Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (1968)

The Japanese studio Shochiku, one of the oldest of all of the country’s major movie makers, went on a bit of a Sci-Fi/horror streak in the late sixties—last year, I wrote about their giant monster movie The X From Outer Space, which was the first in that loosely related group of films. Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell followed the next year, and while The X is a clear attempt to emulate Toho’s Godzilla movies (with its own idiosyncrasies, to be fair), part me wonders if this movie is taking some cues from another Toho creature feature: Matango. Much like that movie, Goke focuses on a group of stranded survivors, pulled from all over modern Japanese (and international) society, whose cooperation frays at the seams while a supernatural threat looms in the background—it’s also filled with psychedelic imagery and an overwhelming sense of bleakness and despair, reflected in the unnatural colour choices used for the environments. Unfortunately for Goke, very little in it is as visually interesting as Matango’s lushly unnerving sets—but, thankfully, it makes up for it in the sheer brazen energy of its themes and its extremely harsh condemnation of the State of Things in the late sixties. Subtlety of any kind has no place here, and what is created is a uniquely feverish fusion of alien vampire terror and utter cynicism.

The Lure (2015)

We’re now on the third and final sample of Creature Canon Contenders found on The Criterion Channel, and since we were on the topic of deconstructionist monster stories: The Lure, a Polish horror/musical/fantasy recreation of the eighties directed and co-written by Agnieszka Smoczynska, is a highly deconstructionist take on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” Do you consider mermaids to be “monsters”? Well, this movie certainly does—in this, mermaids have a tendency to rip throats out and eat human hearts, which is slightly different from the norm, but not that far removed from their mythical origins. BUT, aside from being dangerous, flesh-eating demi-humans with beautiful voices (whose existence in the hyper-stylized world of the film seems to be not necessarily common knowledge, but no one seems to have their mind blown by it), they are also a metaphorical representation of how women are exploited, and how they try to change themselves to better fit societal expectations. Moving between flashy choreographed musical numbers and a grungy depiction of urban Europe in the eighties, you can really see both sides of the central argument: is this really a world worth giving up heart eating and underwater merriment for?

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.

The X From Outer Space (1967)

There are so many streaming services available now, so much content awaiting to become someone’s treadmill background noise, and I hear you asking, “Yes, but what kind of monster movies are on these things?” I’m glad you brought it up, entirely hypothetical person, because I plan to find out on this here website! I’ll be using some of my posts to explore the kind of monster-based content that is available to stream on all the less-than-major streaming services (because I already know how barren Netflix’s selection is), seeing who brings the most creature feature value. I think of this as a public service, but not necessarily the kind that is mandated by the courts.

First up, we’ll be checking out the Criterion Channel—home of film history, world cinema, mind-expanding arthouse classics, and a surprisingly robust collection of monster movies, including most of the Showa Godzilla films. They also have The X From Outer Space (AKA Giant Space Monster Guilala), the only kaiju outing from one of Japan’s oldest major film studios, Shochiku, and the missing final piece of the sixties Monster Boom that I began writing about last year. 1966/1967 were the years all the big players in Japanese cinema and television were trying to cash in on the love of rubber suit monsters—which also overlapped with the period where Shochiku was going hard into Science Fiction/Horror films, of which this was the first (the rest are also available on Criterion Channel.) As we saw in the other Monster Boom subjects, there was often an attempt for the non-Toho studios to find some way to distinguish their monsters from all the others, and it seems like the Sci-Fi angle is about as close to a trademark as X really gets…aside from its kooky monster.