Quatermass and the Pit

The original Quatermass Experiment TV serial in 1953 was followed up by two sequels that aired on the BBC throughout the 1950s, all of them written by series creator Nigel Kneale, and all of them eventually adapted into film by Hammer Film Productions (unlike the original, though, both sequel TV serials have been fully preserved, meaning I can actually provide a proper examination of them.) Quatermass and the Pit was the third serial (I’m sure we will eventually return to the second one, the aptly titled Quatermass II), originally airing in six parts from December 1958 to January 1959, near the tail end of the fifties Sci-Fi boom; studio disagreements kept the movie version, also written by Kneale and eventually directed by Roy Ward Baker, in limbo until 1967, when it was released in North America under the title Five Million Years to Earth. There was a different atmosphere for this kind of genre work in the late sixties (2001 would be released a year after this)—but while the time difference led to this being the only Quatermass movie in colour, the story remained intact.

As he did in the original Quatermass serial, Kneale uses the fantastical elements to posit some deeply unnerving questions about the universe we inhabit and the relationship we have with it—what makes us what we are, and can it be altered by forces beyond our control. The extraterrestrial body horror of Experiment is rendered less physical but all the more existential in The Pit, where our understanding of human history, both in cultural and evolutionary terms, is essentially unravelled. Rather than the encroaching aliens seen in the other Quatermass stories, the aliens here have already encroached—an invasion that took place in the distant past, its presence secretly looming over all mankind, until the day when it isn’t secret any more, and we are forced to confront what seems to be a monstrous part of our own nature.

Giant Robo/Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot

We haven’t ventured back to the original Japanese Monster Boom in a while, but there is still material there left to pore over. Giant Robo hails from the latter half of that brief period of monster ascension, debuting within weeks of Ultraseven and Monster Prince, and feeling a bit like a halfway point between those two series: espionage antics involving an international peacekeeping organization as well a child hero with his own giant, monster-fighting companion. It ended with the same 26-episode run as Monster Prince, a truncated existence easily overshadowed by the much longer and more influential Ultra series, but unlike Monster Prince, Giant Robo was dubbed and aired on North American television thanks to the efforts of our old pals at American International Pictures, its title changed to Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. Johnny Sokko became something of a staple of syndicated TV in the seventies, gaining a cult following among English-speakers who went on to start punk and ska bands referencing it—so despite being “lesser” tokusatsu, it has had a surprising amount of staying power in both the west and in Japan, where it has received irregular reboots (all of them animated) in the decades since.

The Herculoids

As I learned from Mark McCray’s book The Best Saturdays of Our Lives, 1966-1968 was the short-lived reign of superhero action cartoons on Saturday morning TV, building off the success of Filmation’s The New Adventures of Superman—over a dozen series in this genre from all the major cartoon producers premiered in the fall of 1967. This trend was short-lived because those shows became the target of parental groups and publications that criticized the violence (McCray contextualizes this by noting the atmosphere of the US in the midst of the Vietnam War, making some people much more sensitive to what their kids were being exposed to), and by the end of the decade they were replaced by musical comedies, while the “action” shows that came down the pike in the seventies were severely defanged. Anyone born in the last few decades would probably watch any of those sixties action shows and be flabbergasted that anyone would consider them too much of anything—that’s just a sign of how things change.

During that brief two-year superhero cartoon buzz, one of the big pushers of the genre was Hanna-Barbera, who seemingly had a hit with their series Space Ghost & Dino Boy in 1966, and so in 1967 managed to produce a half-dozen new shows in a similar vein (it makes more sense when you consider that they were making cartoons for all three of the big networks at the time, but it’s still a lot.) Almost none of them lasted for more than twenty episodes, although it’s hard to tell if it was because of that anti-violence backlash or just Hanna-Barbera’s typical cut-and-run style of production. As surprising as it may sound for a company not known for originality, H-B did try to find ways to differentiate all these shows from each other, leading to a decent variety of settings and concepts— from that we got our present subject, The Herculoids, whose distinguishing element was that the titular heroes were a team of monsters (with a human family guiding them) protecting their extraterrestrial home from various generic sci-fi threats. This series aired eighteen episodes (thirty-six ten-minute segments) and then halted, but it had enough of an impact that it was briefly revived in the early eighties, alongside Space Ghost, as part of the package series Space Stars. The characters of Herculoids have made cameos or been referenced in later Hanna-Barbera-related series, especially Adult Swim stuff like Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law (coincidentally, the original Birdman series premiered at the same time as Herculoids), so I had some knowledge of the series through cultural osmosis, and its concept would obviously intrigue me—its combination of a “primitive” setting with science fiction, and its clear appeal to kids who were in the midst of a kaiju renaissance in the mid-sixties, is both completely of its time and also still fairly unique.

Viy

As with many memorable stories, “Viy”by influential Ukrainian-Russian author Nikolai Gogol, originally published as part of his 1835 collection Mirgorod, begins with an outright fabrication: “The Viy is a monstrous creation of popular fancy. It is the name which the inhabitants of Little Russia give to the king of the gnomes…The following story is a specimen of such folk-lore. I have made no alterations, but reproduce it in the same simple form in which I heard it.” One-hundred-and-eighty odd years of thorough scholarship can find absolutely no references to the Viy before Gogol’s story, indicating that it is something that he invented himself (this is not unlike the false claims of being based on legends that I saw in the opening of Caltiki.) Regardless of the veracity of Gogol’s inspiration, “Viy” feels like something that could be real folklore—a story of mysterious countrysides and the dark magic lurking just beyond, and while at first it seems based in a religious good-vs-evil struggle, there’s an arbitrariness and cruelty (and dark humour) to its morality that is something else entirely.

It!/Curse of the Golem (1967)

Sometimes, you go in thinking you know what type of movie you’ll be watching and then it turns out to be about three different ones. “A movie about a golem starring Roddy McDowall” seems like a straightforward pitch (although they still manage to misspell his name in the opening credits), but It! Aka Curse of the Golem (also maybe Anger of the Golem? That title is kinda bad, let’s ignore it) complicates matters a bit by making a movie about a golem starring Roddy McDowall that also blatantly rips off Psycho—and it’s not particularly subtle about it, either. Certainly, it’s a bizarre mixture, not one that many people would even think to imagine—sometimes, it doesn’t even feel like the scriptwriter was finished imagining it before filming started—but it’s also surprisingly novel. On paper, it asks the question “what if a put-upon sort controlled an unstoppable monster?”, but in practice it becomes “what if an unstable weirdo controlled an unstoppable monster?”, and mostly thanks to McDowall’s performance, I think we get an interestingly off-the-rails answer.

A Creature Special Report: The Gamera Gauntlet

Gamera is, of course, Japan’s second favourite giant monster, one of the staple kaiju of the sixties Monster Boom whose yearly appearance in theatres (and, in the rest of the world, on television) has given him and his films an outsize influence on pop culture. You’d be hard-pressed to find a turtle in any kind of Japanese media who doesn’t fly by spinning around in its shell, and thanks mainly to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, fans of silly movies in the English-speaking world have formed a real soft (shell) spot for the terrapin tornado. Although starting out as Daiei’s answer to Toho’s Godzilla—considering the original movie was in black-and-white even though it was made in 1965, one might say their direct rip-off—the series eventually diverged in tone, even while maintaining a similar monster fight formula. While both monsters are beloved by children in the audience, Gamera was the one that was directly positioned as the “Friend to all Children”, a playful figure who would usually star alongside young actors in increasingly goofy plots, which is a level of direct pandering that Godzilla never really engaged in (at least until it started directly lifting stuff from Gamera in the late sixties and early seventies.) Gamera was even successfully revived in the mid-nineties with a trio of highly-regarded films directed by Shusuke Kaneko and written by Kazunori Ito, which I wrote about years ago.

While I’ve seen some of the movies in the original series, I’ve never had the opportunity to sit down and soak in the entire 1966-1971(+1980) run until I found the whole series available on our old pal, Tubi TV. The experience of running through the entire Showa Gameras (most of them directed by Noriaki Yuasa) has not only provided a more detailed context for the series and its place in monster history, but also demonstrates the wild evolution the series and its title kaiju took over those five years—what you thought you knew about Gamera is only partially true (he is still really neat and also filled with meat, however.) So, in this special extra-length post, I will compactly address each of the seven sequels—yes, it’s time to fire up the old capsule review machine.

The X From Outer Space (1967)

There are so many streaming services available now, so much content awaiting to become someone’s treadmill background noise, and I hear you asking, “Yes, but what kind of monster movies are on these things?” I’m glad you brought it up, entirely hypothetical person, because I plan to find out on this here website! I’ll be using some of my posts to explore the kind of monster-based content that is available to stream on all the less-than-major streaming services (because I already know how barren Netflix’s selection is), seeing who brings the most creature feature value. I think of this as a public service, but not necessarily the kind that is mandated by the courts.

First up, we’ll be checking out the Criterion Channel—home of film history, world cinema, mind-expanding arthouse classics, and a surprisingly robust collection of monster movies, including most of the Showa Godzilla films. They also have The X From Outer Space (AKA Giant Space Monster Guilala), the only kaiju outing from one of Japan’s oldest major film studios, Shochiku, and the missing final piece of the sixties Monster Boom that I began writing about last year. 1966/1967 were the years all the big players in Japanese cinema and television were trying to cash in on the love of rubber suit monsters—which also overlapped with the period where Shochiku was going hard into Science Fiction/Horror films, of which this was the first (the rest are also available on Criterion Channel.) As we saw in the other Monster Boom subjects, there was often an attempt for the non-Toho studios to find some way to distinguish their monsters from all the others, and it seems like the Sci-Fi angle is about as close to a trademark as X really gets…aside from its kooky monster.

Yongary, Monster From The Deep (1967)

Yongary represents something a bit different—this is a South Korean production (with special effects work provided by Toei), which I guess shows just how widespread kaiju had become at the time. Historically, the relationship between Korea and Japan is, let’s say, interesting—so the fact that Korean filmmakers would make something in a very Japanese genre is pretty fascinating. According to the easiest-to-find sources, this movie does have images and ideas that would have resonated with South Korean audiences—things that would call back to the still-in-living-memory Korean War, and even references to Japanese imperialism—much as the original Godzilla had imagery that was meaningful to the Japanese audience of the fifties. So, although this has similar trappings to all the other Monster Boom movies,it also has a specific context to it that makes gives it even more historical interest.

(It’s also worth noting that the original Korean language version of Yongary is apparently lost, so the English dub is the only one available.)

Gappa the Triphibian Monster (1967)

What struck me while I was watching Gappa the Triphibian Monsters (AKA Monster From a Prehistoric Planet, but let’s face it, the other title is way better) was how old it felt—and I mean that beyond just being a movie that’s already over fifty years old, and also one whose footage looks worse for wear (being in the public domain often means no one’s gonna be doing any high-quality preservation.) Maybe it’s just because the plot of it reminded me a lot of Mothra and the British monster movie Gorgo, both from earlier in the decade, but I imagine that even in 1967 this must have felt like a bit of a throwback to before kaiju movies were getting increasingly out there. This was the only monster movie made by the studio Nikkatsu, jumping into the Monster Boom while it was still ongoing, which might explain it—a studio only dipping their toes into this format either go all out or stay pretty by the books, and this definitely falls into the latter.