Godzilla: The Album

One of the more distinctive cultural legacies left by Sony/Tristar’s 1998 Hollywood blockbuster incarnation of Godzilla is all the myriad ways the studio attempted to transform it into the apex example of a four quadrant multimedia hype machine. Not surprisingly, that’s also one of the major criticisms of it: that the marketing was just as important as the actual content of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s film, if not more so—the movie’s “Size Does Matter” tagline representing their ambitions to outdo the previous decade’s worth of summer crowd-pleasers in every respect. So, trailer campaigns, promotional tie-ins with places like Taco Bell, toys, and Saturday morning cartoons were not just there for a little extra dosh on the side, but a core part of the entire endeavour—and the general short-to-medium-term disinterest that audiences showed those tie-ins ultimately did more harm to a potential American-led Godzilla’s franchise potential than even the poisonous critical reception did. The movie being mostly hype was its downfall when it was the hype inevitably died down.

Among the products produced for the movie was, of course, the soundtrack of “inspired by” rock/pop tracks whose presence in the movie was mostly optional, although the singles and their tied-forever-to-the-movie music videos were key parts of the marketing campaign. Compared to the toys and other merch, Godzilla: The Album was actually fairly successful, a platinum seller in multiple countries with singles that charted on various Hot 100s. This was at a time when every major motion picture had a similar tie-in soundtrack, and most of them sold regardless of the general opinion of the movie—the only explanation is this was the peak CD era, and you had to actually put in the effort to not sell at least a million discs.

Godzilla: The Album did not have the high concept hook of previous soundtracks for summer disappointments like Spawn, which featured collabs between heavy metal and electronica musicians—closer in spirit to the soundtracks to the Joel Schumacher Batman films, it is instead a repository of mostly alternate rock and other popular genres of the late nineties, a clear attempt to make the music associated with Godzilla ’98 contemporary and “cool.” However, a more accurate description is that it’s a repository of the bloodless form of alternative rock that shambled on through our radios after the boom period in the first half of the nineties inevitably collapsed—it’s a real mishmash of veterans of the genre like Foo Fighters and Rage Against the Machine, mostly forgotten newcomers like Fuel and Fuzzbubble, as well as semi-associated artists like Ben Folds Five, just to give you the discombobulating experience of going from hard rock and rap to piano to whatever the heck Joey DeLuxe is supposed to be. The tracks themselves are a mix of written-for-the-soundtrack entries, established deep cuts (like Silverchair’s solid “Untitled”), and weird hybrids like Green Day’s “Brain Stew (The Godzilla Remix)”, where their insomniac anthem is interspersed with samples of Godizlla’s trademark roar. As you can tell, some of the contributors put more effort into this than others, and some put in effort that they eventually felt was not worth it—Foo Fighters were apparently excited to create a song for a Godzilla movie, right up until they actually saw the Godzilla movie they created a song for.

Lost in all of this pure 1998 marketing buzz is Godzilla…you know, the popular monster on which the film is supposedly based. One would assume that Godzilla would be a bit central to the whole project, especially since the aforementioned marketing push seemed to be based on the notion that the world’s most popular giant monster should be able to handily scale up every accomplishment of something like Jurassic Park. So, the state of alternative rock and pop music in 1998 is one thing, but the real question remains: what does any of this have to do with Godzilla? For a good chunk of the songs, the answer is often “nothing, really”, and that sometimes even applies to original songs produced specifically for this album. But surely there was some thought process behind the lead singles in particular, some inkling of what kind of song would be appropriate for the King of the Monsters. The only way to know for sure is to look at each of them and suss out their radioactive DNA.

Ambassador Magma (OVA Version)

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.

Arachnophobia (1990)

Last year, I delved into the strain of big studio monster movies that popped up throughout the nineties—an era emboldened by advances in special effects and a sense that creature features could be made even more palatable to a mainstream audience through genre mixing and nominally self-aware writing. The first movie of era, Tremors, demonstrated those latter points by taking a mostly traditional monster movie premise and imbuing it with a goofy, blue collar sensibility—one must remember, though, that Tremors was not particularly successful in theatres, and only gained its notoriety from home video and television airings afterwards. Arachnophobia, which premiered six months later, carries the same basic tenor, but attracted a bigger initial audience—so it could be argued that this is the true starting point for the dark comedy sensibility that permeated so many of the subsequent creature features.

Arachnophobia did have one major advantage: whereas something like Tremors can only borrow Steven Spielberg vibes, this movie is a true Amblin production—working with Disney’s slightly-less-than-reputable Hollywood Pictures label—with Spielberg on board to produce a movie directed by longtime collaborator Frank Marshall (later to direct previous subject Congo.) This pretty openly formalizes the way these movies attempted to recapture the most successful elements of Jaws, particularly the more grounded approach for both the characters and the thrills. Maybe even more than Jaws, this movie plays into existing, everyday fears—I mean, the title alone tells you that—by exaggerating them just enough, and by filling the scenes in between the horror with a colourful supporting cast that have a particular small town quality, creating a movie approximation of a recognizable world. Just beneath the surface of that, you can find what would become a consistent thread in the next few years of monster horror: the way these elements reveal themselves to be something of a facade, a way to grab people into seeing something as ludicrous as the older monster movies and as mean-spirited as less mainstream films, a prototype form of pulpy excess that would eventually be refined into the spectacle of Spielberg’s own Jurassic Park.

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.

Congo (1995)

Before the year’s out, I’d be remiss not to take one last dive into the short-lived but intriguing Hollywood dalliance with the creature feature in the nineties, a trend that was unarguably spurred on by Jurassic Park. None of the subsequent follow-up movies is more directly connected to JP than Congo, another genre blockbuster based on a Michael Crichton novel that not only features special effects by Stan Winston and Co., but Spielberg’s longtime collaborator Frank Marshall in the director’s chair (one of Marshall’s previous directorial efforts was Arachnophobia, a missing piece of nineties creature feature history that will gets its due on this site eventually.) While its ambitions are certainly on a smaller scale than its predecessor—bringing to life a bunch of mutant gorillas is not quite as impressive as animating dinosaurs—through its rollicking adventure structure and jungle setting, I have no doubts it was trying to bring in at least some of the vast audience that the previous Critchton adaptation got. However, even if many of the surface elements remain similar, the explicitly throwback nature of this story makes for a different beast,

Beowulf (1999)

The last time we went over an adaptation of Beowulf, it was John Gardner’s Grendel, a very intentional reversal of the poem that made the monster the protagonist. I think it’s about time we studied a more straightforward re-interpretation, and so I went for the most obvious one: the 1999 techno-medieval movie version starring Christopher Lambert. What, were you expecting something different?

Shot in the backwoods of Transylvania, this Beowulf looks akin to a Renaissance Fair that was sub-themed around the late nineties, a world of castles and battle axes that also includes smokestacks, winding gears and machinery, and some stylish jackets and tops to go along with the royal robes and peasant rags. From the raging techno/industrial/metal score—including songs from Fear Factory, Anthrax, KMFDM, and many others—that ramps up to numerous fight scenes full of clashing steel and ninja flips (would you believe that Mortal Kombat producer Lawrence Kasanoff was involved?), you really get the sense that this is a bare knuckle attempt to make that musty old poem into a hardcore actioner for the fifteen-year-old boy audience, like a even less mannered and subtle version of Brotherhood of the Wolf. I feel that a movie that opens with a unique, silhouette-based logo is very loudly announcing its own brazen approach to the material, and does it ever live up, or down, to those early promises.

The Monsters of Unsolved Mysteries

Years ago, I wrote about my initiation into the…fandom?…of Cryptozoology and other stories of unexplained phenomenon through books and TV programs like Animal X, which focused entirely on cryptids and other weird animal anecdotes. In the grand scheme of things, a show like Animal X was niche, a foreign import that found its way into circulation during the strange expansion days of cable TV—even a broader-minded program in a similar vein like the Leonard Nimoy-hosted In Search Of… (a recurring topic on my other website) was mostly a minor staple of syndication. These series have snuck their way into the nostalgic memories of lifelong channel surfers, and likely introduced more people to the many mystery monsters of the world…but I imagine that even more people were introduced to Cryptozoology through the most mainstream mysterious phenomenon TV show, Unsolved Mysteries.

Its credentials as an actual hit are pretty evident: the initial run, which like In Search Of… started out as a series of specials, ran for fourteen straight years on three channels, including two of the big networks (NBC from 1987 to 1997, and CBS from 1997 to 1999) and one cable network (Lifetime, from 2000-2002); it almost certainly became another staple of syndication in that timeframe as well, and was recently revived in a revised form on Netflix. A series like that doesn’t go on for that long and end up with hundreds of episodes without being seen by a few people, and the trick to getting this type of show in front of so many eyeballs is ingenious: it’s a Trojan Horse, of sorts. From its inception, Unsolved Mysteries was a true crime docu-series, focusing on murders, robberies, disappearances, separated families and other down-to-earth cases—it’s a good example of what the genre was like before the more recent trends in True Crime “entertainment.” This makes it cheap to produce for networks, and it even includes an audience participation angle, with a telephone line open to hear from people who may have information that will crack those cold cases, with subsequent episodes providing updates on previous stories that showed that this hotline actually worked.

When it became a full weekly series in 1988, the show expanded its range of topics to include different sorts of mysteries, including supposed supernatural phenomena: UFOs, hauntings, and starting in a first season episode from 1989, monster legends. One could question the taste of putting stories with genuine pleas to help reunite families and solve violent crimes to give people closure next to sensationalism about crop circles and Bigfoot, but it’s the exact sort of gleefully tone-ignorant juxtaposition you expect to see on television. These things are all “mysteries”, and so they are jumbled together regardless of their actual content (I do wonder how many phone calls they got with “information” about the weirdo stuff.) In any case, this means that the sorts of people who would initially watch a series about real crimes were, more often than not, also exposed to some of the most well-known cryptids, and maybe even came away convinced that they’re real—and believer or not, other people came away from the show with the memories of these creatures burned into their memory thanks to the dark and menacing atmosphere the show imbued in their portrayal.

Project Metalbeast (1995)

Werewolf stories are one of those things that often thrive on having established mythology/rules—the fun for audiences become not just in seeing the specific execution of those rules (i.e. more and more elaborate transformation sequences), but also seeing that mythology used as a parallel or an allegory (i.e. adolescence), and sometimes in seeing those rules subverted. Project Metalbeast is an attempt at subversion, taking the supernatural angle of the werewolf story and messily grafting it to a Science Fiction-Horror concept, all in the name of creating a new kind of monster for the direct-to-video gorehounds of the mid-nineties. There is novelty in exchanging the typical curse plotlines and uncontrollable transformation with science-gone-wrong medical trauma and Alien style bases-under-siege and conspiracy backstories, but the question is whether the movie realizes that novelty or is simply okay putting out the bare minimum of horror schlock.

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.

Species (1995)

The recurring question I’ve been asking about these bigger budget nineties creature features has been “Is this a plot that could have worked in the fifties?” In the case of Species, the answer is a little yes, and a little no—this is clearly a riff on the old “sinister alien woman” cliche that popped up all over Sci-Fi back then, where the most terrifying thing these writers could come up with was the idea of a beautiful woman being assertive or domineering rather than frail and dependent, as God intended. It’s a cliche so musty that it was lightly parodied by our old pal Ship of Monsters back in 1960. Species takes that concept and ramps it to a 1995 degree, and not surprisingly given the time frame, emphasizes the aggressive sexual component that was once mostly subtext. It’s the nineties, subtext is for cowards! Taking advantage of the permissiveness of cinema of the time to be more explicit and grotesque, and gathering some important names in Monster Movies to help bring this vision to life, you’d hope there’d be something brewing underneath it all—but no, all the surface slickness only hides the pure exploitation energy fuelling this thing.