The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968)

The streaming site of cult movie distributor Arrow Video came to my attention last year, and their selection of genre fare is a curated bunch of weird world cinema from across the ages, so I felt like covering a few creature feature selections currently streaming on there (most of it seems to be available on Blu-Ray as well, for collectors and lovers of special features.) What initially brought me there was their complete collection of Daiei’s various monster series—the entire Gamera saga (including the Heisei trilogy and Gamera the Brave), and both the Daimajin and Yokai Monsters trilogies…basically, a lot of things I’ve written about before on this site. With that in mind, a good place to start this month would be with another Daiei monster mash, which brought me to The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch, which is sort of that? It’s complicated.

Directed by Noriaki Yuasa, who directed all but one of the Showa Gamera films (this released nine months after Gamera vs. Viras, and three months before Gamera vs. Guiron—Yuasa was clearly a workhorse), this movie is a loose adaptation of multiple comics by horror master Kazuo Umezu, best known for manga like Cat Eyed Boy and The Drifting Classroom. The collected version of the stories is called Reptilia in English, and while many plot elements and even specific moments are taken from them, this is a completely new story. Even so, it carries over some of the horror ideas from Umezu’s work, which were often written for a younger audience, but are filled with truly grotesque imagery (contrasted with Umezu’s sixties manga kewpie doll figures) and cruelly play on specific childhood fears. This is a strange movie that goes in many different directions, but throughout it is the consistent story of a child trying to find familial love by enduring a constant stream of nightmare situations.

Monster Multimedia: Monster Prince

We’ve now entered Dinovember, a month devoted entirely to those terrible lizards we all love. First on the agenda is a return to Japanese studio P Productions, who followed up previous site subject Ambassador Magma/The Space Giants with a series that is still just as youthful in spirit, but also very dino-centric. Monster Prince (Kaiju Ouiji) aired twenty-six episodes from 1967 and 1968, putting it in the latter days of Japan’s Monster Boom (and alongside the much higher profile Ultraseven), and in keeping with the trends of the period, aims to appeal to its target demo even more directly by having a kid protagonist who commands their own kaiju. This particular sort of giant monster fantasy, The Black Stallion with more property damage, was likely started with the Gamera movies, but it’s even more central to this series—while I’ve never heard this show be named as an inspiration for later kids & monsters franchises like Pokemon or Digimon (Gamera and the Ultra series are brought up regularly), it’s hard not to see the similarities. There’s also a few similarities between this and Ambassador Magma—specifically the structure and the pacing—and while I wouldn’t consider this on the same level as its contemporaries, it has plenty of peculiarities going for it.

Yokai Monsters: Along With Ghosts (1969)

The third and final Yokai Monsters movie opened three months after Spook Warfare (apparently on a double bill with Gamera vs. Guiron, and it’s difficult to imagine a more contrasting pair than that), and after that lighthearted romp, Along With Ghosts returns to the folktale morality horror that defined the first movie in the trilogy, and fittingly it also marks the return of 100 Monsters and Daimajin director Kimiyoshi Yasuda (who is co-directing with Spook Warfare’s Yoshiyuki Kuroda.) As seen in both those other movies, Yasuda’s take on these Edo-period fantasies is to emphasize atmosphere and an idea of the supernatural as an unstoppable natural force that punishes those who cross the moral line, and places it in the context of the samurai genre trappings that he used in his non-fantasy period pieces. In particular, Along With Ghosts makes our favourite group of vengeful spirits seem to be even more connected to their environment—all those empty country backroads and skeletal forests—and even more mysterious, without even the folklore aspect of the first movie to tie them more directly to human culture. I’m not sure if that’s what the subtitle is getting at (the Japanese title is the more descriptive The Haunted Journey Along Tokaido), but the yōkai in this movie do feel more ghostly.

Rebirth of Mothra II (1997)

Around this time last year I wrote about the first instalment in Toho’s Rebirth of Mothra series, and as is my glacially-paced method of reviewing trilogies, we’ve now reached the second part. Much of what I said about the first Rebirth movie still applies to this one—this is clearly trying to be more of a kids fantasy story rather than a traditional kaiju smash-up, a choice that is at least in line with the original sixties Mothra in spirit if not in execution, and one with a recurring ecological theme, as was the case in much pop culture in the nineties. Rebirth II might actually feel more like a kids fantasy movie in tone than its predecessor, with broader comedy and a greater emphasis on “ground level” special effects, including puppets, elaborate sets, obvious green screen, and even more obvious mid-nineties CGI. The first movie really straddled the line between the style and tone of the Heisei Godzilla movies and a much lighter touch (it’s worth noting that Rebirth II is final bow for special effects director Koichi Kawakita, who started out as an assistant on Godzilla vs. Hedorah and would become the lead from Godzilla vs. Biollante onward, so this movie marks the end of an era; meanwhile, this movie’s director, Kunio Moyishi, was the second unit director on previous subject Orochi, the Eight-Headed Dragon, but this seems firmly ensconced in this poppier, sillier world.

Gamera the Brave (2006)

Considering that this blog now houses reviews of seven Showa Gamera movies, as well as two of the Heisei ones, a maniacal sense of completism persuades me to also write about what is, to date, the last Gamera movie ever made, representing not so much an era but a potential era that was not to be. Gamera the Brave was released seven years after Revenge of Iris concluded Shusuke Kaneko’s trilogy—and not unlike the first movie in that trilogy, coming out just as the Godzilla series was going on hiatus, one that lasted much longer than the previous one. When one kaiju hibernates, another one comes to take its place in Japanese movie theatres—unfortunately, this one evidently did not get the box office necessary to keep it going, and what seemed like a beginning of another series of giant rocket-powered turtle adventures turned into a one-off followed by a decade-and-a-half of silence (except for a 2015 proof-of-concept short, which also went nowhere.) Unlike the hard reboot of the nineties trilogy—with a new continuity and a darker tone—Brave positions itself as a return to the original incarnation, directly tying itself to the classic films and going back to the child-friendly plots. This is a movie that buys wholeheartedly into the thesis I posited at the end of my last post, that the series ultimately became about the deep empathetic connection between optimistic children and a (fantastical) animal, putting the young audience who loved kaiju movies at the centre. But this movie also mines that youthfulness for drama, taking a rather melancholy turn at many points—this is not just pandering to kids, but playing on both their dreams and their anxieties, and in some ways presages the tone of Jellyfish Eyes.

A Creature Special Report: The Gamera Gauntlet

Gamera is, of course, Japan’s second favourite giant monster, one of the staple kaiju of the sixties Monster Boom whose yearly appearance in theatres (and, in the rest of the world, on television) has given him and his films an outsize influence on pop culture. You’d be hard-pressed to find a turtle in any kind of Japanese media who doesn’t fly by spinning around in its shell, and thanks mainly to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, fans of silly movies in the English-speaking world have formed a real soft (shell) spot for the terrapin tornado. Although starting out as Daiei’s answer to Toho’s Godzilla—considering the original movie was in black-and-white even though it was made in 1965, one might say their direct rip-off—the series eventually diverged in tone, even while maintaining a similar monster fight formula. While both monsters are beloved by children in the audience, Gamera was the one that was directly positioned as the “Friend to all Children”, a playful figure who would usually star alongside young actors in increasingly goofy plots, which is a level of direct pandering that Godzilla never really engaged in (at least until it started directly lifting stuff from Gamera in the late sixties and early seventies.) Gamera was even successfully revived in the mid-nineties with a trio of highly-regarded films directed by Shusuke Kaneko and written by Kazunori Ito, which I wrote about years ago.

While I’ve seen some of the movies in the original series, I’ve never had the opportunity to sit down and soak in the entire 1966-1971(+1980) run until I found the whole series available on our old pal, Tubi TV. The experience of running through the entire Showa Gameras (most of them directed by Noriaki Yuasa) has not only provided a more detailed context for the series and its place in monster history, but also demonstrates the wild evolution the series and its title kaiju took over those five years—what you thought you knew about Gamera is only partially true (he is still really neat and also filled with meat, however.) So, in this special extra-length post, I will compactly address each of the seven sequels—yes, it’s time to fire up the old capsule review machine.

Wendigo (2001)

Continuing our examination of Shudder’s selection of films, we’re jumping ahead a good 81 years from our last subject to the uneventful year of 2001, and to a very different sort of movie. Wendigo, written and directed by indie horror auteur Larry Fessenden (who had previously directed the acclaimed vampire flick Habit in 1997, and more recently co-wrote the PS4 horror game Until Dawn, which seems to have some thematic connections with this movie) skews more on the psychological thriller side of things, and while there is a titular monster to actually qualify this for the Creature Canon, it’s not something you’ll be seeing a lot of in the movie itself. It’s really more of a vague presence than a physical force (at least, until it suddenly is physical force), a darkness skirting along the edges of much more down-to-earth story—which, if you know anything about the legends the movie is ostensibly pulling from, is actually rather appropriate. As well, if you have any less-than-favourable preconceptions about indie films, this may be one that fully lives up to most of them…but we’ll get to that.

Rebirth of Mothra (1996)

Last year around this time, I was writing about eco-horror monster movies, where humanity screws with nature and then nature messes us up (which is kind of what’s happening in real life right now)—this time, though, I thought it would be interesting to look at a more positive depiction of an environmentally-minded monster. So, now we’re paying a visit to Mothra, Toho’s brightly-colourful guardian of nature and regular cohort of Godzilla—the original film from 1961, directed by the stalwart Ishiro Honda, is one of the classics of the giant monster genre, but Mothra never starred in another solo film until 1996, despite repeated attempts to make one. Mothra has always been a more lighthearted and fantastical creature compared to Godzilla, and allowed them to make a monster movie with a different tone, but the inability to give her another starring role could possibly be chalked up to the much more limited capabilities of the suits and puppets compared to the bipedal kaiju in Toho’s stable. This was no longer an issue by the mid-nineties apparently, so it was full-steam ahead on Mothra films, which despite being contiguous with the Heisei Godzillas, have a very different feeling to them.

Jellyfish Eyes (2013)

There have been more than a few more intelligent, revisionist takes on monster tropes in the past, ones that take the basic idea and attempt to add a more human dimension, or use it to directly commentate on what the monsters actually mean—I’ve written about a few of them here. Jellyfish Eyes is the cinematic attempt to give that sort of treatment to the monster collecting/kids-and-monsters subgenre (Pokemon, Digimon, et. al.), which by 2013 had become a part of the lexicon, something with a near-instantaneous draw for the youth of the world—I’ve said before that the fantasy of having your own monster friend has been something of a near-universal one for kids for decades now, with the monster collecting games simply being the purest distillation of it. Directed by contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, this movie really does get the emotional attachment kids have these fantasy creatures, and presents them in a story that outright describes them as what they are—a personal expression of their hopes and dreams, and something to protect them from cruel realities—in a story that vacillates from child-like simplicity to hard social commentary on the edges. While my previous Criterion Channel watch, The X From Outer Space, fit into that channel’s ethos for its historical interest, this is definitely more in line with their support of smaller, independently-minded films, and despite taking on fairly mainstream ideas, it does so in a way that’s way more interesting than the norm.

Monster Multimedia: Needle/7 Billion Needles

At some point, Science Fiction writers probably got tired of the standard assortment of Bug Eyed Monsters that had populated the pages of the pulps since back when they called the genre “scientifiction”, and wanted to get at something a bit more conceptual, like the aliens dreamt up by H.G. Wells in War of the Worlds and First Men in the Moon. This was especially the case during much of the “Golden Age” in the forties and fifties, where scientific rigour was emphasized over expediency-for-the-purposes-of-plot (and sometimes over plot itself), so writers began looking at biology to inspire new kinds of extraterrestrial life forms and make more interesting and “accurate” stories (and also so we could get some intelligent aliens with character, rather than just slavering beasts to be raygunned.) Among the more notable examples can be found in Hal Clement’s 1950 novel Needle, which probably introduced a lot of SF-reading kids to the idea of symbiosis.