Dogora (1964)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

83 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This is a very overlooked kaiju movie, having fallen into relative obscurity and thus being known mostly by people who are already into that kind of thing. It did receive an English dub, with the revised titles of its international releases referring to Dogora variously as a space invader, space monster, space octopus, or some kind of monster "from the swamp". You can thank Italy for that one - I guess space is a swamp now. My personal favorite is West Germany, who dubbed this "Phantoms Against Gangsters". It shifts the focus of the film off of Dogora and onto the human side of things, but that's not entirely unfair, considering that this is a two-pronged oddity of a film.

I have to say right out of the gate that this is one of my favorite kaiju movies because it's so dissimilar from others. It's half a diamond heist film, half a monster movie, and that makes it unlike anything else. The world it's set in is so mundane and everybody is so deeply concerned with themselves and their little human schemes, and when clearly supernatural events start happening, they're noted, but eventually just kind of abandoned so that people can go back to doing crimes. This is a bit like Ishirō Honda's later film All Monsters Attack, where the backdrop is a dismal, industrialized urban wasteland, a place where adults go through their dreary lives ignoring any and all unusual circumstances around them, but in the middle of this concrete jungle there still exist strange and weird happenings - only, in All Monsters Attack, the strange/weird happenings are all in the mind of a little boy. In Dogora, it's reality. What I'm trying to say is that this is a theme Honda revisits several times throughout his filmmaking career: A city where the people are so caught up in their own lives that they either don't notice or don't give sufficient weight to fantastical things around them.

If there's anything wrong with this film, it's that it's a little bit talky. That ties into what I just mentioned about how all the human characters have blinders on and are involved in their own schemes all the time, so it's kind of part and parcel of the storyline, but it does make it drag a bit in its short running time. There are two main factions at play as far as the human side of things go: The jewel smugglers, a group of six or seven (?) who launch various plots to steal various burlap sacks full of diamonds, and a few guys from the local police who try to stop them. Hopping between sides is Robert Dunham as someone who's ambiguous about how much he knows and who he really works for. The main cast is way too big for everybody to have a specifically defined role, but somehow it works - had the diamond thieves been two or three people, there would have been some vital quality lost. Even though you don't get background on every single one of them, just from the way they acted around each other and the roles they took during heists, you get the impression of them all having different places within the gang. It feels like there's more backstory than is ever revealed onscreen. Meanwhile, the police are your standard police - Dunham is the wild card, but I didn't find him that interesting even so.

But while the thieves are thieving and the police are thinking up ways to catch them, things are happening all over the world that defy logic. People and objects are levitating into the air, large structures are being chopped in half by some invisible force, and huge amounts of coal are sucked into the sky. There is a sense that society is destabilizing by bits and pieces. The scale of these events varies; sometimes it's small, human-sized: In genuinely one of the funniest non-sequiturs I've seen in a kaiju film, the perennial drunk salaryman floats horizontally down a sidewalk before being accosted by cops. Other times it's colossal: Cars being whipped into the air and buildings dissolved, television satellites colliding with unknown objects and being swallowed. Dogora the organism has a slew of powers that seem hard to pin down and very dangerous, and that, coupled with its bizarre, amorphous form, make it a favorite kaiju of mine.

I love Dogora as a creature. Only a very scant handful of other creatures in kaiju media have ever been like it, certainly not before this and very rarely after it. For someone who is so in love with suitmation and the physical process of having a person playing the monster, it's a little ironic that one of my favorite kaiju is basically a plastic bag with strings attached to it. But I would still argue that the creation of Dogora was a peak that the genre has yet to reach again. You may point out the practical effects as not being up to the standards of today's film industry, and you'd be right, but the level of technology doesn't matter when the broader end product is better than anything we could be making right now. The shots of Dogora undulating in the sky like some uncanny sea creature transplanted into the heavens is not exactly going to be mistaken for documentary footage, but the image of it - just the sheer aesthetic, the way it looks - is more striking than anything else could be. Dogora is not a Godzilla with its feet firmly on the ground, stomping its way through a city. Dogora isn't something your house could be trampled by. Dogora is a phantom, a visitation, an utterly alien and incomprehensible force hovering just far enough away that we can't touch it. It has no eyes to look into, no facial features, and its limbs seem useless, not used for grabbing like an octopus or squid. That the military eventually does logic their way into figuring out how to destroy it almost feels like a cop-out. Dogora is such a bizarre and unclassifiable creature that shooting missiles at it and seeding it with poison feels like going after Godzilla with a flyswatter, but somehow it works anyway.

(I should also note that Dogora is not actually a plastic bag, that was a little exaggeration on my part. What it's really made out of is soft vinyl, a material that was relatively new at the time, not yet put into use to manufacture all the Ultraman figures on your shelf that cost more than a month of your rent.)

My goal here is really just to make more people aware of this oft-forgotten film with one of my most favorite kaiju in it. Dogora got a few token cameos in video games and some mentions in manga and novel adaptations of the Godzilla franchise, but never appeared physically in another film. I think you can only do something like this once and then it loses some of its mystique. But this one instance of everything coming together to make a perfectly unsettling, visually striking creature who happens to interrupt a jewel-stealing plot exists as a gem in Toho's colossal back catalogue.