Visitors From the Arkana Galaxy (1981)

Stumbling into something new while seeking out material for this site is always an exciting experience—and nothing demands my attention like the phrase “weird Yugoslav-Czechoslovak Science Fiction movie from the early eighties.” Visitors From the Arkana Galaxy (sometimes referred to by the more nondescript title Visitors from the Galaxy) is definitely a weird one, and has only found wide distribution in English-speaking countries in the last year thanks to Deaf Crocodile Films—its combination of unvarnished eighties European settings and borderline surrealist storytelling makes for the kind of cult-ready object that modern boutique film distributors regularly gift to us. Shifting between exaggerated reality and extreme fantasy, Visitors has something of a satirical edge, and combined with its bizarre visuals, you can really tell that director Dušan Vukotić comes from an animation background (the movie was partially produced by prominent Croatian animation studio Zagreb Film.) To further invite attention—my attention in particular—there is a prominent monster element that was designed and partially animated by stop motion animation master Jan Svankmajer before he gave us such classics as Alice and Little Otik.

“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.

“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.

“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 Invisible Boy (1957)

An example of how context matters: Robby the robot in 1956’s Forbidden Planet, one of the most beautiful of all the fifties Sci-Fi classics, was a prominent supporting character and very clearly not a monster (that movie already has a pretty great monster anyway); he proved popular enough that the studio heads at MGM decided to put him in another movie a year later, and suddenly he’s “The Science-Monster Who Would Destroy The World!”, as proclaimed on the poster of The Invisible Boy. This is not just a case of them reusing the character or the suit, either, although he is credited in the opening credits as an actor (voiced, uncredited, by Marvin Miller), but by all accounts this is the same Robby the robot from Forbidden Planet, who in the backstory of this moviehas been taken from twenty-third century back to the 1950s by a time travel experiment. If a fantastical character goes from one setting or story to a different one, even if technically in the same genre, are they suddenly so out of place that they become a monster? It’s the kind of meta thought you get while watching this movie, which at times feels like a lighthearted parody of Science Fiction made for the kinds of kids who probably already loved Robby, before it suddenly turns into a serious thriller that is surprisingly well-constructed, and then back into a comedy again. It’s an unusual, interesting time capsule of a movie.

Creature Classic Companion: The Terminator (1984)

Before the name The Terminator defined what a blockbuster film would be for the ensuing thirty years, and before it became synonymous with a lurching franchise constantly finding new ways to not justify its own existence, The Terminator was, simply, a monster movie made by former Roger Corman employees (and with Joe Dante’s Gremlins released a few months before, 1984 was a pretty good year for monster movies made by former Roger Corman employees.) But what could have been a small and economical film with the simple hook of “someone being chased by an unkillable monster” instead feels large in scope, something that does not want to be contained by the Corman ethos. Largeness would come to define pretty much every movie by James Cameron, who started out as a special effects technician, had the frustrating experience of being micromanaged on Piranha II (a sequel to a Corman-produced monster movie directed by, guess what, Joe Dante), and then came up with this and guaranteed the rest of his career. His technical ambitions logically flows from his time in the effects and art departments, but there’s a vision here that isn’t just tailored to fit an effects vehicle—an approach to how to make a thriller, an atmosphere, a sense of what makes for particularly potent “cool” imagery, all stuff that has been normalized in genre movies now but definitely feels distinct when compared to the movies I’ve been watching from this period recently. Everything here comes together in such an explosive way, and casts such a long shadow over film as a whole, you often forget that, at its heart, it is a horror movie, following and innovating on a long line of horror movies.

Creature Classic Companion: Doctor Who – “The Ark in Space”

There are innumerable places out there recounting the long and complicated history of Doctor Who (which will be celebrating its sixtieth anniversary next year), its place within the history of Science Fiction television, its importance to the BBC and UK TV in general, and its dedicated fandom. All of that has already been thoroughly interrogated, and by people far more knowledgeable than me.

So, instead, let’s talk about monsters.

As the old story goes, when the series was being developed in the early sixties, the top brass at the BBC explicitly told the writers to avoid stories about “bug-eyed monsters.” However, the second serial ready to be produced completely ignored this edict, and due to a lack of other suitable scripts, it went ahead—and unfortunately for the anti-bug-eyed-monster producers, the monsters introduced in that second serial were the Daleks, who became immediate pop culture icons in the UK, complete with novelty Christmas records. The show’s time and space-traversing format allowed the stories to theoretically go anyway and do anything, but from that point forward that anywhere often involved some kind of alien monster.

Unlike the other influential creature TV series I’ve written about from around the same time period, like The Outer Limits and Ultraman, there was never a requirement for a Doctor Who story to include a monster, and there are many that don’t—but the monsters in that series have become such a tradition (almost certainly because of the popularity of the Daleks, due as much to the distinctive visuals invented by production designer David Cusick as it was to the scripts by Terry Nation, although it was the latter who got the copyright) that the series, from the original 1963-1989 run or the current one that began in 2005, has never veered away from them. With a basic concept that gives them a near endless choice of settings and storylines, the possibilities for just what kind of monsters can show up are equally as endless, which has led to a panoply of highly imaginative monsters, some of them becoming recurring presences on the show like the Daleks did, while others only appeared once, but may still have left an impression. As in many classic monster movies, the creativity on display in the stories and monsters is crucial because the limited budget of a BBC production means that the special effects, back then and today, are never going to be impressive or believable, so they have to find other ways to engage, or terrify, the audience.

The original series reached its peak popularity in the mid-seventies, after the starring role of the Doctor was given to Tom Baker (whose pre-Doctor career we briefly touched on in the post about The Mutations—although the performance that got him the job was his turn as the villain in the Ray Harryhausen effects vehicle The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, another monster connection), the fourth actor to take the part, who brought a particular laid-back quirkiness to a role that had been defined from the beginning by eccentricity. Due to the length of his tenure (seven years, the longest any actor has played the Doctor) and the fact that his were the first episodes to air on US TV, Baker ended up becoming the most well-known lead for many years (it sounds like he was aware of this at the time, too, leading to some notoriously diva-ish behaviour on set.) His second ever storyline, the four-episode “The Ark in Space”, aired from January to February 1975, and is a fan favourite—it’s also an important one for the history of the show and its approach to monsters, signalling a new direction that has cast a long shadow over the entire series.

Rebirth of Mothra III (1998)

Speaking of Mothra and King Ghidorah…

I said this back in my post about the first of these movies (who can remember what happened two years ago, though?), but the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy was clearly Toho trying to keep their kaiju business alive after the “retirement” of Godzilla in anticipation of the big Hollywood reboot—thankfully, their second most famous giant monster was still on hand. Rebirth of Mothra III released six months after that big Hollywood Godzilla reboot, and by the next year, Toho was back making Godzilla movies like that deal never happened. Mothra ended up just keeping the seat warm.

Capping off this moth-eaten threesome, ROMIII brings back two things from the first movie: director Okihiro Yoneda, and, of course, King Ghidorah. As an interesting transition point, assistant director Masaaki Tezuka and special effects director Kenju Suzuki would immediately begin working on the Millennium era Godzilla movies (the former directing vs. Megaguiras, Against Mechagodzilla, and Tokyo SOS) after this movie. This is, in essence, the true end of the Heisei era of Toho monster movies that began in 1984 (although as any actual person familiar with Japan would tell you, the Heisei era was still going on until 2019, but Godzilla does not follow such useless things as actual historical reality), and while the Millennium era did carry over most of the tokusatsu traditions, there is still a certain kind of spiky texture and weight to the monster action in movies like this that gradually vanished as subsequent Toho stomp-em-ups more fully integrated digital effects to assist the guys in the suits. Which is not to say that this movie doesn’t use CGI—oh lordy, does it ever not not use CGI—but it feels more of a piece with the kaiju films of the previous fourteen years, with a dogged insistence on keeping things practical where it can. The tone of these Mothra movies is different from their Godzilla predecessors, but the look of them is very much the same.

The Twonky

There are quite a few mechanical monstrosities found throughout the history of Science Fiction, especially in the early days, but some present more unique ideas than just rampaging robots. The 1942 short story “The Twonky” by married SF writers Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore (under their joint pseudonym Lewis Padgett) suggests that the most frightening nightmare in our future may be our own technology-based convenience, represented by a bizarre entity (with an intentionally nonsensical name) that suitably flits between ridiculous and scary throughout the story. “Twonky” utilizes some recurring themes from Moore and Kuttner’s work—this isn’t the only story they wrote featuring time-displaced technology changing people’s lives, and Moore has other famous stories about unexpected monsters (namely “Shambleau”)—and delivers them in a creepily methodical way, making a household object into something sinister.

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.