The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Although well-known in horror circles since their original publication, it took a long time for anyone to even take a crack at putting H.P. Lovecraft’s distinctly bizarre terrors on screen, and when they did, it was often subsumed by the aesthetics of more established horror—Roger Corman’s adaptation of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, The Haunted Palace, even slapped Edgar Allan Poe’s oh-so-marketable name on the poster! Daniel Haller started out as the art director on Corman’s Poe series for AIP, and then went on to direct previous site subject Die, Monster, Die!, an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” that hues closely to the Gothic haunted house sensibilities of the Poe films. A few years later, Haller returned for another whack at a Lovecraft adaptation, one based on his 1928 novella “The Dunwich Horror”, and this time there may have been a more concerted effort to capture the particular supernatural atmosphere of a Lovecraft story, not simply plastering his ideas on top of typical witchcraft shenanigans and pagan robes—this is one of the first times the word “Necronomicon” was spoken in a movie (the actual first time was in…The Haunted Palace.) Even so, there’s a feeling in Haller’s Dunwich Horror of being something trapped between several competing styles—Lovecraft, some fleeting remnants of Corman’s Poe films, and a streak of late sixties psychedelia—producing a shambling, patchwork abomination not unlike the ones you find in The Dunwich Horror.

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.

Space Amoeba (1970)

We now travel from the early days of Toho monster movies to their waning days, with increasingly diminished budgets and increasingly diminished audience numbers. Space Amoeba (called Gezora, Ganime, and Kameba: Decisive Battle! Giant Monsters of the South Seas in Japan, and alternatively titled Yog – Monster From Space in North America) turned out to be the penultimate monster movie directed by Ishiro Honda, and while at this point these movies were expected to mostly cater to monster-loving kids, it carries on a number of his recurring themes, and even has a surprising number of parallels to Varan, despite the twelve years between them. This could have potentially been his last go-around in the genre, so it was entirely possible that Honda wanted a chance to get as much of the old gang back together, including several actors and composer Akira Ifukube, to make one of these—and while at times it, like Varan, feels like a composite of other movies, its place in the history and the ideas it utilizes make it interesting all the same.

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.

Equinox (1970)

I always appreciate a movie whose trailer yells its title at me multiple times

Equinox is a home movie made by some dudes who would become major figures in the special effects sector that was later distributed as an actual movie—that sounds reductive, but it also means that this is part of the history of movie effects, which is definitely something notable. Mostly directed by Dennis Muren (later: Star Wars, Jurassic Park) with stop motion animation by David Allen (later: Q – The Winged Serpent) and Jim Danforth (later: a whole bunch of stuff, although I’m mostly familiar with his work on Jack the Giant Killer from 1962) with a budget of $6,500 (in mid-sixties dollars, mind you), this exists mainly as a showcase for creature effects in the Ray Harryhausen mould—would you be at all surprised that they had the direct support of Famous Monsters of Filmland’s Forrest J. Ackerman? This is pretty much the exact kind of movie you’d expect a Famous Monsters reader to make.