Monster Allergy

The popularity of the Godzilla films in their heyday did not just lead to homegrown competitors and imitators—as we saw with Yongary and Gorgo, film makers worldwide sometimes made their own attempts at similar monster material. I’ve written about that particular “Monster Boom” period pretty extensively, but a very similar pattern emerged following Pokémon, a later monster-based phenomenon that was clearly inspired by nostalgia for the original Monster Boom. That series’ thundercrack emergence in the late nineties led to a plethora of other media based on the idea of monster collecting and battling, especially in Japan, and I’ve written about some of those as well (you can also find a surprisingly deep recollection of even more Pokémon coattail riders in Daniel Dockery’s 2022 book Monster Kids)–but wouldn’t it be interesting to see how the basic ideas of a monster collecting franchise could be filtered through a completely different cultural lens?

This brings us to Monster Allergy, an Italian kids comics-turned-attempted-franchise that doesn’t outright announce its indebtedness to Pokémon and the other kids monster series of its era, but come on—it’s about “monster tamers” capturing monsters in small objects, and that alone makes the connection obvious. It’s certainly no rip-off, as any similarities largely disappear past those barest of surface elements, and instead follow more traditional western low fantasy storytelling. But regardless of the degree of intention, this does represent a very European take on some of Pokémon‘s core ideas, a kid-focused adventure in a monster-filled world, and In this way, it is to Pokémon what a Gorgo or a Reptilicus was to the original Godzilla.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)

Reading the Cryptozoology literature, you will inevitably come across the story of the Beast of Gévaudan, an animal that purportedly slaughtered up to a hundred people (or maybe even hundreds, the record isn’t entirely clear) over three years in 1760s France. After numerous hunts and false victories, the killings finally ended after a particularly large wolf was shot, stuffed, and mounted in King Louis XV’s court. The larger-than-life descriptions of the beast given by surviving victims and hunters and fuzzy historical records has led to endless speculation about just what kind of animal the beast really was (it’s even become a common reference for werewolf stories)—and while the consensus, for the most part, is that the deaths were the work of a wolf, or more likely several wolves, the French production The Brotherhood of the Wolf asks the provocative question “what if it wasn’t a wolf, what if it was, like…a different animal?” It also asks another equally provocative question, which is whether this piece of French history could not be made into an epic-length martial arts action movie.

Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue (1992)

This month sees the release of the oft-delayed Shin Ultraman, the movie re-imagining of the original series directed by Shin Godzilla effects director Shinji Higuchi (and produced by Shin Godzilla director Hideaki Anno.) That has inspired me to spend the month covering the most exciting of all topics: franchise extensions! Get ready to be synergized this May!

Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue is not the prologue to Shin Kamen Rider, the movie directed by Anno scheduled for next year—in fact, it is technically a prologue to nothing. Produced in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of the Kamen Rider franchise (although it didn’t release until early 1992, slightly after said anniversary), this is a direct-to-video reboot of the motorcycle-riding bug cyborg superhero created during one of the franchise’s quiet periods, the long stretch between new TV productions that also saw the release of the Ultraman vs. Kamen Rider special I wrote about. Being V-Cinema (although it apparently did get a theatrical run as well), the term for DTV stuff in Japan that has an interesting history of its own, and also being made in the early nineties obviously meant that this new Kamen Rider is very different from the ones that came before—taking on all the dark elements from Shotaro Ishinimori’s original concept (he seemed to be fascinated with the idea of people being transformed against their will) and making them the emphasis, changing its superhero tale into a full-on monster movie, a bloody and dour experience replete with body and psychological horror. This was apparently done to appeal to the now-adult Kamen Rider fans, although it’s difficult to say if it actually did—in any case, it’s a bizarre and fascinating exercise.

Creature Classic Companion: Society (1989)

So ends a month spent with Arrow, and let’s cap it off with the type of movie that makes you appreciate the existence of these specialty services, because you know most mainstream streamers wouldn’t touch this with a ten-foot pole.

There’s a particular strain of eighties movies, genre movies especially, which are almost entirely about how the eighties were terrible, and specifically railed against the wealthy and the corporate culture that seemed to increasingly dominate everything during the Reagan era. Robocop is probably the highest profile example, but you also have John Carpenter’s The Live and Larry Cohen’s The Stuff all espousing the same kind of anti-authority stance—and in using genres and styles that were considered disreputable to mainstream consensus feels like an appropriate punkish way to do so. Horror with B-movie sensibilities, ultra-violent action, and an emphasis on gross special effects have a visceral anger to them, and thumbing your nose at the idea of good taste probably felt like the most subversive way to get your point across. Society is another example of this from the tail end of the decade, and it acquired a strong cult following among horror aficionados by taking things as far as they could go.

This is the first film directed by Brian Yuzna, who was mostly known for producing the movies of the late Stuart Gordon, including such favourites as Re-Animator and From Beyond (which he co-wrote.) Apparently after Gordon and him co-wrote the initial version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids(!), Yuzna wanted more independence, and was able to secure financing for whatever he wanted as long as he also produced a sequel to Re-Animator. Taking that sweet deal for all it was worth, he picked up an intriguing script about a Beverly Hills teen becoming increasingly suspicious of his rich family’s secret life, but felt that the cult/slasher angle of its ending was not his speed, and so altered the twist into something else entirely—a monster movie, but more than that. What was produced was one of the most audacious and disgusting of all eighties horror movies, one that left an indelible impression on everyone who stumbled upon it during the heyday of practical horror effects.

Ultraman: The Next (2004)

There aren’t many standalone Ultraman things out there—as in, ones that are completely outside the historically-minded franchise entries (like the Ultra Galaxy Legend movie I wrote about), and potentially could appeal to audiences who aren’t already invested in that wildly complicated universe. Ultraman: The Next (sometimes simply titled Ultraman) is one of the few, released as part of a confusingly interconnected multimedia strategy that sought to draw in older viewers with a desire for something “grittier”, though that strategy seemingly petered out not long after, and they went right back to their regularly scheduled kids’ TV series. Still, this movie represents one of the times that Tsuburaya Productions has attempted to fully reinterpret the series, taking its familiar elements and putting them in a slightly different context (we’re apparently getting another one this year from the team behind Shin Godzilla.) The Next falls into that realm of “trying to be more real than a wacky cartoon, but not that real”, and while it certainly has far less silliness and more scariness and adult-focused drama to it (including a mildly subversive take on the human/Ultraman relationship), it’s not so far away from the rest of the franchise to feel especially off. If not for those relatively minor changes to the formula, it probably wouldn’t even feel much different at all from the proper spin-off films, which really shouldn’t be surprising given that it was written and directed by Ultra series lifers (the director, Kazuya Konaka, is also the brother of Ultraman Gaia originator Chiaki J. Konaka, who I mainly know as the guy behind the weird third season of Digimon.) So, this comes off less as someone coming to Ultraman from a different perspective, but rather the Ultraman regulars experimenting with tone.

Jellyfish Eyes (2013)

There have been more than a few more intelligent, revisionist takes on monster tropes in the past, ones that take the basic idea and attempt to add a more human dimension, or use it to directly commentate on what the monsters actually mean—I’ve written about a few of them here. Jellyfish Eyes is the cinematic attempt to give that sort of treatment to the monster collecting/kids-and-monsters subgenre (Pokemon, Digimon, et. al.), which by 2013 had become a part of the lexicon, something with a near-instantaneous draw for the youth of the world—I’ve said before that the fantasy of having your own monster friend has been something of a near-universal one for kids for decades now, with the monster collecting games simply being the purest distillation of it. Directed by contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, this movie really does get the emotional attachment kids have these fantasy creatures, and presents them in a story that outright describes them as what they are—a personal expression of their hopes and dreams, and something to protect them from cruel realities—in a story that vacillates from child-like simplicity to hard social commentary on the edges. While my previous Criterion Channel watch, The X From Outer Space, fit into that channel’s ethos for its historical interest, this is definitely more in line with their support of smaller, independently-minded films, and despite taking on fairly mainstream ideas, it does so in a way that’s way more interesting than the norm.