Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds (1977)

directed by Junji Kurata

Japan

92 minutes

2 stars out of 5

----

I'm rating this 2 stars with a caveat: last week I rewatched this at Flicker Theatre as the English-dubbed version, and although the original movie is still a pretty decent 2 stars, the dub took it up to a solid 4. It's not the worst dub I've ever seen, but something about its inherent goofiness combined with how absolutely dead serious the movie takes itself made for an extremely fun viewing experience, especially in a room full of maybe slightly drunk folks.

Although Toei is certainly no stranger to tokusatsu, Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds came late in the 1970s, when the kaiju and hero boom had given way to something new: the disaster movie boom. Our wonderful host at Flicker mentioned in his intro that this movie should be thought of more in the framework of things like Jaws and Orca and other nature- and animal-sploitation films than as a kaiju movie. Viewing it that way (along with, as I said, the goofy dub) helped me to be a lot more lenient this time, because I came to it with the understanding that it wasn't trying to be a kaiju movie and failing, it was trying to be a disaster movie and showing us some cool dinosaurs as a bonus, so shouldn't we all be grateful? Well, your mileage may vary on that last point.

The plot: Tsunehiko Watase plays Se-[coughs]Ashizawa, a geologist who gets wind of mysterious deaths and earthquakes in the area around Mt. Fuji that are rumored to be related to the dragon that, according to legend, lives in Lake Sai. Ashizawa comes to the village around Lake Sai to investigate and happens upon large tracks that look like they could belong to a dinosaur - just what his father studied, and no one believed him. Sightings of strange creatures mount and tension ramps up as more and more people and animals turn up dead, but the characters remain unaware of the plesiosaur for a relatively long time even as us viewers are treated to some weirdly sensual scenes of it killing various women who try to enter the lake.

The characters are fine. The first time I watched this I made a note that I really disliked Ashizawa, but this time, I can't say that I cared about him enough to have an opinion. Watase plays him with a kind of slick, slightly bastardy '70s dudeman vibe, which fits with the overall tone of the movie. I hope it doesn't say too much about me as a viewer that the part where he slaps his girlfriend didn't phase me because I've come to expect that kind of thing out of '70s movies. His girlfriend Akiko is played by yakuza movie actress Yōko Koizumi, and unfortunately aside from at the climax of the film (which looked like it was absolutely brutal to film) she doesn't get to do much acting, since there's a man present to shove her out of the way and get stuff done himself.

Throughout the whole movie I kept thinking how weird it was to watch a kaiju movie (okay, a "kaiju" movie) that was shot like a yakuza movie. All of the actors (note also Hiroshi Nawa, another Toei regular) are familiar from yakuza stuff. The insanely funky soundtrack could easily have been transplanted into any other gritty '70s crime flick. The director apparently worked exclusively in jidaigeki - especially films about ninjas - save for this film, which gives me the feeling that Toei just needed a guy and Kurata was the most convenient option. It's a weird thing, this movie, and it's kind of great.

Arguably, the film should be called Legend of Dinosaur and Monster Bird, singular. (And, I mean, in Japanese, it kind of is.) The film's two creatures are a plesiosaur and a rhamphorhyncus, portrayed (I think) with puppets rather than suitmation. Maybe it's just me, but I had no problems with the quality of the effects when it came to the dinosaurs; it they had been the most startlingly realistic dinosaurs ever put to film, it wouldn't fit with the movie's overall vibe. I really enjoy long-necked dinosaur-like creatures in tokusatsu, so I was rooting for the plesiosaur, but the smaller, more agile rhamphorhyncus won the day. In the end, though, it doesn't matter, because Mt. Fuji begins erupting and all is forgotten.

I'll end this review by talking about the thing I really, genuinely like about this movie: its sense of a global catastrophe starting to churn up, a paradigm shifting gradually as humans go about their business, singing honky-tonk cowboy songs and doing silly little science things, none of which amount to anything in the face of the awe-inspiring power of Mother Earth. If you really tune in to what the movie is saying and ignore the funk music and annoying protagonist, it's a solid disaster movie. It's one of those things where the portents of doom - Mt. Fuji blowing steam, ground subsidence, legendary monsters appearing - feel like they exist entirely separate from the human story at first, and when the human characters finally do become drawn irreversibly into their proper place in the natural order of things, all civilization falls by the wayside.