Mothra vs. Godzilla & Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)

1964 was the turning point for the Godzilla films—after ten years and four movies, the series not only solidified into what it would be for the rest of the Showa era, but what it would be in all the years beyond that. After hitting on the kaiju battle premise in Godzilla Raids Again, King Kong vs. Godzilla, demonstrated that having multiple monster headliners duking it out brought in audiences like nothing else. As we have seen in the sixty years since then, it’s a pitch that finds its way back into public favour even after a period of downtime—watching two or more big monsters fighting hits a primal nerve.

These shifts in focus inevitably changed how the stories were written—for one, humanity was no longer living in a world where monsters were a freakish and tragic aberration, but one where they are woven into the fabric of existence. More importantly, though, was how all of this altered the depiction of Godzilla, which spoke of changing attitudes in Toho and possibly in the populace. Although the tone of the movies had significantly softened after the stark nuclear terror of Ishiro Honda’s original, one thing that stuck around even with the relative optimism of Raids Again or the lighthearted spectacle of KKvG was the idea of Godzilla as the ultimate threat, a walking disaster that humanity must contend with again and again as a constant reminder of what they had brought upon themselves. In 1954, Godzilla’s atomic origins made it feel like a new existential problem for life itself—but what happens when that becomes normalized? If Godzilla is eventually part of everyday life, how are we supposed to see him? Could he even become something more than a menace?

Circumstances at Toho led to the regular monster movie crew producing two movies in the Godzilla series in 1964 (with Dogora released between them), and you can see the drastic shift in the tone of this series happen in real time as you watch them. Godzilla gets one more round as the antagonist that brings humans (and more benevolent monsters) together—but within a few months, the tables turn completely, and it is Godzilla himself that humanity turns to for help from an even greater threat. There is something of a logical through line in this—Godzilla’s subsequent change into monster hero did not come from nothing—but it still rather dramatically realigned how these movies would be made from then on.

Rodan (1956)

While the original 1954 Godzilla remains a startling effective film, it’s clearly also something improvising a genre as it went along, experimenting with special effects, with tone, and with ideas throughout its run time—it becomes its most cohesive mainly during its latter half. It’s the starting point for all kaiju films to follow, but the point where Ishiro Honda, Eiji Tsuburaya, and the rest of their crew really found the path forward was two years later in Rodan (Japanese title Giant Monster of the Sky Radon, and the name will always have two vowel-switched regional variations for the rest of time), the first kaiju film in colour, and the one where Honda found a steady way to handle this type of story. It is kind of amazing to see what a difference two years can make, and how quickly these filmmakers went from figuring out how similar and different these movies could be from their American counterparts to finding their footing in this entirely idiosyncratic take on monster movie, allowing them to experiment with the details of the genre instead.

Dogora (1964)

Crammed into the months between two Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya Godzilla movies (Mothra vs. Godzilla and Ghidorah The Three-Headed Monster, just for those keeping score), Dogora was always likely to be left in the dust of its more popular giant monster brethren—which was certainly not helped by some other things that I will get into shortly. Continuing on from what we saw in The H-Man, this is another Toho monster movie whose human element relies heavily on gangster and cops trying to one-up each other, with some light international intrigue, likely inspired by the popularity of yakuza-themed movies in Japanese theatres in the early sixties (as well as an uptick in real life organized crime.) It was also likely inspired by a scaling back of the original story proposal by Jojiro Okami (who had worked on previous Toho genre movies) by screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa (who wrote both of 1964’s Godzilla movies, as well as previous subjects Varan and Latitude Zero, among many others), using cops-and-robbers antics to fill in time that was originally meant for more globe-hopping cosmic horror. What you’re left with is an uneven movie with many of its more intriguing elements sticking out among the rather tepid filler.

Creature Classic Companion: The War of the Gargantuas (1966) (+ Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965))

Of all the non-Godzilla kaiju movies from the Toho’s Showa era run, The War of the Gargantuas (called Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira in Japan) is one that really stuck with certain members of the audience on both sides of the world—it was used as a reference point by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill Vol. 2,is a favourite of directors like Guillermo Del Toro, and, no joke, inspired Brad Pitt to become an actor. Part of what makes it unique among the Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya collaborations of the sixties stems from the unusual circumstances of its development: it’s a bizarre pseudo-sequel to Frankenstein Conquers The World (Japanese title Frankenstein vs. Baragon), a film produced a year earlier that had its origins in the same international deal that led to King Kong vs. Godzilla. Originally, King Kong animator Willis O’Brien had been pitching a King Kong vs. Frankenstein concept around Hollywood before a producer unscrupulously sold it Toho without O’Brien’s involvement, with the idea morphing into separate King Kong vs. Godzilla and Frankenstein vs. Godzilla scripts, the latter being rewritten to remove the Big G (the whole thing would remain a Japan/US co-production, with producer Henry G. Saperstein from UPA heavily involved in both Frankenstein and Gargantuas.) Frankenstein Conquers the World feels like a sort of prototype, giving Honda and Tsuburaya a chance to test out something new for their giant monster movies: a monster played by an actor without a full suit, giving him a wider range of emotion and more opportunity for the audience to sympathize. That, alongside the smaller scale of the monster action, was something that appealed to both directors, and would continue in its follow-up to an even greater effect, creating a conflict between monster brothers with diametrically opposed natures, a traditional narrative that nonetheless is highly engaging when presented in the form of a kaiju rumble.

Daimajin Strikes Again (1966)

We’re finally here: the end of Daiei’s Daimajin trilogy. Those three movies released over the span of eight months, while my viewings took three years—who can say who was more efficient? In other important Daimajin news, while doing some post-watch research for this post, I learned that the big guy himself will be returning to movie screens in Japan next month with a sizable (still got it!) role in Takashi Miike’s very belated sequel to his movie The Great Yokai War (which I’ll have to get to at some point). Neat!

As with the two previous Daimajin movies, Daimajin Strikes Again (also known as Wrath of Daimajin) is basically a reiteration of the same story in a different setting—but while the second movie flirted with a more human-centric god figure, this one returns to the much more capricious force of nature that Majin was in the first movie, something to be feared and respected, something that metes out justice based on his own terms (time and time again, the thing that undoes the villains is not necessarily their mistreatment of their fellow man, but that they do not show fear and respect.) The movie has an opening narration that informs us that the people in this setting believe that natural disasters are controlled by Majin, and then shows him inflicting every possible natural disaster on a village, seemingly all at the same time, conducting snowstorms and earthquakes and floods with his giant stone hands, while the people flee and ask what they had done to anger him. There is no answer—while Strikes Again shows that the guy can be placated, he is still clearly meant to embody the way the natural world felt to people at a time before we understand the mechanics of things (and maybe it still feels that way now that we know), when the weather could turn against them with a mercurial ferocity. He is a figure of a harsh universe that humans learned to live with and know not to cross, and to me that’s a much more interesting kind of figure.

Creature Classic Companion: Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974) & Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

The Mechagodzilla duology represents the end of Toho’s twenty year run of classic (and not-so-classic) monster movies, with a new one almost every year since the original Godzilla. Despite attempts to keep the series going, costs of production and declining box office (Terror of Mechagodzilla remains the least-attended movie in the series, theatrically) put the King of the Monsters on ice for a decade, when he could be revived in a rawer, meaner form with more modern SFX. Despite having the dubious honours of being in the last two entries of the Showa years, which deviated further and further from the seriousness of Godzilla ’54 with every entry, Mechagodzilla remains one of the more popular of the Big G’s opponents, I think for pretty obvious reasons—it looks like it was pulled directly from the collective imagination of every ten-year-old on the planet, with its endless supply of weapons and a sinister sneer frozen on its mechanical face. I definitely got the appeal when I was a kid who saw Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla on VHS, with many moments from that movie etching themselves into my memory. Nowadays, having a far greater understanding of their context within the history of kaiju films (and having just read Ed Godziszewski, Steve Ryfle, and Yuuko Honda-Yun’s Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film), these two movies don’t just represent the end of their era, but also of the directorial styles of the Godzilla series’ two most important directors: Ishiro Honda, the original and the one who directed most of Toho’s best-known special effects films, and Jun Fukuda, who became prominent during the series’ turn to more lighthearted fare aimed at kids in the late sixties and early seventies. Despite using many of the same elements, they end up producing movies that feel very different.

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.

Giant Monster Varan (1958)

As we edge closer to the release of one of the biggest kaiju films in recent memory, it seems like a good time for this column to cover some of the lesser-known entries of the genre. Specifically, I’ll be writing about the lesser-known entries made by Toho, who obviously needed something monster-related to put out in between Godzilla movies, and so has a wide swathe of giant monsters that will probably not be making a cameo in any Hollywood movies anytime soon, but are still part of the canon, and also represent different eras in the studio’s monster history.

Daikaiju Baran (English translation Giant Monster Varan, although the actual English title is the superlative Varan the Unbelievable) was the fifth of Toho’s giant monster movies released since Godzilla in 1954, and the fourth of them directed by Godzilla’s Ishiro Honda (yes, we’re counting The Mysterians in that, even though it’s not strictly a giant monster movie, but look here buddy, they consider it part of the sequence, so I do, too) alongside special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya—looking back on it, that level of productivity in such a short time frame feels almost, well, unbelievable. Varan is once again filmed in black-and-white, which seems like a step back from the full-colour spectacles of Honda and Tsuburaya’s Rodan and Mysterians, but the conditions under which it was made explain why: this was initially conceived as a joint venture between Toho and an American film company, and was supposed to be made for television—the Americans eventually dropped out, and the film was shown theatrically in Japan (where, based on the title, they find things like Varan to be totally believable), with the Unbelievable English language version being released on TV in 1962, hacked to pieces and with scenes of American actors inserted so American viewers wouldn’t be threatened by a blatantly foreign film (I guess), just like most of Toho’s monster movies. I watched the Japanese original, so as much as I’d like to keep inserting the Unbelievable into this post, it technically wouldn’t be accurate, and I’m all about accuracy.

That this movie was originally made for television in mind might explain why it feels like it has a much smaller scope than its predecessors—a very straightforward plot without a lot of the cultural meaning of Godzilla, or the showmanship of Rodan. This is probably why it’s often been relegated to the lower tiers of the Toho monster oeuvre, with its titular monster mostly making cameos in movies like Destroy All Monsters (as well as in merchandise, including video games and even action figures released outside Japan—I remember when the Varan action from Trendmasters’ mid-nineties Godzilla line was rare and highly sought-after by collectors.) But even if this movie mostly just feels like “another one of those” in many ways, with less of a sense of scale than most other kaiju movies, you can still see bits and pieces of those other movies within it, showing that it still carries the torch fairly early on in their decades-long reign.

The Whale God (1962)

A few years before Daiei dove headfirst into the kaiju genre with Gamera, they produced The Whale God (Kujira Gami), which is really more of a historical drama than a giant monster movie (and unlike Daimajin, has no real fantastical elements at all, although director Tokuzo Tanaka also mostly made his name on movies like the Zatoichi series like the directors of those movies), but it does have a larger-than-average creature at its centre, and so often gets lumped in as part of the company’s kaiju line-up. It’s probably no surprise to anyone that this is a Japanese take on Moby-Dick (based on a 1961 novel by Koichiro Uno), which in itself re-contextualizes the story—Japan has its own very specific cultural relationship with whales and the whaling career (and continues to), and while it is also has similar themes of obsession and man’s relationship with nature, it places those alongside familial themes and an even more explicit delving into masculine ideals. What you get is a grim, conflicted explication on how one’s self-annihilating sense of purpose can lead to glory but also to ruination, especially to all the other people around you, told moodily in black-and-white with another tonally perfect score by Akira Ifukube. The titular whale only appears at the beginning and the end of the movie, but its presence is felt throughout, becoming the driving force for all the human drama, the thing that defines everything this cast of characters does, mostly for ill.

Return of Daimajin (1966)

If you recall, around this time last year I reviewed the 1966 Daiei classic Daimajin, and briefly mentioned that it was the first film in a “quickly-produced” trilogy—and when I said “quickly-produced”, I meant “all released in the same year.” Return of Daimajin premiered just four months after the original, with a different director (Kenji Misumi, who also hailed from the world of Japanese period drama/action movies, and was an integral early director in important series like Zatoichi and Lone Wolf and Cub) and the same premise. I mean, in a lot of ways, this is the exact same movie as the original Daimajin, with many roughly equivalent characters and plot beats—these two more or less feel like two variations on the same themes, so maybe watching them a year apart was a good way to keep them from feeling a bit too samey (I imagine the third movie is also similar, so don’t expect me to cover that one any time soon.) This is not to say that Return is EXACTLY the same as its predecessor and thus pointless, as there are some fairly subtle differences, and at least it also carries over much of the original’s high points as well.