The Great Yokai War (2005)

directed by Takashi Miike

Japan

124 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched all of the original Yokai Monsters films throughout October 2022 and loved pretty much all of them to some degree, but never ended up reviewing any for some reason or another, so I wanted to give it a go for this one.

The inimitable Takashi Miike's celebration of the Yokai Monsters series and the film studio that produced it doesn't have much to do with the older movies directly, which is fine, because none of them have anything to do with each other either. This film is set up as kind of a coming-of-age story, taking place during the hazy, liminal time of summer vacation, when the boundary between reality and fantasy feels flimsy. Our main character, Tadashi, is bitten by a kirin during a festival and therefore chosen to be the "Kirin Rider", whose responsibilities, according to local legend, involve various feats of strength and triumphs against other local folkloric creatures. But it turns out he also has to do a whole lot more than that. If you know anything about Miike, you probably know him for his tendency towards extreme gore and absurd situations - really, as a director he's so unique that summing him up that way doesn't even scratch the surface - but this is a bit more subdued for him, though with a lot of the tricks he usually employs still recognizable. 

What this feels like is a love letter to growing up in Japan as a horror fan, and I'm talking pre-Ringu and Ju-on days, before that was all that Japanese horror was associated with. I'm very hesitant to call this kind of film and indeed Yokai Monsters as a whole "horror" at all, because even though they depict things that are eerie and weird, they don't have any association with horror in terms of the Western conception of it as a cohesive genre. Yōkai themselves are so isolated as a concept that I don't really feel comfortable lumping them in with general monsters and creepy-crawlies like your Draculas and your werewolves and whatnot. If you're not familiar with these creatures, nothing will be explained to you in The Great Yokai War - this is a movie that assumes prior understanding. Due to the protagonist being a young child, some context is given to him along the way, but as a viewer you just have to roll with it. And it also name-drops other things that a young person who was really into the macabre and strange would be familiar with, like GeGeGe no Kitarō, for example, and the fact that the main villain is none other than Yasunori Kato (you know, that guy).

I absolutely love the way the whole tone of the film changes when Tadashi starts making his way up the mountain and encounters all of the yōkai. There is no firm delineation between the realistic, mundane life he's familiar with and the world of myth, but you can tell that somewhere along the way a boundary is crossed. In the city, where everyone is moving on with their lives and no longer paying attention to legends, the kirin has to be puppeted by two people, a depiction of itself. Up the mountain, the kirin just is. In the city the man wears a mask, up the mountain the man is what he really is.

Besides having to save his wandering grandpa, Tadashi also ends up (along with an immense number of yōkai who, aside from the main crew, seem to mostly just be there for the party) having to maybe-not-technically "save" the whole of Tokyo from Kato's weaponized rage and bitterness. In an enormous complex of factory stacks and industrial buildings situated on the back of a flying, salamander-like creature, itself the size of a city, Kato is harnessing the negative energy from all the things the people of Tokyo throw away without a second thought. This is why the city is not wholly "saved" at the end: it goes through a reckoning, is mostly destroyed, but the message is that maybe it needed to be knocked down a couple of pegs, that people had to be reminded to care a little bit more... but not the way Kato wanted.

There's something I also really love about the way Kato is ultimately undone by a single bean coming into contact with his big evil cauldron in which he made his big evil scrap metal creatures. For all of his power and planning, for everything he constructed and put into motion, one tiny element of the traditional, of the remembered, of the story that is continuing on, was enough to destroy him. Just one bean representing everything he wanted to hurry up and forget ruined all of his evil schemes.

This is altogether pretty light on story, it's mostly something you watch if you're an effects nerd like me, but it's still got an important message about care and responsibility. The ending is surprisingly dour, but I liked this because it serves as a final reminder to us, the viewers, of what can happen if we don't have respect for the world around us. I'm looking forward to the more recent sequel and hope it only expands on what this film began.

Army of the Apes (1974)

directed by Kiyosumi Fukasawa, Atsushi Okunaka, Shunichiro Kazuki, Sogoro Tsuchiya

Japan

667 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I've never reviewed a full tokusatsu series before (not from lack of affection, just from lack of being able to say anything coherent about 25-50 episodes' worth of stuff in a single post) but something about Army of the Apes is making me need to talk about it. Forgive me if I don't reference specific episode numbers or titles; the reason for this is because currently, the series is only available with subtitles as an 11-hour-long YouTube video, and I lost track of what episode I was on.

So it's pretty obvious that this is a Planet of the Apes type of thing. I'm being very deliberate in not referring to it as a ripoff, because the intent was to have the series be a wholly original work. After a broadcast of Planet of the Apes reached very high viewership ratings in Japan, combined with the boom in disaster movies (Submersion of Japan, Prophecies of Nostradamus, etc) that was happening at the same time, Tsuburaya decided to get in on the action with their own series. In classic "me" fashion, this is the only of the Apes media I've ever seen, so I can't comment on similarities to other material.

At the beginning of the series, Izumi, a scientist/teacher working on research into time travel, and her two students, Jiro and Yurika, are forced by imminent natural disasters to enter experimental time-travel capsules as a last resort. They're thrown several thousand years into the future, and emerge into a world ruled by intelligent apes - you know the deal, I'm not going to go into it too much. Along the way, they meet the only other Homo sapiens still alive in that time, Godo, and an ape boy, Pepe, tags along with them all as well. The middle of the series lags a little bit when the characters all get separated from each other, and the story flip-flops between Izumi and Yurika and Godo, Jiro, and Pepe, all having their own problems and all trying to reunite. One point against the show is that oftentimes it doesn't feel like it knows how to handle its own cast.

But - and this is a rare thing for a toku series - the whole cast is very likable. I got a real kick out of Tetsuya Ushio (Godo) because he's so incongruous to the series. This is pretty much a straightforward, long-form sci-fi drama, nobody transforms or has superpowers or anything, but there's still this guy going Sonny Chiba on a room full of apes every other episode. Looking up Ushio's previous credits and finding out he played Hyoman made complete sense. Watching him fight, it's obscenely obvious he was a henshin hero at some point in his career. Izumi is a good character, too; she's saddled with two young children who are not family, and they're all in a strange, disorienting timeline, but she manages to keep their spirits up and protect them from bearing the full weight of their situation alone.

On the ape side of things, we've got some serious drama. There's a divide between gorillas (the ruling class/political elite) and chimpanzees (the proles, as it were). The two major players here are Bipu, the cabinet minister (I had to look up who plays him because he's absolutely enormous, and it turns out it's the big guy from Latitude Zero, Wataru Omae), and Geba, the chief of police. Of the two, Geba is the most entertaining to watch, having all the energy of a yappy dog who's been given too much power. The two of them also have opposite opinions on the humans, who are widely reviled by the apes: Bipu wants to keep them alive, although he's still somewhat ambivalent towards them, and Geba hates them with a fury. The humans are hunted down wherever they go, especially after Bipu seemingly dies. Political ape intrigue is also constantly running in the background, and eventually it builds up to a full-scale assassination plot that unfortunately goes nowhere at all.

I can't really explain why I like this series so much, and it might be that I'm attributing stuff to it that isn't really there. I've personally always been attracted to stories where there's only a handful of humans left in the world. In the first half of the series, there's a lot of moments where the crew seems to still have hope that there are other humans out there, but those hopes are dashed over and over until eventually they just focus on trying to survive. The sense of loss is so palpable, even in a low-budget series like this. There's a brief arc involving a robot that I really loved because it drives this feeling home. The gang finds a robot named Chip who was built by an enclave of now-long-dead human scientists when things started to get really bad. When the last human left the bunker and never returned, they told Chip essentially to hold the fort, and it had been doing that ever since, for potentially upwards of a thousand years. Just waiting for its programmers, who would never come back.

It's kind of frustrating that there were so many instances like that during the series where a longer story could have been told, but was glossed over in favor of returning to the ongoing fight against the apes. It's a short series, but I think if there had been more episodes that focused on the individual characters (maybe some backstory on Godo living in the mountains alone after his family died), the show would have felt a little fuller. But it's got great practical effects! The ape masks are quite impressive (and hell to wear, as per usual) and between suit acting and voice acting, the series really gets its mileage out of everything.

Also, I didn't know where else to put this in the review, so I'm just going to leave it here at the end: according to Japanese Wikipedia, Tetsuya Ushio apparently had an exorcism done on him at some point during filming.

The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1956)

directed by Masaki Mōri

Japan

86 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I'm a big Yotsuya Kaidan fan. I'm immensely fascinated by all the different retellings of the story and the spin every director who handles it puts on it, as well as the meaning the story can take on depending on who tells it, and the meaning a viewer can give to it that it may not have originally had. Although the framework stays consistent, the details change a little from film to film. As such, there's no way to really say that a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation is "standard fare", but... Masaki Mōri's Ghosts of Yotsuya feels like pretty standard fare, and I mean that (mostly) in a good way.

I'm kind of interested in Mōri as a director because there's not much information about him out there. His short Japanese Wikipedia article says he died of overwork at only 55. He directed a respectable amount of films, but the only two that have ever been subtitled (not that getting subtitled is a measure of worth, it just makes films accessible to a wider audience) are this one and Ghost Story: Depth of Kagami, which I've seen and which is a decent movie, but no great shakes. Even this movie is fairly obscure; I couldn't find it online, but I received a DVD as a gift, and the third-party distributor (Sinister Cinema) who put it out seems to be the only place you can get it. To make matters more confusing, the synopsis on the distributor's website is for this, the 1956 movie, but the poster on the cover of the DVD is for Nobuo Nakagawa's version! I'm quite happy with the DVD, the print is very crisp and the subtitles are good, but as usual, I am begging distributors who release any adaptation of Yotsuya Kaidan to use a serif font for the subs.

The story in Ghosts of Yotsuya begins amid fireworks, and is told in such a way that details at the outset are relatively scarce, but more of the past is revealed as the film goes on. This is one of the more upstanding Iemons I've seen, which is another interesting variation: there's kind of a spectrum of Iemon Nastiness™ throughout the adaptations, where on one end he's almost a bystander in a murder plot that he becomes guilty of by association, and on the other end he is the one who kills Iwa directly. Here, Iemon loves Iwa, but his family isn't happy with her, and wants him to marry a much wealthier woman, Ume. He refuses, and Ume's family won't accept simply sending her to him as a mistress, so everyone is at odds about what to do. Whether Iemon genuinely does love Iwa or simply feels a sense of duty to her out of guilt for killing her father - a fact which, somewhat entertainingly, everybody knows except for Iwa - is a little ambiguous, but he does seem to feel genuine regret at the way things turned out at the end. Usually in these movies Iemon is pushed to act by the people around him, which is the case here. His own mother is out for blood, explicitly commanding him to grow a spine and kill Iwa. Naosuke's as amoral as ever, of course, and goes cheerfully along with the plot, but in this case it's Iemon's family who's the real impetus for most of what happens.

The big reason why I wanted to watch this was to see Tomisaburō Wakayama in a very early role. He would play Iemon again, much more amorally, in Tai Katō's 1961 The Tale of Oiwa's Ghost. As with most everyone else, his performance is very stiff - at least until Iemon's big freakout at the end, which is the best part of the movie - and it's funny to see him basically just doing a job, considering how distinctive an actor he eventually would be. He's got a full face of heavy makeup and looks quite a lot like his brother here.

There are some adaptations of Yotsuya Kaidan that feel like they're attempting to be ghost stories, and some - notably Keisuke Kinoshita's version - that feel like they want to be a character study and nothing else. I think this leans a bit more towards the "character study" side. Iemon is somebody who is constantly being pulled at from all sides and doesn't seem to have enough of a concept of self to figure out his own morals. One of the things that drives him in any adaptation is self-hatred; his resentment at his own low birth limiting his station, and his fall into poverty making him irritated with his life and in turn his family. After she dies and begins haunting Iemon, Iwa makes explicit a really interesting point that I never really thought about: by killing her (directly or indirectly) and their child, and joining Ume's family, he ends his own family line, forever. Iemon basically dooms himself from the start of the story, and everything that happens between then and the end is a long, protracted journey where he drags everybody around him down with him. As I said, his breakdown when Iwa and the masseur return from the dead is the high point of the film, and it bleeds out to Naosuke too, who seems to be less tortured by conscience and more just wanting to get all the ghosts to quit bothering him. Interestingly, Sode, who's usually more of a peripheral character, does not mess around in this one. She finds out Naosuke had a part in the murder of her sister and immediately comes at him with a huge knife.

This movie isn't bad by any means, but it felt much longer than it actually is. It goes through all the beats at all the right times, but aside from an unusually sober, reasonable Iemon, it doesn't feel too remarkable in terms of addition to the story. But I still love watching these, and I'll continue to hunt down all of them that I can find. I would love to see more from this director as well, especially any other ghost story films he has.

The Manster (1959)

directed by George P. Breakston, Kenneth G. Crane

United States/Japan

72 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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TEMPLE PRIEST SLAIN BY FIEND!

I had not heard of this until I read about it in Stuart Galbraith's Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo!, and I was intrigued because American sci-fi/horror movies from the '50s and Japanese monster movies are basically my two favorite things. How could a movie that combines the two exist without being more widely known?

This was a Japanese-American co-production, shot in Japan, and actually released a full three years earlier there than it was in the States. Reception seems to have been lukewarm at the time of release, and continues to be lukewarm today; for once, I'm not going to be a dissenting voice about that. This isn't a spectacular movie. It's fun, but no great shakes, especially if you've already seen a lot from either contributing country's monster film back catalogue. I looked into director Breakston's previous works, and... I'm not going to be exploring him any further, to say the least. The other guy was at least partially to blame for the Americanized version of Half Human so he's verboten too as far as I'm concerned.

The main character of the film is a foreign correspondent, Larry Stanford, working in Tokyo but about to return to the US. His last job is to interview a scientist named Dr. Suzuki in his lab way up in the mountains (something about the aesthetic of a hidden laboratory in such a rural setting was really cool to me), but once he gets there, Suzuki starts asking him some strange questions... questions, say, that one might ask if one was planning to turn one's conversational partner into a manster. The scientist drugs our hapless protagonist and injects him with a mystery solution that slowly but surely starts mutating him into something more than human. We see the previous results of whatever was in that needle in the form of Suzuki's wife and son, both locked up in his basement after their transformation into terrible, incoherent creatures. Why exactly Stanford was meant to turn out better than the previous two attempts is not entirely clear to me, but by the end Suzuki realizes his mistake.

It's pretty standard schlocky fare. The main problem I had with this was that it's got too much "man" and not enough "-ster". Once Stanford's transformation ramps up, things start getting interesting, but for a 72-minute movie, there's a lot of time spent on Stanford's infidelities and other human woes. I'm also not sure if his sudden turn towards drink and women when he'd previously described himself as a "good boy" was some kind of side-effect of the mystery serum, but we spend a good deal of time watching this guy running himself into the ground before we get to see any monster stuff. In my opinion, this movie picks up once more characters enter the scene: various policemen, Stanford's boss, his wife, and numerous eyewitnesses and unfortunate victims serve to flesh out what had, until then, been a pretty boring cast. It's also fun to see Tetsu Nakamura, who I recognized as one of the goons from Mothra, in a substantial, non-goon role, but he's not in it enough to really carry the film; the task is instead allotted to our somewhat less-than-capable protagonist.

Special effects were handled by Shinpei Takagi, which is... weird, considering this is the only time in his entire career that he did special effects (he was an actor, and also played the doomed priest in this film). The transformation sequence is very choppy and jumps jarringly from one stage to the next; technology at the time was, of course, not at a point where a true, real-time transformation could be shown, but I still feel like there could have been some in-between with regards to how quickly Stanford starts mutating. I will say one of the best scenes in the whole film is when Stanford, messy drunk and alone, tears off his shirt to reveal a fully-formed eye on his shoulder. That's a kind of gross that I wasn't expecting from this. Otherwise, the effects are alright. If I could have found a print of this in better than total garbage quality, I might have appreciated them more.

Recommended mostly for monster movie fans and dedicated ones at that.

Thermae Romae (2012)

directed by Hideki Takeuchi

Japan

108 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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It is taking everything I have not to title this review "Hot Tub Time Machine".

Hey, did you know there was a movie where Hiroshi Abe plays an ancient Roman architect who gets sucked into a modern-day Japanese onsen through a portal inside a Roman bath, and takes the concepts he witnesses back to his own time, revolutionizing indoor plumbing and becoming a hero of the Empire? Neither did I, until yesterday, and by god am I glad I watched it immediately.

So that's basically the whole plot, with some padding here and there to stretch it out to 108 minutes. Abe plays Lucius, an architect who designs Roman baths but is kind of down on his luck, in an unhappy marriage, preoccupied with his job but otherwise essentially stagnant. When a whirlpool in the side of a public bath transports him inexplicably to the modern era, to a public bathhouse in Japan full of jolly old dudes who delight in his presence, he assumes he's somehow ended up in a far-flung province of the Roman Empire, and that everybody there must be slaves. But what he refers to as the "flat-faced tribe" has innovations so far ahead of his own people's technology that it puts him to great shame - he is brought to literal tears by his first taste of fruit-flavored milk - and when he returns to his own timeline, he gets to work bringing innovations from the modern day to the Romans. Of course, because he has no idea about automation or electronics, he assumes everything he sees that works with no apparent human intervention is powered by slaves toiling somewhere offscreen (blowing bubbles into the hot tub, stoking fires under the baths to keep them warm, playing an actual orchestra for background music, etc), and he uses those methods when he implements the modern-day technologies in his own time, so his success is kind of a double-edged sword. But this is not elaborated upon aside from the occasional visual gag.

To Thermae Romae's credit, it seems to be trying as hard as it possibly can not to be an isekai, but eventually Lucius meets Mami, a failing manga artist who's really, really into Fist of the North Star and works at a hot springs inn. It takes a while for the two to spend any real length of time together, because Lucius is always getting sucked back to Rome at the worst moments, and nobody believes Mami about him. But eventually she brushes up on her Latin and accidentally gets transported back to Rome along with Lucius. So it's a little bit of an isekai after all.

Perhaps because of the effort to not shoehorn this into typical genre conventions, one of the film's shortfalls is that it takes a really long time to feel like the actual storyline is kicking in. The plot is obvious from the start, and I can't say that I hated watching Hiroshi Abe explore modern bathhouses in bewilderment, but it takes until over halfway through the film for there to be any real conflict or expectations that Lucius must face. The parallels between him and Mami are interesting, though: both of them struggle in some way with being true to themselves, Lucius because it bothers him increasingly that he's cribbing his ideas from other people, and Mami because even though she's a good artist and extremely determined to make it in the business, her stories are too lackluster for a publisher to accept them, and it's looking like she might have to marry for convenience so her parents don't have to support her anymore. The two of them don't have any particular on-screen chemistry, but their romance is cute anyway, and the two characters compliment each other well.

The best part is how completely straight Abe plays it. Not much of this required any real suspension of disbelief, even though when you really think about it, the system of how Rome and Japan are portrayed onscreen is fairly complicated. In the scenes that take place in Rome, everybody speaks Japanese (which I guess we pretend is Latin - doesn't bother me, I watched Chernobyl) and for the most part they're not played by Japanese actors; there's a handful of more important characters who are, like the emperor Hadrian (in an instance of truly inspired casting, you may recognize Hadrian as the voice of Mewtwo in several Pokemon films) and a few of his higher-ups, but the whole idea here is that we are absolutely not supposed to believe any of the Romans are Japanese. Lucius is recognized as a foreigner when he's transported to modern Japan. Also, when Lucius is in the present day, his thoughts are mostly conveyed through internal monologues, but when he does speak out loud, he speaks Latin. It's... you really just kind of have to not worry about it. It's fine. Just go with it. And even though in the canon of the film, nobody in ancient Rome is actually Japanese, it didn't bother me at all to imagine there could be ethnically-Japanese citizens of the Empire, because we do know that the remains of people with East Asian features have been found within Rome. (Although if we're being technical, the people living in what would eventually become Japan at the time this film takes place were mostly concerned with getting good at farming and making really cool pots, and I doubt any of them came to live in the Empire, but hey, people have always known how to sail, nothing's impossible.)

Historical accuracy is not a huge concern when considering this film critically, because the whole thing is goofy and not meant to be a perfect depiction of ancient Roman life, but nevertheless I really enjoy it as somebody who is into history because I feel like it embodies the spirit of why history fascinates people so much. Everybody fantasizes about meeting somebody from thousands of years ago, which is why movies that use that as a plot point remain so interesting to me. And the backbone of Thermae Romae goes beyond the simple exchange of ideas between time periods and into the idea of cultural interchange in general - Lucius at first is struck by guilt about his ideas not being original, and feels like he's stealing from this mysterious tribe he's encountered, but by the end of the movie, a bunch of Mami's hot springs inn customers get transported back to Rome too, and enthusiastically help construct a bunch of ondol huts (houses that take advantage of the heat and warmth of a natural hot spring for healing and relaxation, without the actual bath component) for wounded soldiers. The message here feels like it's implying that cultural exchange is best when it's two-sided. I would hesitate before assuming any real-world philosophy from a movie where a Roman encounters a bidet and it practically sends him to another plane of existence, but the idea that everybody can learn something from everybody else and it's even better if all involved parties willingly exchange those ideas is a good takeaway.

So yeah, this is a movie that exists. At some point I realized the primary function of it may have been for looking at Hiroshi Abe almost entirely nude, but it's interesting even beyond that. At another point I also realized that this was made over ten years ago in Japan, very clearly depicts ancient Rome as a multi-ethnic society, and yet Americans still struggle enormously with the idea that ancient European societies weren't exclusively 100% white. I wouldn't consider this groundbreaking cinema - actually, yeah, I kind of would, it's a little bit incredible and I love it - but it's really fun and has a good conscience behind it. I really like how some of the scene transitions are marked by a guy singing opera alone in what appears to be the tokusatsu quarry.

Gorath (1962)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

88 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I am writing this with the space pilot song stuck in my head.

I rewatched Gorath for other reasons, but I'd forgotten that it also takes place around New Year's/Christmas, so it's an appropriate watch for this time of year, or any time of year, because it's great. This is also my first time watching it both A. All in one sitting (I got weirded out the first time and turned it off, then finished it much later) and B. Not stoned. While I continue to advocate for watching tokusatsu while you're high, I can think about the film itself much more clearly in a state where the English dialogue doesn't give me the giggles.

The first fifteen minutes or so of this are a feast of practical effects. I'm very surprised that this movie is so obscure among Western fans, because it contains some of Toho's best miniature work by far. We open with the spacecraft Hayabusa, on a research mission to find out about a rogue wandering star that Earth's scientists have been keeping an eye on. Everything is normal until the final approach, when it rapidly becomes clear that the star is far more dangerous than anyone on the crew could have anticipated. There's a great moment when the radar picks up an unknown spacecraft being swallowed up by the star and destroyed, and the crewmen realize that this is also to be their fate. These opening minutes set the overall emotional tone for the rest of the film, and are peak Ishirō Honda: a group of brave people realizing their own impending doom, and trying to find solace in what their deaths may contribute to the pool of humanity's knowledge. Jun Tazaki's captain character stone-facedly crying is a real gut-puncher, and Tazaki's presence can be a bit of a "Drew Barrymore in Scream" moment if you've only watched a couple of Toho movies and are used to seeing him as some stoic captain or commander who sticks around, if peripherally, for the whole film.

Back on Earth, there's revelry in the streets as a new year dawns. Setting the film around the new year is a clever way to emphasize what year it is, and make it very clear to the viewers that this is the future - the film takes place over the course of several years, from 1976 to 1982 - but it's also a good metaphor for the passage of time in general. As the calendar turns over, the power of science and technology also continues to advance. It may seem silly to viewers watching this over 40 years later, but I think this portrayal of 1982 is actually a really nuanced idea of the future: the clothing and culture is the same, humans are still humans, but the technology is different. (One thing I really loved was the video phones. Imagine being on a Zoom call with Takashi Shimura.)

But despite people getting on with their lives, the threat of Gorath - which is what the wandering star is designated as - looms. Earth is directly in its path, and there's seemingly nothing anyone can do about its impending arrival in seven-hundred-odd days. Surprisingly, this exact premise is really not unfamiliar within tokusatsu; I can think of several television episodes off the bat in which a rogue planet or star threatens the Earth, either randomly or through the bad guys' evil plot of the week, and the hero or heroes need to stop it. Hell, Warning From Space is basically this movie but with aliens. But having the premise stretched to a full film, helmed by Ishirō Honda, makes Gorath stand out from the rest. There's a real sense of anxiety that hangs over the whole film, no matter if what's happening is a calm moment or a scene at the South Pole base where jets are being attached to Earth to try to move it out of Gorath's path.

The science in this is also patently ridiculous, some of the most absurd I've seen on film, but that didn't bother me in the slightest and I would hope it wouldn't seriously bother anybody else either. You've got a little cushion of time as an excuse to suspend your disbelief: it's the future, people can do all kinds of weird future stuff, maybe someday we really will be able to fly the planet around like a spaceship. But more than that, I just think this movie is so good - and so obviously intended as science fiction, as a speculation of the future, and not as fact - that I don't think one should get too caught up in fake science.

Unfortunately, if anything bogs this film down, it's pacing. It feels like the movie ends around the one-hour mark, and everything after that (excluding the jubilant finale when Earth manages to skirt the threat of Gorath) is mostly padding. The movie contains one of the most (in)famous examples of what I've heard called a "Tanaka Kaiju"; I.E. a kaiju that's only in the movie because Tomoyuki Tanaka, the producer, wanted it in there. Manda from Atragon is another example, but Manda works far, far better as a plot device than the extremely shoehorned-in walrus-reptile, Maguma. Its appearance comes right when the lull in the action starts, and it is THE most jarring thing; up until then the film had been so serious, and afterwards it still is, but now there's a giant walrus. I do love Maguma, and I think it's a shame that it was derided and edited out of the U.S. release of the film, but I have to admit that it does feel really out of place.

I think the thing that makes this movie what it is is the weight given to Gorath. Even though it is a non-sentient being, it's treated almost as a god, something that inspires a quasi-religious terror in those who witness it firsthand. Akira Kubo's pilot character, Kanai, in one of the best scenes of the whole film, goes on a solo approach to the star and views it head-on from dangerously close, and it gives him amnesia. Watching this part high really messed me up. It's not as effective as the amnesia subplot in Rodan, but it's still great. The effects used to create Gorath, this fiery, spitting demon planet senselessly devouring all in its path, are incredibly convincing when coupled with the characters' genuine reactions of horror. There are lighthearted moments too, though - for example, I really like when Kanai and his pilot buddies make up some flagrant lie about their captain killing himself so the Space Agency brass will tell them why their mission was scrapped - and they create a nice balance between the constant threat of Gorath and the persistence of the human desire to goof around.

This is just peak mid-century sci-fi as far as I'm concerned. I will not hear criticism of it as cheesy. That's something I sometimes don't even say about movies that don't have a giant walrus in them. Gorath itself made another appearance in Godzilla: Final Wars, where the Xilliens attempt to drop it on Godzilla and he one-shots it and the whole affair is over in like a minute, but the film it comes from is largely glossed over, perhaps due to the poor initial reception when it got its English dub. Which wasn't the film's fault, by the way - weird cuts and editing decisions on the part of its international distributors, including just straight up adding seven minutes of educational content to the beginning of the film, detracted from its strong core. I hope this gets an official DVD release with good subtitles someday, but until then, it's worth digging around for it.