I watch more movies than I have time or brain space to write about. Dozens more! Even over the past few years, where I managed to publish something like 15 to 20 essays every month, there were always great film experiences that went unmentioned in my writing. The conflicting time demands of new releases, upcoming Blu-rays, festival previews and commentary projects just meant the time was never there.
I’ve slowly shifted my Year in Review columns to reflect my reality, detaching 2022 and 2023 from the traditional awards-season structure to focus on the movies I enjoyed throughout the year, and … I really enjoyed writing them.
I’d developed a structure around my film criticism ever since the pandemic. I reviewed everything listed above, including a lot of independent films. That all started to crumble last fall, for many reasons, but truthfully, it was becoming time to recalibrate the types of essays I write anyway. I don’t have the time I used to have or the drive to see and write about absolutely everything that might gain clicks for our site. (The click economy for a site like ours has changed a lot, too.) I don’t try to attend every screening like I used to or watch every screener. The compulsion is gone.
What never changed is my desire to watch movies, which remains the way I reward myself after a long day of responsibilities. Over the course of reflexively interrogating my punishing self-expectations, I started to remember how fun it was to follow my whims from film to film, series to series and to really discover movies again. Most of my best moviegoing experiences have nothing to do with scheduling pieces to hit promotional windows or avoid embargoes.
Screenings are great, don’t get me wrong, but I’m talking about a long night spent browsing through the internet archive to find just the right fucked-up thing to watch at the next Fuck, Yeah! Film Festival events. Or an unexpectedly free evening playing the movie bucket game with Aly, where we each put a few suggestions into a hat and watch what fate decides. Or, as is becoming more common, spending an evening on the couch with my 5-year old narrating subtitled Godzilla movies because he can’t read yet. These are the moments I enjoy watching movies the most, and they’re the ones that rarely feel represented on the website I co-own.
Given how much I enjoyed writing my Year in Review columns over the last few years, I caught the notion that it would be fun to do smaller versions of them monthly, at least this year, instead of writing as many essays throughout the month. I’m still going to review a lot of material — and maybe I’ll ramp up again later in the year — but this commentary is built to give room to everything else as I see fit. These won’t be reviews, per se, more like notes about how and why I watched something and how I felt about it.
For now, this list will be formatted in roughly chronological order, highlighting the movies that stuck with me from the month. You can also check out my January 2024 list on Letterboxd if you want to see the entire roster.
King Kong (1933)
I have a private tradition of beginning each year with the first film in a duology and ending it on December 31 with the second half. This started in 2017, when I opened the year with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and ended it with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life as a personal joke … and then did it again the following year with Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor. I just kept doing it, and over time it has taken on a superstitious element. After all, I really jinxed myself in 2020 by choosing the awful Clint Eastwood comedies Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can, and then basically caused January 6, 2021, by starting the year with The Raid. Who could argue otherwise?
So I started 2024 with the original King Kong. I figure it’s unlikely any enormous gorillas destroy part of New York this year, but who’s to say? I hope to end it with Son of Kong, a film I already like quite a bit and look forward to revisiting.
A few years ago, I wanted to write a companion series to my feature Are You There, Godzilla? It’s Me, Evan, this time focusing on the many appearances of Kong throughout history. What stopped me was the enormity of the original film, still perfect and technically impressive almost a century later. I wasn’t sure what to say about it that hasn’t been said, but I did manage a pretty decent essay on King Kong Lives, which I called the “cheapest, shittiest, and weirdest” of the entire series. I may need to revisit it this year.
Stray Cat Rock (Series)
January always presents an opportunity to start over, but oftentimes the books I read and movies I watch are partially determined by the gifts I receive throughout the holidays. I didn’t receive many this year, but I knew for a while I would drop whatever gift cards I had into Arrow’s four-film Female Prisoner Scorpion box set. We watched the original film, Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion, at last year’s Fuck, Yeah! Film Festival, and it was a real life-changer. I ordered it on Christmas night, but while researching it, I saw Arrow also released a pretty affordable five-disc set of Stray Cat Rock, the series that launched Scorpion star Meiko Kaji’s film career, which eventually led to her starring role in Lady Snowblood. Armed with the exhausted post-Christmas Day judgment of an exhausted parent, I ordered that series, too.
I didn’t think highly of the first two films, Delinquent Girl Boss or Wild Jumbo. Both fit the series’ mandate of depicting gang warfare between young men and women, infused with the spirit and music of the time. But like many films, they were built for their times and feel that way. There are clearly cultural references I didn’t quite understand, and everyone involved on both sides of the camera were still figuring out what exactly they were trying to say creatively. Both films end with wild, dangerous and bleakly violent denouements, but they’re ultimately still studio exploitation films built to follow the trends of their day and didn’t do much for me.
The director of Delinquent Girl Boss, Yasuharu Hasebe (a career filmmaker who later made some of the most notorious, violent erotic Japanese cinema of the 1970s), returned for Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, the best of the series and the film that establishes Kaji’s badass screen persona for the rest of the decade. She can kill you with a look but will usually use something even sharper. Nobody on screen has ever had a more limitless stare this side of Clint Eastwood, and frankly Kaji is better at it, embodying the hate, pain and rage of the women whose stories she’s telling. Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter still has her playing a character, but it’s the start of something that becomes utterly transcendent later.
It’s a major setup for the series, leaving behind the freewheeling and episodic structure of the first two movies to tell a dramatic story clearly inspired by the American Western. Kaji is a female gang leader protecting her women from the violent local Japanese gangs and defending their right to love whomever they want — and that includes the mixed-race children of occupying American G.I.s, who are the victims of severe racism as a new, youthful nationalism rears its head in the country. The essence of the film is the cyclical nature of men ruining just about everything and women standing up to their ruinous passions. These are youth run amok in a world where nothing lasts forever, even with the best intentions. A great film!
Hasebe continued his run in this series with the next film, Machine Animal, which again features Kaji as a girl gang leader with an incredible hat. This one is a more straightforward thriller, and it didn’t do as much for me as Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, which genuinely blew my mind. The final film in the series, Beat ‘71, features the return of director Toshiya Fujita, who directed Wild Jumbo (and, later, the Snowblood series). Like his previous outing, Beat ‘71 is a more lackadaisical story of wayward youths, and it did nothing for me!
Sex Hunter
The reason I keep writing out Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter is because I watched another movie titled Sex Hunter this month, purely because I ran across it while searching for the former film on Letterboxd. Although I’ve watched a lot of unique stuff over the years, I’ve never watched many Japanese pinku films, a genre of softcore pornography, and this one was described as an odd, explicit riff on the Suspiria story.
Why not!
Well, it turns out it’s nothing that interesting. A young woman is brought into a ballet academy and told the only way she can truly learn to let go and dance is to be repeatedly and sadistically raped by her teacher and the teacher’s evil brother. (The two tutors are also banging one another.) They also kidnap and torture the young woman’s boyfriend. The most memorable “lesson” is when our heroine is suspended from the ceiling and given an enema with over-carbonated Coca-Cola. It’s truly something! I did not enjoy it and kind of regretted watching it. That’s just the way things are in this line of work: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I added a few more films by the director, Toshiharu Ikeda, to my watchlist.
I’d love to watch this with Sam.
Wandering Ginza Butterfly & Wandering Ginza Butterfly: She-Cat Gambler
My Female Prisoner Scorpion set arrived, but I decided to check off two other Meiko Kaji films I’d discovered before diving into her opus. These two decent revenge flicks focus more on their ex-con, vengeance-driven heroine’s gambling abilities than her swordsmanship (although Kaji kills a whole lotta guys in the respective third acts). Neither film is particularly worth writing about at length, but the sequel features Sonny Chiba, and he and Kaji are just naturally incredible together. Their finale scene as they part ways to run from the law their own separate ways — “We could be a couple of wandering birds, right?” — really worked for me. I could see myself revisiting She-Cat Gambler again down the line. And what a title, right?
Female Prisoner Scorpion (Series)
There are four Female Prisoner Scorpion films starring Meiko Kaji. The first three, directed by Shunya Itō, are visually spellbinding primal screams against the patriarchy — and the way both men and women perpetuate broken systems of sexual power.
701: Scorpion is probably the most balanced of the three, with Itō’s surrealistic aesthetic bringing a lot to what is otherwise a fairly straightforward women-in-prison revenge film. Scorpion (Kaji, solidifying the silent, intense demeanor she first captured in Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter) is a woman wronged by a detective she loved but who set her up and had her sent to prison. She suffers endless pain and indignity with the guiding light of eventually murdering him. And so she does.
Deeply satisfying. It’s worth clarifying this series is not made up of pinku films (although the studio, Nikkatsu, would popularize that genre soon after). Of the three, this is probably the closest, if only because it’s the only one featuring the sort of group nudity you tend to see in prison films.
The series really sets itself apart in Jailhouse 41 and Beast Stable, which are follow-up sequels with a surprising amount of story and thematic development between them. In Jailhouse 41, Scorpion has become a messianic figure to the women in her prison despite the Warden’s harsh punishments. She eventually escapes with a group of fellow convicts, all of whom committed heinous crimes as a result of their vile treatment by the men in their lives. Of the three, it’s the boldest — opening with Scorpion enduring a gang rape while tied to a cross of logs and ending with her confronting a foe in the garbage-heap wastelands just outside of Tokyo, having become something more than just a one-woman vengeance machine. It’s an exploitation film with a lot on its mind.
Beast Stable is lesser than Jailhouse 41 but only a little bit. This time around, Scorpion is on the run from a dogged detective who wants to return her to the jailhouse once and for all. She comes across older foes from the first film and makes a new friend with a shocking secret. It has some deeply shocking, utterly upsetting sequences that have to do with the treatment of prostitutes by their madams, in yet another dark development of the series’ exploration of women’s culpability in keeping other women down. The ending puts a period on the whole trilogy.
Unfortunately, the fourth Scorpion film, 701’s Grudge Song, is considerably weaker than the other three — a sequel that exists solely because director Yasuharu Hasebe came aboard to work on it as a director-for-hire by the studio. Rather than featuring the Scorpion character as a spirit of vengeance, this one features her becoming involved with a similarly tragic young man before being betrayed once again. It’s an uninspiring and aesthetically basic ending to Kaji’s run on the character.
Lady Snowblood & Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance
I wrapped up my run of Meiko Kaji’s career with her iconic Lady Snowblood and Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance. The first film is almost without peer in the female revenge genre. There’s a reason why Quentin Tarantino wholly ripped it off for Kill Bill. Director Toshiya Fujita, who directed one of the worst Stray Cat Rock films, eschews his usual faux-documentary style for the first film. Thank god! Sadly, he returns to it with Love Song of Vengeance, a profoundly weak sequel that really squanders the beautiful ending of the first film. Oh well!
Millennium Mambo
I took a break from 1970s Japanese exploitation to watch Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo. It’s not my first film by the director, but it’s the first I watched with a clear vision of what I was getting into. (I guess, in hindsight, I’m embarrassed about my Flowers of Shanghai review, but in my defense: I just wasn’t ready to watch that.) Of the films I watched in January, Millennium Mambo had the most profound effect on me, and I’m hoping to circle around to Hao’s other films later this year. The film is a trance-like ode to nostalgia and longing, depicting a few months in the life of a young woman, Vicky (Shu Qi) as she navigates two toxic relationships at the turn of the millennium. It really appealed to me.
Bohachi Bushido: Code of the Forgotten Eight
The last Meiko Kaji film I watched in January was Blind Woman’s Curse, a Yakuza revenge film released concurrently with some of her more notable work. I thought it was one of the weaker ones, aside from Kaji’s awesome dragon tattoo, some decent violence and director Teruo Ishii’s ability to shift the entire film from a crime saga into an absolute fucking horror show about halfway through. I decided to look into Ishii’s other work and discovered he’s generally considered one of the definitive voices in this era of Japanese exploitation and pinku. Naturally, I went looking for a few of his others and found Bohachi Bushido: Code of the Forgotten Eight.
Tetsurō Tamba (whom I’ve seen in many other films over the years, apparently) stars as a nihilistic samurai named Shino, who just wanders around complaining about how badly he wants to die. A sadistic BDSM samurai cult attempts to recruit him into its ranks, preaching eight principles that relieve them of all guilt when pillaging, raping and torturing the women in towns where they reside. Shino initially works for them before making enemies of the cult. That doesn’t stop him from talking about how much life sucks, though. Constantly. He fucking hates being alive!
The film is essentially a softcore porno, and I’d be hesitant even to say it’s a porno with a point, but Ishii just goes all-out on the bleakness here. It’s violent and depraved, an exercise in excess that sort of resigns itself to the fundamental evils at the heart of codes that preach masculine power. Tamba’s so massive, so badass, so emo. Sleazy and insane. I can’t wait to show this to my friends.
Rewatches
Interspersed throughout these films were plenty of rewatches. I’m still very happily on the Godzilla train with my son, and he’s at an age where he’s exhibiting the hereditary compulsive-completist tendencies of both his parents. So we watched through most of his blindspots before venturing into Ishirō Honda’s other kaiju films. We rewatched Son of Godzilla, before moving on to Godzilla 2000: Millennium, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Shin Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, Mothra, Varan, Rodan, and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster.
In honor of the Arrow set, I also revisited the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan the Barbarian films. For the purposes of my Criterion review, I watched and wrote about their new edition of Trainspotting. I also revisited Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which we’ve tended to do in January the past few years as an excuse to host a small gathering during the most bummer weeks of winter. They’re some of the only films that make me feel like a better person just for watching them.
Reads:
The Sea of Fertility Book 3: The Temple of Dawn (Mishima, Yukio)
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