The Monster and the Girl (1941)

Bonoho-ho-ho! With December comes the jolliest time of year—Christmas Apes season!

While researching what movies to watch, I try to find details that make them stand out, or possibly resonate with what I’ve written about before, allowing me to compare and contrast. When I decided upon the obscure forties B-movie The Monster and the Girl, it was at least partially because it’s another example of a movie which revolves around a brain transplant, a once ubiquitous plot device that we previously saw in The Colossus of New York. It also has “monster” in the title, which makes it seem like a pretty obvious subject for this series. However, what actually drew me to track this movie down are some quotes from a contemporaneous review from Variety, which described it as “a chiller-diller that will send fans of goose-pimply melodrama from the theaters amply satisfied” and “red meat of the bugaboo ticket buyers.” How could you not want to see whatever it is this apparent human being is describing? You know how much I, a bugaboo ticket buyer, love chiller-dillers.

The Colossus of New York (1958)

Previous techno-wary monster movies I’ve written about like The Invisible Boy and The Lift are about humanity losing control of their increasingly complicated machines—The Colossus of New York takes a different angle, asking if our increasing integration with that technology will cause us to lose our humanity. The idea of human enhancement with mechanical parts had existed in Sci-Fi literature prior to this, but in terms of film, Colossus is taking on what was likely fairly new ground even while using some of the ideas (sometimes pretty directly) from those earlier examples, and in doing so it anticipates decades of cyborg movies (as well as decades of movies with New York in the title that were definitely not filmed in New York) and debates about transhumanism, two years before the term “cyborg” was coined (but only a year after the term “transhumanism” was.) It is a classical sort of monstrous tragedy in many ways, too, but what struck me was how surprisingly dark it is.

Latitude Zero (1969)

Toho’s long history of special effects films is, for the most part, dominated by their kaiju projects—but they applied the same techniques to a host of other fantasy and science fiction movies, sometimes even finding ways to insert monsters into them just to give them that Toho touch. Fifties and sixties thrillers such as The Human Vapor and Matango and adventure epics like The Mysterians and Gorath are all major parts of Toho’s film legacy, and most of them were directed by Ishiro Honda, with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya, giving them all a feeling of consistency with the giant monsters the two were working on at the same time. 1969’s Latitude Zero was the last time the two of them collaborated before Tsuburaya’s death in 1970—it’s a genre piece that manages to include many of the elements of their past ventures (including monsters, even if they don’t show up until much later in it), and also has many things that makes it stand out in their filmography.

A science fiction adventure story with a Jules Verne meets the Summer of Love vibe, Latitude Zero often feels like a spiritual successor to Honda and Tsuburaya’s super submarine classic Atragon. The big difference here is that this film is very clearly meant to be aimed at the American markets, featuring fairly big American actors headlining (as opposed to all the earlier movies that just featured Nick Adams), and no need for dubbing, because even the Japanese actors (including Godzilla series veterans Akira Takarada and Akihiko Hirata, and Ultraman’s Susumu Kurobe) speak in English. Toho was clearly trying to make an international success here, but it still feels like their style of film, just with Joseph Cotten and Cesar Romero driving the action.