The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (2007)

There have been films about the Loch Ness Monster pretty much from the beginning—the first movie about the monster released in 1934 (a film edited by future Lawrence of Arabia director David Lean), only a year after the first noteworthy sightings took place. Needless to say, very few of them are particularly noteworthy, so The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep can take the crown as both the most well-known Loch Ness Monster movie and the best one almost by default (I’ve already written about the only other contender.) Based on a novel by Dick King-Smith (whose book The Sheep Pig was adapted in the movie Babe), Water Horse is pitched as a traditional sort of whimsical family movie, with a cast of respected British thespians and the structure of a “child befriends an animal” story enlivened with fantastical elements ala ET. It burnishes this well-worn plot by taking advantage of the historical context of the Loch Ness Monster story, arguing why a legend like this may have resonated in an era of strife.

Monster Allergy

The popularity of the Godzilla films in their heyday did not just lead to homegrown competitors and imitators—as we saw with Yongary and Gorgo, film makers worldwide sometimes made their own attempts at similar monster material. I’ve written about that particular “Monster Boom” period pretty extensively, but a very similar pattern emerged following Pokémon, a later monster-based phenomenon that was clearly inspired by nostalgia for the original Monster Boom. That series’ thundercrack emergence in the late nineties led to a plethora of other media based on the idea of monster collecting and battling, especially in Japan, and I’ve written about some of those as well (you can also find a surprisingly deep recollection of even more Pokémon coattail riders in Daniel Dockery’s 2022 book Monster Kids)–but wouldn’t it be interesting to see how the basic ideas of a monster collecting franchise could be filtered through a completely different cultural lens?

This brings us to Monster Allergy, an Italian kids comics-turned-attempted-franchise that doesn’t outright announce its indebtedness to Pokémon and the other kids monster series of its era, but come on—it’s about “monster tamers” capturing monsters in small objects, and that alone makes the connection obvious. It’s certainly no rip-off, as any similarities largely disappear past those barest of surface elements, and instead follow more traditional western low fantasy storytelling. But regardless of the degree of intention, this does represent a very European take on some of Pokémon‘s core ideas, a kid-focused adventure in a monster-filled world, and In this way, it is to Pokémon what a Gorgo or a Reptilicus was to the original Godzilla.

Pulse (1988)

Programming Note: I’ll be on vacation next week, so the next scheduled movie post will be sometime during the week of August 20th. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The idea that our increasingly technological lives set us up for trouble has been a recurring theme since the twentieth century (and probably before that), updating itself whenever some new convenience becomes entrenched in the routine of the average westerner. Pulse is the late eighties version of this, set in a home with such advanced appliances as VCRs, microwaves, and air conditioning units, all things that can be turned against us when under the influence of something sinister. In the mind of the devoted Luddite, our homes used to be a solidly independent thing of wood and stone, but the advent of appliances not only makes people overly reliant on them, but invites an outside presence that we do not even understand, let alone know how to control. In this case, the presence takes the form of a malevolently intelligent jolt of electricity, something that can undermine the entire modern home—it’s another high concept horror, but one with a surprising amount on its mind, fanning out not just into the technological aspects of contemporary living, but with a specifically eighties critique of suburbia.

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.

Hatching (2022)

Now begins our brief evaluation of some of the monster movies of the previous year, to see just where filmmakers have been taking the form in recent times. At least in the beginning, the Finnish film Hatching (Pahanhautoja), directed by Hanna Bergholm, seems to lean into modernity, introducing us to a family documenting itself in online video form, and positioning itself as aspirational in the way social media influencers often do, with their gleaming, crystalline European abode and their coordinated normalcy (their house is really the only way they flaunt any kind of wealth, which is the one crucial difference between them and most other influencers.) This, as it turns out, is really only one component of the story, an inescapable twenty-first century incarnation of some well-worn themes of image obsession and parental pressure, all your favourite adolescent anxieties presented here with the addition of a gross and bizarre monster, a thing of pure chaos that manages to both briefly assuage and act upon those anxieties.

The Iron Giant (1999)

Despite the neglect of the studio heads initially hindering its box office performance, animator Brad Bird’s directorial debut The Iron Giant became a cult hit whose acclaim and influence only grew over time. Very very loosely based on the book The Iron Man by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (which, it should be noted, ends with the titular character matching wits with a continent-sized space dragon in order to create world peace), it is a classic story of a kid befriending an otherworldly being and finding both outside acceptance and self-acceptance, themes that will likely always resonate. It’s also a unique piece of American animation, made as the boom of traditionally animated movies was on the downswing, but nonetheless doing many things very differently than the animation norm of the nineties. Most importantly for us on this site, though, it’s also a homage to, and critical analysis, of the Science Fiction and monster movies of the 1950s, using decades of hindsight to craft a portrayal that captures all the complexities of that time. Despite feeling very modern—well, modern for 1999 I guess—it still very accurately reflects many of the ideological components of those older movies, something I’ve only really come to appreciate after becoming more immersed in the source material.

The Invisible Boy (1957)

An example of how context matters: Robby the robot in 1956’s Forbidden Planet, one of the most beautiful of all the fifties Sci-Fi classics, was a prominent supporting character and very clearly not a monster (that movie already has a pretty great monster anyway); he proved popular enough that the studio heads at MGM decided to put him in another movie a year later, and suddenly he’s “The Science-Monster Who Would Destroy The World!”, as proclaimed on the poster of The Invisible Boy. This is not just a case of them reusing the character or the suit, either, although he is credited in the opening credits as an actor (voiced, uncredited, by Marvin Miller), but by all accounts this is the same Robby the robot from Forbidden Planet, who in the backstory of this moviehas been taken from twenty-third century back to the 1950s by a time travel experiment. If a fantastical character goes from one setting or story to a different one, even if technically in the same genre, are they suddenly so out of place that they become a monster? It’s the kind of meta thought you get while watching this movie, which at times feels like a lighthearted parody of Science Fiction made for the kinds of kids who probably already loved Robby, before it suddenly turns into a serious thriller that is surprisingly well-constructed, and then back into a comedy again. It’s an unusual, interesting time capsule of a movie.

Invaders From Mars (1953 & 1986)

The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch has had me thinking about horror stories for children on and off for the last few months—that was a movie that completely homed in on a very specific kind of dread aimed squarely at kids, the sense of a family in collapse, the people you love suddenly turning against you, or authority figures simply not listening. An older and influential movie in that vein is Invaders From Mars, an early entry in the 1950s Science Fiction film boom that was apparently made in a rush in order to beat the George Pal-produced War of the Worlds to theatres (giving it the distinction as the first colour alien movie in American theatres)—it’s a smaller film, very clearly, but trades the spectacle of the bigger alien invasion movies with a nightmare scenario that aims squarely at the kids in the audience, utilizing many of the same triggers that Snake Girl eventually would. Although it might come off as hokey to modern audiences at times, its sometimes very inventive concepts scarred/inspired a generation of genre film fans—and to prove that, we need only look at the fact that one of the most influential horror directors of all time remade it in the mid-eighties, attempting to retain its atmosphere while updating its visuals to appeal to a modern audience.

Rebirth of Mothra III (1998)

Speaking of Mothra and King Ghidorah…

I said this back in my post about the first of these movies (who can remember what happened two years ago, though?), but the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy was clearly Toho trying to keep their kaiju business alive after the “retirement” of Godzilla in anticipation of the big Hollywood reboot—thankfully, their second most famous giant monster was still on hand. Rebirth of Mothra III released six months after that big Hollywood Godzilla reboot, and by the next year, Toho was back making Godzilla movies like that deal never happened. Mothra ended up just keeping the seat warm.

Capping off this moth-eaten threesome, ROMIII brings back two things from the first movie: director Okihiro Yoneda, and, of course, King Ghidorah. As an interesting transition point, assistant director Masaaki Tezuka and special effects director Kenju Suzuki would immediately begin working on the Millennium era Godzilla movies (the former directing vs. Megaguiras, Against Mechagodzilla, and Tokyo SOS) after this movie. This is, in essence, the true end of the Heisei era of Toho monster movies that began in 1984 (although as any actual person familiar with Japan would tell you, the Heisei era was still going on until 2019, but Godzilla does not follow such useless things as actual historical reality), and while the Millennium era did carry over most of the tokusatsu traditions, there is still a certain kind of spiky texture and weight to the monster action in movies like this that gradually vanished as subsequent Toho stomp-em-ups more fully integrated digital effects to assist the guys in the suits. Which is not to say that this movie doesn’t use CGI—oh lordy, does it ever not not use CGI—but it feels more of a piece with the kaiju films of the previous fourteen years, with a dogged insistence on keeping things practical where it can. The tone of these Mothra movies is different from their Godzilla predecessors, but the look of them is very much the same.

The Great Yokai War (2005)

Being so inundated with Hollywood blockbusters for so long, it’s nice to see how other movie industries go about it—what you find is often eminently familiar in their storytelling and reliance on special effects, but in a way that makes their idiosyncratic approaches and cultural differences all the more noticeable. The Great Yokai War is ostensibly a big budget remake of previous subject Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, but in effect the films are barely connected—instead, it takes Japan’s beloved spirits and monsters and puts them in a big special effects extravaganza and a children’s adventure story with your standard “learning to be brave” character arc for the pre-adolescent hero. An even more important difference is that unlike Daiei’s Yokai trilogy, this is set in the modern day and actually grapples with some of the spiritual underpinnings of yokai myths as they apply to a current consumerist culture—all in the name of broad action and comedy, mind you, but it’s still an angle on yokai that I haven’t seen in a movie.