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.

Kong: The Animated Series

In another time, on another website, I wrote parallel analyses of a Godzilla cartoon and a King Kong cartoon, two series with no real relationship to each other that nonetheless called for comparison due to the title monsters’ interlocking history. Decades later, television was briefly rocked by the arrival of another Godzilla cartoon and another King Kong cartoon (and not the other other King Kong cartoon that I already wrote about), but this time their proximity was far closer and their parallel existence seemed far more intentional. Wikipedia and the fan sites that steal from Wikipedia claim that Kong: The Animated Series, a product of the Bohbot/BKN cartoon factory alongside French animation studios Ellipsanime and M6, was created to “rival” the FOX-airing Godzilla: The Series, starting its two-season, forty-episode run just as the other series was ending, airing briefly on FOX and in syndication from 2000 to 2001. As one would expect from anything said about a piece of pop culture ephemera on the Internet, there is no source for that claim, and most of the surviving press releases and industry pieces from the time I browsed made no mention of Godzilla—but I can at least understand where the assumption came from. In the year 2000, with nothing going on in the series movie-wise, what other reason would someone have to make a King Kong cartoon but to pit it against the ape’s scaly counterpart?

Of course, the caveat there is that, despite all appearances, Kong: The Animated Series is probably not an official King Kong cartoon (I also think it stole its logo from the movie Congo, which definitely won’t be featured on this site soon very soon.) Rather than a revival, even if an odd one, this is actually a clever theft that likely fooled every child in its audience with its quasi-authenticity. But, as it turns out, that is only one of the many strange things I discovered by digging up this copyright-eliding incarnation of the world’s premier giant primate.

“The Curse of Fenric” (S26E8-11)

It is 1989, and Doctor Who is on its last legs. You may have noticed that I skipped over all of the serials featuring Colin Baker in the lead role—this is not simply because of the poor reputation most of the stories have even among fans of the series, but because none of them offer a particularly compelling monster-centric story to write about. Things started looking up at least a little bit in 1987, when the show went through a small-scale creative overhaul, with a new batch of writers behind the scenes and a new lead in Sylvester McCoy, but none of the active attempts to make the series more ambitious and relevant saved it from going on an indefinite hiatus just as the eighties ended, leaving it at a still-impressive twenty-six consecutive years on television.

The three years with McCoy and lead writer Andrew Cartmel carry a very distinctive atmosphere, one that attempts to mine the best parts of the series’ past, especially its sense of imagination and its capacity for moments of child-friendly horror, and infuse a puckish kind of whimsy and more focus on the characterization of the Doctor and his companion. “The Curse of Fenric”, the classic series’ penultimate story, carries with it the DNA of previous serials we’ve talked about: there’s a the moody atmosphere and marching army of monsters of “The Web of Fear”, a somewhat Quatermass-esque combination of mythology and Sci-Fi similar to “The Awakening”, and even the winking social commentary of “Carnival of Monsters.” Another similarity to “Web of Fear” is its attempt to provide a new interpretation of a well-established monster—but this goes much further in taking its inspirations and playing around with the iconography.

BTTM FDRS

The 2019 graphic novel BTTM FDRS finds its monster in the legacy of gentrification and exploitation, with beautiful ideas twisted and then abandoned, and the people on the lower rungs of society left to deal with the resulting mess. Writer Ezra Claytan Daniels (author of 2018’s Upgrade Soul) and artist Ben Passmore (creator of numerous comics across mediums including the completely unsparing Sports Is Hell) make no bones about the racial make-up of both sides of that equation, showing its black protagonists putting up with the indifference and hostility of white people in positions of relative power, something used as both a source of horror and of comedy. This is a story that reflects a wider recognition of social stratification, a heady mix of self-consciousness, guilt and anger, and that complexity puts it well beyond just a simple vehicle for social critique and a side of the grotesque—although it is also both of those things, rather pointedly.

“The Awakening” (S21E5-6)

Having already written about a Tom Baker-led serial, we’re taking a big leap out of seventies Doctor Who and into the early-to-mid eighties, where the lead role was taken over by Peter Davison. The eighties ended up being a fairly tumultuous period for the series, following up on the tonal shifts that occurred after complaints of the show’s violent content led to pressure from producers, and where it seemed to gradually slide increasingly into irrelevance, with production problems, creative indecision, and hostility from the top brass at the BBC eventually leading to the show’s fifteen-year hiatus at the end of the decade. The biggest problems of the original run’s final years was still in the future while Davison was there, but you can definitely sense in these early eighties seasons that the show was a little more uneasy, experimenting with different ideas and tones to see what actually worked.

“The Awakening” hails from Davison’s final year, which in turn was following the series’ twentieth anniversary (an anniversary special where Davison teamed up with many, but not all, the previous Doctor actors aired two months before.) After spending an entire year spotlighting the series and its history, a story like this feels like a return to the “classic” mode—it is another plot about an alien presence invading modern England (in this case, specifically said to be 1984), and a plot with more than a hint of Quatermass and the Pit in it, in which our history turns out to be the product of said alien presence. That’s not a surprising direction to go, considering that Doctor Who had been pulling from Quatermass and the Pit (and the other Quatermass serials) pretty much from the beginning, and this one actually puts that story in a new and interesting context, which scales down the scope of its implications while keeping them equally grave.

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

In the spirit of fellow 1965 release Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, which didn’t have Frankenstein in it but DID have a Space Monster, Planet of the Vampires features no vampires but does include at least one planet—its Italian title, Terrore nel Spazio, aka “Terror in Space”, is more non-specific but probably more accurate. It also features a great meeting of some of the minds discussed in previous posts: an international production headed by American International Pictures (who put its North American debut on a double bill with previous subject Die, Monster, Die!), directed and co-written by influential Italian horror auteur Mario Bava (several years after his work on Caltiki – The Immortal Monster), with an English language script written by Ib Melchior of Angry Red Planet and Journey to the Seventh Planet (alongside Louis M. Heyward, who was a producer of many other horror productions of the era like the Vincent Price classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes.) On a conceptual level, it feels very close to Melchior’s previous tales of astronauts terrorized by mysterious alien life forms on other planets, but with Bava’s visual sense, it goes from a mere suggestion of interplanetary Gothic horror to a pure representation of it—its alien planet feels truly menacing and not just inhuman, but anti-human. It’s likely for this reason that this movie became as unexpectedly influential as it has, very likely serving as another one of the inspirations for the Alien, which offered an updated conception of a space exploration haunted by inexplicable monstrosity over a decade later.

Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965)

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.

“Carnival of Monsters” (S10E5-8)

As the seventies dawned, Doctor Who went through several major changes: it was broadcast in colour, Jon Pertwee took over the lead role, and for a few years they changed the format of the show, locking it to a contemporary Earth setting without the Doctor’s time and planet-hopping shenanigans. In effect, this meant that most of the stories were made in the image of ones like “The Web of Fear”, with the Doctor working with a special military organization, which placed the “monsters in your backyard” concept at the forefront more often than not. Even with a more traditional adventure story structure in place, the series honed its horror credentials, and the early years of colour Doctor Who scarred generations with serials like “Spearhead From Space” (the first story of the era) and “Terror of the Autons”, which showed everyday plastic objects (including department store mannequins) transformed into deadly menaces—this is the era when the show really started living up to its legacy of making kids to “hide behind the couch.” Meanwhile, other stories, like the early serial “The Silurians” (where the monsters are allowed to be even a little sympathetic) showcased different and interesting ambitions in the monster space. Even when the plots became more limited in some ways, the creative minds at the helm adapted around those limitations and continued to develop the show’s distinguishing features.

Considering that I’ve written about two stories set on our planet, for the sake of variety I’ve chosen to skip to the fourth year in Pertwee’s tenure, when the series returned to journeys across time and space. The second story of the series’ tenth season has many intriguing qualities, including its wonderfully simple yet evocative title*, but most importantly is another serial written by Robert Holmes, who would go on to write previous site subject “The Ark in Space” (Holmes also wrote the aforementioned “Spearhead From Space” and “Terror of the Autons”, so he was making a name for himself on this series early), and with several more beloved stories to his name, he remains one of the more celebrated creative figures in the show’s history. As in his later stories, “Carnival of Monsters” demonstrates Holmes’ knack for infusing even standard-sounding Sci-Fi scenarios with his sardonic sense of humour, and in this case even carries a slyly meta take on the series itself.

The Faculty (1998)

Consider this a back-to-school special.

The potential pitfall of all those self-aware, meta-referencing pieces of genre entertainment—a particular specialty of the nineties—is a sense of having your cake and eating it: they point out all the tropes and cliches while actively using them, without necessarily demonstrating any original or truly subversive ideas of their own. The Faculty aims for that style of storytelling, but has at least one new-ish angle up its sleeve: it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers set in a high school, leading to all sorts of new metaphorical possibilities for a well-worn concept. Of course, because of the style of writing, it’s a version of that concept where characters directly talk about Jack Finney’s original Body Snatchers story as well as Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, signposting all of those metaphorical possibilities before you even get a chance to really take them in. That part of the movie was, not surprisingly, the contribution of Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who was assigned by the supervillains at Miramax to revamp a script by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel, with the directorial role given to Robert Rodriguez, coming off of From Dusk Till Dawn and his support work on Mimic. As aggressively 1998 as any movie could be, this does make some honest attempts to straddle the snarky hipness of the meta dialogue with a nominally serious Sci-Fi horror take on teenage alienation.

“The Web of Fear” (S5E23-28)

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.