Paprika (Papurika) (2006)

A trio of scientists are working on the psychiatric possibilities offered by a remarkable new device that can record patients dreams. When the device is stolen their own subconscious minds begin to be invaded and hijacked by an unknown assailant and the boundaries of reality and imagination start to blur. With the help of the mysterious alter-ego Paprika, and a police detective who is himself a patient, the team try to infiltrate this unconscious world to track down the missing machine and the person controlling it.

While Miyazaki may have the lions' share of international recognition for his masterful Japanese animation; in the west, science-fiction anime is for the most part still the reserve of a particularly geekish brand of teenage boys. Twenty-odd years on, Akira still dominates this violent and neon-lit landscape and a tendency to  excess has marred much of what came after and disguised the fact that genuinely brilliant and original work has been quietly going on.

Director Satoshi Kon, whose career was tragically cut short by cancer earlier this year has been responsible for several vibrant, feverish slabs of dark but mature storytelling since his minor breakout hit debut Perfect Blue in 1998. Paprika was only his fourth feature as director and sadly will now probably be his last (there is an unfinished fifth currently in limbo), but he's left behind a stunning piece of work. Spritely creative; at times madcap and surreal, with armies of dream monster toys crashing through the walls of reality, time stopping, physics distorting, characters running through alternate films playing in their own mind. It's a bit of a head rush in parts, but still takes the time to establish meaningful characters with complex motivations.

Sci-Fi stories of dreams and subconscious have of course been around for years, and in the concepts and visual ideas present here, one can detect hints of Strange Days, Brainstorm and Blade Runner. But Paprika takes these several steps further and creates a dizzying sense of multi-layered reality. Its most recognisable aspects are those that it has itself gone on to influence, because if any film might hold a candle to the creative invention on show here, it's Inception, and director Christopher Nolan has made no secret of the dept he owes to this obvious forbear.

Compared to the clockwork precision engineering of Nolan's masterwork, Paprika is a touch freewheeling and can occasionally loose the viewer during some bizarre left turns. Plus some dialogue comes across a little awkwardly, although this might just be an issue of the subtitle translation. But these are very minor quibbles. This is grown-up animation of dazzling invention and well worth seeking out.

Rating: 4/5

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009)

OK, the joke is over.

For those who missed it, MSvGO as I will henceforth refer to it, is a zero budget, zero talent, direct-to-dvd exploitation knock-off that generated a little internet buzz last year through a combination of a daft trailer with a few bad looking but utterly OTT monster-mash moments, and its glorious none-more-b-movie title. I never had any intention of actually watching it of course but it popped up on TV one indolent evening and so, ninety pointless, wasted minutes later, here we are.

There is an over-used maxim of b-movie-dom that holds that a movie can be so bad that it is good. This is very rarely, if ever, true. Bad movies, and I mean REALLY bad movies, are just plain bad. They do not come out the other side and attain some nirvana of unintentional silliness that renders them an inverse masterpiece. They simply reek of depressing, incompetent, disastrous badness that makes them an absolute headache to watch.

It's hard in the space of one review to list all the things that are wrong with this movie. The story is naturally non-existent, just a few lines of insanely nonsensical set-up to get straight to the action. Unfortunately the action, of which you saw the whole shebang in the trailer, is so shoddily staged as to render even guilty entertainment value void from the off. The creatures we've all come to see rarely appear and look utterly fake and dreadful in the moments that they do. Strange white flashes keep invading the screen, perhaps signaling explosions or missile launches? I don't know, because the whole thing is so incompetently edited that I can't tell what events follow from which scene. Abuse of physics in a movie may well have a new record holder; we are told that the undersea leviathans are traveling at 500Mph, yes, that's right, five-hundred; underwater! and in one sequence a nuclear submarine is taken entirely in the jaws of the shark and shaken like a rag-doll whilst inside, the crew just stumble around with less enthusiasm than Kirk's gang during a mild phaser attack.

There are barely three sets in the entire movie, two command rooms on opposite sides of the planet which appear to be, remarkably, the same room; only with slightly different coloured lighting, and a lab which has been built from the leftovers of a 60s Doctor Who episode (but with some handy furnishings available for impromptu lovemaking). Oh, and in my favorite scene we are treated to a cockpit interior made from a cardboard box with no windows, a handful of oversize Christmas tree lights, and equipped with a pilot screaming some tosh about “going down” a full thirty seconds before encountering anything.

It seems churlish to even mention such basics as acting or script at this point. It's easiest to simply report that both are notable only by their complete absence. In their place, former pop teen wastrel Debbie Gibson and a clutch of am-dram extras chew on random clichés as though being fed on solids for the first time.

Most movies that are simply not any good usually fall down on such things as character development, dramatic structure, internal logic or the niceties of pacing etc. But however much fun it might be to fling the mud it is probably fair to say that most are at least made with a fundamental level of basic competency that suggests the Director and DOP may have spent a few evenings at film school night classes. MSvGO however, is so many leagues of ineptness beyond this that as I sat there dumbfounded I became genuinely convinced that I could have walked on that set, having never held a film camera or written a line of dialog in my life, and directed any of those scenes with improved results.

Utter bilge, do not watch under any circumstances.

Rating: 1/5