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.
This is a rather unusual proposal, something that sits between a fan film and a historical restoration project. The Great Buddha Arrival was a 1934 film directed by Yoshiro Edamasa, in which the Amida Buddha statue found in Shurakuen Park in the city of Tōkai got up and took a stroll. Although images and newspaper advertisements describing the film exist, The Great Buddha Arrival itself was lost during World War 2, leaving it a phantasmal presence in the history of Japanese cinema. It holds a particular fascination for tokusatsu fans, not only because the base concept sounds a lot like a proto-kaiju film, but because Edamasa was the mentor of tokusatsu effects pioneer Eiji Tsuburaya, directly connecting the film to the legacy of giant monster cinema.
Wanting to celebrate that connection, and in some way bring Edamasa’s movie back from the void, independent studio 3Y Film crowdfunded a new short film based on The Great Buddha Arrival (made at roughly the same time as Howl From Beyond the Fog, the crowdfunded kaiju film I wrote about previously), completing production in 2018 and gradually adding additional footage over the next two years to build it up into the sixty-minute “Final” version that you can find on streaming services right now. Directed by Hiroto Yokokawa, the 2018 Great Buddha Arrival is a unique little experiment, at times a mockumentary, a genuine documentary, and a narrative film, existing in a reality where the original 1934 film exerts a mysterious influence on reality. Being made by a studio that specializes in distributing fan films, it also plays up the kaiju legacy angle by filling almost every speaking part with veteran tokusatsu film actors, including several of the remaining members of Ishiro Honda’s stable going back to the original Godzilla.
So, how exactly did we get a found footage monster movie from the director of Rain Man? According to the backstory, Barry Levinson was tasked with directing a documentary about the ecological problems of Chesapeake Bay, but not unlike the creatures at the heart of The Bay, the project mutated into something else entirely. It was 2012, right in the middle of the much-groused-about-at-the-time trend of found footage horror movies mostly instigated by Paranormal Activity (the producer of those movies, Jason Blum, is also a producer on this one), as well as what still felt like the early days of the mass adoption of camera-equipped smartphones—a perfect confluence of trends that inspired the idea of watching a disaster unfold from personal and media video footage, a collage of reactions and non-reactions from normal citizens, experts, and people in places of authority. The verisimilitude offered by this style of film might even bolster the real environmental issues that inspired the far more gory events in the movie! One could hope!
Of course, the other obvious inspiration for this movie comes from a place I’m sure we’ve all been to: finding out some random (maybe true?) fact on the Internet, especially about weird nature stuff. I imagine that most people only recently learned about Cymothoa Exigua, also known as the tongue-eating louse, probably from some listicle containing the same few photos of that oceanic isopod and its peculiar form of parasitism, where it sucks the blood from the tongues of fish until they shrivel up and fall off, and then replaces the tongue in the fish’s mouth. It’s hard to blame some writer for seeing those images and thinking “now, there’s a movie!”
Much like Incident At Loch Nessand Rubber, Big Man Japan was brought to my attention by cult movie websites—probably the most receptive audience to these sorts of genre pastiches/parodies as they made their way through the film festival circuit. The mid-to-late-two-thousands was a period rife with self-reflexive takes on older genres and styles, and those movies and their particular quirks would even find some mainstream attention. But not only does Big Man Japan evoke that very particular period in film, it also seems to be chronicling a very particular period in the history of its titular country as well. Giant monster parodies are nothing new, and neither are parodies of the giant hero subgenre—but director and star Hitoshi Matsumoto’s comedic offering here is less about kaiju, and more about using kaiju film (as a very Japanese style of entertainment) as a vehicle to satirize an entire nation’s collective apathy. The world it presents is one where a once-strong symbol of heroism and national pride has degraded into a mediocre television show, carrying on traditions out of a halfhearted sense of obligation, and culminating in an absurd demonstration of just how little impact it actually has on a global stage. Don’t get me wrong, it’s also a very silly movie containing some of the goofiest giant monsters around, but the satirical intent of it is also made abundantly clear.
Incident at Loch Ness is a postmodern film to the extreme, a mockumentary that jumps from tone to tone and exploits preconceptions about certain filmmakers and genres—a film about the making of a film, with a separate documentary crew filming someone else making a different documentary. Despite starring legendary director Werner Herzog, it is not actually one of his movies, and honestly doesn’t even really try to replicate the feeling of his documentaries despite clearly playing off his ideas of “fact vs reality”/ecstatic truth and his reputation as a rogue filmmaker. Really, it feels much more Hollywood, which is also one of the central jokes here, but at times goes far beyond self-parody—this is the kind of movie where Jeff Goldblum and Crispin Glover can show up for cameos, and where all the featured players are film industry people playing themselves, including screenwriter Zak Penn (he of such films as X2: X-Men United and Behind Enemy Lines, and the actual director of this movie) playing the ultimate pathetic movie hack. All of that gets centred around the Loch Ness Monster, which makes total sense for a film about what is or isn’t real.
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