War of the Gargantuas (1966)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

88 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This is basically a sequel to the previous year's Frankenstein vs. Baragon, but mostly just in a continuity sense. The lab dedicated to studying Frankensteins from that film is carried over into this one, but neither the specific Frankenstein from the earlier film nor Baragon are referenced. So I guess it's more of a spiritual sequel; one that works with a lot of the same ideas, but is largely separate. But, like Frankenstein vs. Baragon, there's a deep sense of empathy for the mutated humanoids referred to as "Frankenstein/s". This is a very, very Ishirō Honda movie in that respect, as well as in other respects I'll get to later in this review. I just rewatched this last night, and while this particular movie isn't a case of me revisiting something I had previously maligned (I liked it the first time and will always like it), I do want to update my review a little.

So what is a Frankenstein? This film's conception of said creature is entirely different from the Western idea of Frankenstein's Monster and I really love that. There are no references to the Shelley story here at all and the term "Frankenstein" is essentially just used as shorthand for an enormous, human-ish or humanoid creature who typically owes at least some of its existence to science. In the case of the first Frankenstein, he grew to inhuman proportions from eating a discarded heart that was being experimented upon; in the case of these two they're just kind of lab escapees - so the science rule isn't absolute, but it seems like to be a Frankenstein means you have to have been touched by the hand of humankind in some way, and not for the better. The two Frankensteins in this film, named Gaira and Sanda, are something between brothers and clones, one formed from the cells of the other, but vastly different in personality and emotions.

The two giant monsters are by far the most human creatures in this film. In fact, I had trouble staying engaged with it at times because the actions of the human characters turned my stomach. Even for Ishirō Honda's tendency to make kaiju films with philosophical angles to them, this one goes quite far in establishing the humans as the bad guys. Aside from the Frankenstein research people, humans don't even attempt to understand or humanely capture either of the gargantuas/Frankensteins at all. We're explicitly the side who's responsible for the most suffering and destruction because we're the only side capable of truly understanding that we're doing it and continuing to do it willingly. That first lengthy fight scene between the military and Gaira, where they not only shoot masers and bombs at him, but also electrify a whole river, causing him to fall in and be shocked into near-unconsciousness before he's carried away by his brother, is genuinely really upsetting. There's a relentlessness to the military movements in this that feels elaborate even for kaiju movies. When the army shears off and burns the top of what looks like an entire forest just to rout out Gaira like a trapped animal I felt sympathy for him as if I was watching somebody slaughter a deer for a trophy. This movie mostly is about watching the military advance with an inhuman coldness towards their goal of destroying both monsters; the military action takes up the majority of the running time. This is why I said this movie feels so trademark Honda: there's a sense of direness and absolute dead seriousness all throughout that doesn't let anything but tragedy feel like the inevitable outcome.

Despite never having any spoken lines, Sanda and Gaira have an incredibly compelling drama unfolding between them throughout the course of the film. One of our first introductions to Gaira makes it very clear that he eats people. Maybe the only funny (if dark as hell) moment in the film comes when he scoops up a lady, chews on her, then spits out something she was carrying. Even before the human-eating becomes explicit, he's shown messing with a boat and generally scaring the wits out of everybody, which of course means that the government and the military's first response is to figure out how to stop and destroy this creature - but thankfully the research lab, and its scientists who have firsthand experience that proves that a Frankenstein can be a gentle, harmless creature if raised with love, is there to provide a tempering voice. Not that it's heard by the factions attempting to destroy Gaira, but it is at least there so us viewers don't feel completely alienated.

I want to talk about the sets and the suits because I feel like even though this is not one of the more well-known of Toho's Showa-era kaiju films, both things are some of the best examples I've ever seen from the studio. Both Sanda and Gaira are the kind of creatures that my brain accepts as just being what they are. With a lot of kaiju suits, your mind kind of unconsciously goes to the air and sight holes in the neck, the seams, where the actor's head would be, basically there's always a sense of the suit being an object no matter how good it looks. Sanda and Gaira are things I look at and I don't see a human in them, I just see them. The suits were evidently constructed by layering material over a regular boilersuit-like garment, instead of basing it around wetsuit material as was normal for suits at the time, and this gave them a level of maneuverability that allowed for much more human body language and movement. The masks were similarly made of layered material over life casts of each suit actor's face. Haruo Nakajima is, as always, the best, and Hiroshi Sekita, in the Sanda suit, plays his respective Frankenstein equally as well. But I also want to talk about the miniatures because they are mindblowing to me. The Hanada airport scene, one of Gaira's first forays onto land, is genuinely one of the best miniature sets I've seen in tokusatsu of this era. There's a moment where Nakajima in the Gaira suit just books it across the runway and I've been thinking about that ever since the first time I watched this film because nothing else looks like that. The sense of scale is perfect - the Frankensteins are not taller than the buildings around them, so instead of looking unstoppable in the middle of a city, there's a feeling of them being lost and confused in a world that they don't fit into.

Sanda and Gaira's relationship is by far the most memorable thing about this film, story-wise. The humans are important for their role in nurturing a Frankenstein into a well-adjusted being, but as usual, it's the monster stuff that really matters. Sanda is the one who has been around humans and understands a little more of how to behave, and as soon as he finds out Gaira's habit of eating humans, he's horrified. He tries to kill Gaira for this, but - although, again, neither of them speak - you really feel his sense of anguish about this, the panic that drives Sanda to do it, and his regret. Both creatures are connected to each other in a way that goes deeper than a familial bond. Gaira is a tragic creature because he was shaped by the environment of deprivation that he grew up in, and even though neither are human, there's something you can empathize with deeply in seeing Sanda watch this other part of him go down a path that can only lead to destruction. Sanda trying to urge his brother away with very human body language when he knows he's walking right into the military's zone of conflict towards the end of the film is another thing that affected me on my first watch.

There's also a bunch of other stuff that goes on here, but it's comparatively a blip against the brother-on-brother violence and emotional turmoil. There's an octopus for like five minutes at the beginning that makes it onto some of the film's posters despite not even being remotely relevant to anything. There's a lounge scene where a woman sings genuinely one of the worst songs I've ever heard not just on film but like, ever, and is then snatched by Gaira. (I'm told that Devo recorded a cover of this song.) I guess I can see aspects of this film that people might deride, and its tone of total seriousness at all times can feel a little impenetrable, but I just... I feel like everything works together, it's all just as it should be, and I'm really surprised this isn't a more popular film.

Nezura 1964 (2020)

directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

Japan

53 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is quite a short movie - it's not even as long as the 53 minutes it claims to be. There's maybe ten minutes at the end that is made up of credits and other stuff. I would, however, highly recommend sticking around for that ten minutes, because the "other stuff" consists of behind-the-scenes shots that show the cast and crew having a great time, and also Mach Fumiake looking really beautiful and singing the film's theme tune, as well as another song by the immediately recognizable Akira Kushida over the end credits, which was a surprise. So basically this is a film that just keeps on giving right up until the very end.

I'd been waiting to see this for a long time, and it was as exciting to finally watch it as I'd hoped, with the added bonus that I had somehow been geared up for a cynical comedy and ended up watching something far more heartfelt. The film itself gives you some context in the opening, but to recap: During the monster-movie boom in the mid-20th century, Daiei Studios, not yet having come out with their biggest hit, Gamera, was planning to make a movie called Giant Horde Beast Nezura. ("Nezura" is a kaiju-ified version of the word "nezumi", which means rat.) The film's monster concept was to use literal live rats that were brought in off the street and were going to be filmed (hopefully) rampaging through detailed miniature city sets, and then eventually there would be a giant rat creature and other actors and all that usual business too. As one might expect, this didn't go so well, with the rats being city rats and infested with fleas and sickness; eventually production ceased and the rats were incinerated per an order by the city health department.

Nezura 1964 is a faux documentary that focuses on the crew behind this planned film, specifically how everyone put a ton of hope and effort into a project that eventually crashed and (literally) burned. It is comedic, but ultimately the sensational headline we all know about that one weird monster movie where they were gonna use live rats falls by the wayside in favor of an exploration of just plain human nature - the nature of humans to do what we love, and to feel bereft and devastated when that's taken away from us by circumstance. And if you pay attention you'll see that "haha why did they use real rats that was stupid" isn't the point, the point is also that this was all happening at a time when focus was shifting rapidly and drastically away from feature films and onto television - a change that led to the birth of the Ultra series, but meant a lot of concepts for kaiju films never got out of development.

If the faux-documentary angle sounds familiar to you, maybe you've also seen The Great Buddha: Arrival. The concept of that film is in many ways the same as Nezura 1964, but The Great Buddha: Arrival is a meta-love letter to a lost film and a treatise on the importance of memory as a practice of keeping things alive, and Nezura 1964 is... well, I just watched it, so I need some time to digest it, but like I said, it's a movie about people who are invested in making movies putting their sweat and tears into an endeavor that fails. The lead "actor" from The Great Buddha: Arrival is also the lead actor in this film, and the rest of the cast is made up of a bunch of other people you'll recognize from various other toku series, specifically a lot of Gamera folks.

So, is the movie itself good? Very. It's pretty bare-bones, there's not a lot to it, but what makes it good is not even necessarily how it feels to watch it - even though it is fun and I liked it - but the fact that there's a director who is making these movies with a cast and crew who are as passionate as he is about preserving the idea of lost or unmade films that are as special and important to the history of this particular area of cinema as are the films that did get made. (He also did Hedorah: Silent Spring, which is great fun.) I think this one looks a little bit more polished than The Great Buddha: Arrival, but it's not supposed to be, since it's framed as a documentary shot in the early 1960s. There's not as much of a meta element here, which is fine, Great Buddha called for that and this one didn't, but it's still fascinating as an exploration of fiction and that liminal space inhabited by things that got so close to existing that the idea of them is still out there in the world even if they aren't. And the rats are so cute! A big part of why Nezura failed was because the crew couldn't rile the rats up enough to look menacing. And they really, really aren't, they just look adorable. I presume the crew of this film sourced them more ethically than they did in the '60s.

The Lake (2022)

directed by Lee Thongkham

Thailand

105 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This was something I was peripherally aware of for a while and interested in as an up-and-coming giant monster movie, but I didn't know too much about it aside from having seen someone claim it was "scarier than The Host". Also, I love that super generic tagline: "A Monster Will Rise". It certainly does! If all you get out of this is "scary giant monster movie", though, then I feel like you may have missed its underlying message - which, ironically, is also the case with The Host.

A voiceover narration at the beginning of the film provides us with some context about the world all of this is taking place in - that is to say, our world. The appearance of a monster is very much tied to the general unbalancing of nature, of climate change and the human sphere rapidly falling into chaos due to our own actions. Whether or not it's stated outright, this kind of thing is implicit in many, many monster movies: the monster as representation of a failing of things we've taken for granted about modern life, as a visual and physical indication that it's all falling apart. After a spectacular introduction to our monster, which I will address further later in this review, we start off on a farm (side note: more goats in this film than expected) where a little girl finds an unusually large egg and, unthinking, removes it from the water, causing its kin to come looking for it and venture into the middle of civilization where their presence wreaks havoc.

This movie is way more personal about its monster-on-human violence than a lot of monster movies dare to be, especially when the monster in question is huge. But to be fair, the huge one isn't the only monster here; there's a second, closer-to-human-sized, mostly bipedal creature who is the one that does most of the up-front killing. It's really brutal: we watch the characters flee from this creature as it flings other people aside ruthlessly, smashing them with its tail or its claws, carving its way through all of the farm workers until eventually the main-ish characters manage to escape to a hospital, telling their story about what they've seen (and not being believed at first, as is par for the course). The violence of this smaller monster initially raises some questions about what seems to be the core message of the film: how can we see ourselves in something that is mercilessly gouging its way through humans? But that's the truth of the whole thing, isn't it? I feel like this isn't a movie where the point is that humans vs. monsters is a one-sided battle; the monster isn't supposed to be a poor, misunderstood, helpless creature (although we do relentlessly misunderstand it), it's supposed to be like us, and we're like it. We're capable of senseless violence, sometimes to protect our own young, sometimes for no reason. So this movie is not asking us "You've just seen this monster kill all of your coworkers and your children, but please, have some sympathy for it", it's asking us "What parts of yourself do you see in what this monster is doing?" Are we ready to face that?

(Or maybe it's asking us none of this, and this is just extrapolation. But if I can't interpret art then what is art for? And what am I for?)

Okay, so let's talk about some good-looking monsters. I was extremely impressed with the first look we get of The Lake's lake creature - it is beautiful, rain-soaked and lumbering, huge and unaffected. The influences on its appearance are clearly all over the map, from aquatic creatures to dinosaurs to other monsters from other monster movies (can you feel the self-control it's taking me not to reference Godzilla in this review?), and in some frames, not in all of them, but in some of them, it looks so plausibly like a real creature that it gave me one of those moments of awe at the state of modern CGI. Unfortunately not all of it is that good, and I have a feeling that those early shots of the big monster are only as convincing as they are because of the pouring rain and darkness masking some of its rougher edges. I have to say I didn't care for the smaller monster nearly as much as I did the bigger one, and this is where you see a lot of the things that CGI can't quite smooth over, because you see it in daylight, moving at a much quicker pace than the big monster. The big one looks so real because its movements are so slow that it doesn't have the opportunity to look fake; there's not many actual life-forms that lumber around at that size, so we don't have a frame of reference to compare it to and think "boy, that looks nothing like a real animal". We're used to seeing stuff run around, and we're not as used to seeing stuff lumber, so it's easier to get away with faking lumbering. The smaller one runs and lopes and is far more motile, and looks less convincing because of that. In my opinion CGI hasn't gotten to the point where it can imitate a real creature's walk cycle perfectly - there's always something that looks unnatural, either too smooth or too jerky. I also just like the idea of a huge monster doing damage more than a littler one getting up close and personal. But the "up close and personal" is kind of the point of this film.

There's a couple of different human characters throughout this and none of them really feels like the "main" one. The one who gets the most focus on his personal backstory is (unfortunately) the cop and his recalcitrant teenage daughter. Cops with recalcitrant teenage daughters are a constant across all forms of media from all countries, and although the injection of a personal angle in a movie where most of the characters don't go beyond the surface level is probably a good thing, I was still bored by this because I see it too many times. Another thing this movie does more than expected is that thing you see in monster movies sometimes where they dedicate a few seconds to a totally clueless bystander's reaction just for comic relief: a guy with earbuds is oblivious to the carnage around him, a woman gripes about the "traffic" as people run and scream past her car, a couple snipping at each other get distracted by the huge beast about to crush their car. It's funny, and I wouldn't say The Lake overdoes this, but... it kind of gets close.

I will admit I don't fully understand the ending. I think I get the vibe, and it's something I love to see in monster movies - alternative solutions to a life post-monster than just "kill it real hard" - but if you asked me to explain it to you, I couldn't. Honestly, this movie feels like it ends around minute 80. What was happening then seemed so final that I was beginning to wonder if maybe this was just one of those movies that have ridiculously long end credits. The brunt of the film takes place over a very small slice of time, one panicked day or portion of a day when a bunch of people experience something weird and impossible, and then there's about 20 minutes of aftermath. It's interesting how the official police line is just to deny that anything happened, and it's also interesting how the film itself doesn't fully demonize anyone for this - there's no real individual human failure here, the end message is just a kind of whole-scale realization that humanity is looking at nature wrong and that this is going to come back and bite us (literally). The police chief who cements the official story that nothing happened is not necessarily a bad person, he's just doing the only thing he thinks is right; he's got family, he's seen horrific things, and this is his reaction. Our cop dad disagrees with this so much that he quits, but it's not a moment of hard feelings, just an irreconcilable difference. Faceted, measured stuff, not the knee-jerk macho yelling you expect out of cops.

There's stuff I didn't like in this and stuff I liked a lot but overall I think it's good because it's a new direction for a monster movie to go in. I would not expect anything less from Thailand's movie industry, which has produced some iconic horror films as well as multiple filmmakers who have pioneered and changed cinema in a more experimental direction. I recommend this but not if you're just looking to get scared. You have to think about it too.

Ghost Man (1954)

directed by Motoyoshi Oda

Japan

73 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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So this was a treat: A fairly early Toho film that I wasn't aware existed, fully (if a little roughly) subtitled and in decent quality if you don't mind your audio being a bit crunchy. And just look at that poster. There's not a lot of names in this that most people would probably recognize, although Motoyoshi Oda is perhaps best known for directing Godzilla Raids Again*, and this whole movie is based on a Kōsuke Kindaichi mystery. Kindaichi's actor, Seizaburō Kawazu, has a lengthy filmography including multiple solid gold Toho classics, but his role in Ghost Man is essentially next to nothing as Kindaichi doesn't even show up until halfway through the film. Haruo Tanaka, an extremely prolific actor who worked for around 70 years, is also in a supporting role as one of the more interesting of several fairly unremarkable characters.

The film opens with a brief scene of a mysterious three-fingered man escaping from a mental hospital. It's par for the course for this era, but there's no nuance in the film's portrayal of mentally ill people or mental hospitals; this character's status as an escapee is used as shorthand for his evil and dangerous nature. The general public is aware of this incident through newspaper articles concerning the worrying escape of the so-called "Ghost Man" from a local asylum; we then learn that sometime after this event, a spate of murders has begun to occur in which the killer targets young, beautiful women working as nude models and poses them for disturbing photographs after killing them. This has the members of an art/photography club that hires out a group of young women as nude models understandably worried. This club is where the central characters of the film (aside from Kindaichi, but again, he's kind of a secondary concern here) are all located. The real action kicks off when that same mysterious, three-fingered man visits the club looking for a model on behalf of his unseen employer. Unaware of the Ghost Man's appearance, the club lets an (incredibly frightened) model go home with this man to a predictable result.

I want to talk for a minute about the role of women in this movie because there is something interesting about it. I'm in no way claiming that this is progressive or feminist, but I did find it unusual that all of the women we see in this film work in a profession that's generally looked down upon - as either nude models or, later in the film, strippers. There's nothing lewd whatsoever here, even the strip show we see later in the film is very, very classy and modest, and doing work like this that would usually be dismissed as immoral or desperate is... for lack of a better term, it's presented as art. It's also presented as work. These are working women who talk about having to feed their families, and they're good at what they do, but they take jobs that they know put them at risk because they need the money. None of the women are central characters but they are all important characters, always present. Which leads me into my next point.

There's just a ton of people in this movie. Other reviews I've seen have remarked on this as well and it's totally true; this movie has a huge central cast. I guess this isn't relevant to the plot, but it gives the whole of Ghost Man a unique feeling. At one point after everyone has sufficient evidence to be concerned about the wellbeing of the first model who goes missing, four guys from the club and the other four models all pile into the 1950s equivalent of a soccer mom van and go investigate the Ghost Man's creepy old house. In any given scene in this movie there will be at least eight people, and most of them are silent, so the camera's not constantly jumping between them and it's not hard to follow or anything, but really the only time there's a single person focused on is when someone is getting murdered. There's a feeling of safety in numbers - especially with the women - that reinforces the sinister, dangerous tone of the whole film.

There's honestly nothing much that stands out about this movie, which is not surprising considering Raids Again is probably the Godzilla series' weakest point, but I have to say it's one of those things that I knew wasn't outstanding but enjoyed watching very much anyway. It hits all the typical beats for a mystery in which the suspect is completely unknown and motivated by a bizarre obsession, but it's also just a tiny bit darker than I expected it to be. The Ghost Man, his face wrapped in bandages, is somehow not as aesthetically imposing a figure as he's meant to be, but the way he works in the shadows and produces unsettling photographs of women he's done terrible things to makes him genuinely menacing. There's a scene where he's sitting in some dark corner of an attic flipping through a scrapbook of his "works" and it's very effective. His henchman is not particularly interesting, aside from having been played by an actor who was actually missing some fingers, and really seems to be there as a delivery vehicle for a twist that was, similarly, not particularly interesting. But if this movie lacks depth in its characters, it at least makes up for that by having a boatload of them to choose from.

That's about all I can say about this. I liked it. The lighting is really interesting and the film has that "seedy underbelly" feel despite its steadfast refusal to overtly characterize nude modeling and dancing as a shameful profession. A lot of movies might have relegated the models, who are present in all steps of the investigation - it's their lives at risk here, anyway - to the background, a pool of meaningless characters to be picked off, but this one doesn't do that. I do wish this got more recognition, because a lot of '50s Toho films tend to fall by the wayside in favor of their biggest hits from that decade.

*I am dying to see his film "A Texan in Tokyo", which is apparently about "a Texan visiting Tokyo [who] takes medicine that gives him strength".