Warning From Space (1956)

With Daiei, I always seem to be discovering more pre-Gamera contributions to the tokusatsu genre—they had been testing out monster effects for a quite a while before unleashing their own major series (like Daimajin and Yokai Monsters.) Now I think I’ve found their earliest foray, earlier than even The Whale God—originally released in 1956, Warning From Space (Japanese title Spacemen Appear in Tokyo) premiered barely a year after Godzilla, and aside from capitalizing on the new trend of people in monster costumes, it also feels very much part of the general trends of American Science Fiction films in the mid-fifties, which is to say that it has almost exactly the same plot as several of them. But if some of the parts aren’t entirely original, this ramshackle little film’s general aura is much odder and more interesting—and its unassuming weirdness apparently had a surprising impact, as one biography named it directly as one of the films that inspired Stanley Kubrick to eventually try his hand at Sci-Fi. Who knows how true that really is, but who wouldn’t want to imagine a master filmmaker sitting around studying this tale of rogue planets and dancing starfish?

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.

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.

Daimajin Strikes Again (1966)

We’re finally here: the end of Daiei’s Daimajin trilogy. Those three movies released over the span of eight months, while my viewings took three years—who can say who was more efficient? In other important Daimajin news, while doing some post-watch research for this post, I learned that the big guy himself will be returning to movie screens in Japan next month with a sizable (still got it!) role in Takashi Miike’s very belated sequel to his movie The Great Yokai War (which I’ll have to get to at some point). Neat!

As with the two previous Daimajin movies, Daimajin Strikes Again (also known as Wrath of Daimajin) is basically a reiteration of the same story in a different setting—but while the second movie flirted with a more human-centric god figure, this one returns to the much more capricious force of nature that Majin was in the first movie, something to be feared and respected, something that metes out justice based on his own terms (time and time again, the thing that undoes the villains is not necessarily their mistreatment of their fellow man, but that they do not show fear and respect.) The movie has an opening narration that informs us that the people in this setting believe that natural disasters are controlled by Majin, and then shows him inflicting every possible natural disaster on a village, seemingly all at the same time, conducting snowstorms and earthquakes and floods with his giant stone hands, while the people flee and ask what they had done to anger him. There is no answer—while Strikes Again shows that the guy can be placated, he is still clearly meant to embody the way the natural world felt to people at a time before we understand the mechanics of things (and maybe it still feels that way now that we know), when the weather could turn against them with a mercurial ferocity. He is a figure of a harsh universe that humans learned to live with and know not to cross, and to me that’s a much more interesting kind of figure.

The Whale God (1962)

A few years before Daiei dove headfirst into the kaiju genre with Gamera, they produced The Whale God (Kujira Gami), which is really more of a historical drama than a giant monster movie (and unlike Daimajin, has no real fantastical elements at all, although director Tokuzo Tanaka also mostly made his name on movies like the Zatoichi series like the directors of those movies), but it does have a larger-than-average creature at its centre, and so often gets lumped in as part of the company’s kaiju line-up. It’s probably no surprise to anyone that this is a Japanese take on Moby-Dick (based on a 1961 novel by Koichiro Uno), which in itself re-contextualizes the story—Japan has its own very specific cultural relationship with whales and the whaling career (and continues to), and while it is also has similar themes of obsession and man’s relationship with nature, it places those alongside familial themes and an even more explicit delving into masculine ideals. What you get is a grim, conflicted explication on how one’s self-annihilating sense of purpose can lead to glory but also to ruination, especially to all the other people around you, told moodily in black-and-white with another tonally perfect score by Akira Ifukube. The titular whale only appears at the beginning and the end of the movie, but its presence is felt throughout, becoming the driving force for all the human drama, the thing that defines everything this cast of characters does, mostly for ill.

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.

Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters (1968)

If you recall, around Halloween time last year I reviewed the 1968 Daiei classic Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, and briefly mentioned that it was the second film in a “quickly-produced” trilogy—actually, I don’t think I said it was “quickly-produced” that time, but I should have, because all three of those movies premiered within a twelve month span (so, slightly longer than the Daimajin trilogy.) Daiei was all about striking when the iron was (potentially?) hot. Whereas last week’s post was about a sequel to a tokusatsu classic, this week’s is about a prequel—100 Monsters (AKA One-Hundred Yōkai Tales, which is a more fitting title because there definitely aren’t one hundred monsters in this movie) released nine months before Spook Warfare, and despite utilizing a lot of the same suits, it’s actually a very different movie. Where the second Yōkai movie is definitely meant to be the more lighthearted and fun take on Japan’s native supernatural creatures, this is a moralistic pseudo-horror film…very much like Daimajin, actually, right down to the corrupt authority figures who anger the paranormal forces and get their comeuppance. Would it surprise you that this was directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda, director of the the first Daimajin film? He brings a more foreboding character to this movie, whose set design and tone feels more in line with the actual yōkai stories themselves.

Return of Daimajin (1966)

If you recall, around this time last year I reviewed the 1966 Daiei classic Daimajin, and briefly mentioned that it was the first film in a “quickly-produced” trilogy—and when I said “quickly-produced”, I meant “all released in the same year.” Return of Daimajin premiered just four months after the original, with a different director (Kenji Misumi, who also hailed from the world of Japanese period drama/action movies, and was an integral early director in important series like Zatoichi and Lone Wolf and Cub) and the same premise. I mean, in a lot of ways, this is the exact same movie as the original Daimajin, with many roughly equivalent characters and plot beats—these two more or less feel like two variations on the same themes, so maybe watching them a year apart was a good way to keep them from feeling a bit too samey (I imagine the third movie is also similar, so don’t expect me to cover that one any time soon.) This is not to say that Return is EXACTLY the same as its predecessor and thus pointless, as there are some fairly subtle differences, and at least it also carries over much of the original’s high points as well.

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (1968)

The only real difference between the Japanese yōkai, the multitude of spirits that inhabit the country’s traditional stories, and the mythological creatures of other nations is that there has been more of historical trend towards treating yōkai as a collective group of popular characters rather than just creatures in various stories. Although they originate in tales that are often meant to be scary (or at least creepy), most yōkai have ended up becoming more like weird but lovable mascots than figures of terror, and despite often coming from different contexts, they’ve also been treated as one big group for even longer. Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (called The Great Yōkai War in Japan) is an example of how they’ve come to be used in culture—the second in a loose trilogy produced by Gamera/Daimajin studio Daiei (just to further solidify the connection between this and Daimajin, this movie is directed by that movie’s cinematographer), the only thing that seems to connect the three movies are the yōkai themselves, a whole host of them brought to life with sixties tokusatsu ingenuity. Considering that most kaiju films, and Japanese media about monsters in general (even later when you get to stuff like Pokémon) are heavily indebted to depictions of yōkai, it seems rather obvious that they’d get some movies made about them in this style. It’s an homage to where much of the monster movie tradition in the country originated.