While America’s Godzilla/Kong buddy-cop franchise offers heaping helpings of dumb monster fun, substance is virtually nonexistent. And prior to 2016, you could easily argue Japanese studios weren’t handling the iconic kaiju with much more tact. The Showa- and Heisei-era Godzilla films have a nostalgic charm, but beyond 1954’s original, you can only destroy a major metropolitan so many times before it feels inconsequential.

Fortunately, Shin Godzilla’s procedural take on the human drama paired with a grotesque creature design made the stakes feel real again. And with 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, director Takashi Yamazaki brought the most human and emotionally earned story to ever feature the atomic lizard. Despite not quite reaching the highs of its Oscar-winning predecessor, Godzilla Minus Zero comes surprisingly close, even as this series stomps over what feels like more familiar ground.

Two years after Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) successfully destroy Godzilla and anchor his, uh, chunks to the bottom of the ocean, another monstrous threat terrorizes central Japan. Noda leads a kaiju response team, working with the recent American occupation of Japan to subsequently test an experimental bomb and an experimental weather-based weapon. Both fail and only empower their target, inspiring Professor Murakami (Min Tanaka), a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, to recommend a more drastic and destructive strategy.

While Godzilla Minus Zero does expand on what kinds of narratives can unfold within the franchise, it also feels overly dependent on what Minus One established. Survivor’s guilt and the escalation of war appropriately ring true, but despite what feels like more time spent with Noda and Koichi’s family, the real expansion of the ideas explored in the prior film come through Professor Murakami. Tanaka stands out amid several powerful performances, presenting a decent into vengeful justice that feels unhinged, but not outright hysterical.

Of course, most aren’t hankering for a Godzilla film because they expect a deeply emotion arc. Yeah, it’s a welcome addition, but inevitably, you’ll yearn for a rampage or two. Minus Zero delivers in this department, maybe even more so from a technical perspective than Minus One, but it also feels more subdued. Really, there are only two or three major set pieces and handful of standalone sequences. Granted, they’re all executed exceptionally well, especially a dog-fighting scene that concludes the first act, but they do feel lighter. It’s like when the human narrative stalls, the kaiju action doesn’t come quite in the nick of time. You’ll welcome it when it shows up, but that misstep in pacing makes it feel a bit less impactful than it could be.

Minus Zero also keeps a strong sense of scale, which is overwhelmingly supported by Naoki Sato returning for another exceptional score. More so than any piece of the sound design, Sato makes the monsters feel a bit more grand, and the quieter moments that are almost less intimate due to the cinematography, still feel tender.

Even if Minus Zero doesn’t quite escape that very tall shadow of Minus One, it’s still a worthy sequel that leaves the future of Godzilla — at least when it’s produced by the Japanese studio Toho — shining bright. Whatever mathematical equation the kaiju winds up in next, the result, like this flick, should be positive. —Daniel Bokemper

If Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark didn’t make it clear enough, take it from Paul W.S. Anderson: You really don’t need eyes to see. At least, you don’t need them after you take the scenic route through an interdimensional version of hell, courtesy of the titular spacecraft in the grimdark, sci-fi schlock-fest, Event Horizon. 

In 2040, the Event Horizon, a massive ship designed for high-volume space travel and colonization, vanished during its first cruise. Seven years later, it re-emerges. Capt. Miller (Laurence Fishburne, The Matrix), Dr. Weir (Sam Neill, Possession) and a handful of other unfortunate crew members fly out to investigate it aboard the Lewis and Clark, a vessel about one-hundredth of the Event Horizon’s size.

The Lewis and Clark crew discover the Event Horizon abandoned, save for a few eviscerated corpses. A few audio logs and one horrific recording later, Capt. Miller resolves to abandon ship. That’s easier said than done, however, as the seemingly possessed craft reactivates its warp drive, trapping the crew of the Lewis and Clark aboard. The survivors race to execute a desperate backup plan as the demonic presence that seized the ship slowly digs its way into their psyches.

Hellraiser: Bloodline wishes it were Event Horizon. Not that the bar for sacrilegious sci-fi horror is super-high, but for his film, Anderson (the Resident Evil franchise) brings tight cohesion, a genuinely intriguing setting and a quality of acting that leaves the rest of the genre in shambles. Fishburne and Neill transition from contentious comrades to cosmic nemeses believably enough, and the sparse comic relief from Richard T. Jones (2014’s Godzilla) doesn’t feel terribly forced despite being cheesy as — appropriately — hell.

While some may call Alien’s Nostromo the quintessential haunted house in space, Event Horizon’s lead spacecraft may actually exceed it. No, it doesn’t feature cramped quarters and an acid-bleeding Xenomorph, but it is actually haunted by the impression of an ineffable, chaotic dimension. Unlike the versions of space hell seen in Warhammer 40,000 or Doom, however, Event Horizon is less concerned with socketing in demons to make itself a half-baked creature feature. Instead, its terror is predicated largely on just the idea of hell.

Leaning on the concept as a source of horror instead of an overly manifested version of it (like the aforementioned Hellraiser sequel) likewise helps push the film’s theme. Event Horizon centers on a civilization that has pushed too far. It wasn’t good enough for us to get to another planet in a few days; we had to go faster than light itself, and in doing so, we didn’t just travel beyond humanity’s physical limitations, but the psychological ones as well.

Dr. Weir’s transformation into essentially a cenobite at the climax undermines this idea a bit, but otherwise, the crew of the Lewis and Clark aren’t fighting ghosts or demons. They’re fighting their own minds as punishment for not just fucking around and finding out once, but twice. This isn’t necessarily anything new in sci-fi, but using hell as an allegory for what little we know about space is still clever. (And maybe just a little heavy-handed.)

If anything, Event Horizon is worth the price of admission to catch the 30-or-so seconds of the sadomasochistic slaughter orgy captured on the recording the Lewis and Clark crew recover. This includes a follow-up line from Fishburne that is timed so well, it’s sort of baffling Anderson didn’t use it as the film’s tagline: “We’re leaving.” You should stay for the movie’s entirety, of course, even if it means disobeying a directly order from Laurence Fishburne. He’ll probably understand. —Daniel Bokemper

Get it at Amazon.

Between 2024’s Lisa Frankenstein and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s upcoming The Bride!, new iterations of the stitched-together and woefully misunderstood monster drop on a damn-near annual cycle. Lately, these takes have been far-removed from Mary Shelley’s classic novel. So much so, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein — while still highly anticipated by the filmmaker’s faithful — almost seems passé and uninspired on its surface. At the same time, the director’s work is rarely skin-deep. And similar to his last adaptation, 2022’s Pinocchio (the good one, without Tom Hanks), del Toro wraps his iconic aesthetic around an emotional and accessible narrative heart.

After Capt. Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen, Netflix’s House of Cards), his crew and his ship get stuck in the North Pole, they rescue a dying Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac, Ex Machina). Unfortunately, saving Victor incurs the wrath of his creature (Jacob Elordi, Saltburn), who quickly turns a third of the crew into ragdolls and human accordions. After temporarily subduing his monster, Victor recounts his history, including his tumultuous relationship with his brother’s fiancée, Elizabeth (Mia Goth, MaXXXine). Before he can wrap up his memoir, however, the creature returns with a forceful request: to tell his own story.

Frankenstein is a straighter adaptation than Pinocchio, though both necromancy-laden films feel tonally and thematically inseparable. The former notably lands on a less bleak note than its source material without significantly changing Shelley’s plot. Still, it takes some liberties to modernize with mixed results. On the plus side, Elizabeth has exponentially more agency and purpose, who’s made even more vibrant by Goth’s performance.

And despite its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, the film’s pacing is far brisker than a mostly faithful Frankenstein adaptation has any right to be. That said, the film omits a particularly famous act that — while it ultimately makes sense — is nonetheless missed given everything else del Toro includes. Finally, the forced creature fight scenes feel at odds with the film’s celebration of life, almost like they were jammed in because someone felt the film was too boring without some Marvel-esque violence.

Overtly, this may be the most del Toro of the director’s filmography. It’s not for everyone, but for those who vibe with his craft, Frankenstein feels like the film he was born to make. It has some superficial flourishes, like the flaming angel of death that sort of looks like an unused asset from a Hellboy flick, but most of his visual storytelling lands poetically. As far as the cinematography is concerned, it’s a little more muddled. For the most part, the ample closeups lend themselves to the film’s overall intimacy. Conversely, only a few shots of Victor’s castle and Anderson’s ship convey the sprawling epic that the film — at least at times — tries to be.

Frankenstein, like the monstrosity it revolves around, isn’t perfect. But deep down, it delivers a message that we desperate need: We try so hard to beat death, we unintentionally forget to champion life. In a time where catastrophic violence can seem imminent, living might be the greatest act of defiance. —Daniel Bokemper