Shin Ultraman (2022)

Shin Godzilla proved to be a bit of an inflection point for tokusatsu cinema, and its success gave director Hideaki Anno and effects director Shinji Higuchi, both veterans of the field in one way or another (the latter having worked on the Shusuke Kaneko Gamera trilogy), the keys to some of the most influential franchises of the form. They’ve ended up using the “Shin” moniker to denote all their creations as one loosely connected meta-series, but just how connected would these subsequent reboots be? Shin Ultraman, the first of the follow-ups out of the gate, provides a surprisingly complicated answer. Directed by Higuchi and written by Anno, this new version of Tsuburaya Productions’ signature kaiju vehicle inherits some of Shin Godzilla‘s aesthetic preoccupations (and a few of the thematic ones), but is not really aiming for the same apocalyptic feeling—in keeping with the general tone of the material it’s based on, this is a lighter affair that is less focused on re-imagining its monster action to fit modern anxieties, but rather transplants much of the original vision of Ultraman into a modern setting and sees how it plays out. That allows them to be more openly fannish in the number of callbacks to the original series they include, some going so deep as to be based in the details of the series’ production, but the most surprising thing about that is just how invested they are in really examining the ideas present in the original.

Project Metalbeast (1995)

Werewolf stories are one of those things that often thrive on having established mythology/rules—the fun for audiences become not just in seeing the specific execution of those rules (i.e. more and more elaborate transformation sequences), but also seeing that mythology used as a parallel or an allegory (i.e. adolescence), and sometimes in seeing those rules subverted. Project Metalbeast is an attempt at subversion, taking the supernatural angle of the werewolf story and messily grafting it to a Science Fiction-Horror concept, all in the name of creating a new kind of monster for the direct-to-video gorehounds of the mid-nineties. There is novelty in exchanging the typical curse plotlines and uncontrollable transformation with science-gone-wrong medical trauma and Alien style bases-under-siege and conspiracy backstories, but the question is whether the movie realizes that novelty or is simply okay putting out the bare minimum of horror schlock.

Beginning of the End (1957)

Last month saw the passing of fifties B-movie mainstay director Bert I. Gordon at age 100, an appropriately large number for Mr. BIG himself. Beginning with 1955’s King Dinosaur, Gordon was one of the most prolific producers of monster movies in one of the golden eras of monster movies—he directed (and, alongside is wife, provided the special effects for) three movies in 1957 alone—but his reputation in later decades was mostly as a figure of light (and sometimes not-so-light) mockery. The reason is fairly obvious: his most consistent theme in his movies is making things gigantic (or in the case of Attack of the Puppet People, making them tiny), a single-minded pursuit of one of the recurring trends in Sci-Fi movies of the time, and he did it through the use of rear projection, mattes, and split-screens, effects that, being charitable, do not impart a sense of realism. Even though the generations following Gordon’s heyday have often looked down on the special effects of the fifties monster movies as almost inherently phony, his were singled out as the cheapest of the lot, which is probably one of the reasons why he was the single most featured director on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, where most people outside the monster movie historian circles know him from exclusively. I’d like to say that he took this ribbing later in life in stride, but most stories I’ve heard indicate that he most certainly did not.

We can all get a laugh from stills or clips from Gordon’s movies where actors run away from hazy projections that seem to exist solely in the foreground or background, or watching objects clipping through transparencies in the monster’s limbs, but I myself cannot go to the level of genuine mockery of the man’s work. For as silly as something like The Amazing Colossal Man or Earth vs. The Spider looks to us now, these movies remain fixtures of monster history, producing the kind of imagery that, realistic or not, speak to their era and its fixations as much as the more unanimously agreed upon classics (and some of those would likely be sneered at by the same people making fun of Gordon’s movies.) I can’t imagine anyone would have had the kind of filmography he had in the fifties without some kind of enthusiasm for what he was doing—and he had so much enthusiasm for it that he would go back to making the exact same sort of movies in the seventies, a completely different cinematic epoch that still had drive-ins to fill—and simply did what he could with the resources he had. That is something I can relate to as a fellow enthusiast.

So, to honour the memory of Mr. BIG and his gigantic love for gigantic creatures, I viewed his second feature film, Beginning of the End. Within it you can see all the things that defined his films, for good and for goofy.

Creature Classic Companion: Piranha (1978)

The career of director Joe Dante represents the ascent of the Monster Kid from fan to filmmaker—people who grew up during the creature feature boom of the fifties and sixties were suddenly given reign of the genre, which they knew inside and out. Having that kind of understanding of the formulas made it all the more easy to subvert and reinvent them, making a smarter and more self-aware range of monster movies in the late seventies and eighties, which Dante heavily contributed to with The Howling and Gremlins. Before those, though, he worked his way up in the B-movie system, cutting trailers for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures (and co-directing a movie made mostly of stock footage) before being assigned to direct Piranha, New World’s blatant attempt to cash in on Jaws‘ success. Following the general Corman ethos, however, meant that as long as you check off all the exploitation movie requirements—low budget, surface similarity to something popular, blood, and female nudity—you are free to do whatever you want (although that didn’t go quite so well for the director of Piranha II, some guy named James Cameron.) So, Dante got together with writer John Sayles to build a Jaws knock-off full of comedic touches and creature feature homages, something that wasn’t just another killer fish movie. As the story goes, Universal was fully prepared to sue this movie out of existence before it reached theatres…until it received the full approval of Steven Spielberg, who considered it by far the best imitation of his movie.

Creature Classic Companion: The Outer Limits – “The Architects of Fear”

It’s an open secret that the original Outer Limits did in fact equal The Twilight Zone even during its truncated season-and-a-half run from 1963 to 1965 (funnily enough, though, while Twilight Zone has had numerous short-lived revivals, The Outer Limits‘ one TV revival actually lasted significantly longer than the original series)—and while it isn’t as directly referenced as Rod Serling’s seminal TV anthology, the praise it receives from those in the know and the sheer number of times its stories have been ripped-off since then is a testament its legacy. For my purposes, it’s also a series that basically had a new monster in every episode, at least in the first season, centering each plot around what they called “the bear.” It’s such an important and interesting piece of TV, Sci-Fi, and monster history that I could fill months worth of posts covering key episodes (expect me to come back to it eventually), but for now I’m going to focus on a specific episode from early in the show’s run that exemplifies what it did well, and the influence it ended up having. Even if you’ve never seen “The Architects of Fear”, you probably know of a similar story from elsewhere—in order to broker world cooperation, an external threat is manufactured for all the powers to unite against. Famously, this device was reused for the ending of Watchmen, something Alan Moore may or may not have known about. In any case, while the story has kept some resonance, the actual episode itself demonstrates a high level of sophistication in terms of writing and filmmaking—this was clearly a show able to back up its own ideas with its execution.

Creature Classic Companion: The Host (2006)

I was definitely not expecting to see anyone with a major hand in creature feature history take home the Academy Award for Best Picture within my lifetime, but the last few years gave us not one, but two. Of course, Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar nod for The Shape of Water has the double validating effect (not that I need validation, especially not from the Hollywood fatcats) of being for an actual monster movie, even if a revisionist one, but Bong Joon-ho’s win with Parasite was notable on its own for being the first non-English, non-Western film to get the gold. That’s an impressive first to have on your resume! Joon-ho’s career has spanned over twenty years and various genres, producing many critically-acclaimed films in South Korea and abroad—but I can imagine that a lot of you reading this first heard of him back when his monster movie was making the rounds in the film festival circuit and attracting the attention of cult movie websites, as I did. Fifteen years later, and The Host is still a genuine classic, one of the most engaging and inventive monster movies in recent memory, with a stylistic and cultural specificity that remains singular.

Hardware (1990)

The late eighties and eary nineties were certainly an age full of grimy, rusted, industrial hellscapes—even after the Cold War ended, there was a certain punk ideology that revelled in its own cynicism and loved to create images of modern civilization collapsed under its own moral decay, cites transformed into mountains of dilapidated junk. Hardware came from the beginning of the decade, and embodies many of the aesthetics that would show up in big studio films after it (everything from Tank Girl to Waterworld to Super Mario Bros.), presenting a grungy, blasted world full of horrible people and no escape. Amusingly for a movie about a killer robot, it gives off some serious heavy metal/industrial music vibes that run pretty deep— it has Ministry on its soundtrack while also resembling a Ministry music video (it also has cameo appearances by Lemmy from Motorhead, GWAR, and Iggy Pop as a sarcastic radio DJ.) This is the debut feature of Richard Stanley, whose success would later lead to the ordeal that was 1996’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, where he was hired and then fired, but secretly stayed on the set of the movie (there’s a whole documentary about it), and his style really puts the nineties music video feel on full blast, with everything that may imply.