Nope (2022)

Writer-director Jordan Peele’s Nope follows the critical and commercial success of his horror films Get Out and Us, and using all the cultural clout he has accumulated over the last five years, he has produced one of the most high profile creature features in recent memory. It’s a true blue classic-style monster movie, too, one that readily engages in some of the genre’s oldest themes (in a story engages with the history of the American entertainment industry in general) in ways that are smart and modern. Seeing this combination of expensive-looking action, B-movie enthusiasm for the weird, and interesting characters in a mainstream film is impressive, and is even more so because of the way it respectfully contributes to the history of its genre.

Big Man Japan (2007)

Much like Incident At Loch Ness and Rubber, Big Man Japan was brought to my attention by cult movie websites—probably the most receptive audience to these sorts of genre pastiches/parodies as they made their way through the film festival circuit. The mid-to-late-two-thousands was a period rife with self-reflexive takes on older genres and styles, and those movies and their particular quirks would even find some mainstream attention. But not only does Big Man Japan evoke that very particular period in film, it also seems to be chronicling a very particular period in the history of its titular country as well. Giant monster parodies are nothing new, and neither are parodies of the giant hero subgenre—but director and star Hitoshi Matsumoto’s comedic offering here is less about kaiju, and more about using kaiju film (as a very Japanese style of entertainment) as a vehicle to satirize an entire nation’s collective apathy. The world it presents is one where a once-strong symbol of heroism and national pride has degraded into a mediocre television show, carrying on traditions out of a halfhearted sense of obligation, and culminating in an absurd demonstration of just how little impact it actually has on a global stage. Don’t get me wrong, it’s also a very silly movie containing some of the goofiest giant monsters around, but the satirical intent of it is also made abundantly clear.

Yonggary (1999/2001)

If you recall, around this time last year I…okay, running joke’s over. We all remember Yongary as the slightly strange South Korean attempt to create their own giant monster during the Japanese Monster Boom, carrying many of the traditional visuals and tropes. The name apparently had enough cache thirty years later that there was an attempted reboot in 1999, directed by one Shim Hyung-rae, who would later gain some notoriety in the bad monster movie circles with his ambitious 2007 debacle Dragon Wars: D-War. I would say that Yonggary (sometimes called Reptilian in western releases) is a reboot in name only, but they added an extra g, so it doesn’t even technically share that. What it is, aside from the most expensive film made in South Korea at the time, is a million different monster movie things all crammed together into a confusing and sometimes amusingly nonsensical mishmash. Considering how much of it is reliant on CGI that definitely looks PS1 cutscene-caliber, it most resembles the legion of late nineties/early two-thousands TV monster movies (such as those infamous Sci-Fi Channel originals), while also taking nods from the Godzilla films of the time. It’s basically a little bit of everything, except of course the original Yongary.

Digital Monster X-Evolution (2005)

This and the next entry on this site have been chosen for a specific personal reason: I actually wrote about them on another website six years ago (almost to the day), but looking back, I really don’t like the approach I took. I was still all about the Internet smart-assery back then, trying way too hard to be funny, and it’s just not particularly interesting to read now—so, I want to give some of that subject matter its proper due. Not that these things are necessarily lost gems unworthy of some light mockery—they are, after all, film spin-offs of popular Japanese media franchises—but there could still be some material worth digging into.

Case in point: Digital Monster X-Evolution (yes, that means it’s Digimon, but I’ll refer to it by its original Japanese title for clarity), a TV movie that aired in Japan in 2005 as part of a new merchandising push for the series by Bandai (the version I watched even included spots trumpeting the sponsorship and toy/video game tie-ins), which sounds especially cynical and only makes the actual product even stranger in context. Completely unrelated to the previous Digimon anime series, it’s the only entry that foregoes any human characters, and instead is entirely about the Digimon themselves and their lives within their computer data world—this is the rare monster story that is all monsters, all the time. It’s also the only Digimon TV/movie production that is animated in CG—which is interesting considering that it’s always had that computer connection—provided by Imagi Studios, the Hong Kong-based company that would later go on to make feature films based on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Astro Boy, and then not make a feature film based on going bankrupt because they were too busy going bankrupt. A TV-budget CG film seems like an iffy proposition, and you wouldn’t be wrong to think so, what with the lifeless-looking backgrounds (with the odd splashes of 0s and 1s floating around) and scenes with lower frame rates. But X-Evolution is so peculiar in general that it’s really easy to overlook that.