The Great Buddha Arrival (2018)

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.

The X From Outer Space (1967)

There are so many streaming services available now, so much content awaiting to become someone’s treadmill background noise, and I hear you asking, “Yes, but what kind of monster movies are on these things?” I’m glad you brought it up, entirely hypothetical person, because I plan to find out on this here website! I’ll be using some of my posts to explore the kind of monster-based content that is available to stream on all the less-than-major streaming services (because I already know how barren Netflix’s selection is), seeing who brings the most creature feature value. I think of this as a public service, but not necessarily the kind that is mandated by the courts.

First up, we’ll be checking out the Criterion Channel—home of film history, world cinema, mind-expanding arthouse classics, and a surprisingly robust collection of monster movies, including most of the Showa Godzilla films. They also have The X From Outer Space (AKA Giant Space Monster Guilala), the only kaiju outing from one of Japan’s oldest major film studios, Shochiku, and the missing final piece of the sixties Monster Boom that I began writing about last year. 1966/1967 were the years all the big players in Japanese cinema and television were trying to cash in on the love of rubber suit monsters—which also overlapped with the period where Shochiku was going hard into Science Fiction/Horror films, of which this was the first (the rest are also available on Criterion Channel.) As we saw in the other Monster Boom subjects, there was often an attempt for the non-Toho studios to find some way to distinguish their monsters from all the others, and it seems like the Sci-Fi angle is about as close to a trademark as X really gets…aside from its kooky monster.