Godzilla - The Official Guide To The King Of The Monsters

Ghidorah With Delight

Godzilla - The Official
Guide To The King
Of The Monsters
by Graham Skipper
Welbeck Books
ISBN: 9781787398993

Godzilla - The Official Guide To The King Of The Monsters is a new book published towards the end of 2022, written by Graham Skipper and completely authorised by Toho Studios, who have allowed the publishing company unlimited access to loads of never before seen photos from the films and behind the scenes shots (more on those photos later). And, it’s a book I’m very happy to have but, it has to be said, I also had some small issues with it too. So yeah, it’s good and bad... let’s get to it.

The tome is split into six main sections, book ended by an Introduction and a Closing section thusly... The Showa Era, The Heisei Era, The Millennium Era, The Reiwa Era, The American Era and Godzilla In Other Media. And, as you would imagine, the first five of those are split into mini chapters, each one covering one of the films from their particular era. Each main section is accompanied by a nice illustration but, it seems for every positive thing I have to say to about this book (which is ultimately a nice thing to have), there’s a yang to the yin with something negative about that particular aspect.

Okay, so the first thing I will bring up is the design. It looks fantastic and the front cover of the hardback depicting The Big G himself in silhouette, is textured as rubbery scales. Like someone has gone mad with a spot varnish effect to the point where it’s built up in loads of lumps on the cover... it looks and, yeah, feels fantastic. You could definitely have sex with this book if you so desired (I won’t be kink shaming here). And the design positives continue inside where each film is given a huge title information strip taking up between a quarter and a third of the page, with info like the year, the director, some cast members etc presented as a little block. But the negative of this is, because the title sections take up so much space on the page, the regular body copy text is both tiny (maybe 8pt or even less) and on a blue tinted background, which further makes it harder to read. So yeah, it’s a case of cutting down on the legibility and readability of the thing in favour of saving space (and therefore money) it seems to me.

Positive thing number two is that it’s profusely illustrated with, as claimed, lots of shots which will be new to fans of this particular kaiju. But that’s also its downfall because, almost all of the hundreds of photos included are... you guessed it... just shots of Godzilla and various other monsters such as Mothra, Mechagidzilla, King Ghidora and the like. Which can get pretty dull. I’d much rather see a picture of the title credits singer and the psychedelic club dancers from Godzilla VS Hedorah, for example, than endless shots of giant monster destruction. So, yeah, the novelty of the pictures does wear thin after a while. Even allowing for the fact that there’s a picture of Godzooky on one page (and if you know who that is... watch out mate, you’re showing your age).

Okay, positive thing number three is it covers things I didn’t expect it to. Such as the fact that the Hedorah suit actor got appendicitis while shooting and doctors had to come and operate on him in the studio, while he was still wearing the Hedorah costume, in order to save his life. They cover the translation issues about the title creature's name... giving a pretty convincing reason for the translation change from Gojira to Godzilla, which is apparently used with Toho’s blessing. And they’ve even got a section on Luigi Cozzi’s re-tinted, ‘cut and paste with new footage’ Italian release, affectionately known as Cozilla (a film I’d not even heard of until I purchased a bootleg of it last year... yeah, I’ll watch it and review it eventually people). The downside is, of course, that for all the things it includes, it misses out tenfold, loads of other facts that could have been put in here. And it even leaves out things like, in the section dedicated to the comics... well, probably the most famous comic book incarnation of them all. I mean, how do you write a section on the comic book versions and not include Marvel’s late 1970s series of Godzilla - King Of The Monsters comic.

Similarly, if you have a section on American film appearances but fail to mention that a drawing of the character appears in Kong - Skull Island, which is actually the second entry in the interconnected US Monserverse films based on Godzilla and his kaiju brethren, then I just don’t know what to say. So, yeah, that’s a bit short sighted, especially when the third and fourth films in the series follow on from the Kong movie.

Two more things. One, the writer uses the term “an horrific sight” at one point. Nope, totally wrong and I hate it when ‘toffs’ use this kind of incorrect language. It’s “a horrific sight” with a hard H, thank you very much. What planet do these people come from? Also... I can only hope the writer has updated some of the Wikipedia entries for some of the subjects covered there himself... because I certainly don’t want to mention the term plagiarism here, for sure. Which I’m not.

And I don’t think I have much more to say about this one. Overall I enjoyed Godzilla - The Official Guide To The King Of The Monsters and, certainly I wish I’d had a copy of this to pore over when I was first re-discovering the character many decades ago. It’s a perfect thing for beginners to the world of Godzilla for sure and, even jaded old fans like myself should get something out of it. That being said, it’s not the essential guide it makes itself out to be and, I think a proper book of well over a thousand pages with each of the many films given at least one 40 page chapter of their own, would have been more welcome (and I’m hoping that happens sometime, to be sure). But, yeah, it’s a nice looking beast and many people should have some fun with it, I think.

Bliss (2019)

Night Of The
Living Pez

Bliss
USA 2019
Directed by Joe Begos
Eureka Entertainment

Warning: Spoilers here be... you were warned.

I missed Bliss a couple of years ago when... I think it played FrightFest over here in the UK? I think it was a case of really not liking the poster design (I still don’t) and having other movies on my priority list that year. The only reason I came back to this is because the writer/director, Joe Begos, made another movie I saw recently called The Mind’s Eye (reviewed here) which was... well it was kind of an unofficial sequel to Cronenberg’s Scanners, to my mind. The stand out of that movie for me was the score by Steve Moore, which sounded a lot like early to mid phase John Carpenter by the finish of it. Anyway, astonishingly, I managed to find a soundtrack CD to that movie (which is great, by the way) and when I was looking at the website of the company that put the CD out, Relapse Records, I came across a couple of other CD scores by the same guy including this one, Bliss, which was for the same director. So there we are... I wasn’t expecting too much but I gave it a go and... wow.

I really wasn’t expecting to be as impressed by this movie as I was (so much so that I’m going to order a Blu Ray copy of it real soon... and the CD, of course). A certain amount of that is down to the director and crew. I don’t know who Begos is but it’s like, since The Mind’s Eye, his confidence and boldness with what he is trying out with the camera and editing has matured and grown to the point where he really delivers something which demands your attention. The crucial part of this movie for me though, was the absolutely brilliant, tour-de-force performance by an actress I’ve never heard of called Dora Madison, who plays the films central protagonist Dezzy.

Okay...the plot is extremely simple. Dezzy is an artist, working on a big piece on canvass for an exhibition but has been ‘blocked’ for months. She can’t seem to get the painting done and it’s got to the point where she has no rent money and is dumped by her agent. So she goes to one of her drug dealing friends, played by Graham Skipper from The Mind’s Eye and gets something called Diabolo, which is the drug ‘Bliss’, referred to in the title. The effect is marked and immediate and Dezzy is out of it until she wakes up at a party and then has a threesome with two friends... Courtney (Tru Collins) and Ronnie (Rhys Wakefield). Because she’s riding the effects of the drugs and booze she doesn’t notice when, during the sex session, Courtney delivers a vampire bite to her neck and sucks her blood and then gives her some in return. The effect on her painting, however, is beneficial and the rest of the film is about her getting paranoid, getting drugs, finally realising she’s a vampire and then killing people to drink their blood (in some fairly graphic ways) so she can finish the painting... because she will stop at nothing to complete the painting and, that’s kind of my way into the character because I can kinda sympathise with that. Anyhow, that’s the film in a nutshell, if plot is your kind of thing but it's the performance and direction which really make this one of the true vampire masterpieces of our time.

Now, most people who know me know that the quality of the performance in a film rarely comes up but, this one’s hard to ignore as Madison gives her all to the role and really lets go of herself to deliver one of the grittier and gutsier acting jobs I’ve seen in a movie for a long time. And it works in spite of the character she’s playing. I mean, honestly, she’s a hard person to like. She’s bratty, antagonistic, generally unsympathetic and, normally, this would be more than enough to turn me off a movie but, somehow, the actress finds a little of the light of the character to keep me interested in this one (even though she wears a Death Waltz t-shirt and, honestly, vinyl is not my thing... give me a CD any day of the week). I think, for me, the absolute obsession of her to finish the art at the cost of everything and everyone in her life is the glimmer of empathy I needed to get me into the character. I used to love doing ‘fine art’ before I became a graphic designer and the obsessive ‘art trumps people’ kind of attitude you kinda need as part of your psyche to pull this stuff off was something I’d forgotten about but was happy to be reminded of.

And a lot of the scenes in this are wordless, as she gets naked in front of her canvass (both physically and spiritually) and just tears into it with paint and, yeah, sometimes blood. It’s astonishing stuff and the way the camera works in this, totally focused on her character the whole time, really pays off. Such as when the camera is doing 360 degree turns in a bar with a swirl of noise and music before we are suddenly jarred out of it with an overhead shot of her naked on the floor, back in her studio.

Indeed, the way her performance is captured is inevitably a big contributing factor towards the success of the movie too. There’s a party scene where various conversations are chopped up and cross cut to give a real naturalistic feel of people dipping in and out of conversations, fuelled by booze and drugs. My favourite thing, though, is there seems to be almost an absence of establishing shots for most of the film. So instead of going to the next scene, we’ll suddenly be surprised by already being in a different location in the next scene without any preliminary visuals to give us a location fix and this works really well as an on screen indicator of the level of paranoia and the drug/blood heightened sense of dislocation of the character. There are even a few of those shots where the camera is connected directly onto the actor so the front or back of her is static in the middle of everything else she’s moving around... it’s not done often these days but it’s a trick that never really gets old, it seems to me. It’s great stuff and, all the while, Steve Moore’s very different but still kick ass score punctuates the splintering visuals with something which lifts them even higher.

Also, in addition to all this (as if this wasn’t enough), there are some great new takes on the old school vampire legacy. Such as, when a vampire is staked in this... instead of crumbling to dust they just kind of melt away like ice cream (which I suspect is possibly how the practical special effect of this was achieved). Ditto, when a vampire is exposed to sunlight, it’s not a disintegration, it’s a full on blood splashed explosion of flesh. And some of the kills are really memorable too... in addition to seeing George Wendt (Norm from Cheers) come up very close and personal with Dezzy’s new vampiric blood lust... there’s also a scene where she literally pops a guy’s head back like he was a Pez dispenser, leaving the head attached by a hinge of flesh while she dives into the bloody stump of the neck for her next, urgent fix. It’s a memorable moment for sure.

And, yeah, that’s me done with Bliss (until I watch it again which, well, which will be when the Blu Ray arrives and I take an evening off from writing). This feels like one of the best vampire movies in the last ten years and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who has an affinity to films that portray obsession, horror, vampirism or, like this one, the thrilling intersection of all three. If you like that kind of stuff... go seek this one out now, it’s truly phenomenal.

The Mind's Eye

Man With A Scan

The Mind's Eye
USA 2015
Directed by Joe Begos
Channel 83 Films

Warning: Some spoilers.

The Mind’s Eye is, it has to be said, pretty much a sequel/continuation/copyright evading side step to David Cronenberg’s excellent Scanners (reviewed here). I mean, nobody mentions the term ‘scan’ but it’s pretty much ‘what might have happened next’ to certain characters or similar characters in those kinds of situations from the first movie. I hope writer/director Joe Begos doesn’t mind me saying that and I’m guessing that was his intention.

The film starts off directly in the way a lot of it is played out, with long held static shots of people moving through the frame... and a drifter, Zack, played by Graham Skipper. Indeed the film favours a lot of either static shots or locked down shots with a very slow zoom in or out for the meat and bones of the tale, it seemed to me. Occasionally switching to a hand held style in certain sections. The opening of the film reminded me a little of the start of the original First Blood (reviewed here), where Stallone’s drifter was ‘pushed’ by the local police. A similar thing happens here as Zack fights back and, though he’s not successful in escaping his antagonists in the scene, we are clued in that he has some serious psychokinetic abilities as he smashes the police car with his mind and tosses cops around mentally.

Captured, he is recruited by the sinister Dr. Slovak, played by John Speredakos, who wants him to be one of many psychokinetic ‘lab rats’ in his ‘research centre’, the Slovak Institute Of Psychokinetics, with the promise that he’ll be reunited with his lover, Rachel, played by Lauren Ashley Carter, who is an even more mentally powerful individual... who has been ‘volunteered’ to participate in the doctor’s research. Often their mental powers are inhibited by a drug injected directly into the back of the brain and, when he gets there, Zack spends six months or so being ill-treated and experimented on, including daily spinal extractions. After a while, Zack has had enough. With the help of another ‘patient’ he evades the guards, rescues Rachel and they go on the run. Meanwhile, Dr. Slovak, who has been receiving daily injections of the spinal fluid taken from the various psychics under his care so he can become an even more superhuman version of them, sends various people to pursue the two escapees, killing Zack’s father in the process. With Rachel rendered out of action and taken to a local hospital, Zack goes on the rampage and returns to the clinic to have a final reckoning with the now out of control, power mad doctor and his various bodyguards.

And, yeah, it’s not a bad little movie. There are some heavy leanings on Scanners such as the electronic style score, the grating musical effect when somebody is using their mental powers and the ferocious orgasm face theatrics of people thinking ‘really hard’, which very much follow the lead of the former Cronenberg film. It’s different territory in terms of the pacing and, I think for me, the slightly faster speed and the sheer amount of admittedly impressive and over the top gory ‘mind killing’ scenes were maybe a little too much. There are various objects such as knives, guns and axes wielded psychically to achieve many a bloody demise as well as the usual head explosions and an impressive moment where the top and bottom of a persons body are mentally pulled and thrown in opposite directions.

The problem I have with multiple scenes of this nature all piled on top of each other, though, is similar to the same kind of ‘weight of lethargy’ induced in me by multiple action scenes in various superhero movies these days... there’s not enough time to appreciate the art and theatricality of such shenanigans before you’re onto the next thing. Cronenberg tends to slow things down so that when each set piece arrives it feels more like an event being built towards a thing and, though I certainly found The Mind’s Eye entertaining for everything it is, I did feel a little ‘clubbed to death’ by all the flesh ripping and villanous posturing after a while.

But, having said that, I thought the film was still pretty great and, you know, not everyone can be Cronenberg (not even Cronenberg sometimes). The actors were all existing in a state of ‘over the top’ readiness for the most part but the intensity of their performances added another layer of interest to a film which might have fallen flat if handled badly. As it is, the director and actors know exactly what they’re doing here and have made an interesting and engaging film.

One other slight problem I had with it is that there’s not enough of Rachel’scharacter in it. She’s supposed to be the most powerful of the bunch of natural psychokinetics in the movie but, apart from bursting open a guys head with her mental powers after levitating him up a wall, we don’t see her do that much and I was hoping she would have some kind of involvement in the final showdown scene at the end of the movie.

Gluing it all together is Steve Moore’s amazing synthesiser based score. It starts off with more of a nod to Shore’s electronic Scanners score in tone but, by the end of the movie when things are really moving on... it goes into the same kind of territory as a really good John Carpenter score and it doesn’t let up. Much to my surprise and delight, I discovered that there was actually a CD pressing of the score so I’ve currently got a copy on order from someone in Germany so I can give it a good listen away from the film. Really looking forward to this one arriving actually.*

And there you have it. The Mind’s Eye is a Cronenbergian escape and chase romp with plenty of twisted flesh and mind searing action, if that’s your kind of thing. It definitely belongs to that subsection of sci-fi horror that Cronenberg kick started with his earlier classic but, where Cronenberg was probably a little bit like a slightly more visceral Canadian version of Philip K Dick, in terms of where his storytelling lands, The Mind’s Eye is more like an action movie equivalent of similar themes. And there’s certainly room for both approaches as far as I’m concerned. A fun one to check out, for sure. 

*It did arrive and I have to say, it's an absolutely amazing
stand alone listen. The CD has had quite a few spins here already.

Video Palace - In Search Of The Eyeless Man

VHS, Beta and Ota Keta

Video Palace - In Search
Of The Eyeless Man
Sourced by Dr. Maynard Wills
Tiller Press ISBN: 9781982156442

Video Palace - In Search Of The Eyeless Man is a spin off from the popular podcast Video Palace (which I reviewed here). It’s presumably put together by the show’s creators, who have invited a number of writers and luminaries from varying fields (such as actress/director Brea Grant) to take part in the project and who have all contributed a story which, for the most part, are iterations of the fictional antagonist of the podcast, the mysterious Eyeless Man. The gentleman in question being a lurking figure of dread whose ultimate goal of transforming people and allowing them access to other, presumably horror filled worlds of personal torment and suffering, is kept deliberately obscure and unexplained in terms of a tangible direction. This, of course, makes for good horror as the fear of the unknown, as we’re always told, is one of the scariest things going.

Now, the book is presented documentary style, just as the original podcast was, which used the proposal of the slowly forming narratives of each week’s episode being created by a central protagonist knowing each podcast he was cutting would be released on the Shudder horror channel that week. Indeed, there’s similar mention in one story, of the publishing house of this book, Tiller Press, by one of the characters in this tome. Central binding material is presented by Doctor Maynard Wills and, after, by his former student and fellow university Professor Daniel Carter... I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, after the structural set up in the foreword by the fictional Carter, that the Professor will become victim to his own obsession and drop out of the narrative half way through. It’s expected and frankly alluded to very early on in the proceedings.

Now, you may remember, if you’ve been reading this blog with any regularity during the Christmas season, that I’ve not been getting on too well with written horror anthologies. I mean, sure, I love the obvious classics by Poe and Lovecraft but the various Christmas ghost story collections I’ve been reading have been a very hit and miss affair... as is the nature of anthologies but, honestly, it’s been mostly miss. So it’s kind of refreshing to reveal now that Video Palace - In Search Of The Eyeless Man, while naturally having both peaks and troughs in content, is actually a solid and fairly engaging read. Sure there are low points but even those are pretty decent and I was in no way let down by the book... my criticisms are minor and I was certainly entertained greatly by a few of the stories.

As I said, most of the stories focus on past and present iterations of ‘the eyeless man’ and, like Video Palace, they are mostly about accessing his presence to begin the descent into personal hell through various mediums... not just the urban legend of the ‘white tapes’ as in the podcast, although these VHS video cassette tapes (and even a U-Matic video of one... gosh it’s been decades since I used that format) certainly do appear in a number of the stories.

So we have writers like Owl Goingback, Graham Skipper, Brea Grant, Gordon B. White, Merrin J McCormick, Meirav Devash, Eddie McNamara, John Skipp, Ben Rock, Bob DeRosa, Rebekah McKendry, David Ian McKendry and Mary Phillips-Sandy describing all manner of access points into the lives of their characters, told mostly in first person (although not always) and with various variations covered such as musical entries, obscure channel television broadcasts, social media models (and a murderous follower), a student documentary film maker, a murderous internet meme doppelgänger, a sinister self care group and various other things with topics even going into the relationship between dreams and the quantum realm.

Probably my favourite of the main stories, which are all linked and book ended with inserts by either Wills or Carter, was the ‘interview’ transcript, A Conversation With Tamra by Mary Phillips-Sandy. This one is unique from all the others in that, unlike the linking inserts of Dr. Wills himself (who is renewing his interest in the pursuit of the eyeless man specifically because this fictional character heard the podcast), the interview is actually a direct sequel, of sorts, to the podcast in that it deals with what the main female lead character, Tamra Wulff, did next after her boyfriend Mark Cambria went 'missing'. Although, bearing in mind the nature of this kind of horror narrative, don’t expect any solutions to the ultimate mystery being discovered along the way, of course. That’s usually kind of the point on these sorts of narratives, building on the intrigue of the central premise and asking at least as many questions as they attempt to answer.

My one grouch about the whole book was the segment which was supposed to be a snapshot of a letter Dr. Wills left in is own handwriting. Sure, it’s hard to decipher but, alas, it’s definitely been printed in a ‘script font’ rather than the book designer using genuine handwriting and that does nothing to add to the authenticity of the rest of the framing devices, especially when such great care has been taken to ‘stick to the illusion of the search’, to to speak.

What I loved about this tome though is the fact that everything else did exactly that. The illusionists at work in the fictional form of Wills and Carter even leave the different writer’s spellings of the words that formed the ‘opening chant’ of Mark Cambria in the show, ‘Ota Keta’, because, well, how would anybody know how it’s actually spelled? And, of course, the variance in this small piece of connective tissue becomes another thing which ‘authenticates’ the fictional validity of the various stories... because if the writers all spelled everything exactly the same then a single guiding hand... other than the eyeless man, of course... could be detected by the unwary reader. In fact, the character Wills even makes reference that he’s left the different spellings unaltered, which is a nice touch.

Another nice touch is that each main story is prefaced by a note from the author(s) to Dr. Wills about their inclusion in his research project... so, yeah, there must be some section of the target audience who might actually fall for the illusion too, which is a nice thought. There’s even an email address included in the book for ‘would be contributors’ to leave their own encounters with the eyeless man, as Daniel Carter begins to follow his own obsessional research into the titular figure.

So yeah, that’s me done on this one. Video Palace - In Search Of The Eyeless Man is a welcome continuation of some of the ideas brought up in the serialised podcast Video Palace and I think if you liked the show then you’ll probably get something out of this. I would say it’s probably not a good jumping on point for many since it does include all the obvious spoilers of the events that unfolded in the podcast so, yeah, maybe go listen to that first. All in all though, a nicely put together and well paced anthology of horror tales which didn’t disappoint me the way some other collections have in the past few years and a welcome addition to the book shelf (or book stacks in my case, actually, it has to be said). Worth picking up, for sure.