Half Human (original Japanese title The Beastman Snowman) exists as a curious footnote in the history of Toho’s monster movies—it is Ishiro Honda’s direct follow-up to Godzilla (which prevented him from directing the actual Godzilla sequel also released in 1955), with much of that film’s cast and crew carrying over, including effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, story originator Shigeru Kayama, and screenwriter Takeo Murata (also the writer of Godzilla Raids Again and Rodan), which subsequently became an obscurity whose original Japanese release has never officially appeared on home video (although that doesn’t prevent people from finding it if they look a little.) Like Godzilla, this movie’s American incarnation was a heavy edit job, lopping off over over thirty minutes of run time, radically altering the story and tone, and inserting scenes of American actors like John Carradine (who probably wouldn’t turn down a movie role even if you paid him to) to make it seem less foreign, and that version has been the only one easily available all this time. There’s a reason for that pattern of unavailability that we’ll get to, but it has in some ways rendered this movie as much of a phantom as the Abominable Snowman at its centre, a missing link between Godzilla and the Honda-directed monster movies to follow.
Years ago, I wrote about my initiation into the…fandom?…of Cryptozoology and other stories of unexplained phenomenon through books and TV programs like Animal X, which focused entirely on cryptids and other weird animal anecdotes. In the grand scheme of things, a show like Animal X was niche, a foreign import that found its way into circulation during the strange expansion days of cable TV—even a broader-minded program in a similar vein like the Leonard Nimoy-hosted In Search Of… (a recurring topic on my other website) was mostly a minor staple of syndication. These series have snuck their way into the nostalgic memories of lifelong channel surfers, and likely introduced more people to the many mystery monsters of the world…but I imagine that even more people were introduced to Cryptozoology through the most mainstream mysterious phenomenon TV show, Unsolved Mysteries.
Its credentials as an actual hit are pretty evident: the initial run, which like In Search Of… started out as a series of specials, ran for fourteen straight years on three channels, including two of the big networks (NBC from 1987 to 1997, and CBS from 1997 to 1999) and one cable network (Lifetime, from 2000-2002); it almost certainly became another staple of syndication in that timeframe as well, and was recently revived in a revised form on Netflix. A series like that doesn’t go on for that long and end up with hundreds of episodes without being seen by a few people, and the trick to getting this type of show in front of so many eyeballs is ingenious: it’s a Trojan Horse, of sorts. From its inception, Unsolved Mysteries was a true crime docu-series, focusing on murders, robberies, disappearances, separated families and other down-to-earth cases—it’s a good example of what the genre was like before the more recent trends in True Crime “entertainment.” This makes it cheap to produce for networks, and it even includes an audience participation angle, with a telephone line open to hear from people who may have information that will crack those cold cases, with subsequent episodes providing updates on previous stories that showed that this hotline actually worked.
When it became a full weekly series in 1988, the show expanded its range of topics to include different sorts of mysteries, including supposed supernatural phenomena: UFOs, hauntings, and starting in a first season episode from 1989, monster legends. One could question the taste of putting stories with genuine pleas to help reunite families and solve violent crimes to give people closure next to sensationalism about crop circles and Bigfoot, but it’s the exact sort of gleefully tone-ignorant juxtaposition you expect to see on television. These things are all “mysteries”, and so they are jumbled together regardless of their actual content (I do wonder how many phone calls they got with “information” about the weirdo stuff.) In any case, this means that the sorts of people who would initially watch a series about real crimes were, more often than not, also exposed to some of the most well-known cryptids, and maybe even came away convinced that they’re real—and believer or not, other people came away from the show with the memories of these creatures burned into their memory thanks to the dark and menacing atmosphere the show imbued in their portrayal.
Reading the Cryptozoology literature, you will inevitably come across the story of the Beast of Gévaudan, an animal that purportedly slaughtered up to a hundred people (or maybe even hundreds, the record isn’t entirely clear) over three years in 1760s France. After numerous hunts and false victories, the killings finally ended after a particularly large wolf was shot, stuffed, and mounted in King Louis XV’s court. The larger-than-life descriptions of the beast given by surviving victims and hunters and fuzzy historical records has led to endless speculation about just what kind of animal the beast really was (it’s even become a common reference for werewolf stories)—and while the consensus, for the most part, is that the deaths were the work of a wolf, or more likely several wolves, the French production The Brotherhood of the Wolf asks the provocative question “what if it wasn’t a wolf, what if it was, like…a different animal?” It also asks another equally provocative question, which is whether this piece of French history could not be made into an epic-length martial arts action movie.
Now it’s time to highlight some of the new monster-based entertainment released over the prior year, because they still make those things, you know. Sometimes, those new ones are really quite different from what we’ve seen before. Case in point:
Indie comics artist Dash Shaw released his first animated film, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, a few years ago, and last year’s Cryptozoo was his follow-up. While very different in subject matter, it maintains the experimental, hand-crafted style evident in both that first movie and his own comics work. Every moment in this film is a multimedia burst of painterly colour, with lush backdrops, collage elements, and characters who look like they walked right out of a sketchbook, all mingling in visually innovative ways (many of the backgrounds were painted by Shaw’s comics contemporaries like Benjamin Marra, Frank Santoro, and former Adventure Time showrunner Jesse Moynihan.) As for that subject matter, well, it’s pretty much tailor-made for me: what if all the creatures of mythology and folklore were real things hiding out in the world, and how would modern civilization deal with that? This is a story that takes a fantastical premise and uses it as a springboard to explore the concept of social progress, of wanting to protect the strange and wonderful things from a world of prejudice and exploitation, and whether the strange and wonderful want to be protected at all. For as quirky and painterly as the world of this movie is, it also pulls no punches and offers no simple conclusions.
Every year I return to yetis, and every year I wind up with another sympathetic portrayal of yetis. It’s not like there isn’t anything out there that features yetis (or sasquatches…what is sasquatch plural? Should I go with Bigfeet?) as figures of pure menace, but how many of those are at all interesting? The fact is, from the day the idea of hairy wild men roaming around somewhere (be it on the tallest mountains in Asia or in the untouched woodlands of North America) in the wilderness became mainstream, there came a sense of camaraderie with these hypothetical great apes, living free out in the last remote parts of the world. As I said in my Urban Yeti!post, regular people seem to find them inherently amusing, maybe because they have incredibly non-threatening nicknames like “Bigfoot” and “Abominable Snowman”, and maybe because they recognize that there is something human about them, thinking of them as our distant cousins rather than some unknown wild animal. Maybe they are even a sort of aspirational figure, something that exists outside the urban malaise, roaming untethered. We want to like the yeti, whether they are real or not, and the art inspired by it reflects that.
The song “Abominable Snowman in the Market” hails from Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ titular debut album, released in 1976, which is not the debut album of either Jonathan Richman or the Modern Lovers. Richman is known for his highly idiosyncratic sensibilities and manner of singing, his stripped down stylings crafted from the early days of rock and roll (as well from his early obsession with the Velvet Underground), and the humorous streak that runs through many of his songs, including the cult favourite “Pablo Picasso.” Considering his unique vocals, which intentionally waver and place bizarre word emphasis throughout chorus and verses, he seems particularly suited to songs with off-beat subject matter, which can range from observational odes to the mundanities of modern life (like shopping centres or financial districts) or borderline child-like fantasies. Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers (the album) is particularly rich in both, so a two-and-half minute tale of a yeti wandering into the most quotidian symbols of suburban normalcy fits in rather well, especially when it’s sequenced alongside equally whimsical songs like “Little Insect” and “Here Come the Martian Martians.” Richman’s lyrics are fully ensconced in the modern world, but he demonstrates that there can be just as much a place of imagination as anywhere else.
Now, to conclude this year’s Christmas Apes season (which is also the last post of this year), another tale of a certain legendary wild man, albeit one that is probably a little less classy than the last one I wrote about…
For the longest time, I thought that Urban Yeti! would remain something that only I would remember. The Game Boy Advance software library, which I’ve written about elsewhere, was a strange beast, housing some truly outstanding portable games, but just as with its predecessors, it also attracted a glut of low-quality nonsense trying to trick kids or their parents into picking them up (generally speaking, if it was a licensed game or had CG art on the cover, you’d best avoid it.) So, a blatantly bad GBA game was so common that it rarely attracted a second glance when they graced the pages of the game magazines that were often forced to briefly cover them to fill space—but despite looking about on par with the chaff of the system, just the title Urban Yeti! (yes, with the exclamation point) caught my attention back in my game mag-reading heyday of 2002. The game’s cover was ugly-looking yet intriguing, and the accompanying screenshots and text that conveyed a certain level of bafflement on the part of the staff of Nintendo Power or whoever painted a portrait of something that was, while not good, at least unique. If memory serves, one or more of the game magazines I was reading at the time continued to reference it for a few months afterwards, especially the game’s iconic opening line “Now, get ready to yeti!” (if only more games commanded you with such power and conviction), which I also found incredibly amusing. Of course, the game industry would inevitably leave Urban Yeti! in the literal bargain bin of history, where it probably deserved to be, and thought no more about it once that magical summer of 2002 passed us by—but I didn’t forget. No, I carried that exhortation to prepare myself for future yeti-ing with me out of early adolescence and well into adulthood, where I figured that a silly line from a mediocre game (that was evidently the sort of thing that was being sold through a 1-800 number at one point) I had never played would die with me. There was no shame, in my mind, in becoming the lonely torchbearer for Urban Yeti!
AND YET: last year, the charity speed running event Awesome Games Done Quick featured a streamed playthrough of the game as part of their Bad Games block, introducing this strange piece of crypto-Cryptozoological ephemera to a new audience. Apparently, far more people were Ready To Yeti than I had imagined! But what exactly drew us all to the call of this sassy Sasquatch adventure?
A lot of very important monster history is to be found in 1957’s The Abominable Snowman (which sometimes has Of the Himalayas in the title): it’s one of the notable Hammer Films thrillers released before they went all-in on lurid Gothic horror in the late fifties, and it’s also another Hammer production co-written by legendary British television writer Nigel Kneale, based on his own earlier BBC drama, after the studio found success adapting Kneale’s Quatermass stories. Kneale produced some incredibly influential pieces of television and film science fiction and horror from the fifties to the seventies, stories with sober intelligence and fascinating existential themes about humanity and its place in the universe. Abominable Snowman is another example of that, taking the search for the elusive Himalayan hominid (which was in the public consciousness again in the fifties after the Everest climbs of Eric Shipton and Sir Edmund Hillary and the accompanying footprint photographs) and using it as a vehicle to examine the nature of our own species. This is a deliberate and atmospheric movie, one that actually takes the implication of the subject matter seriously.
Incident at Loch Ness is a postmodern film to the extreme, a mockumentary that jumps from tone to tone and exploits preconceptions about certain filmmakers and genres—a film about the making of a film, with a separate documentary crew filming someone else making a different documentary. Despite starring legendary director Werner Herzog, it is not actually one of his movies, and honestly doesn’t even really try to replicate the feeling of his documentaries despite clearly playing off his ideas of “fact vs reality”/ecstatic truth and his reputation as a rogue filmmaker. Really, it feels much more Hollywood, which is also one of the central jokes here, but at times goes far beyond self-parody—this is the kind of movie where Jeff Goldblum and Crispin Glover can show up for cameos, and where all the featured players are film industry people playing themselves, including screenwriter Zak Penn (he of such films as X2: X-Men United and Behind Enemy Lines, and the actual director of this movie) playing the ultimate pathetic movie hack. All of that gets centred around the Loch Ness Monster, which makes total sense for a film about what is or isn’t real.
Anyone with any experience watching a television program about unexplained phenomenon will probably have their completely rote structure memorized: give basic background information, rattle off famous stories about the phenomenon, interview an eyewitness or two, interview so-called “expert”, interview skeptic denouncing the phenomenon, mention that the sheer number of eyewitnesses means that “something must be out there”, and end on a completely inconclusive note. Be sure not to scrutinize any piece of evidence or any claims made during the interviews (the talking heads are usually completely separate, and do not get to interact at all with any of the others—every statement is left free-floating)—this is TV, after all, and you only have a specific timeslot and finite audience attention span. The point of these sorts of shows was to never provide any sort of definitive statement on anything, so they couldn’t be called a rube or a spoilsport—maybe these things are true, maybe they aren’t, maybe someday we’ll find out, who knows? It’s the old “just asking questions” canard at its mushiest, its most weaselly.
I, of course, know this because I’ve seen so much of it. As a kid, I would tune into these shows whenever they aired, absorbing their rhythms, never really caring that one show about Bigfoot rarely presented any new information compared to the previous one I watched. It remained endlessly fascinating to me, this shadow world of phantom organisms that eluded discovery and the few devoted cranks forever maintaining their faith that they would some day be vindicated.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 