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.

Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (2008)

Yes, this is indeed a much belated follow-up to The X From Outer Space, the second tier kaiju film from Japan’s sixties Monster Boom period that I covered over four years ago, and from the subtitle alone you are probably left with many questions. A nominal parody of both the original film and the state of geopolitics circa the late aughts, this one-off reboot is brought to us by director Minoru Kawasaki, who specializes in comedy tokusatsu projects with names like The Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala, and writer Masakazu Migita, an Ultraman TV series writer who has worked with Kawasaki on multiple projects. Migita was also the writer of previous subject Death Kappa, and while this certainly shares comedy stylings with that movie, it benefits from having a direction to its humour beyond just slightly off-kilter recreations of older kaiju films.

Geharha: The Dark and Long-Haired Monster (2009) & Death Kappa (2010)

Japan is another country where giant monster movies are produced. Did any of you know this?

In the gaps between major kaiju films, you can always expect to see alternative sources pick up the slack, including fans. The late aughts and the early 2010s were one of those gaps, and while neither of the two subjects I’m covering here, one a short film that aired on television and the other a feature-length film that comes off as multiple short films cobbled together, are technically fan-produced, they certainly feel like they are. They carry with them the same loving attempts to recreate classic tokusatsu effects (utilizing veterans of the field), and the same desire to fill as much of the cast with recognizable faces from other tokusatsu productions—all things we saw in previous site subject The Great Buddha Arrival, which is an actual fan-made film. In this case, both are also affectionate parodies of the genre, capturing the technical craft while making light of their cliches—with that in mind, another one of their major similarities to each other might be their oddly uneven approach to spoofing the form.

Half Human (1955)

Half Human (original Japanese title The Beastman Snowman) exists as a curious footnote in the history of Toho’s monster movies—it is Ishiro Honda’s direct follow-up to Godzilla (which prevented him from directing the actual Godzilla sequel also released in 1955), with much of that film’s cast and crew carrying over, including effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, story originator Shigeru Kayama, and screenwriter Takeo Murata (also the writer of Godzilla Raids Again and Rodan), which subsequently became an obscurity whose original Japanese release has never officially appeared on home video (although that doesn’t prevent people from finding it if they look a little.) Like Godzilla, this movie’s American incarnation was a heavy edit job, lopping off over over thirty minutes of run time, radically altering the story and tone, and inserting scenes of American actors like John Carradine (who probably wouldn’t turn down a movie role even if you paid him to) to make it seem less foreign, and that version has been the only one easily available all this time. There’s a reason for that pattern of unavailability that we’ll get to, but it has in some ways rendered this movie as much of a phantom as the Abominable Snowman at its centre, a missing link between Godzilla and the Honda-directed monster movies to follow.

Bride of the Gorilla (1951)

So this is Christmas Apes, and what have you done? Well, I’ve started watching another batch of ape-themed films to write about on this site. I hope you, the reader, have fun.

With a title as sensationalistic as Bride of the Gorilla, you’d probably expect something pretty bombastic—but things are not what they appear. That title was not the first choice for writer-director Curt Siodmak, screenwriter of The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (and author of the oft-imitated Sci-Fi story Donovan’s Brain), who began the project under the name “The Face in the Water”, something a bit more mysterious that maybe better reflects the film he was trying to make, something closer to a psychological thriller than a monster movie (also, technically, there is no gorilla in this movie.) Looking past the surface ridiculousness, one can detect traces of not only Siodmak’s previous work on The Wolf Man, with its cursed and agonized protagonist, but Jacques Tourner and Val Lewton’s acclaimed 1942 thriller Cat People (Siodmak had worked with both on the film I Walked With a Zombie), which kept the audience unsure of the movie’s reality. Well, this is trying for that level of ambiguity, at least, regardless of it it achieves it.

Blood Tide (1982)

I’ve already seen a few monster movies based around the eternal, extremely generalized struggle of good vs. evil—see The Creeping Flesh—and also a few that do the same thing while also contrasting Christianity with pre-Christian beliefs—see Viy—so I was prepared for what Blood Tide had on offer. There is obviously something very Wicker Man about the set-up here: outsiders intruding into an isolated place where the old beliefs still hold sway, maybe inviting a terror upon themselves with their unwariness, maybe being pulled in by destiny—certainly they both have a village full of people who are maybe outside the mainstream and are thus entirely suspicious. Substitute the British Isles with the Greek Isles and have the human sacrifice come with a monster, and you’ve got a pretty good idea. Those themes and the choice of location provides an atmosphere for this movie, one that helps it straddle the line between early eighties horror schlock and maybe a more serious kind of horror schlock.

Creature Classic Companion: The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

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 Man From Planet X (1951)

1951 was the year the extraterrestrial film really established itself, with the release of both The Thing From Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still cementing many of the aesthetic trends for Science Fiction boom that encompassed the rest of the decade—which is definitely interesting when you consider how utterly different their depictions of alien life are. Intentionally and unintentionally, they approach the tension of the Cold War from opposing angles, a call for peace and understanding contrasted with fighting off an implacable, shadowy enemy, and while the latter probably became more common in subsequent movies, the concept of a sympathetic alien visitor was seeded very early on. The Man From Planet X was a smaller affair in 1951 compared to the high prestige of the other two, shot in six days on a relatively small budget (and yet Roger Corman was not involved), but it also showcases the pre-formula possibilities of alien-based movies, somewhat bridging the gap between the two opposing approaches. It’s also a bridge between the Gothic horror movies of the thirties and forties and the Sci-Fi thrillers of the fifties, using the environments and moodiness of the former and the ideas of the latter—this is likely due to the influence of director Edgar G. Ulmer, who is mostly known for the Lugosi/Karloff thriller The Black Cat and the noir Detour (he also claims to have worked on German expressionist classics like Metropolis and The Golem, but apparently there’s no evidence of that, so nice try, Eddy!) There’s a lot of history to be found within this thing.

Giant Monster Varan (1958)

As we edge closer to the release of one of the biggest kaiju films in recent memory, it seems like a good time for this column to cover some of the lesser-known entries of the genre. Specifically, I’ll be writing about the lesser-known entries made by Toho, who obviously needed something monster-related to put out in between Godzilla movies, and so has a wide swathe of giant monsters that will probably not be making a cameo in any Hollywood movies anytime soon, but are still part of the canon, and also represent different eras in the studio’s monster history.

Daikaiju Baran (English translation Giant Monster Varan, although the actual English title is the superlative Varan the Unbelievable) was the fifth of Toho’s giant monster movies released since Godzilla in 1954, and the fourth of them directed by Godzilla’s Ishiro Honda (yes, we’re counting The Mysterians in that, even though it’s not strictly a giant monster movie, but look here buddy, they consider it part of the sequence, so I do, too) alongside special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya—looking back on it, that level of productivity in such a short time frame feels almost, well, unbelievable. Varan is once again filmed in black-and-white, which seems like a step back from the full-colour spectacles of Honda and Tsuburaya’s Rodan and Mysterians, but the conditions under which it was made explain why: this was initially conceived as a joint venture between Toho and an American film company, and was supposed to be made for television—the Americans eventually dropped out, and the film was shown theatrically in Japan (where, based on the title, they find things like Varan to be totally believable), with the Unbelievable English language version being released on TV in 1962, hacked to pieces and with scenes of American actors inserted so American viewers wouldn’t be threatened by a blatantly foreign film (I guess), just like most of Toho’s monster movies. I watched the Japanese original, so as much as I’d like to keep inserting the Unbelievable into this post, it technically wouldn’t be accurate, and I’m all about accuracy.

That this movie was originally made for television in mind might explain why it feels like it has a much smaller scope than its predecessors—a very straightforward plot without a lot of the cultural meaning of Godzilla, or the showmanship of Rodan. This is probably why it’s often been relegated to the lower tiers of the Toho monster oeuvre, with its titular monster mostly making cameos in movies like Destroy All Monsters (as well as in merchandise, including video games and even action figures released outside Japan—I remember when the Varan action from Trendmasters’ mid-nineties Godzilla line was rare and highly sought-after by collectors.) But even if this movie mostly just feels like “another one of those” in many ways, with less of a sense of scale than most other kaiju movies, you can still see bits and pieces of those other movies within it, showing that it still carries the torch fairly early on in their decades-long reign.