Super Legend God Hikoza (2022)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

70 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Me? Reviewing a tokusatsu movie that's less than 40 years old? Strange but true!

So this is one of those lower-budget tokusatsu movies that are made specifically to promote tourism to a smallish town. Kawasaki's managed to spin a whole movie out of the "local hero" concept, but with an added history lesson: the backbone of the plot is Aichi Prefecture's hometown hero (I use this term facetiously, aware that it doesn't begin to convey the nuance of a historical figure who has been respected and remembered for something like 500 years), Hikozaemon Okubo. Okubo served sengoku-era shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, and while he was a real person, it seems like his place in history was largely cemented by storytelling, which eventually evolved into kabuki theater and now into a movie with basically a super sentai mecha in it.

The basic story is... well, it's basic, alright. Hundreds of years ago the guardian of the town of Koda fought against an evil monster and was victorious, sealing himself into the form of a wooden doll to be uncovered when the cycle inevitably repeated and the evil rose again. At the same time, there's a team of scientists working on technology that harnesses latent psychic energy, two of whom find the Hikoza doll and transform into God Hikoza when they both hold it together. God Hikoza becomes the darling of Koda, spending a good five minutes doing stuff like shilling for onsen, driving schools, welding shops, and restaurants, and shaking hands with the mayor.

They have four suits in this thing and all of them are more or less great. The shark person felt unnecessary and looked oddly mole-like rather than shark-like, but the weird golden fish creature was aces. As for God Hikoza, I love me a henshin hero who has to go through stages - think Inazuman - so I think it's very cool that Hikoza has a less powerful form, which it takes when only two people are combining, and then a final form that takes four people to achieve. (The final form is essentially Muteki Shogun from Kakuranger.)

I really admire how this movie can be so self-aware without verging (at least to me) into self-parody. We all know what kind of movie this is, we know what to expect. There's no pretentiousness here because the movie knows it wouldn’t be able to get away with it. The actors seem very aware that they're playing a role, and even when their performances feel awkward or unpolished, it all works with the overall vibe of the movie. It's just a super casual viewing experience. A high tolerance for fun is required. You kind of get this feeling from watching older tokusatsu TV sometimes, but now there's an added layer of self-referentiality.

I have to say also that this feels very restrained for Kawasaki, which is to the film's credit. A lot of his earlier works try too hard to be funny all the time, but Super Legend God Hikoza is fun to watch precisely because none of its goofy charm feels forced. It's not a perfect movie, but it's a good time. Also, I'm pretty sure they got Masato Shimon to do the theme song, which is kind of insane.

Son of Godzilla (1967)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

85 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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Son of Godzilla, despite being a bombastic, colorful, and incredibly well-made movie, was apparently disliked by audiences enough that Toho considered ending the series afterward. This was the height of the kaiju boom in Japan: as I mentioned in my Space Monster Wangmagwi review, 1967 saw every major film studio produce a kaiju movie. But every bubble must burst, and the burgeoning success of Ultraman and Ultraseven signaled a shift towards television that would leave film studios struggling to raise theater attendance. For now, though, this is Toho at the top of their game.

Visually - and sonically, Masaru Satō's score is genuinely one of the best soundtracks ever put to film - this movie is such a delight. It was filmed on location in Guam (you can tell because everybody is really tan), so there's no shortage of jungle scenes that are more convincing than anything achieved even on one of Toho's reality-defying open sets, but it's the miniatures that shine the most here. I love the cohesive look of it all. There's something about the brightly-colored structures the scientists live and work in that almost feels a little... dreamlike, perhaps, like an idea that a child might have of what doing science is like.

The editing and compositing here is some of Toho's finest, I believe. This is my fourth rewatch of the film, and it seems like lately when I've been rewatching Godzilla movies I've really been taking notice of the way scale is achieved. I'm thinking about a scene where Godzilla blasts one of the Kamacuras with his atomic breath and a piece of it goes flying off and lands, flaming, while the tiny-in-comparison human characters flee. The optical printing is remarkably well done here, and shots of puppets - small in reality but made convincingly huge - superimposed over the jungle landscape look great. The creative editing even extends to the human story too: I love that scene after the weather balloon experiment fails spectacularly where we hear Fujisaki narrate everything that's gone wrong on the island over a montage of floods and storms, and then it cuts to him writing about it in a journal. That was just such a unique way to structure a narrative moment meant to immerse us further in the environs of the film.

I recently read an article talking about the way science has been used throughout the Godzilla series that I thought was really interesting, and it highlighted this movie in specific and how it has a very different view on the use of science to assert mastery over nature than a lot of previous films. In short, while doing experiments does give rise to monsters - Kamacuras and Kumonga - and cause the weather on the island to go haywire, the thing that stops all of that is just doing more science. The solution to messing things up through your experimentation is to experiment harder. This is a strikingly optimistic viewpoint in contrast to the often dismal opinion of scientific interference with nature that many Godzilla films hold, although if you think too hard about what the people on Solgel Island are doing, they do still seem a little arrogant: it's for the greater good, but they are wrecking the ecosystem of an island which had up until then been in balance, and that includes the other living creatures on it. Kamacuras is as much a product of man's meddling with nature as the original Godzilla was, but Kamacuras is portrayed in a far less sympathetic light than Godzilla.

I will admit this is not my favorite Godzilla suit, but Hiroshi Sekita's performance makes me not care about how the suit looks. Sekita was chosen instead of Haruo Nakajima - Godzilla's default suit actor, pretty much - because he was taller than Nakajima and the film's producers wanted to create more contrast between Godzilla and Minilla. I can't source this because I don't recall where I read it, but apparently Sekita would speak to Minilla while in the suit (either out loud or in his head), narrating what Godzilla would be saying to his son: instructions on how to use his atomic breath, admonishments on venturing into dangerous parts of the island, et cetera. There is consistently so much effort put into bringing Godzilla to life as a character. I will talk about this until I'm blue in the face because for so long bad dubs and a lack of attention caused the Godzilla series to be regarded as "goofy rubber monster movies".

I understand how jarring this movie must seem when you consider the idea of Godzilla as a bringer of misery and pain, as he had been in his first two films (and would be again). But to me the thing that's so, so fascinating about Godzilla as a character, and why he has proved so enduring, is this: there's what Godzilla is - a stand-in for the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, depicted as such with varying degrees of fervency depending on whether you're going off Kayama's original idea for him or Honda's interpretation - and then there's what you do with him. In large part, this transition away from Godzilla as a force of terror and dread was due to Toho recognizing that their biggest audience was children, and so the people who made movies like this maybe did not necessarily want to make them this way - but they did. Godzilla as a cultural icon survived this long precisely because he has changed, and will continue to, but at the same time, there's always been a core concept that has remained throughout all of his iterations. There's no denying that there is a solid idea of What Godzilla Is, but, conversely, it also must be recognized that there's a What Godzilla Can Be.

Gamera vs. Guiron (1969)

directed by Noriaki Yuasa

Japan

82 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Strange things are afoot on the pale blue dot. Unusual radio waves and anomalous activity in space have been detected and are being studied by scientists on Earth. This is the last year of the hyper-modern 1960s, and all eyes and ears are turning outward and upward, to the vast cosmos, wondering: who - or what - is out there?

Well, there's Gamera, for starters.

While the adults are concerned with finding the source of the enigmatic radio waves, Akio and Tom are miles ahead of them. Using nothing more than a simple balcony telescope, they witness a UFO and follow it as it lands nearby. They board it with no hesitation and immediately hijack the thing, which is super fun at first, but then a little scary when meteors threaten to strike the ship as soon as it gets into space. But Gamera is there to save the day - until, controlled by some external force, the UFO starts accelerating faster than even Gamera can keep up with, and soon, the boys are on the mysterious tenth planet, unwilling houseguests of the real owners of the spacecraft.

This is a movie that hides absolutely nothing from its viewers. There's satisfaction in picking at and unraveling a complex plot, in watching a film that demands attention and multiple viewings to fully understand it. But there's also something fun about a movie like this where everything happens in a masterfully controlled linear flow from start to finish. This is just one of the ways that this movie caters - and I do not say "caters" in a pejorative sense - to its young audience. Children are the focus here, and although the film was made by adults, it feels like it has such an understanding of what it's like to be a kid. When the boys are using a dart gun to mess with their local cop and the cop tells them to run along now, returning Tom's dart by sticking it to his forehead, he almost turns to the camera for a second, like "aw jeez, can you believe this?" The language of the film is something that takes steps to include children at every turn.

It's also, to me, one of the most visually stunning Gamera movies. Everything about this is the reason why I love tokusatsu. I've been thinking recently, due to an interview I'm machine-translating (spoilers!), about the inherent unpredictability of tokusatsu and how it differs from visual effects achieved by CGI: I'm not implying in any sense that the distinctive aesthetic of this movie is accidental or that the people making it didn't know what they were doing, but the process of creating something like the Guiron suit and putting it on film is one that necessarily entails a lot of discovery. You can't be sure what something is going to look like on camera, and even once you've filmed it, you now have the work of integrating it within the wider narrative of the film through the editing process. This handmade nature is why older films like this have such a unique feel.

I think one of my favorite parts of this is how the room where Akio and Tom end up almost getting their brains eaten has visible wooden floorboards, painted white. I just love the feeling I get from looking at a spaceship with wooden board flooring.

So I've talked about the visuals, what about the real stars (the monsters)? I'm kind of a Zigra stan - love that wacky goblin shark - but upon this most recent rewatch, Guiron is seriously challenging that. Guiron's first appearance is so, so stunning. For some reason I kept thinking about that scene in Rodan - one of my favorite sequences in all of tokusatsu - where the lead character goes down into a mine and witnesses incomprehensible sights, like the giant baby Rodan emerging from its egg and eating giant larvae. The sheer horror of the scene in Rodan is not there at all, but the sense of seeing something that shifts your paradigm totally is. The real feeling of weightiness that Guiron has is what makes him so good: he's a big lug and he feels like a big lug, you can feel how every step is laborious, how much gravity tugs at his body. Gamera: Rebirth took an interesting tack in their redesign of Guiron as a spring-loaded, weirdly ferrety creature, considering how palpably heavy the original is.

And this whole thing is just so coherent. You understand on instinct how the aliens' equipment works. Reiko Kasahara and Hiroko Kai play Barbella and Flobella the spacewomen like they studied from a real exoplanetary culture.

Like Godzilla, Gamera had a debut that established him as a creature that was not actively malevolent but operated as more of a natural disaster, but by this time, Gamera was firmly entrenched in his role as a protector of children. Every single second of Gamera vs. Guiron reflects that: this is one of the most "made for kids" movies I've ever seen, and that's what's beautiful about it. Or, to elaborate, the fact that, in addition to being one of the most "made for kids" movies I've ever seen, this is also - IMO - one of the most visually stunning non-Toho monster movies to come out of the 1960s - that's what's beautiful about it.

Destroy All Monsters (1968)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

89 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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Somehow it's been three years since the last time I saw this. I watch most of the other Godzilla movies yearly if not bi-yearly, but this one slipped through the cracks.

This film begins by fleshing out the idea of Monster Island, something which continues to pop up within Godzilla media to this day: a remote island where the world's most notorious monsters get sent for being very naughty, able to live in seeming harmony with each other while being kept away from civilization. I'm honestly surprised that more isn't made of this within the film, but it's established that Monster Island has been a thing for at least the past 20 years by the time the story begins, so I guess people had time to get used to it. But to me, creating a place where every monster that had once terrorized the world can live in peace, away from humankind, is one of the most monumental achievements within this franchise - and of course it all goes wrong, because this is an Ishirō Honda film and no hubris can go unpunished.

When an invading race of aliens, the Kilaaks, put the monsters of Monster Island - as well as some human scientists - under mind control, the obvious flaw in keeping all those monsters in such close proximity to one another becomes apparent. The monsters scatter across the planet, wreaking havoc in every major city as commanded by the Kilaaks. What exactly the Kilaaks want with Earth is never explained in great detail, but we all know the genre conventions by now. It's enough to see aliens show up and announce that they plan to take over the world, we don't need to know why.

The thing that struck me upon rewatching this was that the human characters are shockingly competent. In general, the human story is mixed with the kaiju action in a superb way, and I'll talk about that in a minute, but I want to dedicate this paragraph to appreciating the fact that everybody in this movie just gets stuff done. There's not a lot of depth to the character development (the old man, played by Ikio Sawamura, who accidentally retrieves the Kilaak's homing beacon and mentions that his son works on the moon base has more character development than any of the main cast) and so most of the characters mainly exist as embodiments of whatever their job description is than individual personalities, but it works really, really well. The film doesn't even allow the mind-control plot to overstay its welcome when it comes to the human scientists who the Kilaaks use to spread their message. They get their mind-control implants removed and it's immediately back to business. No messing around. The military has their obligatory confrontations here and there, but for the most part it's the Monster Island crew, the moon base workers, and some associated scientists, who know exactly what has to be done and exactly how to do it.

This is really Toho at the peak of their special-effects prowess. Sadamasa Arikawa was director of special effects, and you can see the influence of Teruyoshi Nakano starting to become apparent in the prominence of missile-barrage sequences and other explosions. What I'm impressed by the most is the way scale is established, and how huge, impossible things - not just the kaiju but also scenes like the Kilaak home base - are integrated within the human world. There's no moment where it feels like the human actors and the fantastical space-age world around them are separate, even though they are; the cuts between a monster showing up and everybody standing around goggling at it all feel like they were shot at the same time. Destroy All Monsters establishes its world so well that, even though it's intended to be the future, it fits right in with the time it was released. The film invites you to believe everything in it is plausible, and makes you forget that it isn't. This is, I believe, a perfect example of tokusatsu as an art form.

The plot is pretty thin when you actually sit down and consider it, but when the visual storytelling is this good, that all feels like it's not a big deal.

I think this is a movie to recommend to people - of which there are many, for some reason - who are unconvinced of the importance of human characters in kaiju film. No, there's no intricate personal storylines like in the first Godzilla film, or in Terror of Mechagodzilla or Minus One, but this movie shows that just having characters who are good at their jobs is more than satisfying enough. Watching a clear, crisp print of it where you can appreciate the cinematography and beautiful lighting and color palette is a really rewarding experience, even for me as somebody who already knows they like Godzilla a lot.

Space Monster Wangmagwi (1967)

directed by Kwon Hyeok-Jin

South Korea

82 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I started working a night-shift job for the first time in my life recently and to be frank I did not have my shit together enough last month to do Kaijune like I usually do. Fortunately, however, there are two months with "-ju" in the name.

Welcome to Kaijuly.

Space Monster Wangmagwi is a South Korean monster movie. You will often hear that it was supposedly lost, but it was just lacking a home media release; the Korean Film Archive held copies and would screen it on occasion. SRS Cinema's recent restoration and subtitling of the film has exposed it to a wider audience, but it should really be noted that this film was not, as the story goes, fully lost. 

This film is historically important, as it's the first all-Korean science fiction film and the oldest Korean monster movie, but it's also just really fun: it's interesting to watch a film industry do this stuff for the first time ever. 1967 was the year that all of Japan's major film studios produced a kaiju movie (Toho with Son of Godzilla, Nikkatsu with Gappa, and Daiei with Gamera vs. Gyaos), so this movie came at a time when monster movies were very popular. I am a stickler for only applying the term "kaiju" to specifically Japanese giant monsters - I don't think it makes sense otherwise - but I can justify including this film in Kaijuly because most people who are into kaiju stuff would probably also be into this. 

The plot is bare-bones: aliens, having scouted Earth as the perfect planet for their invasion, release a monster upon their targeted landing site (the southern part of the Korean peninsula) to weaken the populace and make it easier for them to take over. Wangmagwi was not originally huge, but the aliens figured things so that it would expand upon contact with Earth's atmosphere until it became a city-destroying giant. Wangmagwi itself is innocent in all this - even when the aliens are wrangling it out of its cage and shoving it out of their spaceship, it's resisting like a trapped animal. It doesn't destroy out of malevolence; it's just a scared, confused creature, out of its element and under attack for reasons it cannot fathom.

What's interesting here is the way the human characters are handled. I assumed that the two we started the film with would be the protagonists: a young woman and her soon-to-be husband, who is an air force pilot. He gets called away when Wangmagwi lands on the night before their wedding, and she eventually is abducted by Wangmagwi, being carried around in its hand for most of the film. But these people are not the main characters. In fact, I don't believe this is a film that has main characters. We follow several disparate people throughout the course of the film, and none of them feels any more important than another. The random street urchin who we're first introduced to after he's broken into some rich guy's house and eaten all his food does far more to wound Wangmagwi than the literal actual military.

I did not expect Space Monster Wangmagwi to be this funny, either. Mentioning this almost constitutes a spoiler because it's better to go into it believing everything will be played straight. It is at first, but then you've got two chuckleheads betting each other's houses and wives on which of them will survive the monster attack, a guy who really, really needs to go to the bathroom in the middle of the evacuation, and the aforementioned street urchin getting stuck in Wangmagwi's sinuses and peeing in there. This is a more accurate picture of how utterly chaotic and disorganized humans would be in the case of a monster attack than most monster movies will provide. Everybody is running around willy-nilly and just generally acting like dumbasses.

So, what about Wangmagwi itself? As I said, it doesn't have a lot of personality other than just being confused and upset. The way it tramples on Seoul is quite cautious, actually; at times it almost seems to be deliberately going around large structures. It takes a long time to even decide that it wants to smash a building. Its design is... well, it's a design, certainly. Kind of an apeish, toothy, weirdly gangly humanoid thing with big ears that looks like it's coated in rubber cement. But I'll tell you one thing that this movie does surprisingly well: scale. It really nails the miniatures, and accents them with shots of people looking up at the monster in horror, so the overall effect of Wangmagwi's size is very convincing.

This movie surprised me in a lot of ways. The SRS Cinema restoration is stunningly crisp and clear, and it's a testament to the craft of the filmmakers that the effects still look good with the patina of time wiped away. The storyline isn't going to win any awards but the human characters do manage to be sympathetic. The cinematography is genuinely good. I'm really, really fond of Space Monster Wangmagwi, and I'm glad it's getting the recognition it deserves.