human serial killer and some events that point to the possibility of the Chupacabras being extraterrestrial in origin.

And then there are the welcome moments of unintentional hilarity, such as the scene where Reynoso’s investigator character grimly peruses an imposing looking tome from his library…

…only for an over-the-shoulder shot to reveal that what he’s staring at is a Frank Frazetta (Sorry! It's Boris Vallejo; I stand corrected) print featuring one of that artist’s trademark bubble-butted barbarian babes.

Once in Mexico, Reynoso teams up with Hurtado’s ginger partner, and the two proceed to Mulder and Scully their way to the bottom of things. All leads to the entire cast ending up in a misty -- break out those halogen flashlights! -- sheep carcass filled ruin where El Chupacabras, which has been stingy with its monsters up to this point, finally seals the deal, though in a manner every bit as chintzy as its Sci-Fi channel level budget would lead you to expect.

While the X-Files references in the film are plentiful and obvious, I have to say that the one notable thing El Chupacabras adds to the formula is its insane level of machismo. The combined testosterone of the three man mountains in its lead roles is enough to be detected from space, making it surprising that any extraterrestrial would have even come within striking distance. This conspicuous chemical imbalance also guarantees that, in addition to the two women in the film who actually get to do stuff, there is also a generous number of Rubenesque ladies in impossibly tight skirts for these gentlemen to ogle and indiscriminately manhandle. Hulk want!

This also means that, despite the effort put into establishing an atmosphere of mystery and unearthly dread, things can’t be settled without having two guys run away from a tremendous explosion. The truth is out there. BOOM!

OMG War God!

Also reviewed at Tars Takas.NET.

“Try as I might, it’s very hard for me to imagine this movie being anything other than awesome.”

That was me, back in October of 2009, talking about the 1976 Taiwanese fantasy movie War God. If you’re a fatalist like me, you’ll recognize that those words couldn’t have been more designed to be eaten than if they’d been sprinkled with jimmies. At the time, however, I felt safe in uttering them, due to the fact that there seemed little chance that I would ever actually see War God. Furthermore, they were conveyed via the internet, where it’s common practice to throw the word “awesome” at things that are either contingent, lost to the ages, or completely imaginary. Truthfully, it is only in such a limbo state that we net rats actually allow ourselves to enjoy a thing -- knowing as we do that, should it beat the odds and actually make its way into our waking world, the cruel mathematics of nerd expectations will guaranty that it’s made of 100% Fail.

War God came to my attention by way of the evil Tars Tarkas, a dedicated hunter of tantalizing-sounding lost films who’s a great friend to have if you like having, not even carrots, but hazy, low resolution photographs of carrots dangled in front of your nose all the time. From the materials that Tars unearthed, the film appeared to be a Japanese style giant monster mash -- directed, no less, by Chen Hung Min of Little Hero fame –- in which a battleship-sized version of the revered historical figure-cum-deity Guan Yu protects Hong Kong from a trio of equally mammoth alien invaders. For Tars as for me, the mere sight of the faded old lobby cards and publicity stills was the only spark needed to fuel an enduring obsession. The mere idea of War God had us dancing around excitedly like two grown men for whom the idea of a film featuring a man in a rubber monster suit giving a thumping to another man in a rubber monster suit while standing amidst a field of model skyscrapers was somehow both new and novel, while, in reality, we were two grown men who had seen literally dozens upon dozens of such films. This is the sort of thing that is, within our particular circle, referred to in hushed tones as The Sickness. And we had it bad.

Given the inevitable and stratospheric raising of hopes that such self perpetuating hysteria engenders, it’s conceivable that the absolute worst thing that could have happened to us was that War God would actually surface one day, and that we would then be forced to consider its relative puniness within the shadow of the towering mythology we’d built up around it. And dammit, it was fun building up that mythology: spewing all that hyperbole, venting all of that unfounded speculation, saying “awesome” a lot. Why did fucking stupid old War God have to come along and ruin it? But come along it did.

But, having come, did it really ruin anything?

As a production, War God’s timing is interesting, as it is indeed a monster film very much in the Japanese style that happened to come along at a time when, in Japan, not only had the Kaiju Eiga genre disappeared from theater screens, but the special effects driven Tokusatsu boom -- so prevalent on Japanese TV during the early 70s -- was seriously on the wane. Before I’d seen the film, this fact lead me to wonder whether War God might have benefited from the work of some underemployed Japanese special effects technicians (after all, it’s not as if there wasn’t precedent for such a thing). Upon seeing the film, however, and observing the relatively crude nature of its model work and costumes, I began to suspect that this was not the case.

The film focuses on an ensemble cast of characters, among whom are Chao, an aging sculptor who, in order to keep a promise made to his late wife, is racing to complete what he proposes will be a “perfect” statue of the warrior god Guan Yu. Working against Chao is the fact that he is rapidly losing his vision to glaucoma. Still, the devout senior labors on, convinced that, once completed, the statue will be infused with the spirit of Guan Yu himself. Meanwhile, Chao’s son, Chai Chun (Gu Ming-Lun), is a “space scientist”, who, in stark contrast to the decidedly old world feel of his father’s cluttered studio, works in a stylishly antiseptic, space-age laboratory, where he and his staff torture bees in order to replicate the hypothetical environments of other planets. Not surprisingly, Chai Chun is baffled by what he sees as his father’s superstitious beliefs, even at one point -- for the benefit of those in the audience who prefer things on the nose -- protesting that “there is no god in the twentieth century.”

So it doesn’t take long to see that War God is going to present itself as a parable pitting the opposing values of faith and science against one another… and not that much longer to realize that it’s a fixed fight. Like a Chick tract, War God has one, and only one, message to impart. And that message is that Team Faith is the one to be on. When the introductions are over and the shit starts to get real, Team Science again and again proves that it has neither explanations nor solutions, and, in its most shining moments, can only act as a kind of pit crew for the forces of Team Faith. Also at issue is modernity itself, as exemplified by Chai Chun’s troubled younger sister, Li Un (Tse Ling-Ling), whose lack of moral grounding leads her to pursue such decadent pastimes as riding around on a motorcycle and dancing wantonly in a public park to Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting” -- not to mention making her the ideal candidate to be the messenger through which the forces of evil will speak when they arrive. (I have to admit, though, that, despite the film’s nominal agenda, War God’s funky, wakka-wakka guitar soundtrack makes modern life, circa 1976, seem pretty damn cool.)

And the trouble that arrives does indeed have a decidedly punitive, Old Testament quality to it. Mysterious lights in the sky are followed by a series of nightmarish atmospheric and physical anomalies. Boiling rain falls from the sky, gravity fails us, and even time itself starts to run backward without warning. Finally, a flying saucer arrives in Hong Kong and dispatches forth three mammoth-scale Martians, who declare their intention of punishing the human race for its warlike ambitions. An ultimatum is made, demanding that the Earth destroy its nuclear arsenal within 24 hours, and then the Martians set to literally swaggering about like a trio of cyclopean juvenile delinquents, randomly smashing with their gigantic clubs whatever fixtures of Hong Kong’s skyline come within their path.

Throughout this, the makers of War God take great care to show us the collateral damage wrought by this massively scaled carnage. Even once our giant hero makes his appearance and enters the fray, with all the requisite building smashing that such a titanic battle would require, we are constantly cutting away to shots of the terrified and helpless tenants of those buildings being crushed and suffocated. (The only other time I’ve seen something similar attempted in a kaiju film was during the Shibuya sequence in Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera: Revenge of Iris.) This tends to contribute to War God seeming just a bit more grim and mean spirited than your typical Ultraman episode, but also makes sense within the context of the times. The English translation of War God’s promotional materials provided over at the excellent Achilles Girl in Actionland blog indicates that the film was originally marketed, at least in part, as a disaster film. And, indeed, these aforementioned aspects of the film echo to a great extent the smug, God’s eye moralizing of Irwin Allen’s disaster epics of the period, in which, no matter how random nature was in its depredations, it always took great care to ensure that the “bad” people –- the unscrupulous developers, the adulterers, and especially those foolish mortals hubristic enough to think that they were above harm -- got especially fucked up. This, then, is the unique fusion that War God accomplishes, melding in equal parts the sensibilities of the 1960s Kaiju Eiga and the 1970s Hollywood disaster drama.

Alongside these darker tendencies, War God also displays a keen sense of comic book melodrama. Coming after a tense buildup, the final and expected transformation of Chau’s statue into the giant avenger of the film’s title comes not a moment too soon, and at a pitch clearly designed to illicit rapturous cheers from the peanut gallery. From this point on, the film dedicates a generous portion of its running time to the apocalyptic, real estate decimating battle royal at hand -- at the end of which, not just the forces of Team Science, but even the Martians themselves must concede the invincible power of God. Such quivering tribute on the aliens’ part, of course, elicits no mercy from Guan Yu, and they are soon reduced to offal by the slashing of his gigantic guan dao.

You know what? Despite my fears, War God actually lived up to my expectations. After all, as I indicated earlier, the thing that is most awesome about War God is the idea of War God, and the filmmakers here honored that idea to the best that their means and abilities would allow. The film’s pacing is breathless, it’s distinctions between good and evil deliciously stark, and it’s doling out of cheap special effects and miniature carnage just about as generous as one could hope for. Of course, these virtues might be harder for us to appreciate from an adult remove. But I think that, if any kaiju fan out there had seen this film when he or she was a kid, back when they first saw all of those Godzilla movies that are now so close to their hearts, they would have loved it, and would still love it today. It all goes to show that sometimes these films that seem from a distance like potential lost gems can, once found, prove to be gems in fact, however minor.

This review is part of a special crossover event between 4DK and TarsTarkas.NET. Be sure to check out Tars' take on War God over at his site.