Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (1968) Ancient Babylonian demon awakens and goes to Japan where he faces off against the legions of Japanese Apparitions. It's a monster suit movie, with the monsters being traditional grotesque spooks; the protagonist is a Kappa, or water imp, who calls upon creatures like the one-legged cyclops umbrella with the huge licking tongue (actually a big marionette) the beautiful girl with a hideous face on the back of her head, dwarf with giant stone head, squeaking mushroom blob, snake neck woman, etc. Completely nuts except for the incredibly tedious human plot elements in between the monster suit fight scenes. There is a definite nationalist angle in this as in much of Japanese culture, with emphasis placed on the supremacy of the Japanese Apparitions over the foreign invader. First of three such Yokai Monsters films. 6/10
Lake of the Dead (1958) Norwegian psychological thriller that plays with levels of reality in a weird way. A writer reads to his wife from the manuscript of his new novel about a group of people staying at a cabin by a lake said to be haunted by the ghost of a one-legged axe murderer - one night a year you can hear his screams and that is just three nights away. They find and read aloud from a dream journal, and there is uncertainty about whose dreams they are. Hypnosis and telepathic dream-sharing are also involved. What really threw me was that I kept remembering it was just a guy reading a story to his wife, and they never resolve that at the end. Kind of talky, but it's filmed with a sort of cautious staging that makes it seem more fantasy than reality. Really more like a 1940s American b-movie with a more precise presentation. I can't tell if they meant it to be as much of a proto-ironic exercise as it appears. Kind of long to sit through. 4/10
On the Buses (1971) Movie cash-in based on hugely popular British sit-com about bus drivers. Crude low humor throughout, with lewd innuendo, snide cruel asides, and juvenile pranks. It's really an extension of schoolboy humor with the lads standing around cackling over the absurd predicament they've gotten their inspector into, scheming up pranks and drooling over cleavage. The situation in this case is that female bus drivers have been introduced, leading to various other situations occurring. This is an anthropological exercise for me - I see how certain types would find this amusing but it is pretty dreadful to a thinking person. British comedies of this sort have a far stronger anti-authoritarian and class-conflict angle to them than their U.S. counterparts, there is no effort made to heal the rift and strive for co-operation which would be the lesson here. The closest American sitcom to this is Hogan's Heroes - the authority figures are the enemy to be fooled and humiliated. I have two more of them to watch, having rashly downloaded the set. 3/10
