Monster Allergy

The popularity of the Godzilla films in their heyday did not just lead to homegrown competitors and imitators—as we saw with Yongary and Gorgo, film makers worldwide sometimes made their own attempts at similar monster material. I’ve written about that particular “Monster Boom” period pretty extensively, but a very similar pattern emerged following Pokémon, a later monster-based phenomenon that was clearly inspired by nostalgia for the original Monster Boom. That series’ thundercrack emergence in the late nineties led to a plethora of other media based on the idea of monster collecting and battling, especially in Japan, and I’ve written about some of those as well (you can also find a surprisingly deep recollection of even more Pokémon coattail riders in Daniel Dockery’s 2022 book Monster Kids)–but wouldn’t it be interesting to see how the basic ideas of a monster collecting franchise could be filtered through a completely different cultural lens?

This brings us to Monster Allergy, an Italian kids comics-turned-attempted-franchise that doesn’t outright announce its indebtedness to Pokémon and the other kids monster series of its era, but come on—it’s about “monster tamers” capturing monsters in small objects, and that alone makes the connection obvious. It’s certainly no rip-off, as any similarities largely disappear past those barest of surface elements, and instead follow more traditional western low fantasy storytelling. But regardless of the degree of intention, this does represent a very European take on some of Pokémon‘s core ideas, a kid-focused adventure in a monster-filled world, and In this way, it is to Pokémon what a Gorgo or a Reptilicus was to the original Godzilla.

Hatching (2022)

Now begins our brief evaluation of some of the monster movies of the previous year, to see just where filmmakers have been taking the form in recent times. At least in the beginning, the Finnish film Hatching (Pahanhautoja), directed by Hanna Bergholm, seems to lean into modernity, introducing us to a family documenting itself in online video form, and positioning itself as aspirational in the way social media influencers often do, with their gleaming, crystalline European abode and their coordinated normalcy (their house is really the only way they flaunt any kind of wealth, which is the one crucial difference between them and most other influencers.) This, as it turns out, is really only one component of the story, an inescapable twenty-first century incarnation of some well-worn themes of image obsession and parental pressure, all your favourite adolescent anxieties presented here with the addition of a gross and bizarre monster, a thing of pure chaos that manages to both briefly assuage and act upon those anxieties.

Island of Terror (1966)

The theme for this week’s double feature turned out to be “monsters that suck.”

If there’s one thing I’m learning from watching so many of these British horror films from the fifties and sixties, it’s that they all seem to gradually escalate in terms of luridness—that was one of the things that distinguished Hammer’s output (such as previous subject X the Unknown), and other studios seemed to take on the challenge of pushing the shock value further. 1966 is pretty late in the game for this type of movie, but Planet Films still lived up to the lineage of UK creature features with Island of Terror, which was directed by genre pioneer Terence Fisher, who had also directed Hammer’s classic Gothic re-imaginings of Frankenstein and Dracula, as well as a few Sci-Fi flicks for good measure (the credits also inform us that the “Costume Artiste” is named Bunty.) Being a British horror movie made in this time period, it also features Peter Cushing in a starring role as a scientist (I’d imagine Fisher was probably among his most frequent collaborators)—or, I guess in this case, a medical doctor. Close enough! You might have a pretty good idea of how the story of this movie goes, but the imagery and tone of it will still find ways to throw you for a loop.

Dogora (1964)

Crammed into the months between two Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya Godzilla movies (Mothra vs. Godzilla and Ghidorah The Three-Headed Monster, just for those keeping score), Dogora was always likely to be left in the dust of its more popular giant monster brethren—which was certainly not helped by some other things that I will get into shortly. Continuing on from what we saw in The H-Man, this is another Toho monster movie whose human element relies heavily on gangster and cops trying to one-up each other, with some light international intrigue, likely inspired by the popularity of yakuza-themed movies in Japanese theatres in the early sixties (as well as an uptick in real life organized crime.) It was also likely inspired by a scaling back of the original story proposal by Jojiro Okami (who had worked on previous Toho genre movies) by screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa (who wrote both of 1964’s Godzilla movies, as well as previous subjects Varan and Latitude Zero, among many others), using cops-and-robbers antics to fill in time that was originally meant for more globe-hopping cosmic horror. What you’re left with is an uneven movie with many of its more intriguing elements sticking out among the rather tepid filler.