Kaiju Notes: Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster (Ishirō Honda, 1964)

FEATURING:

Godzilla!

Rodan!

Mothra (larval form only)!

King Ghidorah!

BORING EXPLANATORY NOTE: I’m aware that ‘Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster’ is the fifth film to feature Godzilla, whereas this is only the third entry in this supposedly chronological series of posts looking at the big guy’s movie career. Whilst working my way through the big Criterion set though, I accidentally found myself watching the American version of ‘King Kong vs Godzilla’ (1963), which I don’t wish to review until I’ve had a chance to compare it with the hopefully-slightly-less-godawful Japanese version. [Why did Criterion relegate this to a bonus disc, rather than presenting the two versions side-by-side? Not that it excuses my not bothering to check more thoroughly before hitting play on the U.S. version, but still…] Meanwhile, my wife and I also watched an old DVD of ‘Godzilla vs Mothra’ (1964) relatively recently before obtaining the new blu-ray set, so we took the decision to shuffle it to the end of our viewing schedule and instead get stuck into the next few films, which neither of us had seen before, beginning with the same year’s ‘Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster’! Any questions? No? Good.

1.
After two films which saw Godzilla returning from a near decade long sleep to battle other, pre-existing screen monsters (King Kong, obviously, and Mothra, who had previously enjoyed her own stand-alone movie in 1961), ‘Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster’ (or San Daikaiju: Chikyu Saidai No Kessen [‘Three Giant Monsters: The Greatest Battle on Earth’], as the Japanese had it) marks a significant change in direction for the series, not only introducing the titular monarch of space monsters, but also becoming the first of Toho’s kaiju films to adopt what we might call the “monster rally” formula, as inherited from Universal’s horror films of the 1940s and their tendency to throw all of the fans’ favourite beasties together into the same film on the flimsiest of pre-texts. It’s fitting therefore that, in many respects, this initial all-star throw-down emerges as just as just as much of a goofy, uneven mess as ‘House of Frankenstein’ had two decades earlier.

2.
One of the basic rules governing kaiju movies, I’ve always thought, is that the most successful ones need good human stories to go alongside their monster stories, and if the human-level stuff in ‘Ghidorah, The Three Headed Monster’ is perhaps not ‘good’ in the conventional sense, it is at least extremely weird, which certainly does the trick.

One of our central characters – Naoko, played by Yuriko Hoshi – is a TV reporter who works the paranormal beat for some kind of “unsolved mysteries” type show, and boy, she’s really got her work cut out for her this week!

Not only has there been an unprecedented rash of UFO sightings (Naoko visits the local believers, hanging out with their telescopes on a Tokyo rooftop), but an aeroplane carrying the revered Princess Saino of the fictional nation of Selgina (Akiko Wakabayashi, who later appeared in ‘You Only Live Twice’) has disappeared without trace in Japanese airspace, Mothra’s tiny avatars The Peanuts (Emi & Yumi Ito) are in town to make a surprise appearance on a kid’s TV show(!), strange subterranean rumblings beneath a distant volcano seem to presaging the re-emergence of some monster or other (it turns out to be everybody’s favourite supersonic turkey-bird, Rodan), AND a mysterious lady prophet (who bears an uncanny resemblance to the missing Selginian princess) has popped up in Tokyo, drawing large crowds as she claims to be channelling an alien intelligence emanating from Venus, warning of great disaster which lays ahead for the human race! What’s a girl to do, eh?

Zeroing in briefly on the Selginians, they’re certainly an interesting bunch. With their ostentatious ceremonial costumes and extreme veneration of their monarchy, I wondered whether the country was supposed to be a fictional stand-in for Thailand, but who knows, they could just as easily be ersatz Brits, I suppose. That would certainly seem in keeping with the fact that, inexlicably, the male Selginians wear Elizabethan ruffs at all times, sometimes in combination with codpieces, pantaloons and the like. What is up with this? Had Toho inherited a dressing up box from a touring Shakespeare company or something?

Well, regardless – there are certainly few sights in mid-century cinema more gloriously, cross-culturally surreal than that of some grizzled yakuza actors done up like Sir Walter Raleigh, complete with incongruous sun-glasses, whilst on board a spaceship. For this alone, ‘Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster’ will always have a place in my heart.

In fact, the opening, almost entirely monster-free, half of this film is great deal of fun all round. The strange way in which all of the above-mentioned plot threads play into each other is delightful and highly entertaining, occasionally making me wish that they were being explored in the context of some oddball sci-fi comedy, instead of merely padding out the run-time on giant monster movie.

3.
Since I skipped over ‘Godzilla vs Mothra’, let me take this opportunity to express my undying love for Mothra, and the wonderfully weird mythos which surrounds her. She’s so different from all of the other Kaiju monsters, with her female-coded benevolent, maternal instincts, her extraordinary, kaleidoscopic appearance when in full ‘moth’ mode (sadly not seen in this film), and her ability to directly communicate with humanity via her ever-delightful intermediaries in the form of tiny island singing duo The Peanuts.

Together with the colourful rites of the ‘Infant Island’ natives who seem to spend their time continuously praising their guardian kaiju’s larval form, this all brings so much surreal, psychedelic verisimilitude to the films Mothra appears in – a feeling which is only intensified here, as, in a head-spinningly ridiculous turn of events, she intervenes to act as a peacemaker between Godzilla and Rodan, encouraging them to put their differences aside and team up to rid their planet of the invasive Space Monster…. but, more on that below.

4.
Since I’ve already broached the subject to a certain extent above, let’s get into the potentially controversial issue of kaiju gender. I’m unsure whether the films ever explicitly state that Mothra is female, but I’ve always just assumed this, on the basis of ‘her’ associations with breeding and motherhood (something the other monsters pointedly lack), ‘her’ protective/non-aggressive behaviour patterns, and the fact that ‘she’ communicates via the female voices of The Peanuts.

Likewise, I’ve always simply assumed that most of the other kaiju are male, given that they spend their time stomping about like idiots, beating their chests and walloping each other… but of course, thinking about this for even a matter of seconds reveals that these assumptions are based on nothing beyond the most remedial and reprehensible of gender stereotyping.

I’d imagine the fact that Japanese grammar – in its most basic iterations, at least – does not include obligatory gendered pro-nouns probably plays into this ambiguity to a certain extent, potentially allowing the films’ original scripts to entirely avoid the issue - and indeed, the notes accompanying the Criterion Godzilla set find writer Ed Godziszewski playing it safe in this regard, pointedly referring to the monsters using the non-gendered “it” pro-noun.

Whilst technically correct and politically advisable however, this approach feels cold and disingenuous to me, in view of the strong characters and clearly anthropomorphic personality traits with which Eiji Tsuburaya’s creations are imbued, especially in sillier films such as this one.

If I continue to instinctively refer to kaiju using gendered pro-nouns therefore, I hope that readers will be able to forgive me, on the basis that these films were produced in an era when such stereotyping of gender roles was baked into culture and went largely unquestioned. And because I mean, life is basically just feel a lot more fun when Godzilla is a dude, right…?

5.
Meanwhile, King Ghidorah (who is definitely a ‘he’ – I mean, he’s a KING, right?) definitely gets a fantastic build up here for his inaugural appearance – one of film’s strongest dramatic moments (not that that’s saying much) comes when Princess Saino, channelling the survivors of the lost Venusian civilisation, tells us of how Ghidorah single-handedly laid waste to the entirety of Venus, a planet housing a civilisation far in advance of our own.

I mean, Japan’s government may have had some fun and games with Godzilla and the gang in the past, but this SOB must he on a whole other level, surely – I mean, he’s a goddamned PLANET EATER, for goodness sake.

And, happily, his inaugural appearance in the film does not disappoint. Surely one of Tsuburaya’s most impressive and elaborate creations, King Ghidorah initially looks like the kind of thing which might have stalked Ray Harryhausen’s dreams after a few too many brandies, but he becomes even more remarkable once we realise that, like his fellow monsters, he has actually been rendered at man-in-a-suit scale rather than as stop motion, with the suit’s primary occupant – who is frequently required to hang suspended in mid-air above the film’s miniaturised sets - assisted by a small army of off-screen puppeteers, helping co-ordinate the movements of heads, wings and tails. Pretty incredible stuff!

6.
It’s a great shame therefore that the promise of this terrifying new global threat is squandered in the film’s final act, via a lacklustre and absurdly goofy final confrontation which seems liable to have left many fans hoping for a death-defying, destructo-monster showdown feeling distinctly short-changed.

In fact, in contrast to the film’s rather complex and bizarre human storyline, little effort seems to have been put into the parallel monster narrative. Godzilla and Rodan both just sort of pop up out of nowhere, for no particular reason (although I did like the way latter emerges from an apparently genuine, shot-on-location smoking volcano), and begin half-heartedly knocking lumps out of each other, just because… well, it’s what they do, right? Mothra meanwhile is only on the scene because, as mentioned, her avatars The Peanuts have travelled to Tokyo to appear on a TV show, granting the wish of some adorable young tykes whose main dream in life – as they loudly proclaim when asked - is to meet Mothra.

If Godzilla’s pattern of behaviour in previous films put me in mind of a giant cat, here he and Rodan seem more like bored children, squabbling in the playground in the last few minutes before the bell rings. Hanging about on a (conveniently uninhabited) battleground in the shadow of Mt Fuji, they basically spend their time leering and throwing rocks at each other, until Mothra (in larval form) turns up to try to convince them to put their differences aside and join forces to save humanity from the invading space monster.

Not only does this turn of events introduce us to the frankly ludicrous notion that these very different species of prehistoric monster share similar gifts of reasoning and language, we’re also apparently expected to believe that they all understand the same language – and, furthermore, it’s our language (which is to say, Japanese).

I recall watching (I think) the much later ‘Godzilla vs Gigan’ (1972) a few years back, and being absolutely appalled by the fact that the filmmakers were sufficiently disrespectful as to make Godzilla actually speak. Perhaps I should have withheld my scorn however, because here we are, nearly a decade earlier, in a movie ostensibly directed by the great Ishiro Honda himself, and the Big G and his pals are already chatting away like nobody’s business.

“Myuh, myuh myuh, we don’t want to help the humans, they’re always being mean to us, they’re a bunch of jerks,” seems to be Godzilla and Rodan’s basic position, and Mothra is like, “fine then, see if I care”. So King Ghidorah flies in, and Mothra, stuck in larval form, starts trying to fight him, getting pretty badly beaten in the process. At which point, Godzilla and Rodan are like, “hey, that big kid from another school is beating up our fellow earth-monster, let’s get him!!” And so, they change their tune and proceed to help dispatch the unspeakably mighty, literally planet-destroying Space Monster by means of knocking him about for a few minutes and kicking him up the arse, prompting him to fly away in shame, multiple tails between his legs.

Hurray, the world is saved, and everybody rejoices, as the human powers-that-be seem content to let previously city-crushing behemoths G and R loll about unmolested in a big field, because they’re heroes now, I suppose.

Ye gods – what is this rubbish? Only the fifth entry in the Godzilla canon, immediately following the extremely good ‘Godzilla vs Mothra’, and our kaiju have already been downgraded from dread-dripping stand-ins for the existential threat of nuclear war and natural disaster to the level of bickering, Saturday morning kid’s TV puppets. What comes next, I dread to think.

7.
Having said all that though, I couldn’t help but love the fact that Godzilla’s first spoken word is that all-purpose, impossible-to-really-transliterate Japanese exclamation / curse pronounced somewhat like “kyiiisurre”. Frequently heard in yakuza movies, this is often translated as “fuck” or “goddamnit”, but Criterion’s subtitles here simply went with “BASTARDS!”. For all the nonsense outlined above, someone clearly still understood the big dude’s personality pretty well.

Kaiju Notes: Godzilla (Ishirō Honda, 1954)

Like many genre movie obsessives I suspect, this month has seen me grovelling in supplication before the monolith that is Criterion’s Godzilla: The Showa Era Films box set, which landed on my doormat with an appropriately earth-shaking thump a few days after Halloween.

“Box set” is actually a bit of a misnomer in this case, as Criterion have housed these fifteen movies in packaging which more closely resembles an over-sized hardback book. I’m not usually one to geek out over the packaging of physical movie releases (well, not in public, anyway), but Yuko Shimizu’s newly commissioned artwork on the front, back and inside covers of this thing looks absolutely stunning at full size, and most of the interior content (both text and illustration) is equally impressive.

Although I’ve not had much of a chance to dig into the discs themselves yet (this could take years, frankly – I’ve only just finished off Criterion’s equally formidable Zatoichi box, a full five years after I first received it), I nonetheless feel confident in recommending this release as an object which will enrich your life and enliven your home in all manner of wonderful ways.

Obviously more important than any of that however is the access this set provides to the films themselves. With the exception of the original 1954 ‘Godzilla’, these Showa-era kaiju movies have long suffered from a chronic lack of availability, particularly here in the UK. When I first started trying to track them down around a decade ago, I found myself resorting to a mixture of pan-and-scan VHS releases, imported DVD box sets of similarly poor quality and low-res mp4 downloads - all, without exception, featuring the American release versions of the films with English language dubbing.

Admittedly, these English dubs often proved quite endearing, if not outright hilarious (I’ll never forget the deliriously absurd voiceovers applied to ‘Ebirah, Terror From The Deep’ and ‘Terror of Mechagodzilla’ in particular). In fact, my only criticism of the Criterion set thus far is the fact that many of these dubs have not been carried over as alternative audio options, which makes me slightly sad. BUT, never mind - the point I wish to make here is that opportunity to experience these films as their makers intended, with the original Japanese audio tracks and (in the case of the thirteen post-1960 films) the proper scope ratio, promises to be an absolute revelation for most viewers in the Western hemisphere, and is surely cause for celebration.

I’m not planning to write full reviews of these films as I watch them – I mean, I’m sure you don’t need me to provide a full run-down on the artistic merits of ‘Destroy all Monsters’, for goodness sake – but I will do my best to write up a few notes on things which occur to me during each viewing, whether high-falutin’ insights on the way the series developed over the years, or just picking out scenes or moments which seem particularly strange or noteworthy, and we’ll just see where we end up, I suppose.

So, we begin, of course, with the big daddy of them all, and, viewed purely in serious, cinematic terms, the best kaiju film ever made by a considerable margin - Ishirō Honda’s original 1954 ‘Godzilla’.

FEATURING: 
Just the lad himself.

1.
Ever since the original cut of Honda’s ‘Godzilla’ was restored and re-released in the early ‘00s, finding itself justifiably reappraised as a stone-cold classic of post-war Japanese cinema in the process, viewers who grew up with a very different idea of what Godzilla movies were all about have found themselves emerging, suitably shaken, from arthouse and festival screenings, scratching their heads and wondering how and why Toho’s signature monster franchise went on to become so silly, so quickly, over the course of subsequent instalments, despite the fact that the auteur responsible for this initial masterpiece frequently returned to the director’s chair.

Well, I for one tend to believe that the dramatic tonal shift which followed this first film’s success in fact makes perfect sense when one takes into account the strange emotional disjuncture at the heart of ‘Godzilla’.

What I mean to say is, for around 80% of this film’s running time, we’re watching a sombre, mature and deeply sad meditation on scientific morality in the 20th century and the very real terrors and threats to individual human agency which can result from man-made societal catastrophe.

For the remaining 20% of the film however – the portion basically encompassing all of the footage in which The Big G is on-screen - we basically forget about all that, and instead just find ourselves simply thinking, FUCK YEAH, GODZILLA!

I’m not sure to what extent a big rubber suit can legitimately be deemed ‘charismatic’, but from the very moment he first pokes his bonce above that hilltop on Odo Island and unleashes his inimitable elephantine roar, Eiji Tsuburaya’s creation here is just so immediately likeable, it’s difficult not to be overjoyed by his appearance, and correspondingly enthused by his lumbering, apocalyptic antics. As a result, the conflicting emotions we feel as Godzilla first stomps his way to shore on the mainland and cuts a bloody swathe through Tokyo’s metropolitan area are strange indeed.

In keeping with the film’s more serious agenda, what we are shown here for the most part is something we would rarely see again in a kaiju movie - real human misery on a vast scale. People’s homes, livelihoods and families going up in smoke as they frantically try to pack their remaining possessions onto hand-carts and shopping trolleys; a circumstance which must have been horribly familiar to many in the film’s original domestic audience, less than a decade after the Pacific War left much of the nation in ruins.

As the shadow of the Godzilla’s colossal paw looms above the Ginza streets, one famously harrowing shot shows us a single mother – a war widow, presumably - attempting to comfort her daughter as they crouch helplessly in an alleyway; “it’s alright, we’ll be joining daddy soon,” the mother tearfully exclaims. Devastating. It would take a heart of stone not to be moved by this simple, appalling vignette.

BUT, as soon as we cut back to the next model city / special effects shot and get another look at the big galoot causing all this mayhem, we’re immediately back on a more comfortable footing. FUCK YEAH, LOOK AT HIM GO; Godzilla doesn’t give a fuck about your stupid power lines! Look at him, swatting missiles out of the air like Mosquitos! COME ON! This is amazing! Godzilla rules!

How are we to deal with this tonal disjuncture, to reconcile these conflicting impulses? As soon as the initial box office receipts started to come in, Toho dealt with it by entirely ditching the brooding, serious aspect of Honda’s film and instead doubling-down on the kiddie-placating Monster Fun in subsequent kaiju films, significantly watering down their portrayal of the damage wrought upon Japan’s citizenry by Godzilla and his fellow cyclopean sluggers.

And, it’s easy to see why the studio went with the path of least resistance and took this decision, just as it’s easy to see why The Big G romped his way through fourteen more essentially light-hearted sci-fi adventures over the next twenty years. He has such an innate capacity to make an audience (especially, I dare-say, an audience of excitable ten year olds) just so damned happy, it would be a crime for him to have not been given the opportunity to do so, just for the sake of, you know, art and human dignity.

(By some accounts, Honda himself was initially unhappy with this shift in emphasis, but at the end of the day, he was a company man, and as a life-long SF enthusiast, I suppose he must have simply decided that being ordered by his employers to keep on making movies full of space-ships, doomsday weapons, model cities and giant alien monsters wasn’t exactly the worst thing that could have happened to him, all things considered.)


2.
Until my most recent viewing, I had never really appreciated the extent to which ‘Godzilla’, in its first half in particular, basically plays as a horror movie. In stark contrast to everything which was to follow in the Godzilla franchise, Masao Tamai’s photography here is extremely dark and brooding, utilising heavy chiaroscuro effects and unconventional, chaotic framing to establish a palpable sense of foreboding only emphasized by the relentless crashing of waves against the rocks of Odo Island, and the baleful majesty of Akira Ifukube’s legendary score. (Metal fan in particular will likely appreciate the extent to which Ifukube just plain lays down some killer riffs here.)

Scenes such as the one in which an as-yet-unseen Godzilla undertakes a nocturnal attack against a character’s isolated cliff-top home feel as if they could have come straight from the play-book of innovative kaidan horrors such as Kaneto Shindô’s similarly war-haunted ‘Onibaba’ (1964) or Hiroshi Matsuno’s contemporary-set oddity The Living Skeleton (1968), whilst in some sense Honda even pre-empts the island-bound terrors of Hideo Nakata’s ‘Ring’ films, nearly half a century later.

(Odo Island, where Godzilla is first encountered, is widely considered to be a fictional stand-in for Oshima, the sparsely populated volcanic island around 30km out to sea from Tokyo bay where the family of the dread Sadako make their home in the ‘Ring’ mythos.)

With its dark coloration, striking red lettering and montage of fearful figures, the film’s Japanese poster (see above) certainly resembles a contemporary kaidan poster, and the temptation to see ‘Godzilla’ as a horror film is further encouraged by the fact that the tragic Dr Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) appears for some reason to reside in a Western-styled gothic crypt, where he keeps his extremely impressive array of Frankensteinian machinery in a subterranean burial chamber – the signifiers of a Hollywood horror movie perhaps acting here as a canny metaphor for the reckless, predominantly American, scientific advancements which have guided the tormented doctor (himself a traumatised war veteran) toward the construction of his oxygen-destroying “doomsday device”.

Thinking further, these horror-ish vibes are actually very much in keeping with several of the more low-key, and perhaps more personal, sci-fi films which Honda subsequently directed in-between his kaiju commitments (1958’s ‘The H-Man’ and 1963’s nightmarish ‘Matango: The Mushroom People’ immediately spring to mind). From another angle meanwhile, they also allow ‘Godzilla’ to fit neatly into an interesting international sub-set of ostensibly ‘scientific’ ‘50s alien / monster movies characterised by their brooding, overtly gothic visual aesthetic – Edgar Ulmer’s The Man From Planet X, Gerardo de Leon’s Terror is a Man and Riccardo Freda & Mario Bava’s ‘Caltiki: The Immortal Monster’, to name but a few.


3.
Given that Japan bore the brunt of the worst extremes of mass destruction that the 20th century had to offer, whilst its densely populated shores continue to abide beneath a more-or-less-constant threat of natural disaster, I’ve always been struck by the extent to which the nation’s culture has portrayed the collapse of its urban infrastructure with an almost unnerving level of enthusiasm.

In fact, there is a whole pantheon of popular Japanese art which has gleefully fetishized this forthcoming, full scale decimation to a nigh-on crazed degree, creating an entire new aesthetic of twisted girders, disintegrating concrete, bridges and overpasses swinging through space like loose tree branches, fire and debris raining down on all sides, and so forth.

Although Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s ‘Akira’ probably represents the pinnacle of this kind of “disaster-porn”, the original ‘Godzilla’ is surely also a major landmark in its development, and the terrifying beauty which Honda and his collaborators bring to Godzilla’s central rampage sequence remains absolutely startling. Looming, expressionistic shadows, vertiginous low angle camerawork and wild swatches of inky blackness all lend a genuine horror to proceedings that would never, ever be replicated by the comparatively quaint, full colour kaiju rampages which would follow through the ‘60s. Throughout its running-time in fact, ‘Godzilla’ succeeds in evoking an almost physical sensation of leaden, stomach-churning dread in its viewers, ensuring that, all these decades later, its status as the ‘Citizen Kane’ of monster movies remains unsurpassed.