King Kong vs Godzilla (1962)

Original title: Kingu Kongu tai Gojira キングコング対ゴジラ

While a reawakened Godzilla makes his way back to attack Japan, some ad men are sent on an expedition to a mysterious island. After some misadventures with the local natives, the guys manage to capture their god – King Kong. The ad-men’s boss decides it would be great ad copy if the pharmaceutical company they work for would officially sponsor Kong, and they’d get him to beat up Godzilla. Monster fighting ensues.

Some would argue that here, finally, Showa era Toho kaiju cinema has arrived at the overtly childlike and silly yet also often thematically rich tone it would keep to until the era’s end in the 70s.

I don’t exactly disagree, but would also suggest that Toho – as well as director Ishiro Honda – already had arrived at that tone much more successfully with the preceding, Godzilla-less Mothra. Where Mothra does a comparable thing a lot more effectively, here, the satire of capitalism, its expression through a modern media circus and consumerism turns at times gratingly unfunny and drags down the pacing of too much of the first two acts.

Because Honda was one of the great directors of his time, there are still moments of great joy in the first fifty minutes or so: the Japanese people in brown face pretending to be South Sea islanders dancing to a sleeping Kong is pretty incredible (also thanks to Ifukube’s wonderful theme) if “problematic”, and there’s even a bit of fun smashing going on when the film bothers to get away from ad-men and expositing scientists.

The final act, on the other hand, is flawless in its mixture of the silly, the outrageous (there’s for example an incredible bit of dialogue about an electrified Swiss postman only a giant ape wouldn’t love), and the utterly bizarre, wonderful and impactful fights the title promised.

It’s no wonder the US cut – for a long time the only version of the film you could see outside of Japan – decided to cut quite a bit of the material in the first acts. Unfortunately, the news reel style nonsense they replaced it with was even more grating and boring, while sanding away any attempt at depth.

Three Films Make A Post: Give the devil his due.

Under Paris aka Sous la Seine (2024): Apparently, there was a a clearance sale for shark movie clichés in France, and Xavier Gens managed to catch them all. He also brought all of the screenwriters, for he shares various writing credits with six other people here. Given that the whole film plays out like a shark movie as written by ChatGPT (no surprise some film company suits believe replacing writers with AI is a near future prospect), that’s some kind of achievement at least.

As is how unoriginal and culturally unspecific a movie about sharks in goddamn Paris can feel if the filmmakers only not apply themselves properly to their craft. For much of its running time, this isn’t even stupid fun, for the film lacks the energy needed to pull that off, as it does apparently lack the intelligence to realize how silly it is.

This last problem actually turns into a virtue in the final twenty-five minutes or so, when a degree of entertainment manifests – most probably through the magical power of the script’s impressive amount of accrued bullshit becoming sentient.

The Mysterians aka Chikyu Boeigun (1957): It is curious to compare Ishiro Honda’s alien invasion movie with its temporal genre siblings from the USA. Both strands do share a – in Honda rather surprising – today uncomfortable trust in institutions and the military – the latter even more surprising in Honda – but where the Americans most often feel rather po-faced and stuffy, there’s a poppy playfulness surrounding the Japanese film I find irresistible.

This is often a question of design: not only the film’s colours – which do indeed pop – but the colourful and silly-awesome environment suits with capes the Mysterians wear, how the kaiju the aliens use looks a bit like Ro-Man’s cockroach brother, and so on. There’s very little here that doesn’t align itself with a certain idea of directness, brightness and fun.

The Hangman (2024): For at least half of its scenes, Bruce Wemple’s (written by Wemple and lead LeJon Woods) movie is an exemplary piece of low budget cinema, with a sense of mood and forward momentum, and a good idea of the kind of ambitions it can actually pull off, budget-wise. The other half of its scenes tend to meander through ideas, tone, and way too much exposition, and action movie one-liners that have little connection to the emotional core about fathers, sons and trauma, leaving a film that’s generally competent enough to be entertaining but could have used quite a bit of tightening to fulfil its eminently reachable deeper ambitions as well as one would have wished it to.

Some Thoughts About Godzilla (1954)

In truth, there isn’t all that much one can still add to everything that has been written about the movie that started it all, Ishiro Honda’s incredible original Gojira, a film that has been something of a given for me all of my life, at first in the curious German cut (that is based on the US cut, but mutilated further), then in the much superior Japanese original.

My umpteenth rewatch, however, did bring up a handful of observations: first, how much of a horror movie this initial Godzilla movie is at its beginning, with much of the monster action taking place in gloomily lit nights scenes, and a structure that slowly reveals the giant lizard that’s going to threaten Japan. Much of the film’s visual language must of course have resonated quite heavily with a populace that has lived through the war years and their particularly brutal end, and at first, these shots as well seem to be in the service of simply making the horror more horrific.

But the more emotional gravitas the film gains – and this film is all about gravitas, and sadness, and things and people destroyed in the end even when the world is saved – the less Honda uses his shots of destruction that way, and instead utilizes them to argue his emotional, humane and political points. In the end, Honda’s always the humanist, the pacifist who enjoys shots of destructive technology with the best of them but is also genuinely saddened at their use, and only the guy trying to creep us out on the way to get there.

Speaking of the political, it’s interesting to watch a couple of scenes here after Shin Godzilla and after Godzilla Minus One, how important Godzilla’s moments of the squabbling, ineffectual, officials will become to these films in the century after it was made.

In general, one of Honda’s particular strengths here isn’t just that he creates surprisingly complex characters particularly in Drs Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) and Yamane (Takashi Shimura), but that he understands how to create side characters who feel memorable and alive enough to stand up to the giant lizard with the atomic breath – which most kaiju and giant monster movies simply don’t manage.

It is also fascinating to keep in mind how much this one is a movie all about the filmmakers figuring out how to do what they are trying to achieve while doing it, and how little this looks like a movie made by people who weren’t quite sure how to do it until they did it. In fact, Godzilla feels like a fully thought through and composed masterpiece from shot one to its finish, where one has to look very hard for the traces of the scrappiness of some of the production.

Three Films Make A Post: The girl you've been waiting for

The Unheard (2023): Other people’s mileage apparently varies considerably, but I had a lot of fun with Jeffrey A. Brown’s thriller about the auditory haunting of a deaf girl (Lachlan Watson) during and after an experimental procedure to regain her hearing. The whole “person encountering ghosts while regaining a formerly lost sense” thing is of course less than original, but the script by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen is tight, Brown’s direction solid, and Watson’s performance effective and likeable, so I didn’t mind this lack of originality in the least.

Whipsaw (1935): This melodramatic crime romance by Sam Wood about an undercover cop (Spencer Tracy) and a thief (Myrna Loy) he is attempting to pump for information about her colleagues in crime going on the road together is a surprisingly fun little thing, living off the considerable chemistry between Tracy and Loy – not something I would have expected going in, though Loy apparently had the ability to spark off everyone if she wanted to – and a sense of melodrama that never becomes too sappy or kitschy. There’s what feels like genuine heart to the story, so much so that, even under the conservative hammer of the Hays code, the cop seems to learn as much from the thief as she from him. That the film manages to contrive a way to not punish Loy’s character for past misdeeds and points at a happy end is an additional pleasant surprise.

Battle in Outer Space aka Uchu daisenso (1957): Leave it to the great Ishiro Honda (and of course writer Shinichi Sekizawa) to make a film about a space war between Earth and a superior alien force that have made their base on the moon to not go for the jingoist vein but emphasise the importance of international togetherness. It’s till rather refreshing; and a bit uncomfortable in that it makes a space war movie feel somewhat utopian.

If that alone doesn’t float your boat, you also get some wonderful miniature work from Eiji Tsuburaya and company, an ever wonderful Ifukube score, goofy yet awesome science, and even a bit of the old “mind-controlled by the alien menace!” paranoia. Though most of the latter could have been avoided if the powers that be had put any effort at all into guarding their heroic astronauts from alien abduction. But what can you do?

Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

Original title: Mekagojira no Gyakushū (メカゴジラの逆襲)

A short time after the end of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, a submarine working with Interpol is searching the ocean floor for the remains of Mechagodzilla, when it is destroyed by a titanic amphibian kaiju the film is going to insist is a dinosaur, soon to be dubbed Titanosaurus.

It turns out the aliens from the last movie haven’t given up and are trying to smash Japan (the rest of the world to follow later) to build a beautiful, orderly New Tokyo for them to dwell in from the rubble. They are planning to use said Titanosaurus as well as a rebuilt Mechagodzilla for the smashing, and as their tools to destroy mankind’s most competent protector – as it happens also the one with the best theme song – Godzilla. To be able to control Titanosaurus, the aliens – apparently coming from somewhere romantically dubbed Blackhole Planet 3 which does explain their wish to move pretty well – have managed to win over tragically mad scientist Dr Mafune (Akihiko Hirata), who comes in a package deal with his somewhat mysterious daughter Katsura (Tomoko Ai).

Mafune has his reasons for hating humanity. Once a pioneer in underwater agriculture, he then turned to experiments concerned with trying to control animals as if they were robots. When he discovered the peaceful Titanosaurus swimming around in its natural habitat, he decided to make mind-controlling it his next big project. This led to his rejection by the rest of the scientific community, half of which seems to have poopooed the idea of the existence of Titanosaurus despite living on the same planet as Godzilla and company, the other half of which simply wasn’t keen on animal mind control. Afterwards, a mental breakdown and years of poverty that killed his dutiful wife.

Helping out on Godzilla’s side of the equation are the usual assortment of people in lab coats and suits, as well as marine biologist Akira Ichinose (Katsuhiko Sasaki) and his old school buddy turned Interpol agent Jiro Murakoshi (Katsumasa Uchida). Also, the potential power of love and long buried humanity.

Terror of Mechagodzilla, set as a direct sequel to Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla was the very last hurray of the Showa era Godzilla films, holding the sad record of having been the commercially least successful entry in the series at the time it came out. Nowadays, the steady stream of home video versions has of course turned it into a commercially rather successful kind of commercial flop, all without the magic of Hollywood accounting. This film is also the return of the great Ishiro Honda to the Godzilla franchise, and big screen movie direction, as well as his final feature film as a director before he did some intermittent work for and with Akira Kurosawa in the final decades of his life.

It is also a much better film than its clearly low budget and the trajectory of the Godzilla movies suggest. While I’ll always defend the Jun Fukudas of this world for being purveyors of fun nonsense at the worst of times, the comparison of this direct sequel by Honda to a Fukuda movie does not exactly make Fukuda look good. Honda had the same diminished production values to work against yet the resulting film is simply better in every possible aspect, from the character work right through to the realization of the monster fights.

Rather more pertinent, Honda is much better at keeping an audience interested between the rare monster fights (Godzilla himself makes his first non-flashback appearance when the film is already half over). Or really, in this case, Honda simply avoids the feeling of the alien invasion plot, the mad science business and the desperately sad background of some of the villains being any kind of filler between the fights by making the often much-loathed bits of a kaiju concerning humans, as always was his wont, important parts of the actual point of the film. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a somewhat silly pulp alien invasion plot with bad guys so sadistic, they cut the vocal chords of their prisoners just in case they might escape their clutches, a cyborg woman, and some of the silliest helmets any alien invader ever wore, but Honda uses of all of this to treat many of his regular humanist concerns, showing much more interest in motivations and self-justifications of characters than you’d usually get in this sort of film, and doing it so well, a viewer might find oneself actually caring.

Of course, this is also thanks to Yukiko Takayama’s (yes, it’s that pleasant and alas rare occurrence of a woman writing a kaiju) script, that hides some complexity and a lot of intelligence between fun monster fights and Interpol versus alien invaders, clearly sharing in Honda’s understanding of how to join pulp fun and serious themes without losing the fun.

Another element that makes Fukuda look bad in comparison is Honda’s direction of the monster fights. They are few, and they are certainly cheaper than anything made at the height of the series but Honda uses all the tricks - the slow motion, the camera angles from below, editing to the rhythm of Ifukube’s (who wasn’t involved in the Fukuda film either) music, and so on – he has learned over a long career of having men in monster suits smash Tokyo to give the fights weight and drama. In Terror’s particular case, there’s also the excellent intercutting between the climax of the human drama and the monster fights to mention, which is perfectly timed, providing a series of emotional jolts that don’t distract from the city smashing business but enhances it.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how a master takes a bow.

Three Films Make A Post: When She Sings Nobody Can Touch Her!

The H-Man aka Bijo to ekitai ningen (1958): This might be my least favourite among the respectable percentage of films by the great Ishiro Honda for Toho I have seen. It’s not so much that the film treats much of its monster movie element as something to be hidden behind the ninety percent of it which are a crime movie that bugs me. The problem is that said crime movie is such a tepid one, without a compelling mystery or captivating characters. What we get is a bunch of smug know-it-all cops, some very polite yakuza, and a scientist and a fainting-prone nightclub singer who are trying to convince said cops there’s something more interesting going on than a very boring criminal investigation. This goes on for about an hour or so and includes of course the obligatory crap nightclub sequences all mediocre crime movies are bound by law to possess. Now, from time to time, Honda seems to remember his talents, and there’s a scene of human interaction that hints at more interesting things going on behind the flat surfaces of the characters, or a horror sequence pops in that’s actually as effective as one expects of the director. Mostly, though, this is a bit of a slog with only minor pay-off once the crime elements finally take a back seat.

Tank 432 aka Belly of the Bulldog (2015): Going from tepid to really just bad, there’s this thing directed by Nick Gillespie. A bunch of soldiers or something (do you smell a plot twist?) and their two captives manage to trap themselves in an armoured vehicle. Hilarity, that is to say, lots of dollar store surrealism, bad madness and awkward attempts at building suspense ensue; decent actors are wasted; then a plot twist that explains everything – or as a matter of fact nothing at all – happens, the end. There is, indeed, a difference between a film being confusing and it being confused. This one strictly comes down on the latter line, leaving sense behind for what goes by hallucinatory filmmaking only when you have a pretty stunted imagination. The ending is deeply dissatisfying (and honestly explains nothing at all about the random nonsense the film has inflicted on its audience before), but then, so is the rest of the movie, with nothing in it ever feeling like it has made the step from a vague idea to an actual film.

The Dark Mile (2017): Much less underwhelming than the other two films today is Gary Love’s British/Scottish film about a lesbian couple (Rebecca Calder and Deirdre Mullins) going on a riverboat vacation in the Highlands in an attempt to heal the wounds of something the film won’t explain too quickly. As it happens, the locals on the river are of the country hick type, starting with behaviour between deeply unpleasant and downright horrible to easily end up on criminal. Why, some of them might even be cultists!


This isn’t a film that’s exactly a thrill a minute, but rather one that carefully and slowly builds up its characters and their past, and just as carefully ratchets up the tension, making good use of the atmosphere the Scottish landscapes and a talented DP provide, as well as of a convincing cast. Once the more typical elements of this sub-genre really kick in, the film manages to stay tense and interesting despite not exactly being original in its basic plot or the way it develops. There’s a pleasure in an old story told anew, particularly since Love varies the old story with his obvious care for his characters and many scenes that evoke a nice, creepy sense of a place where not too many horror films take place.

In short: The Human Vapor (1960)

Original title: Gasu ningen dai ichigo

This seems to be one of the lesser loved non-kaiju movies by the great Ishiro Honda, at least in the West (the language barrier makes it pretty impossible for me to guess at its importance in Japan). While I disagree, I’m not really surprised by this.

The film is structured like a police procedural, with the first half nearly completely devoid of visible fantastical elements beyond the basic mystery of how the bank robber (Yoshio Tsuchiya) our cop hero Okamoto (Tatsuya Mihashi) and his surprisingly – for a Japanese film of the era – independent and competent journalist girlfriend Kyoko (Keiko Sata) are chasing manages to execute his heists, and what his connection to kabuki dancer/actress Fujichiyo (Kaoru Yachigusa), a young but old-fashionedly Japanese upperclass lady quite in contrast to Kyoko, might be. It’s the kind of set-up you’d find in many a standard mystery, only there, the weirdness would be explained away “naturally”. I suspect many people going in expecting something more directly science fictional will be quite disappointed, particularly since the film’s subtext concerning the inevitable clash of old and new values in Japan, and the strange and possibly dangerous mixtures that can result, won’t be what everyone is looking for (or is even necessarily noticing).

Personally, I found Honda’s approach here quite fascinating, his handling of the police procedural elements tight, and his easy build-up of character relations that aren’t quite as simple as they appear at first glance captivating, while the kabuki sequences are filmed with enough poetry of the eye to interest even somebody like me who only has a very superficial idea of what’s going on there. I suspect I miss out on even more subtext deepening measures there, but what can you do when you haven’t even really digested the ways of Western opera beyond the baroque?

Anyway, once the film gets around to it, it is also quite fine SF/horror piece that seems pleasantly influenced by The Invisible Man, and ending in drama I actually found quite moving thanks to the surprising emotional complexity the film carries under a simpler surface, with Honda showing a melancholic feeling towards the end (or changing) of Old Japan but also the knowledge of the horrible price that would have to be paid to keep it unchanged beyond all reason. Honda seems quite aware of his own emotional and intellectual contradictions at play here, which enables the film to show its representations of Old Japan as monstrous and beautiful at the same time, a humanist approach that can even find compassion for a would-be mass murderer while still not excusing his deeds.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,japanese movies,ishiro honda,sf,crime,horror,tatsuya mihashi,kaoru yachigusa,yoshio tsuchiya,keiko sata

Three Films Make A Post: INVISIBLE and DEADLY!

White: The Melody of the Curse (2011): At first, I thought South Korean former experimental film director brothers' Kim Gok and Kim Sun's horror movie taking place in idol circles would be quite the thing. It is, after all, stylishly shot, solidly acted and interested in exploring the point where melodrama and horror movie - both emotional and visceral genres - meet while throwing mild barbs in the direction of showbiz, and therefore perfectly inside my areas of interest. Unfortunately, after fifty minutes or so, the film begins to drag quite horribly, its plot moving off into a direction that is slightly surprising but not all that interesting. Mainly, though, it moves slowly, until all the goodwill it has built evaporates or transforms into mild disinterest. If I were of a nasty disposition, I'd suggest that what we have here is a movie that only had enough material for seventy minutes of running time but had to be bloated up to a hundred minutes by any means necessary.

Terra Nova (2011): I don't usually talk about contemporary US TV here anymore, but I wanted to at least turn some of the time of my life the pilot to this show - which is as much as I'll ever want to see of it - stole from me into something worthwhile. If you think that the best way to set up a show about a US (the rest of the world doesn't exist, as we know) project to colonize an alternative timeline Jurassic age is to let us view this potentially exciting world through the eyes of that classical US family (though Mum has a British accent) I have come to hate with a passion through overexposure, then you're probably Brannon Braga and Steven Spielberg. Also, creatively bankrupt. As if it weren't enough to make the central cast direly uninteresting, the show also shows them to be ridiculously egotistic, but obviously wants the audience to admire them for that, too. We can also look forward to old auto-plotting chestnuts like the whiny male teenager who will surely learn the meaning of "family" one of these episodes. And while I'm mentioning the word "family" - I think the script writers had a bet going how often they were able to shoehorn the word in; painfully often, it turns out.

Gorath (1962): To end this on a continuing down note, let me just state that this is the only Ishiro Honda movie I've seen I barely could stomach at all. Despite the appearance (or not, depending on the cut you see) of a decidedly silly walrus monster, this is a movie living in that area of the SF movie where only the insufferably po-faced dwell. Expect characters sacrificing themselves, young military officers singing rousingly and ideas about women coming from the least enlightened corners of the 50s.

I'm not usually one for calling movies out for taking themselves too seriously (rather for taking themselves not serious enough), but I have make an exception for Gorath.

Technorati-Markierungen: south korean movies,american tv,japanese movies,horror,kaiju,sf,ishiro honda

Yog: Monster From Space (1970)

Original title: Gezora, Ganime, Kameba: Kessen! Nankai no daikaiju

aka Space Amoeba

A space probe that was supposed to travel to Jupiter is taken over by a blue glittery space creature. Yog, as the Japanese version of the film never calls it, turns the space probe right back to Earth, where it crashes into the ocean near a very idyllic tropical island. Somehow, nobody realizes that the probe returned to Earth (I blame budget cuts) except for the photographer Kudo (Akira Kubo), who just happened to look out of an airplane window at just the right moment. Because Kubo didn't make a photo, nobody at his newspaper believes his story.

While Kudo's angrily planning to return to the place where he witnessed the crash and make underwater photographs of the probe, he is approached by Ayako Hoshino (Atsuko Takahashi). Ayako works for a company that is trying to turn a tropical island - including a full set of authentic, Japanese-adoring "natives" who still love the Japanese from when they used the island as a military base during World War II(!) - into a tourist resort. For some reason, the company thinks Kubo would be just the right guy to go on a little photo expedition there for them. The photographer declines at first, but when it turns out that the island in question just happens to be situated right where he saw the probe crash down, and the expedition just happens to include the biologist Doctor Mida (Yoshio Tsuchiya) who just happens to be an old friend of Kudo's, the awesome power of ridiculously overused random chance in the script convinces him otherwise. Oh, and Mida has a vague theory about the island being the home of monsters.

For my tastes, the so-called "expedition" is a bit short on members, what with it consisting of Mida, Kudo and Ayako (whose job will be to scream when she sees a turtle, scream some more, cry, stumble at inopportune moments and cry while holding an emotional speech about the human spirit). The trio gets rather unpleasant reinforcement in form of the anthropologist Obata (Kenji Sahara) who is on his way to investigate the culture of the "natives" on that very same island. I'm sure his wearing of a white suit, a goatee and tinted glasses, as well as his propensity to smoke, do not hint at him being lying about a few things.

Once on the island, our heroes stumble into a dangerous situation. One of the two company men stationed there has been killed by a giant squid with the curious habit of walking on land. On its tentacles.

Of course, one monster attack is not enough, so the squid thing - Gezora for its friends - will continue its entertaining/horrible work, until the united expeditionary forces of three and the "natives" can do away with it. But even then the ordeal isn't over, for the strange blue glittery space creature turns out to be the responsible party for the monster rampage that's only the first stage in some sort of vague invasion plan and just takes over other innocent animals - first an adorable giant grab (aka Ganime), then an equally adorable turtle (Kameba, not Gamera, you hear). Only excellently ridiculous science, the power of rubber bats and the indomitable human spirit that rests even in the breasts of goatee-wearers can save humanity now!

Yog is another of the less loved movies of the great Ishiro Honda, which comes as not much of a surprise given how very, very silly it is. If you only like Honda when he's in full-on serious humanist mode - but with monsters, Yog will be like silver bullets unto a werewolf for you. That's not to say that Honda isn't - at least in general - walking the philosophical walk he always did in his career, it's just that he demonstrates his humanist ideals with the cartoony broadness that is the whole of Yog's tone. That broadness makes some of the usual problems with Honda's films more visible. The "natives", for example, are just as problematically drawn here as they were in other Honda films like Varan, and Ayako is the sort of female character that has been annoying friends of genre cinema since the 1920s. Of course, neither the treatment of the "natives" nor that of Ayako is in any way or form mean-spirited, and is generally more benign than that in many contemporary films from Japan or the world, but rather seems to show Honda or his scriptwriter Ei Ogawa falling back on secure genre tropes instead of thinking their philosophical ideals through to their logical end point.

I'm honestly not sure if this particular film could even have survived a more dignified treatment of women and racially undefined islanders, because it, quite unlike most other films made by Honda, does seem to be constructed to be a manga-like monster movie first, and anything else forty-second. Once I managed to recalibrate my expectations accordingly, I began to be able to enjoy the whole affair. There's an air of relaxed silliness hanging over much of the film that's impossible to resist for the likes of me, with Honda and his experienced crew for once just leaving their ambitions behind and making a movie that could - apart from a handful of timely elements - have been made any time between the 1930s and the 1980s, and having a bit of fun.

I, for one, am pretty helpless against a film that features a squid using its tentacles like legs, characters who discuss earnestly how there must be a way to defeat the squid because "it's only a monster", Kenji Sahara mugging and eye-rolling for all he is worth (that is, a lot), weaponized rubber bats, and monsters rampaging through grass huts instead of Tokyo. It's not Mothra (not to speak of Gojira), but it sure is fun.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,reviews,giant monsters,kaiju,adventure,sf,ishiro honda,akira kubo

In short: Dogora (1964)

Original title: Uchu daikaiju Dogora

A series of rather inexplicable diamond robberies shakes the world. The Japanese police, especially their inspector Kommei (Yosuke Natsuki), have their eye on a local gang of robbers as the perpetrators of the Japanese part of the deeds, but something's surely not right. Diamonds disappear from safes nobody could have opened, trucks begin to levitate skywards - it's all more than a little peculiar and just might have connection to some satellites that have disappeared from orbit. In his investigations, Kommei meets interesting people, like the scientist Dr. Munakata (Nobuo Nakamura) and his assistant/Kommei's love interest Masayo (Yoko Fujiyama), as well as the shady American Mark Jackson (Robert Dunham - look, it's emperor Antonio of Seatopia!). The former is just developing a way to cheaply make artificial diamonds, while the latter always appears where the Japanese gang tries to steal diamonds.

Of course, the gangsters, the police and Mark aren't the only ones interested in diamonds. Turns out the impossible raids are committed by a giant, floating mutant cell who just loves to snack on carbon and irritate wasps. Fortunately, Munakata is a scientist with quite broad interests.

Dogora seems to have a rather bad reputation amongst many lovers of kaiju cinema as one of Ishiro Honda's least accomplished movies, but I think when you go into the film with an open mind, it can be a pretty damn enjoyable experience.

The trick is to not expect Dogora to be your standard kaiju movie at all, but rather an attempt of Toho and/or Honda to make an irreverent, often outright comedic crime film close to the pop style the competing Nikkatsu studio had perfected, that somehow got mixed up with about twenty minutes of a competent, though not exactly spirited kaiju movie. Understandably, neither the monster nor the special effects scenes are completely up to Honda's and Eiji Tsuburaya's usual standards - the monster being more off-screen than on and a few too many strings being visible when things are flying - yet the b-game of these guys is still better than most anybody's a-game. Plus, Dogora's big scene, where it is floating in the sky, waving its tentacles and gobbling up coal is suitably impressive, and as silly as the nature of the monster and the way it is going to be dispatched in the end afford.

A basic, good-natured silliness is Dogora's biggest virtue when it's not being a monster film, but a crime comedy too. It's the sort of film where gangster molls are exceptionally pretty, policemen slightly goofy and slightly cool, where all gangsters are wearing straw hats and white gloves and attempt to kill tied-up heroes by sticking dynamite in their pockets, and where shoot-outs more often than not end without any victims. Honda's direction is as playful and fun as is proper given the amount of merry silliness he is putting on screen. The only moments when the film loses its momentum a bit are when Honda has to switch from fun crime flick to tonally much more earnest monster film mode.

That, however, is hardly reason enough for me to dislike a movie so earnestly working at being fun.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,kaiju,crime,comedy,ishiro honda,in short,yosuke natsuki,nobuo nakamura,robert dunham,akiko wakabayashi,sf

King Kong Escapes (1967)

A small but evil Asian nation has hired the mad scientist Doctor Who (Eisei Amamoto) - finally driven mad through the syphilis all that making out with centuries younger women has brought upon him, I suppose - to recover a gigantic deposit of Element X. The problem is that the radioactive isotope is buried under quite a bit of ice and stone. Obviously, what the Doctor needs is to build himself a Mechanikong, a giant robot copy of everyone's favorite giant ape King Kong who is known for his proficiency in tunnel digging. At first, Mechanikong's digging is mighty impressive to Who and Madame Piranha (Mie Hama) the cute international spy the country of evil has dispatched to supervise the rather unstable scientist's work, but the robot isn't able to withstand the radiation Element X gives off.

Madame Piranha is mightily annoyed, but gives Who another chance for his plan B to come into action.

Coincidentally, a UN research submarine (with a neat flying hovercraft dinghy) commanded by Carl Nelson (Rhodes Reason), an old acquaintance of Who's as well as a giant ape expert who has never seen a giant ape, has landed on the island where the original King Kong lives. The pervy ape takes a shine to the ship's doctor Susan (Linda Miller, her only other acting credit bizarrely being the Evangelical anti-Communist propaganda nightmare If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do), one supposes on account of her being the traditional blonde, and fights a dinosaur and a sea serpent for her, only to find her slink away to the UN with his heart in tow.

Thanks to the following press conference Doctor Who now knows where and when to find the original digger he needs for his nefarious digging plans.

The big ape is easy to catch, but the Doctor's plan to control Kong through electronically induced hypnosis backfires when Element X's radiation (and I'm sure this comes as a total surprise to everyone) wreaks havoc on the hypno gadget. Kong is easily caught again, but how to control him? Who's solution is as logical as it is obvious: kidnap the blonde woman!

What follows is a nice digression into light 60s spy movie shenanigans (including ineffective seduction attempts and torture like Dick Cheney loves it) with a climactic ape versus robot battle on the Tokyo Tower.

King Kong Escapes is one of the few films Toho got out of their licensing of King Kong from RKO for $200,000. Why they didn't use the giant lug much more extensively is quite beyond me. It is a mystery, as is the reason why this film is mostly based on an American children's cartoon show I have never seen - but this way I can at least blame the American co-producers for most of the flaws of the film.

And flaws there are aplenty. The film's problems start with some of the more dreadful monster suits in Eiji Tsuburaya's career. Our monstrous hero Kong just looks like a ratty carpet with an expressive but goofy face, while Mechanikong has a certain whiff of aluminum foil about it.

The film's pacing is also troubling with too many stretches following Rhodes, Miller and an underused Akira Takarada, which is to say long stretches full of insanely boring people, interlaced with at times underwhelming monster fights but also sudden spikes of goofy coolness.

Having said that, I also have to say that I at times enjoyed myself immensely while watching the film. Basically, every scene with Kong or the mangaesque villains of the piece is fine, even fun. It's all very childish (yes, even when it comes to the torture and seduction), but also quite loveable when you approach it with a little childlike openness of mind and just smile at the goofiness.

It's all well and good to lament that everyone involved (well, except for Miller and Reason) was able to do so much more, but it's also the easy way out for the grown-up confronted with the sort of film he would have just loved as a child.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,reviews,kaiju,giant monsters,ishiro honda,mie hama,eisei amamoto

Rodan (1956)

After a relatively minor break-in of water in a coal mine in the Japanese Kyushu province, one of the miners is found dead, killed in a hardly explicable way and bearing the strangest wounds. Still, the only suspect for the death is another miner called Goro who disappeared during the break-in and has had quite a history of violent altercations with the dead man.

Neither Goro's sister Kiyo (Yumi Shirakawa), nor her boyfriend, the young mining engineer Shigeru (Kenji Sahara) believe the miner to be capable of killing someone, though.

They are soon proven right, when more people are killed, all bearing the same, inexplicable pattern of wounds. What really killed these people is a giant creature that looks rather like a cross between a caterpillar and a crab. Since this is Toho's Japan, there is little skepticism towards the existence of giant monsters and so an early involvement of the JASDF and the biologist Professor Kashiwagi (Akihiko Hirata) in the plot.

Shigeru, who turns out to be quite a heroic young man, is buried alive during the JASDF's fight against the murderous creature which itself doesn't seem to survive the clash with its human food source.

Shigeru is thought dead, but a small earthquake frees the lucky engineer. He must have seen something terrible while he was trapped in the mines, and now suffers from amnesia. When he finally starts to remember what it is that he has seen, he relates a frightening tale of a mine full of the creeping caterpillar things and something worse - a gigantic egg from which a winged reptile hatches, a thing itself so big that it eats the caterpillars the army had such difficulty fighting like small snacks.

One can't help but think that the things Shigeru has witnessed have a connection with the gigantic unidentified object that has been witnessed flying over parts of Asia with a speed no plane could reach and eating planes for breakfast.

Based on Shigeru's description and an out of focus photograph, Kashiwagi develops the theory that a combination of chance and radiation has caused the development of a biological mutant and the meaner and bigger brother of the Pteranodon, the Radon, has returned out of the past.

Rodan is the the third (or first, or fourth, depending on the way you count them) of Toho's kaiju eiga and the first to be made in colour. Directed by the great Ishiro Honda, it is a strikingly beautiful film that would probably be worth watching for some of the colour compositions alone.

To the kaiju fans delight, Rodan (which should be called Radon, but had to be renamed to avoid trouble with a toy making corporation), is also quite a brilliant piece of writing. Sure, you'll have to ignore the weak explanation for the existence of the film's giant monsters, but if you are unable to do that, no giant monster film will ever find your approval. What the script by Takeshi Kimura and Takeo Murata does oh so right is the use of escalation. From one murder to an unseen monster to the caterpillars to the army fighting the caterpillars to Rodan to something I am not going to spoil, the film never stops making everything bigger and every stake a little higher, putting the kind of stuff people like Jerry Bruckheimer do today to shame. I was surprised how thrilling in the way modern blockbusters often try to be a fifty years old film I must have seen a dozen times as a child still can be (at least in its Japanese cut - the eight to ten minutes cut from the American version can't mean anything good).

The film also has the fortune to have come quite early in Toho's kaiju sequence, affording it an obviously high budget and a certain sense of unpredictability of the proceedings.

Rodan has a feeling of freshness about it. Nobody behind the camera had already made a dozen films of the same type, and everybody was at the top of his game, making something new and exciting here. Honda's direction is as meticulous as always with tighter pacing than in many of his later films. Honda also shows a subtle sense for smaller gestures made by the actors, something that you can in fact always find in his films, if you are willing to look for it.

The actors don't have all that much to do, of course, but everyone on screen is more than able to make her or his character credible.

That Tsuburaya's special effects are splendid and Ifukube's music excellent barely needs to be mentioned.

The only thing I find myself able to criticize about Rodan is the film's lack of depth when compared to the original Gojira, but complaining about this seems to me rather like someone complaining that the diamond he got as a present just isn't big enough.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,reviews,kaiju,giant monsters,ishiro honda,kenji sahara,akihiko hirata,yumi shirakawa

Frankenstein Conquers The World aka Frankenstein vs. Baragon (1965)

This review concerns itself with the "International Version" of the film, complete with gloriously non-sensical ending added for us Internationals. (Also: Wow, there are a lot of bad plot summaries for this film out there).

It's the year 1945, shortly before the end of the war in Europe. A group of Nazi soldiers storms into the lab of a mad looking scientist, takes away a metal case and storms out again. The doctor, a certain Dr. Liefendorf (Peter Mann), uses his immense scenery chewing talent to silently emote either great anguish or a very bad case of constipation - we will probably never know.

A German U-boat transports the doctor's metal case to Hiroshima, where another quite mad looking scientist opens it and presents a beating heart inside a tasty looking nutritional fluid. He explains to a small group of other scientists and assorted on-lookers that this is in fact Frankenstein's (it should be Frankenstein's monster, goddammit!) heart, indestructibly beating on and on and on. So it's a perfect starting point for his ambition to create a super soldier who will be impervious to bullets! Before he can even cackle evilly (actually, he's a humanitarian who wants to lower the number of people killed in wars), the Bomb drops.

Fifteen years later, the American scientist Dr. Bowen (Nick Adams, for some reason completely unable to move even one of his facial muscles) works together with his colleagues, the kind-hearted (aka female in a kaiju) Dr. Togami (Kumi Mizuo) and the less kind-hearted Dr. Kawaji (Tadao Takashima) on some experimental radiation magical science thingies to cure radiated people (cancer patients?).

Their project isn't going too well, but that is going to change very soon. There is a strange orphan boy (Kenichiro Kawaji) roaming the town, you see, who steals to survive (when Dr. Togami isn't throwing food at him from her balcony), leaves dismembered rabbits in schools and seems oddly impervious to damage.

When Bowen and Togami are strolling around on the beach, they observe the strange boy getting arrested by the police. After a short look at him, they realize fast that the boy's place isn't in an orphanage, but in the hands of SCIENCE!

As it turns out they are right about that. The boy does look quite freakish, just like Frankenstein's monster as played by Boris Karloff seen by a one-eyed drunk for five seconds and then described ten years later to the make-up artist of the film, who proceeded to cross poor Boris with a Neanderthal. Obviously, the poor guy can't speak either.

The boy's other peculiarities are stranger still: He feels no pain and has an in-built resistance against radiation (how the scientists find that one out, the film never outright tells us, but I suspect they just radiate him). Oh, and now that he's well fed he's growing at an impossible rate.

Next time we see him, he has already grown to the size of one and a half Nick Adamses, yet is still unable to speak. Instead, his anger management problem becomes clear when he criticizes the TV schedule by throwing a TV out of the window. Dr. Togami is the only one who is able to calm him down, which could have something to do with the fact that she's not hitting him with a chair like Dr. Bowen, and instead talks him down.

After the TV and chair accident, the humanitarian scientists decide that it's best to chain him into a cell in the basement of the clinic building (and may I just ask what a clinic specialized in radiation needs a cell for), at least until they have built him a larger and more comfortable cage. The clinic management's idea to just put him into a zoo instead doesn't go over too well with Dr. Kawaji. He doesn't think this is the way a human being should be treated (while shackling a human being in a cellar is perfectly alright).

Since their monster is a media celebrity anyway, the scientific three decide to call upon the public to find out where the hell their lab rat came from. Their plan is met with a certain amount of success, when a Mr. Kawai (Yoshio Tsuchiya) connects stories about a child who was often seen playing alone in the ruins of the research lab we already know from 1945 with his own knowledge (he was one of the Japanese mad scientists breathless admirers) of Frankenstein's heart.

The boy must of course be Frankenstein, regrown from his heart! This does not sound the slightest bit mad to the intrepid searchers after scientific truth, so Dr. Kawaji flies to Germany and meets with the German mad scientist, who of course confirms the story with again much enthusiastic over-acting. He also explains that the only way to make sure about the wonder boy's identity is to cut off an arm or leg of the boy and to wait and see if it regrows. If it does, he is Frankenstein. Even better: The cut-off body part should be able to survive on its own.

While all this is going on, an earthquake hits an oil field back in Japan, waking terrible but cute monster Baragon, who shows us his blinking horn for a second (more about the glories of Baragon later).

When Kawaji returns home, he and the others discuss the German madman's idea. Kawaji comes out in favor of science through mutilation - after all, it's not a real human they're going to mutilate, while Togami (who is obviously the only even slightly morally responsible person in the whole film) declines. Bowen just doesn't know and doesn't want to make this kind of decision in a rush.

But Kawaji really likes a little mutilation in the evening and so he sneaks to Frankenstein's cell to do the deed. While he's still trying to find courage in a drink (yes, he brought the bottle - and a glass! - with him to the "operation"), a bunch of TV people suddenly arrives, sets up cameras and spotlights...and enrages the poor monster so much that it breaks free (if losing a hand in the course of the break-out) and goes on a small rampage.

During that rampage, two of the TV camera men get crushed by debris, but really, it's their own fault.

Nonetheless the Japanese Defense Force is now out to kill him.

Frankenstein himself is a lot more clever than he looks, so he flees into the mountains (which, as our scientist buddies inform us, is as cold as his home in Frankfurt. Whatever they mean by that.), only coming down to pillage villages for food without harming a single human.

All the while, the scientists are trying to convince the public and the government that Frankenstein is relatively harmless and that the best solution to the situation would be to let the monster find a place to settle down and there feed him. (Usually after they just have uttered something like, "kill him if you must, but we as scientists would very much want him to live. Or not.") They are also trying to keep the crawling Frankenstein hand they found in the debris alive, but are just a little too stupid to do it.

The peaceful idea isn't very popular when Baragon suddenly appears in the mountains, too, breaking through the Earth's crust outward to devastate villages and eat all inhabitants. Yes, Baragon would be a fearsome beast if not for its inherent cuteness: Just try to imagine a gigantic, but slighter armadillo-dinosaur with the digging abilities of a mole and with big funny eyes, a blinking horn smack in the middle of its face and large, moving ears that look like batwings. Kawaii!!!!

The public of course believes Frankenstein to be the people-eater (non-purple).

Fortunately Mister Kawai again appears bearing useful information - he saw Baragon when the earthquake happened, he just thought he had an hallucination. Sure, Frankenstein's monster regrowing from its heart - no problem. Giant monster? Nah, must be a hallucination.

The trouble is that no one believes the newest story of the eminent scientists about some big reptile from the Inner Earth causing havoc, so the army is still hunting for Frankenstein.

At least our sort-of heroes are able to find Frankenstein's hiding place before anyone else does; it's just sad that Kawaji has again changed his mind and is now planning to blind the monster and cut out a few pieces for further research. If the others need their big baby so much, they can just grow a new one.

As luck will have it, Kawaji's soon thrown flashbang is not blinding Frankenstein. Rather, it disturbs Baragon's peaceful slumber and makes the poor dear mightily mad (but oh so cute in its rage). Kawaji is in luck though, because suddenly Frankenstein, now clad in a gigantic fur get-up (and no, I don't know where he found the kaiju bear he must have killed for it) attacks Baragon and even saves his would-be mutilator's life.

After an inconclusive first round, the battle continues in the closest village and by a nearby lake, until Frankenstein finally proves the superiority of tool-usage (alright, tree-usage) over cuteness.

Instead of ending it here, the International distributor of the film had a burning wish that Toho just had to fulfill...

So suddenly, as Frankenstein is still cheering his victory, a giant octopus suddenly appears and drags him down into the lake. The End. No, no one asks the question why there is a giant octopus in the lake. Or why he jumps onto land and attacks Frankenstein. Or is at least a little concerned about this new giant plague. Oh well.

 

There is so much wrong with this film I hardly know where to start. It's probably best if I say right now that a lot that is wrong with it is wrong in the most delightful way.

Yes, the plot - as you have witnessed - does not make a lot of sense, but I don't think it is trying to. There's just no other explanation for the nonchalance with which the heroes of the piece (and yes, Kawaji is supposed to be a hero, I think; at least he is never really criticized as the mad scientist in training he is) change their opinions without the slightest provocation, just to change it again very soon after, or for the most obvious of plot holes. Nick Adams, to just give one further example, is somehow able to know the subject matter of phone calls he isn't participating in.

There is also no rational explanation for Nick Adams, whose bizarre presence I already tried to describe.

But there is so much else to love! Baragon, the master of evil cuteness! The silly but neat looking Big Frankenstein! A giant monster smack-down! A solidly rousing score by Ifukube! Model-work ranging from the delightful to the abominable, both loveable in their way and hard to beat in combination! And of course Ishiro Honda's direction that keeps the film moving at a crisp pace that makes the silliness a lot more fun!

One can of course lament the traces of depth and intelligence that get lost in the noise of falling buildings and stomping monsters, but not every film about a giant monster has to be a meditation on the Bomb (especially when the first Gojira, of course also by Honda, has already done that job admirably); sometimes a monster is allowed to be just a monster.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,reviews,kaiju,giant monsters,nick adams,ishiro honda,kumi mizuo

Latitude Zero (1969)

A trio of intrepid explorers, Dr. Tashiro (Akira Takarada), Dr. Masson (Masumi Okada) and annoyingly rude American reporter Lawton (Richard Jackel) are on a deep-sea diving mission, when a beautiful model underwater volcano erupts a little too close to their bathysphere. Fortunately, the sub-marine of humanitarian genius Captain Craig McKenzie (Joseph Cotten, probably slumming, certainly having fun) is close by.

McKenzie is the founder of a secret utopian society of scientists and other do-gooders based in an underwater city called Latitude Zero.

As our heroes will soon see, it's a very late Sixties kind of utopia, a place where funky architecture meets glowing buttons, where women wear vinyl, gold and short skirts, where no man (not even Joseph Cotten) likes to keep his breast fully covered and where the wondrous is the ordinary.

Of course a good genius needs an evil genius as his archenemy. McKenzie has his nemesis in form of Malic (Cesar Romero), a specialist in the creation of nonsensical chimeras like ape-bat-monsters, cute little attack bats and his crowning achievement, a lion-costume/vulture-costume-hybrid with the brain of his betrayed lover. He will - in contrast to my own feelings - be very surprised to learn the creature doesn't like him all that much.

The feud between the two men comes to a climax when Malic kidnaps Dr. Okada (Tetsu Nakamura), a scientist just on his way to Latitude Zero.

McKenzie and his new-found friends pay a visit to Malic's charmingly named island lair of Blood Rock. Will magical science like their jet-packs and their imperviousness to bullets help our heroes win the day? What are the giant rat costumes planning? Is vinyl the future of fashion?

If you haven't got it by now, let me tell you: Latitude Zero is a very silly movie, full of gorgeous late Sixties production design, monster costumes so cute, you want to cuddle them and actors playing gamely along with every silly idea director Ishiro Honda can come up with. As the friend of Toho Studios' kaiju and SF movies will understand, this means an astounding amount of silliness that would be enough to fill two or three comparable American movies. Fortunately, Honda never believed in a less is more aesthetic and prefers to deliver simply more of everything.

Of course, Latitude Zero is not a masterpiece, but very fun pulp SF that steals only the best from Jules Verne without all that pesky science.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,reviews,sf,ishiro honda,joseph cotten,tetsu nakamura,akira takarada