It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

directed by Robert Gordon

USA

79 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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So we round out this year's KaiJune with yet another non-Japanese monster movie. I'm including this one because it is irrevocably tied to kaiju film history, being a product of the same zeitgeist as Godzilla - or I guess I should call it Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, since that's what American audiences would have seen.

I ended up liking a lot of things about this movie but also absolutely hating a lot of other things. The opening of the film is incredibly strong: the interior of an atomic submarine, the camaraderie of its crew, and the sudden, inexplicable things that begin to happen when, unbeknownst to the men inside, the giant Mindanao octopus grips the sub fast in its tentacles. No windows means that while we, the viewer, with the benefit of 70 years of pop culture to inform us of what's going on, are in on the unfolding events, all the crew have to go by is murky sonar images and the uncanny sensation of being very, very tiny in the grasp of something very, very large.

But as soon as they introduce the woman scientist, things get... 1950s. I am limited in how much I want to complain about this movie's misogyny because I know there's no real point in expecting an old movie to have modern attitudes, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Prof. Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue) is arguably the film's best character (although the film isn't stellar at all in terms of the human plot) but she spends the whole movie having to fight tooth and nail to justify her existence as both a scientist and a woman. She's constantly being belittled by the men around her, particularly one of the ones she's having some kind of romantic liaisons with. It's only when a man sticks up for her that her worth as a professional and her individuality are recognized, and even then, it has to be couched in a statement about the "new breed of woman" who is every bit as smart and capable as any given man. In some sense it does feel radical to have a man step aside and make room for women as intellectual equals, but I'm not comfortable with how that statement dismisses the often grueling, thankless, unacknowledged work of women prior to WWII and women becoming more visible in the workforce.

And it's even more of a shame because I really like Domergue's performance here. There's something about her body language and expressions that makes Prof. Joyce feel constantly absorbed in whatever she's doing. Domergue gets into the role in a very believable way. In an era where actors could be fairly stiff or over-polished, Joyce feels like a real human.

I think one of the problems with this movie is that it doesn't really feel like it gets excited about anything. It's not fair to compare it to Godzilla - it's not fair to compare anything to Godzilla - but I couldn't help doing it. The issue that almost ruined the film to me was that the initial octopus scene comes out of absolutely nowhere: when I think about how that Odo Island reveal with Godzilla's ugly head cresting over the hill felt like something that had never, ever been done before, and how it was done with much more rudimentary puppetry than this, I feel like this movie has no real excuse for just throwing in our first full look at the monster octopus at random with no build-up or fanfare. All the action scenes in this thing feel unearned, and while the effects are undeniably impressive, there could have been a much better sense of segue between the monster and everything else that was going on around it. Not to mention that the film is entirely lacking any sense of pathos or poignancy; the Mindanao octopus is just a giant animal to be destroyed by man's might.

All that being said, though, I still did like this more than I thought I would. Its flat, dry tone honestly kind of works sometimes - like in the opening submarine scene, where panic and terror would have felt cheap. I liked the procedural, scientific aspect. I actually also liked how the octopus was just a big creature with no particular intelligence (inaccurate, given what we know about octopuses now) that was too large and destructive to be allowed near human civilization. The film doesn't manage to express the sense of monster as paradigm shift that Godzilla does, but as long as you're not expecting a game-changer, this is a pretty solid atomic sci-fi flick.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

directed by Yoshimitsu Banno

Japan

85 minutes

4 out of 5 stars

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Godzilla vs. Hedorah is a tonal nightmare. Environmental horror presented through a lens of dancing hippies, random Mt. Fuji jam sessions, giant flying sludge piles, and a cuddly, heroic Godzilla. While focusing on the things that make vs. Hedorah such a distinct entry within the series is useful for talking about it as an individual film, I think emphasizing those traits can have a tendency to make it seem like this film does not fit with the overall tone of the Godzilla series. Especially on my most recent rewatch, it's very obvious to me that Banno and everyone involved with the film was - while creating something a lot more bombastic and trippy than the series had yet seen - keeping very closely to the message of the original 1954 Godzilla in their own weird way.

One of the first things we see in the film is a kid playing with some Godzilla toys. We're at full commercialization at this point (not that we haven't always been - there was a lot more marketing done around the time of G '54 than a lot of people may think) and Godzilla is explicitly a hero, suitable for the fantasies of children. But rather than see this as a horrific aberration, as the character being mishandled and fundamentally altered from what it was originally intended to have been, I feel like there's also a way to see some bitterness and irony in this. The simplest way to put it is that in the face of a threat like Hedorah, Godzilla really doesn't look that bad. When one of the characters remarks on the awful state of the planet, how polluted and dirty it is, and says that "if Godzilla saw this, I bet he'd be mad" - I honestly thought "yeah, I bet he would". I think if Godzilla saw that humanity had continued to ruin the planet, not with nuclear power this time but with chemical smog, poisoned earth, and uninhabitable oceans, he probably would be pretty mad. 

I think this movie totally knows what it's doing. On the outside it looks like a stark departure from the roots of the Godzilla series, but I really think it's not. There's an obvious callback to the original movie in the fact that one of the main human characters (insofar as any of the human characters are "main", humans are remarkably useless here, even for this series) is a scientist who ends up spending much of the movie with bandages over his right eye. Even more to the point is that he keeps fish in his lab, like Dr. Serizawa also did. The movie really wants to show us that fish tank, and I have to admit that I can't figure out why the fish were made to feel so important - maybe there was an implication that even these perfect creatures, kept isolated from the toxic slime that was choking their non-captive-bred counterparts in the open ocean, would eventually fall victim to sludge like all the rest of the planet, given enough time. Nothing is safe.

This movie is scary. It deals with scary things. It may not seem like it, because it's so colorful and wild that you almost get distracted from the imagery of people dismembered and buried under stifling piles of sludge. But there is a solid philosophy here, under the fish masks and the dancing girls in bodysuits. The younger characters take the view that the good green Earth their parents grew up with is gone, so the only thing to do is sing and dance: the planet is dying, we are all dying, what else can we do? It's the same core concept of revulsion at what humanity is capable of that fueled a lot of the original Godzilla, but instead of getting all mopey, Banno decides to have his characters party about it.

I also think Hedorah rules. Kenpachiro Satsuma knocks it out of the park with this performance (and so does Nakajima in the Godzilla suit, as always). There's something that really clicked with me about Hedorah's overall vibe this time; I just love its silhouette, how lumpy and blobby it is, how its body plan is so totally opposite from Godzilla. It drives home the point that Hedorah is not a creature born from Earth, even though it may be breeding here. Hedorah looks and acts like an alien. I love its static facial expression in contrast to Godzilla, who had been becoming more and more human-like in his expressions since the 1960s.

Yeah, man, the movie's good. This had been one of my least-frequently-rewatched Godzilla movies because it does feel like such an outlier on the surface. But watching it last night made me realize how good it is and how well it fits with the rest of the series. Banno is often maligned for the choices he made in this film, but imagine a continuity where outside directors were invited into the Godzilla series more often. We could have had a few more super artsy, daring films like this at a time when the series was mostly sticking to an increasingly child-oriented vibe.

Indie Kaiju Roundup, part III

Yatsuashi [2021]

Directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

12 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This very short short comes to us from director Hiroto Yokokawa, who has made more well-known feature-length kaiju films such as Great Buddha Arrival, Nezura 1964, and recently Hoshi 35. As with much of his work it features Kazuma Yoneyama in a central role, although not the lead role; there's an Iron King thing going on here where the guy who actually transforms is not technically the main character. 

Yatsuashi was evidently based off of a scrapped Daiei film called Great Demon Beast Dagora, which I can find virtually no information about (most of the Google results for that title lead back to Yatsuashi itself). Based on a Japanese blog post and a tweet from the creative team behind Yatsuashi, I gather that Dagora was an attempt in the same vein as the disastrous Nezura to use a live animal or animals rampaging in a miniature set to portray a giant monster, only instead of rats, Dagora would have used an octopus. Taking an unmade project and spinning the idea into a brand-new film is always a really interesting experiment, especially when it turns into something like Yatsuashi that is probably nowhere near what the original filmmakers intended to create. Like I said when I reviewed Great Buddha Arrival, that's how lost and unmade films can continue to survive: by influencing a new generation of filmmakers.

As for the plot, Yatsuashi is essentially about a guy who is so frustrated by his job that he turns into a giant octopus. That is pretty much it. Bin Furuya appears on a news broadcast at one point. There's not much else I can say about a 12-minute film. I really enjoyed this short's sense of creativity and how much it felt like everybody involved was passionate about what they were making, and even though the octopus scenes were minimal, the way it's photographed feels very deliberate, like the creative team really wanted to convey how strange and alien an octopus looks, not just slap one in front of the camera and leave the viewer to decide how to feel about it.

Godaizer [2010]

Directed by Hillary Yeo

19 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This one hails from Singapore, which is always cool. It's on YouTube under the title "Giant Robot vs. Monster Animated Short" and that is certainly what it is. With no dialogue, the short uses environmental storytelling and lingering shots of news clippings to introduce us to a world where a small family had, at some point in the past, been making and piloting giant robots to defeat a sudden kaiju invasion, until eventually the cost of deploying the robots became too much of a strain on resources... or so they say.

The animation style here is interesting. I did not know how old this was and took it for a more recent production, assuming the patchy, almost brushstroke-like style was a deliberate choice, but now that I know it's 15 years old, I think some of that feel may have simply been due to technical limitations of the time. Still, though, I really did like the way this looked - it's the kind of thing where you can tell the storyboards for it were probably really beautiful.

The story being told here is also interesting: the past is only hinted at, but there's clearly a deep sadness to the characters and their backstory that is fully expressed despite the lack of dialogue. Facial expressions exchanged between the father and son convey everything we need to know.

That time period between when the mecha program apparently ended and when the events of the film take place is what I kept thinking about after I watched this - the father-son team clearly have a lot of robots fully built, serviced, and ready to go, considering that they deploy on fairly short notice as soon as the monster escapes containment, so you have to imagine a decade or more of these folks just... watching their robots rust, knowing they could be used for good, but probably getting told over and over "no, we don't have the budget for that". Again, this is something that isn't stated, but the feeling of being forced to let your passion stagnate because you're not being given the resources you need is incredibly frustrating in a very real-world sense.

Magara: The Final Showdown [2015]

Directed by Jun Awazu

5 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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At just five minutes, this is probably the shortest short I've reviewed. Like the earlier Negadon, this is entirely CG-animated, but unlike Negadon, I think this one lacks some of the expressiveness that the human characters in the earlier film had. Granted, this one has a total of two human characters: the mech pilot and a little boy on the street having his absolute mind blown by the kaiju showdown he's witnessing.

There's not much to talk about here, but the kaiju design is gorgeous - sort of a standard dragonish thing, but something about the head design and the shape of the mouth was really beautiful to me. I would love to see what the 3D model for it looked like. And then we have the mecha, which is clearly based off of Dogoo ceramics and is actually pretty bad at its job. The best thing about this short is that it's an example of a scenario I don't see in tokusatsu often enough: "What if we deployed the mecha and it just made everything worse?"

Howl from Beyond the Fog (2019)

directed by Daisuke Sato

Japan

35 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Another slightly unconventional pick for our second week of KaiJune, but one that, again, most definitely does have a giant monster in it.

Howl from Beyond the Fog bowled me over for about the first ten minutes. The film begins with a young man returning to his childhood home after the death of his twin brother (this is thematically significant but never addressed). There he meets a blind girl - who everyone thought was supposed to be dead - living in seclusion inside his house, and she introduces him to the god inhabiting the lake in the middle of their village, a creature that just wants to live and breathe along with everything else in the world.

I screened Great Buddha Arrival to a small audience this past month, and afterward, my friend and I were talking about the sense of never being able to go home again, of having memories of some specific place or thing that you can never, ever replicate, because even if you try, whatever you're nostalgic for is never going to be the same as the first time you experienced it. To me, that was the overwhelming feeling of the first ten minutes of this short: coming back home to find that everything is the same but also different - it's your home, the place you grew up, but there are aspects of it that you never recognized, here represented as the tremendous, unmovable force of nature that is the creature, but also the undercurrent of hatred in the village that the protagonist may have been too young to notice the first time around.

This is a stop-motion film where all of the characters are portrayed using puppets. Their static faces did not bother me at all, because I wasn't looking to the individual characters for information, I was listening to what was being told through their actions and the imagery onscreen. The creature (canonically named Nebula, which I think is quite beautiful, although it's never named in the film) was designed by legendary creature designer and modeler Keizō Murase. Most relevant to our discussion of this film is the fact that Murase also designed Varan, a creature who was also depicted as being a god to the people who lived nearby. Varan feels very influential on Nebula, and in a way, the story of Howl from Beyond the Fog is a bit like what an alternate-universe version of the movie Varan might look like. Varan is one of my favorite kaiju because of its unconventional origins, and I've always wanted a story where we get to see the creature in its context as a god.

I also want to mention that the film has this way of making Nebula's roar almost diegetic that I thought was really amazing. There's a soundtrack that starts up almost every time Nebula is onscreen, and when the creature roars, it fits in with the music so well that it feels like it's part of it. I don't know, that just gave me chills whenever it happened. Some of the music in this is actually rather unfitting, but the part of the soundtrack that blends Nebula's roar into itself is gorgeous.

I don't think this movie is all that it could have been, but it's pretty close. Going into this with expectations is not the best way to encounter it. Try to just live in it for a little while, get past the lack of human actors and revel in the craft of making this film.

Comedy Trio [Owarai san'ningumi] with English Subtitles

It took longer than I wanted it to, but I finally finished the subtitling project I've been working on: two episodes of Comedy Trio subtitled in English for the first time. This series has been on my radar because it's the most well-known work of Yoshiko Otowa: singer, actress, and younger sister of Akihiko Hirata.

Read more about Comedy Trio here and see the post about my subtitles - which includes the archive.org link to the episodes as well as my TL notes - here.

Zarkorr! The Invader (1996)

directed by Michael Deak

USA

80 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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"We have Shobijin at home."

Welcome back to KaiJune. Since I opted to do KaiJuly last year due to having started a night shift job and having scrambled eggs for brains, you've technically gotten two kaiju months within one year. Aren't I just so generous. I remain a stickler for applying the term "kaiju" only to specifically Japanese monsters, because I don't think it makes sense otherwise, but I'm justifying including this movie in KaiJune by saying that if you like kaiju movies you are probably going to like this.

Zarkorr! The Invader sounds like a fake movie that a nerdy character on a TV show would get made fun of by other characters for liking. "Look at Steve with his Zarkorr lunchbox, har har!" It is very much a real movie, though, and honestly, for much of its running time, it's kind of delightful. I enjoyed this a lot right off the bat for its creativity, authenticity, and commitment to the bit, even though all of that started fizzling out once it passed about the half-hour mark.

The film begins with footage of a giant monster rampaging through California. Exactly what we love to see. Since this is how the film starts, I'll start out by talking about the monster: I really, really like everything about it. A lot of American monster suits just look kind of... trashy, for lack of a better term; they look cobbled-together and they move weird, which is often exacerbated by bad editing. It could be the fact that I watched this in very poor quality, but the Zarkorr suit looked and moved fantastic, and the miniatures it destroys were similarly well outfitted. To me, Zarkorr looks like an Ultraman Tiga monster who somehow got transported to California.

After that, we meet our protagonist, a very average guy who had been completely unaware of Zarkorr's rampage until a tiny hologram of a teenage girl shows up in his kitchen and tells him to switch on the news. She proceeds to tell him that he is the only one who can defeat Zarkorr: half of the people on Earth would be worse than him at it, and half the people would be better, so he's perfectly in the middle, and therefore the highly advanced alien race that the hologram's real self belongs to chose him. All the while she's exposition-dumping on our protag, I'm thinking "wow, this is so cool!" It's so interesting, like a writing prompt brought to life: a random guy with no special powers, chosen fairly arbitrarily by an alien race to defeat a monster (that they kind of sent on purpose for funsies) that cannot be killed by any conventional weapon either currently in existence or in development. Where do we go from there? How do we build off of such a neat set-up for a story?

Not very well, it turns out. Where this movie really fumbles the bag is in spending too much time doing what I really hate it when sci-fi movies do: establishing that everybody but the main character thinks the main character is crazy. To me, this is unnecessary: the time that the movie wastes on having the protagonist take a cryptozoologist hostage and try to convince the cops and everybody else that he can defeat the giant monster and Should Not be taken to jail under Any Circumstances could be spent doing something more interesting. A monster movie where everybody acknowledges the monster and skips the awkward human conflict is usually a much smoother viewing experience.

The middle part of the movie only gets worse. We're introduced to a pretty cringey stereotypical hacker character who is acted fairly decently but could have been... reconsidered, perhaps. One of the cops joins the main group because he's a conspiracy theorist and therefore predisposed to believe what the protagonist is claiming. This leads into another problem this movie has: all of its attempts at humor fall so flat that it would be better if they weren't there. I don't think there are actually any "jokes" in this thing per se; its style of humor is more "here is a thing that is supposed to be funny because of the way that it is". "Here is an eccentric wacky hacker guy", "here is a cop who believes in UFOs", "isn't it funny that this guy is supposed to save the world when he's so totally unremarkable". Having a little light banter here and there might have actually been beneficial, if used sparingly.

The ending is anticlimactic but in a way that I honestly kind of love. Like, why does killing a monster have to be a huge deal? Why can't the journey to kill the monster be the more elaborate aspect of the story, as opposed to the final fight? Our protagonist gives Zarkorr the old Zetton treatment (as in, he's Zetton and Zarkorr is Ultraman) and it pops out of existence and then it's done.

I think this is a movie that had cool ideas in it but didn't execute them so well. I'm beyond caring about a visibly low budget or poor acting, the only thing that matters to me is an interesting story that feels like the filmmakers cared about it. For the most part, Zarkorr has that. But it doesn't seem to be able to stretch it out even to its relatively short running time. I mean this in a mostly positive way: finding out that the director was a makeup artist whose only directing credit is this movie makes a lot of sense.