A mystery is consuming the island of the Busan Midnight Movie so we’re journeying to another island full of mystery: Fog Island! Who are the heroes of this tale? What revenge is being plotting by the visitors’ host? And upon whom will that fate befall?
After doing March of the Monsters and drug films all through April, I was looking to get away from themes and just post random movies again. However, I also decided to stop doing Busan Midnight Movie. It’s a curious amount of work for very little output (usually about 3-4 minutes of content outside the movie and serial) and I’m indifferent to most of it. The things I enjoy most are repurposing/recontextualizing the media I’m featuring (a la “Last Time” and the sundry promos) or showcasing some really gonzo flick that even I hadn’t been aware of before. Plus I feel like my host segments, in general, aren’t that interesting or funny.
The latter is a consequence of doing the show every week. I have a fulltime job and want to do things other than this silly YouTube show (like cook, take Korean classes, and watch other movies), but all my time was being taken up by the Busan Midnight Movie. On top of that, because I’d imposed such a quick turnaround time on myself, I couldn’t do the work of pre-screening lots of films and picking things that really stood out. War God felt like a bit of a peak in that respect: a truly gonzo feature that I reused to cut into a music video. If I wanted to have fun like that, I’d have to change something
So it was sometime during March or April where I decided I wanted to stop doing the show the way I was doing it and wrap up, let’s say, season 1. I grabbed a lot of movies that seemed potentially interesting from the Archive and uploaded them all to YouTube to see what garnered a copyright claim.
All of this is a long story that probably would have been spread out over several production notes if I’d been updating these posts about the show regularly.
Fog Island and The Ninth Guest (which I mention in the episode) didn’t trigger any claims so I watched them both. Initially I was going to do the episode on The Ninth Guest because it seemed vaguely overwrought, the plot didn’t make sense, and it had very clear echoes of Saw and Clue. Also, the initial copy of Fog Island I opened had been encoded for the iPod and so was formatted for a very small screen.
However, when I found a different copy of Fog Island and watched that, I saw that this was at once a very similar film that was also more fun. It had vim, it had recognizable actors, and it had a sense of knowing what it was about and rushing straight to it. Also, and I didn’t mention this in the episode, it stars George Zucco who was a memorable face from a lot of the films I initially watched for the PD Project. I feel like there’s a nice symmetry in finding a movie starring one of the main figures of the project I originally started to provide more access for movies to be used in midnight movie shows.
As for the movie itself, as I said, I think it’s pretty fun. The characters are all distinct enough and there is a question of how things will shake out in the end. I like the trope of an isolated mansion on an island that’s full of secret passages and panels, plus it has a really brutal death scene at the end. Nothing explicit is shown (and I’m probably overselling it by describing it this way), but the idea of what is happening, that you know the characters are bound to their fate, and that it will take them a while to die honestly freaked me out a bit.
Plus the movie is “good-bad” in a way that’s solid. The putative love interest doesn’t learn how to act or deliver his lines until 2/3’s-3/4’s of the way through the film and the whole thing is highly riffable. Honestly, this is something it has in common with The Ninth Guest which has more of an air of self-seriousness as well as silences that are begging for audience contributions
Wrap Up:
The Good: Strikes the right notes. Everyone in the movie (save one) knows what the work is and gives you the kind of movie you want it to be. As for the exception, he’s so bad as to be hilarious which makes the experience even more joyful. It’s quick, straightforward, and fun.
The Bad: The print. I wish I had access to a sharper print. There are sequences where characters are walking through caverns and secret passages, but they’re so dim and muddy that you can’t wholly tell who’s doing what where. Granted, these are incidental moments, but as a general rule, I always wish for things that make literally watching the film easier.
Production note: I mentioned uploading movies to see what garnered a copyright claim and some of the flicks that did were Korean animations produced by Joseph Lai (he’s the producer responsible for Godfrey Ho’s output). They’re just re-dubbed collages of other animations and I was hoping to feature them on the show because, surely they’re ridiculous (I haven’t watched them yet), plus I don’t have any Korean content on the Busan Midnight Movie. Seems like an omission. In March of the Monsters, I did note that I did The Giant Gila Monster because the Korean kaiju film Yongary was owned by MGM. The same thing seemed to be happening here so I opted for the random films I could find that didn’t trigger copyright. In the end, I’m glad I did because it led me to flicks I hadn’t seen before that I enjoyed (Spooks Run Wild, this film, and next week’s The Night Caller).
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