Yes, this is indeed a much belated follow-up to The X From Outer Space, the second tier kaiju film from Japan’s sixties Monster Boom period that I covered over four years ago, and from the subtitle alone you are probably left with many questions. A nominal parody of both the original film and the state of geopolitics circa the late aughts, this one-off reboot is brought to us by director Minoru Kawasaki, who specializes in comedy tokusatsu projects with names like The Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala, and writer Masakazu Migita, an Ultraman TV series writer who has worked with Kawasaki on multiple projects. Migita was also the writer of previous subject Death Kappa, and while this certainly shares comedy stylings with that movie, it benefits from having a direction to its humour beyond just slightly off-kilter recreations of older kaiju films.
As we’ve frequently seen (even as recently as last week), the spirit of fifties B-Movies remained—and arguable remains—strong in creature features, and one part of that legacy is embracing the poor reputation the low-budget monster movies in the black-and-white era often had. Making fun of that particular oeuvre—their overly-expository and unnatural dialogue, their toy-like special effects, their nonsensical plots—has been a go-to for decades, and I can imagine that seeing so many of those movies turned into comedy fodder on something like Mystery Science Theatre 3000 broadened their audience and extended their period as laugh material for another few decades. A movie like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is an obvious outgrowth of all that: a conscious pastiche of lousy programmers, their most ridiculous traits amplified while still keeping as much of the look and sound of the real deal as possible. Even with the ubiquity of this particular brand of parody, I’m sure there was still a sense of novelty to seeing a movie like this in the early aughts, especially when it was distributed by a major studio like Tristar (three years after it premiered at film festivals), who even let their logo be shown in black-and-white to match the spirit.
There was a time where I would have taken this sort of thing at face value, but after years of watching the kinds of older movies that inspired Cadavra, the experience of watching it feels a bit different. When these fifties B-movies were something a bit more distant—a strange and infrequent discovery on late night television, all blurring together in your memory—the kind of schlock being mined for comedy here probably felt accurate to the general atmosphere. But when you really drill down into the lesser-known genre flicks of this period, you find that they are often much more interesting than their reputation says, offering weirder sights and sounds and wilder ideas even with their budget-constrained nature. Shockingly, you also find that these movies were entirely capable of making fun of themselves in the moment, the filmmakers knowingly playing up their own ridiculousness at a time when irony was not expected. If the targets of mockery have already been cracking all the same jokes this whole time, then what, exactly, can a comedy pastiche made over four decades later bring to the table?
The Movie Monster Game, well, it’s a game about movie monsters. Released in 1986 (the same year as the even more famous giant monster game Rampage) for the Apple II and Commodore 64 and developed by Epyx, a company that gained a name for itself in the eighties PC game space with titles like Impossible Mission and California Games, it comes from a very different epoch than the previous giant monster-based game I’ve written about, a strange and experimental time when game design didn’t always have clear rules, and where a degree of abstraction was still present as a game could only convey so much visual information (Epyx’s earlier giant monster title, Crush, Crumble and Chomp!, a strategy game released in 1981, provides an even primitive-looking example.) Despite that, The Movie Monster Game actually shares a lot in common with later entries in this category, especially in the presentation–decades before War of the Monsterssurrounded itself with a nostalgic metafiction wrapper, Epyx went even further, not just basing its menus around a movie theatre motif (complete with “trailers” for other Epyx games that appear before you begin playing), but structuring their game as essentially a movie you construct from various component parts pulled from numerous giant monster movies across the subgenre’s history. Even this far back, you can see that the artifice of these stomp-em-ups, and the context of the audience itself, was considered an indelible part of the experience.
That’s all well and good, but there’s a major advantage that The Movie Monster Game has that even later creature feature games could not pull off: alongside a group of “original” monsters that directly homage specific movies and tropes, they managed to officially licence Godzilla from Toho, putting the King of the Monsters prominently on the package for all to see, and making it the first video game released outside of Japan to feature him. Epyx was not an unknown company in 1986, but even so, getting the sometimes fickle Toho to lend out their star monster to an American game developer at that point still seems like a feat (it is equally surprising that they agreed to let Godzilla and Pals appear in the recent indie brawler GigaBash, a game that I still intend to play.) This was not long after the release of The Return of Godzilla (and its English release Godzilla 1985), which at least put it outside the lowest periods for the franchise, and leads me to believe that this collaboration was not an act of desperation–maybe they were just feeling generous. In any case, Godzilla’s fully approved presence in something with as definitive a title as The Movie Monster Game certainly gives it an air of legitimacy.
All the way back in my post about King of the Monsters, I briefly mentioned the 2003 Playstation 2 title War of the Monsters, a game stomping the same grounds as SNK’s monster wrestling dust-up, but separated by an ocean and a decade’s worth of technological development in video games. I’ve stressed it over and over again that giant monsters are a topic that has been woefully underrepresented in the video game sphere—a situation that annoyingly does not right itself in the time between posts where I talk about it (although that GigaBash game from last year might be worth looking at)—and for the longest time, War of the Monsters was probably the highest profile entry, or at the least the highest profile one that didn’t have Godzilla’s name plastered on the box. It had the pedigree of being a first-party Playstation game released during the PS2’s unstoppable reign as the top console, and was developed by Incog Inc. (formerly the much more sensibly-named Incognito Studios), a company formed by the lead developers of Sony’s popular Twisted Metal series, alongside Sony’s stalwart Santa Monica Studio—the “original concept” was provided by Twisted Metal and God of War lead David Jaffe, back when he made video games instead of embarrassing Youtube videos.
There is an obvious logic to getting some the leading minds behind the car combat genre to tackle a giant monster game—they are both, after all, concepts that revolve around massive property damage, and in terms of raw tech, Incog could probably carry over the physics engine that powered the PS2 Twisted Metal entry that released a year-and-a-half earlier. You can feel the car combat roots in the basic feel of War of the Monsters, the way it moves and the way it’s structured, although it also attempts to go back to Twisted Metal‘s origins in the fighting game genre in a more direct manner, with hand-to-hand combat rather than a back-and-forth bombardment of projectiles (although there’s plenty of projectiles in this as well). It’s easy to see that this game is making a genuine attempt to be both a appealing competitive smash-em-up and a loving homage to the giant monster movie genre—in some ways, it represents the last hurrah for a specific view of creature features, and a last ditch effort to take what King of the Monsters was trying to do and get it “right.”
Despite the neglect of the studio heads initially hindering its box office performance, animator Brad Bird’s directorial debut The Iron Giant became a cult hit whose acclaim and influence only grew over time. Very very loosely based on the book The Iron Man by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (which, it should be noted, ends with the titular character matching wits with a continent-sized space dragon in order to create world peace), it is a classic story of a kid befriending an otherworldly being and finding both outside acceptance and self-acceptance, themes that will likely always resonate. It’s also a unique piece of American animation, made as the boom of traditionally animated movies was on the downswing, but nonetheless doing many things very differently than the animation norm of the nineties. Most importantly for us on this site, though, it’s also a homage to, and critical analysis, of the Science Fiction and monster movies of the 1950s, using decades of hindsight to craft a portrayal that captures all the complexities of that time. Despite feeling very modern—well, modern for 1999 I guess—it still very accurately reflects many of the ideological components of those older movies, something I’ve only really come to appreciate after becoming more immersed in the source material.
How does one follow up on a game about giant monsters wrestling through major cities? Giant monsters are already quite outlandish, so what can you do to up the stakes and give the audience something fresh rather than just retreading the same destruction-laden ground? In the case of King of the Monsters, you go back to the source material, and do exactly what the old kaiju movies did: bring in aliens.
…But don’t just bring in aliens, bring in the grossest-looking aliens that could ever have come out of the wildest nightmares of your design team.
It’s always been a bit of a disappointment for me as a fan of both video games and kaiju that there aren’t very many kaiju-based games period, let alone many particularly good ones. For whatever reason, the pure visual spectacle of giant creatures smashing up each other (alongside entire cities) is something a lot of game developers and publishers don’t find enticing enough to work with. A lot of genres with cult or nerd roots—high fantasy, space opera, gory horror—have been the basis for many games, so many that the chance of some of them becoming exceptional is very high. Meanwhile, fans of giant monsters have had slim pickings for decades—the most recent game with heavy use of classical kaiju motifs is the 2017 Japan-only release City Shrouded in Shadow, a follow-up to the older Disaster Report series featuring actual licensed monsters like Godzilla and Ultraman, and the only one before that was a 2015 Godzilla game released to a thunderously lukewarm reception. But I bet kaiju fans still took notice of those games, because if they don’t rely entirely on games or series that merely take inspiration from the form (like Pokémon), they have always been forced to cling to whatever they could find.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 