My Life with the Power Rangers (In Memory of Jason David Frank)

     It's no secret I grew up loving everything under the sun that came out of the tokusatsu genre. I was born in a tiny golden niche of television with Spectreman reruns still on the air and Dynaman parody dubs running on Nickelodeon and the USA Network. Then, one day, it all sort of faded away for nearly a full decade. Godzilla movies still ran on a weekend afternoon every so often, but most of the time they aired past my bedtime. It was a definite void that running across a Spectreman VHS tape at a local video store could fill only a little bit.

    Then culture shifted again in my favor. I was already in high school and pushing the age of sixteen when the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers made its debut. I was in the marching band, and I recall one afternoon when the band had to be in class to prepare for some trip. I forget what the trip was for, but I remember that the we were excused from all classes to be there for preparations. There was a television set in the main band room that day, and someone turned it to a local channel. The Power Rangers were on, and I hadn't really seen any of the show yet because I was still in school when it aired. I was hypnotized. Within a fraction of a second, I knew what this show was and where it came from. I knew that style, those costumes, those imaginative monster designs. I knew this all came from the same source as Dynaman even though I didn't know at the time that the franchise had its own name: Super Sentai. It was a proud moment for me... or at least it should have been.

    Bulk and Skull were innocuous bullies compared to the kids I knew in school. I hated high school with a passion for a number of reasons, and one of those reasons was that transferring states early in my high school years put me into several senior-year classes as a freshman because they matched the curriculum I was studying at the time my family moved. This introduced me to a special group of redneck assholes who took great pleasure in targeting me for being a couple years behind them in age, only to prove time and again that they themselves were years behind me in maturity. We're talking about guys who would chew tobacco in class and spit it in the carpet when the teacher wasn't looking. This actually happened, and I had to sit behind these idiots. I'll never forget that rancid smell. One time, one of them slapped a post-it note on my back during class, but it didn't say, "Kick me." No, instead, it said, "I like fat black women" because these idiots were of course stereotypical southern white racists, too.

    Not that I wasn't already a quiet kid who kept to myself, but I had to keep a lot of my personal joys to myself. It was a catch-22. I was bullied for being quiet, but I was also bullied for opening my mouth. If I wore a Spider-Man t-shirt to school, I could count on the two class clowns in the back of my Geometry class pelting me with wadded paper balls for an entire hour. This happened frequently, and the teacher never did anything about it. There were almost always piles of wadded notebook paper on the floor behind my desk every day by the end of class. I honestly don't know who cleaned up the paper balls or the chewing tobacco stains, but it obviously wasn't anyone responsible for it.

    The Power Rangers were instantly one of my personal joys, and one of the main reasons they were a personal joy was Tommy Oliver. Tommy was a symbol of the Power Rangers franchise, its most familiar face spanning nearly 30 years, and the guy behind that character was Jason David Frank. When that day finally came for me to see the show in its glory on that band class television set, I was, indeed, hypnotized, but I was quickly snapped back into reality by a deluge of infantile and homophobic slurs from my peers. Anyone who watched Power Rangers, according to them, was either a baby or something that started with an F, ended with a G, and wasn't something you ate on a Newton. It didn't matter a bit to any of them that Jason David Frank was a local boy from my hometown area of Houston, Texas, and only a few years older than all of us at the time. The fact he dressed up in spandex on a kids' show made him no better in the eyes of my toothless warrior peers than the member of some effeminate boy band. It was made abundantly clear that most of the people I was forced to associate with most in school at the time were scum, and high school was like a prison sentence waiting to end its course before I could finally escape. I would have welcomed Bulk and Skull with open arms to be my high school bullies. Fortunately, most of my high school peers were a couple of grades ahead of me due to those reversed-curriculum transfer classes and graduated before I did, so my senior year was relatively smooth and quiet (which helped a lot because the abuse I suffered at home had increased that much more, but I've already told that story in an earlier blog post).

    I buried myself in these personal joys, privately when necessary, and took from them the things I needed. At that age, I was into superheroes more than anything and felt so much that the world around me needed some. I wanted to be one myself so badly it hurt, and I already carried regrets in my soul for times in the recent past that I was too afraid to stand up and fight. The Power Rangers, preachy and western-washed as it could be compared to the original ZyuRanger or Super Sentai in general, offered me a little bit of extra internal strength. It nudged me into speaking up against some of my bullies in high school, making me feel a little better about myself even though it never really put an end to their behavior. On the whole, I loved Power Rangers for what it was at the time: an action spectacle that actually gave me an opportunity to see Japanese tokusatsu on my local television screen, even if it was stock footage woven around new material. I was grateful to have it, and I slowly gravitated toward an appreciation for the new material as a youth-driven soap opera. 

    That soap opera story would make me a longtime fan when one specific story came along: the prophecy of the Green Ranger. The Green Ranger saga began shortly after I got my first recording VCR so that I could tape shows while I was still at school. I came home from school with baited breath to follow the story of Tommy Oliver, brainwashed by Rita Repulsa to become the evil Green Ranger until the spell was finally broken and he became a permanent member of the team. I kept following the series as it tried to keep up with the available stock footage of the show and the transition of the Japanese franchise, watching Tommy eventually lose his Green Ranger powers and be reborn as the White Tiger Ranger. I went to see the movie in theater. I was very much a fan.

   I looked up to Tommy. I wanted to meet him in person someday and do nothing more than shake his hand and thank him for being a positive part of my late childhood. I didn't want an autograph or to fawn over him for the character he played. I just wanted to let him know I appreciated his work, and it's the same feeling I've tried to maintain for my desire to meet any of my childhood heroes or inspirational celebrities. Despite him living so close to me, I only got close to that chance twice and missed it both times. Well, I thought it was twice. The second time I had to drive family out of town for a funeral when he did a local event with some people in Gokaiger outfits before the Power Rangers adaptation  of that was even confirmed. The first time was when the Power Rangers were doing their live stage tour in the 90s and were coming to Houston. This was around my seventeenth birthday, and my family led me to believe they had gotten tickets to surprise me. It really felt like some sick joke when that didn't pan out, but I thought there was a silver lining in all of it. A martial arts studio had just opened up next to the movie theater, and they had posters all over the place announcing that "Tommy, the White Ranger" was going to make a public appearance at this place. My little brother was nine years old at the time and not a Power Rangers fan, but he was more than willing to come along so that I could meet one of my icons without the awkwardness of being the only kid in my late teens there amongst a bunch of moms and elementary school kids to meet the White Ranger. My brother was one of my personal heroes in those situations, and I carry plenty of regrets for not being the older brother to him that I ought to have been. But that's a story for another time. This was my chance. I just wanted to shake Jason David Frank's hand and say thank you, but instead of shaking hands with "Tommy, the White Ranger," I shook hands with a man in a motorcycle helmet painted to look like the White Ranger helmet. It was apparently the guy who owned the dojo, and the whole thing was a publicity stunt. The muffled voice under the helmet sure didn't match. For the sake of the little kids, no one spoke up about it. The little kids were just as taken with this makeshift Tommy as they would have been with someone in a Spongebob outfit. He was playing a character, and that was enough. What stuck with me, however, was the pause this man behind the helmet took before shaking my hand. In that moment, I was willing to suspend disbelief that Jason David Frank was behind that mask and just fulfill the positive mission I was there for, to offer my hand in appreciation for the impact of this character. I wasn't going to be the villain of this story in front of little kids and taint the experience that I felt had been stolen from me. I just wanted to shake his hand, what I had set out to do from the start. But "Tommy" paused. It lasted about three seconds but felt like an eternity. For at least three long and silent seconds, the whole line froze and he just stood there. He looked up at me like he did not want to shake my hand or that he wondered why I would want to shake his, and with his face concealed, it all came down to obvious and hesitant body language. He seemed taken aback that he actually had to lift his head up, that I was the only person there matching his height that wanted to shake his hand. Maybe he thought I was going to be the "villain" and try to expose him, but that thought didn't occur to me until years later. Eventually he put out his hand and we shook, and that was that. I walked out of the place with my brother as a bunch of little kids fawned around "Tommy" and had him break boards with his fists and then autograph them, listening to the quiet whispers of some mothers clearly upset about the situation but also not willing to spoil the illusion for their children. Some part of me still wants to believe Jason David Frank was behind the mask that day. Even if he wasn't, keeping up the illusion for those kids and not being a dick about it is a little bit of that goodness Tommy strengthened in me at the time. The way my life was going at the time, I honestly felt like I was losing myself, but I did not walk out of that dojo a bitter person. It gave me a weirdly good feeling inside as if I really had met the real man after all. 

    When I heard the word going around last night that he had committed suicide, I did not want to believe it. It took nearly a full day for anything resembling a trustworthy news source to confirm it. It seemed like it was probably a hoax. I still don't want to believe it, and this is coming only a few years after my other favorite Green Ranger, DaiRanger's Tatsuya Nomi, took his own life as well. I've tried to detail how I feel about these types of situations, but I still don't know if I can really put those feelings into proper words. I fear that some of my feelings might come off as unsupportive or make the pain worse for some who read it. I wasn't able to tackle this conversation openly when Robin Williams left us, and I don't know if it will come out right this time, either. The wound of losing my mother is still too fragile in my heart as well with the unprovable suspicion that her passing might have been suicide. I was as oblivious to Jason David Frank's personal life as those little kids were that day about whose face was really behind that motorcycle helmet covered in paint and colored duct tape, and maybe that was for the best. I never followed the reality shows he did, his social media, or anything like that. The mask may be the best metaphor to apply to this tragic situation as it faces us right now. The people who perform, wear masks, and portray characters that bring us joy and entertainment? They are all ultimately human just like us. They're all susceptible to fear and pain and loneliness and personal demons. They have a "secret identity" that goes through life with many if not all of the same hurdles any of us face daily, putting on a smile for the public to keep up appearances. Sometimes they make a choice that sends a harsh ripple out into the lives of those around them. Sometimes we have to live through that ripple, and we're never allowed to fully understand the reason or the motivation. We're never allowed any real closure. We're just left with a void in our hearts to remind us that even our heroes are mortal.

    I thought of Jason David Frank as a man. I knew he played a character on TV, and I never wanted anything more than to thank him for the joy and positive outlook his character gave me and countless others despite whatever was going on in his life behind the mask. I know that many, many people got that opportunity over the years, but at the end of the day, he still had a fight within his own heart that only he could face. I can only hope that his soul finds some sort of peace, and I hope that those he left behind can find some peace as well. I know the hurt never goes away, but we're all still here right now with the potential to make something good out of all of it. I never let go of the desire to see what good the next day might bring, no matter how hard it is to get out of bed to see it. That's one thing that keeps me going. It's all the more reason to pay as much attention as we can to the loved ones around us, to let them know we care and that we want to listen and help as much as we can, even though we are all only human and just as vulnerable. Life's burdens get very heavy when some of us feel as though we have to do it all alone. None of us can do it all alone, and you are never truly alone no matter how desperately you might feel it. I really don't know what else to say other than that. Rest in peace, Jason David Frank. You offered me something good and positive at some crucial moments in my life, and even your tragic passing cannot erase the inner strength those moments afforded me. Thank you. 

What If Twitter Passed Like a Damp Wind in the Night?

    Yes, I went with a fart joke for my title. It's going on 2AM, after which nothing good happens, and while waiting for my sleepytime supplements to kick in (my chronic insomnia situation of which probably would be better served by prescription medications I never have the time or energy to seek out properly), I'm gathering my thoughts on Twitter and its potential crash tonight. I still wonder if the whole point of buying Twitter in the first place wasn't just to pave over Toontown and build a freeway. 

    Not unlike recognizing one's own mortality, I've come to consider how much stock I really put in Twitter these last seven years. Not actual stock, or else I'd probably be pretty unhappy right now outside of my typical misery, but I mean just how much of my personal life has become cemented there. I viewed Twitter with ample dismissal in the beginning. Despite starting my account in 2009, I didn't really start using it regularly until 2013 after my mother died. Before that, I'd been on Facebook, and pretty much all of my friends there were from my previous Internet life in file-sharing chatrooms. Those chatrooms, particularly one devoted to sharing and preserving MST3K episodes years before any of them had DVD releases, were a hefty portion of my life, but they began to dwindle as years went on. Conversation died off, politics reared the ugliest heads ever, and losing my mom changed me inside. It was a gradual shift, but eventually I turned off the chatroom software, logged out of Facebook, and never came back. I wasn't that person anymore, and I'd also come to find that most of the people I knew there were... the reason you hear a lot of people on Twitter giving their reasons for leaving Facebook. I won't go into any more detail than that other than to say I did not fall on the 2016 voting side of most of my Facebook friends. It made me feel awful just to cut ties like that, but I couldn't even begin to think of how to start a conversation with many of these people I'd known through shared entertainment interests for a dozen years. 

    They knew how I felt about their voting choice at the end of a lengthy FB post that I treated with much the same feeling as this post tonight: what if it's over? That FB post was on the night of the oncoming Hurricane Harvey, and at the time my future was very much uncertain... so I just let it all out. After reading one reply offering hope that I would weather the storm (layered with thinly-veiled disdain for my political opinions and almost dismissing them outright as hysterics), I felt like I knew where I truly stood there after all those years. I felt like I didn't belong, so I left and never looked back. I won't speculate where their support might have led them nor will I speak ill of them. At some point, regardless of everything, I considered us friends. On the other hand, some of those friends knew how to get in touch with me outside Facebook and never tried. Maybe the feelings of not belonging were mutual. For me, that part of my life is over, and all I can do is leave it at that. I was just there to riff on movies and TV shows, for Pete's sake, the same thing I do largely on Twitter now.

    Which brings me here again tonight. What if Twitter is over? It's hitting 2AM as I type this sentence, and Twitter is still up. I don't know. What I do know is that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown when I started using Twitter more frequently in late 2014/early 2015 and planning to delete the app entirely, but some really good people convinced me to stay. I would eventually have that nervous breakdown in 2019, and it was only those same people I'd met on Twitter who offered any level of support to help me through it. I was on hold with a Houston area crisis hotline that day for 45 minutes. No one ever answered. If not for laughing off the completely disgusting ineptitude of the people running the crisis lines that day with my Twitter friends, things might have been worse. I wasn't suicidal, but I was depressed and exhausted. I needed help, and my Twitter friends supported me.

    I needed professional help and probably still do, but I never sought it that day. I am just now finding myself in a position to seek that sort of help for myself. Those wheels of progress have turned very slowly, but they have turned. Regardless, I learned through my Twitter friends that I shouldn't be afraid to seek help, and I shouldn't be afraid to speak out. As much as my Twitter "persona" is just a fraction of the real me and "playing a character" to some extent, it is a fraction of myself that has instilled greater courage and confidence in me as a whole. I'm thankful to Twitter for that. In some ways, it made me stronger. It made me care less about what other people think about me, and I gotta tell you that caring about what other people think of me was crippling me for a very long time. I'm still very unhappy and depressed, but the road to help for some of those issues has become a lot less foggy lately. 

    In the meantime, a big chunk of my Twitter life has been livetweeting. It's what revived this blog and gave it a new name, and I have never walked away from livetweeting. I don't plan to, even with many of my livetweets of late playing to a completely empty house. I won't lie and say it doesn't sting a bit to livetweet alone, but I maintain that people showing up isn't the real point. If I'm solo at 10PM E on a Friday night, then so be it. The show goes on, and I also maintain that some of the people who inspired me to get into it were already doing the things I would have done as a more prevalent and proliferate livetweet host, and they continue to do it much better than I would have and deserve the community audience they have (you know who you are). For me, livetweeting is a routine that helps preserve my sanity by sharing things I love... and those things I find increasingly less time to enjoy myself outside of those particular livetweet hours with my life as a primary caregiver.

    I doubled up on my sleepytime supplements tonight, and they decided to hit rather quickly. Insert Liam Neeson impression here. "There's no time! There's no time!" Rather than make this longwinded half-asleep rambling, I do need some sleep to prepare for some of those life situations tomorrow. Of course, I stared at this post like a zombie and robbed myself of another hour of sleep before finally posting it. It's after 3AM now, and Twitter is still there. In any case, even if Twitter doesn't crack, I hope to post more musings here more often. Maybe I'll even get around to finishing that Godzilla fanfic (probably not) or maybe even just post a few chapters of a young adult sci-fi novel I'll never finish.

    Heaven forbid I have to consider becoming a content creator on any of the other half a dozen social sites I use just to fill the void Twitter left. I don't have any talent as an entertainer outside of years of practice at riffing and witty cross-references. I'm definitely too old for TikTok, and I have a real "face for radio" mentality with regard to becoming a content creator in general. I have to get my thoughts out of my head somewhere, and I don't currently have the software to build myself a VTuber avatar of a gorilla in a tunic.

    All of my various and mostly-empty social endeavors are here on https://linktr.ee/sonofkaras. 

Seven Years at the Playhouse

     Nine years ago, I was in a pretty bad place. My mother had just died, and I wasn't truly the same person anymore. I walked away from long relationships and almost felt myself slip away. I wasn't sure where I was going. Nine years later, I can't say I'm any closer to any kind of real future because time almost feels likes it's standing still and bleeding away in an instant at the same time, but this entry isn't about a bummer trip. This is about one of the few positives in my life that I found to keep me going and, in some way, keep me sane and birth me anew.

    It was around the summer of 2014 when I decided to dust off my Twitter account after seeing a fan selection day on Turner Classic Movies from the people of the #TCMParty hashtag. I still was not a fan of Twitter and didn't let that judgment go for several months, but I thought I might find something there to help me through what I was feeling. At the very least, I just needed somewhere I could talk. Into the void, if necessary, and that was exactly what I was doing back then with no follower count and just using Twitter as a silly sort of diary blurb. The chatroom life I'd led for over a decade before that was almost bone-dry for conversation at this point, so I felt like venturing out. Additionally, in that short amount of time coming up on 2015, I came to learn that virtually everyone with whom I had forged a conversational relationship on the platforms I used to use were avid Trump supporters. The landscape was no longer maneuverable for me there when people I used to consider friends suddenly started showing their bigotry and ignorance and leaving me with a sour taste that I had partaken in it myself under the guise of "we're just talking about shared movie and TV interests here" and "well, they were always nice to me."

    It was in early 2015 that I cut the cord and lost Turner Classic Movies, making me feel like I couldn't fit into the tiny corner of a community that brought me there in the first place, and as the depression of losing my mother still took its toll (plus the added difficulty of my aunt becoming permanently disabled from the grief of the experience, very slowly leaning her toward being totally in my care as of almost three years ago), I started thinking very hard about leaving Twitter again. I kept looking for something, anything, that might convince me to stay, but it wasn't there.

    Around March or April of 2015, I was prepared to leave, and then I found them: the prime time livetweeters, many of whom I had met through #TCMParty to find they hosted movies and shows themselves. Some of them had been doing it for years, but I'd never come across them until now. Suddenly, a new world was opening to me where I could get back into the chat groove I felt I had lost over the past few years. This was where I felt the most confident and comfortable. This was where I could be me. After 12 years in a MST3K file sharing chatroom that had slowly died away, I could riff again. For my sanity and my peace of mind, I could riff again.

    Then, on the night of May 10, 2015, it happened. The long-running #DriveInMob livetweet showcased a couple of episodes of Space Giants. Suddenly, I found myself taken all the way back to the age of four when I would watch Spectreman every day after kindergarten. It was just that simple. That was how #GHWP, or the Gaping Head Wound Playhouse, started. I just said hey, anyone wanna stay up late with me and watch Spectreman? And they did. Almost every night after that for weeks, months, they did, after the prime time livetweet candles had burned down and only a handful of night owls like me were still awake. We watched Spectreman episodes on YouTube and had the most wonderful time. I piggybacked off every livetweet I joined at the time, which was almost every day of the week, and I kept the fires burning late into the night with the "Midnight Spectreman" show (a take on the Midnight Special), dropping the showtimes down to a couple of days a week with "new" episodes late Friday night and "repeats" on Tuesdays until I'd run almost the entirety of Spectreman twice over. The mixed bag theme of material soon focused exclusively on its roots in Japanese superheroes, and Friday nights became the place for an hour of colorful action with spandex and giant monsters. I used my blog to promote it and, well, you can dig into those old entries promoting my old livetweets in the beginning if you feel inclined, nestled in with my unfinished Godzilla fanfic stories and other life musings.

    After a lifetime of love for television horror hosts, this was as close to living the dream as I had ever come to being one without stepping in front of a camera and putting on a costume: creating YouTube playlists and having upwards of fifty people at a time show up to watch them and talk about them. My Twitter persona became the "Son of Karas," an offshoot of the colorful and memorable villains of Spectreman: Dr. Gori and Karas. 

    The backstory I created in my head was that I was a test tube baby grown in a lab from the combined cells of my two space ape dads, and that Gori and Karas faked their deaths at the hands of Spectreman and now run a quiet bed and breakfast in Indiana. I thought it was funny.

    Eventually, I got into hosting movies as well, naming and co-founding a livetweet group called the #Filmistines to host movies on Twitter on Saturday nights. There was some level of pressure there because I felt obligated to show "better" movies than I normally would, but I think I did okay.  During that time, I also went from several "guest host" spots including serving as a temporary co-host of the #MondayActionMovie livetweet as well as becoming permanent co-host of the Monday night #Cinemon livetweet. Eventually, the #Filmistines went their separate ways, but I did not want to stop hosting movies on Saturday nights. Rather than walk away from the slot, I decided to keep it going alone, branding it as the secondary branch of the Playhouse, #SpaceApeCinema, hosting movies as well as the entire original Twin Peaks series. 

    As Spectreman was the flagship of #GHWP, El Santo became the flagship hero of #SpaceApeCinema, inspired in large part by my late livetweet friend @GregMcCambley, who passed away from COVID last year and was also one of the people, if not the person, who ultimately convinced me to stay on Twitter to do this. With great thanks to his influence, #SpaceApeCinema developed a rich Mexican flavor I did not expect to happen. I would have thought I'd be showing nothing but Japanese movies on Saturday nights. Go figure. As of this writing, we have featured almost the entire Santo franchise and then some. 

    My livetweeting ability dwindled over the past few years to the point that the livetweets I was hosting myself were almost the only ones I had time for. #GHWP remains cemented in a prime-time Friday slot, the absolute worst place to fight for viewership, especially with the return of one of my lifetime heroes Joe Bob Briggs and #TheLastDriveIn stealing what's left of my audience. I'm kidding, Joe Bob. I love you, and #SpaceApeCinema finds time to feature your old MonsterVision shows several times a year because my movie livetweet show would not exist if not for horror hosts like you. Thank you for sending me a Twitter DM that one time after reading all my tweets about Slaughter High and really making my day. I hope my gushy response didn't make it weird. It probably did.

    Shout out to #slutfluff on late Thursday nights being pretty much the only livetweet I can attend and don't host myself. There's also #CultShelf in a late Tuesday night slot I used to run movies on myself, but I only manage to get to that one on rare occasion. I can't tell you how much I miss #DriveInMob and wish I could join it every Thursday as well. It truly is the best livetweet out there that I am never able to attend. 

    On top of my ability to attend as many livetweets as I used to on a near-nightly basis, the attendance of my own livetweets dropped as well. I'm lucky to get three people on a Friday night these days, but I've always maintained it never was about attendance numbers. I always said I didn't care if no one showed up and I was livetweeting alone. I was doing this to share something I loved whether anyone saw it or not. Into the void, if necessary. Twitter became my repository for sharing what I loved and, eventually, my one home away from home. This helped keep me sane and give me some peace of mind outside of my life, and it pushed me to make time for some self-care that I might not have sought out properly for myself without making it a weekly tradition to put on a performance of commentary and trivia.

    I considered going to a lot of effort to make this blog post special with image inserts and captions of some great memories, but time and energy always seem so fleeting. I just look forward to those livetweets and the momentary respite they bring. A time to laugh and unwind. I wanted to get all this out while it was strong in my mind. If anyone reading this is among that group of people I have joined in these livetweets and this livetweet community, I want you to know how much I appreciate you for spending even a second of your time with me to give me the time of day. It means a lot. 

    As of this writing, cut to seven years later, in 2022, and I haven't stopped. I'll be honest and say I've considered it and imagine that there will come a time that I have to, but I have managed to keep a calendar of livetweets going for seven years for #GHWP with our anniversary this Friday night and over four years of #SpaceApeCinema with our 200th movie feature this Saturday night. I hope to be able to keep doing it as long as I can.

    #GHWP celebrates our seventh anniversary every Friday night in May at 10PM Eastern/9PM Central/7PM Pacific, devoting the entire month of May to Metalder, followed by our flagship hero Spectreman returning for the month of June.

    #SpaceApeCinema celebrates a milestone of 200 movie livetweets over four years with the 1986 movie musical adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors this Saturday night, May 7th, at 1AM E, Midnight Central, 10PM Pacific.

Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds (1977) Official Soundtrack Release

     Has it been almost two years since I last made an entry here already? I never even got round to finishing my 2017 movie viewing highlights, and I had two more entries to go with that one. A lot of things have been happening these past few years, not that any of that is remotely isolated to me personally, but, without a lot of detail, I'll just say things haven't been great.

     If we're lucky in life, we get a few brief moments of respite from the turmoil, and there are a precious few little things in my life that have brought me that kind of joy. One of those things, for me, is the giant monster movie. That really takes the edge off, and if I'm too busy to sit down and watch, then I can listen to those amazing sounds of monster roars and city destruction in the background for a meditative experience. I mentioned in my October 2017 highlights posts (Part 4 on Horror Hosts and MST3K, specifically) that 1987 was a big transition year for me when my family moved to Florida. It was that same year that Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds was released on VHS under the title Legend of the Dinosaurs courtesy of Sandy Frank. This film became a symbol of change in my life, and it is 100% subjective and sentimental. It is often called one of the worst giant monster movies ever made, but I have a very important place in my heart for it. Sentimentality aside, I think it deserves a little more respect than it gets. It goes without saying that when I discovered an official soundtrack CD release coming in October 2019, my mouth watered. I couldn't simply get this album and enjoy it alone: I had to talk about it.

CD cover for the 2019 soundtrack release of 1977's Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds.

     I've been semi-obsessed with Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds, or LOTD as I call it for short, ever since the first time I saw a VHS promotion at a local video store. I don't know what was running through my head that convinced me to pass on it at first glance. I had a weird conservative side to me back then, and I was a little reluctant to consider a dinosaur horror movie released under a "Just for Kids" video label. It was a ridiculously hypocritical notion considering how much horror I watched as a kid, but I used to have an annoyingly insistent ideal about age-appropriate material. FOR OTHER KIDS, not for myself. I even used to make audio recording mix cassettes of TV songs and favorite movie quotes, and I would edit out curse words like I was some kind of network content moderator. It was silly, but maybe it was a subconscious reaction to the amount of exposure I had to things that were decidedly not age-appropriate in my childhood. I was self-conscious about a lot of the things I liked. Of course, I was a kid and didn't come at a lot of ideas rationally. It wasn't until nearly a year later, sometime in 1988, that I saw LOTD on Creature Feature with Dr. Paul Bearer on a Saturday afternoon in Florida. If anyone in Florida reading this recorded Dr. Paul Bearer shows in the late 80s and has this broadcast, it's a holy grail of TV horror host material I desperately want to see again.

     It should be apparent how much this means to me that I didn't jump on here to talk about two other very important releases the same month: Mill Creek's inaugural blu-rays for the Ultraman series and Criterion's gigantic (literally) Spine #1000 release of the complete Showa Godzilla series. Those two releases are certainly worthy of many reviews on their own. I have been making my way through those blu-rays with a great deal of joy. October was a spectacular year for the tokusatsu fan of the West, but I was extremely lucky to stumble over a post on Twitter announcing that Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds was getting a soundtrack CD release in Japan. It's been a long time since I bought an import, let alone a music CD. In this age of digital downloads and MP3's, I'd pretty much shifted my entire music collection over to file data to save space. Even as I write this, I'm ripping the CD to my portable music player so that the actual album can be stored for display and so that it doesn't get worn out from overplay. I wish I had thought of that before I played my Sailor Moon S The Movie soundtrack CD too many times in the car on the way to school when I was in my 20s.

     Listening as I write, this is truly the way the LOTD soundtrack was meant to be heard. It's a jazzy, bluesy mix of emotion that moves from calm elevator music to loud jazz riffs with a heavy beat. More interesting still that something with this kind of style would be the driving force behind a 1977 movie about man-eating dinosaurs, but many Toei features of the 70s were known for the signature style of their soundtracks. Up to this point, the only listening experience I had for the soundtrack was an isolated film score audio track on a fan-subtitled DVD, and the difference between that and the official album is stark. So much sound is sacrificed when it is added to the background of a movie. Masao Yagi composed something special with an album that stands well on its own, but I love it just as much for the frantic feeling it gives me as a horror soundtrack, moving back and forth from peace to panic.

     The crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000 remarked more than once that the soundtrack felt "wrong" and didn't fit the movie. I don't know how to feel about that. It was the music that initially drew me into this film the first time I saw it, but I will admit that there can be a jarring feeling to it. LOTD, however, is chaotic as a film and needs some chaotic music to go with it. Despite the focus on man-eating dinosaurs, the plot tries to set itself up as a disaster movie. When we reach the climactic moment of true chaos in the film, the soundtrack provides a soft and romantic lyrical number. It's like The Poseidon Adventure's "There's Got to Be a Morning After" or Michael Jackson's tear-jerking theme from Ben. It feels like it doesn't fit, but somehow it absolutely fits the moment.

Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds insert booklet back and CD.

     If a complete listening experience for the soundtrack wasn't enough, several unused and instrumental bonus tracks put an extra red ribbon on this release. Sadly, Beau Yatani and the Last Longhorn Band didn't make it into the soundtrack. I would have liked to hear them without the crowd noise and applause. Japanese Bluegrass/Country is an interesting sub-genre of music.

     One other piece of incidental music, however, did make it onto the album: the lullaby of the lake. This traditional Japanese song is beautiful on its own, and the audio version in the film perhaps does it the least justice of any song on the album. The extra tracks give almost everyone a solo as the trumpet, saxophone, and electric guitar all have their time to shine, and one track has the bassoon player go absolutely nuts with a solo. I could have listened to them riff on the final dinosaur death battle theme for an hour. At least we get about ten minutes or so of it with all of those tracks combined. Finally, the sound effects. Typically, I do not think much of sound effects on a soundtrack album, but these are the types of sounds you play in the background at a haunted house. The creatures sound like demonic forces as synthesized winds howl through the air. Those same whooshing winds are present throughout the key tracks of the album, letting you know that some toothy beast from the sea or sky could appear at any moment to sweep you off the ground into its waiting maw or talons.

     The Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds CD soundtrack (CINK-76) can be purchased at fine import outlets like CDJapan. That's where I got mine. I haven't watched the movie in quite some time. I think it's time to dig it out again.

My Year in Movies 2017 Part 3 - The Social Concept of Monsters

The Social Concept of Monsters (Warning: contains spoilers)

Franchises, Shared Universes, and Blockbuster Fun

          I grew up in what can be called an age of monsters. I was born near the end of the twentieth century, and I was a fortunate child not to have to miss the large chunk of the century that had passed before me. I do not speak of the horrors of history like the Nazis or the atomic bomb, but those monsters certainly became the source of a great many metaphors. I speak of the movie monsters such as King Kong, Godzilla, the Frankenstein monster, the Gill Man, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and their many incarnations, and it was the magic of television that gave me the opportunity to see them again and again. 

          Several of the movies I saw this year, including a few I mentioned in my top ten for October in my previous post and promised to revisit, affected me in a way that I did not expect, and The Shape of Water brought all of it together for me with beautiful clarity. In another recent post, I quoted Gilbert Gottfried from his interview with Bob Goldthwait about the meaning behind the classic Universal Monsters and their longstanding allure. All of the monsters have an embedded connection to the human condition with regard to bodily changes during aging as well as the human mind's constant struggle with animal desire, morality, and fear. There is a funny touch of irony that the term Universal (uppercase) initially referred to the studio while many of the monsters themselves would come to be seen as universal (lowercase) social concepts. 

          I have not seen the new Mummy film. I generally like a Tom Cruise movie, but I still feel no desire to see it. I think the only movies of his I have skipped are The Mummy 2017 and the Mission: Impossible franchise. I do not like to make a judgment on the merits of any movie that I have not seen, but it already has become accepted that The Mummy 2017 failed in its attempt to create a "Dark Universe" franchise that would revive the Universal Monsters of the early twentieth century. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has sent virtually every major movie studio into a frenzy to create shared movie universes. Godzilla and Kong are set to meet once again in the new "Monsterverse" of Legendary Pictures, and the DC Cinematic Universe is struggling (poorly) to catch up to the same level of success. Universal's intended Dark Universe, however, apparently considered its first entry such a mishap that it required a return to the drawing board. Last I read, it seems that the studio was more interested in the success of film franchising than capturing the spirit of the classics, and perhaps they realized that. From an executive standpoint, however, I highly doubt it. I suspect that any attempt at a new Dark Universe will be another collection of big-budget popcorn blockbusters offering quantity over quality. They probably will be fun, but they will not be timeless like their predecessors. They probably will be something easily relegated to a RiffTrax commentary track and more enjoyable with it than without it. I am reluctant but not unwilling to say the same about the Monsterverse.

          In my previous entry, I talked about movies like The Dragon Lives Again and 3 Dev Adam (Turkish Captain America and El Santo vs. Spider-Man). These are the movies I mean when I use the word "fun." An unkind way to describe them would be cash-grab cosplay, and I tend to use that phrase with a bit more passion when describing, say, the X-Men movie franchise from The Last Stand to present. A kinder way to describe them would be "easy money." They are foreign productions, and I cannot deny that I have a lot of film bias when it comes to foreign movies as much as monster movies; however, they stand as a perfect example of exactly what the major studios have been doing lately with the X-Men and other popular properties. They are taking advantage of the same concept that has been in use since at least the late 1950s to get people in theater seats. All they needed were faces, names and costumes. The stories were not as important. Less adaptation and more exploitation to a point. Put Olivia Munn in a Psylocke costume, have Hugh Jackman take off his shirt, and at least a section of the audience cares little for the plot. On rare occasion, we were given the gift of classics from Hammer Studios, the gold standard of horror remakes, but even those have been criticized by some as the result of easy money.

          Easy money perks up an executive's ears. The Mummy 2017, which I will emphasize again that I have not seen and do not judge as such, looks like it was meant to be easy money from the trailer alone. The same goes for those more recent X-Men movies. I could call Kong: Skull Island easy money in a similar vein because it was produced, visually, to be a fun movie that hits you in that sweet spot. It certainly hit me in that sweet spot, but I have to make a distinction between being hit in the sweet spot while watching Skull Island on the big screen as opposed to being completely entranced while watching King Kong 1933 or Gojira 1954 on any size screen. Whether or not I have that same feeling for Skull Island remains to be seen because I have not seen it a second time. Yet. 

          I do not like to be one of the people to say that Hollywood is out of ideas, but "easy money" is at odds with "tell a story" every step of the way. "Tell a story." In the 1930s and 1940s when the Universal Monsters took the stage and real monsters like the Nazis were cutting a path of destruction, King Kong was arguably the first blockbuster. Despite its production costs, it was only nearly twice the budget of Dracula and only roughly a third more expensive than Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1933. This could turn into a completely different argument about the correlation between a movie's budget and its overall quality, but it seems like the largest movie budgets suffer less risk simply because, love or hate the story, people will rush to see those familiar faces, especially with nostalgia being such a powerful lure. Even a lot of forgettable bombs still pull a profit. Easy money. Much as I dislike the direction of the Transformers live-action movie franchise, they make money, and I will not be the one to determine, one hundred years hence, whether or not they stand up to some future generation as cult favorites in a society where the inflation rate adjusts a one hundred-million-dollar movie budget into pennies. They are likely to do just that, and there will be (are) pockets of fans that hold them aloft and demand that they be given alternative recognition, claiming that Michael Bay had a pair of wrecking ball-sized testicles to be so bold in his production, perhaps in the same way that I hold aloft movies like The Dragon Lives Again, Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds, or Thunder of Gigantic Serpent. I have far less displeasure with the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie than I did at age nine, but I will not defend it for anything more than how much fun Frank Langella obviously had playing Skeletor. Like Bay's Transformers, the movie is still terrible and lacks the spirit of its namesake. I also will not be the one to tell anyone today to stop giving Michael Bay money, no matter how much I want to.

          I imagine this all makes me sound like a cynical film critic at best. I consider myself neither and save that label for embittered contrarians like Rex Reed and Armond White, people of my grandmother's generation who insist that good movies and music are no longer produced. My only point is to say that a new breed of universal (lowercase) monsters is already here. Before the Dark Universe made it beyond the water cooler, horror and science fiction of the past decade have been weaving new tales that take the social concept of the monster, expand upon it and, in a few cases, turn it completely on its ear. The collection of contemporary horror movies I saw this year, in particular, had this oddly perfect way of melding together, and I could see all of them inhabiting the same universe despite coming from various countries and years. They shared too many common threads of purpose and insight. 

The Social Concept of the "Monster"

          When I was in Kindergarten, the first game I ever played was "Monster." I would stick out my bottom jaw, growl, and chase other kids around the playground, usually girls. We all laughed. I never caught anyone. We did not think about the intricacies of what the monster was or what the monster would do if it caught someone. We just ran around in an imaginary game of chase until we got tired, and then we played on the swings. The standard definition of "monster" in its simplest form is anything abnormal or frightening, but, as a child of the 1980s, I had been exposed already to the notion that a "monster" was not always what it seemed on the outside. I had children's books like Where The Wild Things Are and obscure children's movies like The Monsters' Christmas, and these never left my mind.

          When I was a child, I always felt I empathized with the monster. I often cried when a monster died in a movie. So many of them seemed misunderstood and lost. My early love for reading Greek mythology came in part from Clash of the Titans, where I saw that a number of "monsters" were just people who were cursed with a horrible existence because their gods were assholes. Medusa was among the most powerful characters of my entire childhood, exiled and shunned as a victim of rape by a powerful man and cursed with deadly powers and frightful appearance as a way to ensure that all others held on to the belief that her lot in life was deserved. "She must have been asking for it." The mythology evolved as time passed and written history began to collect its recorded stories, but it became accepted as just one of those fine examples of societal bullshit that remains a standard practice in several cultures. Like monsters, many people in many parts of the world are still subject to exile and even death for being different or "defiled."

          Maybe this is what separates me from the Rex Reeds of the world, people who look at movies like these and see them through eyes that cannot help but look down upon anything that is less than the twentieth century white American concept of normal or the classical image of the hero, holding on to and insisting the righteousness of archaic ideals. The Rex Reeds and Armond Whites accuse us of romanticizing defects as deviant masturbatory aids, ridiculing us for asking why the monsters always have to be looked upon as forces of destruction while the Rex Reeds and Armond Whites ironically romanticize the chiseled masculinity of a John Wayne, who so often portrayed the most destructive force in American history: the settler who fought off the "savages" (just another synonym for "monster" no matter how you look at it). Of course they cannot see the depth of character in a movie like The Shape of Water because they are looking through a glass window at the help. 

          Speaking of Westerns, one of my earliest movie memories was a scene from some unknown Western when I was a very young child. I remember seeing a group of cowboys storming an Indian village, slaughtering everyone in sight. In the midst of all this chaos, I saw two small native babies sitting in the middle of the dirt, and I remember seeing one cowboy give orders to another cowboy to shoot them. The second cowboy refused, and the camera remained on his shocked expression as the audience heard two gunshots. I could not have been more than five years old, but I understood exactly what had just happened. There was a brief moment of shocked silence, and then I burst into tears. I was inconsolable for quite some time afterward. It remains on my list of mystery movies from my memory because I never saw more than this one scene to identify it. My family was enamored of the American Western genre and John Wayne, and they never understood why I did not share their idolatry. My grandmother would disown me for such blasphemous statements about The Duke. This mystery Western was the reason. It could have been an Italian "Spaghetti" Western for all I know. To me, those felt a little more honest.

          The other aspect of the monster that the Rex Reeds and Armond Whites never escape is that comfort zone where a monster is easy to identity by its appearance, and this applies even to reviewers giving glowing praise to The Shape of Water but remarking on "icky fish sex." There is a sense of security in the monster movie because there is always a way to differentiate the monster from the rest of us, even if that monster is something that can look like us for brief moments. They give us an escape from the real-life monster stories of serial murderers, sociopaths, ethnic cleansers, and abusers. That security melts away with a story like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Diary of a Mad Man, suggesting that a monster could replace us or inhabit us without anyone being the wiser, and, with the rise of the slasher movie, the social concept of the monster in film took it to the final step to suggest that we could be the monsters. They dared to remind us that, in some cases, there was no need for the supernatural or mythology for a monster to exist. A monster could be created in the womb or driven to become one later in life. People could be born with something missing or lose something along the way, succumbing to some animal response that erased their former identity. Michael Myers was an escaped mental patient. Before the supernatural was applied to Jason, Pamela Voorhees was a mother driven insane by the loss of her child. Leatherface, raised by a family of cannibals, never truly grew out of childhood and remained fearful of the outside world. Real monsters walk among us already. In hindsight, this was a silent truth that applied to a great many movie characters, but we typically referred to them as "villains." We based them on real people like Ed Gein and Jack The Ripper, but we often still referred to them as people. We still had to distinguish between something that was malformed or physically different and something else that could be both human and evil at the same time. 

          The word "monster" for a Gill Man or a Godzilla meant something animal, not human, or a mutant divergence from nature. The word "monster" for a vampire meant inhuman or humanity lost, a predator of humans. The word "monster" for a Frankenstein resurrection, a zombie, or a mummy meant humanity perverted, distorted, or defiled. In every case, "monster" was the go-to word for anyone that simply did not look like us, and it mattered more that they did not look like us than it did whether or not they were part of us or shared any equal level of intelligence. Even the Phantom of the Opera and the Hunchback of Notre Dame were called monsters by some. The term "alien" barely moved away from the same notion, and H.G. Wells became a standard for the image of beings from another world: monsters bent on human destruction. And from these types of stories came similar "heroes" like Flash Gordon and Commando Cody, more images of chiseled white perfection poised to defend us from anything that we deemed unworthy of sharing our space or our land. This hero concept, of course, goes back through human history to Greco-Roman mythology and beyond, all the way back to those images of a hero like Perseus. Demigod. Monster slayer. Upholder of servitude to the whims of a petty and childish race of all-powerful beings. He was more than willing to behead Medusa and to believe that her fate must have been just because the gods cast her judgment down from on high. One of many schmucks who was part of the games of the gods all along, never truly thinking for himself and never truly looking at anything at more than face value. A great hero who reasoned with his sword, literally and figuratively.

          Among the best examples of that caricature of chiseled perfection is Gaston in Disney's animated Beauty and The Beast. He is the great conqueror, the great hunter, and the master of all he surveys, but he gets by on looks. Average women fall at his feet, average men idolize him, and he values outward appearance and physical strength over education. When "monster" was used to describe a human being, suddenly the word's true meaning came into focus. A human being did not have to be cursed to transform into a wolf or rise from the dead to be a monster. A monster could stand before you as that image of perceived human perfection. Dr. Frankenstein was a monster, a man of science driven mad in his quest for knowledge, putting himself on the pedestal of a god. Gaston was a beast, dimwitted and easily driven to murder in defense of his limited world view. 

          It has become difficult, if not slightly offensive, to use the word "monster" in the way that I always have to describe the movies I loved the most as a child. The word did not always apply, but it was so rare to see a story challenge its correctness. One of those unique exceptions was The Mole People, which used its monsters as a metaphor for the concept of human rights, slavery, and equality. To call something a monster in its simplest form is to assume it has no depth. In the movies, the people who use the term "monster" usually are "heroes" like John Agar or Richard Carlson, saving fair maidens from primitive, savage, immortal, or resurrected abominations that are unrepentant of their separation from the human race. The people who use the term "monster" are the frightened citizens who believe the lie that their purity is the reason for their security and that some holy power has their best interests in mind. The people who use the term "monster" are children who do not know any better and need a name for their fears. The people who use the term "monster" are displaced foreigners like Raymond Burr's Steve Martin, who bore witness to something he did not understand and was unable to translate it into any other word. In Godzilla's case, the entire human race was a group of displaced foreigners witnessing the return of a being that had walked the earth long before they existed, the great challenge to the longstanding belief of many that the world did not truly exist until Man first set foot upon it. It is no surprise that many individuals today still believe the same of America and continue to hold on to the belief that God told their ancestors to cleanse this land of its savages and subhumans and to claim it in His name. That dinosaur bones were placed in the soil to test our faith. That the Earth is flat. That homosexuality is a sin and a mental disease. The social concept of the monster certainly has no monopoly on primitive ideals.

          The term "monster movie" was cemented into the social vocabulary quickly, and there simply has not been any real effort to come up with an alternative. It always left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth because I grasped at an early age that the word was so much more complex, but I suppose that it also lessened the sting of it because I understood that complexity. The term "monster" often had every regard for what we consider physically human and no regard whatsoever for humanity, and it makes the term "humanity" a difficult word to use as well because it, too, is something that came out of that same time lock of hegemonic idealism. It is such an isolating word, embedded firmly in the soil of the planet Earth by its self-proclaimed dominant species. How arrogant we are to use "humanity" to describe our ability to comprehend complex emotions and intelligence, and how ironic it is that we most often use the word "humanity" to describe how we treat animals, the less fortunate, the disabled, and even those we perceive as monsters. To our detriment, we seem to use "humanity" the most as a substitute for "heart." It is an act of kindness toward something or someone "not like us" and often seems more pity than sympathy, more sympathy than empathy, and a self-centered way of proving we feel. The same linguists came up with so many other words like "monster" as a label for those we perceived as lacking in that capability, and we made it easier to lump the misunderstood in with the stuff of our nightmares. The fangs, the cloth wrappings, and the excess body hair just made it easier to compartmentalize some of those feelings and lose sight of the metaphor.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

          Kicking off this modern perspective of the universal monster was this vampire tale from Iran. This story presents us with a young female vampire who thirsts for blood but goes against the classic tropes. In Bad City, she seems to blend in with every other wretched soul in town as a prisoner of a lonely and dead-end life filled with injustices and abuses, and she serves as an angel of death to some and an angel of hope to others. She becomes the opposite of Dracula and Bathory. Instead of taking advantage of her supernatural powers to feed her base desires, that surrender to animal instinct that so often defines a monster, she feeds upon a form of "vampire" that truly exists in the world: the misogynist and abuser in a society that still views women more as objects and property than as people. How strange that we find it so easy to label monsters when we cannot stop separating human beings into categories of inferior and superior, casting judgment and looking away as if hair could entwine to become snakes at any moment. There is an added depression to the story in her sense of guilt and morality. One thing she understands more than anything is fear. She sees herself as a monster, but she feeds upon other "monsters" that use fear to exploit and manipulate their victims. She uses fear as a weapon. They fear death and loss, of course, but much of her behavior is driven by a fear she shares with those around her: an inescapable loneliness as she witnesses humanity draining from everyone around her. She sees hope that grows into love for a young man named Arash, but she still fears the damage she might do indirectly to someone undeserving because Arash's own father Hossein is the source of a great deal of misery and, ultimately, just the sort of man that she would consider a meal. Thus, we are given a dilemma: is her self-judgment misplaced? Does a monster that feeds upon monsters cease being a monster?

Colossal

          Revisiting this movie briefly from my previous entry, Colossal is not what it appears to be. It is not so much a kaiju movie as it is a story of lonely people unable to find a distinct purpose and place in life. There are some interesting parallels between A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Colossal, and they share an underlying emotional tone that focuses on the awareness of one's own footprint. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night looks at the worries of a young woman about the suffering her existence can create while Colossal does much the same thing on a giant-sized scale and with a more literal interpretation. The vampire girl remains in Bad City, feeling trapped within its borders. Meanwhile, Gloria has escaped her hometown life to travel the world, but she is equally trapped within her own existence and tethered to her childhood home. The kaiju and mecha in Colossal are manifestations of inner human turmoil brought to life through a cosmic accident, and it is through their human hosts that we learn that the real monster in the story is entirely human. Oscar, a pathetic man who drowns his troubles in alcohol to bring his misogyny and jealousy to the surface, has no need for a giant robot that mimics his every move, but he takes advantage of it for his own selfish and self-loathing ends. Much like the drug-addled Hossein, Oscar drains the humanity from those around him, pulling them toward him and making it almost impossible for them to escape him because they are beaten down and dependent upon him. Those who find the strength to escape him, he extorts and abuses. Oscar and Hossein are monsters that care only about themselves. One could consider both movies to have a similar sort of happy ending. The vampire girl and Gloria both seem to escape their self-doubt and fear of purpose. They have their moments in which they both see themselves as monsters, but they are not monsters at all. 

Evolution (2015)

          I truly hate to spoil Evolution in this discussion. I enjoyed this one so much that I almost want to exclude it entirely because its reveal is worth the surprise. If you have not seen the movie, then stop reading and go watch it NOW.

          I had it figured out within about the first ten minutes of the movie, so perhaps some of my admiration was the joy I got from being right. As the first several minutes of the story progressed, I began to think to myself, with a few clues, You're not telling me that this about starfish people. This movie was absolutely about starfish people. In Evolution, the adults are not what they seem. The story focuses on a group of young boys supposedly suffering from a terminal medical condition and seeking a potential cure through surgical experimentation, but there is mad science afoot. In this bleak story, it seems that the starfish people are the ones suffering the terminal medical condition and are no longer able to reproduce, and they are struggling to prevent their own extinction by using human children as incubators for a stronger breed of hybrids. I loved this twisted take on the transplant horror stories of the 1950s, and there is a little hint of Cronenberg in the visual feel of this movie. In this case, the "monsters" are a species of intelligent creatures that are other than human. For their race to survive, well, the title says it all: they need to evolve. The separation from their label as "monsters" is a young nurse among them. A starfish herself, she develops a compassionate attachment to Nicholas, the focal point of the story. Does she have feelings for him that are contrary to her nature? Is she responding to him in such a way because she senses he is ultimately the key to their survival, or is she drawn to him because she begins to understand more of humanity through him, perhaps a "humanity" her race once had before falling into desperation? Does she set him free because she takes pity on a lab rat, or does she do it because she sees no point in her own race's survival if they cannot see the misstep in trying to manipulate their adaptation? 

The Lure

          It seems that a large number of movies on this list involve fish people. The Lure takes the monster story fully into mythological territory with a pair of carnivorous young mermaids. This movie is like someone took Splash, Victor/Victoria, and Species and put them in a blender. There is a sort of ho-hum acceptance in this world that fantastic creatures exist, limiting much of their fame to that of a seedy nightclub singing act with a little interspecies prostitution on the side. Everyone uses each other to their own selfish ends. The mermaids treat their situation as a flight of fancy mingled with a little bit of god worship, and their ersatz human "family" takes advantage of the modest fortune that the singing act brings in. This gives us the real lure of The Lure as a wonderful 1980s-era pop musical. In the midst of severe family dysfunction, the mythological rules and natural laws of these mermaids come into play, not unlike Evolution's efforts of "monster" to become more like Man. Although they enjoy the taste of human flesh, these fairy tale creatures have it within their power to forsake their mythological identities and become human, and this is where "humanity" deviates away from "heart" as one of the mermaids decides to shed her immortality in exchange for true love, knowing that, if that love is not reciprocated, she will wither away into sea foam. Her acceptance of this fate makes her perhaps the most human character in the story, the only one willing to give up all of herself for the heart.

It Follows

          To some, it might seem a little off that I included this movie on the list at all, but go with me on this. We have our vampires and our werewolves and our gill men, but one of the important facets of the monster as a social concept is fear. There is a monster that lives under your bed and can find you wherever you go. It is a monster born of recklessness and selfishness, and it can take the form of anyone you know to taunt you, gain your trust, or weaken you, making you easier to catch. The only way to survive the monster is to pass it on to someone else. It Follows is a unique take on a monster as a sexually transmitted disease. It is not clear whether or not the monster is a living entity or, like Colossal, a physical manifestation of inner human turmoil. No matter its true origins, the monster forces you to forsake another's survival for your own, testing the limits of humanity one victim at a time. I almost passed the movie up entirely, but a few trustworthy sources nudged me toward it. There is a touch of The Invisible Man here, but that may be considered a stretch. The Invisible Man was the "monster" driven mad by casting off all human constraints and self-control for a godlike life entirely without consequence. The monster of It Follows, invisible to all but its victim, is the unstoppable and ever-looming embodiment of that consequence.

When Animals Dream

          This Danish entry brings the Wolf Man mythos of the classic monster neatly into the new millennium. This one reminds me a little bit of the highly underrated Ginger Snaps in its poignant portrayal of the transition from adolescence into adulthood with a supernatural twist. This, as Gottfried mentioned, was the underlying theme of the classic Wolf Man and his connection to the human condition: the change, the loss of emotional control, chemical sexual attractions, and the alienation from those around you on both an emotional and a physical level. Instead of Michael J. Fox's dad coming to the bathroom door to discuss the changes he is going through in Teen Wolf, however, When Animals Dream adds an extra layer of family betrayal in an attempt to prevent the transformation, a metaphor for overbearing parents trying to prevent children from growing up and to protect them from family secrets.

Raw

          Like Evolution, this one did not fool me for a minute. I saw what was coming early, and it was nothing like I expected from the things I heard about it. I still loved it. As I mentioned in my top ten horror highlights entry for October 2017, a lot of misleading hype drew me to this movie. What I got for my troubles was possibly the best movie I saw for October and one of the best movies I saw all year. Taking a similar path as When Animals Dream, there is an underlying effort from parents to prevent certain truths in their children's lives from coming to light, but there is more surrender to the likelihood that heredity is inevitable with a slightly contradictory acceptance that children do grow up and seek their own paths. But what are parents if not slightly contradictory? It is almost like an episode of Skins, only with more cannibalism. This gem is a nice horror take on a coming of age story, falling a bit into the monster category of zombies and vampires as the stars of the tale have indiscriminate nutritional tastes. With cannibalism, we return to the monster among us with the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer and Hannibal Lecter, but the young women of Raw are not psychopaths or sociopaths. They are victims of family genetics, a separation from humanity that manifests itself as a transformation into a monster of sorts, a complete regression into an animalistic state of hunger.

          Between The Lure and Raw, I feel like I am not saying nearly enough about how good these two movies were. All I feel I can do is to give them my high recommendation. As for my highest...

The Shape of Water

          Best movie of the year. Best movie of many years. It was the first movie I saw for 2018 and just missed the cut-off for this 2017 highlights list, but I am including it anyway. It earned it, and after seeing the movie, every feeling I had about this entry fell into place. When I speak of the great impact that the twentieth century age of monsters had on me, I can think of almost no other director who understands that impact better than Guillermo del Toro and almost no better example of this than The Shape of Water. His work as a director proves that he analyzed those classic horror movies much the same way I did, studying what made them timeless and looking deep beneath their surface. We see a vast array of time locks firmly in place in The Shape of Water: color, gender, religion, capitalism, and the great American lie that we could feel safe and secure behind our white picket fences and our embroidered drapes because we were the most powerful and advanced country in the world. The good old American Dream. The idealism that the Rex Reeds and Armond Whites and Donald Trumps of the world still seem to think we are supposed to worship. The caste system of discrimination and alienation and property and material wealth that we still struggle against today, where the square-jawed man in a fancy suit is the poster child of normal on his surface, and the people of color and those with disabilities or limited capacities for communication are simply janitorial staff. Or kept in a tank. It is a version of our real world with all its evils, but a fantastic race of amphibious humanoids just happens to exist in it. A world  just like ours where the real monsters are the people deciding who has the right to be treated like a human being. The Shape of Water proves that we should throw neither "humanity" nor "monster" around so casually.

          As with most monster movies, there is a general complaint that the creature never gets enough screen time. Unsurprisingly, I have seen that complaint about the amphibian man in The Shape of Water and admit that I share it just a bit. I am not sure of the exact numbers, but it feels to me that he has less screen time than the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I could be wrong, but, I repeat, I was a child of the early 1980s. My "uphill in the snow both ways" story to impatient young people is that I had to sit in front of a television for an hour and a half just to see a fantastic creature on the screen for as little as a minute at the end of an old horror movie, but I was happy and grateful for it. This issue goes all the way back to Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon, a film originally not supposed to have a physical monster in it at all. Although it was an executive decision denounced by the director to add the demon to the final scene of the film, the monster itself was on screen for mere seconds. This brings me back to Godzilla. Almost no one receives the amount of complaint about lack of screen time than the King of the Kaiju (notice how I try to refrain from calling him a monster, even if it is in the American title of his first movie). One reason I gravitated to kaiju movies so much was that they seemed to be the creatures who got the most screen time of them all, but it still never was enough. The existence of the demon or of Godzilla is the important point of the story, and this is no different for the amphibian man. His actual screen time aside, the amphibian man is the symbol of an ideal that remains on the lips of everyone else in the movie. In a classic horror film like Night of the Demon, The Haunting, a number of films from Val Lewton, and even The Shape of Water, the core of the plot is the acceptance or denial of the main characters that their concept of reality is incorrect. A gill man, a supernatural demon, and a Godzilla force humans to re-evaluate human existence, and they can do one of two things in response: reshape their world view to accept the existence of these creatures or seek to destroy said creatures to keep their world view intact. 

          The real monster in The Shape of Water has plenty of screen time, given that very name in the opening narration in an obvious line to trick the audience into thinking the word "monster" is still nestled safely in their comfort zone. The real monster is that square-jawed poster child of a normal human played by Michael Shannon. Shannon, in a role worthy of a Best Actor Oscar, is a much crueler Gaston in this Beauty and the Beast tale, shattering the image of the human hero portrayed in sci-fi classics like The Creature from the Black Lagoon. I will find it hard to look at John Agar the same way ever again. Del Toro's perspective paints the smug and handsome 1950s drive-in monster movie hero as someone willing to use advances in science as an excuse for exploitation, segregation, abuse, and bigotry. He is a traditional family man, and he refuses to allow the world around him to change. The 1950s drive-in hero claims to be virtuous and wishes to unlock the mysteries of the world, but he is armed at all times with the means to destroy anything he does not understand or deems unnatural.

          Through Sally Hawkins and the amphibian man, we see "heart" rather than "humanity." We see empathy rather than sympathy. We see just how unfit the definition of "humanity" truly is. In the high halls of military and science, we see the stoic power struggle of the Cold War. On the streets of this version of our world, we see the fight against attack dogs and fire hoses for basic human rights. In conversation, we hear of God's image, how He intended us to look and how we are meant to perceive Him. The pioneers of "humanity" tell each other that some are more human or more godly than others, and, behind closed doors, those same pioneers and men of power tell each other that the image of "humanity" is just part of the lie being sold to everyone else, no different than a teal Cadillac or a terrible key lime pie. Shannon acts as both prophet and enforcer of these laws of humanity, preaching sermons while striking down the wicked with his holy cane. He never had to stand in line to purchase the lie. He pre-ordered it. As far as I am concerned, the Rex Reeds and Armond Whites and Donald Trumps of the world can sit down and enjoy a slice of an altogether different pie, one cooked and served up by the great Octavia Spencer, if you catch my drift.

          Without saying a word, Sally Hawkins gives one of the best emotional performances I have seen in years. When she insists for her best friend, played by the spectacular Richard Jenkins, to "say what I sign," I almost cried. I could have saved myself a lot of time writing this entire entry if I were to tell you to go and watch that one scene. This scene is one-hundred percent the point of all of it: her emotions, her identity, her comprehension of that flawed rift between "humanity" and what we perceive to be less than human, and her struggle with another lonely soul to share that comprehension. At this point, she has decided to take the enormous risk of freeing the amphibian man from captivity, but she cannot do it alone. She pushes Jenkins to define how he sees her as a person, challenging him to face his true feelings about their friendship. She demands that he admit whether or not he empathizes with her or simply pities her. Of course, he is defensive and unwilling to open up about how hypocritical his own feelings are, and he dismisses the possibility of the amphibian man sharing her comprehension as if it were no different than a cat meowing when its owner returns home. The presence of so many cats in his apartment creates a valuable image of that separation between human and animal and the belief that it is impossible for the relationship between a human and a non-human to have the level of depth that Hawkins shares with the amphibian man. We see that the definition of "humanity" imposes the same limits of comprehension on every other living thing, buying the biblical ego-stroking decree that Man was meant to hold dominion over all other living creatures on the earth. This so-called statement from the Christian divine strengthens our perception of animal and monster because we are conditioned to believe that Man is closest to God and that everything else, no matter its appearance or behavior, is beneath Man and God, and it is a sin to consider the alternative.

          Jenkins has to experience two final acts of humiliation and degradation to open his eyes again to the truth he always knew: even he, in the eyes of a great many people, is something less than human, someone perceived to exist outside the laws of humanity and nature. He is a homosexual in 1960s America and not a young man anymore, and the wholesome pie salesmen drop their fake smiles when they see the truth come to the surface. He has no physical deformity, no malice of purpose, but to the uneducated and bigoted members of society, those people like Shannon who hold to a strict standard of what is human and what is not, Jenkins is a monster. His very existence threatens and scares them. There is no consolation in the fact that these fears of "monsters" are misplaced.

          See this movie. I hope that it gets more awards than any one person involved in it can carry.

Conclusion

          I love a good crossover, but we don't need them. Not really. We don't need a "Dark Universe" or a House of Frankenstein to bring several different timeless tales together. We just need someone to keep making stories like these. If they are meant to cross paths, then they will, but a shared cinematic universe does not dictate whether or not any of these stories are allowed to share common threads with one another. A movie genre does not need to be reduced to a gimmick for success, and I was happy this past year to see so many movies that truly understand what the monster movie is meant to be. It is something that always challenges us to keep defining who and what we are as a species and a civilization, and it is always evolving to show us that even our concepts of good and evil can be too simplistic. Is it easier to face some abstract fears when they are more easily identifiable as something that triggers a primal instinct? Maybe, but that attempt to communicate and comprehend, even if the result is a priest being disintegrated by a Martian death ray or a man turned to stone by the gaze of a snake-haired woman, is something that is never irrational or illogical. It is the greater act of bravery and heroism than the chiseled half-god swinging his sword at a reflection. As a race of living things, even if we are the dominant species by some grand destiny, we are still children struggling to overcome fear, to survive, and to grow. The "monster" is often an effigy of the obstacles we face, and the way we identify monsters in all aspects of history and media proves that we remain a little "primitive" ourselves, taking an ideal in need of great thought and distilling it down to a grotesque shadow on a cave wall. Meanwhile, some "monsters" who walk among us every day know and exploit those triggers to keep their power and superiority.

          I think this might have been the peak of my highlights for the year, but keep an eye out as I delve into a few more of the best moments of 2017 for me and the movies.

My Year in Movies 2017 Part 2 - Martial Arts, Monsters and Superheroes

          This might be the easiest section to write because these are the easiest movies for me to turn on and enjoy. The past few years have been good for new monster and superhero adventures with Marvel and the new lives of Godzilla and King Kong, and I am thankful that I never seem to run out of older cult classics, giant monsters, and superheroics despite how passionately and quickly I jump at the chance to see them most of the time.

The Dragon Lives Again

          This was the first movie of the year that really hit me. The Dragon Lives Again is the epitome of exploitation (specifically "Brucesploitation") with a plot that is all over the place and a cast that cashes in on enough classic movies to make your head spin. Bruce Lee has died and gone to the underworld, where he makes both friend and foe of some of the biggest names in film from Michael Corleone to Dracula to the One-Armed Swordsman to "The Exorcist" to Popeye. Yes, "The Exorcist" (that's what they call him) and Popeye. I could talk about this movie at length, but I will let this little clip speak for itself:

This movie is so insane that I watched it three times and hosted it as a livetweet for #MondayActionMovie, and it was guaranteed a mention in this year-end review before the opening credits finished rolling. Of course, all of the famous faces and characters were in name and costume only, but that did nothing to detract from my enjoyment of this crazy story. For a fun slapstick martial arts double-feature, watch this one with Jackie Chan's City Hunter, which was also on my first-time viewings list for this year for no other reason than to see Jackie Chan dressed up as Chun-Li.

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare

          The second entry of the Yokai Monsters trilogy and, quite possibly, the best. I have not gotten around to the third installment yet, but this was a fun story about different spirits and creatures in cultural folklore crossing paths. Rather than pranking or taking revenge on evil humans who desecrate sacred lands and totems, this time the Yokai such as the turtle-like Kappa and the snake-necked woman discover that many of the humans around them have been overtaken by an invading vampire from a far-away land. There is a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor that the Japanese Yokai themselves consult an encyclopedia of their own kind and can, in turn, research creatures and ghosts from other lands and countries to find out just what their adversary is. This vampire is so ancient that it bears no resemblance to the likes of Dracula, but most of the classic rules of blood-drinking and possession apply. The humans are powerless against this ancient evil, and even the Yokai themselves are no match for the vampire's power until they realize that they have strength in numbers. Other than The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, at the moment I can not think of any other movies that took different mythologies and blended them together. Even if I am missing a few, there are not enough of them out there.

Wonder Woman

          I have been hesitant to see anything of the DC Cinematic Universe since Batman v Superman, but Wonder Woman was a necessity, not just for me but for us all. I tried to like BvS. Honest. I really did try (https://letterboxd.com/sonofkaras/film/batman-v-superman-dawn-of-justice), but BvS was a hurried attempt to catch up to everything that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has done already and too dark a take on DC's greatest heroes. I grew up watching Lynda Carter's incarnation of the Amazon heroine, and Gal Gadot's Diana was virtually the only good thing I could glean from Dawn of Justice. And, once and for all, the shift between BvS to Wonder Woman to Justice League is perhaps the best example that we need to stop letting men direct female superheroes. Have you read Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman script? And he might get to direct a Batgirl movie? Great Caesar's ghost...

Marvel Cinematic Universe

          In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, James Gunn does it again. The Guardians remain one of the shining examples of the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Gunn's stories continue to elicit every emotion from laughter to heavy tears. Taika Waititi essentially threw a white glove of challenge on the field with Thor: Ragnarok, and I expected nothing less from the What We Do in the Shadows director. This double dose of Marvel Cosmic took me back to my late teens and early twenties. At the time, I was more likely to read stories involving the Silver Surfer and Jim Starlin's tales of Adam Warlock, Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet than I was to plant my feet on Marvel's Earth with the Avengers or the Fantastic Four. Space was the place, and Thor and the Guardians have done a fine job setting the stage for Thanos' arrival.

          Say what you will about Spider-Man reboot after Spider-Man reboot, but I have been on board for them all the way down the line. I even have a tailored Spider-Man shirt that I have worn to every Marvel superhero movie premiere since Sam Raimi's first outing. I have gotten a little big in the gut and can no longer button it up, but I have a couple of very nice Marvel Superheroes t-shirts that enhance the look quite nicely underneath. Spider-Man: Homecoming was a delightful return to Peter Parker's roots with a little modern-day comics mythology mixed in. The MCU needed Spider-Man, and I am glad they got him. I miss Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy, and Homecoming was the perfect palate cleanser for the abysmal handling of Amazing Spider-Man 2. One thing I particularly loved about the plot was that the writers threw a curve ball at long-time fans. We hear a lot of first names and come to assume that they are certain people, but even an encyclopedic knowledge of the Spider-Verse can be a red herring. I was a little put-off to see Miles Morales' best friend Ganke stolen away from Ultimate Spider-Man for this story, but he was a welcome addition. I said it early in the casting stage, but I would have loved to see Michael Keaton play Mysterio. He can play anything to perfection and was great as the Vulture, but a character like Mysterio seemed tailor-made for his personality.

Love & Peace (2015)

          Another instant holiday favorite for me. It would be a spoiler to explain why this is a Christmas movie, but it is most definitely a Christmas movie. This is a story of magic, living toys, talking animals, and wishes coming to life, and when it revealed its Christmas secret, I cried like a baby. I am getting a little choked up just thinking about it. It was an overdose of hope and holiday spirit. I walked into it for one specific reason: I love giant monsters and Gamera movies, and Love & Peace boasted a giant turtle of its own. It took some very strange twists and turns, but it did not disappoint with a little city-stomping. Love & Peace is not widely available yet, but I hope that it receives a domestic US release sometime in the near future.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (Warning: contains spoilers)

          Another instant annual holiday tradition for me. I suspect that I will be watching this and Love & Peace every December for the rest of my years. This is a perfect Christmas horror movie, and I would argue that it is good for the whole family despite the many penises present near the end. No one ever listens to the children in a horror movie, but our story's young hero is not one to leave it at that. He holds within him the true meaning of Christmas: a sense of honor, honesty, generosity and self-sacrifice, but the evil incarnation of Santa Claus in this story is blind to anything short of being good for goodness' sake. I have officially traded in my childhood dream to ride on Falkor from The Neverending Story and would rather hitch a ride on a helicopter net full of frightened Finnish children in burlap sacks.

          Only one aspect of Rare Exports disappointed me, but this is my bias as a fan of giant monster movies. I was a little upset that we did not get to see a gigantic Santa demon thaw from his ice block and lead to a climactic effort to put him back in his tomb, but it took a more heartwarming and Christmasy direction to have a wonderful ending with our young hero willing to put his own life at risk to save everyone else.

Colossal (Warning: contains spoilers)

          I was not sure what to expect from this one, but it was a lot more satisfying than I expected. This was not so much a kaiju movie as a tale of dysfunctional relationships and selfishness with the metaphor brought to life that a monster can live within any of us. If you are among those to count this as a kaiju movie at all, then it was certainly one of the weirdest ones. It is hard not to love Anne Hathaway in virtually everything she does, and Jason Sudeikis is easy to hate in this type of role. I have been a fan of "hating" Sudeikis since his days on Saturday Night Live. He can make me laugh and infuriate me at the same time because he is so good at playing the kind of straight-faced jerk that he plays here. It takes a special kind of talent for a comedian to play a psychopath so well. Given the cast and the small dose of mentions I saw about the movie in various places, I assumed wrongly that this would play out as a comedy or, at the very least, a romance, and I was about as far away from the mark as Seoul is from New York. Those last thirty minutes are an emotional gut-punch when you begin to realize the story is taking a dark turn, and Sudeikis shifts dramatically from "nice guy" to "he seemed like a nice guy AT FIRST." Hathaway is a hot mess, but she begins to find some of her own inner strength when she starts to see just how pathetic and hateful Sudeikis is and always has been. The supporting cast is the first red flag to illustrate how imposing Sudeikis is in his character and how much power he manages to hold over them, and they stand virtually helpless on the sidelines like tiny human spectators in a traditional kaiju movie. This becomes the major charm of Colossal. The kaiju scenes are minimal, but the emotional tone of the human scenes is no different than two giant beasts laying waste to everything around them.

Sector 7 and Train To Busan

          I remember hearing about Sector 7 when it was about to be released, but it slipped my mind until I found it by accident this year. It is an unabashed love letter to some of the greatest action horror movies of all time. Nonstop action, top-notch effects, likable characters working the site of a besieged oil rig, and an assortment of visual nods to the likes of Aliens and other classics. Highly recommended, and very little I could say would do it proper justice. If you enjoy movies like The Host, then this is a must.

          I thought I was going to pass up Train To Busan entirely, but I am glad that I changed my mind. A top five favorite for the year, no contest. Zombie movie fatigue has been heavy for several years for me, and I dropped out of the sub-genre almost entirely after The Walking Dead hit its second season on television (around the same time the comics introduced Negan). Train To Busan is another of my top ten favorites of the year, and I am not sure which movie made me ugly cry harder: Train To Busan or Logan. I was a wreck afterward, and this story provides the essence of survival horror.

3 Dev Adam (Three Mighty Men AKA Turkish Captain America and El Santo vs. Spider-Man)

          I had this in my possession for several years before I finally got around to it, and it did not disappoint. The world of Turkish "adaptation" cinema is a strange one, indeed, and there is no end to Turkish versions of Hollywood classics. Similar to The Dragon Lives Again, this is another instance of famous characters in name only, but the plot makes some effort to convince you that Captain America and El Santo live in a shared universe and have come together to thwart an evil plot that goes beyond their own borders. The wild card, of course, is the villainous "Spider-Man," and the traditional Spider-Man, if he exists in this universe, is nowhere to be seen. His bushy eyebrows suggest that he might be J. Jonah Jameson underneath the mask until you realize that the eyebrows are part of the mask. Less a superhero movie, this is an all-in-good-fun foreign spy action thriller to the tune of Diabolik or Batwoman.

Kong: Skull Island and Logan

          Shamefully far down the list beginning at #62, these are the first two movies I saw in theater for 2017. I still draw a blank trying to remember the last time I went to the theater to see two movies in one day. It had to be in the 1990s at least, but I broke that unknown streak of twenty-some-odd years this year to treat myself to a double feature of Logan and Kong: Skull Island. My nephew skipped out of town on that opening weekend for Kong to visit extended family with his mother, leaving me high and dry on a birthday movie outing that had been postponed for two months already. We were supposed to see some rare Ultraman screenings in January, but everything seemed to fall through for us at the beginning of this year. We did not get to see a movie together in theater this year at all until Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, but I was not going to miss my favorite giant ape on the big screen. If I had a gun to my head right now and was forced to choose between Godzilla and Kong, I think a lot of long-time friends and acquaintances would stop speaking to me. I choose Kong. I do not like to choose between them and spend far much more of my time watching Godzilla movies over and over again than Kong movies, but I have a thing for a long list of famous apes in general. Spectreman's Dr. Gori and Karas, Mighty Joe Young, the original King Kong and Son of Kong, and Planet of the Apes are among my all-time favorites, and Koko had a huge impact on me as a kid. This puts Kong in a special category as a beast not far removed from humanity. Godzilla is a force of nature. Kong is a force of emotion, and he is the giant monster originator of the 20th century. Although the final line of Godzilla 2000 states that we can see a little of ourselves in Godzilla, we can see even more of ourselves in Kong. Kong: Skull Island was solid giant monster fun, and I look forward to seeing the direction the new Legendary Monsterverse takes. Mostly, I just hope they pronounce Ghidorah's name right. If you're not saying it like Nick Adams in Monster Zero, then you're wrong.

          Logan is easily in my top five movies for 2017. Like the DC movies, I have avoided the X-Men franchise ever since The Last Stand and have only seen Deadpool and the last half-hour of First Class when I caught it on a cable channel. I enjoyed Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, but even he never drew me to see any of the solo Wolverine movies until Logan came along. I have been a huge fan of What If...?, Elseworlds, The End stories, and parallel universe/future stories because they can play around with canon. Logan was the Marvel MAX of superhero movies, and it was long overdue for a comic-based movie to pack this kind of an emotional punch. It was a Marvel superhero version of a gritty samurai tale, specifically Lone Wolf and Cub with the introduction of X-23, and there was a good dose of The Road Warrior mixed in for good measure. It is a shame that the franchise did not risk taking Wolverine in this direction much sooner. I have followed a great many Wolverine stories in the comics over the years, and the biggest mistake that the X-Men movie franchise made was to glamorize him, but a faithful visual depiction of Logan probably would not sell tickets. Hugh Jackman is too good for the role in every sense of the word... until Logan. Logan does not glamorize Logan. Logan is Logan. Finally, Wolverine can be seen as the long-traveled, weathered, and tortured soul he has been, and we see more clearly his struggle with the animal inside.

          Cross audiences tend to dismiss some of these movies and bring up the "fatigue" argument, but one point to remember about the superhero sub-genre is that it can be formulaic and non-formulaic at the same time. The presence of superheroes is a backdrop. What we are seeing now with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in a grander fashion, is a rebirth of theatrical serials not unlike the 1940s adventures of Batman and Robin, Captain America, Captain Marvel, and other classics like The Crimson Ghost. The only problem, the real "fatigue" involved, is that this is no longer the 25-cent all-day kiddie matinee and that each new superhero movie is not broken down into 15-minute chunks that always end with an explosion or someone going over a cliff to entice you back to see the next chapter. Imagine being expected to go to a theater in 1949 and to see all 264 minutes of Batman and Robin in one sitting as a complete story. At the same time, I wonder what it might have been like to see the Marvel Cinematic Universe broken down into installments to revive that old theatrical tradition. Theatrical presentations of a few television shows have become a thing, but I would like to imagine having the option of going to a local theater every week to see the next episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. instead of tuning in at home. That volume of material, however, is a large part of the "fatigue" of the superhero movie of today more than anything else, and this is where Logan and Deadpool come in. They break away from the formula in just the right way. It is a shame that the X-Men could not share the same studio with the Avengers, but Logan and Deadpool had the right people involved in the project, making their stories more like a comic series that did its own thing instead of diverting away from a solid story for the company-wide crossover event of the week. It will be interesting to see how the MCU translates this concept in Infinity War.

Up next in part three, I revisit a chunk of my Halloween highlights to talk about what I call the new breed of universal (lowercase) monsters taking shape in the footsteps of the classic Universal (uppercase) Monsters. Speaking of shapes, come Hell or high water, I intend to see The Shape of Water as my first new movie of 2018 before it leaves my local theater. I have little doubt that I can incorporate it into the discussion.