Guillermo del Toro – Blood and Porridge

March 19, 2025March 19, 2025

Eggers’ banquet

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) has finally reached Singapore and a few days ago I watched it in the city-state’s excellent arthouse cinema The Projector. This is Eggers’ reimagining of the 1922 silent horror-movie classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which was directed by F.W. Murnau and based surreptitiously on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula – though not so surreptitiously that Murnau and his producers escaped being sued by Stoker’s widow for breach of copyright.

The new Nosferatu has provoked some extreme responses. The reaction has been as polarised as the weird relationship at the film’s core, wherein the beautiful, fragrant Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) gets intimate with the gaunt, rotting, pustuled Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), the dreaded nosferatu – vampire – of the title. A while back, I read a very positive review of it by Wendy Ide in the Guardian but was taken aback by the negativity of the some of the comments below the line: “A turd…” “Just awful…” “Absolutely terrible…” “Beyond boring, absolute crap…”

Well, I lean towards the Wendy Ide end of the Nosferatu debate because I thought the film was great. At least, I thought so during the two hours and 12 minutes I sat before it in The Projector. When my critical faculties started to function again – they’d been in a daze during the film itself – I became aware of a few flaws. But generally, thanks to its atmosphere, its visuals, its sumptuous (if drained) palette and its overall craftsmanship, I found it the most impressive version of Stoker’s novel I’ve seen. And yes, though it retains the original Nosferatu’s German setting and German character-names, this is essentially another retelling of Dracula.

Not that I’m saying it’s my favourite version of Dracula. That accolade belongs to the 1958 Dracula made by Hammer Films, directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Dracula and Van Helsing, which I saw when I was 13 years old. 13 is a formative age, when certain things tend to imprint themselves on your consciousness and become your favourites for life. Also, I feel uncomfortable saying this Nosferatu is better than Murnau’s Nosferatu. More than a century separates the two films, with huge differences in their historical contexts, themes, styles and filmmaking technology, and to me they’re like chalk and cheese. That said, I noticed some of the flaws in Eggers’ Nosferatu when I did compare it with the old one.

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

While we’re on the subject of comparisons, I should say I massively preferred this film to the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola one, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Despite having the peerless Gary Oldman in the title role, it was one of the few films I’ve come close to walking out of in a cinema. I stayed the course in the hope it would improve in its later stages, but it didn’t. Eggers’ Nosferatu is as operatic in its tone and as flamboyant in its visuals as Coppola’s Dracula. However, while Coppola threw everything at the wall – restless camera movements, gimmicky special effects and make-up, over-the-top costumes, hammy performances – in the hope at least some of it would stick and hold the attentions of the raised-on-MTV teenagers he assumed would be the film’s audience, Eggers doesn’t merely show off In Nosferatu. There are also moments of stillness and silence, of subtlety and holding back, of allowing atmosphere to ferment and ripen. Actually, for my money, comparing it to Coppola’s Dracula is like comparing a moody and detail-laden work by a Dutch Master to a hyperactive kids’ cartoon.

Nosferatu’s storyline follows the Dracula template. Young estate agent Thomas Hutter (the stand-in for Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, here played by Nicholas Hoult) is despatched from the fictional German port-city of Wisburg to a castle in Transylvania, where he has to supervise the paperwork for the purchase of a Wisburg mansion by the mysterious Transylvanian aristocrat Count Orlok. Hutter’s sojourn in Orlok’s castle becomes a terrifying ordeal as he discovers the vampirical nature of his host. He ends up plunging from one of its windows, into a river, while the Count sets off for Wisburg.

The Count’s chosen mode of travel is by ship – Romania, which Transylvania is part of now, borders on the Black Sea and Germany’s coast runs along the North and Baltic Seas, so this is evidently a long voyage – and he brings with him a horde of plague-carrying rats, which first destroy the ship’s crew and then start infecting the citizens of Wisburg when he reaches his destination. These plague-rats are both a physical manifestation of Orlok’s evil and, presumably, a way of disguising his activities – with people dropping dead of plague left, right and centre, nobody’s going to notice a few blood-drained corpses.

But Orlok’s presence has been felt in Wisburg long before his arrival there. Hutter’s wife Ellen – the Nosferatu equivalent of Stoker’s Mina Harker – has had an inexplicable psychic link to the ghoulish Count since her childhood and has already, in her dreams, pledged herself to him. Also, Hutter’s boss Knock (Simon McBurney) has been communing with Orlok via some occult rituals. Sending Hutter off to Transylvania was clearly part of a plan to relocate the vampire to the feeding-grounds of Wisburg. Knock is the film’s version of Milo Renfield, the asylum-inmate who in Stoker’s novel becomes Dracula’s disciple. Accordingly, Knock goes insane, gets incarcerated, escapes and does Orlok’s bidding in the city. Meanwhile, the thirsty Count makes a beeline for Ellen and those around her…

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Eggers’ cast-members acquit themselves well. Lily-Rose Depp is extremely impressive in a role that requires her to be frightened, helpless, yearning, lascivious, possessed and defiant – often a couple of those things in one scene. As a female foil to Dracula, she’s as good as Eva Green’s character Vanessa Ives in John Logan’s gothic-horror TV show Penny Dreadful (2014-16). Likening someone to the mighty Eva Green is big praise from me.

Playing Jonathan Harker in a Dracula film is a thankless task. You have to be bland and bloodless enough to add spice to the forthcoming dalliance between your missus and the Count, to suggest she’s a desperate 19^th-century housewife who might actually welcome the vampire’s kiss. But you also have to be interesting enough to make the audience root for you while you’re trapped in Castle Dracula. And Nicholas Hoult does what’s required as the Harker-esque Hutter. His restraint contrasts with the silent-movie acting of the original Hutter, Gustav von Wangenheim, who spent the early scenes of the 1922 Nosferatu grinning like a maniac.

On the other hand, Simon McBurney is unnervingly off-the-scale as Knock. The 1922 Knock, Alexander Granach, was off-the-scale too, but McBurney’s one is allowed to slather himself in some full-on, 2024-stye blood and gore. (He follows the hallowed Renfield tradition of chomping on small animals.) If there’s a criticism, it’s that he doesn’t get enough to do. More on that in a minute.

Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe respectively play a beleaguered Wisburg physician, Dr Sievers, and a Swiss expert on the occult, Professor Von Franz, who correspond to Stoker’s Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing. When Hutter gets back to Wisburg, they team up with him to put a stop to Count Orlok’s onslaught. Willem Dafoe won’t replace Peter Cushing in my affections as the ultimate cinematic Van Helsing, but he’s delightful as the eccentric, cat-loving Von Franz. Kind old gent though he is, Von Franz concocts a plan to destroy the vampire that may have tragic consequences for the people he’s supposed to be protecting.

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

As for Bill Skarsgård and the film’s depiction of Count Orlok… I can see why it’s been controversial. Some have been disappointed that Eggers and Skarsgård didn’t replicate the iconic look of actor Max Schreck, who played the Count in 1922 as a bald, gaunt creature with rodentlike incisors, Spock ears and unseemly tufts of ear and eyebrow hair. Indeed, in the first part of the film, we hardly see Orlok. During the scenes set in his castle, he’s unsettlingly obscured by a haze of firelight, candlelight, shadows and darkness. But when Eggers’ cameras finally reveal him, he’s an icky, mouldering thing, from the neck down at least, and he sports a monstrous and frankly distracting moustache.

I know Dracula had a moustache in the novel, and certain actors have played him with one, such as John Carradine in the Universal movies House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), and Christopher Lee in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970). But this must be the droopiest, shaggiest Drac-tache ever.

Maybe Eggers avoided the Max-Schreck look because he was sensitive to the accusations of antisemitism that dogged the old Nosferatu – that Schreck’s Orlok played on common German stereotypes and caricatures of Jewish people at the time. Or maybe he just decided that look had become too much of a cliché. As well as a slap-headed, pointy-eared vampire featuring in the previous remake of Nosferatu, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1977), similar ones have appeared in the 1979 TV version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, the original film version of What We Do In The Shadows (2014), and Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II (2002), where the leader of the baldy-vampires was played by Luke Goss. (Yes… a Bros-feratu.)

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

It’s also debatable if Eggers and Skarsgård made the right choice for Orlok’s loud, guttural voice, which booms out of the screen like the Voice of the Mysterons from Gerry Anderson’s TV show Captain Scarlet (1967-68) with a Slavic accent. At least it’s different… And Skarsgård put a lot of work into creating those vocals, training with an Icelandic opera singer and even studying Mongolian throat singing. But I actually found Yorkshireman Ralph Ineson’s deep, gruff, north-of-England tones more menacing, even though his character, Dr Sievers, is one of the good guys. (Sievers must have had a medical practice in Leeds before moving to Wisburg.)

Elsewhere, not a great deal happens during the second half of the film, though Dafoe’s charming performance keeps us engaged. The latter part of the 1922 film is enlivened by a sub-plot involving Knock, who gets blamed for the mayhem in Wisburg after Orlok’s ship arrives. Believing him to be the real vampire, the townspeople pursue him through the streets and the surrounding countryside, in scenes that are still impressive today – Knock perched like a gargoyle atop a vertiginous rooftop, for instance, or the mob mistaking a distant scarecrow for him, rushing at it and tearing it to pieces. Eggers removes this sub-plot, however, and Knock (who in the original film didn’t even meet Orlok physically) serves as a conventional vampire’s acolyte. If nothing else, this gives the Count someone to transport his coffin from the Wisburg docks to the mansion he’s bought. In the 1922 Nosferatu, he suffered the indignity of having to carry the coffin himself.

So, the film drifts somewhat later on and I’m not fully convinced by its portrayal of Count Orlok. But overall I really enjoyed Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. It’s a feast – an Eggers’ banquet – of gorgeousness, gloom, sensuality, repulsiveness, grue, humour, absurdity and tragedy. It has fabulous visuals, entertaining performances and a smart balance between the aesthetically pleasing and the grotesquely yucky, meaning it should satisfy both cerebral arthouse types and horror-movie aficionados more interested in blood, gore and plague-rats.

And I can’t understand why some people disliked it so much. This Nosferatu isn’t Dross-feratu, it’s the Absolute-boss-feratu.

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

October 19, 2023October 24, 2023

A Russell-ing in the dark

© Penguin Classics

Another post for Halloween…

Even if the American horror, science-fiction and mystery writer Ray Russell hadn’t done any writing, it’s likely he still would have had an impact on one of his preferred genres.

In the 1950s, after serving in the wartime US Air Force, studying at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and working for the United States Treasury, he became fiction editor for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine. Playboy was an odd combination of smutty pictures of hot ladies and seriously well-written stories and articles. The magazine’s detractors have dismissed this as a cynical ploy on Hefner’s part, propagating the idea that you could simultaneously be an unsavoury male lech and a connoisseur of the literary and intellectual. Hence, by perusing the latest fiction by Philip Roth or an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, its readers didn’t have to feel bad about jerking off to a picture of the Playmate of the Month a few pages earlier.

Whatever. During the 1950s, Russell must have kept many horror and fantasy writers, such as Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Charles Beaumont, afloat by regularly buying their short works and printing them in Playboy‘s glossy – if sometimes ejaculation-splattered – pages. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, those guys had moved onto television and were writing scripts for shows like The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller (1960-62). (In Robert Bloch’s case, his 1959 novel Psycho also became something of a hit when it was adapted for the cinema screen by a chap called Alfred Hitchcock). These shows imprinted themselves on the DNA of the kids watching them, who occasionally grew up to be popular filmmakers, like Steven Spielberg, or popular novelists, like Stephen King.

In effect, indirectly, Russell helped cultivate an unsettling, mid-20^th-century American gothic. This was one in which the world suddenly and inexplicably turned dark and weird for the citizens of post-war, suburban America – for office-bound men in grey-flannel suits, dutiful housewives in nipped-in-at-the-waist housedresses, wholesome kids playing behind white picket fences. And it’s one whose influence is still felt today.

But it’s Ray Russell the writer, rather than the editor, whom I want to discuss here. I’ve just read a collection of his short stories, first published in 1985 and now reprinted as a ‘Penguin Classic’, entitled Haunted Castles. Yes, I bet nobody working for Penguin Books back in 1985 imagined their prestigious publishing company would one day consider a book called Haunted Castles a ‘classic’. Its seven stories show Russell’s love for a different type of gothic fiction – the full-blooded, 19^th-century variety exemplified by such books as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1821), Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872) and, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

Russell’s tales here take place in a world of wild, sparsely-populated mountains and forests, fearsome thunder-and-lightning storms, nightmarish coach-rides and remote settlements inhabited by superstitious villagers. And, as the collection’s title suggests, castles. Each one is a “vast edifice of stone” exuding “an austerity, cold and repellent, a hint of ancient mysteries long buried, an effluvium of medieval dankness and decay.” In fact, four of these stories feature castles and they’re all equipped with torture chambers: “There stood the infernal rack, and branding irons and thumbscrews, and that grim table called in French peine forte et dure, whereon helpless wretches were constrain’d to lie under intolerable iron weights until the breath of life was press’d from them.”

Occupying the first two-thirds of the book are three novellas that are frequently regarded as a trilogy, though they don’t have anything in common apart from their gothic settings and trimmings and the fact that they have single-word, polysyllabic titles beginning with ‘s’: Sardonicus, Sagittarius and Sanguinarius.

© Columbia Pictures

Kicking off the proceedings is Sardonicus, Russell’s best-remembered story. It’s told in the first-person by a 19^th-century London physician called Sir Robert Cargrave, who specialises in treating muscular disorders. The title character summons him to – surprise! – his castle in ‘a remote and mountainous region of Bohemia’. Sardonicus suffered a nasty mishap in his youth. Following his father’s funeral, he discovered that prior to his death the old man had purchased a winning lottery ticket. Inconveniently, the ticket was pocketed in his burial clothes. The avaricious Sardonicus dug up his father to retrieve it, and claim the attendant fortune, but paid a hideous price. Seeing a terrifying death’s-head grin on his parent’s decaying face, he was so traumatised that his facial muscles froze and fixed his mouth in an identical, grotesque rictus. Now resembling a 19^th-century version of the Joker in Batman, he tasks Cargrave with finding a cure for his affliction.

Channelling Dracula with its setting and Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1909) with its disfigured central character, Sardonicus benefits from both an irresistible set-up and Russell’s knowingly-florid prose-style. Also, he manages to sustain the reader’s sympathy for Sardonicus despite it becoming clear early on that he’s an evil shit who probably got what he deserved. Sardonicus’s unfortunate wife is someone Cargrave once loved from afar, and the smiley-faced cad soon makes clear to the physician that unspeakable things will be done to her if he fails in his mission.

Meanwhile, Sagittarius and Sanginarius channel other macabre literary and historical characters. With Sagittarius, it’s the dual personage described in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), though the setting isn’t Victorian London but decadent fin-de-siecle Paris – well, Paris in 1909, to be exact. Russell has a lot of fun evoking the city’s simultaneously sophisticated and sleazy theatrical world at the time, though when the Jekyll-and-Hyde trope surfaces, it’s not difficult to guess how the story will end.

Sanguinarius focuses on Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious 16^th / 17^th-century Hungarian countess who allegedly bathed in the blood of hundreds of murdered girls and women, believing it was a beauty treatment that’d hold the ravages of old age at bay. Interestingly, Russell’s take on the legend depicts Bathory as, initially at least, an innocent victim. The goodness gets gradually squeezed out of her, and she becomes corrupted, by an evil entourage around her. Russell also downplays the idea that she bathed in blood to stay young. Rather, the slaughter is mostly fuelled by sheer badness, by the thrill of being ‘steep’d… in reeking devilish rites, and vilest pleasures… sharing both dark lust and blame.”

Of the other stories, Comet Wine is the most substantial. Set in a community of composers and musicians in 19^th-century St Petersburg, this one draws on the Faust legend and reflects the love Russell – a student at the Chicago Conservatory of Music – had for classical music. The remaining three pieces, The Runaway Lovers, The Vendetta and The Cage, are comparatively brief affairs and are best described as gothic fairy stories. But each comes with a nasty barb in its tail.

Reading these stories, there’s a sense of Russell having his cake and eating it. He describes horrible, bloody, perverted goings-on in stylised prose and with obvious relish, but at the same time doesn’t go into detail and rub our noses in the gore. Elizabeth Bathory merely laments, for example, about “the manner by which these hapless prisoners were put to death: not with the swift, blunt mercy that is dealt even to dumb cattle, but by prolong’d and calculated tortures, which I have not stomach to set down here, so degraded and inhuman were they.” A fine line is trod between the erudite and the sordid – a line that, come to think of it, Hugh Hefner would have approved of.

© Santa Clara Productions / American International Pictures

Incidentally, Russell also wrote for the movies but, sadly, no one properly managed to capture his flamboyant gothic visions onscreen. He scripted a film version of Sardonicus in 1961, with the title slightly adjusted to Mr Sardonicus. The film terrified me when I saw it on late-night TV at the age of ten. However, as it was directed by William Castle, a filmmaker more fondly remembered for the outrageous gimmicks with which he publicised his movies – plastic skeletons flying above cinema audiences’ heads in The House on Haunted Hill (1959), special ‘Illusion-o’ viewing glasses to allow audiences to see the ghosts of the title in 13 Ghosts (1960), a 45-second ‘fright-break’ near the end of Homicidal (1961) so that cinema-goers who couldn’t handle the horror could flee the auditorium (and get a refund on the way out) – rather than for the quality of the movies themselves, I imagine it wouldn’t stand up well today.

Around the same time, Russell penned scripts for two directors who’d recently made their names pioneering a newer, bolder, more vivid form of gothic-horror cinema – Terence Fisher, who’d helmed Hammer Films’ revivals of Dracula and Frankenstein, and Roger Corman, who’d launched a series of adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories for American International Pictures. The results, alas, represented neither director at their best. Russell wrote The Horror of It All (1964) for Fisher while he was moonlighting from Hammer and working for the low-budget Lippert Films. A horror-comedy about an oddball family getting murdered one-by-one in a dilapidated mansion, it was evidently designed to cash in on a remake, released the year before, of the 1932 classic The Old Dark House. (Confusingly, 1963’s Old Dark House remake had been produced by Hammer and directed by William Castle.) Again, I found The Horror of It All scary enough, and funny enough, when I saw it as a ten-year-old, but I hate to think what it would seem like now, 48 years on.

Russell scripted an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation for Roger Corman, 1962’s The Premature Burial. It has its moments but lacks the flair of Corman’s best Poe movies like The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) or Masque of the Red Death (1964). This is partly due to it not having the energising presence of Corman’s usual Poe-movie star, Vincent Price. And it’s hamstrung by a lame ending.

I prefer a non-gothic film Russell wrote for Corman, the sci-fi chiller X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963). This is about a scientist, played by Ray Milland, who experiments on his own eyes and ends up seeing beyond the visual spectrum that’s perceptible to humans. Nothing good comes of this, of course. Milland’s increasingly penetrative vision goes from letting him see though clothing – hence a party scene where, to his bemusement, the dancing revellers appear to be cavorting in the nude – to letting him see the distant edges of the universe, where horrible things lurk. How one reacts to the film today depends on how one reacts to the special effects that Corman, a famously thrifty filmmaker, deploys to represent Milland’s visions. They vary from psychedelic patterns and filters to (when he’s peering into human bodies) flashes of what are obviously photos and diagrams taken from human-anatomy manuals. The effects are either desperately ingenious or just plain desperate, depending on your attitude. Still, the film cultivates an effective mood of cosmic horror and the ending is nightmarish in its logic.

Ray Russell died in 1999, before there’d been a truly impressive cinematic version of his work. Actually, there still hasn’t. But returning to Haunted Castles… I notice that the forward to my edition of it has been written by none other than the Oscar-winning Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro, who specialises in making horror and fantasy films.

So… How about it Guillermo?

April 16, 2021April 18, 2021

Bungle in the jungle

Godzilla versus Kong. The King of the Monsters versus the Eighth Wonder of the World. The supreme clash of the titans, the ultimate showdown between the royalty of kaiju cinema. In the left corner, we have King Kong, the giant simian star of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 classic that created the template for movies wherein prehistoric monsters rampage through human metropolises. And in the right corner, we have Godzilla, the massive radioactive-breathed lizard who first surfaced in 1954, courtesy of Toho Studios, to flatten Tokyo as a thinly-disguised metaphor for the atomic bombs that’d flattened real Japanese cities a decade earlier – although, while he appeared in dozens of subsequent movies battling against similarly-sized monstrous adversaries, he gradually morphed from being the destroyer of Japan to being the unofficial champion of it.

Having this pair square up to one another – an event that’s only happened once before, in the ultra-ropey but endearingly goofy 1962 Toho movie King Kong vs Godzilla – should be an epic cinematic experience, the kaiju equivalent of Muhammed Ali versus Joe Frazer or Ali versus George Foreman, of the Thrilla in Manilla or the Rumble in the Jungle.

Alas, the recently released Godzilla vs Kong, the fourth entry in Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse franchise, isn’t so much the Rumble in the Jungle as a Bungle in the Jungle.

Of its three predecessors, the first instalment, 2014’s Godzilla, directed by talented Welshman Gareth Edwards, is the one that stands as a quality film. It had some truly cinematic sequences and a memorably sombre tone, embodied in the apocalyptic clouds of ash and dust that swirled around Godzilla while he went about his city-demolishing business. However, it wasn’t the big, enjoyably dumb monster-on-the-loose movie that many people expected and in some quarters it was met with disappointment. And I have to say that while I admired Godzilla, I didn’t massively enjoy it.

Edwards’ downbeat film was the antithesis of the second film in the franchise, Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island, which arrived three years later. Set in the early 1970s, this was a brash, colourful rollercoaster of a movie that managed to balance crowd-pleasing action with enough smart touches to engage the more cerebral members of the audience – smart touches ranging from jokes about Richard Nixon to an outrageous sequence where Kong takes on what is basically the fleet of helicopters from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), though to the accompaniment of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid rather than Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. Kong: Skull Island also benefitted from having a cast of veteran character actors like John C. Reilly, Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman chew up any scenery that Kong wasn’t stomping on.

By the third movie, though, Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), the rot had set in. The kaiju remained magnificent, but too much screen-time was devoted to the human characters, most of whom barely qualified as two-dimensional let alone three-dimensional. Also, between the film’s set-pieces were sections where screenwriters Dougherty and Zach Shields couldn’t be bothered plotting in any credible or meaningful way. You got ridiculous sequences like, for example, the bit where 12-year-old kid Madison Russell (Milly Bobby Brown) strolls out of the heavily fortified, heavily guarded lair of master-terrorist Jonah (Charles Dance) carrying a vital piece of technology that can communicate with and summon the monsters. She then manages to set up the device and operate it in Kenway Park, home-ground of the Boston Red Sox. Wow. When I was 12 years old, I was still having problems tying a knot correctly in my school tie.

Brown’s Madison Russell character is, unfortunately, back in Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs Kong and the chasms in plot logic are as gaping as they were before. Here, she and a couple of conspiracy-theory-obsessed associates infiltrate, no, wander into the premises of a secretive corporation called Apex, which they suspect is up to no good. With almost no visible effort, this motley collection of teenagers / conspiracy nuts discovers and breaks into a series of secret subterranean levels that are full of futuristic technology. Apex might be the bees’ knees when it comes to developing high-tech gizmos, but they are evidently shit at hiring competent security staff.

The human characters involved in the film’s other main storyline, played by Alexander Skarsgård and Rebecca Hall (who, by accident or design in this movie, looks a bit like New Zealand premier Jacinda Ahern), fare no better. They’re saddled with a don’t-even-try-to-think-about-it subplot where they join an expedition, sponsored by that shifty Apex corporation, to travel to the fabled ‘hollow earth’ alluded to by previous movies in the franchise. To get there, they need to use King Kong to lead them, like a giant homing pigeon or upstream-swimming salmon, through the labyrinthine tunnels that connect it with the earth’s surface. The hollow earth, which looks like the planet in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) with some gravity-defying upside-down bits, is not only the home of Kong’s ancestors but also the location of a new energy source that Apex are keen to procure. Once they find the energy source, they promptly download it to a computer in Hong Kong. Yes, download it. Don’t ask me how.

But I’ll try to be positive. What did I like about Godzilla vs Kong? Well, the first battle between the kaiju is a cracker. Godzilla erupts out of the waves to confront Kong, who’s chained to the deck of one of a fleet of battleships and aircraft carriers, and the two beasties then slug it out while hopping from one beleaguered ship’s deck to another. The sequence put in mind slightly of the 1974 Bond film Live and Let Die, in which Roger Moore escapes to safety by using some bobbing alligators as stepping stones.

Also, I liked the character of the little girl who learns to communicate secretly with Kong via sign language. Played with a charming simplicity and straightforwardness by Kaylee Hottle, who in real life is a member of the deaf community, she wins more of the audience’s sympathy than all the synthetic, going-through-the-motions adult characters put together.

And I liked Milly Bobby Brown’s nerdy friend Josh, who gets unwillingly roped into her scheme to infiltrate Apex. This is partly because he’s played by Julian Dennison from Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) and partly because when we first meet him he’s listening to Breaking the Law by Judas Priest.

And I liked how, two-thirds of the way through, a third classic kaiju, one who made his debut in 1974’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, suddenly shows up to give Kong and Godzilla a common foe. It’s just a pity that the ensuing stramash, which takes place in Hong Kong, feels a bit second-hand. Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) has already featured giant organic monsters and giant robotic ones beating the crap out of each other in Hong Kong. Also, the final denouement, involving a heavily foreshadowed flask of whisky, is stupid even by the recent standards of this franchise.

At the end of the day, I can’t say I liked Godzilla vs Kong any more than Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The earlier film at least treated us to spectacular re-imaginings of some of Toho Studio’s kaiju heavyweights, including the vicious three-headed dragon King Ghidorah, the scaly giant Pteranodon Rodan and the vast gorgeous lepidopteran Mothra. The new film doesn’t have that level of interest, seeing as we’ve already met Godzilla and Kong in previous films.

At least I managed to see Godzilla vs Kong on a big screen, for this was my first outing to a cinema during the Covid-19 pandemic since I saw Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020) in one last summer. That no doubt made the film appear more spectacular than if I’d seen it, streamed, on a domestic-sized screen. And I have to say that in this large-sized format the film certainly held the attentions of the Sri Lankan kids and teenagers whom I watched it alongside.

I’m not, however, in any rush to see a fifth instalment in the MonsterVerse franchise. Unless they figure out a way of getting Gamera into Movie Number Five.