Now that we’ve checked out Denmark’s only giant monster movie, it’s only a short trip across the North Sea to see what Norway has on offer—and it’s something that looks to more local, and far older, inspirations than the original Godzilla. Released during the height of the found footage cinema boom, André Øvredal’s Trollhunter uses the format to bring some of Scandinavian folklore’s most well known monsters to life in a way that’s unexpectedly grounded, focusing less on horror and more on the day-to-day issues of living in a world where civilization and the fantastical cross paths. More impressively, it manages to not sacrifice either realism or fantasy in the process of bringing them together.
One of the major inflection points in the evolution of the monster movie was when well-informed fans started working behind the scenes, aware of all the tropes and knowing just where to push them to take something from cliche to slyly self-aware examination. The ur-example of this was the Joe Dante-directed Piranha, which took what could have easily been a movie simply following the trend of ripping off Jaws and turned it into something else entirely—someone was clearly paying attention, because when director Lewis Teague (later of movies like Cujo) was given the job of making a Jaws rip-off about a giant alligator, he threw out the original script and called in Piranha screenwriter John Sayles (later of several award-winning films) to help him craft something more interesting. Together, they produced a movie in the middle ground between traditional drive-in schlock, the intelligently eccentric B-movies typified by Larry Cohen’s entries in the genre, and the cartoonish and loving parodies that Dante continued to refine in the eighties—and it does it in a way casual and subtle enough that many critics of the time didn’t even catch the dark comedy at the heart of Alligator.
Without Warning belongs to the curious category of “movies that are similar to more well-known ones, but came out first” (the last time we saw this phenomenon was with X the Unknown.) Get this: an extraterrestrial comes down to Earth and hunts humans in the wilderness with alien weaponry—sound familiar? This one debuted a full seven years before Predator, though, and most interestingly, the alien in both is portrayed by the same actor, Seven-foot-two Kevin Peter Hall. That’s an amazing bit of coincidence that the Internet often speculates about, but it’s also worth remembering that the Predator was originally supposed to be played by Jean Claude Van Damme and then was subsequently replaced by Hall when they overhauled the design and the suit. If there was any actual direct inspiration from Without Warning in Predator, there’s no concrete evidence of it—so it’s just sort of a weird, interesting bit of trivia.
In any case, this has long been simply considered the proto-Predator movie in cult film circles, but this low budget early eighties affair should also be known as the thing with the wildly overqualified cast and crew. While director Greydon Clark’s filmography includes such classics as…Satan’s Cheerleaders, and the video game-themed sex comedy Joysticks (as well as Mystery Science Theatre 3000 favourite Final Justice), the film features cinematography from Dean Cundey, favourite DP of directors like John Carpenter and Robert Zemeckis, a monster mask designed by Rick Baker, and a cast that includes two future Academy Award winners, as well as a young David Caruso (future star of CSI) running around in short shorts. It’s a large confluence of things that help elevate this movie above its $150,000 exploitation movie predilections.
The last collaboration between Rankin-Bass and Tsuburaya Productions we saw was the TV movie The Bermuda Depths, which I remember being a little odd. After watching The Last Dinosaur, the TV movie they made prior to it (which had an extended cut released theatrically in Japan), I’m starting to wonder if it might have been even odder than I remember, because this one is pure nonsense. You’d think a rather straightforward modern riff on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World would not produce as wacky results as a ghost story that also involves a giant turtle, but you’d be surprisingly wrong! Somehow, this has every cliché in the book—a hidden land not so much populated by dinosaurs but hosting a small party of them, primitive humans, and a hunter out to bag the biggest game of them all—but you never really notice because you’re constantly questioning what is happening on screen. It’s funny that whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry for this spends so much of snidely putting down the special effects, when there’s so much other stuff to be boggled by.
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.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 