Some nine years after It Lives Again, Larry Cohen returned to his monster movie debut for one final bow—but this was Cohen returning after expanding his repertoire and innovating in the genre in the eighties, first with Q – The Winged Serpentand then The Stuff, both classics in their own right. The increasingly over-the-top and comedy-infused styles of those movie do in fact continue in It’s Alive III—sometimes in very direct ways, considering the actors involved—keeping it in line with Cohen’s eighties filmography; at the same time, it develops many of the themes and emotional beats that made the original It’s Alive and its supplementary first sequel into something genuinely special. Yes, these movies about murderous mutant babies carry all the marks of schlock genius, but as weird as it sounds, they also have a heart, and that makes something like Island of the Alive stand out just as much as…well, everything else in it.
1964 was the turning point for the Godzilla films—after ten years and four movies, the series not only solidified into what it would be for the rest of the Showa era, but what it would be in all the years beyond that. After hitting on the kaiju battle premise in Godzilla Raids Again, King Kong vs. Godzilla, demonstrated that having multiple monster headliners duking it out brought in audiences like nothing else. As we have seen in the sixty years since then, it’s a pitch that finds its way back into public favour even after a period of downtime—watching two or more big monsters fighting hits a primal nerve.
These shifts in focus inevitably changed how the stories were written—for one, humanity was no longer living in a world where monsters were a freakish and tragic aberration, but one where they are woven into the fabric of existence. More importantly, though, was how all of this altered the depiction of Godzilla, which spoke of changing attitudes in Toho and possibly in the populace. Although the tone of the movies had significantly softened after the stark nuclear terror of Ishiro Honda’s original, one thing that stuck around even with the relative optimism of Raids Again or the lighthearted spectacle of KKvG was the idea of Godzilla as the ultimate threat, a walking disaster that humanity must contend with again and again as a constant reminder of what they had brought upon themselves. In 1954, Godzilla’s atomic origins made it feel like a new existential problem for life itself—but what happens when that becomes normalized? If Godzilla is eventually part of everyday life, how are we supposed to see him? Could he even become something more than a menace?
Circumstances at Toho led to the regular monster movie crew producing two movies in the Godzilla series in 1964 (with Dogora released between them), and you can see the drastic shift in the tone of this series happen in real time as you watch them. Godzilla gets one more round as the antagonist that brings humans (and more benevolent monsters) together—but within a few months, the tables turn completely, and it is Godzilla himself that humanity turns to for help from an even greater threat. There is something of a logical through line in this—Godzilla’s subsequent change into monster hero did not come from nothing—but it still rather dramatically realigned how these movies would be made from then on.
The movies that get the tag “Science Gone Wrong” on here are part of one of the longest lineages in the history of creature features—and probably one of that history’s most reactionary undercurrents, demonstrating a ceaseless anxiety about scientific discovery and experimentation. The deeper we dive into the mechanics of nature, the closer we get to inevitably crossing lines we were never meant to cross, with terrible consequences the equally inevitable result—or, that’s the way they see it, and it’s a structure and theme that has never really gone away, and manages to adapt itself to whatever the latest technological and scientific advances (although by “adapt to”, I don’t necessarily mean “understand.”) Splice is a film that very intentionally hearkens back to some of the more hysteria-prone versions of that Sci-Fi narrative, and even places it in the consistently hackle-raising field of genetic engineering, which has been the topic of more than a few monster movies over the decades. The innovation here is that the lines being crossed in this story are not necessarily being done in the name of science, but something far more personal—and so the ensuing terrible consequences have some different and sometimes more disturbing dimensions.
Before the year’s out, I’d be remiss not to take one last dive into the short-lived but intriguing Hollywood dalliance with the creature feature in the nineties, a trend that was unarguably spurred on by Jurassic Park. None of the subsequent follow-up movies is more directly connected to JP than Congo, another genre blockbuster based on a Michael Crichton novel that not only features special effects by Stan Winston and Co., but Spielberg’s longtime collaborator Frank Marshall in the director’s chair (one of Marshall’s previous directorial efforts was Arachnophobia, a missing piece of nineties creature feature history that will gets its due on this site eventually.) While its ambitions are certainly on a smaller scale than its predecessor—bringing to life a bunch of mutant gorillas is not quite as impressive as animating dinosaurs—through its rollicking adventure structure and jungle setting, I have no doubts it was trying to bring in at least some of the vast audience that the previous Critchton adaptation got. However, even if many of the surface elements remain similar, the explicitly throwback nature of this story makes for a different beast,
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.
Released at the tail end of the eighties, Leviathan followed a string of major projects for Stan Winston—he had worked with Rob Bottin on The Thing, and after opening Stan Winston Studio, crafted the effects for The Terminator, Aliens, and Predator (as well as Invaders From Marsand Pumpkinhead), establishing that team to be the top studio for creature effects in Hollywood. Winston himself was well past his Gargoyles mask-masking days, acting as Producer of Creature Effects alongside his crew, including Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. (the latter once again tasked with wearing the monster suit), who would move on to Tremors immediately after this. With those in mind, one can’t help but look at Leviathan as a victory lap, the kind of movie that these people could make in their sleep. It doesn’t change the game like Stan Winston Studios prior projects, but it allows them another chance to show why they got those earlier movies in the first place.
While the giant monster movie genre originated in America, it was the productions by Japanese studios like Toho that really gave the genre its own topoi. When studios outside of Toho tackled the subject from the late fifties and into the sixties, it was always in the shadow of Godzilla and its successors, and it’s interesting to see how they responded. Surprisingly few of them really attempted to utilize the tokusatsu kaiju style, instead attempting to keep the stop motion tradition of King Kong alive—Gorgo is one of the few examples of a non-Japanese studio tackling suitmation.
You could call Gorgo a British homage to Godzilla, with “homage” being quite generous—on the other hand, Godzilla itself was a “homage” to The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, so you know, turnabout is fair play. Who is the director of this? Why, it’s Eugène Lourié, director of (the non-Ray Harryhausen parts) of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, “homaging” the “homage” to his own movie! It was also the third time he directed a light variation of “giant marine reptile attacks a city”, with the other two being The Beast and1959’s The Giant Behemoth, the latter featuring stop motion by King Kong‘s Willis O’Brien ( Lourié also directed previous site subject The Colossus of New York between those two.) Two years after Behemoth and yet another lizard from millions of years ago is battering London—but despite the clear attempt to ape from Godzilla (and despite it featuring no apes), one of the ways it differentiates itself is by eschewing the nuclear radiation fears that animated both Toho’s and Lourié’s own movies and going back to ape the plot, and sympathetic monster(s), of King Kong (which does feature apes.) Coming out in the same year as Toho’s Mothra, which also has a Kong-esque plot, there seemed to have been a convergent sense of nostalgia in the giant monster genre at the time.
I’ve argued before that much of movie monsterdom is based on the idea of finding some way to revive the dinosaurs, because people, and kids especially, will never not be fascinated with dinosaurs. As historically inaccurate as it is, I think the reason so many movies feature humans and dinosaurs coexisting is because many just wish that they could co-exist with them, and project it onto the distant past. With that in mind, I doubt many would disagree with me when I say that the ultimate dream of most children, maybe even more than befriending a robot, is befriending a dinosaur, which is like your typical animal friendship stories but massively scaled up. There have been plenty of pieces of entertainment that exploit that desire, and Dinosaurus! is technically one of them—although in practice, it’s really a movie about a kid befriending a neanderthal and then getting to briefly befriend a dinosaur as a fringe benefit. Still, there weren’t many movies about kids getting to spend any amount of time with a dinosaur in 1960, so maybe it could still stand out as something new and exciting.
For this Halloween season, I have lined up a selection of some of the odder monster movies I could find. First up, this Dutch production directed by equally Dutch filmmaker Dick Maas (director of the perfectly-named Amsterdamned), who like Razorback‘s Russell Mulcahy came from the world of music videos, gaining notoriety for his videos for the Golden Earring songs “Twilight Zone” and “When the Lady Smiles” (which was banned in the US.) Maas does not make The Lift (De Lift) nearly as stylistically wild as Mulcahy did with his creature feature, although there is certainly a style to this—more importantly, this has a much more unusual premise, because as the name implies, this is a horror movie about a killer elevator. The purpose in watching a movie about a killer elevator is to discover just how strange the execution of such a premise could be, and what I discovered is that, as unusual as the central conceit is, many of the things surrounding it are equally unusual in some unexpected ways.
Toho was seven years into the Great Kaiju Project, having produced sombre nuclear disaster stories like Godzilla (or The H-Man) and more traditional prehistoric monster mayhem like Rodan (or Varan), and were really putting in the work to find the next big (BIG!) giant monster film. This involved hiring three authors (Shin’ichirō Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta) to write a serialized print story that was then given to screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa (who wrote previous Toho genre projects Varan and Battle In Outer Space, and would write the massive King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1962) to adapt. The story that resulted has the city destruction scenes you’d expect, but otherwise was very different from previous kaiju movies: lighter in tone, more fantastical, and less a grim warning of humanity’s negative impact on this planet than a gentle reminder, and all based around a rather unusual monster (which is also one of the few explicitly female giant monsters.) Sure, there were giant insect movies well before Mothra, but none were this colourful, and certainly none posited that the enlarged arthropod was probably in the right.
Of all the non-Godzilla Toho genre movies, Mothra probably had the largest impact, and its titular lepidopteran would thereon become the company’s second most recognizable creature, appearing frequently alongside the King of the Monsters (Godzilla movies featuring Mothra were often the most well-attended ones in their eras, just to show how much the Japanese audiences dug that bug.) The original movie reflected the changing tone in giant monster movies in the new decade, with subsequent movies often maintaining a similarly lighter touch with much more upbeat endings that allowed the monster to live on—but very few of them have the consistent sense of whimsy that this one does. It really feels like Sekizawa, director Ishiro Honda, and effects maestro Eiji Tsuburaya understood exactly how a movie featuring a giant caterpillar that becomes a giant moth, alongside a duo of tiny singing women, should look and feel, creating something that is a little strange and a little beautiful (and even a little satirical), and one of their most cohesive monster fantasies.
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