The anniversary capsule reviews return! This time, I cover two of the many reboots of the Godzilla series, both offering reflections of the time in which they were made, and how the King of the Monsters could still potential resonate within them.
Continue reading Zillatinum: Part 2 (The Return of Godzilla & Godzilla 2000: Millennium)
Having already written about a Tom Baker-led serial, we’re taking a big leap out of seventies Doctor Who and into the early-to-mid eighties, where the lead role was taken over by Peter Davison. The eighties ended up being a fairly tumultuous period for the series, following up on the tonal shifts that occurred after complaints of the show’s violent content led to pressure from producers, and where it seemed to gradually slide increasingly into irrelevance, with production problems, creative indecision, and hostility from the top brass at the BBC eventually leading to the show’s fifteen-year hiatus at the end of the decade. The biggest problems of the original run’s final years was still in the future while Davison was there, but you can definitely sense in these early eighties seasons that the show was a little more uneasy, experimenting with different ideas and tones to see what actually worked.
“The Awakening” hails from Davison’s final year, which in turn was following the series’ twentieth anniversary (an anniversary special where Davison teamed up with many, but not all, the previous Doctor actors aired two months before.) After spending an entire year spotlighting the series and its history, a story like this feels like a return to the “classic” mode—it is another plot about an alien presence invading modern England (in this case, specifically said to be 1984), and a plot with more than a hint of Quatermass and the Pit in it, in which our history turns out to be the product of said alien presence. That’s not a surprising direction to go, considering that Doctor Who had been pulling from Quatermass and the Pit (and the other Quatermass serials) pretty much from the beginning, and this one actually puts that story in a new and interesting context, which scales down the scope of its implications while keeping them equally grave.
Okay, gang, it’s time to talk about Clive Barker. In the eighties, Stephen King contributed the highly-publicized pull quote “I have seen the future of horror…his name is Clive Barker”, based primarily on Barker’s six-volume short story collection The Books of Blood, which were published in 1984 and 1985. Among the stories first seen in those collections were classics like “The Midnight Meat Train” and “The Forbidden”, the latter the basis for the film Candyman—but it was a story in the third volume, “Rawhead Rex”, that ended up becoming the first of Barker’s works to make it to the big screen, with a script by the author himself and direction by George Pavlou, who had collaborated with Barker earlier on the 1985 horror film Underworld (aka Transmutation.) Unfortunately for Barker, this early stab did not go off as he hoped.
Before the name The Terminator defined what a blockbuster film would be for the ensuing thirty years, and before it became synonymous with a lurching franchise constantly finding new ways to not justify its own existence, The Terminator was, simply, a monster movie made by former Roger Corman employees (and with Joe Dante’s Gremlins released a few months before, 1984 was a pretty good year for monster movies made by former Roger Corman employees.) But what could have been a small and economical film with the simple hook of “someone being chased by an unkillable monster” instead feels large in scope, something that does not want to be contained by the Corman ethos. Largeness would come to define pretty much every movie by James Cameron, who started out as a special effects technician, had the frustrating experience of being micromanaged on Piranha II (a sequel to a Corman-produced monster movie directed by, guess what, Joe Dante), and then came up with this and guaranteed the rest of his career. His technical ambitions logically flows from his time in the effects and art departments, but there’s a vision here that isn’t just tailored to fit an effects vehicle—an approach to how to make a thriller, an atmosphere, a sense of what makes for particularly potent “cool” imagery, all stuff that has been normalized in genre movies now but definitely feels distinct when compared to the movies I’ve been watching from this period recently. Everything here comes together in such an explosive way, and casts such a long shadow over film as a whole, you often forget that, at its heart, it is a horror movie, following and innovating on a long line of horror movies.
Continue reading Creature Classic Companion: The Terminator (1984)
For people on every other continent, Australia is some unknowable alien world, with its strange, seemingly inhospitable environments and unique (and sometimes uniquely dangerous) organisms, developed through eons of island isolation. The common outsider image of Australia being this vision of untamed nature is probably why pop cultural depictions of the people who live there often focus on equally untamed, knife-wielding outdoorsmen (who, it should be noted, are never members of the indigenous groups who have lived there for thousands of years.) Those sort of reductionist portrayals could be expected of people who don’t live there, but Australia’s own native filmmakers seem equally apt at portraying their home as a blasted hellscape, even when it’s not supposed to take place in George Miller’s Mad Max future—take Razorback, brought to us by fellow Australian director Russell Mulcahy two years before he helmed Highlander (and based on a novel by the guy who created Judge Judy—no joke!), which depicts the outback as a vast nightmare land bathed in dust browns or the ominous orange of a murderous dusk. Would it surprise you to learn that this movie brought in the Director of Photography of The Road Warrior? Much of the film, set in the modern day of 1984, has some very Mad Max design work to go along with its vicious conception of nature, embodied in a massive, carnivorous pig. It is all very pointedly ugly.
I didn’t plan on watching Shin Godzilla and the 1984 movie version of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on the same day, and it was probably only about halfway through the latter when I realized what an appropriate double feature it was. The direct connection is obvious to everyone who knows about those movies’ histories: Shin Godzilla co-director Hideaki Anno (known mainly as the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion) got his start in the animation industry working on Nausicaä, being specifically tasked with animating the sequence featuring the giant God Warrior, a melting, corpse-like entity that would prove to be one of the (many) iconic elements of the film. Three decades later, Anno produced a live action short film depicting the God Warrior attacking Tokyo for a museum exhibit on tokusatsu that used a combination of classical and digital effects (I’d link to it, but no complete version of the original exists online), which likely had a large influence on the making of Shin Godzilla a few years after that.
But it’s also clear that his work on Nausicaä had a much deeper influence on the movie: in Shin, Godzilla is as much like Miyazakis’ God Warriors as he is like previous incarnations of Godzilla, both in his visual depiction—less like a giant animal and more like a sickly aberration, scabbed, gelatinous flesh in his earlier “unfinished” stages, and something like a molten tumour with ungainly proportions in his final form—and in his behaviour, which seems borderline mindless, the destruction he causes often coming off as just a mechanical reaction to what happens around him. Even his trademark radiation breath looks very similar to the hyper-destructive beams fired by the God Warriors. Both are meant to represent the worst abuses of the natural world by human hands, but the simpler allegory of the older Godzilla films (which took inspiration mainly from movies like King Kong) has been usurped by the coarser and angrier one pioneered by Miyazaki in his story, which feels increasingly appropriate as we’ve had further decades of thoughtless environmental abuse. It wasn’t enough for us to accidentally create a giant monster in these stories: the giant monster has to look like Death Itself to get the point across.
That unexpected thematic two-fer only reinforced a notion I’ve held for a while: while both the manga and animated versions of Nausicaä are rightly regarded as seminal, and are highly influential to the entirety of Japanese pop culture (you wouldn’t have the world design of many video games without it), they are also innovators specifically in the realm of monster stories, providing some of the most memorable creatures of all time, and making them a central part of the narrative’s thematic core. Not since the original Godzilla had giant creatures, and how they relate to mankind, been taken that seriously—and very rarely have they ever been made to feel a wholly organic part of their universe.
Continue reading Creature Classic Companion: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
The one thing that I find invariably fascinating whenever I take in the work of Osamu “God of Manga” Tezuka (one of the most respected and influential cartoonists of all time, if you didn’t know) is that it always comes off as his work, no matter what the subject matter is. He was inspired by the style of Disney and other American cartoons, adapted it to his own ends (he literally wrote the book on making comics), and in his five-decade-long career jumped from genre to genre (inventing a few along the way) and audience to audience (making kids comics and comics for adults, back and forth)—but his creations still maintained all the very cartoony elements that he utilized in, say, Astro Boy in the fifties and sixties. Look at most of his “serious” comics or animation projects (which includes philosophical Sci-Fi and fantasy, historical fiction, psychological thrillers, and erotica), you’ll still find highly exaggerated or cute characters in major recurring roles, or comical sequences right out of a Twenties Mickey Mouse short—it completely boggles the tone, but at the same time I have to admire the commitment. Tezuka wants to make stories with very important or personal themes (and he succeeds at just as much as he fails, given his voluminous output), but he never wants them to not be cartoons at their heart.
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