Today I thought I would do something different and gather together short reviews of a few independent(-ish) kaiju films. I'm keeping this exclusively to films under an hour in length, since anything longer would just get reviewed in a normal post. This is the first part in what I'm hoping will become a series.
Day of the Kaiju (2014), dir. Kazuhiro Nakagawa
Japan
30 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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As far as I can tell, this was sort of a calling card for its director, who went on to direct not many things thus far but very, very good things. He has directed two episodes of Ultraman Decker as well as the stellar Godzilla Day 2021 short Godzilla vs. Hedorah, and also received an assistant director credit on Shin Godzilla, which is the film with the strongest thematic similarities to this short. Nothing, I don't think, quite matches the feeling of Day of the Kaiju itself, which is why we desperately need to get this guy a film to serve as a solo vehicle for his own ideas.
This is a great one if you're into kaiju bureaucracy. It has a very similar vibe to Shin Godzilla in that a threat appears and immediately the people who have the most ability to do something about it (with their money, influence, etc) don't do anything about it, because they're too wrapped up in paperwork and planning and generally dealing with the idea of the threat rather than the reality of it. A kaiju washes up on the shore of a small town, which now has to deal with all the fallout from that, both economically and in terms of just not knowing what biological effect the creature could have, since such beings are so rare that there's not really established science around them yet. To this end, a marine biologist and another scientist are called in to establish that the creature is, for certain, dead, but the mayor and other officials don't care about if it actually is dead or not, they just want to be able to say it is so they can brush everything off and put the money where it needs to go. There's a great scene where one of them gets right up in the main character's face and goes on this paranoid rant where he basically claims that if they can't take care of the kaiju, then that means this will happen, and then that will happen, and then foreign powers will invade us!!!! Any artifice of caring about actual people is dropped in that moment and it becomes crystal clear that the appearance of strength and competence is more important than human lives.
This is not a great one if you're into actual kaiju. It's mostly a melancholy, slow-burning (as slow as a thirty-minute short can be) and very moody "what would happen" piece. But it hits that tone so perfectly, and is so introspective without ever getting pointlessly glum. There's even moments of humor here and there: At one point everyone crowds around a single tiny monitor to read the stats on the kaiju, and someone says "Should I get the bigger TV from the lobby?" but is shot down for no reason. I know that people are really eager to see films about the on-the-ground aftermath of a kaiju incursion, and seeing this expanded into a feature-length movie would satisfy those people really well.
Geharha, the Dark and Long-Haired Monster (2009), directed by Kiyotaka Taguchi
Japan
20 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This one is why I almost didn't call this an "indie" kaiju film roundup. It was made for television and aired on an NHK program, and many of the people who worked on it are names in the industry in some measure, working on Godzilla, Ultraman, Kamen Rider, Gamera, etc. There are also actors in this that you will definitely recognize if you watch tokusatsu. (I'm actually wondering if the director is related to Tomorô Taguchi, who is in this film, but it could be a total coincidence that they share a name.) But my aim with this post is mostly to highlight films that don't belong to the mainstream franchises, that people may not have seen, and this is that.
At only 20 minutes long, this film feels chaotic, but it does manage to get in a "the monster is us" monologue or two, and surprisingly, despite being referred to as a comedy, it actually felt pretty serious to me. But the high point is undoubtedly the monster itself: Although I could not see it that clearly because the film is not readily available in perfect quality (also, like the title says, it's dark), Geharha is an absolutely beautiful monster, combining the silhouette of a classic bipedal dinosaur-like kaiju with the relatively new idea of being absolutely covered in hair. The suit is gorgeous, easily the quality of something that would appear in an Ultra series. The sense of scale is also conveyed incredibly well, and in general this feels, more so than many other things I've seen, closest to what a typical Showa-era kaiju film would be like if it were made with modern resources but the same general aesthetic. Geharha has weird powers that make it more mysterious than your classic destruction beast du jour, releasing some kind of weird gas from its long hair and also seemingly able to literally wig-snatch any bystanders not otherwise killed by it. I would love, love, more Geharha lore, but sadly, 2009 was a long time ago, and development in that area seems fairly dead.
There's a preview at the end for a sequel that never got released and so serves almost as a separate short film itself, and we see from it that the sequel was going to get much more explicitly comedic. There are even more obvious references to Godzilla and Ultraman and in general it looked like it was going to be super campy and fun, and I'm sad that we never got to see it.
Yagon the Water Monster (2019), directed by Koyo Sugita
Japan
44 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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...And this is probably the most truly "indie" of all the films reviewed today. This was the director's student film at Musashino University and it shows in every single area of production. It's got a laundry list of problems: Incredibly visible green-screen, annoying public domain music, bad acting, jerky claymation, location shots where they clearly didn't have access to those parts of the campus so they just kind of hung around outside it, and more things I'm probably forgetting. But the thing is that I love it. I genuinely do. Not ironically. I think this is a great film. It's one of those things where you can visibly see the idea the director had for it even though they did not have the resources to flesh that idea out into a film that is what most would consider polished and perfect. It has something more important than polish and perfection. It has love, and it has enthusiasm. And it has a scientist with an eyepatch named Dr. Ashizawa. Hmmmm.
Basically this is about GMO gone wrong, where experiments in developing hardier and more bug-resistant rice crops accidentally create a mutant superbug that keeps growing and growing and becoming more murderous as well. A cast of probably university students and the one guy over the age of 25 who they could find to be in their film is summoned and equipped with generic fake guns and armor (actually, the body armor looks cool) to rout out the mutant water bug and destroy it, which proves far more difficult than it might seem. Because of the budget, presumably, Yagon is rendered with clay and wires rather than a suit, which does make it look pretty silly, and just in terms of design I'm not even that crazy about it (bug kaiju tend to not do much for me). However, the amount of screentime it gets makes me feel like the crew was very determined to show us their creature, where they could have easily hidden it behind lens flares and fake explosions, and I have to appreciate that.
I just feel like this film shows such creativity in how it is a fully realized story from start to finish that's assembled using less-than-ideal pieces. If this crew had a studio and more money at their disposal, they could make something awesome.
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