Reptilicus (1962)

Early 1961 saw an unusual uptick in European-made giant monster movies: over two months, Gorgo and Konga premiered in Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, while the Danish-made Reptilicus debuted in its home country. This represented a rather singular mad rush to cash in on the success of Godzilla and other Japanese-made monster movies, but it sputtered out as soon as it began, leaving us with only a few very odd attempts to recreate the kaiju film with different sensibilities. The rest of the world got their chance to partake in Denmark’s only giant monster movie after a year-long delay, as instead of simply dubbing the existing movie, our old pals Sidney W. Pink (acting as director and producer) and Danish expat Ib Melchior (as co-writer) essentially remade the movie, originally directed by Poul Bang, with most of the cast returning. The final product became rather infamous, ending up a modern Mystery Science Theatre 3000 punching bag and finding its way onto “Worst Movies of All Time” lists—by my estimation, it’s not even the worst Sid Pink & Ib Melchior movie I’ve watched, but there are definitely some issues that may be worth formally addressing.

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

In the spirit of fellow 1965 release Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, which didn’t have Frankenstein in it but DID have a Space Monster, Planet of the Vampires features no vampires but does include at least one planet—its Italian title, Terrore nel Spazio, aka “Terror in Space”, is more non-specific but probably more accurate. It also features a great meeting of some of the minds discussed in previous posts: an international production headed by American International Pictures (who put its North American debut on a double bill with previous subject Die, Monster, Die!), directed and co-written by influential Italian horror auteur Mario Bava (several years after his work on Caltiki – The Immortal Monster), with an English language script written by Ib Melchior of Angry Red Planet and Journey to the Seventh Planet (alongside Louis M. Heyward, who was a producer of many other horror productions of the era like the Vincent Price classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes.) On a conceptual level, it feels very close to Melchior’s previous tales of astronauts terrorized by mysterious alien life forms on other planets, but with Bava’s visual sense, it goes from a mere suggestion of interplanetary Gothic horror to a pure representation of it—its alien planet feels truly menacing and not just inhuman, but anti-human. It’s likely for this reason that this movie became as unexpectedly influential as it has, very likely serving as another one of the inspirations for the Alien, which offered an updated conception of a space exploration haunted by inexplicable monstrosity over a decade later.

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.

Konga (1961)

In order to better understand the essence of the classic Giant Ape Movie, I’ve sought the many riffs on King Kong that have improbably filled movie theatres over multiple decades, and I think I may have finally seen all the most notable examples—which is really not saying much. Konga is one of the only ones that was released well before the banana gold rush of big apes that occurred around the release of the 1976 Kong remake, and so has a unique late fifties/early sixties B-movie vibe when compared to the others—I can imagine it was at least partially made because of the successful theatrical re-releases of the original Kong throughout the fifties, which really raised that movie’s cultural stock. But despite being from an entirely different era of movies, it still ultimately falls in line with the brazen schlock that came to define the giant gorilla genre, setting a standard for the films that followed, and not a particularly high one.

Journey To the Seventh Planet (1962)

Three years after The Angry Red Planet, Sid W. Pink and Ib Melchior’s film productions had been shipped off to Denmark, where they collaborated again to produce another interplanetary horror show in Journey to the Seventh Planet—the difference here is not only which planet we visit, but also that it’s Pink in the director’s chair this time. While one could accuse the two of lightly reusing their own ideas for this movie, many other scholarly viewers have accused it of stealing ideas from other, more famous Science Fiction works: the first is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, which saw its first publication in 1961—although it seems unlikely that either Pink or Melchior read it in its original Polish early enough to crib the idea of planet bringing men’s secret desires to life; the far more likely inspiration is Ray Bradbury’s short story “Mars is Heaven!”, which was integrated into The Martian Chronicles in 1950. Regardless of where the story came from, the appeal of it is quite apparent—extraterrestrial life attacking human interlopers with things pulled right from their subconscious, playing on human emotions in ways far more sinister than just employing space monsters as in Angry Red Planet. Obviously, this is done in a significantly…significantly…less thoughtful manner than in Solaris, and to be honest, it might even be less thoughtful than Angry Red Planet.

The Angry Red Planet (1959)

Let’s do some retroactive projection: The Angry Red Planet was released in November 1959, making it the very last Sci-Fi monster movie of the fifties, the decade where the form flourished. There would be more films approximating that style made in the sixties, but the space age obsessions that animated them, both the exaggerated optimism and the equally exaggerated fears, would be gradually replaced with new ones as the genre film business moved on. Completely unintentionally, this movie serves as a sort of denouement for the decade’s monster movies—so, now that we’ve put The Angry Red Planet in the hot seat, what does it have to say about the whole mess? As it turns out, it’s a lot of the same things these movies had been saying since the beginning of the decade.

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.

Day the World Ended (1955)

We’re now in the merry Cormonth of Cormay, which is my extremely tortured way of saying that the rest of the month will be devoted to films by B-Movie King Roger Corman, who has directed 55 movies and produced hundreds more over a seven decade career (and while many of them are actually in the public domain, you can find the best quality versions on Shout Factory’s streaming site.) Corman is famous for many things, especially during the fifties and sixties: his economical (some might say tightfisted) budgets, speedy filmmaking, and an eye for talent that has given early breaks to some of the biggest names in Hollywood. Day the World Ended (which was apparently also the day proper grammar ended) is the first Sci-Fi/monster movie Corman directed solo, made in ten days (a record that he will quickly beat, as we will see), and embodies many of the common elements of Corman’s directorial efforts from this period, being efficient (with a small cast of actors and a limited number of locations), having a goofy-looking monster made (and played) by monster suit pioneer Paul Blaisdell, and being surprisingly effective for what it is.

Die, Monster, Die! (1965)

Back in August, I wrote about the recent adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s short story “The Color Out of Space”, and mentioned one other previous movie adaptation of the story—so why not write about that as well? It is very interesting to look at two different versions of the same story, released over fifty years apart, and how they reflect the horror movie trends of their times—hey, they even both feature big actors in analogous roles! The 1965 version, given the incredible title Die, Monster, Die! In North America (and the slightly more sedate Monster of Terror in the UK), was partially brought to us by American International Pictures, who had just finished their run of Roger Corman-directed Edgar Allen Poe films (the director of this, Daniel Haller, was the set designer of those movies)—and this is definitely in that vein, presenting a horror world of huge, dilapidated English estates, wary villagers, and Boris Karloff in his twilight years. This was the kind of horror movie that was kind of on its last legs by the mid-sixties, and while this isn’t a period piece as many of its predecessors were, it has the feel of something from an older time—even its veering into science fiction territory feels old-fashioned. It makes for a very loose adaptation of the source material, one with less of the lingering dread but one still based on ideas of legacy and familial dysfunction.