Monster From the Ocean Floor (1954)

Two movie posts in one week? Yes, I had so many things I wanted to write about that I’m starting my double features a bit early this summer. In June, you’ll be getting a new millennium subject early in the week, and something more vintage on Thursdays.

I was already planning on writing about this movie at some point, but the passing of Roger Corman (a few weeks ago as of this posting) made it a top priority, and I’m hoping to cover more of his movies in the near future. Of course, Corman had a big impact on the entirety of Hollywood film with his prolific filmography, general eye for talent, and, let’s say, economical methods, but the many monster movies he either directed (I’ve written about a few of them) or produced do have a special place in that vast filmography—with all their B-movie qualities, there were a few that offered genuine innovation in the category, or at the very least were uniquely bizarre and entertaining. There are also the times where he provided a starting point for filmmakers who would go on to become some of the biggest creative forces in monster movie history, including Joe Dante’s big break with Piranha. In a career that spanned everything from Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to women in prison movies and eccentric comedies, the monster movies are a crucial part of his legacy—beginning with Corman’s first-ever film as a producer.

As the story goes, Corman was irritated after seeing a script he wrote altered by the studio, so he decided to start his own production company to have complete control of the movies he worked on. Monster From the Ocean Floor was the first film he produced, and its six-day, cost-saving-whenever-possible production (the budget is somewhere between $12,000 and $35,000 depending on who you ask) was the beginning of the patented Corman method that would serve him for the rest of his career. The money he received up front from Lippert Pictures for Monster was used to fund his next movie, something called The Fast and the Furious(!), which was the first movie he worked on with distributors Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, the founders of his longtime distributor American International Pictures.

On a pure film history level, Monster From the Ocean Floor is actually significant, even if it is rather unassuming as a low budget fifties monster movie that could be best described as “quaint.” I would also argue that it, in its unassuming way, it’s also a fairly forward-looking piece of fifties creature feature history—released between more famous big studio fare, specifically Creature From the Black Lagoon and Them!, it gets into some of the major themes of the era early, signalling the specific form of nuclear paranoia that haunts a large number of these movies. Corman and his crew were not establishing their own distinct brand of monster movie, but developing the entire genre as a whole without really trying—and that’s a very Corman thing to do.

Zillatinum: Part 2 (The Return of Godzilla & Godzilla 2000: Millennium)

The anniversary capsule reviews return! This time, I cover two of the many reboots of the Godzilla series, both offering reflections of the time in which they were made, and how the King of the Monsters could still potential resonate within them.

A Creature Special Report: The Gamera Gauntlet

Gamera is, of course, Japan’s second favourite giant monster, one of the staple kaiju of the sixties Monster Boom whose yearly appearance in theatres (and, in the rest of the world, on television) has given him and his films an outsize influence on pop culture. You’d be hard-pressed to find a turtle in any kind of Japanese media who doesn’t fly by spinning around in its shell, and thanks mainly to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, fans of silly movies in the English-speaking world have formed a real soft (shell) spot for the terrapin tornado. Although starting out as Daiei’s answer to Toho’s Godzilla—considering the original movie was in black-and-white even though it was made in 1965, one might say their direct rip-off—the series eventually diverged in tone, even while maintaining a similar monster fight formula. While both monsters are beloved by children in the audience, Gamera was the one that was directly positioned as the “Friend to all Children”, a playful figure who would usually star alongside young actors in increasingly goofy plots, which is a level of direct pandering that Godzilla never really engaged in (at least until it started directly lifting stuff from Gamera in the late sixties and early seventies.) Gamera was even successfully revived in the mid-nineties with a trio of highly-regarded films directed by Shusuke Kaneko and written by Kazunori Ito, which I wrote about years ago.

While I’ve seen some of the movies in the original series, I’ve never had the opportunity to sit down and soak in the entire 1966-1971(+1980) run until I found the whole series available on our old pal, Tubi TV. The experience of running through the entire Showa Gameras (most of them directed by Noriaki Yuasa) has not only provided a more detailed context for the series and its place in monster history, but also demonstrates the wild evolution the series and its title kaiju took over those five years—what you thought you knew about Gamera is only partially true (he is still really neat and also filled with meat, however.) So, in this special extra-length post, I will compactly address each of the seven sequels—yes, it’s time to fire up the old capsule review machine.

Monster Multimedia: The Mighty Boosh – “The Legend of Old Gregg”

Very few comedy shows hooked me as hard as The Mighty Boosh did when I first watched it—it was unlike anything I had ever seen before, a show with a mastery of quirky, fast-paced dialogue and utterly ridiculous stories, coupled with catchy original music. It was among a wave of cult-forming British comedies that all debuted in the mid-two-thousands—Peep Show, The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, just to name a few—but what made it stand out was also probably what made me love it: the cartoonish world it presented, with outlandish fantasy plots and characters. As we are told in the theme song, we are being taken on a journey through time and space, and almost every one of its twenty episodes features one of its central cast (Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt, and Rich Fulcher) playing an over-the-top costumed character, which was more often than not some kind of goofy monster—sometimes, the show almost feels like a art school comedy take on Doctor Who.

No episode demonstrates The Mighty Boosh‘s capacity for monster-based merriment better than what may be its most well-known one, series 2’s “The Legend of Old Gregg.” For whatever reason, this one blew up, and managed to even reach outside the regular BBC Three audience—I distinctly remember seeing clips from it passed around by people who never mentioned watching the show before. Although it isn’t my favourite episode of the series, it does have a lot of the elements that made it so unique, including another amazing song and a memorable performance from Noel Fielding as the titular character.

Latitude Zero (1969)

Toho’s long history of special effects films is, for the most part, dominated by their kaiju projects—but they applied the same techniques to a host of other fantasy and science fiction movies, sometimes even finding ways to insert monsters into them just to give them that Toho touch. Fifties and sixties thrillers such as The Human Vapor and Matango and adventure epics like The Mysterians and Gorath are all major parts of Toho’s film legacy, and most of them were directed by Ishiro Honda, with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya, giving them all a feeling of consistency with the giant monsters the two were working on at the same time. 1969’s Latitude Zero was the last time the two of them collaborated before Tsuburaya’s death in 1970—it’s a genre piece that manages to include many of the elements of their past ventures (including monsters, even if they don’t show up until much later in it), and also has many things that makes it stand out in their filmography.

A science fiction adventure story with a Jules Verne meets the Summer of Love vibe, Latitude Zero often feels like a spiritual successor to Honda and Tsuburaya’s super submarine classic Atragon. The big difference here is that this film is very clearly meant to be aimed at the American markets, featuring fairly big American actors headlining (as opposed to all the earlier movies that just featured Nick Adams), and no need for dubbing, because even the Japanese actors (including Godzilla series veterans Akira Takarada and Akihiko Hirata, and Ultraman’s Susumu Kurobe) speak in English. Toho was clearly trying to make an international success here, but it still feels like their style of film, just with Joseph Cotten and Cesar Romero driving the action.

Gappa the Triphibian Monster (1967)

What struck me while I was watching Gappa the Triphibian Monsters (AKA Monster From a Prehistoric Planet, but let’s face it, the other title is way better) was how old it felt—and I mean that beyond just being a movie that’s already over fifty years old, and also one whose footage looks worse for wear (being in the public domain often means no one’s gonna be doing any high-quality preservation.) Maybe it’s just because the plot of it reminded me a lot of Mothra and the British monster movie Gorgo, both from earlier in the decade, but I imagine that even in 1967 this must have felt like a bit of a throwback to before kaiju movies were getting increasingly out there. This was the only monster movie made by the studio Nikkatsu, jumping into the Monster Boom while it was still ongoing, which might explain it—a studio only dipping their toes into this format either go all out or stay pretty by the books, and this definitely falls into the latter.

Daikaiju 2014: Resurgence (1 of 3)

Just for completeness’ sake (and maybe to show how my writing technique has grown and/or atrophied over time), I’m going to reprint some reviews I wrote on an earlier website back in the first half of 2014, the 60th anniversary of the Godzilla series. There is a new Godzilla film being released in Japan in July, so maybe this could lead up to me seeing that movie, on the off chance someone sends me by express mail to Japan with enough yen in my pocket to buy a ticket. Unlike Ultraman and Ultra Q, there are no legal ways to stream any of these movies currently (I saw some of them when they briefly appeared on Crackle, and others not mentioned in these reviews are available on Shout Factory‘s site), so if you want to see them for yourself you will probably have to find some DVDs and Blu-Rays.

***

Destroy All Monsters (1968)

The film opens with what is essentially a mini-documentary about the lives of the monster community in MonsterLand, all birds-eye shots of elaborate miniature landscapes and an English voice-over that brings to mind those old Disney nature shows. Aside from being an early example of the really nice wide-shots featuring multiple monsters on screen (something I imagine was some of the most complicated scenes the Toho crew had ever staged), this intro sets up the science fiction utopian vision of the movie – this is basically a whiz-bang sci-fi movie that exists in a world where the existence of giant monsters is a given, which is a really interesting way to go about it. It’s a year of advanced rocket science and nature completely under control, only interrupted by the intervention of even more technologically advanced extraterrestrials.

Most of the movie is that whiz-bang science fiction plot (the two-fisted space pilot lead, the alien stuff, and the super-science are seem to be callbacks to the kind of films that were in theatres at the same time as the original Godzilla), with the monsters more or less acting as walking natural disasters that get in the human characters’ way. I imagine this was because of the previously-mentioned difficulty of staging multiple suit actors, because the human scenes don’t look especially cheap – lots of elaborate sets, shootouts, and Thunderbirds-style miniatures. Normal monster movie logic would say that this is a problem, but everything, while human or monster, barrels ahead pretty quickly, so the film never really gets too dull.

Plus, the all-out bombastic thrills of the monster scenes make it all worth while. The final battle with King Ghidorah not only has about five or six different monsters all getting to do their thing (including surprise all-star Gorosaurus), but even has a ringside announcer doing their entrances. Godzilla, of course, gets the last say on things by kicking in the door of the alien base in Mt. Fuji – payback for spending the rest of the movie in thrall to alien women in silver shawls (am I making this up, or do we several of these movies have their alien threats consist entirely of women? It’s at least also the case in Gamera vs. Guiron. I wonder what the conscious reasoning behind this would be?) It’s all in good fun, though we still get a reminder that no matter how much it seems the monsters are helping us, they are only going after who they know to be the major threat at that time – re-establishing that the kaiju are their own beasts with their own agendas. You know, just so we’re not TOO comfortable with them around, a repudiation of the beginning of the movie.

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991)

A bit of a glorious mess – this movie is all over in the place, going for dozens of different ideas and not really landing any of them, but still interesting in the attempt. Responding to growing anti-Japanese sentiment in the west in the late 80s with borderline jingoism, as white people from the future go back in time to sabotage an age where Japan dominates economically, it is both confused and confusing. At the very least, the change in directions feel a little less like whiplash because the movie starts out incredibly heightened, even by Godzilla standards – we open in a rapidfire number of scenes that present to us grown men obsessed with dinosaurs and a long-debunked photo is used as evidence that dinosaurs still live.

A little distracted by the Terminator-homaging androids and cameo appearances by the Tom Baker-era Doctor Who time tunnel, we may not notice that this is a movie that is mainly about Japan’s complicated relationship with Godzilla, the figure, and in turn with its own history. In keeping with the Heisei series’ determination to keep him an anti-hero, the film goes back and forth with Godzilla’s role, first a menace that endangers the entire country, then a hero stopping an even greater threat to Japan, and then a menace again. It’s hard not to see this as a struggle with Japan’s own military history – it waffles on what to think of the country’s past militarism (which has multiple faces in the film as a few war veterans, who having survived thanks to proto-Godzilla’s slaughter of an entire platoon of American soldiers in WWII, are responsible for building up Japan’s post-war economy), though it still posits a demilitarized and disarmed future. This is further shown through the eccentric millionaire vet’s personal views on Godzilla, who he can’t help but see as a sort of guardian spirit – and this subplot is concluded pretty astoundingly during Godzilla’s powered-up rampage near the end of the movie

The same millionaire, in an earlier scene, reveals to the Japanese government that he has built his own nuclear submarine, suggesting that they use it to recreate Godzilla. Although its not a major part of the film, there is some nuclear weapons subtext in there as well – it may seem a kind of cheat in order to bring Godzilla back for his battle, the fact that he ended up being created even after being removed from the atomic testing sites posits a kind of inevitability to his existence. After all, nuclear weapons didn’t stop being a concern after the time of the original film – Pandora’s box is open, and no matter what we think we can do to stop it, it will always remain a threatening undercurrent. There is the intimation that the future will be better – we go from one generation building nuclear weapons, to the next generation rejecting them, to the next generation abolishing them – but it still gives you pause at what we did before we could get there.

Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001)

This movie is not so ambiguous about its position on Japanese history and militarism – it’s a battle of karmic forces acting in relation to human action, not so far removed from the ideas Shusuke Kaneko used previously in his Gamera trilogy (which is probably why they hired him for this.) Godzilla no longer stands just in for the atomic weaponry used against Japan, but also the vengeful spirits of the countless victims of Japanese imperialism – an acknowledgement of all sides of a tragedy, and Japan’s own bloody attempts at conquest. The forces opposing Godzilla, now more menacing than ever with his soulless eyes and gleeful destructiveness, are nature spirits who can be summoned by humankind, but don’t necessarily fight for them – they are connected to the land, and to ancient traditions, and in their earlier scenes accidentally end up offing groups of disrespectful young hooligans ala Jason Vorhees, just to get the point across. Like in the Gamera movies, there is a place for humans in this conflict, but as is often pointed out again and again, most are not engaged with their history in the slightest, and create a culture where our past can come back to haunt us.

GMK is certainly attempting to return the series to the tone of the original movie, bringing back the terrifying force of nature version of Godzilla, putting a lot of focus on the ground-level effects of the monsters, and even including some straight riffs on scenes from that movie (including Godzilla’s first appearance behind a hillside and scenes of wounded people in a hospital.) Kaneko goes out of his way to undermine any enjoyment we might have in the levelling of the cities – there are always fleeing people always in view – and even the battles with the “good” monsters makes sure to show the collateral (once again, very similar to Gamera, but going farther.) I can’t really say the imagery is straight-up horror as it was in the original, (they certainly go for a lot of dark humour along the way), but it’s certainly not the violence-against-miniatures-for-violence’s-sake that much of the later films became – there are stakes, and there are consequences.

At the same time, the reinterpretation of Godzilla somewhat opposes the original – which, in some interpretations, was at least partially a celebration of the new Japanese SDF. Not here – aside from the notion of Godzilla as vengeful spirit, we see that not only are the events of the original covered-up (the adversarial position to history again), the military shown as overconfident with their latest weaponry (which is first introduced as tools for search-and-rescue operations rather than military use), and the government is slow to act in the face of a crisis. The latter of those is more or less in line with the 1954 movie, but this one obviously goes much farther in its distrust of authority. The military is more or less redeemed through the Commander, who is one of the few people who refuses to disengage with what came before and is ultimately the one to take down Godzilla when even the trio of guardian spirits fail – but the idea remains that human violence, and not just the threat of advanced weaponry, is the real underlying concern with these movies.