Monarch - Legacy Of Monsters

Portal Poppers

Monarch - Legacy Of Monsters
10 Episodes
Airdate: November 2023 - January 2024
Toho/Apple

Warning: A legacy of spoilers.

Well, I have to admit I wasn’t really expecting much from Monarch - Legacy Of Monsters but I certainly got into this and am now looking forward to a second series. You’ll perhaps remember that Monarch is the mysterious organisation, mostly friendly, who monitors and tries to predict and limit damage done by the so called ‘Titans’ in the US branded Godzilla/King Kong movies... aka The Monsterverse.

Now, to just lower your expectations a little, yes, you do see them make cameos in the series, along with a few other monsters but, the actual monster scenes in these episodes are pretty fleeting. You get maybe one sighting (sometimes two) an episode for a minute or two but, that’s okay, because the story is so interestingly written and pretty brilliantly performed that you don’t need the monsters to make for an engaging show. Maybe they could have shortened the title of the show by three words though, so as not to get too many people’s expectations up.

Okay, so this is one of those shows that flip flops back in time so you have the three founding characters who started Monarch in the 1940s/50s played by the absolutely brilliant Mari Yamamoto as Keiko, Anders Holm as Bill Randa (playing the character that John Goodman played in Kong - Skull Island but as he was in the 1950s... and, yes, Goodman also turns up at the opening of the first episode) and last but by no means least, Wyatt Russell, son of actor Kurt Russell, playing a character called Lee Shaw... also played by his father in the modern sections of the show.

But you also have the modern day story with a sister played by Ana Sawai and a brother played by Ren Watabe, who find out about each other in different corners of the globe after their dad (who is the son of Keiko and Bill) is missing, presumed dead. And then they find out that he’s been living two lives of two secret and simultaneous marriages but, also, was once working for Monarch. And there are a whole bunch of other characters who are equally important but if I start listing them all this would be one long  blog entry.

What I will say is that it’s absolutely brilliant and intriguing and is set mostly in the 1950s and 2015 (after the first Monsterverse Godzilla movie) but also in the 1960s and 1980s for little snippets. And, if you’re like me and doing the maths, yes, that should mean that older Russell, Kurt, should be in his nineties by the time of the show’s setting if younger Russell, Wyatt, is playing the same character in the early 1950s. And you’d be right but, here’s the thing... that ageing difference is also built into the plot and teased very early on in the series until, in the final two episodes, everything begins to make a bit more sense. All I’m saying is it has something to do with those portals into other worlds as they were in the time of these films... the 2021 movie Godzilla VS Kong (reviewed by me here) brings more clarification to the package, if you think about it... but that’s another story.

And while there’s not an awful lot of expensive monster mayhem in the show... it’s definitely a fast paced and very globe hopping experience, with more than enough questions, intrigue and drama to keep you on your toes. The odd appearance by a monster is just icing on the cake a lot of the time... plus, of course, the main reason for having an organisation like Monarch in the first place.

The music is kinda okay too although, I have to say, I would have liked to have heard the old Akira Ifukube Godzilla themes at least once in this... it’s a shame they didn’t put in an appearance, for sure. Still, I guess you can’t have everything and, by the time the last episode of season one ends, the present day has shifted to 2017. So I’m assuming, if this runs for another few seasons, it might even catch right up to the year of broadcast.

I hope we get these and, without getting any spoilers into the mix, if one of the above actors is to return (and I hope he does) then it makes sense that some years go by for some of the other characters if they embark on a rescue mission, of sorts. Anyway, I’m not going to say too much more about this one other than I enjoyed Monarch - Legacy Of Monsters way more than I thought I would and I’m glad it’s been renewed for another series at some point.

Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire

Peanuts Gal For
Monkey Magic

Godzilla X Kong -
The New Empire
Directed by Adam Wingard
USA 2024
Warner Brothers
UK Theatrical Cut

Warning: Mild spoilers.

Last week I went to the cinema to see Ghostbusters - Frozen Empire (reviewed here) in which a centuries long imprisoned creature is released and aims to turn the Earth into a new ice age. This week I saw Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire which, apart from having a superfluous X that makes it the most ridiculous and childish title for a Godzilla movie ever, deals with a centuries long imprisoned creature who is released back into the mix with his followers and big ice creature, with the intent of conquering the Earth by turning it into a new ice age. I bet the makers of this one were pretty miffed that the new Ghostbusters had a better title that they could have used themselves.

This one is, by my counts, the fifth in the sequence of the US Monsterverse franchise, comprising Godzilla (reviewed here), Kong - Skull Island (reviewed here), Godzilla King Of The Monsters (reviewed here), Godzilla VS Kong (reviewed here) and now this one. Not to mention the relatively recent Monarch TV series, which I haven’t got around to watching as yet. It carries over three characters from the previous movie, as played by the great Rebecca Hall reprising the role of the main scientist, the extremely cool Kaylee Hottle as her deaf/mute adopted Skull Island daughter and Brian Tyree Henry, providing comic relief as the vlogger who was helping out Millie Bobby Brown in the last movie.

And, not only is this installment in the franchise way better in most respects than Godzilla VS Kong, it’s also a very fun watch and I really rather enjoyed it. Now, given the critical and commercial success of the Academy Award winning Japanese movie Godzilla Minus One (reviewed here ) a few months ago, I was fully expecting to be able to say that the aforementioned movie was way better than this one. And... yeah okay, I am saying that... no comparison. I’d take a film like that one over this any day of the week. However, you have to remember that you really can’t cant compare the two. Godzilla Minus One is very much a serious film similar in tone to the original 1954 Gojira movie (reviewed here) and uses Godzilla as a surrogate for the post survivor trauma of the ‘failed’ kamikaze pilot who is the film’s main protagonist. It’s carrying a lot of weight and it does it beautifully.

In contrast to that, Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire is very much in the style of the fun, mid 1960s to mid 1970s Toho Godzilla ‘monster romp’ movies... and as a lover of both kinds, I am quite happy with what the US filmmakers are able to achieve here, to be honest. It’s a different flavour of Godzilla but they are doing a much better job of that kind of brief here.

Now, the movie almost totally takes place in the Hollow Earth world discovered in the last film, asides from a few sequences where Godzilla and Kong manage to wreck part of Egypt and Brazil between them. And also one memorable moment where the movie’s other main protagonist, a monster veterinarian played by Dan Stevens, extracts Kong’s infected tooth with his helicopter and gives him a new, super duper tooth. Also, after a sequence where Kong suffers from frostbite in his right arm, due to reasons I won’t disclose, he cures it and gives him a new armoured glove so he can punch things better. So yay!

Also, Kaylee Hottle’s character ends up fulfilling the same role as The Peanuts did in the original Mothra films from the 1960s. She is the new human envoy to Mothra and she wakes her up to help out when Kong is trying to lure Godzilla into lending a hand in tackling their bigger problem. It’s nice stuff but, alas, she doesn’t sing the famous Mothra song... which would have been a nice touch.

And was that a shop sign depicting Gamera I saw for a second before Godzilla smashed through it? I’m pretty sure that’s what I saw... can anyone else confirm in the comments?

And it’s a film filled with good action, much better acting than you would expect and a fun storyline. My only real criticism is that the score by Antonio Di Lorio and Tom Holkenborg is bereft of any of the iconic Godzilla themes from the Toho series and, just fails miserably on that level. Every time you are expecting there to be a big Ifukube moment, the score does something which seems, I dunno, like a melody falling just short of the original to evade copyright payments. Which is a shame because, even the great Godzilla Minus One, which had a far superior score to this one, recognised the value in popping in Ifukube’s melodies into certain scenes. And to add insult to injury, the score to this one seems to be unavailable on a proper CD (which is a first for the films, it would be the only live action Godzilla theatrical release without CD representation to date). Shame on Watertower Records for not releasing it in the only physical format that real music lovers want. I hate this backwards decade, ignoring the essential physical media releases which should accompany these films.

Apart from the ‘knock off’ sounding scoring though, Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire was way more entertaining than I was expecting it to be and, if you liked Kong VS Godzilla (I kinda didn’t think it was all that), then you should definitely love this one. Don’t expect to be seeing the same kind of story substance present in Godzilla Minus One though... two very different kinds of films.

Abducted By The Daleks

Exterminating Angels

Abducted By The Daleks
aka Abducted BY The Daloids
Directed by Don Skaro
UK 2005 DVD 0
A Stella International Production

I’m pretty sure Don Skaro isn’t the real name of the director of Abducted By The Daleks... and I also suspect he wrote the film and did various other things on it because, on the credits, all kinds of pseudonyms are used, some of them Doctor Who oriented. Story by Billy Hartnell anyone? I’m pretty sure he’s the same director who made the notorious Fantom Killer movies which, I suspect, he also directed under an assumed name. Now, I think I know his real name because I’m pretty sure the director is the man who sold this to me at the Camden Film Fair back in 2005. I’m not going to say what his real name is here because of a) the very slim chance I may be wrong about my assumption and b) because he seemed like a really nice guy (who sold me some rare soundtrack CDs sometimes)... although he did seem to vanish from the scene a few years after this movie came out. He was a regular stall holder at Camden and I saw, on more than one occasion, one of the ‘stars’ of Abducted By The Daleks and other films come and talk to him briefly, making a rendezvous or business engagement for later in the day/week/whatever.

Given the somewhat illegal nature (in the UK at the time) of a lot of the films he had tucked away and behind his stall for ‘ special customers’, I’m guessing he’s one of the reasons the old Camden Film Fair used to occasionally get raided by the police. We customers didn’t mind... stalls being raided for forbidden items just increased ones desirability to keep going to that particular film fair, it has to be said. It was like free publicity. And talking of free publicity... this little film with covers printed on an inkjet printer and burned onto suspicious looking CDRs... had its fifteen minutes of infamy when the British press got a hold on one somehow and were all over it. Dalek porn corrupting the youth of today... or some such rubbish... perhaps forgetting about Jon Pertwee’s wonderful character companion, actress Katy Manning’s naked photo shoot with a Dalek as an embedded part of Doctor Who culture.

The BBC were said to be furious and, the next month, the name of the film had been changed to Abducted By The Daloids. However, since the film has a good many scenes with actual Daleks in it... I can’t imagine the BBC went anywhere near it and probably figured it wasn’t worth suing as the total budget of the film, which runs for only 55 minutes, is probably less than the price of a couple of ham sandwiches in the BBC canteen. I can’t help but think the title change was merely a less than subtle move to stop policemen coming in and realising what was being sold, after it had hit the tabloids. Can’t sell confiscated stock, after all.

And so we come to the film itself, which stars Katarzyna Zelnik, Eliza Borecka, Sonja Karina, Lina Black, Maria Vasolva and... three Daleks. On the way to somewhere, four girls get lost in the woods after running over a grey alien (aka a Zeta Reticulan... which is not mentioned again later in the story at all). Luckily, the driver of the car happens to carry four torches in her glove compartment for just such emergencies. As the night goes on, the girls... first one... then two more.... get teleported up to a Dalek spaceship for interrogation (sans clothing, of course). When their insanely unpersuasive, shouty efforts fail to make them talk about what earthlings are like, they teleport the fourth one up (who is being stalked by a serial killer who skins his victims alive). She turns out to be the Dalek’s dominatrix for hire, who also tries completely non-harmful ways of getting the girls to talk. It’s almost like the Daleks could just have asked her what Earthlings are like instead, rather than go to all this trouble. All the girls are exterminated apart from the makeshift domme who is teleported down to Earth for a scene with the serial killer. Said teleporter accidentally changing her appearance so she can be played by another ‘actress’ when the other one was, presumably, not available for the last part of the shoot.

It’s pretty terrible but the director does have a few ideas which are worth mentioning.. such as using the naked bodies of the girls reflected in the tip of the Dalek eyestalk. But mostly it’s just rubbish and pretty much all the girls seem really bad actresses. Every now and again, music lifted from one of the Godzilla films, One Step Beyond, The Mole People or Pink Floyd will be used to ‘enhance’ the drama. But, everything looks fake... even the terrible pretence at a lesbian scene by ladies who clearly aren’t into it that much. And I suspect that at least one of the girls has more silicon on her than the three daleks put together.

The Daleks themselves are interesting. One looks like a purchased prop from one of the Peter Cushing films, one looks like a Jon Pertwee era Dalek and the third... looks like an old ride or bad waxworks version, with the top section completely out of proportion with its body but still, somehow, looking kinda elegant.* The Daleks just aren’t able to save this terrible film though.

It’s bad but, that certainly doesn’t stop it from being entertaining... in that, “how does anyone make a movie this bad”, kind of way Well, to answer that, the ‘alternate cut’ on the disc is just a series of multiple outtakes and flubs strung together in he same sequence as the movie. And, honestly, if the girls were as hard to work with from take to take during this shoot as is evidenced here... it’ possibly no wonder that the serial killer story had to be, one assumes, tacked onto the end with a different actress to pad the already small running time.

So yeah, the film gets an A for effort but it never really lives up to the unwritten promise of the title and it is very cheesy... the Daleks never even get to use thier sink plungers in a way you might imagine they might in a film with this kind of content. With a title like Abducted By The Daleks though... not to mention some help from the ‘outraged’ tabloids... I suspect this one was a very good seller for the director in question. 

*I actaully saw an archival interview with Terry Nation on television a few days before this post was published and I'm pretty sure that third, overly streamlined Dalek is one which he actually had in his home for a while.

Godzilla - The Official Guide To The King Of The Monsters

Ghidorah With Delight

Godzilla - The Official
Guide To The King
Of The Monsters
by Graham Skipper
Welbeck Books
ISBN: 9781787398993

Godzilla - The Official Guide To The King Of The Monsters is a new book published towards the end of 2022, written by Graham Skipper and completely authorised by Toho Studios, who have allowed the publishing company unlimited access to loads of never before seen photos from the films and behind the scenes shots (more on those photos later). And, it’s a book I’m very happy to have but, it has to be said, I also had some small issues with it too. So yeah, it’s good and bad... let’s get to it.

The tome is split into six main sections, book ended by an Introduction and a Closing section thusly... The Showa Era, The Heisei Era, The Millennium Era, The Reiwa Era, The American Era and Godzilla In Other Media. And, as you would imagine, the first five of those are split into mini chapters, each one covering one of the films from their particular era. Each main section is accompanied by a nice illustration but, it seems for every positive thing I have to say to about this book (which is ultimately a nice thing to have), there’s a yang to the yin with something negative about that particular aspect.

Okay, so the first thing I will bring up is the design. It looks fantastic and the front cover of the hardback depicting The Big G himself in silhouette, is textured as rubbery scales. Like someone has gone mad with a spot varnish effect to the point where it’s built up in loads of lumps on the cover... it looks and, yeah, feels fantastic. You could definitely have sex with this book if you so desired (I won’t be kink shaming here). And the design positives continue inside where each film is given a huge title information strip taking up between a quarter and a third of the page, with info like the year, the director, some cast members etc presented as a little block. But the negative of this is, because the title sections take up so much space on the page, the regular body copy text is both tiny (maybe 8pt or even less) and on a blue tinted background, which further makes it harder to read. So yeah, it’s a case of cutting down on the legibility and readability of the thing in favour of saving space (and therefore money) it seems to me.

Positive thing number two is that it’s profusely illustrated with, as claimed, lots of shots which will be new to fans of this particular kaiju. But that’s also its downfall because, almost all of the hundreds of photos included are... you guessed it... just shots of Godzilla and various other monsters such as Mothra, Mechagidzilla, King Ghidora and the like. Which can get pretty dull. I’d much rather see a picture of the title credits singer and the psychedelic club dancers from Godzilla VS Hedorah, for example, than endless shots of giant monster destruction. So, yeah, the novelty of the pictures does wear thin after a while. Even allowing for the fact that there’s a picture of Godzooky on one page (and if you know who that is... watch out mate, you’re showing your age).

Okay, positive thing number three is it covers things I didn’t expect it to. Such as the fact that the Hedorah suit actor got appendicitis while shooting and doctors had to come and operate on him in the studio, while he was still wearing the Hedorah costume, in order to save his life. They cover the translation issues about the title creature's name... giving a pretty convincing reason for the translation change from Gojira to Godzilla, which is apparently used with Toho’s blessing. And they’ve even got a section on Luigi Cozzi’s re-tinted, ‘cut and paste with new footage’ Italian release, affectionately known as Cozilla (a film I’d not even heard of until I purchased a bootleg of it last year... yeah, I’ll watch it and review it eventually people). The downside is, of course, that for all the things it includes, it misses out tenfold, loads of other facts that could have been put in here. And it even leaves out things like, in the section dedicated to the comics... well, probably the most famous comic book incarnation of them all. I mean, how do you write a section on the comic book versions and not include Marvel’s late 1970s series of Godzilla - King Of The Monsters comic.

Similarly, if you have a section on American film appearances but fail to mention that a drawing of the character appears in Kong - Skull Island, which is actually the second entry in the interconnected US Monserverse films based on Godzilla and his kaiju brethren, then I just don’t know what to say. So, yeah, that’s a bit short sighted, especially when the third and fourth films in the series follow on from the Kong movie.

Two more things. One, the writer uses the term “an horrific sight” at one point. Nope, totally wrong and I hate it when ‘toffs’ use this kind of incorrect language. It’s “a horrific sight” with a hard H, thank you very much. What planet do these people come from? Also... I can only hope the writer has updated some of the Wikipedia entries for some of the subjects covered there himself... because I certainly don’t want to mention the term plagiarism here, for sure. Which I’m not.

And I don’t think I have much more to say about this one. Overall I enjoyed Godzilla - The Official Guide To The King Of The Monsters and, certainly I wish I’d had a copy of this to pore over when I was first re-discovering the character many decades ago. It’s a perfect thing for beginners to the world of Godzilla for sure and, even jaded old fans like myself should get something out of it. That being said, it’s not the essential guide it makes itself out to be and, I think a proper book of well over a thousand pages with each of the many films given at least one 40 page chapter of their own, would have been more welcome (and I’m hoping that happens sometime, to be sure). But, yeah, it’s a nice looking beast and many people should have some fun with it, I think.

Terror Of Mecha-Godzilla

Mech N’ Roll

Terror Of Mecha-Godzilla
aka Mekagojira no gyakushu
Japan 1975
Directed by Ishirô Honda
Criterion Blu Ray Zone B

It’s funny how one’s perceptions of a movie can change when you revisit it years later. I remember watching  Terror Of Mecha-Godzilla once, almost thirty years ago and thinking that it wasn’t that great (that being said, it was an English VHS version, which was probably the dubbed American cut, I would expect). Looking at it now I realise it’s one of the high points in the series.

This is the ‘last film’ of things in a few ways. Firstly, it was the final Godzilla film in the Showa Era wave (and hence the last in Criterion’s wonderful Showa Era boxed edition). The character would not return to cinemas for another nine years later, rebooted back to being the antagonist rather than hero of the films, with the Heisei Era movies which revisited the monsters and encounters of the original series in ‘modern’, re-imagined ways.

Secondly, it’s the last Godzilla film of the director of the original (and many of the early sequels), Ishirô Honda. He decided to do this film on a freelance basis, years after he had been ‘let go’ by the struggling Toho, because he liked that the woman who wrote the original script was from his area and I think he realised there was an interesting plot at the heart of this one, which is still effectively a direct sequel to the previous movie in the series.

Thirdly, not only was it’s Honda’s last Godzilla movie, it was his last feature length film period. Although, as I’ve mentioned before, he afterwards went to work as assistant director on some of the films of his good friend Akira Kurosawa. I personally belive it’s Honda’s assured direction of this one which makes the film superior to many of the other, later entries in the Showa Era movies.

Look at the lengthy opening credits sequence, for example. Honda chooses to play selected highlights of Jun Fukuda’s footage from the final fight of Godzilla VS Mecha-Godzilla (reviewed here), by way of a recap, of sorts. Also, true to Honda’s ‘very slow burn’ approach, since Godzilla only turns up in the film about two thirds of the way through, it’s a way of giving the viewers a taste of what’s to come and keep them in their seats. However, the way this is edited together is far more exciting and attention grabbing than it was in the original film the footage was culled from. This is not a failing of Fukuda, perhaps, since it obviously is paced faster but, I did find it interesting how there was even a sense of gravitas to the clash of these two titans in this revisited opening as opposed to just the humour of watching it the first time around.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that while the opening credits are playing out, we have the return of another old, absentee from the series for a while in the form of composer extraordinaire Akira Ifukube... and it’s great to hear his original Godzilla march playing over this titanic battle. In fact, in terms of the first two thirds of this movie, I’d say this is right up there as one of Ifukube’s finest Godzilla scores, although, towards the end, is does tend to sound like he’s constantly playing the same cue over and over, it has to be said.

The plot of this film involves the wreckage of the Mecha-Godzilla under the surface of the sea going missing. A submarine searching for it is destroyed by a dinosaur called Titanosaurus. For some reason, the good guy scientist at the Japanese equivalent of an Oceanic research lab are puzzled as to how a dinosaur could suddenly be alive. I’m more puzzled, bearing in mind they all clearly demonstrate they have a working knowledge of not only Godzilla’s various appearances... but also many of his kaiju antagonists and allies... that they are suddenly surprised there’s another one. But, hey... whatever!

Anyway, Dr. Mashumi, played by Akihiko Hirata, is helping the aliens from Black Hole Planet 3 (the antagonists of the previous movie) by controlling Titanosaurus and also helping them with their super duper, ‘rebuilt and improved from the previous wreckage’ version of Mecha-Godzilla. He does this because a) he is an embittered man who was sacked 15 years before for believing in dinosaurs and controlling them (which makes no sense, see previous paragraph) and b) because they saved his daughter when she got accidentally electrocuted helping him. His daughter, Katsura, played by the beautiful Tomoko Ai, was given robotic insides and helps control Titanosaurus. When she takes a knock later in the film, they also bury the controller of Mecha-Godzilla in her, to make things easier. Probably shouldn’t have fallen in love with one of the good guys then, I guess. Which is what is really at the heart of this story and probably what drew Honda to it... can a cybernetic girl still love and have human thoughts and feelings. Gee, I guess so, is what the writer and director conclude here. By the way, if you’re wondering why the name Akihiko Hirata, who plays Dr. Mashumi, looks familiar, he’s no stranger to having parts in various Godzilla films over the years and it was he, of course, who played the doomed hero Dr. Serizawa who created the Oxygen Destroyer in the original Gojira (aka Godzilla, reviewed by me here).

There are a couple of things of note in this one, such as a prisoner of the aliens being gunned down with multiple bullets and the director actually using blood squibs... which you wouldn’t really expect to see in a movie made specifically for the Children's Champion Film Festival in Japan. Similarly, there is some nudity, of a sort, when Katsura is undergoing surgery and her mechanical innards are being repaired... her breasts are clearly visible here. Admittedly, they’re bizarre, prosthetic breasts such as you might find on a department store mannequin but this didn’t stop the footage from being censored in the US release of the film.

Other than that it’s kaiju shenanigans as usual but Honda genuinely brings a certain levity to the proceedings and, like many of his previous movies, takes things quite slow. It’s the first time in a while Godzilla hasn’t had an ally other than the humans to help him defeat his foes and, arguably this is noticeable. He gets beaten up quite badly by Titanosaurus and Mecha-Godzilla in this one and, it has to be said, without the humans blocking Titanosaurus’ controls with sonic waves and Katsura killing herself to relinquish control of Mecha-Godzilla for the good of humanity, then Godzilla wouldn’t have had a chance here. As it is, he gets to swim off into the sunset and this is his goodbye for the original cycle of films.

Criterions presentation of the film is wonderful, as are all of their entries (barring the ‘hidden on a different disc’ and slightly less quality transfer of the Japanese version of King Kong VS Godzilla, reviewed here). This really is the only set of these you need to be going for if you don’t speak Japanese and want a quality presentation of the material. Terror Of Mecha-Godzilla is a fine film from the franchise although, you kinda need to see the previous film to get all the references. Definitely it would be high on my list of Showa Era films, for sure and, as such, is one of my recommendations in the series. As is the wonderful Criterion boxed edition, Spine Number 1000 for all you Criterionphiles out there. Definitely worth the investment... these films have never looked better in English speaking territories.

Godzilla VS Megalon

Maim, Jet & Scratch

Godzilla VS Megalon
aka Gojira tai Megaro
Japan 1973
Directed by Jun Fukuda & Yoshimitsu Banno
Criterion Blu Ray Zone B

This is another one of those films which I loved in my twenties but, looking at it now, just seems like one of the lesser and most disappointing entries in the Godzilla series, although there’s also lots to enjoy and it’s still a heck of a lot more interesting than the previous movie, Godzilla VS Gigan (reviewed here).

Okay, so we hear that those pesky humans have been testing bombs again on a remote island.. the consequences of which can also be felt on Monster Island. You might ask why this would be the case and the answer seems to me to be two fold. Firstly, Godzilla doesn’t properly turn up in this movie until almost 50 mins into the 80 minute running time... so it’s kind of a way, I believe, of pacifying the audience, showing that it really is a Godzilla movie they have come here to see. There have been a lot of rumours that, in response to a young boy who won a design a creature competition for Toho, that his drastically changed creation (to the point that the crying young prize winner was inconsolable at the changes Toho made to the design), renamed Jet Jaguar, would be the sole headliner of the movie. Although that makes sense in many ways, there is apparently no real evidence to suggest that was the case, from what I understand. So yeah, they show Godzilla to remind the audience and, the other thing the studio gets to do is to use old footage from Monster Island at this point to pad out the running time.

Then, after this footage we have the opening credits and a kid in a wonderful little robot boat in a lake, which looks like three colourful dolphins, with the two side dolphins acting like paddles. However, his inventor dad and his friend almost can’t get the kid back after a fissure is opened in a series of earthquakes, one of which drains this lake. Luckily, the inventor friend has his handy “rope launcher” with him on the picnic because, yeah, this is just what you would take on a picnic, right? Anyway, the three escape the disruption and go back to the scientist’s pad where they fail to stop two thugs who are interested in the father’s latest project, the robot Jet Jaguar. But they do leave behind a red button and some red sand which, on scientific investigation... and I’ve no idea how this is science but I’ll suspend my disbelief here... they figure out comes from 2000 miles beneath the sea and is similar to sand found on Easter Island (which, as I said in my review of Gamera VS Jiger - right here), was all the rage at the time.

It turns out that survivors of the ancient cities of Lemuria and Mu (Atlantis), which were swallowed up by the Earth’s oceans, have built an underwater kingdom called Seatopia, complete with silly costumes and dancing girls. They are fed up with the horrible land dwellers testing bombs which have disastrous consequences for them, so they unleash Megalon... a giant bug with a star on his head that makes him look like a badly dressed Christmas tree that can spit bombs out of its mouth... to destroy humanity (later on, he accidentally swallows one of his own bombs when it fires straight up at Godzilla but lands back in his own mouth, which slows him down for a bit).

For some reason, the Seatopians need Jet Jaguar to tell Megalon what to do for about a quarter of an hour and there’s also a sub-plot where the scientist and his little nipper are kidnapped and driven in a container to be dropped in the cracks where the sunken lake... um... sank... only to be rescued by their friend in a highly non-sensical car and bike chase. Actually I have to ask how ocean dwellers suddenly got so proficient at riding motor bikes and cars. I mean, not quite so good that they can stop the guy they’re chasing but, still, pretty good for people who lived for thousands of years under the sea.

Finally the scientists regain control of Jet Jaguar but then, because he’d had his mechanical brain ‘stimulated by battle’, he gains free will and battles Megalon himself while waiting for Godzilla to arrive, whom he summons for aid. However, the Seatopians have also summoned help, this time from space, as the previous movie’s main villain, Gigan, arrives to help Megalon destroy humanity and its defenders. This is also, of course, in order that lots of footage of Gigan fighting Godzilla could be recycled from the previous films, along with various building carnage which, perhaps not surprisingly, is hardly ever in the same shot as the monsters inflicting the damage. Well, at least day and night footage doesn’t fluctuate so dramatically like it did in the previous movie but budgets at Toho were really stretched by this point in the cycle.

At one point, to make the ‘big fight’ more interesting, Jet Jaguar suddenly grows to giant kaiju size. Now I thought we were going to get some kind of bizarre pseudo-scientific explanation of how he manages to change size at will, such as organic metal or redistribution of molecules but, no, according to his creator... and I quote... “His determination made him grow this big.” Oh, well that’s a neat trick then. Must make a mental note to be more determined.

The fight scenes themselves are ludicrously bad, with Godzilla and Jet Jaguar teaming up to fight Megalon and Gigan and with all the beasts making signs and waving at each other etc like they’re human. A lot of the footage is recycled and spliced in with new stuff but it’s all just a bit dull to watch for any real amount of time, truth be told. It doesn’t help that Megalon’s signature move is to jump instead of walk. A really terrible, bizarre looking, series of progressive two legged hops which look about as credible as... insert least credible thing you’ve seen here...and which will probably make your eyes roll out of their sockets while you laugh at the unintentional hilarity. Things took on more poignancy about the sad state of affairs at Toho when I was researching this after watching it and found that the Megalon suit was extremely heavy and so it took the suit actor and the technicians huge efforts to manage those stupid looking jumps.

Later on, when Godzilla is throwing Megalon around, it’s pretty obvious that there’s no actual actor in the Megalon suit because every time The Big G throws him onto the ground, his floppy legs bend the wrong way. Other than this, when the military get involved, it’s just the usual live fireworks fired at the suit actors as a stand in for the shells of the cannons and, yeah, it just doesn’t look great.

One last thing I’ll menton is the music. Riichirô Manabe’s score doesn’t recycle any of Ifukube’s old themes and it’s not anywhere near the masterpiece of a score that the same composer supplied for Godzilla Vs Hedorah (reviewed here), although it does recycle a Godzilla theme from that one. It’s also interesting in that it’s a lot lighter in tone and, for a lot of the time, really doesn’t match the drama of the action, instead playing through the scenes with a kind of elevator pop muzak style. It does, however, have an interesting theme for Jet Jaguar which gets expanded into a full blown song for the film’s final minute or so. Which for me was probably the best part of the movie... a song very much in the style of the Gamera song found in rival Daiei movies around this time.

And that’s me just about done with Godzilla Vs Megalon. It’s not a film I could recommend to most people but, obviously, you can’t miss this one if you are into Godzilla movies. It’s definitely not Toho’s finest hour and their would be only two more films in the series before the first cycle of Godzilla films had run their course.

Godzilla VS Gigan

Gigan Counter

Godzilla VS Gigan
aka Chikyû kogeki meirei:
Gojira tai Gaigan
Japan 1972
Directed by Jun Fukuda & Yoshimitsu Banno
Toho/Criterion Collection Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, next up in my revisit of the original Godzilla films, courtesy of Criterion’s Godzilla - The Showa Era Blu Ray set, is Godzilla VS Gigan. Now, when I last watched this, maybe 25 -30 years ago on a PAL VHS tape, I seem to remember I quite liked it. Looking at it now though, I have to say it’s one of the worst in the series of films of this era although, as in a lot of them, it still has some interesting moments.

The film starts off, after a quick appearance by The Big G himself, on an opening credits sequence with a nice Akira Ifikube ostinato style credits march. As it happens, Ifikube was not actually involved with this film and all the music in this one composed by him is just needle dropped in from his previous Godzilla scores. We then get a nice, moving camera montage over several black and white comic book panels to introduce the main protagonist as an aspiring comic book artist. From this point on, though, which is only a few seconds after the opening titles, it would be fair to say the film rapidly goes downhill.

Okay, so comic book guy is not having much luck at finding employment so his... well he calls her his mother but she’s as young as he is and seems to act more like some kind of agent or sister so... I don’t know what relationship she has with him but she sends him to get a job at a relatively new company who are building a giant theme park called World Children’s Land. They even have a big tower with a lift on it built in the shape of Godzilla, at the heart of the theme park.

However, after some shenanigans with a man and woman who are, shall we say, concerned individuals... it becomes clear that the main players at World Children’s Land are all ‘space cockroaches’ who are masquerading as humans (but their shadows still show as cockroaches if you catch them in the right light). Their much publicised plan for bringing ‘Absolute Peace’ to the entire word really involves destroying Godzilla (which they fail to do) and bringing King Ghidorah and the new monster Gigan, from space, to decimate the cities of the world so they can live in peace on our planet in their cockroachy ways.

And it’s mostly painful to watch. The lead actor is almost comic in his ‘over selling’ of his facial expressions (perhaps he came from theatre, where that acting style works better than for screen acting?) and the various 'to'ing and 'fro'ing in and out of danger involving him and his new group of friends... and rescuing the brother of one of them before disrupting the plans of the cockroachy aliens... is kinda tiresome. All I will say about all that stuff is that it’s lucky his ‘sister/agent/whatever the hell she is supposed to be’ is a kung fu gal who can karate chop the aliens when they need to get out of a tight jam.

Now, there are a couple of things which are of interest. Number one is that Godzilla and his buddy Anguirus, from Monster Island, can speak to each other by crying out and then having their words translated as comic book speech bubbles filled with kanji (subsequently translated in the subtitles). So, yeah, nice but extremely silly. I think they dropped this element after this movie, if memory serves.

Another interesting thing is that Godzilla bleeds quite a lot in this one... finally. This was a response to children constantly asking why Godzilla never bleeds in battle and, I suspect, this is probably due to the more violent kaiju punch ups in rival studio Daiei’s various Gamera movies. So, yeah, when Gigan activates his front chest plates... which basically serve the same purpose as a giant buzz saw, you do finally get to see some arterial spray coming out of poor Gojira. Incidentally, Gigan doesn’t do much else in terms of fighting style to be honest. His only other move seems to be sweeping down with his sharpened arms to either swat jet fighters out of the air or bash a monster on the top of their head. I guess, because of his fighting style, I’d have to say that Gigan is pretty much the Bud Spencer of the kaiju world, for sure.

Overall, though, the film is very bad. The monster battles are made up with a huge chunk of footage from previous movies thrown into the mix... which is why the costumes and models don’t match each other from scene to scene (and why you have fights taking place at both night and day in the same scene). The model shot of Ghidorah flying whenever Gigan is in the same shot has absolutely no movement in it at all and looks just like a kids plastic model on a string... as opposed to footage from other movies where he has the full movement. You can see the budget was completely shredded for this film and also, special effects legend Eji Tsubura had died two years prior to this movie, which obviously doesn’t help. But even so, the effects still look cheap and the mismatching of the footage looks pretty bad all the way through.

Another head scratcher is... well... why the heck is King Ghidorah alive in this one anyway? We’d previously seen him killed in Destroy All Monsters (reviewed here). Well, the usual defensive explanation people seem to give is that Destroy All Monsters was set in the future and this film isn’t. Okay, fair enough but, if that’s the case, wasn’t Monster Island also started up in that same film set in the future then? Honestly, the continuity here is a bit loose at best. This would be King Ghidorah’s last appearance is a Showa era film, although he would obviously return in the various other era's movies since then. After this, he was also in a few episodes of the TV show Zone Fighter... but I don’t know anything about those.

And that’s me done on this one. I don’t think much of it, to be honest. It was supposed to be an antidote to the mis-step Toho thought they had made with Godzilla Vs Hedorah (which I reviewed here and which is, in fact, my favourite Showa Era Godzilla film) but, as far as I can see, they got something which is truly cheap and horrible as a follow up. There would be only three more Showa Era Godzilla films after this one and, yeah, I’ll be reviewing those on here very soon.

Destroy All Monsters

 

Crouching Eiga,
Hidden Dragging

Destroy All Monsters
aka Kaijû sôshingeki
Japan 1968 Directed by Ishirô Honda
Toho/Criterion Collection
Blu Ray Zone B

Well, the next up in my rewatch of The Showa Era Godzilla films, courtesy of Criterion’s lovely Blu Ray Book Edition, is Destroy All Monsters and... well it’s a bit of a curio. Especially since only one monster is actually destroyed in it.

Depending on which version of the film you are watching (Japanese or American), the film takes place in Earth’s far future... at the end of the century (Japanese) or 1999 (American). After being introduced to some of the characters on the moonbase we are straight into a title sequence that, for some reason, I have no recollection of in terms of visuals but... well... the opening title music is absolutely stunning and you can tell right away that Akira Ifukube was back on board. One of the biggest strengths of this film is its wonderful score and, even if the visuals and drama in this were terrible, it almost wouldn’t matter because I spent most of the film tapping my toes along to the music.

As it happens, it doesn’t have terrible visuals or drama. Like Honda’s previous films in the series, this one is strong on story and plot twists but, unlike his earlier works, this one gets straight to the monsters after the end credits. It seems that in our future, the monsters from various Toho films all live together on Monster Island... so Godzilla, Minilla, Baragon, Mothra, Rodan, Varan, Manda, Gorosaurus and Kumonga. Eagle eyed monster movie spotters will no doubt wonder why some of these creatures are still alive, having been killed off in earlier kaiju eiga but, I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you on that one.

Anyway, tragedy strikes as the people in the control sections of Monster Island (referred to as Monsterland in this iteration) are gassed... along with all the monsters. What is going on? Then tragedy strikes as the ‘escaped’ monsters start attacking the rest of the world. Rodan attacks Moscow, Baragon (kinda) destroys Paris, Mothra sorts out Beijing, Manda is malevolent in London and Godzilla takes out New York. What’s going on?

Oh, wait. The monsters didn’t escape at all. Instead they, along with the human staff of the island, are under the control of the Kilaaks, a race of space aliens who want to take over our planet. It’s up to Captain Katsuo Yamabe (played by series regular Akira Kubo... who you might recognise from films like Mantango - Attack Of The Mushroom People and some of Kurosawa’s masterpieces) and his trusty moon rocket crew, with the aid of Dr. Yoshido (played by another Gojira and Kurosawa regular, Jun Tazaki) to help the military resist and get up to all kinds of shenanigans as each twist and turn of the plot is revealed.

Luckily, the humans finally defeat the aliens who have been calling the shots on the moon and then regain control of the various ‘Earth kaiju’ so they can lead a big, all out monster attack on the alien’s not so secret base under Mount Fuji. One complication is, as an eleventh hour surprise for everyone, the aliens summon space monster King Ghidora. There is much glee from the alien antagonists as they tell their human enemy, “Earth’s monsters are no match for him.” Which seems to be a bold claim and I can only assume the aliens haven’t watched the previous Godzilla films to feature King Ghidorah. The Big G has needed much less aid than he has in this one to try to take down his old, three headed foe and, predictably, the ‘big monster team’ fight ferociously and suffer no casualties as they defeat the behemoth. Little Minilla, Godzilla’s son, puts in a finishing touch by blowing one of his cute, trademark smoke rings over Ghidorah’s last, surviving head, which proves to be the surprising last straw that breaks Ghidorah’s defensive back. What’s more surprising though, for a film set in the Earth’s far future in the year 1999, is that little Minilla hasn’t grown to become a big Godzilla like his father already.

This film probably has both more monster and human VS alien action in it than the majority of Honda’s work in the Godzilla series but, in amongst all the set pieces, he still finds time to give us bright colours, nicely lit sets and some creative shot designs. There’s a scene where a doctor who has been taken over by the aliens is being interrogated by Katsuo and Dr. Yashida, in which a kind of decorative screen is placed between the three actors and the camera. The elabourate screen has three circles in a row going the whole width of the shot and from the top to the bottom of the screen. The back of the doctor’s head is large and more than fills the middle circle. However, with the perspective of the shot, the other two actor’s heads are perfectly framed in the centre of the two circles on either side of this character. Yeah... there’s some great stuff here.

This was supposed to be the last hurrah for the Godzilla films as the box office returns for the kaiju eiga were diminishing with every new entry... thus the idea to have a load of monsters in the one film (it would be many decades later before this many monsters in the series would be matched... or exceeded, in fact). However, this was a pretty entertaining movie and, I guess the audience thought so too at the time because, this one was a huge financial success for the company and kept them going with the Godzilla series for quite a few more films comprising the Showa era.

And I honestly don’t have much more to say on that. I think Destroy All Monsters is one of the most fun in the series of films and, despite the unintentional hilarity of many of the scenes (or possibly because of it), it’s certainly one I’d watch more enthusiastically than some of the others. Next up for the series, though, would be a very different kind of Godzilla movie indeed. I’ll let you know about it after I’ve watched it again soon.

Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men

Fungi With The Kaiju Eye

Mushroom Clouds and
Mushroom Men - The Fantastic
Cinema Of Ishiro Honda
by Peter H. Brothers
CreateSpace Books ISBN: 9781492790358

I’ve been wanting to acquire and read a copy of Peter H. Brothers’ book Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men - The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda for quite a while now and I’m kinda glad I held off for so long because the one I was gifted by a very special friend on my birthday proudly states on its cover that it’s a “Revised and Expanded Edition” so, yeah, I’m glad I didn’t have a prior copy from before this new edition was launched.

Now, I have to say that overall it’s a really great book and really held up to my expectations in most departments but there are also a couple of criticisms I could level at it too and, since they’re mostly minor and don’t affect my overall positive reception of the book, I’ll just get my main problem with it out of the way first so I can concentrate on the good stuff for the rest of the review.

Which is... it’s full of typos and I don’t know why. Especially since it’s a revised and expanded edition. It feels like nobody actually bothered to proofread this because, frankly, it’s over 400 pages long (and it’s coffee table tome sized with very few pictures) and so, in all this density of very welcome text, there are maybe 3 to 4 typos per double paged spread once it gets going. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me but that’s my only real glaring problem with it and the rest is all good.

My only other slight concern was that it turns out that it doesn’t actually cover all of the films that Ishiro Honda directed. Which I thought was a puzzling omission until I started reading it and realised just how much in depth research and coverage there is here on the films that are included. I’ll side with the author on this one in that, the book is a bit of a doorstop as it is and to try and cover all of Honda’s creative output in the same fashion as what’s been done here would have been... well... an almost impractical task. And, as I read further, I have to say I appreciated and applauded the author’s decision to limit himself to just the horror, fantasy and science-fiction films of Ishiro Honda.

So in the opening of the book, Brothers talks a little bit about Honda’s movie making colleagues and friends. So people like the producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, the special effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya (I read a good book about him many years ago) and also his great friend Akira Kurosawa, who regular readers of this blog will know is my favourite director. After Honda found himself retired from directing after his last picture, Terror Of MechaGodzilla, Kurosawa would often employ him as his assistant director on his films in their twilight years and even, on occasion, during their early careers (Honda was also assistant director on Kurosawa’s wonderful Stray Dog, for example). Apparently, Honda had a late start graduating to directing features because of his career in the war but, it turns out that Kurosawa was also a good friend to Honda’s wife when her husband was on one of his many tours of duty for the Japanese military in the 1940s.

The writer also says some interesting things about Honda’s signature style of directing including something I’d never really thought of before but which rings absolutely true now I reflect on the many movies I’ve seen by this director... that they don’t focus primarily on one heroic character and, instead, they always come across more as ensemble pieces with a number of important characters all getting their own screen time. In the second section here, the writer fills us in on Honda’s life both before and also after the films under the spotlight in this tome, leading up to the point where the book splits up into several more chapters, each split into mini sections highlighting each of the director’s fantasy films in more detail. Much more detail, as it turns out.

So the films covered in this book, not necessarily under these variant titles but I’ve basically chosen the title choices I know of from various DVD and Blu Ray releases as a trade off for familiarity so the average movie goer can see what’s explored here, are... Godzilla (reviewed here), Beast-Human Snowman (reviewed here), Rodan, The Mysterians, The H Man (reviewed here), Varan, The Battle In Outer Space (reviewed here), The Human Vapour, Mothra (reviewed here), Gorath, King Kong VS Godzilla (reviewed here), Mantango - Attack Of The Mushroom People, Atragon, Mothra VS Godzilla (reviewed here), Space Monster Dogorah, Ghidorah - The Three Headed Monster (reviewed here), Frankenstein Conquers The World, Invasion Of The Astro Monster (reviewed here), War Of The Gargantuas, King Kong Escapes (reviewed here), Destroy All Monsters, Latitude Zero, Godzilla’s Revenge, Yog - Monster From Space and Terror of MechaGodzilla.

So starting with Godzilla, we get the origins of the character as an attempt to cash in on the success of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (which in itself was a late cash in on the original King Kong) and with Honda coming on board after another director refused the assignment, retooling it to align with his world view and becoming a reflection on the perils of nuclear power (inspired by the Lucky Dragon 5 fishing boat incident still very much in the Japanese consciousness) and, of course, accidentally kick-starting the kaiju eiga cycle in Japan. And each film is looked at in detail with each long section going roughly to the same formula. Brothers starts off with a brief overview of the film and also a summary, then he’ll talk a little about the cinematography, then he’ll go into all the effects work done on the picture, and then he’ll go into a detailed account of the score on each film (a great many of these were scored by the great Akira Ifukube, of course), then he’ll talk about the various actors and how they perform in their roles in the movie and then he’ll talk about the critical and box office reception of each film, sometimes bringing in the various incidents and elements which would lead to the next assignment in Honda’s string of fantastic cinema.

And, of course, he’ll highlight how Honda’s style and approach would both change and sometimes adhere to his original ideas over the years, not to mention telling some great stories that I’d never heard of before (or forgotten) along the way. Such as the incident during the shooting of Godzilla when the guy in the suit got electrocuted in a water tank and had to be giving resuscitation in order to get his heart beating again. And again when the suit actor drowned on King Kong Vs Godzilla and had to similarly be brought back to life. Or the time when Ifukube felt betrayed and angered by Honda for cow-towing to producer pressure and moving the placement of a musical cue where he didn’t want it on Godzilla Vs Mothra. He’ll also highlight any problems Honda might have had with various actors and actresses over the years and there are some interesting incidents, both good and bad, with some of the American stars he got to be in his films to sell them overseas over the years... so you’ll get a little insight into people like Rhodes Reason, Nick Adams, Russ Tamblyn and Joseph Cotton as the volume progresses.

And, overall, yeah... great book. This must have been an exhausting one to write and put together and you can see that a huge amount of research has gone into this one. I’m really pleased to have had the opportunity to finally read Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men - The Fantastic Cinema Of Ishiro Honda and I would wholeheartedly recommend this to fans and followers of either the director or the kinds of Japanese fantasy films of which Honda was one of the absolute masters (and arguably the originator of... at least in terms of the proliferation of kaiju eiga which came after his first go round). If you like these kinds of movies then do yourself a favour and give this one a read... very illuminating and entertaining, to boot.

Son Of Godzilla

 

 

 

It’s A Dad, Dad,
Dad, Dad World

Son Of Godzilla
aka Kaijûtô no kessen:
Gojira no musuko
Japan 1967 Directed by Jun Fukuda
Criterion Blu Ray Zone B

Jun Fukada returned in the next Godzilla film in the franchise, after his work in the previous film in the series, Ebirah - Horror Of The Deep (reviewed here). This one, Son Of Godzilla, sees the transformation or, some might say, devolution of the Godzilla character completed, going from out and out villanous menace in the early films, slowly evolving into heroic defender and protector of Japan and, for this one, he and his son Minilla (or Minira in the original Japanese, obviously, as short for Mini-Gojira, I suppose) are pretty much the cutesy comic relief of the film.

The movie starts with an insert shot of some planes in stormy weather who stumble upon Godzilla at sea, who himself seems to be mysteriously called to an island. The timing seems almost off here in terms of the timeline of events in the movie as Godzilla arrives (again) on the island later in the film but I’m guessing that, since the film is mostly ‘monster light’ for the first half, this and another scene showing a Kamacuras, one of the giant preying mantis creatures that populate the island which is the film’s only setting, are here to give us a glimpse of what we are all waiting for later in the story when the plot decides to get out of the way.

Said plot includes a Professor played by Tadao Takashima... we all know he’s a professor because barely a shot goes by with him in it where, no matter what is going on, he doesn’t have a pipe dangling out of his mouth... and his team of volunteer researchers who are doing weather experiments to try and freeze the island so we can later, in 100 years or so, transform fallow regions of the Earth like the Sahara desert into something which a starving and over populated mankind can grow things in to feed the planet. However, a young reporter played by Akira Kubo travels to the island to get a story about what they are doing there. Cue the usual antics until the reporter and professor bond and the reporter is allowed to stay... although nobody believes him when the sees the only woman on the island, played by the very interesting but underused actress Beverly Maeda, who has survived on the island alone since the death of her archaeologist dad in the 1950s.

However, their experiments go wrong as the calls from a giant egg upset the delicate controls of the experiment and they end up making it even more tropical and unlivable as an island. This causes the mantises to grow even larger and, also, for the egg to hatch to be Minilla, Son Of Gozilla, who is in immediate peril from said Mantises until his father finally arrives to kick ass, teach his son how to blow fire... in a wonderful and much re-used sequence in the movies where the cute, young tyke keeps blowing little smoke rings instead... and see off the other main monster in the film, a giant spider called Kumonga.

It’s a playful and fun film, for sure but, it’s a real sea change in the series for fans of The Big G as he originally used to be, continuing the trend from the last installment. Right from the start, with Masaru Satô’s quite wonderful and dynamic score, the stage is set with the whimsical and comic nature of the film played full throttle in terms of the musical content. It’s a fun listen away from the movie and equally appropriate to the on-screen visuals but... it’s a far cry from the serious but beautiful melodies of the films scored by Ifikube. Still, great stuff though.

One strange thing that happens, around about the twenty minute mark, is that the film suddenly takes on a narrator for about a minute, to explain to the audience just what is going on as a result of the failed experiment of the professor and his crew. It’s almost like the producers decided the plot was somehow just a little too convoluted for the target audience and decided to over explain things at the post-production stage, with absolutely no context as to who the narrator is and why his voice suddenly enters and then exits the narrative so inexplicably. It doesn’t hurt the film as such... just seems to be fairly superfluous in a story which doesn’t use this kind of technique from start to end so, yeah, a strange one.

The fight choreography is similar to the bizarre shenanigans when Godzilla fought the giant crab monster Ebirah in the previous film but, this time, the emphasis is on trying to put Minilla in comic situations where he gets inadvertently bumped for his troubles or, a lot of the time, is trapped by his enemies and has to call out for his poppa to come and help. For example, when Godzilla throws a rock at two mantis creatures they catch it, batting it back and forth between each other before launching it in Godzilla’s general direction, only for it to hit Minilla on the head instead and send him comically falling backwards. It’s that kind of film but... no argument from me because, at least it’s a fun movie and sometimes the potency of a really good, broad entertainment is forgotten with ‘serious’ film makers.

That being said, the film doesn’t have much in terms of substance to it, as you can probably tell and, when it ends, with the island freezing in the snow after an experiment goes right, allowing the pesky humans to escape, it takes one of the characters to tell us that Godzilla and son will be fine, they’ll just go into hibernation for a bit. Not often that kind of reassurance was given for the monster characters in a lot of these movies and I’m surprised they didn’t decide to bring back the bizarre 'narrator of the moment' to tell us this instead.

But there you have it, not much more to say other than this is an immensely enjoyable film and Criterion’s Godzilla - The Showa Era set gives us a nice, Blu Ray transfer which is the best way to see the movie. By this time the writers seem to have run out of ideas but some of the more interesting (and even more fun) Showa Era films were still to come.

Ebirah, Horror Of The Deep

Crusty Asians Up For Crabs!

Ebirah, Horror Of The Deep
(aka Gojira, Ebirâ, Mosura:
Nankai no daiketto)
Japan 1966 Directed by Jun Fukuda
Toho/Criterion Collection -
Godzilla - The Showa Era Box Set  Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so the seventh of the Showa Era Godzilla films, Ebirah, Horror Of the Deep, feels like a complete sea change in terms of the direction the series was heading in previously. It’s also the culmination of the little stabs of humour and humanisation that have been showing up as part of The Big G’s personality in the previous few films. Although he’s technically not a good guy here, he does save everyone in this and at the end of the film the human cast talk about how he really is the hero here.

This one was originally going to feature King Kong taking on Toho’s new crab monster (shrimp monster in Japanese if you go by the name but... yeah... it’s pretty clearly a giant crab) instead of Godzilla but rights issues etc means it soon developed as part of the Gojira franchise. Maybe that’s why Godzilla spends the first two thirds of the movie asleep. Which seems to be a common factor because the other big monster co-star here, Mothra, manages to stay asleep on her island until maybe the last ten minutes of the film, no matter how much the natives of Infant Island try to wake her from her slumber. Maybe she realised that the tiny, miniaturised twins who are her caretakers were, for the first time in the series, not played by The Peanuts but, instead, a different singing duet (they’re really not all that good as stand ins, I reckon). Regardless, as far as I’m aware this was the last time that Mothra would appear in her moth form (as opposed to her larvae form) in the Showa era movies. Not much of a swan song, to be honest.

Anyway, it’s a slow and convoluted plot. After a fishing boat goes down in the sea, the brother of one of the victims, after his mother consults a psychic, is convinced he’s still alive... but can’t interest the authorities in looking any further. So he does what anybody in his state of worry does... goes to watch a dance ‘’til you drop' contest in the hopes of winning a yacht to go look for himself. Alas, when he arrives, the contest has already been going for three days already. Fortunately for him, two of the people who drop out right at that moment say they’ll show him a yacht as they know where there are loads. After trespassing on one, they are startled by a guy already in the yacht. They assume it’s the owner who tells them they can stay the night but, overnight and unbeknown to all, the guy who’s brother is missing casts off with them and the newcomer... who turns out to be only hiding on the boat after a jewel heist... along for the ride.

With me so far? So, anyway, they look for the brother but Ebirah, the giant crab gets in their way and they wash up on shore of an island, finding that many more, mostly some of the inhabitants of Mothra's Infant Island but also the crew of the fishing boat that went down, are being used as slave labour by a shady organisation called The Red Bamboo. They control passage to the island past Ebirah with a yellow liquid and are making deadly, atomic bombs. However, the newcomers find themselves separated and, between them all, manage to accidentally wake the slumbering Godzilla they find in a cave by a clever, lightning strike method (which makes sense if you remember this was originally written to feature the ‘electrifying’ Japanese version of King Kong) while the island is scheduled for detonation and the islanders try to raise Mothra to rescue them.

And, despite the tangled machinations of the story, which I’ve abbreviated here or we’d be here all day, it’s actually not all that interesting, for the most part. The giant monster battles are few and far between and it’s just Godzilla and Ebirah having a go at each other, albeit in a comical fashion, that’s the real draw here. They basically have a game of ping pong with a rock one time followed up by a second volley of ‘rock tennis’ before Godzilla heads the rock like a football towards the crab. When he defeats Ebirah the first time, he even does a little dance in the sea to show his pleasure.

The film is scored by the famous composer Masaru Satô, one of a few in the series composed by him... so it doesn’t have any musical continuity with the Ifukube scores on the majority of the previous films in the series. It also doesn’t have the huge dramatic punch needed for the action scenes and this is very much spoof scoring to a certain extent. Now I know Satô can be very dramatic when he wants to be so my guess is the director really wanted him to play to the comedy of the monster brawls rather than try to make them more substantial in terms of the scoring. So, while I love this composer and the score by itself is a great listen as a series of musical cues in its own right... I’m not sure I’d say the scoring choices on this would have been the same ones I would have made but... yeah... it certainly gives the movie a different atmosphere from the others.

I’ve nothing against a fluffier, fun iteration of the Godzilla character though, who even looks a little like the ‘cookie monster’ from Sesame Street in this movie but... this is not my favourite of those ones and Ebirah, Horror Of The Deep wouldn’t be my first choice if I was looking for a quick monster mayhem’ style distraction either. It’s not a terrible movie by a long shot but... it’s one of the lesser pieces in the Showa era for my money. And as for King Kong? Well, the big ape would indeed make his way into one more Japanese kaiju eiga and that film will be the subject of one of my upcoming kaiju eiga reviews.

Ghidorah - The Three Headed Monster

Ghidorah With Excitement

Ghidorah - The Three Headed Monster
Japan 1964 Directed by Ishirô Honda
Criterion Blu Ray Zone B

So this next kaiju movie, which I am reviewing as part of Criterion’s lovely Spine 1000 box set of The Showa Era of Godzilla films, is very much a direct sequel to the previous film in the series, Godzilla VS Mothra (reviewed here). That’s not to say things haven’t moved on a little in this entry, Ghidora - The Three Headed Monster, as we’ll soon discover but some of the characters (human and kaiju alike) recur and many references are made to the original film.

This one is directed, once again, by Ishirô Honda... who was responsible for kick-starting the series with his original movie Godzilla (reviewed here), as well as directing other films starring both The Big G and a variety of other monsters, such as Mothra (reviewed by me here). And like his previous kaiju eiga, this one has a very slow build up but, where that really seemed to hamper the previous film in the series, this one has a very entertaining plot which is developed over a half an hour before the first monster even turns up... in the form of Rodan (or Radon as he was know  in Japan... wish a legitimate Blu Ray release was available for this monster’s debut feature). In fact, this is probably the best in the series so far since the original Godzilla movie and it never once gets dull.

The opening titles are a bit strange, showing a series of 'moving to freeze frame' monster moments from the forthcoming movie and I can only assume that this was done because of the slow build up on this one (much like the inclusion of ‘home video footage’ of Godzilla in Godzilla Raids Again, reviewed here). In this case, the decision is not the best because, as I said before, the plot development on this one is quite interesting and holds its own against the forthcoming attraction of battling behemoths.

Okay, so lets get to that plot then. Characters and their relationships with each other are established very economically with some nice, catch all lines which make any subsequent patter redundant, so it cuts to the chase very quickly compared to some of the other dialogue writing in the series... for instance, the line when a character is asked if there’s "anything up" is followed up with the answer... “If so, your paper would be on it before us cops.” Stuff like this really moves things along nicely and cuts a lot of extraneous material which might have been there in an alternate approach.

Primarily, the film centres around the princess of a fictional country called Sergina, played by Akiko Wakabayashi. She was in a few of these kinds of films but Bond fans may remember her for her performance as Aki in You Only Live Twice, three years later. Everybody in Sergina seems to dress with big Elizabethan ruffles around their necks, making them look totally out of place in the modern world in which this movie is set. Even their briefly glimpsed military look completely strange, as they all appear to be dressed in bright red Santa suits. Thankfully, not many of the princess’ scenes are set in her home country and she is the unfortunate victim of an assassination plot as her plane explodes from a bomb planted within. Or, at least she would have been if a strange alien voice in her head hadn’t urged her to leave and caused her to jump out into a bright light outside the aircraft before it explodes... could this have something to do with the mysterious UFOs that Naoka, the other female lead played by Yuriko Hoshi, has been researching for her job on the upcoming TV show, Mysteries Of The 20th Century? Pretty likely, I would say.

Confusingly, Yuriko Hoshi was in Godzilla VS Mothra playing a similar but totally different character. It’s puzzling since another of the main protagonists, Professor Miura played by Hiroshi Koizumi, reprises his role from that same film. He is studying one of the ‘mysterious meteors’ with strange properties that have crashed in the area. Meanwhile, the Princess resurfaces as an uncannily true prophet, who walks around in an almost trance-like state warning people to flee, as she believes she is a Venusian who can see into the future. Which she kind of is actually, because the Venusian light thing that rescued her from the plane is obviously controlling her actions.

She warns people to keep away from a mountain, for example, just a short while before Rodan busts his way out of it. Then, after Godzilla goes on the prowl again, out of the blue, she also warns about the creature that's the instigator of the destruction of the Earth, King Ghidora, the three headed monster of the title... who promptly hatches in a strange, phoenix like manner from the mysterious meteor.

Meanwhile (again), Mothra’s tiny guardians, played once again by the pop duo The Peanuts (their third and final appearance in a Godzilla film), are in town for a TV appearance and we are informed that, of the two surviving Mothras from the previous movie, one has passed away. Which is a shame. However, when Ghidorah starts his rampage, The Peanuts summon Mothra (who stays in larvae state for the entire movie) to talk sense into the warring Godzilla and Rodan, in a sequence in which we see Mothra talking to them while The Peanuts translate for the benefit of the audience... and so the stage is set for an epic battle at the end of the movie where Godzilla, Mothra and Rodan team up to battle King Ghidorah.

While all this is going on, we have the cop trying to protect the transformed princess from a group of hit-men who have been sent from Sergina... so we have a Godzilla movie with some proper gun battles in it too, which wouldn’t, it has to be said, look totally out of place in a Seijun Suzuki movie. The second half of the film also features legendary actor Takashi Shimura in his last appearance in a Godzilla film, as yet another new character, Doctor Tsukamoto.

And... it’s a really entertaining movie and a lot better than how I’d remembered it.

The special effects on this one are great and even the scenes where live action and miniature work are blended look pretty good (as opposed to the previous movie). There’s a lovely shot too, where Godzilla rising up out of the sea is preceded by the backs of fleeing whales rippling the surface of the water... this is really nice stuff.

The sound design is a mixed bag though. Nice work with the silenced guns of the villains, so the heroes louder gun shot sounds have their own signature and you can hear just who is doing the shooting at any one time in a gun battle. I’ll never understand, though, why Rodan always seems to sound like a jet engine. That just never works for me.

Akira Ifukube provides a magnificent score for this one and uses his big, ponderous Godzilla main theme a lot. There’s even something like a theremin used for some of the UFO/meteor moments. Curiously, though, his big Godzilla march still doesn’t make a reappearance here, at least that I could hear. There’s a wonderful musical build up when we first see King Ghidorah attack a city and we see the people shutting up shops and fleeing.

There’s a big musical misstep here though, as far as I’m concerned and, yes, I know selling records would have been a priority here... but there’s a brand new Mothra song which The Peanuts perform in two scenes and, well, it’s just not good... although matched visually by some nicely montaged shot compositions, such as the heads of the two blown up large on either side of the frame, superimposed with the chanting natives on Infant Island sandwiched between them.

All in all though, Ghidorah, The Three Headed Monster is a really entertaining and rewatchable entry into the series and brings in the concept of space aliens and space monsters to the films, acting as a great prelude/set up to the next movie in the series the following year, which was always one of my favourites, Invasion Of The Astro-Monster.

It also marks a great turning point in the series because Godzilla starts off as a menace but, when talking to Mothra and revealing his reasons for his former behaviour... and then agreeing to team up and help protect the earth from King Ghidorah... he finally takes on the mantle of heroic protector of Tokyo which would pretty much stick with him for most of the following films in The Showa Era. There’s also a hint at how whacky and comical the character would become as his laughter and amusement at Rodan getting equally covered with Mothra’s semen-like silk is plain old slapstick, pantomime acting... it’s quite hilarious, as are some of the reactions the monsters have to each other during the fights. This is one of the best movies in the series, for my money but... the best was yet to come.