Dogora (1964)

Crammed into the months between two Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya Godzilla movies (Mothra vs. Godzilla and Ghidorah The Three-Headed Monster, just for those keeping score), Dogora was always likely to be left in the dust of its more popular giant monster brethren—which was certainly not helped by some other things that I will get into shortly. Continuing on from what we saw in The H-Man, this is another Toho monster movie whose human element relies heavily on gangster and cops trying to one-up each other, with some light international intrigue, likely inspired by the popularity of yakuza-themed movies in Japanese theatres in the early sixties (as well as an uptick in real life organized crime.) It was also likely inspired by a scaling back of the original story proposal by Jojiro Okami (who had worked on previous Toho genre movies) by screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa (who wrote both of 1964’s Godzilla movies, as well as previous subjects Varan and Latitude Zero, among many others), using cops-and-robbers antics to fill in time that was originally meant for more globe-hopping cosmic horror. What you’re left with is an uneven movie with many of its more intriguing elements sticking out among the rather tepid filler.

After a Japanese space agency witnesses another one of their satellites destroyed by some mysterious something floating just above the Earth, we are introduced to the main problem plaguing humanity: something keeps stealing all our diamonds! This is witnessed by a group of criminals who were themselves trying to steal some diamonds, but no one wants to admit that something probably monster-related is afoot. On the case is Inspector Komai (Yosuke Natsuki, who had a bit part in H-Man and would also appear in Ghidorah and the first two Heisei Godzilla movies in the eighties), who is tracking down a Person of Interest at the home of the completely curt Dr. Munakata (Nobuo Nakamura, who would later appear in both Frankenstein Conquers The World and War of the Gargantuas)—both of them are surprised to see its an American with the placeholder name Mark Jackson (Robert Dunham, who later played the toga-clad leader of the Seatopians in Godzilla vs. Megalon.) Despite all these characters essentially sharing the same goals, they are always obfuscating what they’re doing, surprising and knocking each other out and running away—a bunch of goofballs working at cross-purposes despite it being completely unnecessary. This is especially true of Jackson the “diamond broker” from the World Diamond Insurance Association, who calls himself “a magician”, which apparently means that despite being one of our heroes, his motivations and actions remain pretty opaque throughout the movie. These characters border on being interesting, but never quite get there.

The gangsters are apparently part of an international diamond theft ring—which Jackson is investigating—but when they contact their organizers with an elaborate hidden desk radio, they learn that there have been several high profile diamond heists that were not perpetrated by any of their own members. No matter, they’re already planning on yet another high profile theft, which Jackson attempts to foil by himself—but their eventual shootout is interrupted by a phenomenon-that-is-probably-a-monster, as a whole truck full of coal is siphoned up into the clouds. Previously, Komai had seen an entire coal mine vacuumed up in a similar way (he was taking Munakata’s pretty secretary home, and then comments on how unusual it is for a girl like her to live in the industrial part of town—chauvinistic and classist), which is when he starts to suspect that the phenomenon is probably a monster. The effect of the coal being sucked up is the most basic trick in the book—just reversing footage of material being dumped—but it remains an effective image, and one that I can say I’ve never seen in a monster movie before.

The culprit is a monster that developed from a “space cell” exposed to radiation from Earth sources, becoming an entity that needs to consume loads of carbon to survive, whether that be from coal or diamonds. Obviously, something that is eating all our coal is problem (I’m sure Santa Claus would be having a fit), but despite all the scenes of coal flying into the air, the number of characters monomaniacally focused on diamond heisting has a weird effect on the human element of the narrative. It feels oddly small in scale, not quite establishing the sense of urgency that you would need from a giant monster movie—Dr. Munakata states that the monster, which they call Dogora, could eventually become much more of a threat eventually (I mean, we are carbon-based lifeforms), but that sense of danger never coalesces. Which is kind of a shame, really, because the idea of a monster devouring the important resources of the modern world (of the time) is a good one—even if they were to focus on the diamonds, they could probably wring some proper drama from the effects of diamond-based greed, with a bit of extra thought (Dr. Munakata is apparently trying to find more practical uses for them, which is one a detail that is brought up once and then never again.) What this story really reminds me of are episodes of Ultra Q like “Balloonga”, where those ideas are more directly explored, and in a fraction of the running time. What those episodes lack, though, are scenes of people stealing diamonds and then realizing that they are not really diamonds—that happens more than once! At one point, it’s revealed to be a bag of sugar chunks.

Although appearing as an atmospheric disturbance at first, when Dogora shows up in full it’s a rather spectacular and innovative bit of Tsuburaya special FX. Taking the form of a giant, pulsating jellyfish (complimenting the fleshy heartbeat sounds that announce its approach), it flits and floats unencumbered in the sky, a fascinating phantasmal beauty that nonetheless eats coal by the mineful, causes trucks (and, sometimes people) to levitate, and then uproots an entire bridge for no real reason other than to allow for another cool bit of miniatures work that also utilizes some hand-drawn animation. It’s an ethereal presence, another cool visual concept with eldritch vibes that was never-before-seen in kaiju eiga, which is unfortunately only there for a few scenes in the middle of the movie and then is split into multiple creatures during the requisite military counterattack, which take the much less spectacular form of a series of twinkling lightbulbs. Apparently this cool creature was the victim of budget cuts that didn’t allow them to film scenes with multiple jellyfish, as was described in the original story treatment.

So, as the military learns once again that you can’t just explode your monster problems away, the solution essentially happens upon our heroes: after radar catches a swarm of bees flying higher up into the troposphere than normal, followed by mysterious rocks falling from the sky, they figure out that bee and wasp venom causes a chemical reaction in Dogora’s body that petrifies it. It’s a bit of a War of the Worlds-style natural solution for our extraterrestrial problem, but it feels a little perfunctory—Honda would utilize something similar close to a decade later in Space Amoeba, but in that he made sure to have the characters note the optimistic idea of all Earth’s organisms coming together to save the planet, a sense of deeper meaning that is not present in this. Another interesting element that is ultimately underdeveloped is the idea that the solution to the monster problem is just as dangerous as the monster itself, as the venom causes the many mini-Dogoras to fall to the earth in a hail of hill-sized rocks, right in the middle of the climactic chase between the police and our gangster squad. While the effects for the jellyfish creature were really something else, the rocks come off as a little silly-looking—and it’s not the only iffy effect here, as there are far more noticeable scenes of actors CSO’d in front of backgrounds than usual for a Tsuburaya joint. Are you telling me that they couldn’t find a city street or coal mine to shoot some scenes in? Like I said, it’s a highly inconsistent movie.

I feel like when people talk about “boring human scenes” in these old kaiju movies, they’re talking about movies like this. The two antagonistic groups—the crime-fighters and the crime-doers—border on being the proper kind of over-the-top, but like many things in this movie they feel underbaked. The gangsters approach being cartoonish crime film archetypes (the nervous guy! The unpredictable enforcer with weird teeth!) but are never cartoony enough to stand out, or make the many scenes of double and triple-crosses and gun fights come off as anything other than running the clock (the action-y scenes featuring the Inspector and Jackson are slightly less uninteresting, with some clear attempts at some classically lighthearted capering.) They have many scenes entirely disconnected from the monster stuff, so the thrill of seeing their story from another genre intersect with the fantasy one is just ultimately not there, which should be fun of a movie like this.

Considering that this was one of three giant monsters with this same creative team released in the span of nine months, that one of them would feel obviously lesser should come as no surprise (especially when the other two are some of the most important and beloved movies in the entire genre.) Dogora is a movie whose monster has a strong visual hook—or, at least, has one for part of the movie—plus some interesting ideas, and when those come together onscreen, it’s engaging. Where the Godzilla movies of the time were becoming about increasingly anthropomorphic monsters, the titular creature hereis one that defies ever being made comprehensible to humanity, removed even from the rubber suit illusion of the kaiju genre. If there were more scenes of awe or terror to go with this mindless, unknowable devourer of natural resources, this would be a far more memorable movie. Unfortunately, it’s part of what really feels like a rushed production that didn’t have enough time for more crystallized ideas.