The Realm of Ryan

The Shadow in The Thunder King

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 04:30:00 +0000

The Thunder King (1941)

Walter B. Gibson writing as Maxwell Grant

The 1940s were a lesser decade for the Shadow than the previous one. Perhaps principle Shadow author Walter B. Gibson was fatigued, and the changing tastes of the reading audience toward comic books was dictating creative choices at Street & Smith inimical toward making the character as great as during the halcyon days of the ‘30s. Readership numbers were slipping, leading the publishers to attempt gimmicks to lure new readers. One of these tricks was moving the character of Margot Lane, invented for The Shadow radio program, into the supporting cast of the novels. Margo Lane (Gibson preferred the phonetic spelling) debuted in The Thunder King, the feature novel in the 15 June 1941 issue of The Shadow Magazine.

Margo’s origin is… nothing. Gibson drops her into the story without explanation. She comes “as is” from the radio adaptation, making it obvious that Gibson did not want her in the novels at all, and Street & Smith pressured him to include her so any newcomers who only knew the radio show would find a familiar cast when they picked up an issue of the magazine. The regular readers in the letters column complained about the Margo Lane appearing, but she would remain an important member of the Shadow’s agents for the rest of the pulp run.

Margo Lane doesn’t end up as a disaster when inserted into the literary Shadow’s world, and Gibson uses most of the opportunities that she offers. As one of the Shadow’s agents, Margo is in a different position from the rest of the crew since she regularly interacts socially with the Lamont Cranston identity and is a vague love interest. Margo suspects that Cranston and the Shadow are the same, as do most of the agents like Harry Vincent (who plays a large role here), but Margo receives her instructions through Cranston specifically. It wasn’t until The Devil Monsters a year and half later that Gibson settled on Margo knowing for certain that Lamont Cranston is one of the Shadow’s identities.

Unfortunately, Gibson also uses an opportunity with Margo Lane I wished he’d left alone: the kidnapped damsel in distress. The Shadow stories don’t often dip into the kidnapped helpless woman ploy, and that it shows up here is another example of how the magazine was shifting toward the style of the many pulp heroes who originally emerged as imitators of the Shadow.

The change is also apparent in the story’s fast-paced but often empty action. This was typical of late-era Shadow, when the magazine competed with the big blood n’ thunder of other hero pulps, as well as with comic books. Gibson could write action as well as he could anything else, and he always found clever gag in the midst of a typical firefight, but one shoot-out after another isn’t too thrilling to read.

The plot of The Thunder King pits the Shadow against a mad scientist with a powerful lighting-creating device that he uses to attack manufacturing companies involved in a game of industrial sabotage. Two industrialists, Oswald Kelber and Jerome Thorden, are in the midst of a duel over obtaining important military contracts (the U.S. was already preparing for war). Eccentric electronics genius Oliver Bayruth, possibly based obliquely on Nicola Tesla, unleashes spectacular lightning doom on the manufacturing plants that Kelber needs to maintain his contracts. Bayruth also has some foreign help, since Fifth Columnists have an interest in seeing U.S. industry collapse, although this is merely sprinkled into the story later on as some current event spice.

The Shadow fights close to the forefront through most of the book, with the readers following his actions in the thick of the shoot-outs and the electrical demolitions. Although some of the Shadow’s mysterioso personality remains—and he executes a few stylish tricks to outwit the lightning machine, such as using a rubber insulated version of his disguise—he is more a traditional superhero at this point, especially when he dashes off for the finale with rescuing Margo Lane in mind.

The twist in the final chapter is one of the least surprising I’ve come across in a Shadow novel. The writing telegraphs it from far off, and it requires a few pages of backfill explanation to wave off events that were originally supposed look like incriminating behavior. Earlier Shadow stories would have contained a more intricate design building up to the twist, working like an elegant stage magic trick. But with the accent on pulpy heroics there isn’t much room for the cleverness of old. And, as I’ve suggested before, Gibson was perhaps feeling worn out by this time.

The Thunder King is decent pulp, and works better as a science-fiction tinged action piece than much of the lesser magazine fare of the early 1940s. But it is nonetheless standard pulp, and that means it’s only adequate Shadow. The main reason to read it is for the historical value of Margo Lane’s debut. It’s nice to see that he doesn’t do as much damage as fans feared she might.

The Thunder King is part of Nostalgia Ventures’ Vol. 68 of Shadow reprints, paired with The Star of Delhi.

The Shadow in The Ghost of the Manor

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Sun, 28 Sep 2014 05:55:00 +0000

The Ghost of the Manor (1933)
Walter B. Gibson writing as Maxwell Grant

Too much time has passed since I spent quality time with the Shadow. The last time was over a year ago, when the 1994 film was slated for its first Blu-release. Since the last Shadow novel I read was a character-driven and realistic noirish drama (Road of Crime), the obvious choice now is to turn toward the Gothic and mysterious realms of the Shadow’s adventures.

The Ghost of the Manor (originally published in The Shadow Magazine for 15 June 1933) uses many of the traditional trappings of the “Old Dark House” sub-genre. As author Walter B. Gibson demonstrated repeatedly, the Shadow could fit into any crime genre without stretching. However, the character was uniquely at home in two: super-crime fighting tales (The Cobra, The Voodoo Master, The Black Hush), and Victorian-style gloomy mysteries (The Grove of Doom). The Ghost of the Manor is a good example of the latter, culled from the early years of the magazine when Gibson could seem to do no wrong. It won’t satisfy the action crowd, but it’s definitely the mystery fan’s kind of Shadow adventure.

Gibson makes the subgenre for this novel clear from the opening chapters with one of the famed clichés of the “Old Dark House” tale: relatives of an eccentric rich man gather in a grand manor home late at night to hear the reading of the recently deceased’s will. The dead man in this case is millionaire Caleb Delthern, one of a long line of Deltherns who have inhabited the halls of a mansion in the city of Newbury for centuries.

At the nighttime gathering, the family lawyer reveals Caleb Delthern’s last will and testament to the surviving grandchildren, with one of the five in absentia (but who has named Lamont Cranston as his proxy… interesting). The will dictates a property split, with the eldest surviving heir receiving half of the thirteen million dollar inheritance and the other four dividing the remainder. Squabbling immediately ensues, and that’s when the sudden eruption of ghostly laughter through the hall sways Winstead Delthern, the principle inheritor, from denying his absent cousin Warren Berringer his share of the wealth.

The laugh comes from no ghost, of course: it’s the Shadow. He is acting in the interests of the real Lamont Cranston to protect the Cranston’s friend, young Warren Berringer, from losing his rightful inheritance to the scheming of the three oldest heirs, brothers Winstead, Humphrey, and Jasper Delthern.

This event would appear to conclude the Shadow’s dealings with the Delthern legacy. However, the will won’t be officially concluded until all five heirs gather together in the mansion in a month. Anything might happen before then, and since the will stipulates that the oldest living heir will receive the largest share, it seems likely one of the younger grandchildren, such as the unscrupulous Jasper Winstead, might seek a fast route to the top.

On cue, right after Warren Berringer arrives in Newbury to visit his crabby cousin Winstead, someone or something strangles Winstead and hurls him down the staircase to his death. So the game’s afoot, and the Shadow returns to Newbury from New York to trap the killer. More people start dying at Delthern Manor, and the finger of suspicion points toward Warren Berringer.

Berringer has some help: the president of the City Club, Clark Brosset, who has strong disdain for the wastrel Jasper Delthern, lends Berringer assistance trying to steer clear of the family’s scheming. The police who show up on the case, Chief Gorson and the over-enthusiastic Detective Tewiliger, are more on the ball than the fumbling officials often are in mystery novels. There’s also the tantalizing presence of the youngest grandchild, Marcia Wardrop, who has lived in Delthern Manor all of her life and has an important part to play that the novel keeps hidden without drawing too much attention to it.

The Ghost of the Manor moves at a slower pace than the majority of Shadow stories, although it still hooks the reader to keep turning the pages. There is little in the way of physical action until a short burst during the finale because it hews close to the classic murder mystery in structure and pacing. This is the nearest any of the early Shadow novels I’ve read has come to a traditional whodunit. The major difference is that the detective solving the case is an enigmatic wraith who flits in and out of the story… and also a few more dead bodies show up than usual for this sort of story. Warren Berringer, the type of character who would normally be a suspect in a mystery novel, instead serves as the protagonist and proxy hero. Most of the plot follows Warren struggling to maintain his innocence as the murders keep piling up to accuse him.

But never underestimate Walter Gibson for pulling out surprises. So many of his Shadow novels deal in long-game trickery: from the Shadow, from the villains, and from the story structure itself. The Ghost of the Manor makes an unexpected shift in direction at the three-quarters mark, when the murderer willingly reveals him/herself. The mystery suddenly doubles, which makes the conclusion much more surprising, even though what it actually reveals isn’t particularly shocking. This is execution and pacing trumping a generic story idea.

The title is a touch deceptive: there is no “ghost” in Delthern Manor in the sense that anyone suspects supernatural activity. Regular readers of the Shadow’s chronicles would suspect that maybe one of the criminals is using a fake ghost as a blind. However, the only ghost in the story is the Shadow, who masks his activities to balance the scales of justice behind the suspicion that it is actually the spirit Caleb Delthern interfering to see that the rightful heirs receive their reward.

The Ghost of the Manor closes with a sequence where the Shadow, ensconced in his Sanctum, writes down the case in his private annals. This large tome is, supposedly, where “Maxwell Grant,” the pseudonymous author of the Shadow novels, receives his inspiration. It’s rare that readers witness the Shadow making final case notes, and Gibson uses this device to 1) wrap up the final mysteries the police did not cover in their own explanation in the previous chapter; and 2) allow the Shadow to excuse some actions that would seem a bit, uhm, cavalier regarding human life. Gibson must have sensed that the Shadow required some excuse for the way justice was dispensed that didn’t make him appear as if he crossed the line or just allowed people to die.

Although Road of Crime and The Ghost of the Manor stand far apart in their tone, they have in common a low-key approach to heroics from the Shadow. I think I’ll look to the super-science and superheroics of the Master of the Night next: The Thunder King. (I always have to read two Shadow novels back-to-back; they’re short.)

“Gamera Is Really Neat!” A Gamera Series Wrap-Up

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 02:39:00 +0000

I wrote this article specifically for Black Gate as a summary of the Gamera Blu-rays, so it repeats most of what my regular readers have already experienced over the past two week. (I think I have regular readers.)

The Japanese giant monster world of the 1960s and early ‘70s was about more than Godzilla. It was also about the Frankenstein Monster, dueling Frankenstein Monsters (a.k.a. “Gargantuas”), wrathful stone idols, burrowing Boston Terrier lizards, alien saucer-headed chicken thingies, King Kong, a robot King Kong, huge squids and crabs, Atlantean dragon-gods, and a gratuitous giant walrus.

Mixed up in there was a flying turtle who was the friend to all children, Gamera. This airborne Chelonia somehow managed to sustain a seven-film franchise during the Golden Age (plus a strange one-off in 1980), making it the most successful monster after Godzilla, and the only giant monster from a studio other than Toho to make a large impression on audiences outside its home country.

Gamera is Godzilla’s poor stepchild/competitor, but the spinning turtle has leaped into the Blu-ray ring right along with the recent influx of Godzilla films as part of the release of the U.S. Godzilla. Reaching North American shelves a month before Godzilla stormed onto screens, all eight of the Gamera films from 1965–80 are available courtesy of Mill Creek on two separate releases, presented in their original Japanese language soundtracks. Now people with little acquaintance with Gamera outside of memories of watching the AIP television versions in the late ‘70s and the Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing episodes can witness all the full weirdness of this uniquely strange/wonderful/awful region of kaiju cinema.

This release will test many adults’ threshold for Japanese giant monster films. You’ll either devour the oddness and tolerate some of the poorer (actually, horrendous) installments, or you’ll check out before Gamera starts doing gymnastics routines while a children’s chorus sings the monster’s praises. Undiluted Gamera is simply not for everyone, although I can unreservedly recommend the five Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, which are available as a box set from Shout! Factory and should come as a packaged purchase with the Mill Creek Blu-rays. (The Mill Creek discs are inexpensive, so you really ought to shell out for the MST3K set as well.)

To provide some balance to all the Godzilla material I’ve written, and since I can never get enough of giant monsters, I spent two weeks running straight through the classic Gamera films on their Blu-ray discs—the first time I’ve watched the films in release order. I’ve returned with some of my sanity intact and a few observations on the individual films (I’ve written longer reviews of each elsewhere).

However, Gamera does require a bit of background first….

Gamera: A Brief History Full of Turtle Meat

Gamera was born in 1965 when the giant monster boom in Japan was approaching its height. Although Toho Studios had dominated the genre since its inception in 1954 with Godzilla, the other three major studios threw out their own entries. Daiei Film Co. Ltd. took the genre the most seriously. They not only created the period-set Daimajin trilogy (filmed consecutively in 1965 and released in 1966), but they made a low budget imitation of the original Godzilla featuring a mega-turtle.

The inexpensive black-and-white Gamera: The Giant Monster emerged as an unexpected hit, and Daiei released a new film a year for the next six years until the company went bankrupt in 1971. Gamera came back with Daiei’s resurrection as New Daiei in 1980 with a low-cost cash grab, Gamera: Super Monster. The heroic turtle would not return until the astonishing trilogy of ‘90s “Heisei” films… but the newer movies are not the purview of this article. (Mill Creek has released the Heisei trilogy on Blu-ray as well.)

Although beginning as a Godzilla copy, the Gamera movies rapidly transformed into something different. Series director Noriaki Yuasa (who also worked on the special effects), producer Hidemasa Nagata (son of Daiei president Masaichi Nagata), and writer Nisan Takahashi found that Gamera appealed to young children, and so steered the movies to speak directly to a young audience. From the fourth entry on, the filmmakers deliberately crafted the movies as “storybooks,” according to Yuasa. The Gamera films became bizarre children’s films whose surreal monster action has given them cult likability that would later tap perfectly into the Mystery Science Theater 3000 mentality.

Gamera’s history in the U.S. has been strange. Only the first of the films reached stateside theaters. The next five went to TV via American International Pictures Television in fondly remembered dubs that showed in syndication through the early ‘80s. AIP didn’t pick up the seventh film, and around 1982 their rights dried up and Gamera—a staple of Saturday and Sunday afternoons—vanished in the U.S.

But in 1985, New York distributor Sandy Frank, who had pulled in huge money through altering the Japanese anime series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman into Battle of the Planets, picked up the rights to five of the Gamera films, including the seventh one AIP passed on, but excluding the fourth and the sixth. Sandy Frank gave the films new and hilarious dubs, and the movies showed sporadically on cable networks. They did not receive much attention until Mystery Science Theater 3000, at that time a local Minnesota show, secured the rights to use the Sandy Frank versions as riffing subjects. When Mystery Science Theater 3000 went national on Comedy Central, they re-did the Gamera films for Season 3, and the wild success of these episodes helped propel the show into a cultural phenomenon. It also gave Gamera back the spotlight, although the Sandy Frank dubs were unfamiliar to people who remembered the films back in the 1970s.

Gamera: The Giant Monster (1965)

(Full review) Gamera started out as an eleven-years-late copy of the original Godzilla: a B&W film done in a dry, semi-documentary style about the appearance of a giant monster and the various attempts by scientists and the military to destroy it. It’s a bland picture that feels out of place among ‘60s Japanese science fiction, and the low budget means there’s little to enjoy from the special effects.

What the first movie does have in its favor are small touches of oddness that would become the focus of the later movies once director Yuasa and writer Takahashi figured out the niche: Gamera saving a child’s life and the bizarre idea of a monster able to spin itself through the air with sparkler legs. The child angle feels poorly thought out in this case, since rescuing little Toshio (the original “Kenny”) from a collapsing lighthouse is the only generous act Gamera commits during the film. Toshio dashing around telling everyone that Gamera is good is hilariously incongruous with the mass destruction the giant turtle continues causing.

This is the only classic-era Gamera film that received a theatrical release in the U.S., where it was edited with new footage of actors Brian Donlevy and Albert Dekker and titled Gammera the Invincible, with an extra “m” for pronunciation clarity. When Sandy Frank purchased the North American rights, the movie was released as Gamera without the U.S. footage or the bonus “m.” Shout! Factory gave the movie its current English title for a 2010 DVD release.

Gamera vs. Barugon (1966)

(Full review.) When Gamera: The Giant Monster proved a surprise success, Daiei Film upped the budget for the sequel, but also replaced director Noriaki Yuasa because the studio brass didn’t see him as A-list enough. Since this is the only movie of the series Yuasa did not direct, it is very telling that it’s such a bore. Although graced with a second and very odd monster—the freeze-tongue and rainbow ray-shooting lizard Barugon—most of the film is a slow chore about a group of men arranging to steal and opal from an island and then having a falling out over the consequences. The monster action is scarce, Gamera even scarcer and of no relevance to the rest of the plot, and clocking in at a hundred minutes (the longest of the series) the movie seems to take three days to watch. The series quickly dumped any pretense of aiming for adult viewers and returned Yuasa to the director’s chair.

For television release, AIP renamed the film War of the Monsters, a bland title that fits the movie’s overall tone.

Gamera vs. Gyaos (1967)

(Full review) The best of the classic Gamera series bridges nicely the attempts to make a serious monster film and Saturday-morning cartoonishness. A child is at the center, although not the main hero, and the adult characters have enough brains about them to make for legitimate drama when they try to stop the flying sonic-beam monster Gyaos. The tone is lightweight but never flat-out ridiculous; it’s solid monster fun in tune with the times.

The special effects are plentiful, and even though a less expensive film than Gamera vs. Barugon, it feels far bigger in scale: full urban destruction scenes with Gyaos, and plenty of use of Gamera as an opponent. The fights between the monsters are definitely the most exciting of the series. The silly stuff is still here (trying to stop Gyaos by trapping it on a rotating restaurant is a wonderfully daft concept) but the movie doesn’t seem to be attempting silliness for its own sake.

AIP released the film to television as Return of the Giant Monsters. The Sandy Frank version removed the “y” from Gyaos’s name, Gamera vs. Gaos.

Gamera vs. Viras (1968)

(Full review) This is the first of the four Gamera films that follow the strict model of making two children—always one Japanese and one Caucasian—the heroes and putting the focus clearly on appeasing young viewers. This is when Yuasa’s structuring of the movies as storybooks kicks in. Gamera transforms completely into the “Friend of Children” and now has the famous “Gamera is really neat!” theme song. The movie also set in stone the pattern of Gamera getting incapacitated mid-movie, and then popping back for the finale.

Unfortunately, Gamera vs. Viras has fifteen minutes of stock footage from the three earlier films eating up its running time, which hampers an otherwise enjoyable children’s movie. The monster Viras, who only appears for the final battle, is a forgettable squid-thing with a parakeet face, and the least interesting of all Gamera’s opponent.

Gamera vs. Viras was released to U.S. television as Destroy All Planets (AIP was trying to surf on the success of their release of Destroy All Monsters). For some reason it was not part of the package of Sandy Frank films in the ‘80s, and thus never appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Gamera vs. Guiron (1969)

(Full review) Perhaps the most childlike of the movies, although that doesn’t count against it. Gamera vs. Guiron has almost no plot, but instead an extended situation: abducted aboard an automated spaceship to an empty base on the planet Tera, the two young heroes watch Gamera battle a giant letter-opener monster while they also try to avoid two alien women who want to eat their brains. That sums up the whole story. But it’s a flipped good time, playing for “weird” all it can and succeeding. Guiron is Gamera’s most memorable adversary, demonstrating enormous personality while sporting a ludicrous visual concept. All the sets are groovy ‘60s designs that play like “Take Your Son to Work Day” on the old Star Trek sets.

The AIP-TV version, Attack of the Monsters (what’s with these generic titles, AIP?), cut out a scene of Guiron hacking apart a “Space Gyaos” limb from limb and then making luncheon slices, apparently because it was too graphic. (It’s too funny for that.) The Sandy Frank version restored this scene, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 hopped on the weirdness train to make the best of their Gamera episodes.

Gamera vs. Jiger (1970)

(Full review) The second best of the Gamera movies shows a sudden maturity about how to handle these heroic children adventure tales. The two young heroes aren’t portrayed as pranksters but responsible and smart, and the adults no longer look like utter dolts. The story has nice turns as well, with the children needing to pilot a miniature submarine into Gamera’s body to remove a larva that the evil monster Jiger planted there. Considering that the series seemed about ready to run out of ideas, Gamera vs. Jiger is willing to go some new places and expand on the standard formula. The effects-work shows a pleasing uptick as well, featuring a return to scenes of urban destruction for the first time since Gamera vs. Gyaos.

Like Gamera vs. Viras, this film somehow didn’t end up in the Sandy Frank syndication package, which is a shame since Mystery Science Theater 3000 would have had a grand time with it. The only English version available is the AIP-TV release, titled Gamera vs. Monster X.

Gamera vs. Zigra (1971)

(Full review) Agony booth time! Daiei’s impending bankruptcy shows in every moment of this production, which feels depressingly cheap and aimed at an even younger crowd. The two heroes are now around seven or eight years old and they are annoying twerps who don’t deserve the spotlight—but then all the adults are even dumber. The scope of the special effects has been chopped down markedly, and the film feels cramped, stuck most of the running time in a shabby marine park. The monster scenes are bland and take place underwater on minimal sets, and what passes for “adventure” elsewhere is mostly a hapless alien agent running around an empty amusement trying to catch two kids who outwit her at every turn with moronic tricks. It’s hard to imagine even the youngest children managing to sit through this.

AIP-TV did not pick up the movie, and it was not seen in the U.S. until the Sandy Frank dub (which makes the movie almost unwatchable) appeared on cable in 1987. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 version does the movie proud however: it’s the ideal kind of “bad” for them.

Gamera: Super Monster (1980)

(Full review) This is nothing more than a clip show. New Daiei wanted to raise some fast money, so they convinced Noriaki Yuasa to make a film that could recycle the fight scenes from the other Gamera movies with a minimal amount of new footage to create something like a story. Yuasa wasn’t thrilled with this surgery he had to perform on the monster he created, but he did as well as could be expected given the modest aims and a budget no larger than a half-hour television drama. The new story has three alien women who are hiding on Earth confront a space pirate who sends a series of monsters to conquer the planet. All the monsters are from the previous films, and Gamera bests them one at a time in rehashed footage. Only about two minutes total of new VFX of Gamera appear.

This film may have interest for young children who have not seen the other Gamera films, but otherwise only die-hard kaiju completests need apply.

Series ranking

From best to worst, here is how I rank the classic Gamera series:

Gamera vs. Gyaos
Gamera vs. Jiger
Gamera vs. Guiron
Gamera vs. Viras
Gamera: The Giant Monster
Gamera vs. Barugon
Gamera vs. Zigra / Gamera: Super Monster

I had to give a tie for last place: Gamera: Super Monster is marginally a better story, but its clip-show status knocks it down a notch

The Mill Creek Blu-rays

Mill Creek’s Blu-rays are presented over two volumes, with four films squeezed onto each of the two discs. This causes some compression issues, although it only bothered me noticeably on the black-and-white Gamera: The Giant Monster. The films are in their original 2.39 aspect ratios (except for Gamera: Super Monster, which was shot 1.85) with mono Japanese soundtracks. The picture quality won’t please Blu-ray hardcores, but the films look better than they ever have on video. There are no extras, and not even a menu aside from selecting which of the films you wish to watch.

There is one serious problem with the Mill Creek release: no English versions or language option. Although I personally have no interest in watching English dubs—unless there is a man and two robots also watching—these movies are aimed primarily at children, and dubbed versions would make it easier to share with the target audience. The Shout! Factory DVDs all contain the English versions as well, so if you have children you might want to invest in those instead. These Blu-rays are strictly for older kaiju fans.

The Classic Gamera Series on Blu-ray: Gamera: Super Monster (1981)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 05:21:00 +0000

Gamera: Super Monster (1980)

Directed by Noriaki Yuasa. Starring Mach Fumiake, Yakeo Kojima, Koko Komatsu, Keiko Kudo, Stock Footage.

I normally wouldn’t include Gamera: Super Monster as part of the Showa era Gamera series. It hardly counts as a full movie. But it’s from Daiei Films (New Daiei), has director Noriaki Yuasa helming the amount of it that’s new footage, and Mill Creek and Shout! Factory both included it in their Gamera sets. So I have to acknowledge it.

This is nothing more than a clip show New Daiei threw together to make some fast cash. It consists of forty minutes of new film shot to hold together VFX footage from the previous seven movies in a vague semblance of a story about Gamera battling cosmic monsters that are under the control of the space pirate Xanon. It’s a crass endeavor, but at least it makes for fast viewing since you can speed through the monster recycling or the new footage, depending on your intentions. If you’ve never seen a Gamera movie before, you might find some entertainment in watching the monster battles, but the connective material weakens that as well. The original 2.39 aspect ratio of the original films had to get hacked down for this movie’s 1.85, so you’re not even watching the full images from the old films. You’re better off seeing the best of the original Gamera films (Gamera vs. Gyaos, Gamera vs. Guiron, Gamera vs. Jiger) than wasting time with this.

Okay, that’s done…

No, I should talk a bit about the new story around the clip show. Three “space women” hiding in civilian identities band together to defend Earth from Xanon’s attack. They do this by occasionally performing cheerleading hand moves, transforming into superhero costumes, and encouraging an annoying boy who thinks his pet turtle turned into Gamera. (Maybe it did? The film is unclear on this point.) Xanon sends its own female agent to Earth, Giruge, and she pesters the young boy as well.

Almost none of this has any affect on the unspooling of fight footage from the earlier films, except for a few minutes when the leader of the space women removes Xanon’s control device from Gamera’s neck. Otherwise, these characters have their own inexpensive corner of the movie were Giurge eventually turns out to be decent and sacrifices herself. It’s actually better drama than anything in Gamera vs. Zigra, I’ll grant it that.

The new footage looks on par with a low-budget TV drama. It mostly occurs in mundane locations with an unconcerned Tokyo populace wandering around—nobody appears worried about the monster mayhem. The film’s idea of a science-fiction “set” is a white room with a plastic painters’ curtain at the back, and the visual effects are at Sid & Marty Krofft level. The most expansive special effect is Xanon’s ship, which is a copyright infringement-worthy version of an Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars. The ship also appears via stills of what may be pre-production art. For some reason, the movie also drops in clips from animated films. One of the clips is from the anime show Space Battleship Yamato (1974), which U.S. viewers may know as Star Blazers. Its appearance here is bizarre and distracting—but at least it is explained as a dream.

For the record, here’s how the stock footage unfolds: Xanon wakes Gyaos from a volcano to wreck havoc until Gamera defeats it in an edited-together version of two different fights from Gamera vs. Gyaos. Next, Xanon brings forth deep-sea beast Zigra, and the two monsters have a fight on the beach that cuts through the few battles from Gamera vs. Zigra in mercifully short time. Because Gamera is now at the seaside, Xanon can quickly bring in matching footage of the fight between Gamera and Viras from, well, Gamera vs. Viras. Jiger gets sent next, and we watch the middle fight of Gamera vs. Jiger, which is oddly the least interesting of the monster scenes from that movie.

Aware that it must use some film of Gamera attacking civilization, Xanon puts a control device on the giant turtle, so Gamera then attacks the Kurobe Dam (again!) from Gamera vs. Barugon. The black-and-white footage from Gamera: The Giant Monster appears as a news broadcast on a blurry TV set to disguise its origins (a better job than Gamera vs. Viras did using this same B&W stock). Gamera breaks free from control, flies to the planet where Xanon keeps its monsters so the movie has an excuse to use scenes from Gamera vs. Guiron. Fed up after Guiron blows up, Xanon resorts to Gamera vs. Barugon, which means one of the poorest films ends up providing the climactic monster fight footage.

There’s approximately two minutes total of new Gamera VFX, most shot in close-ups of the monster’s head and arms. The “finale” has Gamera ram into Xanon’s ship—although we don’t see it actually happen—and apparently die. So ends the classic Gamera series. Be glad it’s a mere fifteen years before Shusuke Kaneko revives the monster with the fantastic Gamera: Guardian of the Universe. The existence of that film makes me feel a better about this sorry funeral oration.

Is there any reason to watch Gamera: Super Monster, aside from historical curiosity for kaiju fans? Children who have never seen a Gamera film may enjoy the monster fights, and the new scenes won’t aggravate them; but if they’ve already seen the other movies, they won’t have much tolerance for this aside escapade from easy access to monster scenes. They can fast track through the human “drama” and use this as a highlight reel. Nobody else needs to bother.

Gamera: Super Monster reached the U.S. quickly, although not widely. Shochiku Films of America distributed it to television in dubbed form, where it occasionally appeared on late-night shows. Elvira featured the movie on her program in 1983, but by the time Sandy Frank was purchasing the rights to the rest of the series, Super Monster was already a forgotten film. I can’t imagine Mystery Science Theater 3000 could have done much with it except complain about needing to repeat the same jokes for the forty minutes of rehashed footage.

I’ll leave the classic Gamera movies with a quote from series director Noriaki Yuasa regarding this regretful final installment: “After New Daiei came about, one person came to me to ask [me to direct Gamera: Super Monster] and I was reluctant to accept because it was hard to see old friends, many of whom had been having trouble, and I’m sure [screenwriter] Mr. Takahashi felt the same way. And the budget was very low. New Daiei didn’t think of it as a new film and just wanted to cut the old footage together. I grieved for my son Gamera—it was a very strange fate.”

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The Classic Gamera Series on Blu-ray: Gamera vs. Zigra (1971)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 00:10:00 +0000

Gamera vs. Zigra (1971)
Directed by Noriaki Yuasa. Starring Yasushi Sakagami, Gloria Zoellner, Koji Fujiyama, Isamu Saeki, Eiko Yanami, Reiko Kasahara, Arlene Zoellner.

I dare you—dare you!—to struggle through the entirety of Gamera vs. Zigra in one sitting without the aid of the crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

After the success of Gamera vs. Jiger the year before, the terrible drop in quality to the worst of the original seven Gamera films would appear stunning—if not for Daiei Film Co. Ltd.’s impending bankruptcy thanks to the combination of a recession and upper level mismanagement. If you’ve ever wanted to know what it looks like when a major studio perches on the verge of going under, here you go.

Gamera vs. Zigra is a painful experience that combines plummeting production values with an irritating non-story, intolerable child heroes, and a thrill level approaching zero. This is what all Japanese monster movies must look like to people who dislike Japanese monster movies, and a reason fans like myself feel we have to defend the genre constantly.

This is just a rotten movie, and even children will have a hard time getting through it (and they’ll have to watch it via the Sandy Frank dub, which makes the film substantially worse). No previous Gamera film boasted a significant budget; however, the filmmakers still managed to make the most of the small funds available to craft colorful adventure stories. But Gamera vs. Zigra drowns in cheapness, making for a cramped, ugly, boring experience.

The biggest mistake the movie makes has nothing to do with the budget, however: it’s the casting of the two lead children. Nothing against actors Yashushi Sakagami as Kenichi and Gloria Zoellner as Helen; both do as much as you can expect from children far too young to handle headlining a special effects picture. It’s the filmmakers’ fault for deciding to target the Gamera series even younger and going toward the under-eight set with their “stars.” Kenichi and Helen are portrayed as aggravating little twerps who are annoying in every scene, doing all they can to irritate the adults (and the viewers) without actually advancing the story. Yashushi Sakagami as Kenichi is the poster child for the “Kenny” of Japanese monster films: the monster-kid brat whom you start to loathe by the end of the film. And poor Gloria Zoellner is really out of her depth, and it feels like any child of comparable age (six? seven?) could’ve pulled off the part as well.

It’s exasperating that it has taken this long for the Gamera movies to make a girl one of the two leads (instead of relegated to curious little sister part) only to still botch it with a character as young and ineffectual as Helen. Looking back at Gamera vs. Jiger, it seems like a missed opportunity not making the character of Tommy a girl. But in Gamera vs. Zigra it’s too late to turn into the spin with a female lead when the characters are too young to make effective heroes.

The impact of the low budget is really depressing. Most of the story remains locked in the same location, Kamogawa Seaworld, a decrepit-looking aquatic-themed amusement park. The film stretches out the running time with footage of orca and sea lion shows at the park, plus the infamous “fish argument sketch” between a dolphin trainer and a Seaworld hotel owner over who gets the only catch of fish from the day. The Sandy Frank dub doesn’t not exaggerate how useless this scene is.

There is no urban destruction and very little in the way of model work for the VFX scenes; the most extensive models appear on Moon base in the opening scene, which give false hope for effects level of the rest of the movie. When Zigra triggers an earthquake in Tokyo, devastating the city, we only hear talk of it and a few shots of some wreckage seen through a viewscreen. That’s how cheap things have gotten around here. (And nobody hanging around Seaworld seems duly upset about the thousands of deaths the Tokyo quake must have caused.)

What passes for “thrills” in the film are embarrassing. The U.N. makes a single half-hearted attack on the Zigra starship, and then the whole world collectively gives up. A large chunk of the middle of the film, before the monsters even have their first encounter, has Zigra’s hapless agent (Eiko Yanami) running around an empty Seaworld trying to catch two little kids who keep outwitting her with sub-par Scooby-Doo antics. It’s the low point of the Gamera series, no doubt. The draggy scene with the trapped bathyscaphe that eats up most of the second half is hardly an improvement, and it’s a perfect example of how useless Kenichi and Helen are. Of course, their fathers are useless in this scene as well. Uselessness all around!

The monster action doesn’t improves on things. Zigra and Gamera spend most of their time underwater on a set with a few rocks. Gamera doesn’t encounter Zigra until forty-five minutes into the movie, first attacking Zigra while still in spaceship form (resembling a bowl of jellybeans), then engaging in a boring fight that puts Gamera into yet another long coma until the conclusion. Zigra makes hilarious threats toward the Earth it can’t possibly back up (it only has one human tool, and she isn’t even capable of dodging stuffed animals), and Gamera finally wakes up due to a random lightning strike (again, the human characters are useless) and gets involved in a lifeless underwater fight that concludes with a few minutes of a land engagement… and it’s—all—so—boring.

To add a final insult, the film takes a preachy stance on the environment, letting the Seaworld marine biologists spout about pollution and science ruining the planet. This sort of sledgehammer messaging makes the same year’s Godzilla vs. Hedorah feel like a model of restraint.

There are a few minor positives. Until reduced to scrambling around Seaworld during the interminable chase scene, Eiko Yanami makes an intimidating figure as the possessed Earthwoman whom Zigra uses as its pawn. Zigra’s design, based on the goblin shark, is far better than the film deserves, although the stand-up suit variation during the brief surface scenes looks clumsy. It’s stupidly amusing to see Gamera play Zigra’s dorsal spines like a xylophone; it’s the only silly-fun moment in the tedious monster action. Otherwise, the whole movie should only be digested in its Mystery Science Theater 3000 form.

About that: Gamera vs. Zigra is the only of the original seven Gamera films that did not see a U.S. release of any sort soon after its Japanese debut. AIP didn’t pick up the film for TV distribution as they had for the last five (my guess: they saw it), so it never appeared on television in the ‘70s and early ‘80s with the rest of the series. It didn’t have its U.S. premiere until it turned up on the USA Network in 1987 as part of the Sandy Frank package. This means Gamera vs. Zigra is the only of the classic films that exists in a single dubbed version. Sandy Frank’s usual awful dub makes the movie almost unwatchable. Of course, MST3K rescued it, and the film’s endless faults make it one of the finest of their Gamera episodes.

Although Gamera vs. Zigra looks like it should have killed off the franchise, director Noriaki Yuasa and producer Hidemasa Nagata had plans for another film, which would pit Gamera against a two-headed monster. But Daiei collapsed before it could happen, and so the series came to end.

Except… well, I don’t know if Gamera: Super Monster truly counts as a Gamera film, but it’s on the Mill Creek Blu-ray collection, so I have to deal with it.

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The Classic Gamera Series on Blu-ray: Gamera vs. Jiger (1970)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 18:58:00 +0000

Gamera vs. Jiger (1970)

Directed by Noriaki Yuasa. Starring Tsutomo Takakuwa, Kelly Varis, Katherine Murphy, Kon Omura.

The progression of the classic Gamera series does not follow standard logic. Once the movies settled into children’s entertainment, they should have entered into a period of steady decline. Although Gamera vs. Guiron offers psychedelic good times with little in the way of plot to interfere with kids’ enjoyment, it also should’ve signaled an irreversible trend toward lower budgets and sillier, simpler plots.

Yet the next film marks an uptick in series quality and apparent budget. Gamera vs. Jiger (released to U.S. television as Gamera vs. Monster X, probably to tie into the delayed stateside release of the 1965 Godzilla film Monster Zero) is still a children’s movie centered on a pair of heroic boys, one Japanese and one Caucasian. But of the four Gamera films in a row that used this formula, Gamera vs. Jiger has the most interesting story and a good weave of child heroes with adult characters who aren’t a slew of doubting, obstructionist idiots. The Japanese Self-Defense Force returns and has military engagements with the monster, urban destruction comes back in a big way, people seem in legitimate danger, and the story takes an interesting science-fiction turn with elements from Fantastic Voyage that make the obligatory down-period for Gamera into one of the movie’s best stretches. This is definitely the finest installment of the series after Gamera vs. Gyaos.

The young heroes this time are Hiroshi (Tsutomo Takakuwa) and Tommy (Kelly Varis), a much improved duo than those of the previous films and the subsequent one. Instead of delinquents who cause trouble for the adults before the monster action gets underway, Hiroshi and Tommy are smart, diligent, resourceful, and earn the respect of the adults enough that having them become involved in the action around the monsters makes sense. Although Gamera is portrayed as a helpful beast, the giant turtle isn’t there to assist the kids specifically, and this makes Hiroshi’s and Tommy’s choices all the more heroic. This is the closest the Gamera movies approach to a classic “boys’ adventure” book. Takakuwa is also the most personable child performer in the series, although Varis comes across as a bit anonymous… but at least never annoying.

Although Gamera vs. Jiger has a larger budgeted feel, it still makes a few Yen-saving maneuvers. There’s stock footage, but it only appears under the main credits, where it’s forgivable. To eat up time, the filmmakers instead provide a prolonged tour of Expo ‘70 in Tokyo, or the future site of Expo ‘70s, since it wasn’t finished at the time of shooting. (I doubt the filmmakers would’ve bothered if they had to find a way to shoot in the middle of the exposition.) An archaeologist, who’s dating Hiroshi’s sister, gives the boy a tour of the site that runs through shots of every pavilion (I love what the Swiss did with theirs!) and discusses the exposition’s theme of world cooperation. The archaeologist then explains about how he’s arranged to move a megalith called the Devil’s Whistle from Wester Island in the Pacific as part of the exhibition—which sounds suspiciously like colonial theft to me, but hey… world cooperation!

Moving the Devil’s Whistle does end up as a bad move, since it unleashes a monster from the continent of Mu, Jiger, whom the Muvian imprisoned millennia ago using the monolith. Gamera, apparently aware of the presence of all evil monsters, whether terrestrial or extra-terrestrial, tries to prevent humanity’s foolish mistake, but the archaeology team still moves the Devil’s Whistle to the Expo, sending Jiger out in pursuit to eliminate the object that kept it immured for so long.

In a moment of cultural insensitivity, ignorance, or laziness, the Wester Island cultural envoy who shows up to Tokyo to object to the interference with the Devil’s Whistle is clearly presented as from Central Africa in language and dress, even though Wester Island is in the Pacific. I have no idea what the filmmakers were thinking when they did this, except that maybe the kid viewers wouldn’t care; it’s an unusual misstep in a film that otherwise makes an effort to treat its young audience with some respect.

Jiger combines elements of older, more realistic dinosaur kaiju with Gamera series outlandishness. The quadruped monster resembles a ceratopsian with a Dimetrodon dorsal crest; it might have fit into the earlier Godzilla movies without much change. But Jiger has the most extensive array of odd gizmos of any Gamera opponent yet: an “Ultra Wave” from its snout capable of skeletonizing people, spears shot from its tusks, air jets in its frills allowing its non-aerodynamic body to fly, and a tail spike capable of injecting larva into an opponent. Jiger is pretty nasty business, able to incapacitate Gamera twice (which means we get three monster fights, yeah!) and thoroughly wrecking Osaka in scenes that seem like they must have cost twice the budget of both previous films.

Jiger delivers the most humiliating defeat on Gamera yet with the larval-injecting spike. This incapacitates Gamera face-down in the water, apparently unable to recover. Once the scientists figure out the problem, Hiroshi and Tommy dash off to pilot a mini-sub from the Expo into Gamera’s mouth to seek out and destroy the offending larva.

Gamera’s mid-movie break is a staple of the series, but this time it happens twice, and the second time becomes a part of the rest of the story. Usually, the plot trudges on with the child heroes until Gamera recovers on its own, but now the whole finale rests on Hiroshi and Tommy making a journey through inner space to rescue the giant turtle. The scenes inside Gamera’s body, as the two boys communicate with home base and attempt to find the dangerous larva, are definitely among the cleverest of the series, and show a nice intersection of weird with plot practical. Even given the limited budget, the Gamera lung sets are quite wonderful to look at. The resolution rests a bit too much on chance (it turns out Jiger is susceptible to wireless phone transmissions!) but the sequence is as memorable as anything in these movies.

The last fight, kept at the edge of the Expo ‘70 site because Gamera kindly wants to avoid destroying it and to keep the budget from spiraling too much, suffers from the slower choreography that the monster battles have adopted since Gamera vs. Viras. The maneuvers are as entertainingly odd and anthropomorphized as ever: Gamera grabs a metal club and beats off Jiger’s tail stinger, jams telephone poles in its ears to block the Ultra Wave attack, and somehow understands the importance of the low-frequency sounds of the Devil’s Whistle and hurls it right into Jiger’s head. Loopy stuff, all around.

Sandy Frank did not pick up Gamera vs. Jiger for distribution (I would love to know why), so like Gamera vs. Viras, the movie only appeared in the U.S. courtesy of AIP Television, then vanished in the ‘80s when the rights expired. Mystery Science Theater 3000 never got the opportunity to take the movie on, which is a shame considering how much material worth heavy riffing it contains. At least we never had to deal with a horrendous Sandy Frank-commissioned dub job.

If you don’t know anything about the history of the Gamera series or the direction of the Japanese film industry, you might imagine that Gamera vs. Jiger was the mark of a new stretch of quality films. However, economics and fatigue would now defeat Gamera more effectively than any giant monster with a larva-injector tail, and the next installment would shut down the series for nine years (and 1980’s Gamera: Super Monster hardly counts as a “Gamera” film) and plunge it down to embarrassing depths. The cosmic forces that aligned to make Gamera vs. Jiger a good film realigned to make Gamera vs. Zigra a…

Oh, we’ll get to that. No need to commence the punishment early.

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Tarzan-on-Demand: Tarzan and the Great River (1967)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 15:24:00 +0000

Tarzan and the Great River (1967)

Directed by Robert Day. Produced by Sy Weintraub. Starring Mike Henry, Jan Murray, Rafer Johnson, Manuel Padilla Jr., Diana Millay.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

The second Tarzan movie starring former NFL linebacker Mike Henry as the Ape Man, Tarzan and the Great River (available through Warner Archive, WB’s manufacture-on-demand division) reached theaters a year after the previous installment, Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, but was shot directly after it on location in Brazil. Producer Sy Weintraub continued to emphasize a modern Tarzan with aspects of the globe-trotting James Bond films, but Tarzan and the Great River eases back on military machinery and super villains and instead targets a stripped-down jungle chase story that Edgar Rice Burroughs would have found familiar. This doesn’t end up making for a better film, unfortunately.

Tarzan and the Great River opens with its most overt gesture toward the espionage movies of the era: Tarzan receives a summons from across the globe, and dressed in a snappy suit arrives in Brazil at the behest of an old friend, a professor at a zoological garden. The professor needs Tarzan to investigate a growing Jaguar Cult in the Amazon that has started to enslave local tribes. But while Tarzan takes the time to meet some of his African animal friends who reside at the zoo, the professor ends up dead on the poisoned claws of one of the cult’s wicked jaguar clubs. Tarzan now has vengeance on his mind as he travels deep into the Amazon rainforest to locate the cult’s leader, the cruel Barcuna (Rafer Johnson), in the company of the chimp Cheetah and the lion Baron. (The same animal performers who played “Dinky” and “Major” in the previous film.)

To travel faster along the great river of the title, Tarzan hitches a ride on the skiff of Captain Sam (comedian Jan Murray) and his young first mate, Pepe (Manuel Padilla Jr. from Tarzan and the Valley of Gold), who are transporting medicine crucial to curing a plague among a village near Barcuna’s campaign of terror. Along the journey, they also pick up Dr. Ann Phillips (Diana Millay, a regular on Dark Shadows), the physician tasked with helping the natives against the disease.

In a number of aspects, Tarzan and the Great River rises above the previous Mike Henry film. The photography is lusher, taking fuller advantage of the Amazonian location shoot to create a beautiful rainforest setting that’s perfect for Tarzan. It also has a more robust and romantic score, and the animal action goes a step beyond some of the already impressive scenes from Tarzan and the Valley of Gold. (Although the animal performers caused a serious production problem. More on that later.) The main villain Barcuna is also a more Burroughs-style villain than the James Bond knock-off Augustus Vinero from Valley of Gold.

However, in the majority of ways that count with viewers—story, pacing, characters—this is substantially the weaker film. It’s easily the poorest of the “New Look” Tarzan movies from producer Sy Weintraub that I’ve watched so far. There is some entertainment lurking around here, and Mike Henry still shows that he is (physically) the best on-screen Tarzan. The problem is that the story lacks urgency and has placed too much focus on a comic actor who isn’t capable of pushing forward a jungle adventure.

You can’t blame Jan Murray too much for his misuse in Tarzan and the Great River. He does what he was hired to do: play a colorful boat captain with a humorous salty-dog delivery. But Murray was the wrong actor for the job. His Borscht Belt comic style makes the character of Captain Sam feel like an intruder from a ‘60s sitcom with no place in a Tarzan tale, especially the more realistic series Weintraub created. A rougher-edged character actor better capable of balancing comedy and drama would have suited the role better. Murray eventually becomes a handicap, and every moment spent with Captain Sam after the mid-point feels too long. The character should have died earlier during a Barcuna attack, leaving young Pepe “orphaned” and needing to rely on Tarzan while learning independence.

The late Manuel Padilla Jr. delivers a more natural performance here than he did in Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, and as with Murray it isn’t completely the fault of the actor that the part doesn’t click. The movie sacrifices its suspense and forward drive to fiddle about with the drama between Pepe and Sam, and this sublimates Tarzan and his fight to reach Barcuna to second-string status. The addition of Dr. Phillips worsens the situation, since the script immediately folds her into the Pepe and Sam plot, where she pressures Sam to turn into a better man who doesn’t think of making a buck first and on Pepe to seek an education. This isn’t a terrible idea for character drama… if this were a lighter children’s adventure story in the live-action Disney mold. But it’s murder on pacing for a jungle action tale pitting Tarzan against a genocidal Jaguar Death Cult.

Barcuna and his followers should make for superb villains, and in the early scenes where we see their cruelty (killing the professor, roasting a villager over an enormous pit) they seem capable of remaining exciting foes. But the movie starts to forget that they exist; by the time Tarzan reaches Barcuna’s headquarters, the Jaguar Cult feels like afterthoughts to the story of Captain Sam learning a lesson about ethics and what’s best for Pepe. Tarzan simply walks into the Jaguar Cult camp, challenges Barcuna to a man-to-man duel (the first time the two characters have even met), and has the obligatory fight to the death. It’s an underwhelming result based on the expectations the movie established in its opening scenes.

If viewed in isolation, the tussle between Tarzan and Barcuna works. As with the other Sy Weintraub Tarzan movies, the action emphasizes the actual performers involved in violent close-quarter stunts that look painful for both. Seeing two men in the sort of shape as Mike Henry and Rafer Johnson—both of them world-class athletes in their prime—fly into face-crunching fisticuffs and full body blows along a rickety wood frame over boulders and a waterfall is the action you expect from the classic days of adventure movies. It’s unfortunate that so little is dramatically invested in the fight. Compare it to Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, which perfectly establishes the tension between old adversaries Tarzan and Slade and Slade’s growing desperation until the two face off, and the finale of Tarzan and the Great River feels paltry and almost a footnote.

In fact, the filmmakers appeared to have thought the dramatic highlight of the story would be Pepe bravely agreeing to receive an injection of medicine from Dr. Philips to show the superstitious villagers that the visitors want to help them. As a piece of drama placed earlier in the movie, this might have been a good moment. But positioned as the character culmination before the action climax, it’s a snooze. The arrival in the village, which was the original goal of all the heroes, should carry the weight of Barcuna’s slave-gathering rampages. Instead, the Jaguar Cult is sidelined at this point and seems to have no impact on the village at all. The tension comes down to whether Pepe is brave enough to let a doctor give him a shot. Frankly, the drama of an average pediatrician’s office on any given day is inappropriate as the climax for a Tarzan adventure.

Perhaps I’m overstating the case a bit, since Tarzan and the Great River is by no means a “bad” film. It simply isn’t a gripping one that will hook viewers into its story enough to carry them along the rapids of the Amazon. An eighty-eight minute adventure movie needs more tension and suspense (and actual action) to sweep the audience along, and this movie only has sporadic moments of those elements.

Mike Henry again shows what an excellent choice he was for the part, even with a script that doesn’t allow him much room to stretch. His Tarzan is physically capable of everything we see watch him do, and his dark handsomeness and pantherish build make him almost the perfect image of Burroughs’s character—just with hair that’s too short. Henry doesn’t have a firm hand on the dialogue scenes, and it’s a shame the movie didn’t give him more interesting interactions with the other characters (couldn’t we at least have some sexual tension with Ann?) to allow him to explore his acting capabilities further.

Rafer Johnson, Olympic gold medalist, has the same issues as Mike Henry. An amazing physical presence, not so adept at delivering dialogue. Barcuna seems significantly less threatening every time he speaks, sounding like a guy who grew up near Fresno (Johnson’s family moved there when he was five) instead of a primal Amazonian god figure. But he was cast principally to look menacing, and Johnson pulls that off. A more substantial version of Barcuna might have made for a first-class villain.

Animal stunts are a major part of the history of the Tarzan movie franchise, and Tarzan and the Great River has an abundance of animal work done in close quarters with the cast. Some of it is annoying comedy between two chimpanzees, but the scenes with Baron are impressive for how Mike Henry and Manuel Padilla Jr. work in such physical harmony with an actual lion.

There are two downsides to the animals, however. First is the abundance of nature stock footage that kills time while the boat putters up river. Not only is the footage obviously older and worn, but it frequently violates geography with animals that have no business in the Amazon. Watching Tarzan race to break apart a tussle between lions that is supposed to occur near Dr. Phillips should be exciting… except that wild lions don’t exist in South America and it’s difficult to ignore this glaring error. (Burroughs made a similar one in the first published version of Tarzan of the Apes, where he placed tigers in Central Africa. All later versions changed the tigers to she-lions.)

The second trouble with the animal stunts led to Mike Henry leaving the series after only three films. While shooting this movie, the chimpanzee playing Cheetah viciously ripped open Henry’s jaw with its teeth. The actor needed twenty stitches and the wound became infected, resulting in a string of other health problems that plagued shooting this film and the next, Tarzan and the Jungle Boy. This was the major incident in a series of troubles during production of the films in Brazil that led to Mike Henry unsuccessfully suing Sy Weintraub’s Banner Productions for creating unsafe working conditions. (“[M]altreatment, abuse, and working conditions detrimental to my health and welfare,” according to the wording of the $800,000 suit.) Henry was originally slated to play the Ape Man on the subsequent television series, but because of health problems and the delirious scheduling, he turned the role down. Ron Ely took the part instead.

If you know this behind-the-scenes story, it’s difficult to watch the actors in close proximity to the animals and not wonder how much worse things might have gone if the safety on the set were as slapdash as Henry accused it of being. Each time Pepe asks if he can “pet the lion” comes with a chill that has nothing to do with the storyline.

The movie’s poster features outright and disappointing fabrications. Tarzan trapped by the erupting volcano! No, no volcanic eruption. No volcano at all. Tarzan kills the ferocious jaguar barehanded! No, he wrestles some lions that apparently got very lost from the African veldt, but no jaguar fights. I wonder if the marketing team was confusing the three Tarzan movies shot at the same time, or if they knew that the tagline Watch Tarzan encourage a young boy to let a doctor give him a shot! wouldn’t pull in viewers off the streets, no matter how well air-conditioned the theater.

Gratuitous personal note: Rafer Johnson’s daughter Jennifer, who later became an Olympic medalist herself for women’s volleyball, was in my junior high and high school class (she’s now the school’s assistant volleyball coach). Rafer was a regular fixture at school events, and even played the small part of Santa Claus in a seventh-grade school play I was in. He was the nicest and most affable guy you could imagine, and he always remembered my name when he saw me, and so I feel sorry for criticizing his line delivery here. I can remember how thrilled all of us at school were when he showed up in a James Bond film, Licence to Kill. Wow, we know a guy who was in a Bond movie!

Anyway, Mr. Johnson’s in the next Tarzan film as well, Tarzan and the Jungle Boy, so let’s just move on to that.

The Classic Gamera Series on Blu-ray: Gamera vs. Guiron (1969)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 07:43:00 +0000

Gamera vs. Guiron (1969)

Directed by Noriaki Yuasa. Starring Nobohiro Kajima, Miyuki Akiyama, Chrystopher Murphy, Yuko Hamada, Eiji Funakoshi, Kon Omura, Hiroko Kai, Reiko Kasahara.

This is the Gamera movie that features the “letter opener monster,” the aliens who shave a kid’s head so they can eat his brain, and Gamera performing a men’s gymnastics routine. It’s also the one that decides plot is essentially optional when all you really need is kids wandering around science-fiction sets watching monsters have outlandish battles. This is an outgrowth of what happened in Gamera vs. Viras, only now stretched out to fill most of the movie. But thanks to the reduced use of stock footage and an abundance of bright weirdness, Gamera vs. Guiron ends up as a much more enjoyable movie, and arguably the one that will appeal the most to young children—if they aren’t squeamish about the threat of brain-hungry alien women.

The story could fit easily into a Little Golden Book, or perhaps one of the Marx Brothers’ films from Paramount. Two boys, Akio (Nobohiro Kajima) and Tom (Chrystopher Murphy), discover an empty spaceship that has landed near their homes. They get aboard, and the ship then zooms them off to the planet Tera, where the boys avoid a pair of aliens (Hiroko Kai, Reiko Kasahara) who want to snack on their gray matter. The boys stop occasionally to watch Gamera, who has come to rescue them, battle Tera’s guardian, the steak-knife monster Gurion. On Earth, people worry about the kids, but they don’t achieve anything except brief distractions from the action. Eventually, Gamera destroys Guiron and repairs the spaceship so the boys can go home. Gamera apparently took shop in high school.

The movie is a mere series of set pieces for the two boys to wander through, all designed to appeal to male viewers of the same age. Basically, all the “dull” stuff is cut out, and what remains is colorful stimuli on Star Trek sets with periodic monster fights. The similarities to classic Star Trek are remarkable: the planet Tera resembles most of the Season 3 planet sets, and the constant uses of teleportation machines with “beaming” effects will make any Trek fan feel right at home. The number of teleportation scenes eventually gets a touch monotonous, which makes me think it must have been the least expensive special effect the filmmakers had available.

Gamera continues to ramp up the superhero business. Now the mega-terrapin has telepathic abilities to communicate with children, and can detect Akio and Tom in trouble from far off-planet and runs to the rescue. When Gamera repairs the ship and escorts the boys back to Earth, the final barrier falls down and Gamera essentially becomes Mr. Rogers with a shell and flame breath.

Gyaos may have starred in a superior movie, but Guiron is the best opponent monster in the classic series: the bizarre thing has so much personality, and it takes such a perverse joy in using its massive blade head as a weapon. The fight scenes all take place on the Tera space base, which limits the interesting things the monsters can do, so the staging is based on the monsters’ exhibiting their personality and using occasional ridiculous fight moves—such as the legendary gymnastic spins that Gamera (or a Gamera prop) does with a parallel bar, complete without dismount.

Although it has slower choreographed fights than the last two movies, Gamera vs. Guiron does contain the best “finishing move” of all, with Gamera driving Guiron blade-first into the rocks, then hurling a missile into the slot in Guiron’s head and flaming it until the evil beast blows up. The bottom line is that the fights are adequate compared to the others in the series, but have more memorable moments. Nothing but memorable moments.

Speaking of memorable… the most infamous scene features a third kaiju, originally meant as a new monster, but presented as “Space Gyaos”—the Gyaos suit from Gamera vs. Gyaos spray-painted silver—to save money. To show how tough and mean Guiron is, it cuts down Space Gyaos one limb at a time in a perfect prognostication of the Black Knight sequence from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Guiron then slices Gyaos into serving portions while giving a deep chortle. The original U.S. television release excised this scene, although the 1980s Sandy Frank version restored it—which means that MST3K also got to enjoy this scene. It may be a bit disturbing for the young ‘uns, but here is where the unreality of the special effects work in the movie’s favor.

Unfortunately, the story cannot divorce itself entirely from adults, and the sporadic scenes on Earth interrupt the pacing. A strange film like this doesn’t need comic relief, but we still have to endure scenes with Officer Kon-chan that are filled with miserable mugging. The opening starts as a miscue, with a typical scene of a scientist explaining a situation to a room of reporters who have nothing more important to cover. The sequence feels like set-up for a different movie, since it has no bearing on the rest of the story, and offers scientific explanations regarding alien life that children in the audience don’t need.

The alien situation brings up an irritating point: Did everyone in Japan miss that an alien invasion occurred in the last movie—quite publicly? The adults here are all convinced that intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is impossible and has been disproved, and they harp on Akio’s poor sister (Miyuki Akiyama) as a liar when she insists her brother went up in a spaceship. She should just shout: “Didn’t you see the last movie?”

Stock footage still shows up, and once again it comes from aliens doing a brain scan in order to learn more about Gamera. Mercifully, we only have three minutes to deal with this time around, just a quick jaunt through three previous moments when Gamera helped out children.

When first released in the U.S. on television through AIP, Gamera vs. Guiron appeared under the title Attack of the Monsters. I don’t know why AIP insisted on giving their Gamera films such generic titles like this, War of the Monsters, and Return of the Giant Monsters. At least Destroy All Planets has some life to it. The original Japanese title, Gamera tai Daiakuju Giron, translates as “Gamera vs. Evil Giant Beast Guiron.”

Gamera vs. Guiron has the distinction of being the best of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Gamera episodes. Not only is the film bizarre on a constant basis to supply Joel and the ‘Botsm with plenty of comedy material, but the Sandy Frank-commissioned dub is perhaps the worst I’ve encountered on a Japanese SF/fantasy movie. Not only are the performances terrible, the script idiotic, and the lips poorly matched to the dialogue, but the actors’ cadences are otherworldly in the way they start and stop: no human speaks this way. No aliens speak this way, either. (However, some of the stranger lines that MST3K parodies, like Akio’s obsession with traffic accidents, the constant confusion between “planet” and “star,” and Gamera “dancing Go-Go,” actually originate with the Japanese dialogue.)

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The Classic Gamera Series on Blu-ray: Gamera vs. Viras (1968)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 03:03:00 +0000

Gamera vs. Viras (1968)

Directed by Noriaki Yuasa. Starring Kojiro Hongo, Toru Takasuta, Carl Craig Jr.

The fourth Gamera film adds the finishing touches, the last three elements that director Noriaki Yuasa and producer Hidemasa Nagata needed to create the complete Gamera style: a Caucasian second child actor, Gamera’s catchy kiddie chant theme, and stock footage. The last of these isn’t an advantage. The other two… it depends on the film and how loose you’re willing to get.

Gamera vs. Viras is 100% a children’s movie with no quarter given. At this point in the series, some adults will simply check out and never return. You either have to have children yourself or have a soft spot for child-empowerment stories in order to get involved in super-kids and monsters dominating the story and the grown-ups sitting on the sidelines as essentially stooges. It also helps if you like watching colorful but inexpensive monster battles.

Gamera vs. Viras has a great opening that puts Gamera in space for the first time—yes, our heroic turtle can also fly through space! A spaceship that resembles five bumblebee abdomens linked together has come from the star Viras to conquer Earth because the Virases need another Class M planet to live on. Gamera shows up and destroys the spacecraft, but the aliens have enough time to transmit a warning to Spacecraft #2 to continue the mission and destroy Earth’s protector monster… Gamera! Cue the “Gamera Is Really Neat!” theme song.

Even with Gamera rescuing kids in two of the previous movies, we’ve made a fast jump to Gamera the Superhero, protecting the world from outer space invaders and helping children. It feels as if the Gamera series was squeezing the same arc of how Godzilla became a hero into only a few installments, and then going was step farther. But the Gamera series probably wouldn’t have continued without taking this route.

The heroes of our story are two eleven-or-twelve-something Boy Scouts, Masao (Toru Takasuta) and Jim (Carl Craig Jr.). Both are kid-power icons who go far beyond the Hardy Boys model. They’re pranksters who always succeed at fooling the adults and get away with it, have nifty gadgets like a Dick Tracy communicator watch, outwit invader aliens, and free Gamera from brain-control so the monster can save the day at the end. Masao and Jim will probably rule the entire globe in five years given what they achieve here in a mere few hours.

The second Viras spacecraft arrives on Earth during a Boy Scout retreat. When the aliens learn that Gamera’s weakness is a fondness for children, the Virases kidnap Masao and Jim and hold them hostage, then turn the subdued Gamera into their mind-controlled slave. However, the Virases are idiots who give the two boys free range on the spaceship, so Masao and Jim eventually turn the tables right at the point when the U.N. is on the verge of giving up to an alien civilization in order to save the lives of the two little industrial saboteurs.

There are some adults in the film, like Kojiro Hongo on his third “lead” role in a Gamera film as a Scout Master, but they don’t have much screen time, and there’s only a short nod to the formerly obligatory gathering of the military and scientists (this time just to surrender). Most of the movie is Gamera flying around the groovy-looking Viras spacecraft, and Masao and Jim wandering around the equally groovy interior of the Viras spacecraft. If you love old Star Trek and Doctor Who sets, you’ll like all the tinkering around on the ship and experimenting with its telepathy devices.

The Virases are dolts and have the drabbest “space” outfits imaginable, looking like they work at a North Korean factory. But in dim light the effects department gives them frightening glowing eye appliances that have a genuine nightmarish quality. There’s also a weird moment where one of the Virases detaches and reattaches his arm. I appreciate these little odd details that appear in all Gamera films. (And I won’t spoil the crazy “decapitation” moment.)

The villain monster, an amalgamation of all the aliens aboard the ship into one creature known just as “Viras,” doesn’t appear until the finale. But the monster fight goes on for a good stretch and even gets a touch gruesome. Viras looks like a silver squid with a parrot face, and it can turn the top of its head into a stabbing spear. Viras pierces Gamera with this a few times, which looks deep enough to have easily killed the giant turtle. But the wounds hardly even slow Gamera down. Masao and Jim yell advice, and Gamera takes it and wins. The battle doesn’t have the same spectacle as the climax in Gamera vs. Gyaos, but it works for the movie.

Now, the bad news… there’s no way around how the stock footage hobbles the movie. In 1968, giant monsters were losing ground at the Japanese box-office because of the booming popularity of superhero TV shows like Ultraman and Ultra Seven. To keep Gamera profitable, Daiei Studios needed to slenderize the budget, and recycling VFX scenes offered a way to do that without harming production values elsewhere (much). The in-story excuse for the stock scenes is that the Virases must scan Gamera’s brainwaves to understand the monster’s history and weaknesses. The footage consists of Gamera breaking free from the ice in Gamera: The Giant Monster, both monster fights from Gamera vs. Barugon, and the first confrontation with Gyaos followed by Eiichi’s rescue from Gamera vs. Gyaos. Regardless of the excuse, it’s murder on the pacing to have stock footage pop up only twenty minutes into the running time and then trudge on for ten minutes.

But wait, we’re not done yet. Once the Viras spacecraft gains control of Gamera, the aliens send him on a rampage to destroy a power dam. In other words, the footage from Gamera vs. Barugon of Gamera attacking the Kurobe Dam. Then the Virases send him to attack Tokyo. In other words, the Tokyo destruction scenes from Gamera: The Giant Monster, given a slight tint to unsuccessfully disguise the original black and white footage. The only reason the Virases don’t send Gamera on further destruction is because they didn’t have any more footage to consume.

The deluge of re-used material restrains me from giving Gamera vs. Viras full approval. I enjoy most everything away from the recycling, no matter how silly or childish it is. I can roll with the wish-fulfillment aspect, and a ‘60s spacecraft is always a good time. But fifteen minutes of stock footage in an eighty-one minute movie—almost a fifth of the running time—is too much for a flimsy story to handle.

On the plus side, those fifteen minutes constitute 80% of the good material from Gamera vs. Barugon, so at least you no longer have to watch that film.

Gamera vs. Viras (Gamera tai Uchu Kaiju Bairasu, “Gamera vs. Space Monster Viras”) isn’t as well known in North America today as most of the other films in the series because Sandy Frank Entertainment didn’t purchase it as part of their mid-’80s syndication deal. The version from AIP Television, titled Destroy All Planets in an attempt to recapture some of the success the company had with Destroy All Monsters, was ubiquitous during the ‘70s through the early ‘80s; I can attest that it played on almost continuous rotation on local stations every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. But when AIP's rights expired in the early ‘80s, the film vanished in the U.S. for years. After Gamera made a comeback through Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the 1990s, this ol’ standby was still nowhere to be seen because MST3K acquired all the Gamera movies through Sandy Frank. So if you didn’t grow up during the ‘70s, Gamera vs. Viras will be a new experience. And you can make your own MST3K episode commentary for it.

Previous: Gamera vs. Gyaos

Next: Gamera vs. Guiron

The Godzilla Blu-ray Flood: Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 01:39:00 +0000

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)

Directed by Jun Fukuda. Starring Akira Takarada, Kumi Mizuno, Akihiko Hirata, Jun Tazaki, Toru Watanabe, Toru Ibuki, Choutarou Tougin, Hideo Sunazuka, Pair Bambi.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

After a few years fighting battles among the cities of Japan and facing the hapless measures of the Japanese Self-Defense force, Godzilla got to go on a tropical island vacation and enjoy broiled seafood. The results were an entertaining variation on the classic Godzilla formula known as Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. Or maybe Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster. It depends on how strict you are about Toho Studio’s official English titles.

The arrival of the new U.S. Godzilla triggered a flood of Japanese Godzilla films to Blu-ray, with eleven hitting hi-def on the same day, spread across seven releases. The oldest film on the slate is 1966’s Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, arriving courtesy of small label Kraken Releasing, a successor to ADV Films. You may know Ebirah better under its original U.S. television broadcast title, Godzilla versus the Sea Monster, with “vs.” spelled out for reasons best left mysterious. This Blu-ray is the first stateside release to have the official English title on the cover, although the movie’s title card reads Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster, no longer spelling out “vs.” Reasons more mysterious.

A brief backdrop to this odd G-film: In 1965, Toho Studios made a deal with U.S. animation company Rankin/Bass to co-finance a live-action movie featuring the return of Toho’s version of King Kong. The show would tie into a Rankin/Bass Saturday morning animated series, The King Kong Show. Toho’s writers created a script titled Operation Robinson Crusoe, but Rankin/Bass passed on the idea. The King Kong film eventually emerged in 1967 as King Kong Escapes. But Toho chose to recycle the Operation Robinson Crusoe script as a Godzilla project.

Toho also decided to make it a lower budgeted Godzilla film than the previous entries and placed a different creative team on it. Crime movie director Jun Fukuda replaced Toho’s A-list monster and science-fiction specialist Ishiro Honda. Although Toho Special Effects Department head Eiji Tsubaraya received credit for the VFX direction, his assistant Teisho Arikawa handled most of the hands-on work. Regular Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube was also absent, although his replacement, Masuro Sato, certainly was no B-lister; he was director Akira Kurosawa’s favorite composer and previously scored the second Godzilla film, Godzilla Raids Again (1955). Nonetheless, going with Sato—along with Fukuda and Arikawa—definitely gives the sense that Toho viewed Ebirah as a scaled-down production compared to the Honda-Tsubaraya-Ifukube epics of the previous years.

Ebirah often divides Godzilla fans, although not as sharply as oddities like Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971) or Godzilla: Final Wars (2004). For many fans who grew up with G-films on television, Ebirah disappointed: it brought the monster action in too late, contained no urban destruction or super-weapons, and Godzilla’s kaiju opponent was a less than impressive crustacean.

But the movie surprises the adult fans who can get over the childhood disappointment and discover how good a story it has. Ebirah snaps away from the science-fiction plots of the previous series entries and instead creates a tropical adventure story with an appealing cast and fast-moving events that use the monsters as elements in a larger fabric. Although it isn’t a great Godzilla film, it’s a very good adventure film and at least a partially good Godzilla film. Viewed as a change of pace, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep succeeds.

The monsters do not set the story in motion, which is one of the unusual aspects. Instead, humans take the center stage—and they aren’t a dull lot either, since they’ve been designed as the leads in an action story rather than supporting figures for a SF tale about giant monsters. It’s unusual for a Godzilla film to have such vibrant characters; usually only villains receive such parts, but this is another element that makes the movie stand out for older viewers.

Our protagonist—or at least the one who catalyzes the story—is Ryota (Toru Watanabe), a young man with an obsession about finding his brother Yata (Toru Ibuki) after his boat vanishes in the South Seas. Ryota seems a bit touched in the head the whole movie, but everything turns out fine in the end so nobody holds him accountable for repeatedly almost getting everyone killed.

Ryota starts off his nutty escapades when he cuts loose a yacht from a harbor and sets it adrift in the sea while three other people are onboard: two youths Ryota bumped into at a dance marathon, and the ostensible owner of the yacht, Yoshimura (Akira Takarada). However, Yoshimura has no idea how to sail the yacht, won’t let anybody touch his attaché case, and gets nervous every time news reports pop up on the radio about a thief who robbed the offices of a shipping company. The script thankfully allows the other characters to figure out soon that Yoshimura is indeed the thief so they don’t look like bumbling fools.

After a few weeks at sea with the food running out—and no doubt the other passengers wondering how best to drown or keelhaul Ryota for sticking them in this mess—the good ship Yahlen reaches Devil Island, where its guardian super-lobster Ebirah cracks the yacht into splinters and strands the three kids and the thief on shore. Now the fun starts.

Devil Island harbors the headquarters of the evil paramilitary organization, the Red Bamboo. Although designed after SPECTRE from the James Bond movies, the Red Bamboo might as well wave the flag of mainland China for all the subtlety they project of Japan’s fears of the nuclear giant next door. The Red Bamboo has no specific plan about which we ever learn, but the facilities on Devil Island contain a heavy water factory capable of creating hydrogen bombs. That was a scary concept for the Japanese at the time. With North Korea’s continued nuclear blustering, it’s still scary.

James Bond was a sensation in Japan, and Ebirah shows heavy 007 influences. The Red Bamboo is an obvious imitation of SPECTRE (plus Chinese analogy) with uniformed thugs, colorful high-tech headquarters, nuclear terrorist ambitions (I think), and a head enforcer with a physical deformity. Instead of sending a James Bond figure to save the day, Ebirah sends Godzilla. Godzilla is tall, dark, and has a great sense of style, and so isn’t as far removed from James Bond as you might think. Godzilla even flirts with the film’s native girl heroine, although this is probably a leftover from the King Kong version of the script.

The Bond movie that Ebirah borrows from the most is Dr. No: both occur on tropical islands where a villainous cabal runs a secret laboratory and keeps intruders away with the threat of a monster. But where Dr. No only has a tractor and flame-thrower pretending to be a dragon, Ebirah has a genuine monster, a ginormous carnivorous lobster that kills anyone attempting to land on or escape from the island.

Once our gaggle of mismatched heroes are shipwrecked, the film turns into a chase-and-escape tale, as the three kids, the good-hearted thief, and a freed native girl (Kumi Mizuno) try to elude the clutches of the trigger-happy Red Bamboo soldiers and their captain (Akihiko Hirata) while finding a way to escape the island without Ebirah turning them into the sushi special. Ryota is still dizzy with his fantasies about saving his brother, whom he learns is on Infant Island where the natives are trying to wake up Mothra to come rescue the ones the Red Bamboo have enslaved.

Godzilla eventually enters the story: while hiding from the soldiers who are randomly firing guns everywhere they go, the castaways discover the famous monster hibernating at the bottom of a cavern. Why is Godzilla asleep buried among rubble? Probably because this is another leftover of the King Kong script. When the kids hatch a plan to wake up Godzilla using lightning—thus giving the Red Bamboo a much larger problem than trying to track down some pesky kids—we have yet another King Kong leftover: in King Kong vs. Godzilla, lightning energized Kong but repelled Godzilla.

The film was exciting before Godzilla’s awakening, which is no mean feat considering that this is a Godzilla film, but it ramps up fast once the heroes jolt the Big G from sleep and the monster makes life tough for the Red Bamboo and tussles with the local sea life.

A confluence of events occurs puts the movie on a track for its exciting conclusion: rescue the enslaved islanders, let Godzilla trash the Red Bamboo base and broil Ebirah, disarm a hydrogen bomb about to go off on the base, and hope that Mothra wakes up and arrives with an exit from the island before everybody goes ka-boom!

Even with all this extra action, the main monster’s belated entrance, the human-dominated story, and a cast of characters you can easily tell apart (aside from the two interchangeable guys from the dance contest, who function like a single part), this is still a genuine Godzilla film. Godzilla works as co-hero and an adversary to the protagonists: the monster turns its attention on the Red Bamboo and Ebirah because they’re the ones who attack and bother it; but our heroes need to worry about not getting squashed in the process.

In the very end, Godzilla refuses to play nice and makes an effort to atomic-roast Mothra when the natives and the castaways try to board a basket Mothra is carrying. Godzilla doesn’t discriminate, but at least most of the time the monster is after the bad guys. With the clock ticking toward the island going up in mushroom cloud, the escapees in the basket shout at Godzilla to get out into the water—apparently thinking the Big G understands Japanese or something. This is a nice touch: the monster almost killed them trying to blast Mothra, but it did wipe out the Red Bamboo base and that annoying lobster… so Godzilla’s an okay bloke.

The Godzilla-centered effects scenes are generally entertaining. The fights with Ebirah will never go down among Godzilla’s most famous battles, but they have amusement value. It’s a touch of ludicrous fun to see the two monsters batter a rock between them like a badminton game, with Godzilla executing a nice header. Godzilla also pulls two great finishing moves on the sappy lobster in the final fight and gives Ebirah the Godzilla equivalent of “the bird.” All the personality that Godzilla developed over the last three films is strong here; the Big G just has a less interesting opponent to face and fewer models to knock over.

The reduced budget for Ebirah, Horror of the Deep doesn’t show often on screen because the island setting hides that VFX handler Teisho Arikawa had fewer funds to build miniatures. But what he does manage is often excellent. The Red Bamboo base stands in for the city that gets the Godzilla stomping treatment, and the details on it are impressive and match the full-sized sets. Arikawa also uses clever low angles and seamless composite shots of the cast with Godzilla in the background that remind us, even without skyscrapers present, how enormous this monster is. Mothra receives a similar treatment: when the giant moth touches down on Devil Island during the finale and the refugees dash toward it, the composited shot is jaw-dropping for how it displays the immensity of Mothra’s wingspan. Mothra hasn’t appeared so large since its original movie in 1961.

The special effects highlight is when the Red Bamboo scrambles attack jets to assault Godzilla. Arikawa treats us to a few minutes of spectacular firepower and sweeping camera movements as the jets unleash their payload and Godzilla takes them down with some fast maneuvering. The sequence feels like another survivor of the King Kong version of the script: the execution resembles the bi-plane attack on Kong atop the Empire State Building. Even some of the swooping POV shots appear similar to the photography from that famous scene. The set-piece opens with an odd and inappropriate piece of surf-rock style music (not credited to Sato), which is the only down note in an otherwise fine sequence.

Ebirah is nobody’s favorite monster; its design is too uninspired and similar to a familiar animal. As a Godzilla adversary, it adequately fills the role and gets out after its two fights. When placed against the humans, however, Ebirah enlarges into something horrifying; this is a rare monster that pays attention to people… and eats them! When Ebirah’s claw starts to rise out of the ocean behind swimmers in the water, the effect is menacing and creates a sense of how enormous the creature is compared to people. Sato provides a eerie guitar effect for these moments.

There’s a bonus monster in the cast: a giant condor that pesters Godzilla for a minute before it gets unceremoniously charred. Not one of the VFX highlights. It actually works better as stock footage in All Monsters Attack where lack of context makes it seem less out of nowhere.

Among the human cast, Akira Takarada as the Good Thief Yoshimura and Akihiko Hirata as the captain of the Dragon Guard are the standouts. Both men have a long history with Godzilla, going back to leading roles in the 1954 original. Takarada is all roguish charm as the thief who turns into just the right sort of hero who can outwit the Red Bamboo with stealth tactics and a skeleton key. Hirata plays a classic Bond henchman type with a dragon eye patch and grinning snarl. Both actors were clearly having a great time with their roles.

Comparing this movie to the Heisei and Millennium films released to Blu-ray the same day shows how much more visually appealing the Showa era movies are in general. This was a golden age of Japanese cinema, and even in a lower-budgeted monster adventure film, the talent pool at Toho Studios of the day shines. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep is a color burst, with gorgeous oranges and reds popping out of the frame in almost every shot. The extensive sets for the Red Bamboo base are also exciting, recalling the work of Ken Adam on the James Bond films—on purpose, certainly.

The experiment with the scaled-down island adventure was enough of a success that Toho repeated it next year, using essentially the same creative personnel, with Son of Godzilla.

When it reached the U.S., Ebirah skipped theatrical release, the first Godzilla film to go this route—and unfortunately not the last. The Walter Reade Organization, which previously distributed Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964) to theaters, shipped the new film straight to syndicated television. (Promotional materials from the distributor describe Godzilla as “the heroic-titan-ape.” Did they even know what they were selling?) Walter Reade’s title change to Godzilla versus the Sea Monster makes marketing sense, since it informs viewers that this indeed is a Godzilla film, and that Godzilla fights a sea monster. Subsequent video releases retained the TV name for convenient shelving purposes. But the title Ebirah, Horror of the Deep shouts “classic Toho” in its strangeness; and since the film marks an abrupt switch from the style of the previous films, putting the title focus on a tropical ocean beastie has logic to it even if Ebirah itself isn’t worth owning it. The Japanese title, Nankai no Daiketto, which translates loosely as “Big Duel in the South Seas,” is the most appealing of all. If I could retitle the film for a new English release, it would be Godzilla: Battle in the South Seas. But nobody asked me.

The Walter Reade version has a few changes. A new opening made from editing together pieces of the wreck of the Yahlen later in the film is supposed to show Ryota’s brother Yata in the shipwreck that stranded him; this replaces cut scenes of Ryota seeking help finding his brother from the government and later from a newspaper. The dub was another superb job from Titra Sound in New York. However, the Walter Reade Godzilla versus the Sea Monster is now rare, since the dub on the current Blu-ray, as well as the earlier Sony DVD, is the “international” dub that Toho contracted from Frontier Enterprises.

Kraken’s Blu-ray looks and sounds fantastic, although like the other G-films from the label there are no bonus features aside from the Japanese trailer. (Great trailer, however. Nice use of “Night on Bald Mountain.”) Kraken’s transfer is clean, crisp, and captures the bold colors of the movie in its original Tohoscope.

The Classic Gamera Series on Blu-ray: Gamera vs. Gyaos (1967)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 21:36:00 +0000

Gamera vs. Gyaos (1967)

Directed by Noriaki Yuasa. Starring Kojiro Hongo, Kichijiro Ueda, Naoyuki Abe, Reiko Kasahara, Taru Marui, Akira Natsuki.

Finally! After two bland movies, the Gamera series finds its niche and breaks out the good rubber suit monster times. Fans generally consider Gamera vs. Gyaos as the best movie of the series, and I won’t dispute that distinction. The pacing, the monster battles, the cast, the blend of the human story with the big beastie action… it all comes together for an entertaining monster-vs-monster show, and one of the best kaiju films of the classic era from a studio other than Toho.

Gamera vs. Gyaos doesn’t waste time: after an intro with Gamera investigating the eruption of Mt. Fuji, it’s a mere twenty minutes until opponent monster Gyaos makes a startling appearance (eating a snoopy reporter!). Gyaos immediately threatens our child hero, Eiichi (Naoyuki Abe), bringing Gamera out to save the day. Gamera rescues Eiichi and lets the boy down to safety from a ferris wheel. This whole sequence is superior to anything in either previous movies

The special effects scenes are plentiful and a joy to watch. Gyaos makes an urban attack on the city of Nagoya when the Japanese Self-Defense Force irritates it. The flying monster smashes apart the skyline and takes down the city’s famous castle with its supersonic ray. (This castle has had rotten luck in the past with monsters: Godzilla crashed into it and battered it to rubble three years earlier in Mothra vs. Godzilla.) Gamera arrives in the city for a fine aerial duel over Nagoya’s baseball stadium, a scene that would inspire a major sequence in 1995’s Gamera, Guardian of the Universe.

Gyaos is a wonderfully designed monster. It resembles a cross between a bat and a Pteranodon; its mortar board head and glowing yellow eyes give it a sinister look appropriate for a villain kaiju. The plot doesn’t really need to explain Gamera as the hero monster, because Gyaos comes across on screen as the Black Hat through design alone. Also, Gyaos likes to eat people. That’s a bad thing.

Gamera is still not fully articulated as “friend to all children,” although when the giant turtle rescues Eiichi, it makes it only a short step toward this development in the series. Since Gamera commits no destruction against humans this time, Eiichi’s adoration of the monster works well, and it’s easy to flow with Gamera’s gentle treatment toward the kid at the opening. Kids like giant monsters, so why shouldn’t giant monsters like kids? Makes sense to me.

The human story contains some usual “military and scientists attempt to stop the monster” scenes, which superficially aren’t much different from the same material in the previous movies. However, they fold well into the other plots, include lots of Eiichi interrupting and providing the JSDF with ideas to stop Gyaos (pretty much every ploy they devise with originates with the kid), and leads to a delightfully daft attempt to kill Gyaos that’s one of the highlights. It’s a thrill just to type out the scheme: lure Gyaos to the top a rotating restaurant using a huge vessel of synthetic blood, then spin the restaurant extremely fast so Gyaos will become too dizzy to escape before the sun comes up and roasts it to death.

The main human plot centers on a village near the mountain where Gyaos appears. The villagers are trying to negotiate a settlement with the corporation that is building an important expressway through the mountains. The village’s elder councilman (Kichijiro Ueda), who is Eiichi’s grandfather, pushes the other villagers to hold out for a higher price from the corporation and resist the road’s construction until the moneymen give in. The story oddly takes the side of the road crew against the villagers, with foreman Tsutsumi (Kojiro Hongo, who was also the lead in Gamera vs. Barugon) emerging as the rational force between the two. The villagers eventually chastise themselves as too greedy, which is a strange development (shouldn’t they be the underdog heroes?), but the movie does at least show that the president of the company back in the city is a heartless SOB: “I don’t care about the volcanic eruption and the giant monster! Get back to work!” It sounds like a punchline to a joke about the Japanese work ethic.

Except for the Nagoya battle, the whole film takes place in the environs of the mountain village, so the story about the road construction fits well with the chaos occurring around Gyaos. In the finale, everyone joins together for a last plot against Gyaos, and Gamera appears for a terrific final fight that’s exactly what you want it to be: energetic and occasionally ludicrous. Clocking in a leaner fourteen minutes shorter than the endless slog of Gamera vs. Barugon, Gamera vs. Gyaos is fast on its turtle feet and a pleasure throughout.

Daikaiju Kuchusen: Gamera tai Gyaosu (“Giant Monster Air Battle: Gamera vs. Gyaos”) first reached the U.S. through AIP Television as Return of the Giant Monsters. After the AIP version vanished in the early ‘80s, Sandy Frank Entertainment picked it up for distribution, re-dubbed it, and gave it the title Gamera vs. Gaos, dropping the “y” from Gyaos’s name for some reason—the same strategy that the Walter Reade Organization used when it turned “Ghidorah” into “Ghidra” for their release of Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster.

Although the best of the Gamera films, Gamera vs. Gyaos also made for one of the finest of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Gamera episodes. We can partially thank Sandy Frank for this, since once again his company’s dub job is horrendous and makes the movie seem substantially stupid because the characters all seem like dim bulbs. But since Gamera vs. Gyaos is so genuinely entertaining to watch, it also makes for a fun riffing subject. There’s simply so much more for the Satellite of Love crew to work with than the snoozer of Gamera vs. Barugon.

In summary: If you have children and want to show them a Gamera film, skip the first two and go straight to this one. You’ll have happier children. (Although the Blu-ray only has the subtitled version, which makes it a bit of a challenge for the younger ones. Perhaps you should purchase the 2010 Shout! Factory DVD that contains the AIP dub. Younger kids usually aren’t picky about standard-def vs. hi-def.)

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The Classic Gamera Series on Blu-ray: Gamera vs. Barugon (1966)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 03:07:00 +0000

Gamera vs. Barugon (1966)

Directed by Shigeo Tanaka. Starring Kojiro Hongo, Kyoko Enami, Yuzo Hayakawa, Takuya Fujioka, Koji Fujiyama.

The second Gamera film (Daikaiju Ketto: Gamera Tai Barugon, “Giant Monster Duel: Gamera vs. Barugon”) is a case of trying to correct course and ending up heading a different wrong direction. The previous year’s Gamera: The Giant Monster was an out-of-date retread of the 1950s giant monsters films, but with some interest because of its smattering of bizarre ideas and the presence of a child as a main character. The second film adds a monster opponent for Gamera, the weird creature Barugon, but drops the child actor and instead forges the dullest and most time-consuming human subplot of the series. Gamera doesn’t even have much screen time, and you have to wonder if director Shigeo Tanaka and producer Masaichi Nagata had any larger view of what they were doing. It’s appropriate that when Gamera’s original director, Noriaki Yuasa, returned with the next film (he only served as VFX director on this one), the series at last found its path of unabashed monster action and kid-centered stories.

This is a tedious film, lasting twenty-two minutes longer than Gamera but with far less to fill the time. It’s low on Gamera and high on filler about four men trying to retrieve an opal from a cave in New Guinea that one of them hid there during the war. Actually, they plan to steal the opal, since it’s really the property of the natives. The four thieves are an uninteresting lot, even the treacherous Onodera, and their scenes lack humor and tension. The whole opal plot is a long path toward getting Barugon into the movie, and it takes forever. The most decent of the lot of opal thieves, Keisuke, who plans to open his own travel company with his share of the loot, becomes the default hero of the story, but he doesn’t do much but stand around and wonder why nothing works at stopping Barugon.

The opal from the cave turns out to be Barugon’s egg, which hatches on the ship returning with it. Finally, forty-minutes into the film and thirty-five since we last saw any giant monster, Barugon emerges from the water near Kurobe.

While this is going on, our opal buddies are still worried about their little scheme long after the movie should’ve given it up and moved onto Gamera. The falling out results in a clumsy fight in an apartment right at the point when everybody should be a bit more concerned about the giant monster loose in the city. There will be another thieves’ fight later, this one extremely violent, and the point at which the film boldly declares that it’s not for children. This is the only of the Showa Gamera films I suggest you screen before permitting youngsters to watch it—although they’ll probably fall asleep before anything violent happens.

Our main monster Barugon—Gamera is only the supporting monster—is the baseline of “strange” for this series. A quadruped reptilian beastie with a rhino horn and a sort of friendly puppy look, Barguon has a ram-action tongue with a deep cold blast that makes for some fine effects work of castles, tanks, and planes freezing. There’s one shot a plane frozen over in flight that then breaks apart in chunks that’s more interesting than any of the effects in Gamera: The Giant Monster. Barugon has a second special attack with a rainbow ray shot from its back that can vaporize anything, which produces nice optical-based visuals. It’s unfortunate that these effects, all contained in Barugon’s rampage through Kobe, exist in isolation from everything else. With a script that was actually about the monsters, this could’ve been worthwhile. Instead, it works better as material for a clip show (i.e. Gamera vs. Viras).

Gamera appears at the opening, first through blue-tinted stock footage from the first movie (they needed to add some color, especially after the tie-dye paint pattern under the opening credits) and then in an attack on the Kurobe Dam. Clearly, Gamera is still far from being the Friend to All Children supported by a rah-rah theme song. Gamera crashes into the dam and breaks it—an impressively detailed piece of model work—then flies off to a volcano below the equator to search for more food. The movie forgets about him for a long time.

It isn’t until fifty-two minutes into the movie that Gamera at last returns, and for the flimsiest reason: interest in Barugon’s rainbow ray suddenly draws the spinning turtle from some outer reaches of the world to Osaka. Here’s where the film should finally pick up and feed off the promise of the Barugon attack scenes. But alas...

Gamera vs. Barugon establishes the kaiju fight pattern for the remaineder of the series: Gamera and Guest Monster have a mid-movie confrontation where the Guest incapacitates Gamera in some fashion with a special attack. The Guest Monster rampages for a spell, Gamera recovers, outwits whatever weapon the Guest Monster used, and is victorious. The difference with this film is that the audience doesn’t know which monster to root for (Gamera isn’t established as heroic yet, and there’s no little kid for moral support) and the fight scenes have bland and slow blocking that makes them uninteresting.

Once Barugon puts Gamera on ice, the movie turns into a picture that should just be titled Barugon. It’s padded with standard scenes of scientists and military men trying to devise a way to kill or stop a monster, failing each time. The tactics against Barugon are super-boring and involve either luring the monster very slowly toward water or making it stop because of rain. Not only does Gamera do nothing during this stretch, nobody even gives a thought to the frozen turtle. At least in later movies during Gamera’s time in the penalty box, some kids would pay attention and try to revive the monster.

When Gamera at last returns for the final fight, it’s a brief affair that closes an unsatisfying film on an even less satisfying note. And none of the characters even have anything to say about Gamera saving the day. The whole movie is just a glum affair with a few good effects tucked in here and there. At least there’s the anticipation of Gamera vs. Gyaos ahead.

The Mill Creek Blu-ray transfer of Gamera vs. Barugon has an improved picture over Gamera: The Giant Monster, with fewer noticeable artefacts and none of the banding that sometimes appeared in the earlier film’s transfer.

Gamera vs. Barugon went straight to television in the U.S. via American International Pictures, who would also distribute the next four movies. AIP titled the movie War of the Monsters. When Sandy Frank purchased the rights to the movie and gave it yet another rotten dub, the film went to its now standard title of Gamera vs. Barugon. The MST3K version (based, like all their Gamera episodes, on the Sandy Frank print) is the weakest of the lot: they have a great time with the weirdness of Barugon (“That’s it. We’re licked.”), but the opal theft stretch that eats up almost half the movie doesn’t have enough fodder for excellent riffing, and of course there is very little Gamera to go round.

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The Classic Gamera Series on Blu-ray: Gamera: The Giant Monster (1965)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 02:30:00 +0000

Gamera: The Giant Monster (1965)

Directed by Noriaki Yuasa. Starring Eiji Funakoshi, Harumi Kiritachi, Junichiro Yamashita, Yoshiro Uchida.

The original Gamera giant monster series of 1965–80 from Daiei Studios spanned eight films and became successful enough with an audience of children that it eventually influenced the Godzilla films that had inspired it in the first place. All Monsters Attack (1970) was Toho’s copy of the low-budget Gamera formula of kids, monsters, and stock footage.

But Gamera never enjoyed the respect that Godzilla received until the fantastic trilogy of films in the 1990s from director Shusuke Kaneko. The original “Showa era films” still have the reputation for being cheap and bizarre, although this constitutes a large part of their charm and the reason Mystery Science Theater 3000 had such a great time with them. (MST3K used the Sandy Frank dubs from the mid-’80s, which are among the worst dubs ever for any Japanese film, which upped their hilarity in a way the filmmakers never intended.)

But the first Gamera film, Daikaiju Gamera (“Giant Monster Gamera”), was far less strange and positioned as a mostly-serious monster picture. For that reason, it’s also not very good.

Gamera: The Giant Monster (the English title distributor Shout! Factory bestowed upon it in 2010) was about twelve years behind the times. In 1965, the kaiju craze was rapidly reaching its height in Japan with colorful monster adventures everywhere. But Gamera was shot in black-and-white in a dry documentary style trying to imitate the 1954 Godzilla. It’s a strange tactic for Daiei Studios to have taken to compete with Toho Studios (Godzilla’s home). The movie contains the seeds of the rest of the series because it makes a child one of the principles, but the story of young Toshiro (Yoshiro Uchida) and his adoration for the giant monster that is demolishing Japan feels so incongruous with the rest of the film that you again have to wonder: what were they thinking? You could almost imagine a time-travel scheme where the filmmakers of the later Gamera films came back to 1965 and inserted new footage of a child into the picture to align it with the rest of the series.

The Toshiro story aside, Gamera is routine monster movie business stuck a decade in the past. A Cold War fracas between the U.S. and an unnamed adversary (go ahead and guess) in the Arctic wakes up a giant turtle from the ancient continent of Atlantis. The monster comes ashore in Japan and begins wrecking things. Scientists and military figures try to figure out what to do; they make a few unsuccessful attempts, and at last defeat the monster by trapping it in a rocket and blasting it out to land on Mars. The final scheme is outrageous, but this is otherwise the same type of story from 1950s U.S. science-fiction movies, and a formula that Toho Studios abandoned by the time of Mothra in 1961.

What Gamera does have going for it are brief touches of the bizarre that would blossom in the later movies. Gamera’s ability to fly by pulling its head and legs and blasting out fire to spin like a Frisbee through the air is delightfully weird. The “Z Plan” of tricking Gamera into the nose cone of super rocket is also so daft you have to applaud it. But these are the exceptions in a mostly stodgy film, more akin to Godzilla Raids Again than to the original Godzilla. The one influence it picks up from Toho’s later films is the theme of international cooperation that director Ishiro Honda loved so much.

Regarding our young hero, Toshiro (the notorious “Kenny” of the Sandy Frank dub): his story doesn’t make the least lick o’ sense. Gamera saves his life, catching the boy when he falls from a lighthouse and then gently placing him down. But this is the only action of this sort that Gamera takes during the whole movie; at no other point does the fire-breathing turtle show any kind of benevolence or even regard for human beings. Gamera just trounces cities like a standard monster. This makes Toshiro’s running around military headquarters and irritating people with his insistence that Gamera is actually a gentle fellow feel like sloppy writing, or a second screenwriter who didn’t know what the first one was writing.

I can’t offer any better criticism of Toshiro’s scenes that all the snubs that the MST3K crew lobbed at the film: “Yep, what Gamera’s done today has been a benefit to all, Kenny,” shown over footage of Gamera wrecking a power station. It’s so strange. But the same way that Joel and the ‘Bots had such a grand time lancing into the film for the Toshio/Kenny plotline, I enjoy Toshio’s scenes for their oddness much more that the rote scenes with Dr. Hidaka, Other Scientist, the Boring Reporter (“News Stud”), and Blank Love Interest. In fairness to Toshi-chan, the character comes across as far less grating in his original Japanese performance than the horrendous dub Sandy Frank crammed in his mouth. Yoshiro Uchida is a fine child actor, and I feel for the character considering what a louse he has for a dad. (Come on, what’s your problem with the kid keeping a pet turtle?)

The special effects aren't bad. They don’t reach the level of Eiji Tsubaraya’s work for the Toho movies; Daiei Studios didn’t have the same tradition of visual effects available to Toho, and the film suffers from a budget far below what Toho could lavish on even a mid-budget Godzilla film like that next year’s Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. Special effects director Yonesaburo Tsukiji still manages some fine work with what he was given, such as the model planes and ship during the Arctic opening, Gamera’s destruction of a geothermal power plant, and the animation for Gamera in flight. The black and white photography comes in handy, since it helps smooth over the model and optical effects. The weakest section is the obligatory attack on Tokyo, where the limited model work cannot hold up well to what Toho could achieve at the time. (This is also the point where everybody needs to stop listening to Toshiro’s pleas about Gamera’s beneficial nature.)

Gamera has a pretty silly and awkward design for what’s supposed to be a serious monster film. Once the series moved into odd territory with later installments, Gamera started to look far better. Director Noriaki Yuasa took over the special effects with the following film and started to give them their unique look.

The image transfer for the new Blu-ray looks good for a film its age and budget; the clear widescreen photography does wonders in improving the effects. But Mill Creek crammed four feature films onto this one disc, and this means many irritating compression artifacts that even casual viewers will pick up. It didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the film, but Mill Creek should have made this a double-disc package with two films per disc. There are no extras: the menu screen directs you straight to your choice of the four films, and then the movie starts.

Daikaiju Gamera has gone under a number of different names in English over a variety of versions. This was the only classic era Gamera film that received a first-run U.S. theatrical release, as Gammera the Invincible, with the extra “m” apparently inserted to keep people from pronouncing the monster’s name as “GAH-mare-ah.” World Entertainment Corp. and Harris Associates, Inc. handled the release and Americanization using footage of Albert Dekker and Brian Donlevy as U.S. military officers. This version hasn’t seen a legitimate release since a pan-and-scan DVD from a decade ago. As the film was released in an anamorphic 2.35 widescreen, pan-and-scan tends to kill it.

In the mid-’80s, the film was one of the five that distributor Sandy Frank Entertainment purchased. Frank only had access to the Japanese version, not the American footage. He gave the film a cheap dub job but kept it mostly intact, and then released it to television as Gamera. When Mystery Science Theater 3000 picked up the films for their show, they were the Sandy Frank versions (which explains the absence of two of the classic films from the MST3K line-up; Sandy Frank never obtained the rights to Gamera vs. Viras or Gamera vs. Jiger, and I don’t think anybody even considered Super Monster or knew it existed)

The original subtitled Japanese film reached laserdisc in the ‘90s, now called Giant Monster Gamera, which is the closest to the meaning of the Japanese title. In 2010, the original version at last reached DVD, courtesy of Shout! Factory, as Gamera: The Giant Monster—and now we have it on Blu-ray as well, this time from Mill Creek. Shout! Factory has also released a box set of all the MST3K Gamera episodes, and I can’t recommend that collection highly enough: these rank among the best installments of the show.

I am looking forward to the other films in the series after this bland but necessary opener. Although the next film, Gamera vs. Barugon, doesn’t have the formula down yet either. At least it has a second monster.

Next: Gamera vs. Barugon

Maleficent Fails in an Unusual Way

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:20:00 +0000

Maleficent (2014)

Directed by Robert Stromberg. Starring Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, Sharlto Copley, Sam Riley, Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple, Lesley Manville, Ella Purnell.

Sometimes, we need the fictional villains in our life to just stay evil. Forget sympathy for the Devil: I don’t want sympathy for the Red Skull, the T-1000, Michael Myers, the Joker, Auric Goldfinger, the Dark Lord Sauron, or King Ghidorah.

I especially don’t want sympathy for the Mistress of All Evil, Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent. So few movie characters so relish evil for evil’s sake like she does. And Maleficent executes this vileness with such stylish vigor!

Maleficent is the unofficial ruler of Disney’s dark parallel to their Princess line, the Disney Villains. And hoo-boy, does Maleficent do a great job at the top of the wicked food chain. This is a creature so evil that getting a birthday party snub hurls her into a generational revenge plot that consumes a kingdom and all her free time. Her design (courtesy of legendary Disney artist Marc Davis) and voice (Eleanor Audley) emphasize the beautiful allure of evil to make the Middle Ages proud. As bonuses, she has a crafty raven sidekick and can transform through a mushroom cloud explosion into a black and purple dragon that blasts green flames. Give the dark lady a hand!

So what worse way to foul up Maleficent than to try to explain in a feature length film how she got so evil?

Amazingly, Disney found a worse way.

Based on the trailers, I anticipated the new live-action Maleficent was going to make the same mistake as Rob Zombie’s maligned Halloween remake and provide too much backstory for character who needs none. Although Maleficent does err in this direction, the comparison doesn’t truly fit. Instead, imagine a Batman film where the Joker becomes Batman’s closest ally, tries to help the hero overcome the grief of his parents’ death, and then aids Batman against a psychotic Jim Gordon who wants to viciously gun down Gotham’s protector. And by the way, Jim Gordon is the one who killed Batman’s parents all those years ago.

Wait, scratch that. It sounds too interesting. I can’t say that about Maleficent’s script-flip.

In this iteration, Maleficent is not an anti-hero, nor a tragic villain, nor anything else so nuanced or challenging. For the second half of the running time, Maleficent is the no-excuses hero. This is what actually occurs in the movie. It’s utterly bizarre that Disney would do something so drastic and undermining to one of their most beloved properties. Another studio exploring this reverse-villain concept à la Wicked (without a trademarked character like Maleficent) is understandable. This feels like Disney trying to kill their own IP.

Maleficent cannot avoid comparisons to the 1959 animated film, and that’s not a position in which any film should place itself. Sleeping Beauty isn’t the finest movie from Disney Animation Studios—it has a few dull stretches, and Aurora is the least of the princesses in the canon—but it’s no doubt the studio’s most gorgeous movie. I would place it on a short list for most beautiful movie of all time along with entries like Barry Lyndon and Days of Heaven. The tsunami of indelible imagery in Sleeping Beauty drowns its flaws. The opening few minutes alone appear like a Medieval tapestry come to multi-planar life, and there’s yet to be a movie shot in 3D that can match the dimensional effect achieved through this 2D hand animation. I could fill up three posts just gushing about how wonderful Sleeping Beauty looks, going almost frame-by-frame.

Poor Maleficent looks dreary and cluttered beside its inspiration. Like so many recent live-action fantasy movies, the art direction team went over the top trying to create a fairy-tale world and instead crafted a massive junk-heap that is tiresome to look at. The numerous cartoonish beasties that live in Maleficent’s moorlands look fit for a computer animated film (How to Train Your Dragon popped to mind more than once) and do not fit into the movie’s general design. And the three good fairies are ghastly in their winged form: disturbing bobble-heads that are either funny or nightmare fuel depending on your state of mind. The three characters are aggravating in their human shapes, but at least they look better than these CGI monstrosities.

But all these problems are trivial compared to the obstacle the film created for itself when it set out to reinterpret an established character by changing what everyone liked about her.

Maleficent’s new backstory, a frolicking winged fairy (played by Ella Purnell) who falls for the human prince Stefan, only to later lose her wings when the older Stefan (Sharlto Copley) needs to prove himself to his father, isn’t all that rotten. The movie has some kick to it during these first twenty minutes, and even if the progression of Maleficent from gentle to aggressive occurs with jarring abruptness—it seems like a few key scenes were cut—there is at least the sensation of an intriguing alternate history developing. This new origin could have made the start of the evil and beautiful villain we all love.

Then the movie plunges into the actual story of Sleeping Beauty and starts down the road of making Maleficent into Princess Aurora’s protecting fairy godmother and a fantasy action hero. The result is Maleficent becomes dreadfully… boring. Once her villainy vanishes, there is a sad and drab ordinariness to the character. Maleficent makes a poor heroine; she simply doesn’t have the necessary qualities, and wasn’t designed for the role. This is like expecting a relief pitcher to hit homeruns: that’s not the position’s job.

The film teases a scattering of good ideas after expending itself in the opening. Maleficent starts to watch over Aurora because the three good fairies are too incompetent to handle caring for a human child. Since Maleficent’s curse cannot take effect if the child dies before her sixteenth birthday, the dark fairy has to protect Aurora from afar with the help of the raven Diaval (who can turn into Sam Riley, a decision that isn’t as awful as it sounds). Although this story change removes a basic suspense element of the original, which is that Maleficent doesn’t know where the fairies have hidden Aurora, it makes sense for a villain who likes to work the long game. The Mistress of All Evil would want to make sure her full plan plays out, or else why come up with such a strange curse to begin with?

The film’s one strength that improves on the animated original also comes out during this stretch of the film: Elle Fanning as Aurora. The original animated Aurora is a cypher and a weak character whose lack of screen time feels done on purpose. Fanning, an actress with great charm and a wonderful career ahead of her, gives Aurora the necessary spark to feel worth the Disney Princess line. She also has great chemistry with Angelina Jolie, and the early prickly relationship Maleficent has with the young girl contains the best work from both actresses. Yes, there was something interesting happening here.

But these are a few moments in a drab and dull tale with a main character who is fundamentally wrong. None of the fantasy action that crops up to keep the story physically moving helps at all. The movie can’t even pull off a remotely exciting dragon at the finale. You’ve seen this all before and done far better. Even Snow White and the Huntsman executed this in a more interesting way—although Elle Fanning could wipe out Kristen Stewart in the charisma department any day of the week.

A strong director might have pushed Maleficent past the mistakes of its concept, but first-time director Robert Stromberg, a VFX designer who worked on Avatar and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, was apparently hired to bring no vision to the film at all and step out of the way of the Disney executive machine. Fanning and Jolie function fine as performers without directorial input, but the rest of the film suffers from the lack of a strong hand on the rudder.

Angelina Jolie was the best choice for the title role, and the boring characterization isn’t her fault. She cannot surpass the Marc Davis/Eleanor Audley original, nor does the film give her the chance to do so the way that Elle Fanning is allowed to better her animated counterpart, but Jolie is definitely giving the role her all. She’s as good a live-action Maleficent as could have been crafted, and once more the film that could have been peeks through the pixelated dreariness.

Despite the company’s efforts, Disney won’t succeed in damaging the Maleficent IP. The new movie will make money, but come October, when the Mouse House re-releases Sleeping Beauty to Blu-ray, Maleficent will likely change into an embarrassing memory. This is a short gain for Disney in terms of profit, and I hope the studio realizes its error, pick up the cash, and then lets Maleficent live on as the Evil we Need.

Mothra vs. King Ghidorah: Which Toho Monster Will Appear in the Next U.S. Godzilla Movie?

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 27 May 2014 00:09:00 +0000

Caution: This article discusses some details about Godzilla ‘14 that viewers who have yet to see the film may consider spoilers. (Non-spoiler review here.) Viewers who haven’t seen the film should also go take care of that now.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. felt confident enough about the almost $200 million that the new Godzilla took in at the global box office during its opening weekend—the biggest International opening of 2014 at that point—to announce a few days later what everyone knew the moment the movie started pulling in heaps of cash: “Yep, we’re gonna make another one.”

We know little more at the moment. In the build up to Godzilla ‘14, all parties involved avoided sequel speculation. Director Gareth Edwards—whose association in a follow-up is uncertain at this time, especially since he signed on to direct the first Star Wars spin-off movie—made brief mention of doing something with the “Monster Island” concept introduced in Destroy All Monsters (1968), but nothing specific. Which means we can all speculate freely and wildly about what might happen in Godzilla Raids Again or whatever title “Godzilla II” has.

The big question about any Godzilla sequel: What other monster(s) will appear? Although it’s possible for Legendary Pictures to go with an original creature—and they did well with the MUTOs—it’s almost a guarantee they’ll negotiate with Toho Studios for the rights to one of the classic kaiju. Toho is reportedly through the roof with excitement over the new movie, so the negotiations won’t be aggressive.

There are many monster possibilities, but most online speculation has landed on two superstars: Mothra and King Ghidorah. Any Godzilla fan would place these kaiju at the top of a list of “must haves.”

To the objection that Mothra and King Ghidorah are too outlandish for a “realistic” take on Godzilla, I want to point out that the new G-film feels like an open world that isn’t going to remain realistic much longer. The movie is willing to embrace classic Godzilla ideas to the point that bringing in almost any monster isn’t out of the question. Max Borenstein, the screenwriter of Godzilla ‘14 has made the point that this “realism” allows almost anything: “The same way Chris Nolan was so brilliantly able to create a Joker that felt of a piece in his dark and grounded reality, whereas if you just watched the television series from the ’60s, the Batman shows, you would have said that was impossible. I think it’s possible.”

The “possible” creature he was specifically referencing? Mothra.

With the gates thrown open like this, I’ll engage in my own speculation based on Mothra’s and King Ghidorah’s histories and the current Godzilla film and its setting to see how either monster might work.

Mothra (Mosura)

After Godzilla, this moth-god is the most popular giant monster in Japan. Mothra debuted in an eponymous 1961 film that is a watershed moment not only for the Japanese giant monster genre, but for Japanese fantasy and science-fiction films in general. It marked the point where what had started as a Japanese take on a U.S. genre peeled away into unique territory. Mothra was a giant monster but also a mythic, spiritual creature, and the movie around it was filled with color and scope different from the semi-documentary style of earlier Toho SF pictures. Mothra scored a huge hit, and two years later its star went up against Godzilla in arguably the best film of the G-series, Mothra vs. Godzilla (originally released in the U.S. as Godzilla vs. The Thing to make the identity of Godzilla’s opponent into a mystery gimmick.)

Mothra’s filmography since those first two films is prodigious: Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964), Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966), Destroy All Monsters (1968), Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992), Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001), Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003), Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), and a solo trilogy, Rebirth of Mothra I–III (1996–1998).

Mothra always appears in a positive light in its movies: the gentle giant—as long as you don’t kidnap its fairy priestesses—who represents the spirit of Earth in the face of other destructive monsters. No other Toho creature has been responsible for less destruction than Mothra. Mothra instead works as a conduit between humanity—with whom Mothra will willingly choose to work given the right circumstances—and the other monsters.

Mothra is the only Toho creature whom Godzilla ‘14 references. An early scene at the Janjira power plant contains a shot of a classroom, where a picture of a spread-winged moth with a similar color pattern to Mothra is positioned on the chalkboard in the center of the frame, impossible for the eye to miss. Later, when the two Brodys return to the ruins of their home in Janjira, the camera places a terrarium in the foreground with the word “Mothra” written on a piece of tape across it. A few shots show larva-like creatures crawling around the ruins of glass container.

An in-joke for fans? Or an actual set-up? It could be either. Here’s screenwriter Max Borenstein on the topic: “I can’t say the Mothra Easter Egg is an indication of any specific plans for Mothra, though everyone has a fondness—I know I speak for [director] Gareth [Edwards], and I speak for Legendary—everyone has a great fondness for all the Toho characters.”

So basically, “We aren’t going to tell you, but we think Mothra is cool!”

If we take the shots from these scenes as a direct set-up for the future, Mothra could arise from the radiation accident in Janjira that the male MUTO caused. But that’s an unnecessary step, since Mothra has an easy entrance into the story that works with the film’s mythology of primordial beasts that went into hiding approximately 250 million years ago. This comes from the tie-in prequel comic written by Borenstein and his brother, Godzilla: Awakening. The comic establishes that there was a great variety of MUTOs, with many unusual and often-alien seeming shapes, in pre-Mesozoic Earth. Mothra could be a type of “Queen” MUTO that reawakens, but one that no longer needs radiation to survive and had adapted to a peaceful existence on the new Earth… and then Godzilla seeks it out.

Any discussion of Mothra must address the Shobijin (“little beauties”), the twin miniature fairies who serve as Mothra’s priestesses in most incarnations. Mothra in the Showa Toho-verse comes from Infant Island, where the natives and the Shobijin worship the moth-god. The fairies are an important part of Mothra’s personalities and motivations. Can the Shobijin work within the setting developed in Godzilla ‘14 and Godzilla: Awakening?

Yes, and in different ways. If Mothra emerges from hibernation, it’s easy to imagine a small island, perhaps one occupied during the War or one located near a nuclear test site, that worshipped the memory of Mothra from distant history when it stirred before. Putting telepathy into the story wouldn’t be a stretch; you can have two women on the island with telepathic powers to communicate to Mothra in its sleep. These women become the Shobijin and their powers pass down through generations as a priesthood—or perhaps the powers only manifest when twins are born. A story that deals with Mothra awakening, possibly in response to the events around the MUTOs and Godzilla, would have excellent dramatic potential as the Shobijin try to convince the world that Mothra means no harm. This idea was used well in 2003’s Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S., a movie that offers excellent template ideas on how to tackle further Godzilla stories on screen.

Whether the Shobijin appear as standard-sized women or as the six-inch tall fairies of the Toho-verse is, I think, unimportant: what’s important is their relationship to Mothra and Mothra’s relationship to Earth and its people. There is a fantastic conflict about gentle nature vs. raw nature and a spiritual expansion of the environmental themes of Godzilla ‘14 implicit in bringing Mothra in as the next adversary.

Also, if I may make a casting suggestion: for the Shobijin, consider actress Rila Fukushima, who played Yokio in The Wolverine, as both parts. Her childlike-look and strong screen presence (she stole The Wolverine from its ostensible female lead) make her perfect for the part.

King Ghidorah (Kingu Ghidorah)

What the Joker is to Batman, King Ghidorah is to Godzilla, and that makes the towering golden three-headed space dragon a major consideration for everyone who makes The Dark Knight comparisons for the new Godzilla series. It almost seems like a no-brainer to include King Ghidorah—except Mothra also has a strong case in a “let’s put Superman in a team-up with Batman!” sort of way.

King Ghidorah first appeared in Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster in 1964, the follow-up to the smash success of Mothra vs. Godzilla earlier that year. This was the film that first established Godzilla in a heroic role, when the monster joined forces with Rodan and Mothra to fight against the alien invader. King Ghidorah came back to battle Godzilla three more times in the Showa Era: Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965), Destroy All Monsters (1968), and Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972).

Ghidorah returned in the Heisei series in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991), where it started as the villain, and then in the identity of Mecha-King Ghidorah, as a human-controlled weapon. The Millennium series gave King Ghidorah in its only pure heroic role in Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001), although it was much underpowered. A version of King Ghidorah called “Keizer Ghidorah” showed up in the finale of Godzilla: Final Wars (2004). To add a few more films to its roster, the three-headed dragon was featured in the first and third installments of the 1990s Mothra trilogy, appearing in the first under altered guise as “Death Ghidorah” (Desu Ghidorah).

The films have portrayed King Ghidorah, with a few exceptions, as an alien creature. In its original appearance, Ghidorah was a free agent, simply ravaging planets across the galaxy during many millennia. Later, Ghidorah came under control of various alien invaders, who used it as a tool. With the strange exception of Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, King Ghidorah is unsympathetic and brings the Earth nothing but grief until the planet’s defenders step up to defeat it. King Ghidorah is about as true a nemesis as Godzilla has, and with an unforgettable design.

As a concept for the new movie series, Ghidorah has a good basis from its first film appearance, where it arrived on Earth via asteroid. I’ll attempt to tie this core concept into the mythology of the Legendary Godzilla-verse as we currently understand it. The MUTOs and the giant creatures similar to Godzilla (two different biological groups) existed 250 million years ago, and were unlike the other, smaller life forms of the period that died out at the end of the Permian. Could the MUTOs possibly have an extraterrestrial origin, as opposed to a terrestrial origin for Godzilla? Panspermia, the theory that life on Earth may have originated from the impact of extraterrestrial debris containing microbes, is a subject of serious scientific debate; the MUTOs could be an example of a life form with an off-planet beginning. Why not another off-planet visitor, closer to our day and age? King Ghidorah might come from an unearthed meteorite containing three separate creatures that fuse into a single three-headed beast when exposed to Earth’s current atmosphere. As an extraterrestrial looking to make Earth more like the world it knows, King Ghidorah starts to ravage our planet. So Godzilla kicks the hell out of it.

This idea isn’t too far from Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, where Ghidorah erupted from a bizarre meteorite and took shape from a mass of cosmic fire (a fantastic piece of effects animation). Moving back to the idea of telepathy, a woman in that film who claimed she was inhabited by a spirit of a dead Venusian (a Martian in the U.S. dub) brought the tale of Ghidorah to the people of Earth, warning of the entity’s history.

I don’t think much needs to change from this outline for a new Godzilla film. This ain’t broke: don’t fix it, and please wheel it out before our amazed eyes.

Let’s check back with writer Max Borenstein about Ghidorah-san:

I think the choice of what character [the next monster] that might be, whether it’s a Toho character or a new one, it’s always going to have to be dictated by finding a way in to that character that feels of a piece with the tone we’re establishing. So you asked earlier if picking a grounded tone is why we didn’t have, Ghidorah or whatever? Not really, because I think there is a way to take any of those characters and put a fresh spin on them that might feel more of a piece tonally with our film than it would with maybe a campier, light-hearted version.

So King Ghidorah is on the table. And probably blasting it with lighting bolts.

Why not Mothra and King Ghidorah?

Here the risk of overstuffing a second movie rears its head(s). But since Mothra and Godzilla teaming up to defeat off-worlder King Ghidorah feels too great to pass up, we can’t pass up thinking about the possibility. This was the premise behind Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, which has striking similarities to Godzilla ‘14. (Rodan was on the Godzilla-Mothra team as well, but I the flying beast emerging in the next film feels unlikely.) Ghidorah contains the moment Godzilla first took the side of humanity, and it was Mothra who talked the Big G into facing King Ghidorah as the more important threat. Mothra trying to bring Godzilla into a battle against King Ghidorah (perhaps Godzilla has a “hang up the cowl” or “toss the Spidey suit in the trash” moment and goes to the bottom of the ocean to sit things out) could make for a stunning finale.

Some other monstrous possibilities

It would require a whole other post to go over extensively the other Toho monsters that could emerge in the next film. None are as likely as the Big Two, but for the record, here’s a fast rundown on the ones that have the best chances:

Rodan (Radon): Because the flying MUTO from Godzilla ’14 has some resemblance to Rodan (in flight, at least), bringing in the Pterodactyl-like creature may seem redundant. King Ghidorah and Mothra are both substantially different flying beasts with no overlap. But Rodan fits as an expansion on the alpha predator group to which Godzilla belongs, and I personally love Rodan, so I wouldn’t mind seeing it swing past, create sonic booms over major cities, elude jet planes, and wreck massive amounts of havoc with wind storms from its wings.
Anguirus: Almost as down-to-earth as the kaiju get, Anguirus needs little help to be ushered into the Legendary Films setting. Anguirus was the second monster Godzilla ever fought, in 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again, so there’s precedence. And fans really like the feisty fellow.
Destoroyah (Desutoroiya): If one of the monsters invented for the Heisei or Millennium Era appears, Destoroyah (from 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah) is my selection, since it’s a beast that arises from a misguided human attempt to destroy Godzilla and thus it has perfect motivation to assault the Big G. Destoroyah works well with the “humans tampering with nature theme” as well. However, Destoroyah isn’t as famous with Western audiences as the others on this list.
Mechagodzilla (Mechagojira): If the series lasts long enough, we will eventually see Mechagodzilla. But we need to give it time. The movie humans must first to reach a higher level of technology and a greater anger toward Godzilla, or they need existing alien tech from a previous invasion. Given enough time and odd circumstances, bank on Mecha-G as a major movie event.
Gigan (Gaigan): Well, I can dream can’t I?

Recommended viewing

Some classic Toho films are unavailable on Region 1 DVD or Region A Blu-ray (other English speaking territories are more fortunate), so making recommendations for viewing can be tough. We can expect the situation to improve before the rest of the year. For the moment, here are films easily available in North America that will help new viewers grasp the wonder of Mothra and King Ghidorah and what they might do in Godzilla II: Folded Moth, Hidden Dragon.

Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964): The essential Ghidorah-Mothra film, even though Mothra remains in larval form. This is one of the best of the Showa Era movies, it first made Godzilla heroic, and had a huge impact on the 2014 film. It’s exceptional entertainment and demonstrates how a Godzilla-Mothra teaming could work and how to introduce King Ghidorah to Earth. Available on DVD from Classic Media and on Amazon Instant Video.
Mothra (1961): Mandatory viewing to understand Mothra and the evolution of Japanese fantasy films. An all-around superb movie as well. Available on a DVD set from Columbia, Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection, paired with two other Honda-Tsubaraya films, the special effects extravaganza Battle in Outer Space (1959) and The H-Man (1958).
Mothra vs. Godzilla: Arguably the best Godzilla film of all. Mothra appears in its most positive light, and the Shobijin have their best roles. On DVD from Classic Media.
Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003): Mothra plays third lead to Godzilla and Kiryu, the new Mechagodzilla (the film follows events in Godzilla against Mechagodzilla from the year before), but it’s a fine blueprint for how the new series might proceed. Plus, it’s a direct sequel to the original Mothra. Available on Sony Blu-ray paired with Godzilla: Final Wars (2004).
Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991): Excellent Heisei movie that shows a King Ghidorah variant that makes it a creation of time-travel. Maybe a bit too much of a stretch for a new movie, but still a superb piece of entertainment, and Godzilla itself is stunning. Available on Sony Blu-ray, and also as a standalone DVD and on Amazon Instant Video.
Godzilla vs. Mothra/Godzilla and Mothra: Battle for Earth (1992): A simply plotted but fun Heisei movie that emphasizes the balance of nature and humanity’s small role in it, similar to the recent film. On the same Sony Blu-ray as Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. So that’s a must-have. Also on Amazon Instant Video.
Rebirth of Mothra I & II (1996, 1997): Aimed at children and done in a light fantasy tone, these movies explore the softest side of Mothra and its mythology, and include a version of King Ghidorah. Available on Sony DVD in a two-pack, and the first streams on Amazon Instant Video. The third Mothra film has never received a Region 1 release. Somebody please fix this.

Godzilla (2014) Is a True Godzilla Film and a Unique Blockbuster

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Fri, 23 May 2014 18:30:00 +0000

New to Godzilla? Read my 5-part history series.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

To all of those who saw the new Godzilla this last weekend who have never before fully understood the obsession fans have for this monster… now you will get it. Welcome to our weird world!

Godzilla isn’t just a massive monster that stomps stuff, confronts the military, and grapples with other monsters. Any giant beast can do that without much thought put into it. Godzilla is a character and a legacy. Even when playing the straight-up villain in films like 1962’s Mothra vs. Godzilla, the Big G is larger than larger than life and something you cannot help but stare at in awe and then salute. What a piece of work is a giant radioactive reptile! In apprehension how like a god(zilla)!

Director Gareth Edwards’s 2014 take on Godzilla, only the second film from a U.S. studio featuring the monster (or, if you ask most fans, the first), is a genuine movie. Edwards’ creature isn’t the greatest incarnation to grace the silver screen, something I’m sure he would admit, as nothing could re-capture the cultural magic and hands-on effects work of director Ishiro Honda and visual effects creator Eiji Tsubaraya from the classic series. But the Edwards Godzilla is a legitimate and superb version that achieves the gravity of the 1954 original Godzilla and the thrilling monster-on-monster mayhem of the films that followed it through three eras and six decades. For Godzilla fans, this movie is the sheer ecstasy of a dream realized that brings spontaneous cheers, gasps of admiration, and watery-eyed moments of recognition. I could not imagine a better way to craft a U.S.-made Godzilla film, and it is to the immense credit of Edwards and everyone involved that until now I could not have foreseen how such a feat was even possible.

Even for those with scant knowledge of the great monster except what comes from the pop culture mill, Godzilla ‘14 is as an unusual Hollywood blockbuster. Gareth Edwards and Co. created a movie that stands apart from the stateside summer thrill machines as much as the Japanese films of 1960s did from their U.S. counterparts. Godzilla plays at the slow build, purposely restraining the sprawling spectacle until unleashing the finale. During the first two thirds, the suspense centers around scenes where the monsters remain glimpsed, their masses emphasized to drive the action without making them the centerpiece. Godzilla doesn’t receive a full reveal until an hour in, and the movie immediately leaps away afterwards: instead of signaling the opening of the mayhem, the moment switches into the next step of the gradual climb to the plateau. Where many blockbusters pummel audiences with as much noise and pixels as they can afford until viewers feel only numbness for the finale, Godzilla wants to make them breathless in anticipation for the climax so that when it arrives, it means something.

Overuse has bled the word “awesome” of its original meaning, but Godzilla revitalizes it with its true sense. By taking a grounded visual approach to the monsters, doling them out one jaw-dropping piece at a time, Gareth Edwards elevates them into beasts of amazement. It’s no casual filmmaking choice that the first images to appear on screen are of early human representations of legendary creatures. The movie raises Godzilla and his two opponents into the realm where they are no longer simply big monsters, but the “strange beasts” of the Japanese word kaiju. How would it feel to us to actually see a 350-foot monster moving through a city? Terror mixed with a measure of humility and… awesomeness!

Don’t let some of the myopic criticism directed at Godzilla ‘14 deceive you: the escalating pace of the monster action doesn’t mean the early parts of the film are dull or missing thrills. There are nail-biting sequences that Gareth Edwards slams home, such as a tidal wave hitting Honolulu due to Godzilla crashing ashore and a military operation against the MUTO on a train trestle that’s as tight as suspense comes and has already draw comparisons to the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park. The analogies between this film and classic Spielberg are not far off. When some of the dislike toward the film’s refusal to play for nothing but empty-calorie action dissolves away, Godzilla ’14 will probably be viewed as a watershed event, a picture that made brave and intelligent choices at every step and succeeded. It won’t come as a surprise if people remember the summer of 2014 principally for how Godzilla restored the sense of wonder to the exhausted blockbuster genre.

And we haven’t even arrived at the film’s best part: the climax that now sets the bar for excitement for the rest of the year. The last half hour transforms into a VFX spectacular that stuns in how it portrays the monsters as if they were traditional effects work. Imagine if Toho effects wizard Eiji Tsubaraya came back to life armed with a computer and got suitmation actor Haruo Nakajima (who portrayed Godzilla from 1954 to 1973) to mo-cap the monster. I’m unsure how it is possible for CGI to look this way, but the combination of giant monsters grappling each other in a classic effects style mixed with a Gustav Doré setting of a debris-choked sky is the stuff of dreams; I’ve never seen effects like it and yet it comes with a beautiful familiarity.

As you may have picked up from hints in the trailers and the buzz around the film, Godzilla is the hero. Not just because the humans—both viewers and those in the movie’s universe—want Godzilla to triumph over the two insectoid MUTOs for the fate of San Francisco, but because Godzilla really is the main character. Godzilla’s portrayal has a similar nuance and subtlety to other praised CGI-generated characters like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings series and Caesar from The Rise of the Planet of the Apes. At points, Godzilla is enraged, at other times exhausted and annoyed, blowing out a peeved sigh in the middle of the wreckage of San Francisco as if to say, “These damn bugs, huh? Need to get back in shape.” This is a monster you understands and love, even as your world crashes down around it.

The MUTOs, the spindly beasts who emerge from their chrysalises to feed on human-made radioactive sources, also receive a great deal of personality and aren’t relegated to fight-fodder for the end. As with many great Toho monster opponents, the MUTOs have a reason to exist beyond just supplying Godzilla with a target. They set events in motion, dominate the first half, and their aggression to reach radioactive sources and eventually each other comes from a place far distant from human concerns. We want to see Godzilla triumph over the MUTOs in the conclusion because they have already caused more destruction with the potential to create worse, while Godzilla just wants to trounce them and go home. But the MUTOs are impossible to completely hate, especially when they receive a few moments that are actually touching.

When Godzilla and the MUTOs hurl into the Battle of the Bay for the climax, the hero of the story explodes into majesty that will tear cheers out of almost any audience and destroy most G-fans. One of the biggest moments is one that anybody familiar with Godzilla knows is coming… but the realization that the movie is actually about to go there is one of the greatest pleasures I’ve ever experienced during a summer blockbuster. (My opening night audience flew into absolute hysterics when it happened.) And even this isn’t the finishing note that everyone will come out of the theater talking about.

You may have noticed that I’ve so far made no mention of the characters played by humans. The movie does have them, and… they’re fine. No more or less intriguing than the majority of human characters from many of the Toho classics, which frequently had low-key leads and gave the more intriguing roles to supporting parts and the occasional villain. The characters benefit from good performances, especially David Strathairn as the stoic military official. Strathairn can do this sort of authority without stretching, but that gives a pleasant “studio system” feel to the character, and the part is refreshingly avoid of the cliché of the gun-happy military moron we often see in spectacle movies.

The humans hold down a terse first thirty minutes, and then gradually ease back as the scope broadens and the true leads step up to the plate… and this is just as it should be. It would be far worse to have bloated attempts at “colorful” Hollywood stereotypes, such as those in any Michael Bay flick or the grating 1998 Godzilla, who end up either plot-driven idiots or pure annoyances.

The human lead, Lt. Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), comes across as a bit of a blank. He works best across from his father (Bryan Cranston in fine manic form) and then as Godzilla’s buddy cop partner during the conclusion. No, I’m not making that up. It’s another remarkable aspect of the finale. Even though we cut between the Godzilla vs. The MUTOs fight and a military mission to reach a nuclear warhead in the middle of San Francisco, the movie manages to meld the two through the suggestion that Ford and Godzilla are aiding each other. Godzilla doesn’t know Ford, of course—Godzilla cares nothing for any puny human—but the magic happens through the editing and structure of the sequence. This undercuts any complaints I have about Ford as a character or Taylor-Johnson’s performance; both of them work in the film as larger whole. The story makes us know that Godzilla is the true hero and lead. The other characters exist to build up the Big G, and they handle this job admirably.

Godzilla ‘14 doesn’t engage in an overtly explicit theme, certainly nothing near Godzilla ‘54 or even some of the Heisei movies. The ideas exist, but the characters don’t participate in much discussion about them aside from Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), who reveals a personal connection to Hiroshima in an understated and effective scene. At its core, this is a “balance of nature” tale, in which Godzilla represents a violent swinging of the pendulum back toward order against a disturbance. “If you humans are going to wake up a primordial conflict from 70 million years ago, you have to expect collateral damage and violent heroics before it all gets sorted out.”

In this essay, David Ehrlich calls Godzilla ‘14 the first “post-human blockbuster,” in which all human action is futile or fatal, and the creatures rule all even in scenes where they aren’t present. But the sense of the film is not the grim and hopeless display that Ehrlich implies, for this is no Lovecraftian plunge into human despair looking into the void. The mere mortals of Godzilla, along with the viewers, are invited to stare up at the inhuman majesty and whisper: “Thank you.”

As Godzilla ’14 closes, it breathes life with a beautiful moment where people revel in astonishment. Fearsome and terrifying as this giant monster appears, what a marvel that it exists! And what a marvel that blockbuster films, even in the Era of Glut and Excess, can still seize onto that sense of primal wonder.

…and, thanks to a phenomenal opening weekend take of $93.2 million in the U.S. and an additional $103 million international, it’s also a new beginning. Although Godzilla ‘14 tells a complete story, it feels like the start of a fourth series—the Legendary Era—that could stretch on for ten more films and fly off in astonishing directions that include alien invasions, three-headed space dragons, and fighting robo-replicas.

Quoth Dr. Praetorius: “To a new world of Godzillas and Monsters!”

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996-2004)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Wed, 14 May 2014 05:22:00 +0000

Hey, kids: guess what comes out in theaters this Friday? Oh, wait… I have something I need to finish up here. (Sorry about the delay. It’s a boring story.)

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)

Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)
Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)
Part 4: The Heisei Era (1964–1996)

Godzilla ‘98: An American Tragedy

Oh, I wish Theodore Dreiser wrote this.

All right, let’s get this mother*&!%ing thing over with as much speed as possible: Godzilla ’98 stinks like rotten limburger. We can all agree on this. It isn’t the worst film in the Godzilla series, but that’s because it doesn’t belong in the series and has no business associated with anything with the name “Godzilla” on it. It has zero connection to any version of Godzilla, nor does it make any attempt to interpret the monster whose name it crassly exploits—which is probably the most insulting thing about this massive heap of industrial Hollywood sewage.

But even ignoring its crippling Godzilla-lessness, Godzilla ‘98 is a terrible movie on its own terms. Have you seen it recently? Damn, it’s almost unwatchable. Screechingly, aggressively horrible. I prefer the ‘70s the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. At least the episodes are short and the theme song is catchy.

There are two bright sides to this fiasco. First, it catalyzed Toho to restart the Godzilla series at home. Second, the monster in Godzilla ’98 would get retroactively, and officially, declared not to be Godzilla. In Godzilla: Final Wars, the monster is identified as “Zilla,” a creature the U.S. military and press mistook for the true Godzilla. The real Big-G faces Zilla in Sydney and, in a moment of extreme fan satisfaction, finishes off the scrawny twerp in five seconds. Eat it, Roland Emmerich!

I would like to point out that Roland Emmerich has at this point made films that directly insult Godzilla and William Shakespeare. I just… I just can’t even….

Out of respect for they family-friendly nature of this website, I shall cease here.

Japan’s Counter Attack: Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999) and Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000)

Back to Japan, where Toho ditched their original plan of allowing Godzilla to remain in the U.S. while Sony/TriStar completed their series. The mediocre box-office showing of Godzilla ’98 made it clear no sequel was coming, and Toho recognized that their homegrown celebrity had suffered a public black eye because of the loathed and financially disappointing imposter. They needed the real monster back, fast.

A year later, Godzilla 2000: Millennium arrived on screens in Japan. Although the movie’s crew featured prominent personnel from the Heisei films, with Tadao Okawara returning to the director’s chair and Wataru Mimura of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II back on script, Millennium breaks away from the previous series with a more down-to-earth, almost subdued approach. Although the plot revolves around Godzilla battling an extraterrestrial invader, it’s probably the most realistically styled film since 1984’s The Return of Godzilla—although thankfully a far superior entry. The story takes its time building up Godzilla returning to Japan after an unidentified period of time (there are no links to any previous film; Godzilla simply exists and has for many decades) until the confrontation with an alien spacecraft in Tokyo.

Godzilla 2000: Millennium represents a special-effects step forward from the Hesei era with increased digital compositing that naturalizes the suit-based work. Although Godzilla was shrunk from the 100-meter stature of the last five Heisei movies down to 55 meters (closer to its classic era size), the change allowed for more detailed models. The VFX photography emphasizes Godzilla’s enormity compared to the human cast and military machines, making the monster actually loom larger than ever. The new suit design—which would remain fairly consistent for most of the Millennium era—is one of the best, accentuating Godzilla’s reptilian qualities. The final clash between Godzilla and the alien life form in its adopted shape of a turtle-backed kaiju called Orga contains fantastic choreography and destruction that shifts away from the “monsters shoot rays at each other” style that often bogged down the Heisei films.

However, Godzilla 2000: Millennium is a bit too gradually paced, especially in a middle stretch where Godzilla vanishes. Some of the heightened enjoyment of the Heisei era also vanished with the more realistic tone. At the time, however, the movie was such a refreshing rebuttal to Godzilla ‘98 that it was hard not to love it. Great or not, this was the real Godzilla.

For the first time since The Return of Godzilla, a G-film received a wide theatrical release in the U.S. For the stateside release of Godzilla 2000 (“Milennium” was dropped from the title), TriStar sponsored its own dub using professional Asian-American actors, including François Chau from Lost. It’s one of the best-performed English dubs for any film in the series. Sony also re-did most of the sound design, giving a sonic boost up to the levels expected in North American blockbusters. The U.S. version made some strange choices in the dubbing script—such as including two terrible references to famous George C. Scott lines and mistranslating the movie’s closing line into something hilarious and nonsensical. It also confuses a few plot points about the alien’s purpose. The U.S. version did minor business and the later Millennium films went straight to video from TriStar (although in a timely manner).

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000) followed the sober tone of Millennium with outright comic-book antics. Establishing the Millennium series M.O. where each film reinvents the timeline from scratch, Megaguirus opens with a prologue describing an alternate history of Japan where Godzilla attacked the country in 1954, 1966, and 1996, specifically targeting Japan’s energy sources and forcing the government to relocate to Osaka. The prologue concludes with the ‘96 attack, featuring a thrilling scene of the JSDF battling Godzilla on foot with rocket launchers. It makes no logistical sense, but it’s so well executed and more exciting than the majority of Godzilla 2000: Millennium that it hardly matters. The opening also sets up one of the movie’s huge winning qualities: a thunderous score from composer Michiro Oshima, who has created the finest G-film scores outside of Akira Ifukube.

The remainder of Godzilla vs. Megaguirus is outlandish, involving a plot to annihilate Godzilla by hitting the monster with a miniature black hole. (Hey, it’s only a short leap from hand-held rocket-launchers.) The black hole experiment invites a dimensional invasion from insectoid creatures that transform into the monster deerfly Megaguirus (inspired by the Meganurons from the original 1956 Rodan).

Many Godzilla fans don’t enjoy Megaguirus’s willfully outrageous approach. But new director Masaaki Tezuka, who would direct two more (excellent) Millennium films, is more of a classic G-fan than any of the Heisei directors and isn’t afraid to show it. Masaaki engages in every Godzilla style possible, from Engine of Destructions to Action Hero. Godzilla in this movie is all about cool, and the final battle with Megaguirus shows the Big-G strutting and posing like a true marquee star. The film is enormous fun and perhaps the Millennium series’ most underrated entry. I don’t even mind Godzilla’s notorious airborne tackle maneuver, the craziest stunt the monster has pulled since the flying double-leg kick in Godzilla vs. Megalon.

An Auteur Enters: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001)

During the second half of the Heisei Era, Toho faced competition from Daiei’s revived Gamera trilogy. These films revamped the campy kid-oriented movies of the 1960-70s into intelligent adult-themed thrill rides, earning enormous respect if not the same financial success as the Godzilla movies. Toho’s brass wanted some of the Gamera goodies, and since the previous two Godzilla movies hardly caused much of a flare-up at the box office, the studio needed to catalyze the series to keep the engines revving. Toho convinced the Gamera trilogy’s auteur, director Shusuke Kaneko, to helm a one-off Godzilla film to indulge in his own view of the King of the Monsters.

The resulting 2001 film with the unwieldy title of Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (usually shortened to GMK) both fascinates and disappoints. Kaneko set out to re-interpret Godzilla and succeeded, yet he failed to deliver a movie with the same entertainment level as his Gamera films.

Part of the problem lies in the stunted versions of Godzilla’s adversaries: King Ghidorah is shrunk down and underpowered in order to make Godzilla the most imposing monster, and Mothra feels lessened as well, although the effects for it are top-notch. A third monster, who failed to make it into the title, appears: Baragon, the tunneling reptile from 1965’s Frankenstein vs. Baragon (first released in the U.S. as Frankenstein Conquers the World). Kaneko was clearly more interested in the lesser-known Baragon than either King Ghidorah or Mothra (he originally wanted Varan and Anguirus instead as Godzilla’s other two opponents), and so the best fight has Godzilla and Baragon ripping it up mid-movie.

Kaneko’s most controversial alteration to G-mythology was to push away from science fiction and toward fantasy that emphasizes the monsters as mystical protector beasts and Godzilla framed as a force of anti-Japanese rage. This is the only Godzilla movie where the title monster can be described as “evil,” and not destructive because of an instinct for self-preservation or as a force of nature. Godzilla contains the spirits of the dead soldiers of World War II who feel fury toward their home country for neglecting their memories.

Since GMK was meant as a one-shot, the changes aren’t crippling problems. This still feels like a Godzilla film, even with King Ghidorah playing the hero against Godzilla, and Kaneko goes out of his way to show the star monster as pure power through impressive sequences with rare displays of civilian casualties. (There’s a tremendous sequence involving a woman in a hospital that ranks among the finest Godzilla film moments ever.) But as the GMK moves toward its climax, it also falls apart, and Kaneko simply cannot make the sequence of climatic fights feel climatic enough. The disappointments mount, ending in a prolonged underwater finale that will make most viewers restlessly check the running time. It’s a shame that such intriguing ideas and great effects work ended up as middling entertainment. But the film was a financial success, ensuring the Millennium era continued.

The Mechagodzilla Duology (2002/2003)

With the Kaneko experiment over, Masaaki Tezuka brought back the Millennium style with the only movies of this series that connect to each other: Godzilla against Mechagodzilla (2002) and Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003). The two form a tight unit about Japan striking at Godzilla with another incarnation of RoboZilla, given the proper name of “Kiryu” (although the English subtitles insist on translating the name as “Mechagodzilla” even when you can hear the actors say otherwise). Kiryu makes the most story sense of any of the Mechagodzillas, since the robot structure is fused onto the skeleton of the first Godzilla that died in Tokyo Bay in 1954. In concept and design, Kiryu is a massive success and the top adversary of the Millennium years.

Godzilla against Mechagodzilla is the finest Millennium movie, striking the right balance of comic book stylings, solid characters, well-paced action, and effective world building, plus the best non-Ifukube score in all of the G-movies, courtesy again of Michiru Oshima. (Why a major U.S. studio didn’t hire her to score blockbusters right away can only mean they haven’t seen any of the films she’s done.) The movie feels like a live-action anime, and if that phrase excites you, then Godzilla against Mechagodzilla is your ideal entertainment.

The only aspect of Godzilla against Mechagodzilla that restrains it from maximum greatness is that Godzilla acts mysteriously sessile at many points, as if the suit were standing empty without a stunt actor inside. It’s bizarre staging and doesn’t resemble Tezuka’s work in his other Millennium movies. Kiryu carries the monster action, leaving Godzilla a touch underwhelming.

The new Mechagodzilla was popular enough for Toho to immediately make a sequel with Godzilla going into a second round with the giant robot. To boost interest, Toho added Mothra into the mix. Not only does Mothra have a major role, but Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. is a direct sequel to 1961’s Mothra, and has that film’s star, Hiroshi Koizumi, return as the same character, Dr. Chujo. It feels as if director Tezuka wanted to do his own version of Mothra vs. Godzilla, since the Mothra plot has many of the same beats, with double larva battling Godzilla at the end. Although Mothra seems like an odd kaiju to insert into the military tech milieu, it works as a bridge between the theme of “Nature vs. Machine” in the Godzilla vs. Kiryu conflict.

The plot surrounding Kiryu is much less interesting than in Godzilla against Mechagodzilla, with a feeling of repetitiveness to the characters and the sense that the first half hour is rapidly stitched together and then not paid off. There isn’t much new to add to Kiryu; the machine once again provides fantastic battle spectacle (backflip!) but it no longer has as watchable a story surrounding it. The human interaction in general is much less successful this go-round.

The most intriguing and radical decision made for Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. was to have only a single monster fight. Instead of providing a mid-movie fight as a tentpole—the standard structure for the kaiju genre—Tokyo S.O.S. has a single battle that consumes the last forty minutes. It does go on too long and overwhelms all the human aspects, but it contains enough highlights to make the movie another enjoyable Millennium entry. (The problem with the immobile Godzilla suit from the previous movie was also solved.)

What the…? Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) and Yet Another Ending

GMK was designed as a “director’s film” to allow Shusuke Kaneko to play with his own vision of Godzilla. But the closing Godzilla film of the Millennium Era—and the last Godzilla film until the 2014 U.S. version—is at a level of directorial extreme that makes GMK seem like a studio “yes man” helmed it. Toho turned over the reins to ultra-geek director Ryuhei Kitamura, who then proceeded to cram everything from every previous Toho science-fiction movie, plus massive amounts of The Matrix, the X-Men films, and martial arts flicks—into a phantasmagoria of monster insanity. Godzilla: Final Wars is the strangest G-film of all, and it divides viewers sharply. It’s either a blast of fan-pleasing lunacy or an unbalanced mess that hasn’t the slightest interest in the classic monster Ishiro Honda created in 1954. Plenty of fans think it’s both.

Director Kitamura developed a reputation from his zombie action film Versus (2000), which turned him into an overnight cult sensation. Kitamura’s adoration of classic Japanese science-fiction films, particularly kaiju movies, landed him the job on what Toho envisioned as the last Godzilla film for the foreseeable future. Essentially, Toho wanted another Destroy All Monsters, a movie that was also intended as a close to the G-series, and Kitamura had the nerdish enthusiasm to feel right for a project that threw together a record fifteen monsters: Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, Minira, Gigan, King Ghidorah (called “Keizer Ghidorah”), Anguirus, King Seesar, Kamacuras, Manda, Kumonga, Zilla, Ebirah, Hedorah, and new kaiju Monster X (which transforms into King Ghidorah). A few of the kaijus have little to do—Hedorah flies out of the water and splats into a building, the end—but most of them at least receive one great soloist moment.

I can’t decide from day to day how I feel about Godzilla: Final Wars. I appreciate how unrelentingly geeky it is and how it celebrates the history of Toho, from Godzilla to more obscure pictures like Gorath and Atragon. But the movie is also bloated with too much non-monster action centered on mutants, aliens, motorcycle chases, and wire-work martial arts fights. Ryuhei Kitamura wanted the audience engaged in more than monster battles—an admirable approach—but viewers don’t come to a Godzilla film to watch other kinds of action sequences away from giant monsters. With so many beasts packed into 125 minutes, the other set pieces drain away from the headliners’ screen time. Kitamura has called the movie a “Best of” album, except this album has numerous tracks of filler from some decent bands that simply don’t belong with the A-listers. (Speaking of music, Keith Emerson’s score is a huge miscalculation, especially in the wake of Michiru Oshima’s scores.)

However, all the monster scenes are terrific with the best special effects of the Millennium movies. Even when the monster fights launch into overtly silly territory, like Godzilla defeating the team of Rodan, King Seesar, and Anguirus in a game of Shaolin soccer using Anguirus as the ball, they are pure kaiju fun. Gigan is the movie’s big surprise: a fan-favorite monster who has the misfortune of appearing in two of the worst Showa movies, Gigan now receives featured villain status, and Kitamura lavishes immense love on the cyborg. Ebirah also receives a stunning sequence, where a team of mutants takes on the giant lobster and manage to defeat it on their own. Who ever thought Ebirah would be a highlight of a Godzilla film? Rodan also makes a fun appearance in New York, and it was actually filmed in New York!

The best nod Kitamura made to the classic Showa era Godzilla films was giving large roles to three legendary ‘60s Toho SF actors: Kumi Mizuno, Kenji Sahara, and Akira Takarada. Takarada is a blast and clearly having the time of his life as the gun-wielding U.N. Secretary-General. Another astute casting choice is MMA fighter Don Frye as the captain of the film’s version of the super-sub from Atragon. Although Frye is not an actor by training, he brings a granite-jawed American tough guy persona that recalls Nick Adams in Invasion of Astro-Monster, and jolts the movie the same way Adams did. Every moment Frye takes center stage, the human action leaps up a notch.

Godzilla: Final Wars flopped spectacularly. Apparently, Kitamura’s mad monster party burrowed too deep into G-series fandom to translate to mainstream audiences. Toho’s hiatus plans ended up coming true this time, and the Godzilla series went into hibernation for the longest span yet. Toho announced they would not produce another G-film for ten years.

Although ten years did pass before the next film, it wasn’t Toho that made it….

We’ll see how that turned out this weekend.

NEXT: The return to the U.S.: Warner Brothers’ and Legendary’s Godzilla.

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1996)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 05:44:00 +0000

Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)

Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)
Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)

The Underwhelming Comeback: The Return of Godzilla (1984) and Godzilla 1985

After an absence of nine years, Godzilla smashed back onto screens in 1984 in a film simply titled Godzilla (Gojira) in Japan, but marketed as The Return of Godzilla to English-speaking markets. In modern movie lingo, The Return of Godzilla is a reboot. It wipes from continuity all the previous G-films except Godzilla ’54 and fashions a new continuity: The Heisei Series.

The new movies developed a recognizable style, but The Return of Godzilla looks different from the installments that followed. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka aimed to capture the somber tone of the 1954 original and transplant the Godzilla nuclear metaphor into the 1980s Cold War. The monster, having somehow survived Dr. Yamane’s Oxygen Destroyer thirty years past, heads back toward Japan, squeezing the island country between the nuclear superpowers of the U.S. and Soviet Union. Scientists and the Japanese Self-Defense Force race to find a way to stop Godzilla before a greater nuclear confrontation arises.

It’s an ambitious, admirable premise. The actual movie fails to live up to it, either as a serious tale or as a monster show. While the Cold War background is intriguing, the human action is bland and no character stands out. The exception is the Japanese Prime Minister, whose scenes dealing with the U.S. and Soviet envoys evoke a true sense of Japan’s awareness of it legacy in the atomic ago. Otherwise, the time spent away from Godzilla is a stodgy bore of people sitting around talking about all the things they aren’t doing, handled with workman like direction from series newcomer Koji Hashimoto.

The effects scenes are hit-or-miss. The Return of Godzilla was Toho’s most expensive SF film at the time, and it gave VFX supervisor Teruyoshi Nakano his only hefty budget for a kaiju movie. This translated into a few spectacular sequences, such as Godzilla’s first engagement with the JSDF in Tokyo Bay, and the monster’s showdown with the movie’s special-tech weapon, the flying tank Super-X. Godzilla concludes the fight by toppling an entire skyscraper onto the Super-X. Now that’s how you do it!

But the effects scenes suffer pacing issues—Godzilla takes a lengthy nap in the middle of the city rampage—and the increase of the monster’s size from 50 meters to 80 meters means less detailed model work. The finale is a massive letdown: Godzilla trips into a volcano. The End.

The Return of Godzilla failed to create an atomic flare-up at the Japanese box-office, so Toho tried to sell it to foreign markets. The major U.S. studios turned it down, and low-budget independent company New World purchased the rights for a skinflint $500,000. For the first time since King Kong vs. Godzilla, an American company shot new footage to insert English-speaking actors into a Godzilla movie to make it more accessible. New World managed a coup when Raymond Burr agreed to return to the role of reporter Steve Martin (now simply called “Mr. Martin” for obvious reasons).

But any hope that hiring Raymond Burr meant New World was approaching the work respectfully vanished when the film premiered under the title Godzilla 1985. Although better than the wreck made of King Kong vs. Godzilla because it had lesser material to muck up, Godzilla 1985 mocks the Japanese original with camp humor. The new footage is cheap, chock full of product placement (Dr. Pepper took over the Pentagon, apparently), and has no connection to the Japanese scenes: military men and Raymond Burr stare at screens while a snide twerp makes cracks at the expense of Tokyo. Most aggravating of all, the movie was edited to twist the Soviets into the villains: instead of trying to stop an accidental missile launch, the Soviets purposely launch the missile. At least Raymond Burr performs his part with dignity. A stand-up fellow, Mr. Burr. One of the good guys.

Godzilla 1985 did minor-league business at the North American box-office. Times had changed, and U.S. audiences expected bigger spectacle from their SF movies. New World’s tight-fisted approach garnered them a profit, but the small gross scared away other studios. The U.S. would not see a new Japanese Godzilla film released to theaters for fifteen years.

A New Style Emerges: Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989) and Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991)

Tomoyuki Tanaka was determined to continue the G-series despite the disappointment of The Return of Godzilla. Four years later, Godzilla vs. Biollante made it clear Tanaka wanted to correct his previous errors: Godzilla quit working solo and tussled with a humungous plant. Real world politics vanished, replaced with a faux-Middle Eastern country and an assassin wearing stylin’ shades. Semi-plausible science transformed into an institute of psychic children and a doctor fusing his dead daughter’s spirit with Godzilla cells and rose petals. Although Godzilla vs. Biollante comes nowhere near the best of the Heisei films, it improved enormously over its predecessor and set the SF and comic book style of the rest of the series.

A major figure in establishing the new style was Koichi Kawakita, special effects director for the rest of the Heisei films. Kawakita’s effects are the highlight of Godzilla vs. Biollante, displaying greater imagination and energy than anything seen since Destroy All Monsters in 1969. The new Godzilla suit design, which would remain consistent for the remainder of the Heisei years, is one of the best, with a long neck, cunning feline facial features, sinister all-black eyes, and enormous dorsal fins. Godzilla is fiercer and more bestial, and the confrontations between the monster and the JSDF’s array of lasers, tanks, aircraft, and battleships make for spectacular viewing.

Biollante, the first of Kawakita’s multi-stage monsters, is a pleasingly bizarre creation, although its general lack of mobility restricts it. The show belongs to Godzilla, and it’s a damned impressive show whenever the monster is takes up the screen.

When Godzilla (and Biollante) are off-screen, however, the movie is a mess of too many characters and too many subplots getting too little done. Director Kazuki Omori has always been vocal about his greater interest in American blockbusters and James Bond films than the classic Godzilla series, and he goes overboard in Godzilla vs. Biollante to make it “anything but a Godzilla film.” There’s dueling spy intrigue, psychics, secret military projects, an assassin, industrial sabotage, and a gratuitous van chase. Omori tries to knit these strands together with thematic jabber in a voiceover at the conclusion. Viewers never have a specific character to focus on, making them wish the movie would cut back to the monsters.

Godzilla vs. Biollante had a standing room-only opening in Japan, but tapered off quickly and ended up a financial failure. But the filmmaking enthusiasm was back, so Tanaka pressed ahead. He originally planned to use only new monster adversaries for Godzilla, but to help shore up the next project he tried to secure the rights to King Kong for a classic re-match. When that fell through, he turned to the biggest, baddest G-villain of all….

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is a highpoint of the Heisei years. Director Kazuki Omori returned, and again borrowed liberally from stateside blockbusters, in this case science fiction movies in general and the Terminator series in particular. The villains of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah are future time travelers (“Futurians”) who trick the Japanese into manipulating the past so Godzilla blinks out of existence and the Futurians have their own mutated monster under their control, King Ghidorah, to use as a weapon of extinction against Japan. (It seems Japan will be responsible for a future economic apocalypse; the movie both rejoices over and feels trepidation about the country’s early ‘90s prosperity.) The Futurians have an invincible android as well, in case the Terminator connection wasn’t obvious enough.

Although a derivative story, the stew of elements in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is fun and easy to follow (standard time paradoxes aside), and the effects scenes are showstoppers and among the best of any G-film. Godzilla appears in two forms in the movie: the 100-meter atomic monster (up from 80 meters in the first two Heisei movies) and its original dinosaur form, Godzillasaurus, which is approximately the size of a Tyrannosaurs rex. The Godzillasaurus appears in the past, where the Futurians bring the protagonists to a World War II island encampment that is supposedly Godzilla’s atomic birthplace. Although the dinosaur effects are no competition for Jurassic Park, the smaller-scale action is an enjoyable variation on the usual kaiju set pieces.

The new King Ghidorah introduced in the movie lacks the hyper-kinetic power of the Showa era creature—its new roar is especially disappointing—but it gets to shine later when transformed into Mecha-King Ghidorah for the jaw-dropping showdown with Godzilla in the Shinjuku District of Tokyo. Although it feels odd to root for King Ghidorah for a change, the tremendous scale of the clash between the two beasts shows how far the Heisei series evolved over only two movies.

A major actor from the classic era, Yoshio Tsuchiya (the Controller of Planet X from Invasion of Astro-Monster) takes on a memorable role as a World War II vet turned millionaire developer who believes Godzilla is a personal protector god—and turns fatalistic when he finds out how wrong he is. Tsuchiya gives the best performance in the Heisei series, and his character’s journey into disillusionment until he allows Godzilla to kill him has emotional and thematic weight worthy of Ishiro Honda.

One of the four “Godzilla Fathers” returned for King Ghidorah after a sixteen-year absence: composer Akira Ifukube. Although most of his score reworks his earlier themes, it’s thunderous and makes the film feel twice as epic. His return was such a success that he scored three more of Heisei movies.

A New Peak: Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992) and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993)

The next two films mark the high points for the Heisei series: the commercial and the artistic high respectively. All the elements came together to pack audiences into theaters and keep them marvelously entertained.

Godzilla vs. Mothra raked in the most money of any Godzilla film since King Kong vs. Godzilla, and ranked second only to Jurassic Park at the Japanese box-office that year. Kazuki Omori returned as screenwriter only, and new director Tadao Okawara took over the reins, on his way to becoming the best director of the Heisei films.

Toho positioned the gentler creature Mothra as a direct appeal to female viewers, who made up 70% of the Japanese movie-going audience at the time. The human story centers on a simple tale about a divorced couple reuniting with the help of their young daughter. Godzilla vs. Mothra is closer to a remake of 1960’s Mothra, with Mothra coming to Japan because of the kidnapping of its fairy priestesses, and then transforming into adult form from a cocoon on Tokyo Tower. Tossed into the mix at Tanaka’s insistence is a new monster, a “dark Mothra” called Battra that resembles a mutated fly. Godzilla plays a supporting role, basically a villain who pops up when necessary but doesn’t have much to do with the story aside from adding marquee value.

Mothra vs. Godzilla is a lightweight, enjoyable film, and the showdown in a Yokohama amusement park where Battra and Mothra unite to join forces to beat Godzilla is impressive. A giant fly smashing Godzilla with a Ferris wheel… good times.

(When released to home video in the U.S., the movie was retitled Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth to avoid confusing it with the 1964 Mothra vs. Godzilla, which in the U.S. was often titled Godzilla vs. Mothra. Japanese monster movie titles are confusing.)

The box-office sweep of Godzilla vs. Mothra ignited the creative fires at Toho. Next year’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II is the best of the Heisei series, and one of the all-around champs of the G-films.

Although the Roman numeral in the official English title makes it sound like a direct sequel to 1974’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, it’s only used to differentiate the two. The new movie follows directly on events in the previous films, with the anti-Godzilla international organization G-Force planning to kill the monster using a piloted giant robot made from the future-tech of Mecha-King Ghidorah.

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II bridges the female target audience of Godzilla vs. Mothra and the male target audience of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, and miraculously manages a best-of-both-worlds outcome. The story is streamlined, although more intricate than Godzilla vs. Mothra, with heavy emphasis on military technology and two impressive super-weapons, the titular Mechagodzilla and the flying attack vehicle Garuda, which can link to Mechagodzilla to form… wait for it… Super Mechagodzilla! But a parallel, gentler plot-strand features the discovery of a Godzilla egg and the hatching of “Baby,” a non-mutated Godzillasaurus who befriends a female scientist. And Rodan shows up as well!

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II is a blast. Director Okawara finds the right balance of full-on monster mayhem with the human story, keeping the action motivated and moving at a fast pace. The use of Baby as the story’s objective gives the movie a strong core that, for the first time in the Heisei series, pushes Godzilla toward a sympathetic interpretation. Screenwriter Wataru Mimura crafts a Nature vs. Technology theme that eventually makes G-Force and their giant robot the true villains in the final battle—which is a stunner, by the way.

Aside from the superb finale, effects supervisor Kawakita stages a down-and-dirty fight between Godzilla and Rodan that gets away from the usual Heisei style of monsters blasting beam weapons at each other and instead captures early classic Toho kaiju thrills. And Ifukube’s score is one of his finest. This movie has just about everything.

Let’s Forget This One Happened: Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994)

Godzilla vs. Megalon is the worst Godzilla film Toho has made… but I’d still rather watch it than the low point of the Heisei series, which ironically followed its high point: Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla.

Coasting on two successes that appealed to the male and female demographics, Toho decided to target teenagers. Apparently unaware that teenagers were already a large part of the audience for these films, the studio hired a director and writers with no kaiju or SF experience, but instead a background in “Teen Idol” films. The situation is similar to what happened with Godzilla vs. Hedorah: a new creative team took over and refashioned the series for youth appeal with bizarre results. However, Godzilla vs. Hedorah has kooky charm. SpaceGodzilla is a tonal disaster, cheap-looking with embarrassing effects. Worst of all, it’s boring. Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla is a movie targeted toward no one.

Director Kensho Yamashita and his writers are way out of their depth with the giant monster genre, and seem to have no clue how to integrate monster battles with their cheesy romance story and lightweight espionage plot. Psychic Miki Saegusa, a supporting character since Godzilla vs. Biollante, gets to take half the lead in the love story, but it fizzles because she and her co-star have no chemistry at all.

Still, some kaiju films have triumphed over boring puny humans. Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla is not one of them. Koichi Kawakita’s refashioning of Baby Godzilla into a roly-poly bug-eyed toy is a huge miscalculation. There was some potential for SpaceGodzilla as a concept, but in execution the giant bulky crystals on the monster’s shoulders make it look ludicrous and on the verge of tipping over every time it steps. And Mogera, the new G-Force robot loosely based on the alien robot from 1957’s The Mysterians, might as well be an off-the-shelf coffee maker from Target. It was probably a clearance item.

The monster scenes drag and drag. Godzilla takes half an hour to move anywhere. The final battle consumes hours of screen time without anything happening. Making everything worse are special effects that look spectacularly bad, as if Kawakita forgot everything he knew about his art in only a year. The space battle between Mogera and SpaceGodzilla is the VFX low-point of the Heisei series: the two combatants fly around in an “asteroid field” that looks like a fifth-grader’s science fair project. (And not a winning science fair project, either.)

This film stinks. I’m done with it.

Godzilla Is Dead! Long Live Godzilla!… Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995)

Toho realized their error and brought back the team of Okawara and Omori for the next movie. But series fatigue had set in, and the studio recognized it—so they plotted a spectacular closing event while doing a bit of sales maneuvering. As Toho negotiated a deal with Sony/TriStar to make the long-delayed big-budget U.S. Godzilla film, the studio announced that in the next movie Godzilla was going to die.

No, not a spoiler. The Japanese poster for the film shouts: GODZILLA DIES! It was an effective lure for audiences to see Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (sometimes written as Godzilla vs. Destroyah for U.S. releases), which concludes with the legendary monster disintegrating from a radioactive meltdown in its body as the Japanese Defense Force desperately tries to contain an extinction-level event across the planet.

Of all the Heisei movies, Godzilla vs. Destoroyah connects the closest to the 1954 original. Momoko Koichi reprises her role as Emiko Yamane, the female lead from Godzilla; Dr. Yamane’s grandson plays a main role in G-Force’s new Godzilla offensive; and the consequences of the use of Dr. Serizawa’s oxygen destroyer forty-one years earlier leads to the creation of a new monster, Destoroyah, a crustacean creature with multiple forms, proving that Serizawa’s hesitation about using his device was prophetic.

Although Destoroyah is a fun, outlandish Godzilla opponent, the new monster is really a subplot to the main story about Godzilla approaching a nuclear meltdown that could engulf the world. Godzilla is a true force of atomic rage, burning red and smoking as its body approaches critical. Godzilla Jr., now a half-sized juvenile version of its parent, is again put at the center of the action, coming into its own as a monster worthy of the G-name when it battles one of Destoroyah’s smaller stages.

Godzilla vs. Destoroyah is mostly worthy of its position as the final Heisei installment and the movie that killed off Godzilla. The legendary monster’s death, done with funereal dignity, is extremely moving and makes an effort to recall Honda’s original film and the theme of humanity bringing about its own destruction. The movie doesn’t reach the level of entertainment of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah or Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, but if viewed as a second attempt at the seriousness that The Return of Godzilla failed to achieve eleven years earlier, it succeeds.

Godzilla vs. Destoroyah was the final film for the Godzilla Fathers still alive at the time. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka died in 1996. Composer Akira Ifukube, who considered the requiem music for Godzilla’s death his finest piece of work, returned to retirement and lived quietly until 2008.

Perhaps it was best that Tanaka died in 1996. He did not live to see what TriStar and director Roland Emmerich did to his co-creation.

Unfortunately, the rest of us did.

NEXT: That thing and the Millennium Era

Godzilla Interruption: All Monsters Attack (Godzilla’s Revenge)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 05:06:00 +0000

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

I now interrupt my continuing “History of Godzilla on Film” to bring you an Up Close and Personal look at one particular movie: 1969’s All Monsters Attack, also known as Godzilla’s Revenge.

It’s seems like an out-of-left field pick, since this movie has a poor reputation among the kaiju fans. As film historian Richard Pusateri says on the audio commentary for the current DVD: “Fans cannot decide if this is the worst movie of the series, or the second worst.”

However, I picked this movie for spotlight attention because it rarely receives any attention. Most Godzilla fans have seen it all the way through only once—probably in the English-dubbed version—and then left it on the shelf. With its chunks of stock footage lifted from earlier Godzilla films, fantasy elements that relegate the monsters to existence only in the imagination, and q target audience of third- and fourth-grade children, All Monsters Attack is easy for adult viewers to dismiss.

However, the movie contains elements unique among the classic Godzilla series that make it worthy of discussion. And for good or bad, it does have SF legend Ishiro Honda in the director’s chair in his penultimate Godzilla movie.

So let us go pay a visit to late-1960s industrialized Japan and meet a bullied latchkey kid with dreams of monsters.

The Background of All Monsters Attack

Toho Studios planned to conclude the Godzilla series with 1968’s epic Destroy All Monsters. But their resolution did not hold for long. Although the studio system would not collapse for another year, Toho’s movies were doing less business because of television’s popularity. When the studio heads decided to make another Godzilla movie, it was because they devised a way to make it as inexpensively as possible.

Rival studio Daiei’s 1968 movie Gamera vs. Viras inspired Toho’s choice. The Gamera film (released in the U.S. as Destroy All Planets) used battle footage from two previous Gamera movies to expand the running time and reduce the budget, and it used child heroes for direct appeal to the kiddie crowd. Toho gave instructions to producer Tomoyuki Tanaka to create a Godzilla film for children that made extensive use of existing special effects footage.

Screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa, who wrote the majority of the Godzilla films, worked with director Ishiro Honda to put together a movie script that could re-use large sections of Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and Son of Godzilla. With special effects director Eiji Tsubaraya too sick to take on the work, Ishiro Honda handled the visual effects with the aid of Tsubaraya’s protégé Teruyoshi Nakano.

Two months after All Monsters Attack premiered in Japan in December 1969, Eiji Tsubaraya was dead and Toho shut down its Special Effects Department. And so the final Godzilla film of the ‘60s was the harbinger of the low-budget days ahead.

The Secret Life of Ichiro Mitty: The Story of All Monsters Attack

All Monsters Attack takes place in the “real world.” Although considered part of the Godzilla series, there is no in-story indication that the monsters exist beyond movies, toys, and the imagination of its child hero, Ichiro (Tomonori Yazaki). No one outright denies the monsters’ reality, but the film’s naturalistic style away from the VFX scenes and the attitude of the adults indicate that this is “our” world… and it’s a dreary place.

The story takes place in the industrialized city of Kawasaki, located between Tokyo and Yokohama. Ichiro is a latchkey kid whose father (Kenji Sahara) works for the railroad and whose mother (Machiko Naka) has a job in the hospitality industry. When not spending time alone, dreaming of the creatures on Monster Island and trying to invent a radio to speak to them, Ichiro hangs out with a friendly neighbor, toymaker Mr. Shinpei (Eisei Amamoto). Ichiro deals with bullying almost daily from a gang of kids led by one nicknamed “Gabara.”

During a day when neither Ichiro’s mother or father can come home for the evening, Ichiro fantasizes about flying to Monster Island where he meets Godzilla’s son, Minira (Marchan the Dwarf, a novelty pro wrestler). The two spend time watching Minira’s irritable father Godzilla (Hauro Nakajima) fight battles from previous movies.

Ichiro’s unsupervised wanderings through the industrial shells and urban prairies of Kawasaki bring him to the attention of two bank robbers (Sachio Sakai and Kazuo Suzuki) hiding in an abandoned building. The two kidnap the boy and plan to use him as a hostage. But Ichiro uses his ability to place himself into a trance to ask Minira for help. He watches as Minira learns to stand up for himself against the bully monster Gabara (Yasuhiko Kakuyuki). Godzilla eventually pounds Gabara in the only major new fight footage.

Ichiro wakes up from the empowerment dream, turns into Kevin McCallister from Home Alone, and outwits the two robbers until Mr. Shinpei and the police arrive. Although his latchkey kid existence continues, Ichiro now swells with confidence, and immediately goes to beat up the kid Gabara and commit a petty prank on a poor sign painter. Victory!

The Monster World

Ichiro has three different dream voyages to Monster Island, in each one interacting with Godzilla’s “son” Minira (often written as “Minilla,” and called “Minya” in the English dub). In Ichiro’s fantasy world, Minira can shrink down to child size and speak (voice of Midori Uchiyama), but when necessary to interact with Godzilla or Gabara, Minira grows back to giant size.

Ishiro Honda also directed the effects sequences, the only time he took on this duty. It was probably a cost-cutting maneuver: instead of having principle photography and the VFX unit shoot simultaneously on different stages, All Monsters Attack shot on a quick one-month schedule with principle photography first, and then VFX done afterwards on the same small stage. However, because the effects scenes included the lead actor—another anomaly—there was artistic justification for Honda to direct these scenes as well. Young actor Tomonori Yazaki performs well across from Minira, likely benefiting from having Honda direct him in both the real world and the monster world.

In Ichiro’s first visit to Monster Island, he gets an overview of various other famous monsters—none of whom reappear in the movie—through footage from Destroy All Monsters and King Kong Escapes. The new footage of Ichiro in the jungle matches well with the stock shots, but once he and Minira settle down to watch complete scenes from other movies, the excitement ebbs. Viewers see an edited version of Godzilla’s two fights with Ebirah from Eibrah, Horror of the Deep and the fight with the Kamacuras from Son of Godzilla. Taken out of original context and scored with lighter music, these otherwise fun effects scenes lose their impact. It’s more enjoyable to watch Ichiro talking with Minira; the dialogue is simplistic, but effectively relates a child’s everyday problems and stresses to a young monster who is terrified of a bully and bit afraid of his “dad.” (Godzilla does not cut a strong parental figure for much of the movie, and at one point knees poor Minira in the gut.)

Ichiro’s second visit has a brief bout between Minira and the sole new monster, Gabara, along with Godzilla’s fight with Kumonga from Son of Godzilla and stand against the fighter planes from Ebirah, The Horror of the Deep. Gabara is an odd monster more suited to play an ogre in a fairy tale than an opponent in a Godzilla movie. But the lumpy beast with the electro-shock hands ably fills the function of an obnoxious bully. Just from his brief taunting and tormenting of Minira, Gabara makes audiences really loathe him.

The third visit is the first of All Monsters Attack’s trio of climactic confrontations. Ichiro goes into a trance to see Minira finally stand up to Gabara, and the boy helps out his monster pal with a bit of Road Runner cartoon strategy to knock Gabara off a seesaw-rock. Godzilla steps in after Minira has learned his lesson in self-reliance, and the Big-G wipes up the island with Gabara, who never stood a chance of going even half a round with the King of the Monsters.

This monster showdown will never appear on anyone’s list of classic kaiju fights. But it isn’t half bad, and the rich foliage and greenery of Monster Island look far better than the empty field of Godzilla vs. Megalon. Children are sure to enjoy it as well, since the victory over a punk like Gabara feels earned for Minira, even if Godzilla could have roasted the twerp in seconds. Godzilla never has to play the clown or hang out with a kid, since all that responsibility rests with Minira, so our favorite giant monster comes out of all this unsullied. Which already puts All Monsters Attack far, far ahead of the 1998 U.S. Godzilla.

The Human World

Viewers may not come to All Monsters Attack to watch the problems of working class Japanese families in a polluted city, but the heart of the movie lies here, as do the sympathies and interests of Ishiro Honda. These scenes resemble nothing else in the Godzilla canon, emphasizing a naturalism removed from the government conference rooms, newspaper offices, and gee-wiz laboratories that dominate kaiju films. Bright colors and shiny surfaces are replaced with drab gray blocks and ugly smoke stacks puncturing a corroded sky. In places, the abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn yards resemble the design of Michael Radford’s film version of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not what you expect from either Godzilla or a children’s movie.

The human story splits between a child coping with loneliness and finding personal strength, and a more mature look at the change in the traditional Japanese family. The screenplay wants adult viewers to take away a lesson about placing themselves more in their children’s life, although it offers no solution for how to do that if both parents must work jobs in order to support the family. All the screenplay can do is acknowledge the problem exists.

What’s most intriguing about the human drama in All Monsters Attack is the glimpse it gives into a part of the career of Ishiro Honda that few Westerners know about. After the success of his SF films in the early ‘60s, Honda found himself assigned almost exclusively to special effects and monster pictures. Honda had a broad career before this, first as an assistant to his close friend Akira Kurosawa, and then directing many different genres, such as romances (Love Makeup and A Rainbow Plays in My Heart), war epics (Eagle of the Pacific), comedies (Seniors, Juniors, Co-Workers), and crime dramas (The Scarlet Man). Few of these have seen release in English-speaking countries, leaving a large area of Honda’s output unexplored outside Japan.

According to many who were close to the director, his goal was to make films similar to those of Yasujiro Ozu, one of the most acclaimed of all Japanese filmmakers. Ozu specialized in restrained dramas about contemporary life, of which his most famous is the marvelous Tokyo Story. Some of the influence of Ozu appears in scenes in Godzilla, such as the tense dinner at Dr. Yamane’s house. However, Honda’s SF films usually focused on his interest in humanity coming together to fight off a global menace, a reflection of his cautiously optimistic views. Although these epics gave Honda the chance to explore large human emotions, they rarely gave him the opportunity to explore intimate drama.

All Monsters Attack allowed Honda a chance to indulge his Ozu-side within a Godzilla film. The opening shots of smoke stacks and thick traffic moving along roads and bridges reflect the way Ozu opened and made transitions in many of his movies. There are also small moments of subtle characterization sprinkled throughout that don’t strike viewers until watching the movie a second time. When Ichiro expresses his new independence to his mother at the conclusion, she gently wipes a tear from her face as the boy leaves, indicating that she knows nothing will really change for her.

A statement Honda made near the end of his life adds an extra layer of autobiography to Ichiro’s story:

My nightmares are almost always about war—wandering the streets, searching for something that’s lost forever. But it’s possible for me to will myself to have pleasant dreams. For me, the most wonderful fragrance in the world is new film. You open the canister for the first time and breathe deeply. That night, the same wonderful fragrance fills your dreams. It’s grand.

A pleasure for fans of Toho’s fantasy films is the number of familiar faces in the cast, most of whom show up for only a scene or two but bring that special quality missing from the post-studio system films of the ‘70s. Kenji Sahara, Yoshifumi Tajima, Ikio Sawamura, Sachio Sakai, and Eisei Amamoto all add life to their roles.

Amamoto stands out among the adult cast as the toy inventor and Ichiro’s uncle figure Mr. Shinpei. Amamoto had a distinctive face and lanky body that made him instantly noticeable in any film. Like Christopher Lee, his appearance often led to him cast as villains; most U.S. viewers know him as the evil Dr. Who (no, not that one) in King Kong Escapes. But in All Monsters Attack he takes on the role of the most sympathetic adult in the movie and brings warmth when the human scenes start to tilt toward the misanthropic.

The second and third climaxes of All Monsters Attack occur in the real world. The second is the movie’s highlight, beating out the special effects scene right before it. Ichiro gets free from his kidnappers, then outwits them in a chase through an abandoned building until a satisfying showdown where Ichiro uses his “radioactive breath” (a fire extinguisher) to defeat the lead robber.

Unfortunately, the third climax is the worst part of All Monsters Attack, and it undermines the positive messages it sends to children. Ichiro strides from his home past eager reporters, filled with a new confidence that looks a touch like arrogance. Mr. Shinpei makes the odd comment to the reporters that Ichiro has his own “god,” Minira. (The dubbing in the U.S. version subdued this strange line.) Ichiro then encounters boy-Gabara and his chums, whereupon Ichiro takes the lessons Minira taught him and abuses them by laying out a first-strike beating on Gabara. The movie might have survived this mistake, but then Ichiro runs off to pull a prank on sign painter that makes the man fall and get splashed with a bucket of paint. Ichiro runs off, asks his father to cover up his mischief, and marches away with “his” new gang. The End.

The slapstick way this sequence plays can’t atone for what a terrible miscalculation it is. It makes Ichiro look insufferable and on his way to becoming a bully himself. Maybe in a few years, he’ll hallucinate that he has become King Ghidorah, and Godzilla will take him down a few notches. I don’t know who came up with this idea for an ending—Honda, screenwriter Sekizawa, or producer Tomoyuki Tanaka—but it was an awful decision that now makes me think I should shut the movie off right after the police catch the robbers.

The Americanization: Godzilla’s Revenge

Henry Saperstein, head of UPA, picked up the stateside rights for All Monsters Attack, although unlike Invasion of Astro-Monster and War of the Gargantuas, UPA did not co-finance or co-produce the film. Because UPA lacked its own distribution, Saperstein made a deal with independent distributor Maron Films. Either Saperstein or Maron retitled the movie Godzilla’s Revenge to make sure young viewers knew Godzilla was in it. Maron released it to theaters in December 1971 on a double bill with the horror movie Island of the Burning Damned.

The pairing shows how Maron tried to sell the picture. The ad campaign played down the child-friendly aspect with taglines like: “SEE Prehistoric monsters crawl out of the hidden depths and take revenge against the living!” Older Godzilla fans in the U.S. must have felt mighty irked to discover a movie aimed at eight-year-olds about a latchkey kid who fantasizes about previous Godzilla movies. Nonetheless, Godzilla’s Revenge turned a profit for Maron, and the company later re-released it on a double bill with War of the Gargantuas. Ultimately, All Monsters Attack performed better in North America than in Japan, where it was the first Godzilla movie to sell fewer than two million tickets.

The U.S. version makes few changes and contains the rare dubbing job that does not significantly damage the film. Minira has a deep, comical male voice that sounds a bit like Yogi Bear instead of the girlish voice in the Japanese version. Either UPA or Maron made the wise choice to excise the title song, “March of the Monsters,” which consists of child “singer” Risato Sasaki screeching out the names of the monsters. In its place is a groovy surf-rock number with shades of the theme for The Munsters. No one is credited for the piece, but later research revealed it is called “Crime Fiction” and was composed by Ervin Jereb.

Will children like All Monsters Attack/Godzilla’s Revenge?

This is the big question, since the movie can never hold up completely as entertainment for adults, even those with an intense fascination for Japanese science fiction and Ishiro Honda’s career. It has a good grasp on child empowerment fantasies and does not speak down to its audience, and accurately portrays the fear of bullying and feeling of being different that afflicts many children, in particular those drawn to introverted pursuits. Except for the blundering of the message in the last few minutes, All Monsters Attack contains a positive theme about overcoming fears.

However, with all the visual stimuli now available to children, All Monsters Attack probably won’t draw many young viewers, and most will find the first half, before the robbers nab Ichiro, too slow and downbeat. When I wrote about the movie last week as part of “The History of Godzilla on Film,” I called it a good child’s introduction to Godzilla. Viewing it again, I have to rollback that remark. Invasion of Astro-Monster and Mothra vs. Godzilla have few objectionable scenes and will grab children far quicker. (Son of Godzilla is not a good choice, despite its surface cuteness; too much human endangerment and Kumonga is a genuinely scary beast that nearly kills Minira.)

All Monsters Attack isn’t the worst or even the second worst movie of the series. Fans can unearth intriguing ideas and a new slant on Ishiro Honda as a director from a fresh viewing. But it will always remain one of the last choices for Godzilla fans to slip into their DVD player for some kaiju fun.

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 02:37:00 +0000

Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)

Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)

Part 3: The Heisei Era (1984–1997)

Sayanora, Tsubaraya—and Sayanora, Golden Age of Japanese Cinema

The end of the Golden Age of Japanese Giant Monster movies coincided with the end of the most productive era for the Japanese film industry. Starting in the early 1950s, the country’s film industry experienced a meteoric rise. The major studios released a combined average of 450 movies to theaters each year. But the growth of television in the 1960s started to erode film attendance. In the late-‘60s, audience levels dropped precipitously, numerous theaters closed, and the studios faced cutbacks. Contract directors and stars were released, departments were scaled down or eliminated, and the studio responsible for the “Gamera” and “Daimajin” films, Daiei, was forced out of business entirely.

Science-fiction and monster movies had it particularly rough because of the growth of television. Popular superhero TV shows offered a cheaper alternative for young audiences to get their giant monster fix. The children who increasingly made up the viewership for Godzilla movies could now see kaiju action daily from their living rooms.

Ironically, the person most responsible for the growth of SF television was Eiji Tsubaraya, Toho Studio’s master of visual effects and one of the four “Godzilla Fathers.” Tsubaraya formed his own independent company, Tsubaraya Productions, in 1963 to create special-effects television programs. The 1966 hit show Ultra Q led to the monumental success of Ultraman the next year. Each week, Ultraman pitted its giant-sized title hero against a new monster. Clone shows sprouted everywhere, and the monsters of cinema screens started to bring in less money.

In January 1970, Eiji Tsubaraya died. Minoru Nakano, one of Tsubaraya’s protégées, recalled: “I respected him so deeply. My world was Eiji Tsubaraya. He was that important. When he died, I didn’t know how to live.” It seemed Japanese science-fiction films didn’t quite know how to live after Tsubaraya’s death either, although they struggled on. Toho shut down its once legendary Special Effects Department, the place where Tsubaraya once ruled over a kingdom of fantasy films. In its place was a smaller unit with restricted budgets. The Godzilla series continued, but at only a fraction of its former splendor.

Children and Hallucinogens: All Monsters Attack (1969) and Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

Toho’s vow to conclude the Godzilla series with Destroy All Monsters lasted for only six months. No artistic drive lay behind the decision to make another film: Toho brass saw a way to make an inexpensive movie to appeal to children, an idea borrowed from Daiei Studio’s Gamera movies. The Gamera films recycled footage from earlier outings to pad the running time, and aimed at young children with a monster who gets buddy-buddy with kids. Toho lifted the formula and applied it to Godzilla with All Monsters Attack.

Toho couldn’t quite envision transforming Godzilla into a “friend to all children” like Gamera, so with All Monsters Attack (originally released in the U.S. as Godzilla’s Revenge) they instead took Minira, the adorable mini-Godzilla from Son of Godzilla, and made him the imaginary friend of a lonely boy.

In an unusual departure, All Monsters Attack occurs in the “real world”: the monsters are creatures from movies that appear in the imagination of the boy Ichiro, who learns lessons about bravery from Minira while the two watch Godzilla on Monster Island face different foes—all re-used footage from Ebirah, The Horror of the Deep and Son of Godzilla, plus heavy borrowing from Destroy All Monsters. Eventually, Ichiro takes the lesson of watching Minira stand up against a bully monster named Gabara (new footage, thankfully) and uses it in the waking world against kidnappers. Essentially, it’s a kaiju-flavored version of Home Alone.

All Monsters Attack again had classic SF director Ishiro Honda behind the camera. Despite the low budget, the movie gave Honda an opportunity to film scenes of ordinary lower-middle class life in Tokyo. According to many of his acquaintances, Honda always wanted to film intimate human dramas similar to those of director Yasujiro Ozu. The real world setting of All Monsters Attack gave him the chance to do that in a Godzilla film. It was also the only monster movie on which Honda personally supervised the visual effects scenes (with the help of Tsubaraya’s former assistant Teruyoshi Nakano). Although Tsubaraya received final credit as Special Effects Supervisor, he was already too ill at the time and did no actual work on the movie.

There are moments of dramatic worth in All Monsters Attack, and it works as a child’s introduction to Godzilla. But as a genuine monster film, it’s a pale entry in the series, with far too much time spent re-hashing the fights from two earlier, much better, movies.

“Pale” is the last word to describe the next movie, Godzilla vs. Hedorah. Until Godzilla Final Wars in 2004, this was the strangest Godzilla movie of all. Better known in the U.S. under the title AIP gave it for its stateside release, Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, the film attempted to return to serious allegorical themes. This time, instead of atomic power, the boogeyman is pollution, which was a headline-making issue in Japan in 1970. However, Godzilla is now the hero (and for the first time, unquestionably a superhero, coming at humanity’s call for help), and the sludgy ooze creature Hedorah stands in for humanity’s myopic destructive impulses.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah is sometimes horrific, with visuals of people rotting away to skeletons from Hedorah’s power, and a sequence where the monster’s slimy tendril kills an entire nightclub. But these are the exceptions in what is otherwise a psychedelic pop-art kids’ movie, complete with animated bumpers, letters from school children read over montages of pollution, blaring rock music, and Godzilla learning to fly using his radioactive fire-breath as a jet. “We made Godzilla fly in that movie,” special effects director Nakano remembers. “That was outrageous, we probably shouldn’t have done that…. Looking back, the movie seems kind of crude and heavy-handed.” He probably should’ve added “kind of stoned.”

First-time director Yoshimitsu Banno crafted the film without much interference from producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, who was hospitalized during most of the production. When Tanaka got out of the hospital, he was not pleased with Godzilla vs. Hedorah. Nakano recollects that Tanaka told Banno, “You ruined the Godzilla series!” Banno never directed another movie.

Despite Tanaka’s dislike for it, Godzilla vs. Hedorah is sort of terrible and wonderful at the same time. It’s admirable to see an attempt to give the Godzilla series real-world relevance again, and the many unusual asides and colorful deviations show great imagination at play. But the filmmakers didn’t have the skill or the budget to balance relevancy with child-friendly fun. Still, nobody could argue they achieved their goal of creating something different within the series.

Bottom of the Barrel—With Bugs! Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972) and Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973)

Tanaka pushed the Godzilla series “back on track,” and ended up creating two of the worst entries. Although they returned to the standard monster and alien-invasion action familiar from the 1960s, Godzilla vs. Gigan (first released to the U.S. as Godzilla on Monster Island) and Godzilla vs. Megalon are so cheap-looking and crammed with stock footage that they are often embarrassing to watch. Only younger fans who haven’t seen earlier entries in the series can find non-ironic enjoyment in either film. People who make fun of Godzilla movies in general are actually making fun of these movies specifically.

Considering that director Jun Fukuda had helmed two fine Godzilla pictures before, it’s hard to put the blame on him for why these films fail spectacularly. So much else is wrong: second-tier casts, rushed scripts, and production poverty in both the human and special-effects scenes. But the endless stock footage is the most crippling fault. The recycled scenes are obvious even to someone who has never seen any other Toho monster film: the quality of the footage, the color of the sky, and even the monster suits change jarringly from shot to shot. Using stock footage was not something Teruyoshi Nakano, who succeeded Tsubaraya as head of special effects, wanted to do: “Of course it hurt me when I had to re-use those scenes, but there was no other way—we did not have the time or the money.”

Godzilla vs. Gigan sets up a tag-team confrontation between monsters: Godzilla and Anguirus on one side, and on the other King Ghidorah and new monster Gigan. Alien invaders who look like cockroaches but wear the outer appearance of dead Japanese businessmen have an evil plot to conquer the world that revolves around a children’s amusement park. Some nondescript characters, including a comic book artist and a pseudo-hippie who always carries a corncob for some reason, help stop the nitwit aliens while the monsters fight each other and loads of re-used footage from every Toho special effects film ever made.

Gigan is the movie’s one bright spot. The spiky cyborg creature with the hook hands and buzz-saw chest turned into a fan-favorite and eventually snagged a major role in Godzilla Final Wars. The returning monsters fare worse: Godzilla is literally falling apart on camera (this was the fourth movie in a row using the same suit) and the King Ghidorah costume should’ve received a serious scrubbing before photography started.

The villains in the next film, Godzilla vs. Megalon, aren’t actual bugs, but they do send a big bug to handle their dirty work: the giant beetle Megalon. Or what passes for a giant beetle, but is one of the saddest looking man-in-a-monster suits Toho ever designed. Megalon looks nothing like an insect—just compare it to the Kamacuras in Son of Godzilla and you’ll see how far the effects-work plunged in six years. Similar to everything else in the movie, Megalon appears on loan from the set of one of the later Ultraman shows.

Increasing the look of a television program is Jet Jaguar, a friendly robot made from a wetsuit and the grill of a ‘50s Mustang. Jet Jaguar definitely comes from the Ultraman school of superheroes, and he can conveniently grow to 50 meters tall so he can take on Megalon and Megalon’s evil pal, Gigan (who appears for the flimsiest reasons and provides an excuse to lift footage from Godzilla vs. Gigan—again and again and again). It comes as something of a relief that most of the story centers around Jet Jaguar, with Godzilla arriving only for the climax, because Jet Jaguar functions better as a kiddie hero. The less Godzilla is made to look ridiculous, the better.

Godzilla vs. Megalon concludes with a four-way battle non-royale shot on an almost empty soundstage containing a few low hills and a wrinkled sky backdrop. Godzilla performs his silliest maneuver ever, a flying double leg kick that swings him horizontal along the ground, and at the finale he chummily shakes hands with Jet Jaguar. It’s sad.

There’s one upside: although a backhanded compliment, but Godzilla vs. Megalon did make for an excellent episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The good news is that Toho couldn’t possibly make the movies any cheaper than this, and the poor box-office of Godzilla vs. Megalon shook up the executives enough that for the last two movies of the Showa series, they increased the budget and let Godzilla end the era on a relatively high note.

The Mechagodzilla Duology (1974–1975)

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974) is an average monster movie that repeats the stock alien invasion plot yet again (with a dose of the costuming from the Planet of the Apes series). But compared to the previous movies it stands tall: improved production values, a minimum of stock footage, familiar faces in the cast, no annoying kids, a jazzy score from Masaru Sato, and a spectacular new monster villain.

Mechani-Kong from King Kong Escapes inspired the creation of Mechagodzilla. This alien-constructed robot mockery of the Big-G provides great on-screen spectacle with its numerous offensive and defensive gizmos. As a concept, it doesn’t make any sense for the aliens to build a robot duplicate of Godzilla, but these aliens have a poor sense of planning. We never even discover what their grand invasion scheme is. Oh well, it doesn’t matter: Does Mechagodzilla look cool? Okay, send it out!

There’s another new monster in the mix, a protector of the Okinawan royal family named King Seesar. Designed to resemble a lion statue from Okinawan shrines, King Seesar has an interesting appearance, but in action looks mostly ridiculous and out of place with Godzilla and Mechagodzilla. A large amount of the plot revolves around predictions of King Seesar’s return to protect the world from Mechagodzilla, making a sloppy mix of mysticism and science fiction.

King Seesar ends up helpless against Mechagodzilla’s onslaught, but Godzilla shows up in time for an exciting action finale that includes the King of the Monsters discovering powers of magnetism—handy against an enemy made of space titanium. It’s popcorn fun and won’t make you facepalm every few minutes.

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla was enough of a success that Toho turned around with a direct sequel: Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975). The studio also brought back director Ishiro Honda for his first feature film in five years. (Like many other directors during the down years, Honda turned to doing television.) Honda infused the story with a seriousness unseen in the series since the early ‘60s, and Terror of Mechagodzilla is unquestionably the best Godzilla movie of the 1970s.

Like the original Godzilla in 1954, Terror of Mechagodzilla is centered on a tragic scientist played by Akihiko Hirata. Hirata this time takes the roles of Dr. Mafune, a biologist whose daughter Katsura almost died in a laboratory accident. However, aliens—the same E.T.s from the previous Mechagodzilla movie—saved Katsura’s life by turning her into a cyborg, and used her to gain control over Mafune for their own plans. They also implanted a device in Katsura that controls the rebuilt Mechagodzilla as well as an underwater dinosaur, the awkward Titanosaurus. Katsura and an Interpol agent investigating Dr. Mafune start to fall in love; Mafune rails against humanity for rejecting his genius; and the aliens have a vague plan to clear Metropolitan Tokyo so they can relocate from their dying world. (At least it’s a plan.) Godzilla shows up, lots of smashing ensues, and everyone ends up happy… except for the majority of the characters who are destined for tragic conclusions.

Terror of Mechagodzilla is a surprisingly downbeat movie for the period. This is certainly Honda’s touch. The human drama, even when the plotting doesn’t make much sense, has gravity that recalls the earlier movies Honda directed. The film still has lightweight monster antics surrounding the grim tale of Katsura and her misanthropic father, and if Honda can’t make the two separate pieces gel together perfectly, it’s completely forgivable. Terror of Mechagodzilla is a film that gets better with each viewing.

The Hiatus

Terror of Mechagodzilla was not intended as the last Godzilla film for nearly a decade. But it had the poorest box office returns in the series, and with the Japanese economy still in a tailspin from the 1973 oil crisis, Godzilla went on indefinite hiatus. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka intended to bring the monster back, but he wanted Godzilla to make a splashy, big-budget return… and it took longer than Tanaka expected. Godzilla entered into good old-fashioned Development Hell.

In 1983, Tanaka found what seemed like the perfect solution to bring Godzilla back: have an American studio take over the responsibility of making a blockbuster-sized Godzilla movie. Hollywood director Steve Miner, at that time best known for the second and third Friday the 13th movies, and later to direct House, Soul Man, and Forever Young, made a deal with Toho to develop a Godzilla project to sell to a Hollywood studio.

Miner joined with screenwriter Fred Dekker and artist William Stout to create a package for a movie with the working title of Godzilla: King of the Monsters in 3-D. (This was during a brief 3D resurgence.) Miner shopped around Dekker’s script and Stout’s designs and storyboards during 1983 and 1984, asking for $30 million in funding. The story had Godzilla in a James Bond-style Cold War plot that often sidelined the monster for the espionage story.

Miner came close to securing funding, almost setting it up with Warner Bros. But the asking budget was too high for the studios, who at the time could not see Godzilla as anything other than cheap junk. (I blame Godzilla vs. Megalon.) Miner kept at it, but the process took too long, and Tomoyuki Tanaka got jumpy. The Toho producer finally decided to go ahead with a domestic Godzilla film, not intended for international release so as to avoid tainting potential U.S. interest in funding Miner’s project. However, when New World Pictures bought the U.S. release rights for the new Toho Godzilla film, it killed off the last chance for Godzilla: King of the Monsters in 3-D. It now rests permanently in the “archive” file.

Next: The Heisei Era (1984–1997)

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 04:19:00 +0000

Welcome back… the double holiday interruption delayed this march across (and on top of) the Tokyo skyline. But now the Big-G is back and about to enter the Golden Age of Japanese Fantasy Cinema and the peak of kaiju movie greatness.

Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)
Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)

Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1997)

**The Godzilla Masterpiece: Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)**

The astronomical success of King Kong vs. Godzilla made Toho Studios commit to yearly Godzilla movies for the rest of the decade, as well as increasing their giant monster output in general. The studio shifted away from broader science-fiction epics like The Mysterians: the same year that King Kong vs. Godzilla ignited the box-office, Toho’s more ambitious and expensive science-fiction movie from the team of director Ishiro Honda and special effects creator Eiji Tsubaraya, Gorath, made a poorer showing. From now on, Toho would push that they had monsters and were ready to hurl them against each other for audience’s viewing pleasure.

After briefly considering King Kong re-match, G-series producer Tomoyuki Tanaka turned to a hometown hero: Mothra, the monster-goddess from the popular 1961 Ishiro Honda film of the same name. Mothra was the point where the Japanese kaiju film came into its own as a specific cultural style different from the U.S. model that first inspired it. The lovely yet powerful Mothra was a perfect foe to put in the opposite corner from Godzilla—at least in terms of box-office appeal. From a story and special-effects perspective, it was a trickier idea: Godzilla fighting a giant mystical moth?

But the creative team came through in an astonishing way: Mothra vs. Godzilla is the height of the Godzilla series and one of the finest monster epics ever put on film. This is the movie to show people at the start of a Godzilla odyssey, since it captures so well the Japanese interpretation of the giant monster genre, has Godzilla at his most charismatic yet menacing, and is more fun than most amusement parks. Eiji Tsubaraya was at his zenith with visual effects; after some wonky optical work in King Kong vs. Godzilla, the effects here are seamless, especially the scenes featuring the miniature Twin Fairies (the shobijin, played by pop singing duo the Peanuts). The two monster battles, with Godzilla against the adult Mothra and then against two larval Mothras, are thrillingly staged and scored.

Mothra vs. Godzilla lacks the heavy, bleak artistry of the original Godzilla, but as movie entertainment it excels. Breathlessly paced, with fantastic villains and energetic heroes, the story follows an exciting trajectory of Japan seeking help from Mothra to defeat Godzilla’s destructive return—only to receive a harsh “no” from the inhabitants of Mothra’s island. But Mothra changes its (her?) mind at the last minute when Godzilla threatens Mothra’s egg, leading to a standstill battle that Mothra only loses because it comes to the end of its life-cycle. But, in a wonderful example of turnabout and the underdog winning the day, Mothra’s egg hatches, and two larval Mothras dish out a clever and humiliating defeat to the King of Monsters. It’s awesome.

And Godzilla is awesome, in the truest sense of the word: an awe-inspiring beast who has shifted from the more comical personality of the previous film to Mr. Get the Hell Outta My Way. Godzilla’s first rampage through the city of Nagoya has the monster realistically reacting to the devastation it causes, which includes a stunning scene of the monster accidentally knocking into a Shogun castle, and then beating it into rubble just to show that stupid building who’s boss. Godzilla blooms into a fully realized character, and what an amazing show the Big-G puts on. Godzilla is still the villain, but every minute the monster is on screen is a blast.

It was only a short leap to somebody at Toho thinking, “Hey, what if Godzilla saved the day?”

Mothra vs. Godzilla reached the U.S. in record time, debuting in theaters only five months after its April opening in Japan. American International Pictures handled the release with the best-dubbed of all Godzilla movies. Not only was the Japanese original left virtually uncut, but AIP included an extra visual effects scene of U.S. warships firing on Godzilla which Toho shot specifically for the American release. The only odd part about AIP’s version of the film is the decision to retitle it Godzilla vs. The Thing, an attempt to disguise Godzilla’s foe for publicity reasons. Later U.S. video releases titled the film (on the cover art, at least) Godzilla vs. Mothra, giving Godzilla first place on the fight ticket for alphabetical shelving purposes.

Aliens and the Golden Dragon: Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964) and Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)

“More monsters, more monsters!” Toho cried, and the next Godzilla film, Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, came out eight months later, featuring four kaijus. The movie brought back Mothra, re-introduced flying beast Rodan (last seen in its own self-titled film in 1956), and created the most magnificent of all Godzilla adversaries, the tri-cephalic golden space dragon King Ghidorah.

King Ghidorah (shortened to “Ghidrah” in the U.S. release) shows how much Toho and special effects director Eiji Tsubaraya were willing to ramp up the fantasy elements of these movies: even in a setting with a goddess-moth and two radioactive dinosaurs, a three-headed golden dragon who ravishes planets over thousands of years is pretty damn out there. King Ghidorah made a huge hit with audiences and has remained a major force in Toho’s monster line-up.

Extra-terrestrials were familiar adversaries in Japanese films of the last decade, and the team of Eiji Tsubaraya and Ishiro Honda had already made two epic alien invasion films, The Mysterians and Battle in Outer Space. Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster was the first time alien elements entered the Godzilla series, although it isn’t a full-fledged invasion film; that would wait for the next movie in the series. It features an alien-possessed character (Akiko Wakabayashi, later to play a Bond girl in You Only Live Twice) and a monster from space wreaking havoc on Japanese cities in scenes of astonishing lightning-laced demolition. Away from the monsters, the plot is crime movie material, with a team of assassins in sunglasses tooling around Tokyo trying to assassinate a princess.

The movie marks an even bigger milestone in Godzilla’s history: for the first time, Godzilla plays the good guy—a reluctant hero, but still someone audiences root for. Godzilla remains an engine of destruction and spends most of the movie in a petty grudge match with Rodan that wrecks large amounts of public property. But at the climax Godzilla and Rodan agree with Mothra that it is in everyone’s best interests if they beat the daylights out of that cackling three-headed space jerk. Which they do, in one of the most satisfying monster fights ever filmed. The switch abrupt, but when Godzilla hurls that first rock at King Ghidorah’s head, it’s impossible not to cheer.

King Ghidorah returned for the next movie, Invasion of Astro-Monster, which U.S. audiences know better under its first American release title Monster Zero, or video box title Godzilla vs. Monster Zero. Invasion of Astro-Monster unites two separate strands of Toho’s science-fiction film canon: the kaiju film and the alien invasion film. Earth now faces a full attack from outer space, with its own monsters turned against it. This was a theme that would re-occur throughout the remainder of the classic era.

Aliens from Planet X deceive the nations of Earth into sending Godzilla and Rodan to their planet, supposedly to help them defeat King Ghidorah. But King Ghidorah was already under the control of Planet X, and the scheming aliens send a brainwashed Godzilla and Rodan, along with Ghidorah, to smash Earth into submission! The people of Planet X fail thanks to their trouble with high-pitched sounds, and the freed Rodan and Godzilla pummel King Ghidorah again.

Invasion of Astro-Monster is the most visually epic of the classic Godzilla series. Destroy All Monsters may pack in more big beasts for an all-star cast, but Astro-Monster looks and feels grander, with Toho Visual Effects Department executing astonishing planetary vistas and gargantuan military assaults. The alien plot pushes the monsters a bit to the sidelines, which is why Astro-Monster feels a touch inferior to the two previous movies; but as a straightforward science-fiction film, it’s a good ride.

Invasion of Astro-Monster was co-financed with United Productions of America, the studio responsible for the Mr. Magoo cartoons and the move toward stylized animation in the 1950s, and its owner, Henry G. Saperstein. UPA put up half the budget for the film, and allowed Toho to land a fading American star, Nick Adams, as one of the leads. Adams appeared in three Toho films and is a beloved icon for kaiju fans because of how he threw his full tough-guy persona into the parts, which makes a fun contrast with the Japanese actors. Hearing Adams snarl, “Why you rats!” to the Planet X aliens is wonderful. You can only get the full effect of Nick Adams’s performance in the English-dubbed version, where Adams’s own voice (recorded on the set) is used. However, watching the dubbed version means you miss out on the film’s other stellar performance, Yokio Tsuchiya as the Controller of Planet X, which is the definition of “quirky.” Somebody needs to create a combined version with Adams speaking English and everybody else subtitled.

For reasons that Henry G. Saperstein never adequately explained, Invasion of Astro-Monster had a long delay reaching stateside screens despite U.S. co-financing. The movie finally came out in 1970 as Monster Zero on a double-bill with War of the Gargantuas—five years after its Japanese release.

Island Vacation: Ebirah, The Horror of the Deep (1966) and Son of Godzilla (1967)

Japan’s mania with monster films reached its apex in 1966–67. Other studios started to try out the genre that Toho had dominated until then. Daiei started its successful “Gamera” series, which aimed directly at an audience of children, and the fantastic “Daimajin Trilogy” set against a feudal Japanese background. Shochiku released The X from Outer Space, a combination of swinging ‘60s SF party and a giant space-chicken-muppet-thingy (it’s as groovy as it sounds). Nikkatsu gave the world Giant Monster Gappa, released to U.S. television as Monster from a Prehistoric Planet.

Toho only got busier, turning out multiple giant monster epics during these years. Ironically, Godzilla ended up pushed to second chair in the string section. The next two G-films were shot on tighter budgets with a different creative team, and they mark a significant change in style from Ishiro Honda’s SF epics. But the shift turned out surprisingly well, although it has taken most Godzilla fans years to embrace Ebirah, The Horror of the Deep and Son of Godzilla as enjoyable departures from formula.

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (released to the U.S. as Godzilla versus the Sea Monster) started as a script for Toho’s return of their version of King Kong, a project co-produced with U.S. animation company Rankin/Bass. When Rankin/Bass rejected this first script, Toho turned it around and made it into a Godzilla picture, which explains some of Godzilla’s out-of-character behavior, like sleeping in a cave on a tropical island and occasionally displaying interest in a native girl.

The King Kong project was eventually made as King Kong Escapes (1967) with the Honda-Tsubaraya team at the helm. Over at Ebirah, The Horror of the Deep, tough-guy action movie director Jun Fukuda was brought on, and Eiji Tsubaraya’s assistant Teisho Arikawa handled the effects.

Ebirah takes place almost entirely on a tropical island with a group of stranded youths and a clever thief running afoul of an Evil Organization (a thinly disguised version of Mainland China) and their giant guardian lobster, Ebirah. But Godzilla is also on the island, and mayhem ensues until Mothra makes a brief appearance to rescue our heroes. The urban destruction of the earlier Godzilla movies is gone, and in its place is an adventure story with heavy James Bond influences. In fact, the movie bears a striking resemblance to Dr. No in setting and plot. Although Ebirah is a lame monster as far as Godzilla’s pantheon of foes goes (a big lobster, nothing more or less), the film is exciting and well-paced, and the cast of familiar actors from the G-series, including Akira Takarada as the charming thief and Akihiko Hirata as an eye-patch-wearing sub-vaillain, are fun to watch.

Not so fun: Ebirah, The Horror of the Deep became the first Godzilla movie to skip a U.S. theatrical release. It went straight to syndicated television through the Walter Reade Organization in 1968. Tastes in the U.S. were shifting, and the days of major studios purchasing of Toho’s product were over.

Toho repeated the island experiment the next year with the same crew. Son of Godzilla has the team of a science station stranded on an island filled with giant praying mantises (Kamacuras) and a horrifying super-spider (Kumonga). Life turns both cute and extra dangerous when an egg hatches an infant Godzilla (Minira, often written as “Minya” or “Minilla” in English) and the parental figure comes crashing onto the island to make sure the bugs don’t bother junior.

Minira is adorable, although the roly-poly doughboy creature looks nothing like Godzilla. The scenes between the two monsters are personable and sometimes touching. However, Son of Godzilla remains a serious adventure film most of its running time, focusing on the trapped humans and their survival struggle. At times, the movie turns downright frightening: usually, giant monsters remain oblivious to humans, but Kumonga actively pursues and tries to kill the heroes. The film isn’t afraid to put poor Minira in serious jeopardy as well.

Son of Godzilla of course begs the questions: Is Godzilla male or female? Is Minira really Godzilla’s “son,” or just a member of the same species Godzilla adopted? The mystery remains to this day.

The Big Finish (But Not Really): Destroy All Monsters (1968)

Toho recognized that the giant monster genre was about spent after the two-year splurge. The studio planned to finish off the Godzilla series with a mad monster party, Toho’s own version of House of Frankenstein, and crammed eleven monsters together along with more alien invaders and a toy-ready super-spaceship. Although not the greatest Godzilla film ever made, Destroy All Monsters is perhaps the quintessential monster-rally flick, and the closest the series came to a pure 1960s comic book style. Godzilla: Final Wars in 2004 would throw even more monsters into the mix, but Destroy All Monsters is the movie people remember, and is forever identified with the idea of fan-pleasing crossover events.

I’ve already written extensively about Destroy All Monsters for the movie’s Blu-ray release, so I’ll keep it brief here. The enormous cast of monsters necessitated a simplified plot that could quickly incorporate all of them. Toho returned to the concept of aliens mind-controlling Earth’s monsters to turn them against humanity. Earth’s heroes eventually undo the alien control, and the monsters have a showdown with the aliens’ last-ditch ploy, King Ghidorah. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same story as Invasion of Astro-Monster, but with much of the human drama removed to accommodate the large number of kaijus. This is where Destroy All Mosnters lags behind some of the earlier films: the story and its protagonists are so meagre that there isn’t much away from the monsters that’s interesting to watch. Comparing it to Invasion of Astro-Monster shows its dramatic deficiencies. But there is no denying that the two major special-effects set pieces—Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra and Manda wrecking Tokyo under a massive missile barrage; the full monster gang taking on King Ghidorah at the foot of Mt. Fuji—are tremendous spectacles.

Destroy All Monsters was the last Godzilla movie to have all four Godzilla Fathers—Honda, Tsubaraya, Tanaka, and Ifukube—working together. (Tsubaraya died in early 1970). It was the close of an era. Although Toho reneged on their plan to end the Godzilla series almost immediately, for the rest of the Showa era, life was going to get considerably more… economical.

NEXT: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 03:07:00 +0000

Other Installments
Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)
Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)
Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1997)

With the release of the teaser trailer for the upcoming Godzilla from Warner Bros. and Legendary pictures, a decade of cinematic silence has come to an end. Godzilla last appeared in 2004 in the Japanese movie Godzilla: Final Wars, which Toho Studios intended as the monster’s final bow before going on sabbatical. It’s the longest break in the iconic monster’s career, and regardless of what happens next, the forthcoming Godzilla ’14 is a reason for G-fans to celebrate. Maybe stomp a few cities. The trailer makes San Francisco look particularly stomp-able.

At this point, we only know as much about Godzilla ’14 as we’ve seen in the teaser. But it was an exciting glimpse that at least assured fans the new movie would not repeat the horrible mistakes of the first American attempt at a stateside Godzilla, the 1998 Roland Emmerich disaster.

This is the first of five (projected) installments covering the history of Godzilla on film, written and condensed for a broad audience. I hope these articles will help readers who have only a passing relationship with Godzilla—the general knowledge from pop culture osmosis—see the unusual variety of one of the longest and most durable film franchises in history. Many of my readers are probably familiar with much of the information I’ll provide in these articles, but since I’ll also sling around my own opinions about the movies mixed in with the history, Godzilla fans may find parts of this worthwhile… if perhaps only to ignite arguments.

Terminology and Other Business to Dispense With

Godzilla’s film history divides into three distinct phases: The Showa series, also known as the “classic series” (1954-1975), named after the period of the reign of Emperor Hirohito; the Heisei series (1984-1995), named after the reign of Emperor Akihito; and the Millennium series (1999-2004), named after the inaugural film, Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999). The first three installments of this history will cover the Showa movies, and the last two will cover Heisei and Millennium, as well as the hiatuses between.

For clarity and consistency, I’ll refer to the movies by the official English titles Toho Studio gave them for the purpose of foreign sales, and use the alternate U.S. titles for specifically Americanized releases. For example, I will refer to the first movie of the Heisei series as The Return of Godzilla (1984) and its Americanized version as Godzilla 1985. I will point out the more familiar U.S. titles when they are drastically different from the official Toho title, such as Godzilla versus the Sea Monster, the U.S. television and video title of Ebirah, The Horror of the Deep.

Black and White Beginnings: Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again

I’ve already written extensively on Godzilla’s origin tale in my review of the Blu-ray of the original. Here is the “on-the-go” version:

In 1954, Tomoyuki Tanaka, a producer at Japan’s powerful Toho Studios, needed a movie to go into production after co-financing on a war film collapsed. Seizing on the recent popularity in Japanese cinemas of the original King Kong and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, and referencing a recent flare-up over fear of atomic power because of an incident where a Japanese fishing boat was caught in the fallout from the Bikini Atoll test, Tanaka devised the concept of a radioactive giant beast coming ashore and devastating Tokyo. Special effects wizard Eiji Tsubaraya devised the design of the monster (originally intended as a sort of “aquatic gorilla,” hence the monster’s Japanese name, Gojira, a portmanteau of the words for “gorilla” and “whale”) and the extensive miniature special effects. Rising dramatic director Ishiro Honda handled the human action. Musical maestro Akira Ifukube crafted the thundering, doom-filled score, and also created the monster’s distinctive roar: the sound of a resin-coated glove rubbing the strings of a contra basso.

Honda, Tanaka, Tsubaraya, and Ifukube are collectively known as the “Godzilla Fathers”: the four were instrumental in shaping Godzilla into the phenomenon we know today, and each remained with the monster for many years, seeing the numerous alterations the series underwent as it shifted from a tale of atomic doom into a multifaceted science-fantasy franchise. Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsubaraya became an almost inseparable team in Japanese fantasy films from the late ’50s until Tsubaraya’s death in 1970, their work together forming a distinct “Honda-Tsubaraya” canon.

Godzilla (Gojira) hit theaters in Japan in November 1954, the same year as The Seven Samurai, and turned into a smash success. The film cost thirty times more than the average Japanese production, but Toho’s risk paid off. The film broke the record for opening-day ticket sales in Tokyo, and approximately 9.6 million people saw the film during its initial run.

No one in Japan had seen a film like it before; although special-effects films were common, they were almost always war spectacles. Since Japan had no military, effects artists like Eiji Tsubaraya had to create military tech using miniatures. The work in Godzilla, however, created a stunning monster and scenes of devastation that gnawed deep at people for whom World War II was still a fresh memory. The devastating nuclear message struck a chord with a country that was only beginning to grapple publicly with their tragic part in the start of the nuclear arms race. Godzilla opened up eyes, and for some it was an powerful awakening.

Star Akira Takarada, who was at the beginning of his long successful career with Godzilla, later recalled: “When Godzilla destroyed the big clock [in the movie], it was a metaphor for an alarm telling us we are running out of time. Forty years have passed, but deep down the message is the same. Mankind woke Godzilla, and today we have similar issues: air pollution, the ozone layer. That is also Godzilla. They’re the same in that they were all brought on by mankind.”

Yet… there was an ineffable compassion for the frightful atomic monster that hinted at what would come. Takarada took notice of this: “When I first saw Godzilla at the studio screening, I couldn’t help crying when I watched Godzilla become a skeleton. I thought, ‘Why did mankind have to punish Godzilla like that?’… Mankind seemed like a bigger villain than Godzilla, and I felt sorry for him. I think sympathy for him still exists today. If Godzilla were truly evil, people wouldn’t have loved him so much.”

Commerce dictated a sequel, and a sequel fast. In the 1930s–1950s, sequels were usually quickie affairs done cheaper than the original to strike while the property was still on the public’s mind. The sequel to Godzilla, which reached theater screens a mere six months after the first, followed this pattern.

Godzilla Raids Again (1955) is one of the more forgotten Godzilla films in the West. Director Ishiro Honda, a key part of the success of the first movie, was already assigned to another project, so a less visionary director, Motoyoshi Oda, handled the film with aggressive blandness.

Godzilla Raids Again pits Godzilla against another monster for the first time, the spiky Ankylosaurus-like beast Anguirus. The film contains a few fine pieces of special effects staging, but significantly less thought, passion, and time went into its production. The human factor Honda brought to Godzilla is absent from the non-effects scenes of Godzilla Raids Again, making it a chore to get through when the focus is away from the often impressive battle sequences between an animalistic Godzilla (who moves with stunning swiftness at times) and feisty Anguirus. Godzilla Raids Again made money, but didn’t impress audiences. That appeared to be the end of Godzilla on movie screens.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters! and the Japanese Science-Fiction Boom (1956–1961)

Indeed, Godzilla would not return in a new film for six years. But those middle years were busy for Godzilla in other parts of the world, and busy for the Japanese film industry setting up a new universe of magnificent monsters and strange aliens as the tokusatsu (special effects) genre exploded.

In the United States, a burgeoning interest in importing Japanese films because of the success of the movies of Akira Kurosawa and Hiroshi Inagaki brought Godzilla (yes, the monster’s English name comes from Toho Studios, not the U.S. distributors) to the attention of Hollywood. A group of investors purchased the U.S. rights to Godzilla for a modest $25,000. Giant radioactive monster films were making cash for B-movie studio units and small production companies, and the investors recognized in Godzilla something they could re-craft to appeal to American teenagers who enjoyed movies like Them! and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Thankfully, Godzilla’s U.S. handlers did better with their purchase property than anybody had any right to expect. Director-editor Terry Morse oversaw a respectful re-working of the Japanese film with new footage of a pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr starring as an American reporter who arrives in Japan in time to witness Godzilla’s attack. The re-fashioned film was released in 1956 as Godzilla, King of the Monsters! and was a substantial hit not only in the U.S. (a $2 million gross during its opening run) but also worldwide.

Although Godzilla, King of the Monsters! is a lesser version of the Japanese Godzilla, the power of the original shows through, and the new scenes were written, directed, and acted with a sobriety and honesty that befits the tale. Although the U.S. scenes were shot on a tight schedule of only three days (Burr liked to claim he shot all his scenes in a straight twenty-four hours), they feel as if everybody involved cared about what they were doing.

More important than the quality of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! is how it played internationally. This was the version of the film that traveled the globe and made Godzilla a success outside its home country. By Americanizing the film, the U.S. producers created a more easily palatable product for foreign markets of the 1950s. Even Japan released Godzilla, King of the Monsters! to theaters, rather clumsily cropping it to make it seem like a CinemaScope film.

While the U.S. version raked in revenue across the world, Toho Studios turned not toward more Godzilla, but more monsters in general, igniting the kaiju (“monster”) genre. They also turned to color, which was beginning to grow as the new spectacle for tokusatsu cinema. Director Ishiro Honda returned to giant monsters with Rodan in 1956, an excellent film about two Pteranadon-like flying creatures emerging from a volcano. Toho then leaped into pure science-fiction spectacles from the Honda-Tsubaraya-Tanaka-Ifukube team (hereafter HTTI) with The Mysterians (1957) and Battle in Outer Space (1959), both massive alien invasion/space opera epics with copious special effects that still dazzle. Although influenced by the U.S. model of alien invasion movies, the Japanese versions were more colorful, expensive, and strange. The HTTI team stumbled a bit with the Varan (1958), the last of their films in black and white. But when they reached Mothra (1960), a crazy movie with a giant moth and miniature fairies and musical numbers and famous comedians, it was clear that Japan had developed their own peculiar, fantasy-slanted take on what started with as an imitation of the U.S. documentary-style of science-fiction.

In North America, the second Godzilla film made its lurching way to theaters, and thanks to idiotic marketing moves, made zero impression on U.S. audiences. Originally, the investors who picked up Godzilla Raids Again planned to plunder the film for only its special effects and create an entirely new story around the footage with English-speaking actors. The project, titled The Fire Monsters, almost happened—but its production company, AB-PT Pictures, went under before the script went before the cameras. Godzilla Raids Again eventually ended up with producer Paul Schreibman, one of the original U.S. investors on Godzilla, King of the Monsters! Schreibman made a distribution deal with Warner Bros. Godzilla Raid Again received a cheap “Americanization” that consisted of a rancid dubbing job, replacement library music, and a slew of hilariously mismatched stock footage.

Worst of all—both for the movie and its box-office prospects—Paul Schreibman decided to take the name of its star off the film! The movie was released in 1958 as Gigantis, The Fire Monster, with all mentions of “Godzilla” excised from the dubbing, as well as any reference to the earlier film. Schreibman apparently believed he could pass this off as “new” monster, instead of capitalizing on the name value of the previous movie. Guess what happened? That’s right, nobody bothered to show up to see Gigantis, The Fire Monster. After a few showings on TV in the ‘60s, the movie vanished from the U.S. for decades, becoming a semi-lost Godzilla movie for Western audiences. It’s now on DVD in North America, both in its Godzilla Raids Again version and the gut-bustingly bad U.S. hack job.

Godzilla Becomes a Celebrity: King Kong vs. Godzilla

By 1962, Toho Studios was ready to bring Godzilla back to screens. The Toho Special Effects department had now mastered their distinct style, and with a string of SF and monster-related hits from the HTTI team and the popularity of Godzilla growing worldwide, the Toho front office was eager for a splashy color and widescreen return of the Big-G. They delivered a monster smack-down with a title never rivaled in crossover history: King Kong vs. Godzilla.

How did Toho end up with the rights to the famous U.S. super-simian? Unfortunately, it’s a sad story of a producer named Jerry Beck doing an end run around special effects master Willis O’Brien, who handled the effects for the original King Kong and ranks as one of the giants of movie magic. O’Brien always struggled finding backing for his own projects, but when he proposed King Kong vs. Frankenstein, he got the interest of Jerry Beck, who promised to shop the project around the studios. The idea eventually morphed into King Kong vs. Prometheus, but Beck actually cared not a fig for O’Brien’s idea or creative passions; Beck wanted the rights to King Kong so he could sell them off. Toho studios leaped at the chance, and Beck sold the King of Skull Island behind O’Brien’s back. In exchange, Beck got exclusive rights to distribute the film in the U.S.

King Kong vs. Godzilla was an enormous hit in its home country in 1962, and remains one of the highest grossing Japanese films of all time. The movie does no favors for King Kong, who looks rather shabby and goofy, but does amazing things for Godzilla. Visual effect supervisor Eiji Tsubaraya wanted to shift Godzilla from a bleak interpretation and make the monster more light and fun. Although not the direction that director Honda wanted to go—he preferred serious drama about humanity uniting to face a common threat—it was a way to transform Godzilla into a franchise figure. Godzilla in King Kong vs. Godzilla is still a nasty bit of business when facing down the military, but the monster now sported “attitude,” striking poses and genuinely seeming to enjoy wreaking havoc. In the confrontations with Kong, Godzilla pulls out Sumo wrestler moves and does taunting and teasing gestures. The personification of Godzilla had begun.

King Kong vs. Godzilla is a deliberate comedy—at least in the Japanese version that has never seen an official release in the U.S. It’s the only Godzilla film made intentionally for laughs. Instead of a grim tale of atomic power, King Kong vs. Godzilla plays as light satire about Japanese media culture in the early ‘60s, particularly television. North American viewers only familiar with the U.S. re-cut have no idea how hilarious the film is, or that the monster fights are intentionally meant for laughter and rah-rah cheering. There’s no way that King Kong swinging Godzilla around by the tail or trying to stuff a tree down his enemy’s mouth was meant as anything other than appealing silliness.

Oh yes, Jerry Beck’s U.S. version, eventually released through Universal International Pictures… what a fiasco. The Japanese version wouldn’t have worked well in the U.S. at the time; it was too ingrained in the comedy of its culture. But Beck’s changes made the movie into the wrong kind of joke. Incredibly boring and condescending footage of an American newscaster and his scientific commentator interrupt the flow of the story continually, with large portions of the Japanese comedy scenes dumped out and the dubbing script killing what does appear. The new footage appears horrendously cheap as well, which degrades the look of the overall film. Most of Ifukube’s incredible music was excised and replaced with library music that overuses the already overused sting from The Creature from the Black Lagoon—again and again and again.

Although King Kong vs. Godzilla in its U.S. incarnation did excellent business when released to theaters in the summer of 1963 and on its subsequent TV broadcasts, it has turned into too much of a punch line in North America and is often used to dismiss the whole Godzilla series as camp junk. (Apparently, these people have never seen Godzilla vs. Megalon. Now that is how you do camp.) The Japanese original needs to receive a stateside release one day.

For both Japan and the rest of the world, Godzilla had entered a new era: a 1950s atomic bringer of doom from a serious black and white movie was now a colorful and red-hot property ready for superstardom.

NEXT: The Golden Age (1963–1968)

The Vincent Price Collection: Pit and the Pendulum

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 04:01:00 +0000

Pit and the Pendulum (1961)
Directed by Roger Corman. Screenplay by Richard Matheson. Starring Vincent Price, John Kerr, Barbara Steele, Luana Anders.

I should move faster on the films in Shout! Factory’s Vincent Price Collection Blu-ray set. But once Halloween drifts past, you can’t spend all your time on horror films. And now it’s December. Oh well.

Anyway, moving on.… Now that the House of Usher has fallen, it’s time to lower the pendulum.

(To be a stickler about the title, although advertised as The Pit and the Pendulum, the onscreen title has no first “The,” and therefore I will treat it as such.)

Pit and the Pendulum, the second of the Corman-AIP-Poe cycle, faced a larger adaptation problem than The Fall of the House of Usher. Where Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” contains enough story to create a beginning-middle-end structure, “The Pit and the Pendulum” is more typical of the author’s adherence to storytelling economy. Essentially, the short story is a great finale for a movie, but has nothing before that. Screenwriter Richard Matheson needed to craft an original opening and middle in order to create a full movie. What he devised feels like Poe, with a man character dropping down into madness, and it stays within the Spanish Inquisition setting of the short story and its emphasis on torture. I don’t beleive a better feature length film could be fashioned from the material.

For those unfamiliar with the original story (go read it now!) it’s a masterful piece of suspense featuring a single unnamed character who is trapped in a chamber where he endures three death traps. That’s all. Nobody ever forgets the story, however, because of the agonizing terror of the second trap, a slowly descending blade swinging on a pendulum, coming nearer and nearer to slicing through the heart of the helpless prisoner with each pass. A century and a half of torture-related literature and film arose from this scene.

The movie, uhm, executes its equivalent sequence brilliantly. Pit and the Pendulum lacks the fiery close of House of Usher, but seeing Vincent Price in full madman mode, relishing the dropping of the death blade—yes, it’s a blast. And tense, even for modern viewers. The scene also gave Price his signature iconic image. The actor never had a strong association with a particular character the way Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff did, but he had a powerful connection to his look in Pit and the Pendulum, cowled in inquisitor’s robes beside a devilish torture device.

However, the final shot of the movie is its most shocking and horrifying moment. Nope, won’t spoil it, because it isn’t something from Poe. Great touch, Mr. Matheson.

Matheson’s new tale leading up to the pendulum climax has many similarities to The Fall of the House of Usher. A young man arrives at a castle, searching for a woman. He meets the skittish and strange master of the house, who reveals that something horrible has happened, but also acts deceptive. The young man in this case is Francis Barnard (John Kerr, a far better actor than Mark Damon in the similar role before), and he has come to see about his sister Elizabeth, whom he learned died abruptly. Elizabeth’s husband, Nicholas Medina (Price) warily explains that she died of a blood disease a month ago, although Barnard realizes that the man is hiding something

Barnard decides to stick around to dig up the truth. The truth unfortunately involves Medina going bonkers because of his father’s sadistic history as a master torturer, and a scheming plot between two of the other characters that ends up doing no one a bit of good. Edgar Allan Poe—you thought this was going to end up happily?

Price played an understated role Usher, but he launches into full scenery-chewing here, and that’s just as fun. Although starting as a sympathetic figure, Don Medina eventually throws all that out when the madness takes over and he never looks back. Barbara Steele, in a small but juicy part (she just had her breakout role in Europe from The Mask of Satan/Black Sunday), adds to the fun of the final act—the movie could have used much more oh her, but the nature of the role made that impossible.

Although not made on an appreciably bigger budget, Pit and the Pendulum looks larger and more expansive than The Fall of the House of Usher because the production crew was able to re-use sets from the earlier film while building new ones. This explains why the Corman-Poe films keep looking more expensive as the series progressed. The movie continues the hallucinogenic visual style for the flashbacks and nightmares, and the music score from Les Baxter takes a turn for the atonal and odd. It’s one of the best score Baxter wrote for the series.

However, despite its fame within the Corman-AIP-Poe canon, Pit and the Pendulum impressed me much less this viewing than the first time I saw it. Arriving in the wake of The Fall of the House of Usher weakens it a touch, since the earlier film works on a more psychologically subtle level, and yet contains the more blazing finale. Price brings an enormous amount amusement to his performance as Don Medina, but I’m discovering more and more how much I enjoying his acting range in his more constrained parts.

Next in the Vinnie Blu-ray vault, I’ll look at The Haunted Palace, which despite it’s Poe poem title, is really an H. P. Lovecraft adaptation.

Odd personal story: When I first read “The Pit and the Pendulum” in fifth grade, I thought it took place in Ohio. I didn’t know there was a city called “Toldeo” in Spain.

Godzilla ‘14 Teaser Trailer Is Here and Life Is Good

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 04:38:00 +0000

You might not have noticed it, because you don’t read my blog often, but Godzilla is sort of a huge big damn bloody deal to me.

Well, Godzilla is just plain huge to anybody, especially if you are in its way.

That’s why I hovered over my keyboard today at 10 a.m., hands palsied, awaiting the premiere of the first teaser trailer for the new Hollywood Godzilla from director Gareth Edwards. And… when the camera at last found the great lengths of the Japanese leviathan looming through the rubble of its devastation, and the beast let loose the legendary roar… I also roared out loud with him at the top of my lungs.

I was at work, mind you. Some impulses cannot be stopped. We’re a loose workplace, fortunately. They expect weird actions from their writers.

There’s no need to describe the trailer further—you can behold it for yourself—except to say that using György Ligeti’s “Requiem for Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, 2 Mixed Choirs and Orchestra” for the HALO-drop opening is perfect. This music is best known for its use as the “monolith theme” in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and is anything more monolithic than Godzilla? (As a hardcore Stanley Kubrick fan as well, this slammed my geek-meter up to “Do Not Pull This Lever Again.”)

Although the trailer leaves many open questions, as any early teaser trailer should (will Walter White have to move the cook now that a monster has stomped it?), it does show that Gareth Edwards and company have created a genuine interpretation of the figure of Godzilla.

This is crucial: there are many different Godzilla interpretations since the beast first crashed onto Japanese screens in 1954. Godzilla has served as a nuclear metaphor, a force of nature, a butt-kicking anti-hero, a child friendly superhero, and a near-demonic force. All of these are legitimate interpretations of Godzilla, who can absorb many concepts and channel many human emotions. I prefer some versions to others, but as a dedicated G-fan, I can find some enjoyment in all of them.

What isn’t acceptable: not interpreting Godzilla at all. This was the major failure of the 1998 Roland Emmerich-Dean Devlin disaster. The filmmakers did not care about Godzilla whatsoever—its history, its importance, or even why people liked it. They wanted to create their own monster and do their own thing with a popular brand name attached. The fans and the public rejected their crass endeavor. If you make a film titled Godzilla, you must interact with Godzilla in some way.

And this trailer tells me that’s what the new Godzilla is doing. They are going for a 1954 version (perhaps without the radioactivity metaphor that is less timely than it was for Japan in the ‘50s) that emphasizes the beast’s catastrophic effect on everyday people. This was a key part of the power of Ishiro Honda’s original movie and if Godzilla ’14 can capture even a quarter of that film’s epic, bleak power, it will be a winner.

I couldn’t be more ecstatic. Come get in line for the first screening with me right now.

For the sequel: Godzilla doing flying jump kicks and shaking hands with a giant robot! Like I said, legitimate interpretation.

Flash Review: Hangover Square

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 05:47:00 +0000

Hangover Square (1945)
Directed by John Brahm. Starring Laird Cregar, Linda Darnell, George Sanders, Faye Marlowe, Alan Napier.

I've wanted to watch Hangover Square for years, ever since I first heard Bernard Herrmann’s “Piano Concerto Macabre,” a concert piece based on his score. The concept of the music as part of the plot—it’s the concerto the tortured main character is composing—made it more intriguing.

However, before I rented the film, I read Patrick Hamilton's 1941 novel. It’s a fabulous work of World War II British fiction… and the movie bears only superficial resemblances to it. I appreciate the film as a well-fashioned “period noir” that melds psychological drama with the Victorian Gothic, but most of what makes the novel such a grim experience is highly romanticized on screen.

Hamilton's novel tells about the British lower class in a boozy slog toward the outbreak of World War II (the final chapter occurs on the day Britain declares war on Germany), seen through the eyes of the pathetic, jobless George Harvey Bone, a man with occasional episodes of psychotic black-outs. Bone has enslaved himself to a trashy actress named Netta Longdon who leads him on just to get drinks and food out of him. Hamilton weaves in the growth of fascism as a theme, making for a vivid portrait of Britain on the edge of the abyss.

The movie’s script switches the setting to late Victorian London, makes Bone (Laird Cregar) into a concert piano composer, and Netta (Darnell) a music hall singer trying to trick Bone into writing songs for her using feigned love. Bone's psychotic episodes now always lead to him attempt to murder someone, and discordant sounds bring them on. A new character, a psychiatrist looking into Bone’s condition (Sanders), pursues Bone after the murders, adding elements of a standard suspense. There’s also a sweet romantic interest, Barbara (Faye Marlow), to contrast with Netta. Barbara has no equivalent in novel—and doesn’t serve much purpose here except to further romanticize the tale and move it away from its pub-stranded source material.

There are some superb, atmospheric parts to Hangover Square thanks to director John Brahm, who helmed some famous Twilight Zone episodes, including “Time Enough at Last” and “Shadow Play.” Among the stunning set pieces are Bone depositing a victim onto a November 5th bonfire, the corpse wrapped in a Guy Fawkes disguise; and the amazing hallucinatory fantasy during Bone’s performance of the concerto during the finale. Laird Cregar, who basically killed himself losing weight to play the part, is fantastic as Bone. Cregar made a name for himself as towering villains, but saw Hangover Square as a path toward more sympathetic leading roles. To that end, he went on a crash diet using amphetamines, lost a hundred pounds, and died of a heart attack on the operating table during a procedure for the stomach problems his diet caused. He was only 31, and tragically, Hangover Square was his best and final role.

But it's not the book. Nowhere near. Perhaps it was too grim and realistic for 1945 and a world sick of war.