Dogora

In space, a big jellyfish destroys a satellite. The thing then comes to Earth and uses its twisting tentacles to get everything in its path. Buildings, trucks, and even a bridge get lifted up from the ground by the thing. The thing also has a craving for diamonds. Also involved in this mishmash are some diamond thieves who only want a truck of diamonds and a day to the beach without getting stung. Pretty interesting with imaginative special effects. The American print is terrible,dark, and scratched up. The dubbing is also bad.

"Atragon," the 1963 offering from the great film-making team of director Ishiro Honda, composer Akira Ifukube and special FX master Eiji Tsuburaya, is an excellent sci-fi movie depicting a Japanese supersub's battle with the undersea kingdom of Mu. The following year, this same team came out with "Dogora," a fun if decidedly lesser effort. In this one, a single-celled organism floating in space is affected by Japan's seemingly ubiquitous radiation and grows to become a humongous, jellyfishlike monster who lives to suck carbon off the surface of our world...along with any buildings, bridges or trucks that happen to be in the area! In a somewhat confusing plot, multiple story lines involving a group of diamond thieves, a mysterious insurance investigator, an aged expert on crystals, and a swarm of bees are conflated, with mixed results. The first time I watched "Dogora" (and no, we never learn the meaning or origin of this particular "kurage kaiju"'s moniker), I thought the film rather hard to follow, and in all somewhat diffused. On a second viewing, the plot seemed to make more sense, but its dependence on coincidence still rather marked. One of the picture's saving graces, for me, is the presence of Akiko Wakabayashi--who I first became enamored with in 1967, as a result of her appearance in the James Bond blowout "You Only Live Twice"--who here plays a moll and who looks more beautiful than I have ever seen her. Dogora itself is a pleasing creation, and the sight of it whirlpooling coal into its giant maw or pulling a Kyushu bridge to bits is actually fairly awesome. Its ultimate demise is brought about in a fairly unique manner, as well. In all, not a bad little picture, as long as you don't go in expecting anything on the order of Honda's "Gojira" or "The Mysterians"!

In the US, this is probably the least well known of the classic kaiju eiga. Sure, "Dogora" may not be a very good movie overall, but in my opinion it has one of the very best monsters in film history. Dogora is an enormous space jellyfish, vast, mindless, and cosmically terrifying. It floats through the atmosphere, draining the Earth of life-giving carbon. The full-grown Dogora is only on screen for five minutes (!!), but it's still an awe-inspiring sight as this huge, transparent creature, the size of a small town, sucks up buildings, vehicles, bridges and minerals.

The remainder of the movie is mostly an uninspired detective spoof, with two inept policemen and an enigmatic American agent hot on the trail of a gang of jewel thieves. It seems the monster has been getting to the diamonds first... With such an incredible monster, and such well-executed effects, it's a real shame the rest of the film is so mundane.

It's SUPPOSED to be a comedy. Unfortunately, the US television version dubbed the movie as a serious monster film, with disastrous results. Worse, though, is the Toho "international" version -- it may be more accurately translated, but it's performed by the most inept readers you'll hear outside of a Sandy Frank production. Anyway, even if you don't know Japanese, watching "Dogora" in the original language with no subtitles is still probably more enjoyable than suffering through the English versions.

I remember watching this film when I was a kid and I thought it was a pretty decent film. However, when I read some of the comments I couldn't understand how a lot of people hated it. This might have something to do with the fact that due to the stupid re-editing job that was done to the film after it arrived in America. Ishiro Honda originally wanted this film to be a comedy that brought together two of the genres that he was famous for, gangster films and, of course, kaiju eigas. Unfortunately, the persons in charge of editing and dubbing the film when it reached our fair shores decided that it would be better to make this film into a typical kaiju and make the monster the most prominent element of the film, unlike the Japanese version where the monster takes a secondary role in the film. Thank God for Media Blasters. Because of them the film is now on DVD and it is finally being seen as Mr. Honda had originally envisioned it.

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Directed by Ishiro Honda; Produced by Yasuyoshi Tajitsu, for Toho; released to American TV as "Dagora, The Space Monster" by American-International TV. Screenplay by Shinichi Sekizawa; Photography by Hajime Koizumi; Edited by Ryohei Fujii; Music by Akira Ifukube; Special Effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. Starring: Yosuke Natsuki, Yoko Fujiyama, Nobuo Nakamura and Robert Dunham.

Japanese horror flick combines monster and gangster genres, with not only the physical plant of Tokyo in danger (as usual) from a giant gooey jellyfish from space, but also the loot and lives of some cheap criminals.