davidmvining Reviews

Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972)

A return to form?

[5/10 · 3 June 2024]

Tomoyuki Tanaka brought back Jun Fukuda to the Godzilla franchise after the...interesting results from Yoshimitsu Banno on Godzilla vs. Hedorah, choosing to go a more traditional monster-mash route from the man who had made Ebirah and Son of Godzilla. There's also a move away from more direct proselytizing about an issue-du-jour and inelegantly inserting messages about how everyone needs to be nice to each other. It's more generically monster-movie stuff with the humans having some small effect on the plot as we wait for monsters to smashy-smash.

Gengo (Hiroshi Ishikawa) is a cartoonist looking for work, selling his incomplete comic book about a homework monster to appeal to kids. He's having no luck even with the help of his friend and business manager Tomoko (Yuriko Hishimi). He gets a meeting with the director (Toshiaki Nishizawa) of Children's Land, a new theme park for children with a monster and peace them and a central tower of Godzilla. The organization is run by a young man named Sudo (Zan Fujita) who can do advanced math while having a conversation. As Gengo leaves the office, having been hired to design a pair of monsters (it never comes to anything, which is a disappointment), the young woman Michiko (Tomoko Umeda) runs out of the building, dropping a reel of magnetic tape, chased by the director and some lackeys. Gengo picks up the tape and meets with her later, along with her friend Shosaku (Minoru Takashima), where he finds out that they have suspicions that the Children's Land organization isn't concerned with peace but subjugation.

It's a fair amount of plot to deal with, but at least the film doesn't completely forget about it once the monster action starts. Essentially, the director and the chairman are insects projecting images of human form over their bodies (there's a small segment dedicated to investigating the people, finding out that they both died a year before), and they have a plan to bring space monsters to Earth to terraform it into a hellscape that they could thrive in. The young people mess up the plan by stealing the tape, the second in a series, and playing it which awakens Godzilla and Anguirus to the danger.

I think what holds me back from appreciating this entry of monster smashy-smash action is that the plotting on the human side while competent largely feels extraneous even within its own context. It mostly becomes about rescuing Michiko's brother, Takashi (Kunio Murai), who is trapped at the Godzilla tower for reasons. The aliens supposedly need him for reasons, but they're never explained and he never seems to do much work. I mean, the rescue attempt with a weather balloon and zipline is amusing, but it ends up feeling like a distraction to the monster action which is just wheeling up.

The aliens bring in King Ghidorah and the new monster, the eponymous Gigan, a metallic-looking creature with a buzzsaw vertically along his belly, but Godzilla and Anguirus have been called too early to put up a decent fight. The aliens control the two alien monsters and the fight goes against the two earthly monsters. This is where I begin to wax poetic about the monster action, but this is the first in a long while where I feel like the monsters are misused.

So, first of all, there's this comic book approach to communication between our two hero monsters. They literally communicate with speech bubbles. Never mind that they are talking in a very human way (Anguirus says OK! A couple of times), but it diminishes them from monsters to something more human, an effect that I've resisted every time it comes up. The next thing is that the early parts of the monster madness are heavily lifted from previous films (to drive down production costs since these films were now being shot cheaply), namely Ghidorah's debut in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. And then, when everything does come together for the big showdown, Ghidorah doesn't have a lot to do and just kind of stands back while Godzilla and Anguirus take on Gigan themselves. It has this placid quality where it feels like things are just stopping when they should be fast, which is an interesting contrast to the previous extended fight in Godzilla vs. Hedorah which was just two monsters against each other, intentionally slow, and more compelling (even if a bit incoherent).

So, the monster stuff isn't great, though it tries. The human stuff is okay but feels like as much a distraction as anything else. It's not bad, but it has little to recommend it beyond some light entertainment that doesn't quite come together as well as it should. It's something of a return to the standard form for the Godzilla franchise, but you know what? The previous film, while not entirely successful, was at least interesting.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

Well, that's certainly interesting

[6/10 · 3 June 2024]

This is probably the most interesting of the Godzilla films. It's the first film by Yoshimitsu Banno, who also wrote the script, and he swung for the fences stylistically and thematically. He wanted a return to the more serious-minded approach to the monster film like in Ishiro Honda's first film while using it as a vehicle to talk about pollution rather than atomic energy. He also brings this weird 60s energy to so much of what happens on screen as to be simply...fascinating. I don't think the overall package works entirely. It's alternately too didactic and forgetful of its theme. Its opening is something of a confusing mess. The extended action scene that ends the film honestly doesn't stitch together from one minute to the next. However, I found it hard to take my eyes off the screen as it moved along.

Pollution is destroying the planet, guys, and a creature is destroying and sinking tankers off the Japanese coast. While out looking for oysters near his seaside home, Ken (Hiroyuki Kawase) sees the creature jump out of the water and go for his father, Dr. Yano (Akira Yamanouchi), a zoologist beneath the water collecting samples. The creature scars Dr. Yano's face, burning half of it (a recuring motif), and Ken gives it the moniker Hedorah (derived from hedoro, the Japanese word for sludge). Ken's uncle (it's not clear at all until later, making this opening just kind of weirdly assembled), Yukio (Toshio Shiba) is something of a Japanese hippie with a singer girlfriend, Miki (Keiko Mari), who sings a song about how all industrialization is bad and the Earth is dying, there are no seas or forests anymore. I mean...the hysteria on display is so on point and over-wrought that it just makes me roll my eyes, especially since it's being sung in a swanky nightclub that surely used many of the materials she's calling as being in the water in its construction.

This whole first act is just weirdly put together. The connection between Yuko and Dr. Yano isn't brought up until they're just in a car together. The attack on Dr. Yano isn't actually shown. There's a credit sequence that feels more like a Bond opening number than anything from Godzilla. Miki is wearing a weird, nature-themed onesie as she sings. The film picks up when Hedorah becomes more land-based, evolving to something amphibian-like, crawling onto a dock, and sucking up the pollutants from smokestacks. Banno directed the special effects along with Teruyoshi Nakano, and most of the special effects sequences happen at night, which is a benefit. It allows for a certain obfuscation in the visuals that make the miniatures look a bit more believable while the camera speed tends to keep to slow motion which helps sell scale.

The other major thing about the monster mash stuff is that Hedorah is very different. Not only is he made of minerals and feeds off of pollution, not only can he change shape from a walking hulk to a flying version, but he excretes sludge which burns Godzilla when they fight (taking out one of his eyes), and actually gets stronger when Godzilla uses his atomic breath. He's a unique opponent that Godzilla can't just punch into the ground until he flies away to be preserved for another film in the future. No, Godzilla's fight with Hedorah is hard, and it's the most compelling stuff in the film.

On the other end, though, is a return to the effort at categorization through Dr. Yano doing little experiments in his home lab while he convalesces from his injuries. Honestly, it feels like a way to eat up 10-15 minutes of screentime in a film where the human element is, at best, half-thought out. Heck, the point of view shifts to Mount Fuji because Yukio decides to have some sort of apocalyptic celebration because he knows that Hedorah is going to head there. It's not even that necessary since there's another point of view from the military, setting up a bit of tech brainstormed by Dr. Yano (note: he's a zoologist, not a mechanical engineer) that sets up two giant electrodes that should dehydrate anything in between.

The finale is this extended bit that is Godzilla fighting Hedorah on the plains before Mount Fuji, and it's both kind of great to watch and nonsensical at the same time. There's a bit where Hedorah overpowers Godzilla, throws him into a hole, and starts pouring sludge over him. There's a cut to some business about the humans, and it goes back to Godzilla just out and without sludge. It kind of feels like either a big chunk was cut out or Banno was working too quickly to get major sections of the sequence done with little regard for the connective tissue. However, that being said, this stuff is just great to watch.

There's a stylistic incoherence about the film, veering from zany 60s psychedelic editing (most obvious when introducing Yukio and Miki) to this very sedate way of presenting the monster action. It's mostly wide angles, the sound design drops off to hollow echoes, and there's this great emphasis on selling scale. It's honestly some of the best looking stuff in the franchise, and it was using a fraction of the budget the earlier films got. That's a great testament to Banno and Nakano and their work.

What's not a testament is Nakano's insistence on the whole flying Godzilla thing. Never mind that the film is supposed to be geared towards children, the moment doesn't fit with everything that came before it. The didactic nature of the messaging fits more, to be honest. And, the fight honestly goes on for too long. The monster ends up down, Godzilla pulls his eyes from his body, and then the monster gets up again (leading to the flying).

Gotta fill that runtime up with something.

Still, the stripped down approach to the monster stuff, the uniqueness of Hedorah, and the surprising brutality of how it all comes to a close is a lot to recommend. However, there's still the didactic messaging, the categorization section, and the overall confusing opening. I don't think it quite comes together. This isn't Invasion of Astro-Monster, but I do think it does a decent job for most of its runtime. It's kind of too bad that it was, apparently, poorly received, especially by the producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, because I think I would have liked to see more Banno in charge of the franchise. Oh well.

Space Amoeba (1970)

Underappreciated

[7/10 · 3 June 2024]

Toho's final special effects science fiction film under its old studio system of contract players and Ishiro Honda's final feature film for several years until Toho brought him back for the final Godzilla film of the Showa Era, Space Amoeba is an entertaining sendoff for the era, bringing together the basic narrative building blocks of this kind of film in the right amounts to work in combination with its interesting approach to the special effects behemoths that go stompy-stomp.

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REPORT THIS AD An unmanned space probe has been sent to Jupiter to study its moons when it loses contact with Earth, gets captured by some kind of amorphous extraterrestrial thing (oh...space amoeba...I get it), and turns around. Its splash down is witnessed by photojournalist Tara Kudo (Akira Kubo) on a trans-Pacific flight back home to Japan (amazing coincidence that honestly didn't need to happen, but whatever). He's then approached by a company to photograph a remote island where they are planning to build a resort, publicity photos that he has no interest in taking until Dr. Miya (Yoshio Tsuchiya) walks into the meeting and Kudo figures out that the island and the splash down are the same place. So, they all go on a cruise to the island, joined by Obata (Kenji Sahara) who says that he's an anthropologist looking to investigate the local population.

The problem is that a giant squid-like creature has risen from the sea and killed one of the company's workers on the island leaving the other one shaken and the natives antagonistic to the outsiders. There's a really interesting line (that never gets followed up, by the way) as the new denizens of the island show up where Dr. Miya mentions how it's remarkable that the natives remained friendly even through the Japanese presence through the war. Honda's references to WWII had mostly fallen off after Godzilla, only really coming back at any explicit level in Atragon, so I'm always interested to see how this could reflect his changing attitudes towards Japanese behavior during the conflict. There's an implication that Japan actually did do things wrong back in the day, which is both in alignment with his idealistic treatments in Eagle of the Pacific and Farewell Rabaul but also against the implication in Godzilla.

Anyway, the meat of the film is the monster stuff, and the first iteration of the space amoeba's physical form is the best. The walking squid lumbers around unnaturally (though, to be honest, you can tell which tentacles are actually legs), and it does great damage, only letting Kudo and Miya go when they go underwater to confront it when porpoises come near. The second form, after the squid is defeated by fire, is a giant crab, and there's some great action as Kudo shoots out its eyes.

In a surprise move, the central pathos of the finale ends up revolving around Obata who was lying about being an anthropologist and is actually there for a bit of corporate espionage to steal the plans to the resort for a competitor. He, however, gets possessed by the amoeba and becomes humanity's best hope to fight the extraterrestrial threat, needing to fight the possession while the amoeba gives him great strength to fight against puny humanity's efforts to stop the amoeba's quest for world domination.

You see, it's super basic monster movie stuff, but it's helped by a few things. The first is that the monsters themselves are not the real threat. It's the amoeba. Fighting off giant monsters with a handful of bullets and half a tank of gasoline is one thing, but finding the amoeba's key weakness is something else. It keeps the monsters as a physical threat but directs the characters' energies towards something more manageable. The second big thing is that we get a few new monsters (though the crab does look a fair bit like Ebirah), so there's variation. The third is the final act focus on Obata. It'd be better if he were more of an anti-hero and focus from the beginning, but the turn he gets in the finale to help fight the evil within him is surprisingly well done in the limited screentime he gets. I felt something in the end.

And that really is what pushed this film up a notch for me. That ending has a shocking sadness that's absent from most of Honda's other science-fiction/kaiju work. Things must be sacrificed to win, and it's not something to forget as the victory takes shape.

Really, I think this is underappreciated. It's really quite a good example of the kaiju genre that does its job efficiently and well.

All Monsters Attack (1969)

I liked it

[6/10 · 3 June 2024]

The Godzilla franchise had been trending towards kiddie for a few films, but this is the first in the series to actually be made explicitly for children. Released as part of the Toho Champion Matsuri, a festival program for children, All Monsters Attack was made very cheaply, very quickly, and reused a fair amount of footage from previous entries in the series, mostly Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. It's easy to see how the Godzilla faithful would turn against this film. It's barely a Godzilla film at all. However, what it is has its own qualities as a life-lesson dramatic-comedy around a boy learning to stand up to bullies. I actually enjoyed it on that level a fair bit.

Ichiro (Tomonori Yazaki) is a latchkey kid who loves Godzilla (it's unclear if Godzilla is real in this film or if Ichiro is just a fan of the movies), hearing Godzilla's son, Minilla, in the honking of horns as he walks home with his little friend. He's also the target of a group of bullies, led by a red-shirted kid he calls Gabara (Junichi Ito). When his parents are out working, his father on a rail line and his mother at a hotel, he goes home to do his homework and get looked after by his neighbor, the toymaker Shinpei (Hideyo Amamoto). During a nap, though, he transports himself to Monster Island where he befriends Minilla who is human sized can suddenly speak. I get it, this breaks Godzilla lore, but it's a dream. It's silly by nature, but the whole Son of Godzilla thing was silly in and of itself. I don't see this as some sort of massive break with what came before either in terms of lore or tone.

Anyway, the dreams come in a series, one after the other, interspersed between sections in the real world while Ichiro is awake. There does develop a plot around two bank robbers who stole fifty million yen and are hiding out, supposedly, in the area. Of course, this is going to intersect with Ichiro because why else bring it up? Okay, many of the little subplots haven't come together all that well in previous Honda monster mashes, but it does here. Ichiro hides out in an abandoned three-story warehouse because it's a play area where the bully won't go, the robbers hide out there as well, Ichiro picks up one of their driver's licenses, and they need to clean up that mess. This all happens while the dreams Ichiro has back on Monster Island escalate from hanging out with Minilla watching Godzilla recreate the events of Ebirah to Minilla being terrorized by a new, green monster called Gabara (it's for kids, can't be too subtle, I guess).

The events escalate in both stories with Minilla fighting Gabara himself (getting much bigger when he fights the monster while retreating back to kid size when he goes back to talk to Ichiro) and Ichiro getting kidnapped by the robbers. It's a tale of two young children learning how to stick up for themselves and fight back. One more reason, I suppose, that this film isn't well regarded is how it treats bullies. You see, Godzilla pushes Minilla to fight Gabara himself, and this teaches Ichiro to fight back against his own bullies on his own. You see, that's not a modern sensibility. Instead, bullies just should not bully, and if they do, you should go to an authority figure. Instead, Ichiro learns that to deal with bullies, one should bite them on the arm and ram them in the stomach, get them to fall back, and stop fighting you. He's essentially Ender without going quite so far as kicking them while they're down. Honestly, I don't disapprove.

So, it's simple (perhaps simplistic). It heavily uses footage from previous films (though, thankfully, it relies on Ebirah which might have been Tsuburaya's best work), the new footage isn't as good (Honda took complete control and did a solid job with a limited budget and no time, it's just that the footage from Ebirah is that much better), and it leans more fully towards silliness than even the sillier previous entries like Son of Godzilla did. However, the story itself of a boy learning to stick up for himself is integrated well into the two halves of the film. It's straightforward and potentially simplistic. The ending also goes too far into Ichiro becoming the anti-bully, so he becomes a bully himself which it then tries to pull back immediately afterwards, which is weird. However, it mostly works.

So, I don't quite think it's good. It's too silly, too reliant on old stuff, and the ending is a weird bit of whiplash around the central point. However, it does have a central point that it explores surprisingly well. I mean, this isn't the worst Godzilla movie by a mile. It's okay.

Latitude Zero (1969)

Silly

[5/10 · 3 June 2024]

Based on a series of radio serials by Ted Sherdeman, Latitude Zero is a combination of utopian fantasy, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Wizard of Oz. It's kind of an odd mix. It doesn't really work. I am surprised at how good it looks, though. The budget was cut in half right before production because the American partner to Toho, Ambassador Productions, went bankrupt. With a distinct Star Trek The Original Series vibe (no idea if there was a direct influence or more of a general 60s scifi influence), Latitude Zero has a certain flare while also being kind of dull. At least Cesar Romero is having a ball, though.

Two scientists, Dr. Ken Tashiro (Akira Takarada) and Dr. Jules Masson (Masumi Okada), are joined by a reporter, Perry Lawton (Richard Jaeckel), for a descent in a bathysphere to investigate an undersea current. They get swept away, disconnected from the ship on the surface, and end up stranded on the ocean floor where they get picked up by Captain McKenzie (Joseph Cotton) in his nuclear powered submarine, the Alpha. There's a twist, though. Captain McKenzie represents no government. The Alpha has a plaque saying it was built in 1805. McKenzie also says that he's 200 years old. Considering the injuries to Dr. Masson, Dr. Anne Barton (Linda Haynes), the ship's doctor, recommends that they return to home base, the eponymous Latitude Zero, an underwater haven of scientific discovery, kind of like Galt's Gulch (I wonder if Ayn Rand was inspired by the radio serials...?).

Now, part of the plotting that makes no sense is that McKenzie's rival, Dr. Malic (Romero), has some kind of tracker on the Alpha that he uses to send his own submarine, the Black Shark, commanded by Kuroiga (Hikaru Kuroki). Why does the tracker suddenly start working? Well, there's never any mention of a tracker, actually, it's just that there's a map that Malic has where a little light goes on and off all of a sudden that is the Alpha's location. There's never talk of a traitor or mole or anything. It just kind of happens without explanation. Sure, whatever. Anyway, it does lead to the best part of the film, the extended chase between the two submarines, a special effects showcase that evolves a couple of times and works quite well.

And then we get to Latitude Zero, and it shares some of the same problems with Lost Horizon: portraits of perfect places are just not very interesting. Having McKenzie walk around, pointing at places on the large 3D map of the island with a metal pointer, and explaining how there are no bad things in this place while being dismissive of Lawton's skepticism is just not terribly appealing. I know this portrait appeals to some people who just love to see perfect places and wish they were there, but it's so dramatically inert that I just don't understand the reaction.

One of the weirdest parts of the film's structure is the central conflict between McKenzie and Malic. It's an eternal conflict, having fought each other for a hundred years, but the direct manifestation is the kidnapping of the newest addition to McKenzie's utopia: Dr. Okada (Tetsu Nakamura), on a ship from Japan to San Francisco. He is mentioned once in the first half, but he doesn't actually appear until the halfway point when Malic decides to kidnap him. This is the central plot mechanic of the whole thing, the entire justification for the goings on of the third act, but it gets introduced so late. It's weird.

Anyway, Malic does kidnap Okada and his daughter, taking them to his secret island, and McKenzie brings his new recruits along with him to rescue Okada. This is where the film's balance between silliness and weird doesn't really gel, and I think the problem is Joseph Cotton. Cotton takes all of what happens around him deeply seriously. In contrast is Cesar Romero who is having a ball chewing the scenery as the bad guy. The weirdness around them includes these gold-colored suits the good guys wear, the dialogue saying that they're gold/platinum alloy which ends up being magnetic despite neither metal being magnetic, a bath that makes them impervious to bullets for twenty-four hours, and...Malic's experiments combining creatures including punishing Kuroiga by cutting out her brain, putting it into a lion's head, and attaching wings to make her a griffin. It's weird how she doesn't end up following his orders in the finale, huh?

So, it's real silliness. It makes little sense. But a light tone (largely carried by Romero) helps a decent bit. Plus, it looks good.

I mean, this film is nonsense, but it entertains decently in the first and third acts. The strange directions of design that pretty much come out of nowhere are interesting and provide a decent guffaw. Watching Joseph Cotton take everything super seriously while dressing up very silly is also worth a watch to some degree. It's not good, though.

Destroy All Monsters (1968)

And so Godzilla ends forever. Right?...Right?

[7/10 · 24 May 2024]

This was supposed to be the end of the whole Godzilla thing. Honda thought so, at least. It was a grand sendoff for everyone involved since the beginning with Honda, Eiji Tsuburaya, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, and composer Akira Ifukube getting one final assignment from Toho to end the franchise on a grand note. And a grand note it is. This is epic silliness, and it is silly. However, Honda and Takeshi Kimura, while getting lost in the early nonsense for a bit, commit fully to doing the silliness with the correct attitude, giving the focus where people want it to be while keeping the human element at an appropriate distance from the monster smashy action. It's still not fully embracing what these films could be, taking them to the top of this approach to kaiju movies but not above it.

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REPORT THIS AD The part of the story that most interested Honda, it seems, was the opening montage, something he wanted to greatly expand into the film but was prevented by Tanaka and budgetary concerns: it shows Monster Island, now occupied by all of the earth-bound monsters that Toho could dig up and still had the rights to (Kong having reverted back to RKO means he's not around). They're kept on the island by specialized traps that prevent them from walking off like Godzilla or flying off like Rodan would like to. At the same time, Captain Yamabe (Akira Kubo) is leading a mission to the moon where there is an existing base. He's the one who gets called...all the way back to Earth...to investigate when all contact with the base on Monster Island is lost. There, he discovers that the scientists on the island, including his girl Kyoko (Yukiko Kobayashi) have been taken over by mysterious aliens called Kilaaks, led by their queen (Kyoko Ai). She brings messages of peace, but they are not to last, of course. The monsters from Monster Island start showing up around the world, causing disaster wherever they go.

The conflict between man and monster is never supposed to be even. The monsters are huge, should represent some kind of larger, elemental force, and cannot be pushed back on. Also, they're supposed to be really hard to defeat, hence the whole challenge of it all. So, do you have the puny humans beat back Godzilla one more time, making him decreasingly threatening with every success? Or do you redirect the human efforts in another direction? The latter is better for the longevity of the franchise (especially when you've spent the last few movies trying to make Godzilla a good guy), and that's what Honda and Kimura decided to do here. The enemy isn't the monsters. The enemy is the Kilaaks, and the humans have to figure out how the aliens are controlling the monsters, where they are, and how to stop it.

It really is a men on a mission film where the thin characterization is less of an issue. What's more of an issue is that the whole effort is kind of confused and doesn't make the most amount of sense. Why is Captain Yamabe the best guy to investigate Monster Island when he's days away on the moon? The whole flying around on a rocket to get from place to place feels silly. The efforts to track down the base feel almost random and coincidental. The explanation of how the Kilaaks need super-heated environments so they don't become rocks is weird. However, it's never outright bad. It just has this level of silly boys' adventure novel logic that is amusing to watch but falls apart the second you think about it.

The meat of it all is the final act which goes full monster action as the humans figure out the signaling device, reverse it, and use the monsters against the Kilaak base in Mount Fuji. It's a very large set with nearly a dozen monsters marching alongside each other. I was honestly surprised to see Kumonga from Son of Godzilla because he seemed so hard to puppeteer well (the special effects team did very well in both films), but he's just one of several including even Minilla, the son of Godzilla, Rodan (whose suit hasn't been updated since his original appearance looks so stiff and unnatural that it's a shock they included him at all), and Mothra...in larva form. Seriously, I find it hard to believe that there are any Mothra fans who want to see the larva instead of the moth. There's some business about the control over the monsters failing but the monsters knowing which side to fight on (because good guys now, long since is forgotten Godzilla smashy-smashing Tokyo in 1954).

So, the appeal is the boys adventure plotting (which makes no sense), the characters working through a problem, and then the grand special effects showcase. This was an expensive way for the Godzilla and related kaiju movies to go out, and it really feels like Toho spared no expense. It's grand, and it's very fun. All of the monsters have something to do, and even when King Ghidorah shows up, they can come together and work as a team. It's honestly quite satisfying.

It's just that the setup is kinda dumb, you know? This is why I say that this represents some of the heights of the kaiju era as it was being done. They were ultimately all dumb adventure stories, not all that well told, and largely hanging on the execution and breadth of their monster action. It's bright, colorful, inventive, and fun. The story does enough to justify it and keep it from feeling like a complete waste of time (fighting for control of the monsters is better than fighting the monsters themselves).

If there was to never be another Godzilla movie, this would have been a good way to go out, giving the people what they came for.

King Kong Escapes (1967)

Mild entertainment

[5/10 · 24 May 2024]

So much of the enjoyment of these kaiju films of the 60s is wrapped in how the third act plays out. If it's generic monster smashy stuff, it can work decently. If it's interesting in a new way, it can help to every so slightly elevate what came before. If it's merely in line with pre-established character, it can almost save a film on its own. I think King Kong Escapes is the third of these, giving us an ending that fits the cultural impression of Kong, though not what actually came before. What came before ends up feeling like three episodes of a Saturday morning cartoon show, which it kind of was. Though written by Takeshi Kimura, the story was conceived of by Arthur Rankin of Rankin/Bass, adapting their Saturday morning cartoon show, The King Kong Show, through Toho Studios. It's kind of a mess of a film, but at least the monster action in the third act is pretty decent.

A UN research submarine (the UN is REALLY built up in these kaiju films, and it's so weird) is going towards an oil deposit to investigate it. Its path takes it near Mondo Island, a particular interest of the sub's commander, Nelson (Rhodes Reason), who believes that the giant gorilla, Kong, lives there. His second in command, Jiro (Akira Takarada), shares his interest while their nurse, Susan (Linda Jo Miller), operates as the audience's cypher into the explanation. At the same time, the evil Dr. Who (Hideyo Amamoto) is at the North Pole, showing off his robotic Kong to Madame Piranha (Mie Hama) who is going to pull Element X out of the ground which is necessary for the nuclear weapons that Madame Piranha is trying to build for her unnamed country. The first episode, I mean act, is really around setting up Dr. Who and getting the three UN sub personnel onto Mondo island, which they decide to go to because of an underwater landslide that opens the passage? I think it's supposed to be related to the events in the North Pole, when Robot Kong breaks down while trying to get Element X, the radiation breaking down his internal mechanics. The three get onto the island in a futuristic hovercraft, meet Kong, watch him kill a dinosaur, show affection for Susan (because blondes), and let them go.

The second act is about Dr. Who kidnapping Kong, realizing his location because Nelson gives a public report at the UN that outlines the location and their plan to go back. The actual kidnapping of Kong is fairly well done. Who uses helicopters to drop ether bombs around Kong to lull him to sleep. I was honestly surprised that Eiji Tsuburaya and Sadamasa Arikawa had the self-control to not show Kong knocking helicopters out of the sky because they flew too low, a common occurrence in these kinds of scenes (it was hilariously present in Ebirah). They finish before Nelson and his crew arrive again, forcing them to figure out where Kong might have gone, thankful that Nelson and Who have a previous connection that makes it easy for him to know exactly where to go...the North Pole and the third act.

The third act involves Who capturing the three sub crew, using the real Kong with mind control to dig out Element X, Madame Piranha turning on Who for...reasons, Kong escaping and heading towards Tokyo because of course. The actual finale is Kong and Robot Kong fighting up the Tokyo Tower, and it recalls the original Kong's ending climbing up the Empire State Building. Honestly, I had real appreciation for that ending. The technical side of the special effects is usually pretty good, but they always hinge on the adorableness of it all, which can't be forced (see Son of Godzilla). The special effects still need to be earnestly delivered, and Kong going up after Robot Kong to save Susan has the basic elements to make it work.

So, the actual story feels like it's in chunks. The characters are thin. The whole thing needs a script doctor to come in and just modify things a bit (have Dr. Who tap into Nelson's communications to the UN to figure out the location of Mondo Island rather than getting it from a press conference, then have Dr. Who show up while Nelson and crew are still there, giving them the evidence they need right then to figure out where to go next...that sort of thing). There are at least a couple of little attempts at character-based storytelling, mostly around Susan. She's in something like a chaste romance with Jiro, and she's the object of Kong's affection. Nothing ever comes of it, of course, but it's there. Nelson, on the other hand, is just big-chinned adventure lead, and he serves his purpose decently.

Honestly, if the ending hadn't pulled together the little bit of story with the pre-existing lore of Kong, I'd be a bit more down on the film. However, that ending worked decently well. I think it did elevate it slightly from bad to mediocre. Because this film, for all the charm of the special effects, especially in the ending, is kind of dull. At least the ending is there, though.

Son of Godzilla (1967)

Going too far into cuteness

[4/10 · 24 May 2024]

The return of Jun Fukuda to the Godzilla franchise pushes the whole affair more fully towards silliness and outright appeal to childish entertainment. Ishiro Honda did not approve, but he was not involved. There was almost always a certain seriousness to the monster action, making them real threats with puny humans underfoot, but the introduction of a kid monster, the child of our central hero monster who had gained favor with audiences over the years, pushes it all directly towards light-heartedness that undermines the action itself. So, we have the rather typical underdeveloped human side of things combined with a less effective sense of monster action. I mean, it's not the worst thing, but this is very much a step down for the largely moderately successful series.

Professor Kusumi (Tadao Takashima) is leading a team of scientists on the remote island of Sollgel in the remote reaches of the Pacific Ocean. They are performing an experiment (heavy sigh) to counter the incoming overpopulation bomb by trying to freeze giant sections of land and save foodstuffs for the coming times when we can't grow enough food for everyone (the nonsense science in these movies is regularly just...whatever). Anyway, in parachutes the reporter Maki (Akira Kubo) who wants a story, refuses to leave, and gets recruited to be the team's cook. There are also giant, man-sized mantises that terrorize the place, keeping the team on edge, and necessitating their use of guns on a largely deserted island. There's also a girl, Saeko (Bibari Maeda), that Maki sees that none of the others do who swims and disappears when noticed.

Their attempt to conduct the experiment is derailed when a mysterious radio wave (with brainwave properties, or something) interferes with their communications equipment to the probes rising in the sky, firing the key component at the wrong moment, and turning the island into an over-heated wasteland (that immediately greens again because budget). It also has the side effect of taking the already large mantis creatures and enlarging them to Godzilla size. Godzilla is gonna need something his size to fight, anyway, because the radio signal was a telepathic signal from Godzilla's still egg-bound baby that the large mantises immediately attack when they are big. What was Son doing this before the mantises got big? I dunno. Coincidentally about to grow up, I guess, and wanted his daddy around.

So, all of this is really just busyness to get us to the giant monsters. It's not particularly worse than the average of the other films in the series because most of what preceded it is rather unimaginative and not that interesting beyond Honda's efforts to change genres from time to time. I mean, the science is goofy, but it's done in service of some nice miniature work by Eiji Tsuburaya and Sadamasa Arikawa. Where it falls apart is really the titular Son of Godzilla.

First, it's introduction is weirdly done. The baby is prostrate (presumably because it can't walk yet), so it's not actually a man in a suit. It seems to be a large puppet that just moves weirdly. And then it gets silly. Godzilla shows up to save the day, killing a couple of the mantises (how many there are total is never all that clear, they just kind of keep showing up), and then Son holds onto Godzilla's tail to get dragged away. I mean...there was silliness in watching Godzilla sit on his tail and take a nap in Ebirah, but this is a whole different level. Then we get to watch Godzilla teach some basic monster stuff to Son, in particular the nuclear fire breath. In my mind, the appeal of giant monsters isn't that they're "just like us", including parenting techniques, as Maki makes mention of when he and Saeko witness the act. It's taking that which is giant and huge and bigger than us, and trying to make it human-sized. I just don't think it works in the least.

However, that's not the extent of the monster action. There is real monster action, including the sudden appearance of a giant spider buried in the side of a mountain. There are some weird issues with some of the action, though. The giant mantises are obviously run on a rail, and their movements look largely fake. The spider, though, is just outright great and might be one of the best monsters in this whole series. It's kind of sad that he's something of a throw-away and won't be coming back because the puppetry on him is shockingly good.

So...I don't hate it, but it's bad. The charm of the special effects is reduced by, ironically, the effort to make them more charming. The story itself never has much to do or say while getting to a point where characters are just spinning their wheels because the film can't come up with anything for them to do when the monsters start getting going. Still, the special effects do have a charm, and the story doesn't actively bore. Again, there's something to be said for having less than good movies move along quickly. It's not enough, though.

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)

A bit of a mix, but the special effects are great

[6/10 · 24 May 2024]

So much of what I get out of these monster movies from Japan in the 60s is how they take on the aspects of different genres to try and keep things interesting. This, the first Godzilla film not directed by Ishiro Honda since he was too busy to make Godzilla Raids Again, decides to take on the mantle of a James Bond film, but only the villain aspect of it. Like many of these films, it ends up being a showcase for Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects work. Well, the work he supervised but was actually done by Sadamasa Arikawa. Shinichi Sekizawa's script directed by Jun Fukuda is a frantic, unfocused series of excuses to get three monsters punching each other. It's at least interesting as it plays out, and the monster action is real good.

Ryota (Toru Watanabe) is desperate to find his brother Yata (Toru Ibuki) who has been lost at sea. A psychic has said that he's still alive, so Ryota makes it a mission to find a boat. He goes to a dancing competition where the top prize is a luxury yacht, shows up too late for it, hooks up with two guys who failed at the dance, goes to a marina where they find a yacht, board it, find it already populated by Yoshimura (Akira Takarada) with a gun, a briefcase he won't open, and aversion to news about a bank robbery played on the radio. Ryota takes the yacht out determined to find Yata. How freaking over-complicated is this opening? It's kind of crazy in how many directions it goes in so short a time, but it's a testament to energetic editing techniques that it never gets bogged down in any of them in particular. I mean, it's thin and random and so ridiculous as to reach the point of comedy, but it moves quickly, at least.

So, they reach an island after a storm and a giant claw from the sea shipwrecks them, and they discover that it's been invaded by the Red Bamboo, a criminal organization making hard water for nuclear weapons, kidnapping the denizens of the nearby Infant Island, the home of Mothra, and forcing them to create a yellow liquid that will protect their ships from Ebirah, the crab-like monster whose territory is the water around the island. One of the newest shipment of slaves is Daiyo (Kumi Mizuno), who, for some reason, carries a knife through the whole thing even though she was captured as a slave? Whatever. Anyway, it becomes this back and forth action as the shipwrecked survivors try to figure out a way off the island, figure out what the Red Bamboo is doing, free the prisoners, and wait for the residents of Infant Island to wake up Mothra who's just taking a nice, long nap while her people are being kidnapped. As a quick sidenote, Mothra's last appearance in Ghidorah was as a larva, and here she's full moth just napping. It feels like it would have been better to have her in a cocoon with Infant Island waiting for her to wake up for the first time. I'd guess it was a budget/production solution since Mothra is mostly just stationary through the film.

Anyway, they also find Godzilla sleeping under a mountain. How did he get there? It's a mighty coincidence that he's there, huh? At least they actively wake him up instead of him just randomly waking up. Minimize those coincidences. It helps the storytelling.

The finale ends up being the mess of different elements thrown together in a big, sprawling action spectacle. It begins innocently enough with Godzilla waking up, chasing after Daiyo (evidence of the original script being about King Kong because this is the first time that Godzilla has expressed any interest in any human ever), and escalating as the Red Bamboo bring in reinforcements, leading to a fight with Ebirah and Mothra ultimately saving the day. Aside from the special effects, the most interesting thing about all of this is the further push to make Godzilla sympathetic. He never tries to hurt any of the good guys, protects them from a giant monster, and they plea for him to escape the island which is about to explode (talk about a Manic Monday).

So, that takes us to the special effects. The only difference I can tell from working with Honda to working with Fukuda is that there's a certain silliness creeping more into Godzilla than before (not to say that there was a complete absence of silliness with Honda, just that it was minimal). Godzilla sitting on his tail and taking a nap is kind of silly, you know? However, Sadamasa Arikawa just keeps honing the craft with every film, building on the work of Tsuburaya, his supervisor. The highlight is the stuff at night. I'm a fan of all of his special effects work, but it's rarely convincing. There are really convincing shots here of Ebirah's claw coming out of the water, and it happening in water makes it even more impressive because water is really hard to do with miniatures.

So, it's manic and all over the place and thin with the character stuff. The excuses of bringing the monsters together is just as thin. However, the special effects are very good, and the whole embrace of a Bond villain aesthetic regarding the Red Bamboo layer is fun. Really, that this film is only 90 minutes long and kind of embraces the silliness just enough is a good thing. It's not enough to completely save it, but it is enough to provide some decently light entertainment along the way.

Come Marry Me (1966)

Nice musical romance

[7/10 · 24 May 2024]

This is such a weird little film in the middle of science fiction and monster mashes from Ishiro Honda, and it really just seems to have come together because Toho wanted to use Honda's bankable name on the project. It seems like a cheap little romance, something they could throw together pretty quickly, film on a handful of sets (with a couple of scenes on a boat at sea), and push out the door. It's machine, studio filmmaking at its core, and the result is a small delight of a romantic comedy. Written by Zenzô Matsuyama who wrote Honda's earlier Be Happy, These Two Lovers as well as Masaki Kobayashi's epic The Human Condition, Come Marry Me is a trifle with a bit on its mind. But only a bit.

Tamotsu (Yuzo Kayama) and his sister Yoko (Yoko Naito) are trying to get a train to Osaka, but their car is acting up. To help Tomatsu push comes a random girl, Masako (Keiko Sawai), who gets them rolling and leaves an impression on Tamotsu's mind. They meet later that day when he shows up at the hotel where she works for a birthday party, Yoko teasing him for the obvious attraction he feels towards this hotel girl without being able to act upon it. Later that night, Masako meets her friend's older brother, Michio (Toshio Kurosawa), with a medicinal present for his brother that he wants her to give to him, him being a taxi driver and unable to make it all the way out there on his own time.

This sets up the core trio of the love triangle to form. Tamotsu, current head designer of the family yacht manufacturer, grows affectionate for Masako even though he's terrified of actually approaching her. Masako and Michio keep meeting up to hand over gifts for Michio's brother, developing a quiet affection there. Yoko schemes to get Masako with Tamotsu, even going so far as to hire Michio's cab to get him out of the way for a day (which doesn't work to some entertainingly modest result).

There is a surprising little thematic push through it all that's kind of interesting, shares some parallels with what happened in Be Happy, These Two Lovers, and honestly feels underserved on a narrative level, coming together more awkwardly and inelegantly than I would have expected. It centers around Masako's opinion of rich people, carrying a class-consciousness attitude around how little she earns and can purchase on her salary. This gets thrown up against this nice richer guy (he just designs the boats, he doesn't order them, he insists) who showers her with gifts. This contrast is nicely handled, but the resolution feels off.

Essentially, she has the excuse of not wanting to become a boring woman who does nothing except being a rich man's wife. Except, he loves her because of that moment when she helped pushed the car, her being active. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who wants a placid woman who stays at home. He'd embrace her being active in some way, like getting a job at the shipbuilding firm. Also, the romance side with Masako and Michio feels a bit underserved in the actual writing. The biggest bit in the film up to the ending is Michio amusingly getting Yoko to her destination in record time, but that is more about Michio's feelings for Masako, not the other way around.

Essentially, I was really on board with the romance, the light tone, and the whole affair, even the themes manifesting in different ways like Masako's friends at the hotel going on strike when Tamotsu's parents get her fired, much to the chagrin of their boss (Ichiro Arishima). It's just when the writing has to get us to the point where Masako chooses against her own interests a guy she hadn't really exhibited much affection for (to be fair, this is Japan, actually showing affection isn't a huge thing). So, I can buy it, but I just don't entirely feel like it's effectively done.

The film was apparently written around the central song sung by Kayama, a Hawaiian-like tune about love that's quite an easy listen. The two stars were apparently big in Japan at the time, Yoko, in particular, having been launched to stardom in Kurosawa's Red Beard. Combine that with Honda's bankable name, and this feels like a quick effort to make some easy money on Toho's part. That it's a lightly entertaining film on its own is just icing, I suppose. I do wish the finale played out a bit cleaner, though.

The War of the Gargantuas (1966)

Characterization is an asset? Weird.

[6/10 · 16 May 2024]

A direct sequel (with some small retconning) of Frankenstein vs. Baragon, War of the Gargantuas is mostly a generic Honda kaiju (or kaijin?) movie. There's still the thin characters, the insistence on categorization as a major plot thread, and then Eiji Tsuburaya's great special effects work. There's an extra wrinkle in the final act that makes things slightly more interesting, though, so we have that in the end.

Two years after Frankenstein was supposedly killed fighting off first Baragon and then a giant octopus, a giant octopus attacks a vessel off the Japanese coast. I honestly don't know why the giant octopus returns, but it does represent a nice kind of symmetry with the end of the previous film. Anyway, only one sailor survives, and the others didn't die at the tentacles of the octopus. They died at the hands of a giant humanoid monster who bears a striking resemblance to the (retconned) Frankenstein, except he's green and can live underwater. The scientists at the lab who fostered the original Frankenstein become interested in protecting their reputation by categorizing the new Frankenstein as not their Frankenstein. Dr. Paul Stewart (Russ Tamblyn) and Dr. Akemi Togawa (Kumi Mizuno) go out and try and search for evidence of this new Frankenstein.

Now, I have a rather constant refrain of complaint against many of these monster films in that they needlessly stop for this quest on correctly categorizing the monster. The nadir was probably the effort in Rodan, but it's been prominent in many others as well. This is the first time where there feels like an actual narrative reason for the categorization: the science lab needs to defend its reputation. It ultimately comes to nothing, but at least there's motive behind it all. I mean, correctly identifying which dinosaur Rodan is does nothing. Correctly identifying the new Frankenstein as something new and not the old protects Dr. Stewart's reputation. That's something.

So, their investigation leads to them discovering that yes, this isn't the old Frankenstein. It is some kind of offshoot that grew from a cluster of cells that washed out to sea and became a new entity. They're brothers, sort of. Also, the old Frankenstein is still around and alive, and that leads us to the single most interesting thing in the whole film: the relationship between the two. It's done completely wordlessly without the Infant Island princesses translating or anything. That lack of translation, their actions dictating everything, provides a nice opaqueness that requires audience attention and participation to get through. It's nothing terribly deep or complicated, though. New Frankenstein (renamed Gaira) is violent and has no compulsion in killing the little people while Old Frankenstein (renamed Sanda) is non-violent and wants Gaira to stop. Again, it's not overly complicated, but that it's handled wordlessly is nice.

And then there's the special effects. Tsuburaya keeps the hits coming with his use of little military cars and trees and buildings to stomp around in. It's quality special effects work, and there's a fair amount of it from beginning to end, the film not relegating all of it towards the ending. There's the opening terror on the boat, a fight between the Japanese Defense Forces and Gaira in the mountains, and then the final fight tearing up parts of Tokyo. It's fun.

It's just that...the humans aren't that interesting and they take up such a large portion of the film. Tamblyn apparently hated the assignment and project as he worked, and his boredom shines through. The effort to clear the lab's name regarding the identify of Frankenstein is something, but it's just not much and doesn't ever feel all that important to the characters. It's just kind of there. There's also a bit about Akemi having an attachment to Sanda that feels underserved, at best.

So, it's largely generic, but the special effects are still fun and the creatures have some slightly more thought put into them than normal. It's a step up from the direct predecessor film, but I wouldn't quite get to the point of calling it good. Still, I do have affection for these efforts at just moving along quickly and throwing monster mashups on screen. They're amusing. Lightly.

Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)

The best of the Showa Era

[7/10 · 16 May 2024]

Huzzah! A Godzilla movie I actually like! Sure, it's still not great cinema, but it doesn't try to be. Invasion of Astro-Monster still only carries the modest ambition to entertain, but the writing is finally the kind of well-assembled series of events where character arcs and motives have bearings on the plot. It's just about what I expect from B-movie efforts, to be honest. Throw on top Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects work, and you've got an entertaining package of a film.

The two astronauts of a rocket to the mysterious Planet X, Kazuo Fuji (Akira Takarada) and Glenn (Nick Adams), are barreling towards Jupiter behind which hides the strange heavenly body that has eluded astronomers for so long (because it's too dark because the science has to be goofy, unintentionally, of course). Back home, Fuji's younger sister, Haruno (Keiko Sawai), wants to marry the hopeless inventor Tetsuo (Akira Kubo) who has developed a portable alarm for women that emits a loud, annoying sound when triggered. Will this be relevant later? Considering the track record of Honda's first acts paying off in the third, don't bet on it. But, let's just watch to find out.

Let's just take a moment to notice that the first act of Invasion of Astro-Monster feels different. There's a wittiness to how things are presented, particularly in the editing, that are more than just basic filmmaking. For instance, Tetsuo and Haruno meet the representative, Namikawa (Kumi Mizuno) to a company to sell his invention. Walking away with the contract signed, Tetsuo says that Kazuo would have to do a handstand to make up for his resistance to him and the idea that he would ever sell his invention. The film then cuts to a shot of the two astronauts upside down. I mean, that's kind of clever and fun. It then also has an explanation in that Glenn accidentally orientated the ship upside down, which he then corrects.

Moving on, the astronauts land and discover that Planet X is inhabited by Xiliens, led by the Commandant (Yoshio Tsuchiya). They have built their society underground to hide from Monster Zero who terrorizes the surface. And, Monster Zero is, of course, King Ghidorah from Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. The Xiliens have a proposition: they will trade a cure for cancer for the use of Rodan and Godzilla to fight off Ghidorah on Planet X.

The writing on the film isn't perfect, despite my overall appreciation of it. The film kind of stops for a bit as the astronauts return to Earth, bring the proposal before the UN where the housewife delegation gets a say (I mean,...that's supposed to be funny, right?). Then the Xiliens just show up anyway, show how they can take the two monsters, and pretty much just hand over the cancer cure without much say from humanity. Considering how things progress from there, it really is curious why the Xiliens felt the need to ask for permission to get the two monsters. They obviously could without asking, and they obviously have precious little respect for property rights. It'd be cool if there was something in there about humanity being the guardians of Godzilla, or something, but it's just a giant hole in the narrative that never gets explained. Oh well.

So, the two monsters go to Planet X, fight off Ghidorah, and then Planet X reveals itself fully: they want to conquer Earth with all three monsters. Why they wanted to get the two Earth-bound monsters makes sense (especially when you consider the events of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster which the film makes no real mention of beyond Glenn knowing the monster when he sees it), and the rest is humanity finding ways to break the Xiliens' control over the monsters. And, surprise!, it uses Tetsuo's invention! It's nice how things get set up and then paid off. That's just the basics of writing, right there.

So, the finale is a lot of busy action, but it's actually moored into what was setup before. It feels significantly less random and more planned out. The humans have ways to actually affect what's going on, and they contribute. The little bit of character-based storytelling (namely the conflict between Kazuo and Haruno over her affection for Tetsuo) pays off and actually contributes to the story.

And all of this happens while Tsuburaya's model work continues to stretch the bounds of what he could convincingly pull off while being delightful to watch.

So, the script still has some issues. The idea of all Planet X women looking the same gets introduced and dropped for no reason. The middle act feels a bit aimless. The Xiliens' plan doesn't make the most sense when you think about it. However, the basics are in place, and they work. The light tone (not comedic, just light and propulsive through most of it) helps to keep things moving. The monsters still feel dangerous, even with Godzilla giving his victory dance on Planet X. This is just solid B-movie fun, and I had quite a good time with it.

Frankenstein vs. Baragon (1965)

What is this categorization fetish?

[5/10 · 16 May 2024]

Toho was always searching for the next monster to add to its pantheon, wasn't it? Taking and modifying the particulars of the Creature birthed from Dr. Frankenstein's work and throwing it together with another giant lizard thing, hidden away from the ravages of time and coming up because coincidence drives all of this stuff. Bringing back some of the more irritating habits of Honda's earlier monster movies, Frankenstein vs. Baragon mostly ambles around slowly for most of its runtime until it reaches its action-spectacular conclusion, which ends up feeling completely random and haphazard. I get that these were getting made super fast, but was no one willing to try and come up with reasons other than coincidence that newly discovered monsters find themselves in the same place?

Before the fall of Berlin at the end of World War II, German scientists sent the heart of Frankenstein (it's honestly unclear if there's supposed to be a difference between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster at all in this, so it's just Frankenstein) to Japan. Taken to the military hospital in Hiroshima where we get explanations about how the heart can never die from Takashi Shimura in his little cameo, the action swiftly moves to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Is that horribly tasteless? I'm going to be honest, it feels horribly tasteless.

Anyway, fifteen years later, Dr. James Bowen (Nick Adams) is investigating the effects of radiation on the human body when stories of a feral boy (Koji Furuhata) start popping up. He's seen by Bowen's girlfriend (?) Dr. Sueko Togami (Kumi Mizuno), and they bring him into the lab when some local villagers corner him in a cave. At the same time, Kawai (Yoshio Tshuchiya), the naval officer who brought the heart to Hiroshima, witnesses an earthquake and what looks to be a new monster peeking out from the cracks in the earth, but don't worry. That thing's not coming back for a long time.

No, we have to spend a lot of time with Frankenstein. One thing we haven't seen in Honda's monster films in a while is the movie coming to a screeching halt in order to properly categorize the monster (the last time that it was really an issue was Rodan), and that's exactly what this film ends up doing. They wonder endlessly about whether this is Frankenstein or not after Kawai gives them a visit and connects the dots for them. They even send the third of their trio of scientists, Dr. Kawaji (Tadao Takashima) to Germany to talk with the scientist who sent the heart to Japan in the first place. This happens while they give Frankenstein more food and he starts to grow at an accelerated rate (it's never explained why he suddenly starts growing, but I assume it's because he has access to a steady food source for the first time). In fact, it goes so far that Dr. Kawaji approaches Frankenstein's cage to cut off a limb as the only way to prove that Frankenstein is Frankenstein (the cut off limb should regrow).

And that's where the movie just kind of lost me. Why is this so important? Why is it so important that Dr. Kawaji would be willing to sneak in and do it without permission? Why is this effort to catalogue Frankenstein so key to everything? It's just not. He's a monstrous man, and ironing out the connections with another IP (in the public domain, of course), just feels like an excuse to burn some script pages on the way to 90. This would be weird enough if Dr. Kawaji's propensity for monster murder didn't come back later in the finale, but it does. And...nothing ever comes of it. It feels like an attempt to make any character interesting but not being able to follow through on it or do anything with it.

So, Frankenstein ends up escaping because flash bulbs make him cranky (the extension of the fire thing from the original Universal monster movies which Honda reportedly rewatched while writing to give Frankenstein similar traits as his most famous incarnation), and he disappears into the Japanese Alps. The trio of scientists go in pursuit, not being able to track him but wanting to help him anyway. At the same time, the mysterious underground monster (remember him?) shows up in the same area. He's dubbed Baragon and causes havoc, killing a bunch of dancing teenagers having a dance party in a small, remote mountain village. This gets blamed on Frankenstein, and there's a small push and pull between the scientists and the military about what to do.

This is, of course, just set up for the big action spectacular to end the film. Now, it's time to talk about Eiji Tsuburaya again. Once more, he works on a Honda film, and he does it well. I think the effort is helped by the fact that the model work is at a larger scale, going generally for 1/4 scale rather than 1/25. This allows more forgiveness around improper lens choices and film speeds, making the effects feel generally more convincing while retaining the same levels of effectiveness. There's also an embrace of composition in the special effects that ends up being really effective, especially when Honda and Tsuburaya frame Frankenstein holding Baragon over his head with flames from a forest on fire. It looks great. It's honestly what saves the film from being a complete misery. You're always able to count on Tsuburaya coming through in the end, no matter the narrative deficiencies that lead up to.

And then Frankenstein fights a giant octopus for no reason. It's random and dumb, but, again, at least it looks good.

This is not some hidden gem of Honda's career. The only thing saving it is that Tsuburaya has gotten a lot better at special effects since the days of something like Varan. It's a bit of a slog getting to those special effects, but it's also helped by the fact that, outside of the categorization effort, the film moves along quickly. I mean, it's not good, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it bad. It's...okay.

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)

Let Mothra fly!

[6/10 · 16 May 2024]

Toho takes the monster mashup to the logical conclusion: turning the familiar ones into good guys to fight the new monstrous bad guy. These sorts of franchises can't go on forever making a huge threat repeatedly defeatable. The threat loses its sense of danger by the tenth time. So, if you're going to bring Godzilla back, don't find another way to kill him or put him under ice. Get him to win the day for humanity instead. Then you can focus the idea of the threat on some new creation, perhaps a three-headed flying monster who previously destroyed Venus 5,000 years ago? Sure, why not? Honda and Tsuburaya are up to the task to deliver that spectacle, but the need for humanity in an inherently inhuman story undermines the effort just enough.

A meteor shower leads to one meteor crashing in the Japanese Alps at the same time that the small country of Selgina is going through a leadership crisis focused on their princess Salno (Akiko Wakabayashi). The rival regime's assassin, Malmess (Hisaya Ito), sets a bomb on her plane which explodes midair. Salno escapes by jumping out of the plane because she hears a voice from the meteor. The crashed meteor in the Alps gets investigated by Professor Miura (Hiroshi Koizumi). A police investigator, Shindo (Yosuke Natsuki), decides to investigate a woman who says she's from Venus who looks exactly like Salno (I'm really not sure if this is supposed to be a mystery to the audience or not). Shindo's sister, Naoko (Yuriko Hoshi), works for a sensationalist media organization looking for interesting science-fictiony stories in the real world, so she pursues to woman from Venus at the same time. Meanwhile, the two princesses from Infant Island (Emi and Yumo Ito) are visiting Japan with news that one of the two Mothra twins died (budgetary reasons, I suppose), but the other one is alive and well and still in the larval stage (definitely production reasons because wings are hard).

Anyway, the point of the film isn't all of these characters. It's the monsters. And, much like Mothra vs. Godzilla, the bringing together of the monsters is really just coincidence. Rodan decides to rise up from Mount Edo because reasons. Godzilla shows up on Japanese shores for reasons. They start fighting, and it is just coincidentally about the same time that Ghidorah rises from the meteor and starts ravaging Japan. The only part that isn't coincidental is the Infant Island princesses appealing to Mothra to come to Japan and help. It's nice that there's some small element of these characters running around actually affecting the monsters in some way, to be honest. It makes them feel like a bit less of a waste of space.

However, most of the human action is around Malmess trying to track down Salno and kill her. It's obvious that Honda didn't want to just make monster movies all the time, and he tried to make all of these things into something else for at least some of the runtime. This political thriller aspect is, much like many of the attempts across the previous decade of Honda's body of work, decently well done. It's not great and wouldn't be enough to handle an entire movie on its own, but the chase around Japan while monsters pop up in the background reflects the better done effort to have monsters around another kind of movie in Dogora. I do appreciate, though, that this thriller part doesn't just go away once the monster stomping really gets going. It actually goes through the monster action to the end.

The monster action would be great if it weren't for this effort to humanize the three Earth-based monsters. Well, first I have to say that I have no complaints about Tsubaraya's work. It's the same kind of technical achievement he's been building upon since the original Godzilla. The problem is a narrative one mixed with the needs from the studio to give more solid explanations for their behavior as well as trying to appeal to kids more. Essentially, the problem started back with Godzilla Raids Again when he lost his level of metaphor and just became a monster who likes to stomp. They took something elemental and almost unknowable into a large, uncontrollable toddler having a tantrum. That's fine for some fun monster action, but it makes them feel small. Having three of them come together to set aside their differences to fight an extraterrestrial kaiju leads to a discussion between the three (translated by the Infant Island princesses) about how humans were mean to them. I mean, it makes them feel small, and it was a scene that Honda later regretted adding in. Sure, it's just an excuse to get them together and fight Ghidorah, but it's both kind of awkward from a practical filmmaking point of view (watching them flap their mouths to talk is weird) and too human for creatures who, I feel, shouldn't exhibit much in terms of human behavior. They should be more alien and unknowable.

That being said, the entire package is a light and decently amusing time. The monster action is good and fun. The political thriller stuff is decent while the film commits to it through the entire runtime. I just have these niggling issues around how the monsters come together that keep popping up, especially in the runup to the big final fight. Also, I know that the wings were a giant headache, but when I see Mothra in a movie, I'm not there to see larva Mothra. I want those wings!

Dogora (1964)

Underrated and fun

[7/10 · 16 May 2024]

Most of Ishiro Honda's science-fiction films have started out as another kind of film before moving into the genre promised on the posters. Dogora is the first that...never really leaves the genre it starts out in. I liked that. This film seems to be negatively viewed for a couple of reasons, the first being that it never really fully commits to being a monster movie, the other being that the English language version is apparently incomprehensible nonsense, but seen in the original Japanese version, I think it's a charming and different heist movie that just happens to take place during a monster invasion at the same time.

Inspector Komai (Yosuke Natsuki) is looking into a series of diamond robberies, and his attention is fixed upon an American, Mark Jackson (Robert Dunham), who is having interactions with a small cartel of diamond thieves led by Natsui (Akiko Wakabayashi). There's also a professor, Dr. Munakata (Nobuo Nakamura), who studies geological formations and has developed artificial diamonds, his assistant Professor Kirino (Hiroshi Koizumi), and Kirino's sister Masayo (Yoko Fujiyama). As the opening moments of the film play out, it's mostly a look at a heist of a bank, tense as the police patrol unknowingly outside, that gets fuddled a bit when a mysterious flying space jelly floats through, levitates everyone, and makes off with the diamonds while cutting through the vault with temperatures too hot for an oxygen-powered flamethrower.

I was really expecting this to follow the rather normal pattern so far of Honda's career where this heisting plot gets dropped steadily until about halfway through the film when it's dropped completely. And yet, it continues to be the main focus of the film. Dr. Munakata is there through it all to both talk to the properties of diamonds and the weird force wandering around the skies over the world, stealing into vaults to take diamonds while also hoovering up giant piles of coal, but mostly it's about Komai tracking down Jackson, figuring out his connection to Natsui, and a series of heists around diamonds that always get interfered with by the space jelly.

There's a moment in the latter half of the film where Komai's superior chastises him for caring about space monsters at all. They have crimes to solve. I mean, that's just uniquely framing the central plot. This is a heist movie with monster action influencing it.

And the heist stuff is pretty good on its own. It's not La Cercle Rouge or anything, but it's well-realized, clear, and moves nicely. There are little double-crosses and unknown loyalties, and it would stand decently well without the monster action. However, the monster action also adds. Firstly, it adds the contrast between the characters and their focus with the larger events unfolding around the plot. Secondly, the monster action itself. It's never the focus of the film, but it does a good bit on its own.

And, of course, one must take the time to recognize and praise the work led by Eiji Tsuburaya, the man behind the special effects. The monster, eponymously called Dogora, is a floating jellyfish in space, and it looks really good. The film's opening moments are not actually the heist stuff but space footage that is shockingly well put together, even within Tsuburaya's own accomplished body of work. When Dogora floats down to suck up coal mountains, it has this marvelous floating structure to it captured by filming flexible vinyl underwater, a new practice they invented during production. It's colorful with a bright blue sheen, and it moves wonderfully on screen.

Really, this is a heist movie that has some monster action in it, and the monster action is both kind of great and really different. No more men in suits stomping on little Japanese villages, this is a successful effort to make something new, and Tsuburaya and Honda accomplished that well.

And, through the end of the third act, the heist plot never diminishes. Honda stuck to his guns on this one, and I think it works. The chase is about diamonds, but it's happening in the middle of sci-fi nonsense about wasp venom attacking Dogora and crystallizing it. That's delightful.

I think this is one of those Honda films that deserves something of a re-appraisal, but you apparently need to watch the Japanese version and also recognize that it's not really much of a monster movie. Oh, there's a monster in it, and it's great. It's just that the focus is elsewhere. I mean, I had no idea what I was walking into and had a good time, but that expectation game is apparently really important for a lot of people.

Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)

Pure-ish Kaiju Mayhem

[6/10 · 10 May 2024]

I'm of two minds on this one. On the one hand, this is typical monster fare from Ishiro Honda, especially the early efforts to shoehorn in another kind of film into the first act. On the other hand, this is also the purest kaiju film I've seen so far in this series of Godzilla films as well as Honda's overall efforts at making science-fiction spectacles. It's really captured in the film's two halves, and while I appreciate the continued efforts by Honda to make something other than a kaiju movie while making a kaiju movie, it's the latter half that I embrace more fully.

A giant egg lands on the shores of Japan, and it causes a sensation, obviously. The egg gets purchased by Kumayama (Yoshifumi Tajima), a business man who is a front for another business man, Jiro Torahata (Kenji Sahara). Frustrated at this development is Professor Miura (Hiroshi Koizumi) who wants to study the egg and will essentially be our eyes and ears once the monster action heats up. But, we've got to wait a bit. You see, the start of this film is a corporate satire with Jiro having plans to build an amusement park around the egg. Like much of Honda's efforts to build in other genres into his kaiju films, though, it's kind of thin and doesn't really go anywhere. It's also not really related at all to the monster action because Godzilla just emerges from the ground at one point. Maybe (maybe) it's supposed to have something to do with the effort to clear the land to build the park, but it honestly just feels like coincidence. It's not like the whole film is about how building amusement parks is bad.

So, the egg is, of course, Mothra's, and the two princesses from Mothra (Emi and Yumi Ito) show up to beg humanity to give the egg back (how Mothra lost the egg in the first place is never explained), but Kumayama and Jiro won't allow it, leaving Miura unable to help. However, with the rise of Godzilla, Miura goes to Infant Island to beg Mothra's help. So, the effort to get Mothra to face down against Godzilla is drawn out and distracted (there are also a pair of journalist characters because this is that kind of movie). It's not bad, but it's not great. However, once the monster action starts, the film really takes off.

Firstly, it should be noted that these are the best special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya in this series and while working with Ishiro Honda. We return to the slow-motion efforts to try and recreate scale with Godzilla's steps feeling weighty and terrifying. There's a lot of aircraft flying around doing different things, including dropping nets. There are electric bolts firing from large towers. It's bright, big, and colorful, and there's also an embrace of compositing in real people into shots. That helps blend the two realities of miniature and real life.

And once that action starts, it hardly lets up. The only serious hiccup is the destruction of the dreams of Jiro and Kumayama which turns surprisingly violent, but Godzilla is in the background trudging toward them at the same time. Mothra, of course, shows up, and there's a twist where Mothra will never be able to return to Infant Island because she's going to die out there. Is that predictive? Is she just old? Or, is it just an excuse to have a moment of tension when Mothra lays down to die after a fight with Godzilla, protecting her egg, and the audience wonders what is going to happen next?! It's the latter, of course.

I was wondering if the film was going to willfully forget that Mothra is supposed to have a larval stage, but the film actually leans into it. Two larvae come out and use their unique skills to fight Godzilla. Really, I enjoyed the heck out of this. It's inventive, fun, colorful, and well executed.

And then I remember that the first half of the film is a largely middling corporate satire that doesn't really tie into the action in any more than the most basic of plot mechanical ways. I mean, I get that Honda didn't just want to make monster movies, but that didn't mean that they had to be so completely separate. Even a super basic, "We shouldn't despoil nature or Godzilla will come," would be good enough. Instead, as the battle is won and our characters look off into the sunset for the final seconds, they give a message about how we need to just be better? Whatever.

So, the corporate satire is decent, but it goes nowhere. The monster action is really good, but it barely ties into the first half. So, I'm caught in between. I want to like it more than I do, but I still think it's larger two halves simply don't connect very well. Oh well, it's honestly the best this franchise has been since its inception.

Atragon (1963)

Science nonsense and post-WWII self-reflection

[5/10 · 10 May 2024]

I'm always most interested in how Ishiro Honda is going to take his next bit of science-fiction nonsense in the limited new direction he could find. It's almost always in the setups, usually in the first act, and Atragon, the story of a Nemo-like captain who built a powerful submarine, puts a toe back into the realm of the Japanese culture's continuing efforts to deal with its legacy after WWII. And then there's science-fiction nonsense buoyed by adorable model work that almost never makes a whole lot of sense. Rushed together from concept to completion in four months, Atragon represents the limits of what Toho could push out using their assembly line process: moderate entertainment. There are worse things.

Mysterious humanoid figures rise from the sea and try to kidnap Japanese citizens. The focus falls on former Rear Admiral Kusumi (Ken Uehara), now the president of a large company, whose assistant is Makoto Jinguji (Yoko Fujiyama), the daughter of a WWII submarine captain, Hachiro Jinguji (Jun Tazaki, in a role written for Toshiro Mifune which he couldn't take because production on Kurosawa's Red Beard was taking forever), who supposedly died when he took his submarine in a revolt that Kusumi covered up to protect Jinguji. When the police capture one of the mysterious figures, an agent of the ancient lost continent Mu, Number 23 (Akihiko Hirata), with threats of raising the Mu Empire and bringing the entire world under their control once more, as well as with orders to find Hachiro, the only man Mu considers a threat.

Kusumi, despite knowing that Jinguji isn't dead (a secret he kept from Makoto for twenty years), has no idea where to find the old sub skipper. They get that information, though, from a spy Kusumi sent to ensure the safety of his daughter, caught by the police coincidentally just in time for him to give the information over to Kusumi. So begins the quest to find Jinguji...which ends pretty quickly because they have a guide.

Alright, so the most interesting thing about this film is when we finally meet Jinguji. He's been removed from the changes of the world for twenty years and still acts like the war is on (no mention of America, though). This is, of course, a parallel with real Japanese soldiers hiding out on tiny islands, waiting for orders for decades after the unconditional surrender, and that Honda and his writer Shinichi Sekizawa chose to deal with it in this context is fascinating. I mean, they do very little with it seriously, but it's interesting to watch.

Essentially, it becomes this argument between old-school nationalism and new-school internationalism (with Japan leading, of course, because, you know, nationalism didn't die). That the film doesn't quite see the irony in that is probably more of a blindspot to the filmmakers than anything else. It's not that important. All that's important is that we get some dramatic tension when Jinguji demonstrates the power of his new submarine called Atragon which can fly and has a cold ray and then refuses to use it to help. He's there for Japan, not the international order, you see.

One curious decision was to make the Mu Empire Egyptian in design. According to the graphic shown on the screen, the Mu Empire was a giant continent roughly the size of Asia in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, very far from Egypt. The decision to make it Egyptian was probably just a quickly made one to find a way to make it exotic to Japanese audiences, but it also creates one of those weird situations where a highly advanced civilization is decked out in silly, ancient garb, dancing ancient-looking dances in ancient-looking halls, while sliding it aside to reveal switches and buttons from time to time. It's always weird to me.

Speaking of the look of things, this is a special effects movie made by Ishiro Honda, so there must be time dedicated to talking about the work for Eiji Tsuburaya. This isn't his best work. The problem is that it's honestly too ambitious. The Mu Empire is a miniature, but it never feels like anything else because it's mostly filmed alone. What helps make the miniatures work in the other stuff is when there's actual action going on, so the long, dreamy shot through Mu that doesn't have a single person or thing moving just looks fake. However, in the spectacle-laden ending, when the Atragon shows up to cause destruction, including some halfway decent compositing of people in the foreground from time to time, it works better. It's still not believable, but it's more effective.

I should also note that since the movie brought up WWII itself, I don't think it's untoward to bring up WWII regarding its ending. Japan is attacked. They have a secret superweapon. They use this superweapon to literally destroy an entire continent, including civilians, to end the conflict and protect themselves. If that's not a parallel to what happened to Japan in WWII, I don't know what is. I do wonder if either Honda or Sekizawa recognized the connection.

Anyway, it's...okay. It has some interesting ideas that it doesn't explore in any serious way, but the ideas are there. The action is silly. The character-based storytelling is thin and unpursued. It's pretty typical fare, but it's not the worst thing. Spectacle has some benefits.

Matango (1963)

Creepy atmosphere

[8/10 · 10 May 2024]

It's the smaller films by Ishiro Honda since he got pigeonholed into the sci-fi/horror genre that I'm finding far more interesting than the bigger ones. This and The Human Vapor are missing the grand scale of something like Gorath or Rodan, but in place we get a stronger focus on character and atmosphere. That ends up combining with Honda's strong technical skills, never in doubt even in his lesser work, to create more complete packages of genre thrills that simply work better overall.

I suppose that I only have two main complaints with the film. The first is the wraparound, a pair of scenes as the one survivor of the film's events speaks, with his back to the camera from a room overlooking the Tokyo skyline (the first real modern look at Tokyo in Honda's work), laying out how many survive while giving the audience the assurance that, yes, they've paid for a horror movie. Just give it a minute because the film's real beginning is almost akin to a beach picture from the 50s as a group of rich Tokyo residents take a yacht out for a couple of days of relaxing boating. My other complaint is that there are probably two or three too many characters, several of them blending together slightly confusingly.

Anyway, the whole affair was arranged by Kasai (Yoshio Tsuchiya), the president of Kasai industries, bringing along his mistress, the television singer Mami (Kumi Mizuno), the writer of mystery novels Etsuro (Hiroshi Tachikawa), the professor of psychology Kenji (Akira Kubo), the student Akiko (Miki Yashiro), the ship's captain Naoyuki (Hiroshi Koizumi), and his first mate Senzo (Kenji Sahara). They're out having a good time, demonstrating their characters in small ways, when a storm comes up. Kasai decides, as the owner of the boat, that they'll keep on, a decision that turns sour when the storm gets too powerful, and they find themselves lost in a fog, sailing in sight of an island that they seek shelter on considering the damaged nature of the boat.

It honestly doesn't take too long for the film to start feeling like a weird, very Japanese, horror film. It's maybe twenty minutes. However, once they get to the island, it's obvious that it's not anything like normal. There are no animals to be found. The place is too quiet. They cross the landmass and find an abandoned vessel with rooms filled with weird growths all over them except the infirmary where the growth won't seemingly thrive around antiseptics. They also find some canned food hidden away, but never any sign of the former crew aside from the log which just stops without an answer.

Trapped, the seven begin to grate on each other with their different priorities, desires, and goals. Kenji is the most pro-active of them all, trying to organize hunting parties for food. Kasai just wants to buy his way through every problem. Mami plays with the men because she's bored. Naoyuki is concerned with fixing the boat. Akiko keeps to herself, all shy-like. Etsuro, perhaps because he's the writer, is the first to eat the local mushrooms, called Matango, that Kenji insists they shouldn't.

It's in this environment that weird things begin to happen. They're visited at night by some kind of man-like creature with growths all over it that may or may not have actually shown up. Kasai tries to steal food in the middle of it all, and he's only stopped by the horror he witnesses and desire to save his own skin. The thin bonds between the men fray. Tensions mount. A gun is used to threaten. People get kicked off of the ship. Bribes are attempted. People disappear and then reappear with surprising smiles and the insistence on eating mushrooms.

I really like all of this. The weirdness of the setting. The focus on characters as they deal with it. The unexplainable nature of the events (well, not unexplainable, but definitely outside the realm of possibility and easy explanation), and the abandonment of any desire to come up with scientific explanations for it. There is some early-ish dialogue about how the previous crew of the abandoned ship were studying the effects of radiation and atomic weapons, but at no point is there a scientist in a lab coat saying that radiation caused people to turn into mushrooms for two straight minutes. That's a blessing.

So, it's a horror movie. It's a very effective horror movie. I get lost in the characters, trying to keep all of them straight, and I don't like the wraparound all that much, but the rest is very solid stuff. I get into the weird atmosphere of it all as the characters go steadily insane while bizarre things unfold around them and engulf them. It's well filmed, well directed, well performed, and well put together. It's a good time at the movies.

King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

Monster mashup

[5/10 · 10 May 2024]

Now, the monster mashups begin. Godzilla's first squaring off with another creature is the result of a script that originally pitted King Kong against Frankenstein's monster that Toho got their hands on and retooled for their marquee monster that they were discovering they could bring back repeatedly without turning off their Japanese and American audiences. They also brought back the original filmmaker behind Godzilla, Ishiro Honda, though without his original writing partner, choosing instead to use Shinichi Sekizawa, one of two writers who had become Honda's regular partner. The result is what one might expect from this period of Toho monster movies: thin, a bit (though not incredibly) silly, and with an effort to make another kind of movie in there somewhere.

The head of Pacific Pharmaceuticals, Mr. Tako (Ichiro Arishima), has decided that his media and advertising contract is not performing to standards, so he demands that the television studio create a sensation to up their ratings which should lead to more sales of the company's drugs. Here is the heart of the film, the satiric look at the Japanese television industry and its quest for ratings no matter what, and it's probably where the film works best. It's unfortunate that Sekizawa wasn't a good enough writer to bring it into the whole of the film, picking it up and dropping it from time to time as other types of film dominate for large sections of the film, but Mr. Tako doing everything he can to push the reporters into making things sensational across the action of the film provides some solid chuckles here and there.

Sakurai (Tadao Takashima) and Furue (Yu Fujiki) end up being sent to Faro Island (also the name of the place Ingmar Bergman called home for decades, but it has to just be a coincidence, right?) to investigate a mysterious spirit that the locals live in fear of. Yes, it's King Kong. They witness him battling a giant octopus and then getting so drunk that he falls asleep in a ceremony the locals provide him, giving them the perfect opportunity to get the Japanese boating crew to tie him up and lash him to a giant raft. Where the original King Kong outright ignored how to move a giant ape from one side of the world to the other, King Kong vs. Godzilla embraces it, and the sight is always inherently silly. Granted, the raft sight isn't hilarious (though the combination of man-in-suit and water just doesn't mesh all that well), there's a moment late where they transport him by giant balloon that is just...kind of hilarious.

Meanwhile, at the same time, Godzilla has decided to awaken for no reason at all, heating up the ice prison that he was trapped in at the end of Godzilla Raids Again, and he heads straight for Japan. This (so far) short series has developed a little tic of bringing back scientific characters from the previous entry to explain the science or behavior of Godzilla in the new one. Takashi Shimuri had a cameo in Godzilla Raids Again after his near-star role in Godzilla, and this time it's Dr. Shigezawa (Akihiko Hirata), who was also in Godzilla, to appear in a couple of scenes and explain Godzilla's behavior. I mean, for this weird little series in the 60s, the commitment canon is surprising.

Anyway, the two monsters have a fight, but King Kong is bested by Godzilla, leading to a retreat, some business with a girl being kidnapped by the giant ape, drugging it based on the stuff it got drunk off of on Faro Island, and then transporting him to face Godzilla again when the scientists decide that despite Kong losing his first battle maybe a day before, Kong is definitely strong enough now. It'll help if he gets miraculously struck by lightning to make him much more stronger at a down moment, too.

So, it's silly. There is some more character stuff around Sakurai's sister and Furue's fiancée (I might have mixed those up, but it just doesn't matter in the least), Fumiko (Mie Hama), but she's forgotten for long sections in favor of bits of satirical comedy around Mr. Tako and monster mash action. Focusing more purely on the satirical elements would have been a net-positive, I think.

Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects are, once again, the star of the show, but I have to say that he repeated the decision to play monster action quickly here like he did (supposedly accidentally) in Godzilla Raids Again. Moving these guys quickly makes them feel smaller, not bigger, and it makes the action itself inherently sillier. So, the suits are mostly pretty good (Godzilla is pretty good, Kong looks...not great, to be honest), and there's this wonderful continued embrace of miniature destruction. However, I just wish Tsuburaya had gone back to how to film kaiju from his first effort rather than his second.

So, it's fine. It's an excuse to pit Godzilla against another monster. The character stuff works slightly better this time than most because it has that satirical edge, even if it doesn't really go very far. So, it's decent, on the brighter side of this kind of film in this era. It entertains slightly. It's just, you know, not good.

Gorath (1962)

Science nonsense

[5/10 · 10 May 2024]

I never knew that Ishiro Honda made a prequel to Moonfall. Okay, this is slightly less stupid, but it's still pretty stupid. Also, I much prefer miniature effects to CGI, so this has some charm to it in overdelivering special effects. This isn't near the top of Honda's science-fiction oeuvre, but it does provide a nice platform for Eiji Tsuburaya to showcase his skills on some kind of weird ideas.

A star, named Gorath, has been noted as heading towards our solar system, and the crew of the Japanese led spaceship, the JX-1 Hawk, change course from their mission to first study Saturn and collect data on the mysterious object. They discover that it's 6,000 times as dense as Earth but a quarter of the size, and that it's headed straight for Earth as they plunge to their deaths to collect the data and transmit it back. On Earth, scientists both nationally and internationally through the UN discuss the situation. The only real ideas to note here is the continued self-impression of the Japanese people as leaders of the free world, being the most advanced in terms of science since their rockets are further along than the rest of the world's, and they take on a key leadership role in the UN. So, despite being ravaged into the Stone Age in WWII because of their military adventurism gone wrong, Japan is still the smartest, best, and most successful country on the planet. Sure.

Anyway, the key scientist (and honestly the only character worth mentioning since they're almost all just thin caricatures) is Dr. Tazawa (Ryo Ikebe) who comes up with the plan to use nuclear power (Honda's anti-nuclearism seems to have begun to soften with Mothra, and that continues here) to build...giant rockets on the South Pole to move the Earth out of Gorath's path. I mean...that's stupid. That's real stupid. That's an idea that Roland Emmerich would say, "That's too far." And yet, the innocent nature of its presentation, helped in no small part by the miniature work, helps save it from being completely ludicrous. It edges into camp just enough so that it's not a total disaster.

There's business about getting another ship up to collect more data (for reasons), and the little bit of a love story between Tatsuma (Akira Kubo) and Tomoko (Yumi Shirakawa), daughter to prominent paleontologist Kensuke (Takashi Shimura) who is friends with Tazawa. It's thin, deals with Tomoko's old love for one of the first ship's crewmembers, and feels like a weird little distraction in the whole thing. It's a half-hearted attempt to inject human drama in what is ultimately a procedural film about professionals doing a professional job to overcome a problem.

It's just that everything about the professional job and the problem is ridiculous while everyone takes it very seriously. I mean, that just limits my enjoyment of the whole thing, but, again, so much is carried out by those charming miniatures from Tsuburaya. There are the rockets, the super-dense star (that seems to have been some kind of inspiration for the antagonist in The Fifth Element), the South Pole base (which is rather large, to be honest), and even a bit of Tokyo when destruction needs to happen. It's a lot, and there's quick movement from one thing to the next, keeping it from being boring.

There was one moment where I almost just lost what little interest I had in the film, and that's when the monster on the poster appeared. The rockets have fired, and it somehow wakes up a dinosaur who does some damage. "Is this what this movie is going to become? Another Godzilla?" Well, it was dead moments later, and the film refocused. It's a weird moment, at best some kind of wink between nuclear power and monsters that created the previous kaiju, but then we're back to the good ridiculous nonsense: Japan leading the world in an engineering effort to shift the planet's orbit with absolutely no negative side effects whatsoever.

At least the special effects through all of this are charming and kind of wonderful.

So, it looks expensive. There's a decent amount of English dialogue including the final declaration of victory, indicating that this was made with an American audience in mind. It's charming to look at but never engaging while also never rising above its innate silliness. It's not good, is what I'm saying, but it's not a complete waste of time. I've seen far, far worse mindless entertainments. I'll take this over Moonfall any day.

Battle in Outer Space (1959)

Starring: Special Effects...in SPACE!!!!

[6/10 · 3 May 2024]

Ishiro Honda returns to the cinemas with another big, special effect spectacle ala The Mysterians. I'd say that this is a step down from the previous film, not having the same kind of narrative verve (the modest amount that The Mysterians demonstrated) and is more of a straightforward sci-fi adventure. That could work if, again, there were characters of any depth to be had, the kind of lynchpin necessary to bring audiences into an adventure. But, alas, the script by Shinichi Sekizawa is just too thin to accomplish that.

Alien ships attack a Japanese space station, destroying it and causing a panic in the upper-echelons of the world governments. In addition, strange weather events dealing with cold are doing terrible things like lifting entire bridges off the ground, sending trains to crash in the valleys below. There's a surprising amount of time trying to explain how cold temperatures lessen gravity (nonsense), the sort of science deification that is sadly constant in Honda's science fiction films which mixes really badly with the fact that the science itself is, well, nonsense. Anyway, the film is better when it just accepts nonsense without trying to explain it, like when Dr. Ahmed (George Wyman) gets remote controlled by the aliens, turning him into a saboteur. What's the science behind that? Doesn't matter. It just happens. That's better.

Anyway, the governments of the world decide that the only action is to send up two rockets to the moon, where the alien radio signals are originating. The first is commanded by a Japanese commander (Minoru Takada), and the second is commanded by Dr. Richardson (Len Stanford). The inclusion of the American commander is interesting mostly because he's barely in the film, but he gets prominence near the beginning and the end, like some sort of half-thought-out sop to American audiences and distributors who were eating this stuff up at the time. It sort of reminds me of the common practice these days of including minor Chinese characters in big budget films like The Martian to appease the Chinese market and funding.

Anyway, the actual main character is probably Major Ichiro (Ryo Ikebe), the Japanese commander's second hand man. He seems to be the focus, but this is such a plot-heavy film with hardly any sense of character that it doesn't really matter. He's strong, professional man in the middle of special effects. There's also his love interest (I guess) Etsuko (Kyoko Anzai) who accompanies the team to the moon. The only real bit of actual character work goes to Iwomura (Yoshio Tsuchiya) who gets controlled by the aliens (intermittently, only when they actively send commands). He's the navigator, instructed to sabotage the mission at certain points (but never the best times to completely destroy the ship because plot), and he feels guilt at his lack of command of his own actions. It culminates in a nice moment in the first of the two action spectacular finales that doesn't quite seem to make the most sense, but it's fine.

That leads me to the actual appeal of this film: the special effects. Like most of Honda's films in this vein, the main attraction is Eiji Tsuburaya's model work, and there's a lot of it here. This was obviously an expensive film at the time (probably a reason for the sort of prominent and out of place American character, a potential necessity of funding), and Tsuburaya throws a lot at the screen. The rocket launches, the alien base on the moon, the extended fight on the surface, the counterattack on Earth, it's a lot, and it's genuinely fun. There's a lot going on, and it's inventive and just a joy to watch.

So, the plot is threadbare but functional, an excuse for special effects. The characters are threadbare and don't take up too much screentime (except the early scenes when scientists try to explain stuff which is...please stop). However, the film has its focus on what it does best: models doing action and science fiction things. It's a clear line through the action from one beat to the next, and the characters almost never get in the way. It's an expensive film of modest narrative ambitions, but it manages those with flare and fun.

I mean, it's not quite good, but it's decently amusing for long stretches.

Mothra (1961)

Decently entertaining

[6/10 · 3 May 2024]

The first kaiju film from Honda that actually feels like it owes something to the original King Kong, Mothra was Toho's efforts at appealing explicitly to the female part of the movie-going audience. You see, Mothra is a girl this time. And there's singing. Other than that, it's pretty typical of this era in terms of kaiju action. The character work is thinner than it needs to be. The action is big and brash and fun. There's an effort at a different kind of movie for a while because Honda already seemed bored of kaiju movies when he started making them. It comes together in a decently entertaining package that doesn't quite work totally but is a somewhat fun time while it lasts.

A ship wrecks in a storm off the coast of Infant Island, and a rescue operation finds four survivors on the coast. This is remarkable considering the levels of radiation there due to atomic bomb testing (yup, there it is). They attribute their survival to a juice that the locals gave them, initiating an effort by the Japanese government to try and organize an exploratory and scientific team to see what's going on in the island's interior. They invite the involvement of the Rolisican government. What is Rolisica? It's a combination of how the Japanese say Russia and America, but mostly it's just a thinly veiled America (the movie ends in New Kirk City, not Kirkcow). Anyway, the Japanese government wants Dr. Shinichi Chujo (Hiroshi Koizumi) to be part of the time since he was part of the Rolisican government's previous expedition. There's a bit where he's shy about having his picture taken by two reporters, Fukuda (Frankie Sakai) and Michi (Kyoko Kagawa). It leads to nothing other than a reveal of stubble on his face, though.

The expedition is led by Clark Nelson (Jerry Ito), a Rolisican who's obviously not trustworthy from the moment we see him. I think the film is perhaps most interesting during the actual expedition. It's like a natural adventure where professionals go into a strange new place and discover strange new sites. There are strange plants, strange rock formations, strange words etched into rock. All of this is given a lighter tone by including Fukuda who sneaks on board the ship as a cabin boy and gets accepted as part of the expedition as long as he promises to not write about it (any excuse to keep these characters around, it seems). The central strange sight is a pair of diminutive princesses (Yumi and Emi Ito).

One of my biggest problems with the film is how a bunch of the elements never seem to come together into a cohesive whole, and Nelson becoming greedy at the prospect of becoming a stage producer with these little princesses is probably the biggest example. According to the dialogue, he's actually a meteorologist. I mean, it's a leap that the film never tries to bridge. He's just evil and wants to put the princesses on stage (this is where the connection to the original King Kong is most apparent). There's also a weirdness where there was obviously a late editing choice to get Nelson kidnapping the princesses at a different point, but not that different. It seems like, originally, he just went back at night while the ship was just off the coast and picked them up, but the film puts the scene after they get back to Japan. I suppose it's supposed to paper over the idea that he'd have the princesses without anyone noticing on a closed ship for days or weeks (I'd imagine there are deleted scenes around it), but it's still weird to see it play out.

The film then focuses on Nelson's successful efforts to make money off the princesses singing, but they are telepathic and singing back to the other natives of Infant Island (all regular sized for some reason), a song they use to wake up the titular Mothra. We get lost in some business of Chujo, Fukuda, and Michi trying to convince Nelson to let the princesses go. There's also a bit about coming up with a material that will block their telepathic powers that Nelson ends up using to hide the fact that he's fleeing Japan for New Kirk City. All this time, Mothra steadily awakes.

Now, in terms of the monster action (Eiji Tsuburaya is always the star of these), this is interesting because it's the first in Honda's filmography where the monster has multiple forms. The first is the larval stage, erupting from the giant egg, swimming across the sea, and heading towards Tokyo, the last place she sensed the princesses. She causes destruction, the Japanese defense forces unable to make a dent in her thick skin, until she gets to the Tokyo Tower and forms a cocoon. Her life cycle for such a large monster is really fast, but monster movie. Let's get on with it.

I would just say that monster action happens with Mothra developing her wings, flying across the world, and leveling a good part of New Kirk City, but there's an extra bit in the resolution where Chujo recognizes a similarity between one of the prominent symbols found on the island and a cross on top of a church, haloed by the sun. Normally, if you do this sort of thing, especially with one of the most recognizable symbols on the planet, you're doing it to draw some sort of comparison. I was reminded of the 1976 version of King Kong which had a visual comparison between the World Trade Center in NYC and some large rock formations on Skull Island. That felt like coincidence and a direction to look for Kong. This, though? It feels like there's supposed to be some kind of intended meaning. If I were being generous, I'd say it's an implication that Christianity is right in some way, but this is a Japanese film written by Shinichi Sekizawa who never seemed to put meaning into his films one way or the other. It just ends up feeling random, but the use is so prominent. It's the second big thing in the film where stuff just doesn't come together in ways that it feels like it should.

Anyway, the monster action is inventive and good (also adorable, I love miniatures). The character work is thin but functional except for Nelson who has some logical leaps in characterization. It looks good, moves quickly, and has some nice sights along the way. It's decently entertaining as it plays out, but it really could have used a rewrite.

The Human Vapor (1960)

A hidden gem worthy of reappraisal

[8/10 · 3 May 2024]

Well, this is a surprise. I did not expect to so thoroughly enjoy The Human Vapor. A curious mixture of film noir, The Invisible Man, The Phantom of the Opera, and even a soupcon of His Girl Friday, this genre-bending horror film from Ishiro Honda is his most effective and entertaining film since he got stuck in the science fiction ghetto. A lot of credit has to go to the script by Takeshi Kimura who had written some of Honda's better science fiction fare over the previous few years, so it's nice to see that Honda's confident filmmaking supported by a script that mostly gets things right.

A bank robber is foiling the police, namely Detective Okamoto (Tatsuya Mihashi). The robber gets the money, leaves no trace of his presence (including fingerprints or footprints), and vanishes from the car crash scene during his flight. The car crashed near the house of semi-retired Noh dancer Fujichiyo Kasuga (Kaoru Yachigusa) where her live-in, elderly servant Jiya (Bokuzen Hidari) insists no one has been seen in or near the house other than the two all day. Okamoto tells his suspicions that Kasuga must be involved somehow to his girlfriend, the reporter Kyoko (Keiko Sata) (her scenes seem to be influenced directly by Howard Hawks' newspaper film) and his superiors at the police station. So begins the film's feel of film noir as Okamoto trails Kasuga, a femme fatale, and investigates seemingly disparate paths towards one mystery. It's quiet with a bit of tension that feels appropriate for the opening of a noirish mystery and thriller.

There's also a surprising reticence to jump into over-explanations of nonsense science. In fact, we don't even get an explanation for the bank robberies until halfway through the film. Honda and Kimura show a really strong amount of restraint before jumping into Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects, establishing character to build the story upon. I suppose the only complaint I have with this opening is that the relationship between Kyoko and Okamoto is too thinly drawn, like it needed one full scene of them being romantic instead of buddy-buddy. It's a small part of the film since the romance is more of a character-based subplot than the main story, so it's easy to forgive. However, there's a moment late in the film that relies on the relationship that doesn't hit as well as it should.

It takes until about halfway into the film before the man responsible shows up, Mizuno (Yoshio Tshuchiya), whom the newspapers end up calling the gas man since he can literally turn his body into gas at will. His demonstration to the police is interesting because if you take the perspective that this is a science-fiction film, it's frustrating because the police should know the rules that weird things are gonna happen, right? Except they don't know that, so it's this weird moment where we have to push aside all of our knowledge of movies to accept perfectly acceptable actions by police. It's not really a criticism, just an observation.

Anyway, I love Mizuno as a bad guy. The inspiration from The Invisible Man extends well beyond just the use of empty suits walking sometimes. It goes to how Mizuno acts and the reasons behind it. There's a mad scientist bit, Mizuno being the victim of Dr. Sano (Fuyuki Murakami) and his experiments shown in a brief flashback (with mercifully no effort to explain the nonsense science), which is a tie to James Whale's film, but Mizuno also has a line about how he's no longer human. He doesn't need to follow human morality which is exactly the sort of madness that plagued Claude Rains' character, derived from the eponymous character in Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse films. It doesn't extend in dialogue beyond that, but it provides the foundation for his actions and madness.

His plot, though, is to fund the comeback by Kasuga to the stage, stealing the money and giving to her to put on a large recital that should cost at least ten million yen. There's a plot to try and capture and kill the gas man who can filter under doors at will, introduced by another minor scientist character who gives no real detail on it (mercifully), allowing greater focus on our characters as we go to the ending. The real emotional core of the film ends up being Kasuga (making the underdevelopment of the relationship between Okamoto and Kyoko slightly less important), and it's a surprisingly strong culmination of her and the overall story.

So, I have some small issues with a couple of character moments. The other is Mizuno's affectation towards Kasugo is more implied than shown (there's a moment where Okamoto announces it when he first meets the guy that feels off), but otherwise this film is really, really good. It's an homage to classic Universal monster movies, film noir, and Howard Hawks that manages to feel alive on its own. This is, I think, deeply underappreciated. It's really good. I'm a fan.

Varan (1958)

Dull retread

[4/10 · 3 May 2024]

What if Ishiro Honda made a cheap Godzilla ripoff for Japanese television that was quickly recut into a feature length motion picture? Would you believe me if I told you the result was not very good? That it does nothing to set itself apart from the movie it's copying? Well, as can be said for pretty much every Honda monster film, the special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya are the star, even if Varan himself ends up looking like Godzilla's brother from another mother.

A pair of entomologists go into what is called the Tibet of Japan, a remote region in the inner mountains of the nation, where a butterfly only known to live on mainland Asia has been found. Does this butterfly have anything to do with the inevitable monster? Nope. We do get a knowing wink at the audience when one of them says that it's too early for monsters as they drive out from the small village, so that's nice, knowing that Honda and his writer Shinichi Sekizawa are savvy enough to know not to reveal their monster too early. Anyway, the pair are killed in mysterious circumstances, mostly after they feel an earthquake that isn't an earthquake. This sends the sister of one of them, Yuriko (Ayumi Sonoda), to their lead professor, Dr. Sugimoto (Koreya Senda), and attaches herself to the expedition to investigate what happened. The investigation seems to be one person, Motohiko (Fumindo Matsuo), until Yuriko joins which then convinces Kenji (Kozo Nomura), another entomologist, to join. So, that's weird. Anyway.

They go to the village, learn that the locals worship a god named Baradagi, and insist on investigating despite the warnings. They end up chasing after a small boy who is, in turn, chasing after his dog, and awaken the wrath of Baradagi. Of course, there are efforts to properly categorize this monster, labeling him as Varanapode, hence the name Varan, which is de rigeur at this point in these films, but thankfully it doesn't last too long.

However, the film jumps right into the whole, "Japan must use all of its terrifying military might to destroy this thing that was being all alone and isolated until scientists stuck their nose in a place they were told not to go." You know, for a genre of films that almost deify scientists, it's the scientists who start most of the problems. The overall theme is, however, a plea for responsible science, but the scientists who start things never seem to learn a lesson and often are strategizing how to create larger weapons (never nuclear) to defeat the thing that they started. It's weird.

Anyway, irritating Varan just leads to him deciding to fly away (he has flying squirrel-like wings which seem insufficient for flight, but whatever, at least we don't have 3 minutes explaining it), and he heads towards Tokyo. The military has to get on alert to fight it off, and we have our standard look at how conventional weapons have no effect. They must come up with another weapon! Well, good thing that Kenji has developed an explosive that burns twenty times hotter than TNT! (But no nuclear, remember, nuclear burns a whole lot hotter than that.) They have to use it! But it isn't effective! They have to find another way!

Seriously, this is just rote. There's nothing particularly interesting about anything that happens. The characters are, again, threadbare, having something close to stories around them that are mostly ignored (Kenji and Yuriko become an item, I guess, not that it matters). The plotting is just standard giant monster stuff. The highlight is, once again, Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects. Sure, Varan is essentially Godzilla with some fleshy stuff under his arms, spikes along his spine, and the ability to crawl on all-fours, but he's decently realized and looks pretty good on screen. The destruction is always nice to see, the embrace of miniatures making it all the more adorable, and there's a good amount of it towards the end.

It's just that there's nothing else of interest to really talk about. The story around it isn't so much horribly handled as just boringly repeated. The characters are largely just there. The performers do what they can, but they have so little to do that they don't really make an impression. At least Varan himself looks decent as he stomps on tiny buildings.

That's something.

The H-Man (1958)

Good monster, underwritten gangsters

[5/10 · 3 May 2024]

Moving away from giant monsters for a moment, Ishiro Honda brings Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects skills on a smaller, perhaps more effective, scale in service to a monster movie disguised as a gangster film. It's a curious mix where we get Honda's now expected over-explanation of scientific nonsense in combination with underwritten characters who never feel terribly distinct. The spectacle is on a much smaller scale and with less screentime, leaving these thin characters to fill in the gap which creates a less enticing overall genre experience. I mean, it basically functions as it lurches from one bit of special effects to the next, but at least the special effects are pretty good.

Misaki (Hisaya Ito) is running through the rain with a parcel of heroin when he suddenly gasps in pain, shoots downward, and vanishes, his clothes left behind. The police are baffled at the happening, the investigation being led by Tominaga (Akihito Hirata). They are approached by Dr. Masada (Kenji Sahara), a specialist in radiation, who has a theory that Misaki was dissolved because of radiation from H-bomb tests off the Japanese coast. At the same time, Tominaga is watching Misaki's girlfriend, Chikako Arai (Yumi Shirakawa), a lounge singer who purportedly knows nothing of Misaki's work with organized crime smuggling drugs.

So, this being a Honda science-fiction film, the scientist is definitely going to be right, dragging the civilian authorities towards the truth, and the film is going to take a good amount of time laying out why all this silly nonsense purported to be science is right and true. I just don't understand this need to try and prove to the audience that men being turned into gelatinous monsters who crawl up and down walls and turn people into water (or other monsters, it's just a bit unclear) when it's so obviously nonsense. I mean, it's part of an effort to scandalize H-bomb testing and atomic power in general, but by putting such weight onto stuff that's obviously not true about what radiation does feels counter-productive to the point. It desensitizes the audience to the dangers of nuclear power rather than sells them an actual case. This is why combining silly genre thrills with serious points about the world is a tricky balance to pull off.

Anyway, most of the movie is actually about the investigation around Misaki that touches on the organized crime angle. It's honestly not great. There's no strong sense of anyone in the organization, so the investigation feels half-hearted. It ends up focusing on Uchida (Makoto Sato), another low-level gangster who pretends to be eaten by the monster, leaving his clothes behind, and going after Chikako because he desires her. Since Dr. Masada and Chikako had grown close during the investigation, it provides what little character-based thrill is in the film, but none of the character-based stuff is terribly well-done. But, at least it's there. There's something. It's not great, but it's there.

The highlight is the monster itself. Filmed inventively using upside-down sets from all angles to simulate movement along with a weird ghostly image at heightened moments, the monster is surprisingly effective for being just a glob of goo that snakes around on the ground. It's helped in no small part by the actual visual of the bodies dissolving when attacked. It's quite gruesome in a non-gory way, and it's very effective. Honda saves the visual for later in the film, not giving it away too early, which would have been a great thing if what filled those early minutes were effective storytelling. But, it's, at best, moderately functional storytelling that precedes that reveal.

So, I wouldn't go so far as to call it bad. It's interesting to see Honda squeeze in another genre into his monster movie, implying that he had some desire to work outside the realm that his producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, was forcing him into all of the time. The monster stuff is really good. There's a flashback scene to the shipping tanker where it all started that's decently well-done. However, the gangster stuff is massively underwritten, the characters are paper-thin, and the overall plot is nothing terribly exciting while the thematic point is degraded to the same level of silliness as the science that "explains" the monster. It's a mixed bag, but Honda has made worse. There's some halfway decent entertainment to be had in this film, but only halfway.