Let’s return to the Showa era, and examine how the Godzilla series looked towards the youth in two different ways.
Continue reading Zillatinum: Part 3 (All Monsters Attack & Godzilla vs. Gigan)
After all of these years of covering lesser-known tokusatsu series, we’ve finally come to Spectreman, which I’ve mentioned multiple times while discussing other topics—and in its way, it is rather important. This is another series by P Productions, the studio formed by former cartoonist Tomio Sagisu that brought us both The Space Giants/Ambassador Magma and Monster Prince, and managed the feat of sparking a second Japanese “Monster Boom” in 1971, a few years after the mid-to-late-sixties boom petered out. As pointed out in previous posts, it managed to beat both Return of Ultraman and Kamen Rider to the punch by only three months—P Productions was a smaller outfit than Tsuburaya Productions or Toei, but they showed themselves to be pretty on the ball when it came to televised kaiju delivery systems. Crucially for this series’ unexpected legacy, they also had something their bigger rivals did not: distribution outside of Japan.
So, who were the people behind all the drive-in filler in the seventies? Sometimes, it was small-time movie industry outcasts, as we saw in Blood Freak—but in this case, it was Hollywood veterans trying desperately to stay in the game in whatever way they can. The Cremators was written and directed by Henry Essex, who was the writer or co-writer of both It Came From Outer Space and The Creature From the Black Lagoon, two of the most significant entries in the fifties Sci-Fi and monster movie canons. He otherwise mostly stuck to either crime films or TV, but apparently thought he could return to his glory days in the seventies, writing and directing both this movie and the previous year’s even more infamous Octaman. You can certainly find a vein of that fifties B-movie energy in Cremators—it’s based on a high concept monster and features a lot of standing around trying and mostly failing to make sense of that high concept monster—but unlike the mid-sixties movies I’ve written about previously, this is very clearly trying to feel contemporary. Maybe that’s part of the issue: reminding you that it is 1972, with colour and almost two decades of movies to compare it to, does something like this very few favours.
Monster movies were in a bit of a slump in the seventies, but began to pick up steam starting in the eighties. This, I think, can primarily be attributed to the rise of increasingly complicated special effects, and the dedicated studios producing those effects that started pushing the limits on the imagination and believability of monsters in film. Once monsters stopped looking so much like guys in rubber suits, a number of possibilities began to open up, and movie studios noticed. Stan Winston and his studio were among the pioneers in that space, providing award-winning effects for some of the biggest movies of the eighties and nineties.
But before he could be the director of Pumpkinhead, Winston had to start somewhere, and that somewhere was the 1972 TV movie Gargoyles, his first credited work as a make-up artist (a credit that he apparently had to fight for), which won the 1973 Emmy in the make-up category alongside effects overseers Ellis Burman Jr. (“prop manufacturer” for Prophecy) and Del Armstrong. You can tell that they really wanted to emphasize the make-up effects in this thing because they include several publicity shots and scenes of the titular gargoyles in the opening narration as it slips from quoting Paradise Lost to giving an entire history of gargoyles before we’ve had a chance to catch our breath. Seeing the monsters before the movie even begins would seemingly spoil the surprise, but I guess the question is…what surprise? This is a TV movie made in 1972.
This is a movie about a man who becomes a mutant, blood-drinking man-turkey due to a combination of bad weed and unethical experimentation on poultry. Not to spoil too much too early, but it’s also a movie where the solution to the problem is embracing Christianity. Could this seemingly incompatible combination of ideas come together at any other time in history but 1972*? To be honest, they barely come together even then.
Hidden beneath Blood Freak‘s home video production values, sub-amateurish acting, and plot so ludicrous that you’d need to come up with some pretty strong arguments just to convince people that it’s not parody, are a number of fascinatingly contradictory messages that mark it as unique even among the lowest of the seventies exploitation schlock. It’s a movie built to be served to the bored young people who were going to see horror in the early seventies, but ungracefully tries to pull a bait-and-switch and pushes a Come to Jesus message even while pouring on the fake blood. It’s not even a case of it not being smart enough to be subtle—it tells you, straight to your face, what its message is. It tries its damndest to show the horrifying consequences of what it sees as an age of self-destructive debauchery, and does it in the form of something that only those partaking in said debauchery would ever think to watch: a violent monster movie that makes no sense. In some ways, this is kind of genius, although a genius that is readily disproved by the actual execution.
As we discussed in the Zone Fighter post, the early seventies were a pretty weird time for kaiju in film, but things were going swimmingly for Ultraman and Tsuburaya Productions (at least for a while). 1972 was the company’s tenth anniversary, and for such an occasion they teamed up with Eiji Tsuburaya’s longtime partners at Toho to make a completely new giant monster movie, which turned out to be Daigoro v.s Goliath (full title Great Monster Battle: Daigoro vs. Goliath in Japan, a title that is both generic and possibly overblown, given the movie its attached to.) There is some speculation that this project evolved out of the unmade Godzilla vs. Redmoon, which was also supposed to have Tsuburaya Productions involved and has a small number of surface similarities to Daigoro, but there doesn’t seem to be any actual proof that the two are connected. Written and directed by regular Ultraman and Ultra Q director Toshihiro Iijima (he would be at the company long enough to direct the first Ultraman Cosmos film in 2001)—whose screenplay credit is under the pen name Kitao Senzoku—with special effects by fellow Tsuburaya regulars Minoru Nakano (later of The Last Dinosaur and Ultra Q The Movie) and Junkichi Oki, what this collaboration produced is something that is definitely of its particular era of giant monster movies, and then some.
By this point, kaiju film was firmly in the realm of children’s entertainment first and foremost, taking the kiddie-pandering that had been working for the Gamera series (already ended at this time) and running with it—even Godzilla had become a cute, pug-faced superhero figure by the early seventies. Toho ended up leaning into this through their Champion Festivals in Japan, which showcased multiple kaiju movies new and old, animation, and TV compilations, and was often the debut for whatever their latest tokusatsu movie was, whether that be something like Space Amoeba or the latter day Godzilla films. Daigoro vs. Goliath premiered alongside a shortened version of Destroy All Monsters (re-edited by Ishiro Honda himself)and Panda! Go Panda!, an early animated short film by future Studio Ghibli co-founders Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki—that should give you an idea of what the intended audience for this movie was. But even that might not prepare you for the juvenile lightness of it all.
Of course, the main appeal of most tokusatsu productions are the fight scenes between costumed characters—it’s what everything always leads up to, deliberately paced so that the inevitable clash between suit man and suit monster gets the biggest reaction from the audience, who knows exactly what’s going to happen and when, but loves to see it happen every time. Based on that, the received wisdom from those with less extensive knowledge of the genre would have you think that all the scenes that aren’t costume character fights are extraneous, or boring—not always wrong, but it assumes that the fight scenes would work just as well without any humans talking and explaining things beforehand. That mindset is really put to the test in Redman, a series of short interstitials created by Ultraman producers Tsuburaya Productions, an experiment to see what would happen if you made a tokusatsu series with absolutely no context whatsoever (as well as no money.) Each two-and-half minute segment (originally aired as part of a variety show called Ohayo! Kodomo Show, or “Good Morning Children Show”, of which there is very little information on the English Internet other than that it regularly hosted short tokusatsu content like this) features the titular hero fighting a monster or two (all of which are reused costumes from Ultraman and its successors) in the middle of the woods or in some badlands (which is sometimes dotted with discarded tires), and that’s it. No explanation, no narration or dialogue other than Redman’s tiny assortment of canned catchphrases, just two people in rubber costumes smacking each other around out in the country. I don’t know if it’s just from watching a whole bunch of these a row, but the experience of viewing Redman borders on a fever dream.
This really does feel like one last hurrah of a particular kind of horror movie, the quaintly lurid and darkly humorous sort that typified the genre in the fifties and sixties. Horror Express has many of the stylistic hallmarks of those films, not the least of which being that it’s a period piece that stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing—it even has a science fiction conceit that also feels of the previous era (it was produced by Bernard Gordon, who had a major hand in Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and Day of the Triffids). The early seventies was basically the transition point from these sorts of movies (which had mostly been dominated by Hammer Productions, and mostly starred Lee and Cushing) to more contemporary and hard-edged ones—this came out the same year as Last House on the Left (…and also Frogs), and a year before The Exorcist. It’s pretty clear that something like this wasn’t the kind of terror people were looking for in the theatre. Still, you probably couldn’t have asked for a better send-off than this, which is entertaining and stylish, all the more impressive because Spanish director Eugenio Martin had no previous experience in horror.
Let’s try something fun: a theme month! April’s batch of entries will all be examples of eco-horror, a subgenre I find fascinating, not just as someone interested in nature (and how it’s depicted in fiction), but as someone who is also interested in examining the ups and downs of storytelling trends. There are specific periods in time when eco-horror seemed to proliferate in movies especially (although it seems like they haven’t been as prominent in recent years for whatever reason), and one of those periods is represented in this first entry…
One of the lasting legacies of the counter-cultural movements of the sixties was the creation of modern environmentalism, which became one of the more prominent offshoots in the seventies and beyond as the free love types mostly stuck to getting stoned and selling ice cream. Although the movement took close to a decade to have some mainstream influence (following its first major event, the publication of Rachel Carson’s expose Silent Spring), there did seem to be an attempt by the mainstream to acknowledge or address the issues they brought up, as you saw the establishment of the EPA and the creation of Earth Day—but as was the style of the time, the supposed good vibes masked a widely held apocalyptic belief that modern society was on the edge of collapse. The environment and the human abuse of it became yet another thing to be afraid of, and another thing for grody schlock to exploit—thus we have the creation of eco-horror, a genre that seemed to be at its peak in the seventies. This new wave of creature features benefited from a much more intimate scale than their B-movie predecessors: compared even to monsters created by nuclear power (which was still a cultural fear at the time, mind you), monsters created by everyday pollution seem a lot closer to home. It’s especially true when the monsters aren’t even “monsters”, but everyday organisms who are simply pissed.
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