The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001)

As we’ve frequently seen (even as recently as last week), the spirit of fifties B-Movies remained—and arguable remains—strong in creature features, and one part of that legacy is embracing the poor reputation the low-budget monster movies in the black-and-white era often had. Making fun of that particular oeuvre—their overly-expository and unnatural dialogue, their toy-like special effects, their nonsensical plots—has been a go-to for decades, and I can imagine that seeing so many of those movies turned into comedy fodder on something like Mystery Science Theatre 3000 broadened their audience and extended their period as laugh material for another few decades. A movie like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is an obvious outgrowth of all that: a conscious pastiche of lousy programmers, their most ridiculous traits amplified while still keeping as much of the look and sound of the real deal as possible. Even with the ubiquity of this particular brand of parody, I’m sure there was still a sense of novelty to seeing a movie like this in the early aughts, especially when it was distributed by a major studio like Tristar (three years after it premiered at film festivals), who even let their logo be shown in black-and-white to match the spirit.

There was a time where I would have taken this sort of thing at face value, but after years of watching the kinds of older movies that inspired Cadavra, the experience of watching it feels a bit different. When these fifties B-movies were something a bit more distant—a strange and infrequent discovery on late night television, all blurring together in your memory—the kind of schlock being mined for comedy here probably felt accurate to the general atmosphere. But when you really drill down into the lesser-known genre flicks of this period, you find that they are often much more interesting than their reputation says, offering weirder sights and sounds and wilder ideas even with their budget-constrained nature. Shockingly, you also find that these movies were entirely capable of making fun of themselves in the moment, the filmmakers knowingly playing up their own ridiculousness at a time when irony was not expected. If the targets of mockery have already been cracking all the same jokes this whole time, then what, exactly, can a comedy pastiche made over four decades later bring to the table?

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace – “Skipper the Eyechild”

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, which aired six episodes on the UK’s Channel 4 in early 2004,came out of the same British alternative comedy scene that fostered previous subject The Mighty Boosh, and both not only share many of the same actors, but a similar outlook that combines wry dialogue and a love of the utterly ridiculous. Matthew Holness’ Garth Marenghi, “author, dreamweaver, visionary, plus actor”, is the image of a pompous hack whose astronomical self-importance never allows him to notice his own clear lack of talent, and the show itself becomes a parade of cliches and ineptitude taken to the extreme. But the brilliance of Darkplace is not that it’s full of things that are blatantly wrong, but that all those things are wrong and yet the mastermind behind them still thinks he is somehow making great art—what Holness is parodying is not simply wilfully mediocre storytellers, who are content just churning out trash without a care (although Marenghi also admits to being “one of the few writers who has written more books than they’ve read”), but the kind of superstar writers who let any amount of success get to their heads.

As a prolific author of horror novels in the eighties, the first possible inspiration for Marenghi people mention is Stephen King at his most popular (and most cocaine-fuelled), but he seems just as much inspired by local UK purveyors of over-the-top schlock like James Herbert, author of The Rats (I would think the quality of Merenghi’s writing is based more on the latter than the former.) Even though Darkplace was short-lived and little-viewed when it originally aired, it has gained a cult following in the years since, and Holness has used that to not only periodically revisit the characters from the series, but to move into directing legitimate horror movies with his 2018 film Possum, and will soon publish a short story collection written in-character as Marenghi.

Ultraman: The Next (2004)

There aren’t many standalone Ultraman things out there—as in, ones that are completely outside the historically-minded franchise entries (like the Ultra Galaxy Legend movie I wrote about), and potentially could appeal to audiences who aren’t already invested in that wildly complicated universe. Ultraman: The Next (sometimes simply titled Ultraman) is one of the few, released as part of a confusingly interconnected multimedia strategy that sought to draw in older viewers with a desire for something “grittier”, though that strategy seemingly petered out not long after, and they went right back to their regularly scheduled kids’ TV series. Still, this movie represents one of the times that Tsuburaya Productions has attempted to fully reinterpret the series, taking its familiar elements and putting them in a slightly different context (we’re apparently getting another one this year from the team behind Shin Godzilla.) The Next falls into that realm of “trying to be more real than a wacky cartoon, but not that real”, and while it certainly has far less silliness and more scariness and adult-focused drama to it (including a mildly subversive take on the human/Ultraman relationship), it’s not so far away from the rest of the franchise to feel especially off. If not for those relatively minor changes to the formula, it probably wouldn’t even feel much different at all from the proper spin-off films, which really shouldn’t be surprising given that it was written and directed by Ultra series lifers (the director, Kazuya Konaka, is also the brother of Ultraman Gaia originator Chiaki J. Konaka, who I mainly know as the guy behind the weird third season of Digimon.) So, this comes off less as someone coming to Ultraman from a different perspective, but rather the Ultraman regulars experimenting with tone.

Incident at Loch Ness (2004)

Incident at Loch Ness is a postmodern film to the extreme, a mockumentary that jumps from tone to tone and exploits preconceptions about certain filmmakers and genres—a film about the making of a film, with a separate documentary crew filming someone else making a different documentary. Despite starring legendary director Werner Herzog, it is not actually one of his movies, and honestly doesn’t even really try to replicate the feeling of his documentaries despite clearly playing off his ideas of “fact vs reality”/ecstatic truth and his reputation as a rogue filmmaker. Really, it feels much more Hollywood, which is also one of the central jokes here, but at times goes far beyond self-parody—this is the kind of movie where Jeff Goldblum and Crispin Glover can show up for cameos, and where all the featured players are film industry people playing themselves, including screenwriter Zak Penn (he of such films as X2: X-Men United and Behind Enemy Lines, and the actual director of this movie) playing the ultimate pathetic movie hack. All of that gets centred around the Loch Ness Monster, which makes total sense for a film about what is or isn’t real.

Daikaiju 2014: Resurgence (2 0f 3)

Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995)

Many of the later movies in the Godzilla series attempt to grapple with the legacy and meaning of the first film, and Destoroyah is probably the most explicit of these, calling back numerous times to the original – and while it’s not perfect, it manages to connect to it in some pretty interesting ways. Godzilla is now more than ever a walking atomic nightmare, going into meltdown and becoming a living embodiment of mutually-assured destruction; at the same time, the Oxygen Destroyer, the only weapon able to kill Godzilla (the creator taking his own life to keep it from becoming another weapon of war), has spawned a monster of possibly greater destructive power – in both cases, human technology coming back to haunt us years later. This makes it, in concept alone, one of the most fatalistic films in the series – especially in the way it basically says Dr. Serizawa, whose story was one of the dramatic cruxes of the 1954 movie, essentially died in vain, and that no matter how hard humanity tries to undo its mistakes, it’s already too late. To be fair, the movie ends positively anyhow, but it’s certainly a sobering idea.

Lending to the atmosphere of uncertainty, there is actual debate about the ethics of certain scientific discoveries and the creation of weaponry, if one distracted in the midpoint by a artless bit of Aliens-riffing. Reflecting a post-Cold War alleviation, the arguments regarding potential dangers versus benefits of new technology are no longer as heated, posited as logic and possibility versus caution and sentimentality. After so many decades since the atomic bomb without similar incidents, it seemed that there may finally be a civilized age where this technology could be used properly. Then again, the pro- arguments seem rather facile while the world is staring down the end results of previous generation’s technological mishaps – and though technological solutions are initially floated as great advancements for humankind, when they are suddenly needed to solve technological problems, it starts looking more like acts of desperation.

But Destoroyah also puts in some time establishing Godzilla not just as a nuclear monster, but as part of a species, mainly through the use of Godzilla Junior. Although now more or less a miniature version of the Big G, the early scenes where the lesser beast appears has a sense of awe to them that is rarely expressed in this series – and in the scenes where Godzilla mourns the death of Junior, we get a glimpse of a creature that exists apart from itself and the destruction it wreaks. In these scenes, as well as the scenes with the psychic characters and the inventive use of Godzilla’s fantasy physiology as the basis for the plot, we really get to look at these kaiju as creatures worthy of some kind of empathy, a victim of circumstance rather than malevolent entity. So, the sad sight of Godzilla finally dissolving into nothing comes not just from seeing the passing of a pop culture figure, or the destruction of a living weapon, but the final moments of a dying animal, betrayed by its own mutant biology. Having engaged itself so thoroughly with all the different facets of the series, and the monster, it seems like a proper way for this movie to do its send-off.

Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)

THIS, on the other hand, is a far cry from a respectable tribute to the franchise, not even feigning engagement with the intent of the original film. Ostensibly a remake/re-imagining of Destroy All Monsters, it takes the basic outline of that movie, replaces its (now) retro-futurism/scientific utopian aesthetic with a more modern sugar-fueled combination of big-budget Hollywood action spectacle, anime, and video games, and uses the monster action primarily to show how Godzilla is basically the most super badass of all time (Disaster Year 20XX’s description of it, “It’s Godzilla as the coolest, most powerful action figure grinding lesser merchandise beneath his heel,” is the most accurate synopsis you’re ever going to get.) Far longer than the rest of these movies and so focused on the anime/video game superheroes karate fighting each other, everything seems entirely wrong here, but the movie is so committed to its action nonsense it’s hard not to forgive some of that and just enjoy the ride.

There are some ideas and artistic direction in the mix here – the characters seeing Godzilla as a sort of unstoppable Elder God (with Colonel Gordon acting as a bizarre, smirking Ahab variant), the idea of a future world where kaiju hunting squads are the norm, the ashen grays of the ruined cities – but they are window dressing at best, lacking even the muddled attempts at thematic resonance typical of the Heisei series, preferring a purified form of the later Showa stompathons. Any attempts at intellectualizing it seem to be preemptively sabotaged by the movie itself: concepts like the classic series’ ideas of a science utopia are roundly mocked, society outside the militarized mutant armies is essentially a cartoon that exists solely for snarky jokes (the militarized mutant armies are a different kind of cartoon), and the dashed-off motivations given to Godzilla are provided in a tiny number of scenes featuring a child actor, his grandpa, and the single-most hated monster in the series’ history. Even the soundtrack leaves behind the respectable orchestrations of Akira Ifukube for electronic noise and Sum41. The filmmakers obviously knew what they wanted this to be, and will broker no depth, analysis, or classical moodiness.

Anyway, it’s more interesting to contemplate is what the film considers giving fans what they want – numerous callbacks to older movies, with almost every Showa kaiju showing up to be roundly thrashed by the star. Most of the monster fights are short, almost jokes, all tension and heft bled out (since Godzilla wins so easily and all the cities come pre-destroyed after some initial scenes of apocalyptic horror), and are constantly under threat of being overwhelmed by the human action – however, they manage to contain just as much energy, and by breaking all the ethereal rules set by previous movies, actually manage to feel kind of fresh. It seems that being freed from the constraints of caring, and given an overinflated budget, we get to see great-looking updates of some favourite monsters fighting in cool and creative ways that seem more in line with what would be done in something like Ultra Galaxy Legend (except with enough money to have actual sets) rather than the more methodical fights of the previous movies. It essentially embodies every dismissal of the series as a whole, yes – but for those of us who still secretly maintain our adolescent fondness for creature violence while still trying to engage with the ethical and cultural undertones of the series, this still has the goods. Godzilla has never been this over-the-top and focused on being “cool”, and for longtime viewers, it gives it a rhythm all its own.