This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the original Godzilla–my, how time flies! I’ve written my fair share about the King of the Monsters, but I’ve generally avoided going over most of the actual films, which is territory that I thought was well-trodden, quite unlike, say, Godzilla’s appearances on Zone Fighter. Still, for an anniversary this special, I think it might be time to finally go all-out in the name of the G-Man, so expect a lot more Godzilla-related posts throughout the year, including the return of the capsule review format that I used to write about several of the moviesa decade ago, which will give me even more opportunities to fill in the series gaps on this site.
Before we go back to the beginning (actually a couple of months after the beginning) though, let us travel to just a little over a month ago…
Released a mere nine months after the original King Kong in 1933 (this will post just two days shy of its eightieth anniversary), Son of Kong’s rapid turnaround leaves it in a bizarre place, a sequel that feels supplementary to what is probably the most important monster movie ever made. It has never been a particularly beloved movie, and despite the involvement of all the key people behind the scenes of the original—producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest Schoedsack, screenwriter Ruth Rose, and stop motion artist Willis O’Brien and his crew—one can detect how the rapidity of its creation rendered it a half-formed footnote (only sixty-nine minutes in length) even when it was new. King Kong inspired multiple generations of monster fans and left an entire form of storytelling in its wake—Son of Kong, not so much.
That hasn’t stopped me from being fascinated by this movie, because for all the ways it will forever toil under the shadow of its predecessor, it is historically important in several low-key ways, representing a major shift in the evolution of both King Kong and of monster movies as an idea: it is the point where the underlying sympathy for the monster comes to the surface. Now, this is a legacy that I’ve technically started writing about backwards, after I covered Mighty Joe Younglast Christmas Apes season—that was the second movie by Cooper, Schoedsack, Rose, and O’Brien to take the sympathy they had built for Kong and rewrite it into a lighter story. As I argued there, this could come off as a commercial decision, but it also feels like a product of some phantom sense of guilt, and a desire to show that no matter how King Kong turned out, it is possible for humans and amazing creatures like Kong to co-exist peacefully, if they just got to know each other. What they would do with Mighty Joe Young begins in Son of Kong, but what’s particularly intriguing is, in the latter’s close proximity to the original Kong, it shows just how soon the original crew began to reconsider how a monster movie could operate.
What makes Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion work stand out is his attention to lifelike detail. Following on the techniques of his mentor, King Kong animator Willis O’Brien, the animated creatures in his movies have tics and behaviours that mimic those of real animals, no matter how outlandish or fantastical the creature is. They make the kinds of seemingly pointless movements that living things have, and they react dynamically to situations—all the kinds of things that lesser animation and guy-in-suit movies generally lack (although they sometimes make up for it with unique performances), but with the same “physical object” gravity that all practical effects possess. Yes, these days his animation no longer has the “realism” that they once touted, especially when seen in a level of fidelity they were never intended for, but there’s a sense of empathy that comes through Harryhausen’s work, a sense that these things have a vitality and a presence, and aren’t just there for schlocky thrills, which is why in interviews he never liked his creations to be called “monsters.” Remember, too, that for most of his career, he did all that painstaking frame-by-frame animation by himself—it’s a true labour of love.
Of course, the history of monster movies really begins with the desire to bring dinosaurs back to life—that’s what built O’Brien’s career, and Harryhausen followed dutifully. As I’ve said elsewhere, dinosaurs are like every imaginary monster humanity has ever concocted, except they were real animals that roamed this planet in a time so long ago, it was more or less an alien world. Artists have been trying to resurrect them visually ever since Richard Owen coined the term in the nineteenth century, and when film came around, suddenly we had the opportunity to see these long-dead organisms move around (based on our current knowledge of how they moved around) for the first time. O’Brien was the master of the movie dinosaur, and nothing could match the marvel of his work on King Kong, but he never really got a chance to work on that subject again during his unfortunately turbulent career—it was appropriate, then, that Harryhausen would see one of his unrealized dinosaur-based ideas come to fruition years after his death. That would be The Valley of Gwangi, which probably felt like a bit of a throwback when it was released in 1969, and was under-seen at that time (because the new management at the studio gave it paltry advertising, at least according to Harryhausen himself), but did prove to be a bit of a benchmark when it came to portraying dinosaurs on-screen.
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.
We’ve now entered Dinovember, a month devoted entirely to those terrible lizards we all love. First on the agenda is a return to Japanese studio P Productions, who followed up previous site subject Ambassador Magma/The Space Giantswith a series that is still just as youthful in spirit, but also very dino-centric. Monster Prince (Kaiju Ouiji) aired twenty-six episodes from 1967 and 1968, putting it in the latter days of Japan’s Monster Boom (and alongside the much higher profile Ultraseven), and in keeping with the trends of the period, aims to appeal to its target demo even more directly by having a kid protagonist who commands their own kaiju. This particular sort of giant monster fantasy, The Black Stallion with more property damage, was likely started with the Gamera movies, but it’s even more central to this series—while I’ve never heard this show be named as an inspiration for later kids & monsters franchises like Pokemon or Digimon (Gamera and the Ultra series are brought up regularly), it’s hard not to see the similarities. There’s also a few similarities between this and Ambassador Magma—specifically the structure and the pacing—and while I wouldn’t consider this on the same level as its contemporaries, it has plenty of peculiarities going for it.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 