If Reign of Firewas a purely 2002 vision of the apocalypse, Love and Monsters is its late 2010s counterpart, the same basic story with a completely different approach. Where Reign loudly communicated its era by draining itself of colour and humour and having only vague self-awareness of the limitations of its CGI effects, L&M reflects its own by saturating itself with bright cartoon hues and quippy narration and CGI that has become so advanced and widespread that its generally seamless integration feels almost effortless (in fact, it received an Academy Award nomination for Effects.) The interesting contrast between these two movies might be further bolstered by eerie coincidence: Reign took place in a decimated world in 2020, while L&M was released in the midst of a decimated world in 2020, which mostly killed its theatrical run minus a few small-scale screenings and left it to become a perennial item in the Netflix back catalogue. In short, choosing to watch these two in close proximity definitely gave me even more to think about.
Stumbling into something new while seeking out material for this site is always an exciting experience—and nothing demands my attention like the phrase “weird Yugoslav-Czechoslovak Science Fiction movie from the early eighties.” Visitors From the Arkana Galaxy (sometimes referred to by the more nondescript title Visitors from the Galaxy) is definitely a weird one, and has only found wide distribution in English-speaking countries in the last year thanks to Deaf Crocodile Films—its combination of unvarnished eighties European settings and borderline surrealist storytelling makes for the kind of cult-ready object that modern boutique film distributors regularly gift to us. Shifting between exaggerated reality and extreme fantasy, Visitors has something of a satirical edge, and combined with its bizarre visuals, you can really tell that director Dušan Vukotić comes from an animation background (the movie was partially produced by prominent Croatian animation studio Zagreb Film.) To further invite attention—my attention in particular—there is a prominent monster element that was designed and partially animated by stop motion animation master Jan Svankmajer before he gave us such classics as Alice and Little Otik.
Previously—as in almost five years ago—I wrote about the sixties tokusatsu adaptation of “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka’s series Ambassador Magma, notable not only for its connection to a major cultural figure in Japan, but for being one of the early superhero-vs-kaiju television shows (premiering a week before Ultraman in 1966), and one that was also localized into English as The Space Giants. This is all to say that the Ambassador Magma namedoes hold some historical significance, which would explain why it received a second adaptation in 1993, four years after Tezuka’s death (conveniently, the dubbed versions of all thirteen episodes are available to view on the official Tezuka Youtube channel.) Released as a thirteen-episode OVA series by Bandai Visual and the Tezuka-founded Mushi Productions (among many credited animation studios) during the boom period for direct to video animation in Japan, the newer version of Magma adapts to its era and format much in the same way the previous adaptation did—I’m sure anyone who has sampled the kind of violent, genre-heavy serials aimed mostly at fans with disposable income will recognize the animation style and rhythms of this series as well. What’s interesting to me is seeing how Tezuka’s humanistic tendencies blend with that aesthetic—which in this case translates to a mix of the grotesque and the sentimental.
The Movie Monster Game, well, it’s a game about movie monsters. Released in 1986 (the same year as the even more famous giant monster game Rampage) for the Apple II and Commodore 64 and developed by Epyx, a company that gained a name for itself in the eighties PC game space with titles like Impossible Mission and California Games, it comes from a very different epoch than the previous giant monster-based game I’ve written about, a strange and experimental time when game design didn’t always have clear rules, and where a degree of abstraction was still present as a game could only convey so much visual information (Epyx’s earlier giant monster title, Crush, Crumble and Chomp!, a strategy game released in 1981, provides an even primitive-looking example.) Despite that, The Movie Monster Game actually shares a lot in common with later entries in this category, especially in the presentation–decades before War of the Monsterssurrounded itself with a nostalgic metafiction wrapper, Epyx went even further, not just basing its menus around a movie theatre motif (complete with “trailers” for other Epyx games that appear before you begin playing), but structuring their game as essentially a movie you construct from various component parts pulled from numerous giant monster movies across the subgenre’s history. Even this far back, you can see that the artifice of these stomp-em-ups, and the context of the audience itself, was considered an indelible part of the experience.
That’s all well and good, but there’s a major advantage that The Movie Monster Game has that even later creature feature games could not pull off: alongside a group of “original” monsters that directly homage specific movies and tropes, they managed to officially licence Godzilla from Toho, putting the King of the Monsters prominently on the package for all to see, and making it the first video game released outside of Japan to feature him. Epyx was not an unknown company in 1986, but even so, getting the sometimes fickle Toho to lend out their star monster to an American game developer at that point still seems like a feat (it is equally surprising that they agreed to let Godzilla and Pals appear in the recent indie brawler GigaBash, a game that I still intend to play.) This was not long after the release of The Return of Godzilla (and its English release Godzilla 1985), which at least put it outside the lowest periods for the franchise, and leads me to believe that this collaboration was not an act of desperation–maybe they were just feeling generous. In any case, Godzilla’s fully approved presence in something with as definitive a title as The Movie Monster Game certainly gives it an air of legitimacy.
The third of the Shin series, this one written and directed by Hideaki Anno solo, follows the general trends of the previous two by returning to the first incarnation of a massive tokusatsu institution and sussing out the meaning inherent within it. As in the Anno-written Shin Ultraman, the type of examination at heart of this update of Shotaro Ishinomori’s insect-themed, monster-battling superhero is entirely compatible with an equal amount of superfan-pleasing callbacks and repurposed imagery–even though I’m not as familiar with Kamen Rider as I am with Ultraman, I can see still see that this is all coming from a place of respect for the originators of the series, even if it’s not always as direct as the previous movie (less outright use of the original soundtrack, for example, although older tracks are remixed for key moments.) Even more than in Shin Ultraman, I think Shin Kamen Rider’s delirious narrative momentum comes from its own visual and conceptual idiosyncrasies.
(A reminder: Shin Kamen Rider is not the follow-up to previous subject Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue. That two completely unrelated movies called Shin Kamen Rider could be released decades apart is one way to know just how long running and arcane this franchise is–another way you know is because Shin Kamen Rider isn’t even the first time Toei has put out a cinematic reboot of the 1971 Kamen Rider.)
This October will mark five years since I started writing monster media reviews on a regular basis—and almost two hundred movies (and dozens of other things) later, I know that there’s still plenty left out there. For this year’s Halloween season, most of my subjects will be themed around sneakily breaking my own personal rules when it comes to subject matter—since this project began, I steadfastly avoided covering movies based on the “traditional” monsters of horror, things like vampires, werewolves, and the undead. For me, those represent their own little corners of culture, with their own histories and tropes and meanings that have already been examined in great detail, offering less for me to dig into than the vast “miscellaneous” monster category.
However, if one were to find movies that are ostensibly about those most famous of monsters, but with some kind of twist…
In that spirit, we’re starting this Halloween month off with a film that name checks one of most well-known monsters in history…that’s right, the Space Monster (or Spacemonster, depending on how seriously you take the stark-looking opening titles of the movie.) But anyone coming to this looking for a traditional Space Monster story are going to be in for a shock, because this is really an in-name-only Space Monster movie—it is actually an odd duck mash-up of retro Sci-Fi movie concepts and early sixties cultural trends, a drive-in chimera if there ever was one. If you squint real hard you might be able to make out the Space Monster spirit hidden somewhere in this bricolage, but that is only one minor ingredient among many.
I don’t think I’ve ever written about Mike Mignola on here—rather unfortunate, as he’s a figure of some significance in the wider monster culture space, and one of the most unique artists in the mainstream/mainstream adjacent comics sphere of the last thirty-plus years. His major work is, of course, Hellboy and its various comics and multimedia offshoots, an entire universe likely worth exploring in depth at some point. In Hellboy, a milieu with some moderate superhero influence also becomes one big repository for every occult, paranormal, or folkloric concept Mignola and his collaborators see fit to include, everything from werewolves and vampires and black magic to man-made abominations, space aliens, and other-dimensional eldritch entities. It’s a classic Monster Mash series—maybe one of the classic Monster Mash series—a form pioneered by lifelong horror/monster fiction fans to encompass all their favourite creepy things (for other examples of this, there’s Castlevania, or if you want a more kid-friendly version, maybe even Hilda.) Even with all the obvious influences going into the work, though, Mignola manages to put his own stamp on it, especially with his stylized, shadow-lined artwork, which finds the appealing middle point between German Expressionism and Jack Kirby.
For someone looking for a bit of Mignola’s style in a form more succinct than the sprawling Hellboy and BPRD universe, there’s The Amazing Screw-On Head, a singular take on very similar material whose primary difference from Mignola’s main series is its more overt focus on comedy. Originally published as a one-off comic from Mignola’s regular collaborators at Dark Horse Comics (and since included in a book with several other short comics), it gained additional notoriety when it was adapted into a single pilot episode for a potential animated series on Sci-Fi Channel in 2006, a few years before the channel rebranded itself as the ever-perplexing SyFy. The pilot was one of those early forays into Internet focus testing, with Sci-Fi uploading the full thing on their website and using the feedback to determine if they should greenlight more episodes—which they did not, in fact, do. Watching it again after seventeen years, it feels like something very specific to its era of pop culture, and probably the single most faithful attempt to bring Mike Mignola’s art to a non-comics medium.
Almost four years after “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, Doctor Who returned to the concept of aliens overtaking London—but at that point, the show was in a slightly different place than where it began. The role of the Doctor had been handed off to Patrick Troughton, establishing the tradition that has allowed this series to continue to exist for sixty years by making its lead a character who can change their appearance when necessary. The show also really started to take the form in which it would be known for those sixty years, putting its full emphasis on Science Fiction-based plots, which often meant focusing more specifically on creating new, memorable monsters to give those plots an additional horror bent. The Troughton years were especially rife with monster-centric thrillers, with “The Web of Fear” being a fairly well-known example—and by sharing a milieu with the previous serial I wrote about, it makes for some interesting comparisons in approach.
All the way back in my post about King of the Monsters, I briefly mentioned the 2003 Playstation 2 title War of the Monsters, a game stomping the same grounds as SNK’s monster wrestling dust-up, but separated by an ocean and a decade’s worth of technological development in video games. I’ve stressed it over and over again that giant monsters are a topic that has been woefully underrepresented in the video game sphere—a situation that annoyingly does not right itself in the time between posts where I talk about it (although that GigaBash game from last year might be worth looking at)—and for the longest time, War of the Monsters was probably the highest profile entry, or at the least the highest profile one that didn’t have Godzilla’s name plastered on the box. It had the pedigree of being a first-party Playstation game released during the PS2’s unstoppable reign as the top console, and was developed by Incog Inc. (formerly the much more sensibly-named Incognito Studios), a company formed by the lead developers of Sony’s popular Twisted Metal series, alongside Sony’s stalwart Santa Monica Studio—the “original concept” was provided by Twisted Metal and God of War lead David Jaffe, back when he made video games instead of embarrassing Youtube videos.
There is an obvious logic to getting some the leading minds behind the car combat genre to tackle a giant monster game—they are both, after all, concepts that revolve around massive property damage, and in terms of raw tech, Incog could probably carry over the physics engine that powered the PS2 Twisted Metal entry that released a year-and-a-half earlier. You can feel the car combat roots in the basic feel of War of the Monsters, the way it moves and the way it’s structured, although it also attempts to go back to Twisted Metal‘s origins in the fighting game genre in a more direct manner, with hand-to-hand combat rather than a back-and-forth bombardment of projectiles (although there’s plenty of projectiles in this as well). It’s easy to see that this game is making a genuine attempt to be both a appealing competitive smash-em-up and a loving homage to the giant monster movie genre—in some ways, it represents the last hurrah for a specific view of creature features, and a last ditch effort to take what King of the Monsters was trying to do and get it “right.”
We haven’t ventured back to the original Japanese Monster Boom in a while, but there is still material there left to pore over. Giant Robo hails from the latter half of that brief period of monster ascension, debuting within weeks of Ultrasevenand Monster Prince, and feeling a bit like a halfway point between those two series: espionage antics involving an international peacekeeping organization as well a child hero with his own giant, monster-fighting companion. It ended with the same 26-episode run as Monster Prince, a truncated existence easily overshadowed by the much longer and more influential Ultra series, but unlike Monster Prince, Giant Robo was dubbed and aired on North American television thanks to the efforts of our old pals at American International Pictures, its title changed to Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. Johnny Sokko became something of a staple of syndicated TV in the seventies, gaining a cult following among English-speakers who went on to start punk and ska bands referencing it—so despite being “lesser” tokusatsu, it has had a surprising amount of staying power in both the west and in Japan, where it has received irregular reboots (all of them animated) in the decades since.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 