As we edge closer to the release of one of the biggest kaiju films in recent memory, it seems like a good time for this column to cover some of the lesser-known entries of the genre. Specifically, I’ll be writing about the lesser-known entries made by Toho, who obviously needed something monster-related to put out in between Godzilla movies, and so has a wide swathe of giant monsters that will probably not be making a cameo in any Hollywood movies anytime soon, but are still part of the canon, and also represent different eras in the studio’s monster history.
Daikaiju Baran (English translation Giant Monster Varan, although the actual English title is the superlative Varan the Unbelievable) was the fifth of Toho’s giant monster movies released since Godzilla in 1954, and the fourth of them directed by Godzilla’s Ishiro Honda (yes, we’re counting The Mysterians in that, even though it’s not strictly a giant monster movie, but look here buddy, they consider it part of the sequence, so I do, too) alongside special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya—looking back on it, that level of productivity in such a short time frame feels almost, well, unbelievable. Varan is once again filmed in black-and-white, which seems like a step back from the full-colour spectacles of Honda and Tsuburaya’s Rodan and Mysterians, but the conditions under which it was made explain why: this was initially conceived as a joint venture between Toho and an American film company, and was supposed to be made for television—the Americans eventually dropped out, and the film was shown theatrically in Japan (where, based on the title, they find things like Varan to be totally believable), with the Unbelievable English language version being released on TV in 1962, hacked to pieces and with scenes of American actors inserted so American viewers wouldn’t be threatened by a blatantly foreign film (I guess), just like most of Toho’s monster movies. I watched the Japanese original, so as much as I’d like to keep inserting the Unbelievable into this post, it technically wouldn’t be accurate, and I’m all about accuracy.
That this movie was originally made for television in mind might explain why it feels like it has a much smaller scope than its predecessors—a very straightforward plot without a lot of the cultural meaning of Godzilla, or the showmanship of Rodan. This is probably why it’s often been relegated to the lower tiers of the Toho monster oeuvre, with its titular monster mostly making cameos in movies like Destroy All Monsters (as well as in merchandise, including video games and even action figures released outside Japan—I remember when the Varan action from Trendmasters’ mid-nineties Godzilla line was rare and highly sought-after by collectors.) But even if this movie mostly just feels like “another one of those” in many ways, with less of a sense of scale than most other kaiju movies, you can still see bits and pieces of those other movies within it, showing that it still carries the torch fairly early on in their decades-long reign.
The film opens with footage of a rocket launch, which might make you think this is going to be another warning about the dangers of nuclear weapons, but in fact it’s quite different: as the narrator intones, while our technology is advancing and we approach the space age, there are still plenty of natural mysteries left to uncover. The first half of the movie emphasizes this the most, being set almost entirely in the robust woodlands and mountains around the Kitakami River, which the movie informs us is “the Japanese Tibet.” Two researchers go there looking for rare butterflies, find themselves rebuffed by the rural villagers of the region, and then are “mysteriously” killed in a landslide caused by something that is definitely not not a monster. An oddly placid professor sends one of his colleagues alongside a pair of reporters (one of whom is the sister of one of the dead men, not that she shows much emotion about it), who work for a production company amazingly named “20th Century Mysteries Solved”, to go to the region and figure out what happened. They find the villagers, and are told that it was the work of the god Baradagi, who lives in a nearby lake. If you bet money that Baradagi was a giant monster, you are currently richer.
The villagers in the early parts of the movie, who not only seem “rural” but time warped from another era, parallel similar scenes early on in Godzilla, regarding the monster as a deity and faced with unbelieving outside scientists and reporters, and both try to draw a line between ancient beliefs and modern monsters. As part of that idea, our hero Kenji acts like a total smug atheist sort, berating the villagers for their “superstitious” beliefs and their attempts to placate Baradagi—but, as it turns out, they are 100% correct about the thing’s existence. Just because it turns out to be some prehistoric throwback (Kenji is apparently informed enough about the species, named Varan, that he can identify a live specimen even though they’d only have fossils for reference—he must be real good at his job) and not an actual supernatural entity is splitting hairs, I think. They are also correct that the outsiders coming in and disturbing it seem to be the only thing causing trouble, as it has apparently existed for years without anyone being the wiser—the interesting thing about the depictions of “backwards” people in these sorts of movies is that their lifestyle is often based on living harmoniously with nature, as represented by the monster, even if they explain it in supernatural terms. What do they get for their troubles, though? Varan emerges from the lake and then smashes their village. Real fair.
Realizing that something that big would inevitably cause problems if it visited a city, the military is dispatched to proactively deal with Varan—a very nice detail is the contrast presented by the soldiers and their hardware in the bucolic natural setting, with no music and only the cheery sounds of birds in the background. A barrage of artillery, including chemical weapons that seem to kill all life in the lake, are unable to faze Varan, and after sitting there and taking his lumps (and presenting some danger for Kenji and the reporter Yuriko), he goes “screw this, I’m outta here”, and unfurls his flying squirrel-like membranes to take to the skies. Again, this seems like a problem that our heroes brought upon themselves, not that any of them acknowledge it—aside from all the military planning, there is almost no real human drama in this movie at all, quite unlike Godzilla.
The flying reptile moment aside, this movie is still in the era where these things are taken very seriously, with nothing truly outlandish happening, or anything that signals this as kids’ stuff. The closest thing to a light touch this movie has is the comic relief photographer, but that’s about it. The scientists and army brass are pretty sombre, especially after seeing just how resistant Varan is to conventional weaponry. The mood is regularly set by Akira Ifukube’s score, which is probably the overall best part of the movie, and includes some motifs that would return in many subsequent kaiju film scores he did, with a theme for Varan that is almost a recreation of the famous Godzilla theme, but zigs when you expect it to zag. The thing is, without the atomic age dread that gave Godzilla its power as a story, Varan mostly comes off as a story of just an unruly animal that they have to exterminate (and not a particularly scary one, either, lacking something like Godzilla’s malevolent glare)—not enough is really done with the “ancient entity revived in the modern day” angle to give it a similar kind of weight.
As well, the destruction in the movie is surprisingly slight, which goes back to the television movie feel of it. After destroying the village and cracking a few boats and planes, Varan only really makes it to Tokyo Bay and then the airport, but never gets into the city proper, although we still get some evacuation scenes anyway. This is a monster movie that, because of the budget constraints, never really approaches true horror territory in terms of carnage wrought.
Multiple failed attempts by the military to find a way to repel it (including Kenji risking his life driving a munitions truck into Varan’s vicinity) lead them to figure out that, for whatever reason, Varan just loves to eat falling flares (which is really sort of adorable, and recalls another enjoyable scene where we see it hide underwater while watching depth charges fall), and realize that they can feed it a special explosive created by Dr. Fujimura. Kaiju fans will recognize Fujimura as being played by Akihiko Hirata, who portrayed the tragic Dr. Serizawa in Godzilla (there are a few recurring players in the Toho Monsterverse in this, including Destroy All Monsters’ Yoshio Tsuchiya and Mothra vs. Godzilla‘s Yoshifumi Tajima as our lead army guys), but here he is a slightly more optimistic scientist. The tone is fairly hopeful, in a sense—Fujimura’s innocuous creation, which was made to be used in excavation by exploding rocks from the inside, is still misappropriated as a monster-killing weapon (not unlike Serizawa’s creation in Godzilla), but he seems perfectly okay with it, and it comes off as a case of human ingenuity overcoming the odds. As the narrator says, “After a desperate struggle, Man has won another victory”—no existential dread about our science’s effect on the world here.
It’s pretty clear that even the people making Varan thought of it as of less consequence than other Toho special effects movies of the time, which is understandable considering its origins. But it also acts as a sort of stopgap film, showing them experimenting with monster ideas (as August Ragone’s book Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters points out, Varan is basically a cross between Godzilla and Rodan), and either testing out or reiterating themes that would be far more fleshed out in Ishiro Honda’s other movies, both earlier ones and later ones like Mothra. Understandably, there’s a reason it’s not considered one of the true classics, but it fits in as a piece of the larger picture.
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