Gargoyles (1972)

Monster movies were in a bit of a slump in the seventies, but began to pick up steam starting in the eighties. This, I think, can primarily be attributed to the rise of increasingly complicated special effects, and the dedicated studios producing those effects that started pushing the limits on the imagination and believability of monsters in film. Once monsters stopped looking so much like guys in rubber suits, a number of possibilities began to open up, and movie studios noticed. Stan Winston and his studio were among the pioneers in that space, providing award-winning effects for some of the biggest movies of the eighties and nineties.

But before he could be the director of Pumpkinhead, Winston had to start somewhere, and that somewhere was the 1972 TV movie Gargoyles, his first credited work as a make-up artist (a credit that he apparently had to fight for), which won the 1973 Emmy in the make-up category alongside effects overseers Ellis Burman Jr. (“prop manufacturer” for Prophecy) and Del Armstrong. You can tell that they really wanted to emphasize the make-up effects in this thing because they include several publicity shots and scenes of the titular gargoyles in the opening narration as it slips from quoting Paradise Lost to giving an entire history of gargoyles before we’ve had a chance to catch our breath. Seeing the monsters before the movie even begins would seemingly spoil the surprise, but I guess the question is…what surprise? This is a TV movie made in 1972.

Steel Justice (1992)

One curious phenomenon from yesterday’s internet were articles listing failed television pilots that aired once and then vanished, oftentimes for very obvious reasons. While there were some failed pilots that looked like missed opportunities in hindsight and were passed around like glorious contraband by online fans (the high concept comedies Heat Vision and Jack and Lookwell! come to mind), most of them were self-evidently bad ideas that somehow convinced enough people to provide the money to realize their untenable visions. It wouldn’t be the entertainment industry if there weren’t a subsection of people with wild ambitions and no sense whatsoever.

One of the more intriguing-in-its-ludicrousness pilots that regularly featured in those proto-listicles was the 1992 NBC pilot/TV movie Steel Justice, which on paper feels like a parody of a high concept TV show pitch: what if a cop fought crime with Robosaurus? You know Robosaurus, don’t you? The giant mechanical monstrosity that has been making appearances at monster truck shows for over three decades? Crunches cars and breathes fire? Parodied on The Simpsons as Truckasaurus? Yes, I imagine some Hollywood executive went to a local motocross event, saw Robosaurus do its thing (or, I guess more accurately, it’s two things) and thought “that’s a TV show!” By that, of course, they meant that they could take the template of some other shows and then insert Robosaurus into it, which is really what most high concept pitches end up being—cop shows were a big thing then, and if Cop Rock showed us anything, it’s that viewers wanted their law & order dramas to be leavened a bit with completely incongruous elements. But Steel Justice is more than just a show where a police officer fights crime with a forty-foot robot dinosaur that exists solely to crush cars, the most efficient way of fighting crime—it’s also some near-future nonsense with a fantasy twist with sets that shout “this was shot entirely at Universal Studios and isn’t even trying to hide it.” Other than that, it is just a show where a police officer fights crime with a forty-foot robot dinosaur. A sure-miss scenario if there ever was one!

The Last Dinosaur (1977)

Come on, Lasty!

The last collaboration between Rankin-Bass and Tsuburaya Productions we saw was the TV movie The Bermuda Depths, which I remember being a little odd. After watching The Last Dinosaur, the TV movie they made prior to it (which had an extended cut released theatrically in Japan), I’m starting to wonder if it might have been even odder than I remember, because this one is pure nonsense. You’d think a rather straightforward modern riff on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World would not produce as wacky results as a ghost story that also involves a giant turtle, but you’d be surprisingly wrong! Somehow, this has every cliché in the book—a hidden land not so much populated by dinosaurs but hosting a small party of them, primitive humans, and a hunter out to bag the biggest game of them all—but you never really notice because you’re constantly questioning what is happening on screen. It’s funny that whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry for this spends so much of snidely putting down the special effects, when there’s so much other stuff to be boggled by.

Digital Monster X-Evolution (2005)

This and the next entry on this site have been chosen for a specific personal reason: I actually wrote about them on another website six years ago (almost to the day), but looking back, I really don’t like the approach I took. I was still all about the Internet smart-assery back then, trying way too hard to be funny, and it’s just not particularly interesting to read now—so, I want to give some of that subject matter its proper due. Not that these things are necessarily lost gems unworthy of some light mockery—they are, after all, film spin-offs of popular Japanese media franchises—but there could still be some material worth digging into.

Case in point: Digital Monster X-Evolution (yes, that means it’s Digimon, but I’ll refer to it by its original Japanese title for clarity), a TV movie that aired in Japan in 2005 as part of a new merchandising push for the series by Bandai (the version I watched even included spots trumpeting the sponsorship and toy/video game tie-ins), which sounds especially cynical and only makes the actual product even stranger in context. Completely unrelated to the previous Digimon anime series, it’s the only entry that foregoes any human characters, and instead is entirely about the Digimon themselves and their lives within their computer data world—this is the rare monster story that is all monsters, all the time. It’s also the only Digimon TV/movie production that is animated in CG—which is interesting considering that it’s always had that computer connection—provided by Imagi Studios, the Hong Kong-based company that would later go on to make feature films based on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Astro Boy, and then not make a feature film based on going bankrupt because they were too busy going bankrupt. A TV-budget CG film seems like an iffy proposition, and you wouldn’t be wrong to think so, what with the lifeless-looking backgrounds (with the odd splashes of 0s and 1s floating around) and scenes with lower frame rates. But X-Evolution is so peculiar in general that it’s really easy to overlook that.

The Bermuda Depths (1978)

We’ve had a bit of a nautical theme for the last few entries, and I’d call it a maritime monster month, but it actually took place over two months, so that would be a lie. Next up is October, and let’s say that I already have plans for then that will be…seasonally appropriate. Yes, that is an accurate, straight-to-the-point description of it.

The Bermuda Depths represents the third of three collaborations between Rankin/Bass and Tsuburaya Productions—yes, the people behind Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the creators of Ultraman, together at last! R/B frequently employed the talents of Japanese studios to make their television specials, so it’s not that much of a surprise—what was surprising was just how prominent Rankin and Bass’ names were in the opening credits, even compared to their other productions. Rankin is credited as co-writer, and Bass penned the lyrics for this thing’s very on-the-nose theme song. It almost feels like all those beloved holiday specials were what they made to pay the bills, but this represents what they really wanted to make.

Bagi, The Monster of Mighty Nature (1984)

The one thing that I find invariably fascinating whenever I take in the work of Osamu “God of Manga” Tezuka (one of the most respected and influential cartoonists of all time, if you didn’t know) is that it always comes off as his work, no matter what the subject matter is. He was inspired by the style of Disney and other American cartoons, adapted it to his own ends (he literally wrote the book on making comics), and in his five-decade-long career jumped from genre to genre (inventing a few along the way) and audience to audience (making kids comics and comics for adults, back and forth)—but his creations still maintained all the very cartoony elements that he utilized in, say, Astro Boy in the fifties and sixties. Look at most of his “serious” comics or animation projects (which includes philosophical Sci-Fi and fantasy, historical fiction, psychological thrillers, and erotica), you’ll still find highly exaggerated or cute characters in major recurring roles, or comical sequences right out of a Twenties Mickey Mouse short—it completely boggles the tone, but at the same time I have to admire the commitment. Tezuka wants to make stories with very important or personal themes (and he succeeds at just as much as he fails, given his voluminous output), but he never wants them to not be cartoons at their heart.

Killdozer

In memory of the late B-movie master Larry Cohen, I’d like to direct you to my post about his monster classic Q—The Winged Serpent from a few years ago.

Sometimes, a great title is all you need to have any sort of longevity—the name “Killdozer” is so blunt and over-the-top that it has somehow maintained some kind of cultural cache for over seventy years. There’s a band named after it, and to make doing video and image searches for it more difficult, there was even a real killdozer that went on a rampage in 2004. “Killdozer” probably got itself ingrained in the culture purely by being a fun thing to say, and so irregardless of its origins it kept being repeated, to the point where I knew the title without ever knowing where it came from.

Where it came from, though, is itself fairly interesting. The original “Killdozer!” novella was written by preeminent science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (the guy who originally said that “ninety percent of everything is garbage” and was the inspiration, at least in name, for Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout) in 1944, one of the many influential stories he wrote over his six decade career (another important monster story by him was “It” in 1940, which introduced the world to the concept of a monster made of decaying vegetable matter). It’s a quintessentially pulp concept, but also brought to us by one of the SF genre’s most important innovators, so I knew there had to be something more to it than just a story of a possessed bulldozer. I mean, a story about a possessed bulldozer (with a title that uses an exclamation point for emphasis) probably would have been embraced by the SF-reading kids of the forties regardless, but still.