Let’s return to the Showa era, and examine how the Godzilla series looked towards the youth in two different ways.
Continue reading Zillatinum: Part 3 (All Monsters Attack & Godzilla vs. Gigan)
Bonoho-ho-ho! With December comes the jolliest time of year—Christmas Apes season!
While researching what movies to watch, I try to find details that make them stand out, or possibly resonate with what I’ve written about before, allowing me to compare and contrast. When I decided upon the obscure forties B-movie The Monster and the Girl, it was at least partially because it’s another example of a movie which revolves around a brain transplant, a once ubiquitous plot device that we previously saw in The Colossus of New York. It also has “monster” in the title, which makes it seem like a pretty obvious subject for this series. However, what actually drew me to track this movie down are some quotes from a contemporaneous review from Variety, which described it as “a chiller-diller that will send fans of goose-pimply melodrama from the theaters amply satisfied” and “red meat of the bugaboo ticket buyers.” How could you not want to see whatever it is this apparent human being is describing? You know how much I, a bugaboo ticket buyer, love chiller-dillers.
Crammed into the months between two Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya Godzilla movies (Mothra vs. Godzilla and Ghidorah The Three-Headed Monster, just for those keeping score), Dogora was always likely to be left in the dust of its more popular giant monster brethren—which was certainly not helped by some other things that I will get into shortly. Continuing on from what we saw in The H-Man, this is another Toho monster movie whose human element relies heavily on gangster and cops trying to one-up each other, with some light international intrigue, likely inspired by the popularity of yakuza-themed movies in Japanese theatres in the early sixties (as well as an uptick in real life organized crime.) It was also likely inspired by a scaling back of the original story proposal by Jojiro Okami (who had worked on previous Toho genre movies) by screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa (who wrote both of 1964’s Godzilla movies, as well as previous subjects Varan and Latitude Zero, among many others), using cops-and-robbers antics to fill in time that was originally meant for more globe-hopping cosmic horror. What you’re left with is an uneven movie with many of its more intriguing elements sticking out among the rather tepid filler.
Released in the same year as Varan, The H-Man sees director Ishiro Honda return again to ideas and imagery from Godzilla, just four years old at the time, beginning with more footage of a nuclear bomb test and another invocation of the Lucky Dragon 5 incident. What’s different here is that while the kaiju films visualized the fear of nuclear fallout and ongoing weapons testing through the creation of a walking natural disaster, this one is entirely human-based: men transformed into nightmarish new forms, completely unlike anything seen in nature (this is, in fact, yet another blob movie that predated The Blob—there must have been something gooey in the air in the late 1950s.) While treading some similar ground to other Honda/Toho genre films on the surface, the smaller scale and bizarre nature of the threat lead to something far different from the other monster movies of the Showa era.
One curious phenomenon from yesterday’s internet were articles listing failed television pilots that aired once and then vanished, oftentimes for very obvious reasons. While there were some failed pilots that looked like missed opportunities in hindsight and were passed around like glorious contraband by online fans (the high concept comedies Heat Vision and Jack and Lookwell! come to mind), most of them were self-evidently bad ideas that somehow convinced enough people to provide the money to realize their untenable visions. It wouldn’t be the entertainment industry if there weren’t a subsection of people with wild ambitions and no sense whatsoever.
One of the more intriguing-in-its-ludicrousness pilots that regularly featured in those proto-listicles was the 1992 NBC pilot/TV movie Steel Justice, which on paper feels like a parody of a high concept TV show pitch: what if a cop fought crime with Robosaurus? You know Robosaurus, don’t you? The giant mechanical monstrosity that has been making appearances at monster truck shows for over three decades? Crunches cars and breathes fire? Parodied on The Simpsons as Truckasaurus? Yes, I imagine some Hollywood executive went to a local motocross event, saw Robosaurus do its thing (or, I guess more accurately, it’s two things) and thought “that’s a TV show!” By that, of course, they meant that they could take the template of some other shows and then insert Robosaurus into it, which is really what most high concept pitches end up being—cop shows were a big thing then, and if Cop Rock showed us anything, it’s that viewers wanted their law & order dramas to be leavened a bit with completely incongruous elements. But Steel Justice is more than just a show where a police officer fights crime with a forty-foot robot dinosaur that exists solely to crush cars, the most efficient way of fighting crime—it’s also some near-future nonsense with a fantasy twist with sets that shout “this was shot entirely at Universal Studios and isn’t even trying to hide it.” Other than that, it is just a show where a police officer fights crime with a forty-foot robot dinosaur. A sure-miss scenario if there ever was one!
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.
We’ve once again entered Halloween season, giving me an excuse to write about monster movies, which is something I rarely get to do. To kick this October off, we’re returning to an old favourite source: Hong Kong film pioneers Shaw Brothers Studios, who gave us previous subjects Super Inframan and The Mighty Peking Man. Released between those two movies and directed by Mighty Peking Man‘s Ho Meng-hua (several actors from both movies also appear), The Oily Maniac takes some of those same aesthetics and puts them in service of a horror movie that combines seedy exploitation and blatant moralism, never a more potent mixture in the world of B-movies. As we are told in the opening text, this is based on “tall tales” from Malaysia (although I’d say they are better described as urban legends, especially considering they originate in the twentieth century) of an oil-covered night stalker called Orang Minyak, a figure who was featured in several Malaysian films in the decades before this. In this one, though, they take a figure who in the original stories was a frightening figure of violence against women and turn him into a supernatural avenger, with the film finding other ways to maintain the distressing tone suggested by its origins. Although by far the grimiest of the Shaw Bros monster trilogy (in more ways than one), that is sometimes offset by a comparable devotion to outlandish film making.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 