Gorgo (1961)

directed by Eugène Lourié

Ireland, UK, USA

78 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I wasn't sure if I wanted to review this as part of KaiJune '23, because I am a little bit of a stickler about not calling just any old giant monster who isn't from Japanese media a "kaiju" as an English-speaking writer. I don't know what the general consensus is about that, but it strikes me as a little weird - sure, Gorgo is technically a kaiju, but by the same token I could say a horse is technically an "uma", or a crab is technically a "kani". But this did get a near-simultaneous release in Japan (a poster for your delectation), and Gorgo himself very much feels like part of the canon that includes other characters who can unequivocally be called kaiju, so I think he does qualify at least in an honorary sense. The first time I reviewed this I called it a "k-Eire-ju" movie. I'm sticking with that.

As has been noted, the plot of Gappa: The Triphibian Monster is pretty similar to the plot of this movie, with some differences. A small, fictional Irish island is devastated by a sudden storm at the same time as an underwater treasure hoard is discovered, and the continued searching for more treasure eventually brings divers into contact with a strange, prehistoric-looking animal: Gorgo. Just like how they comb the sea floor for treasure to be made into a profit, the two main characters quickly realize that they could make a lot of money off of exhibiting Gorgo and charging admission. He's captured, shipped off to London where he attracts massive crowds, and everybody is making money hand over fist - but at what cost, we wonder?

Like Gappa, this is a movie where all of the main characters are kind of terrible people. Gappa is different in that some of the characters are nice about it and we're not supposed to hate them, but all of the adults in Gorgo have nothing but money in mind. I guess not all of them, really; the two main guys are warned by everybody around them, who have a very sensible mindset of "What is wrong with you? You have no idea what this creature is and you just want to stick it in a cage and charge money for people to gawk at it?" And much like Gappa, the only person with any sense is a child, in this case a little boy with no parents who helps out an archaeologist living on the island (which, by the way, is called Nara, but, you know, not that Nara). I could have been missing something but I don't think the film's tagline - something to do with "Only a child knows his secret!!!" - is entirely accurate to what's shown in the film; the boy is clearly more savvy than everybody else, but I don't think he or anyone ever gives a clear-cut explanation of Gorgo's "secret" beyond just "it isn't right to be parading around an animal like this".

I'm really fond of the Gorgo and Ogra (Gorgo's helicopter mom) suits. Mick Dillon is listed as the suit actor for both of them, but evidently there may have been other suit actors who did not get credit: Wikizilla lists them as "likely" being David Wilding, Peter Brace and Peter Perkings. The creatures do have a very classic kaiju look about them: very reptilian, dinosaurian, big hands, big teeth, you know the deal. The elephant roar is reminiscent of Titanosaurus, but that would not come about until over a decade later. The miniatures are also nothing to sneeze at, and while very obvious to modern viewers, neither is the repeated use of optical effects to edit people into any given backdrop. It's a very well-made movie for its time.

Behind-the-scenes, a lot was apparently cut from this, and it sounds like it was mostly for the good. 78 minutes is a perfect running time for this and it allows for the philosophical aspects of the story (such as they are) to be focused on after we're introduced to Gorgo and his mom. There's an awkwardly shoehorned-in news reporter at the end of the film who kind of does some Takashi Shimura-ing, telling us what folly it is to believe we're the dominant species, warning us away from our disrespect of nature, etc. I think this would have been more potent if it had been a character we'd seen already doing this monologue instead of just a random guy, but it still mostly works. The destruction that Ogra visits upon London in search of her child is truly at a devastating scale - our newsman says that it's worse than it ever was during the Blitz, and the effects are remarkably good at conveying a city being almost completely torn to shreds. Like most kaiju, Ogra isn't deliberately killing people, she's just mad and looking for her kid, and her kid happens to be in the middle of an extremely populated area. And whose fault is that? Ours.

So it's easy to look at this as kind of a goofy artifact of the '60s, and in a lot of ways it really is, but it's not without its message, even if said message feels a little tacked-on. Notably, Lourié wasn't originally going to include the city destruction scenes, which provides for an interesting thought about what could have been: Would he have gone in an even more philosophical direction, dealing with what the two monsters represent in the imaginary instead of in physical space? Or would he have replaced the destruction with something worse, possibly a goofy romance subplot like a lot of mid-20th-century monster movies have? He did self-edit a version of this film in the 1980s to conform more closely to his original plan for it, but this was never shown to the public, so we will never know what it could have been like. Fortunately, though, the movie we do have is just fine by me.

King Kong Escapes (1967)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan/USA

104 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I first watched this last year (just a few days before Akira Takarada died, actually) after putting it off for a while due to considering it somehow "separate" from the canon of other Toho films I was already a big fan of. I've probably mentioned this at some point before, but I'm really not into King Kong at all; the whole concept of him just does nothing for me, so despite appreciating his place in the history of monster movies, I can't say I've seen much involving him outside of the tokusatsu realm. My prejudices prevented me from watching King Kong Escapes for a long time, but thankfully I did end up watching (and now re-watching!) this extremely fun, entirely worthwhile film. I've heard the English dub is terrible but I remain blissfully unaware of that.

I'm not familiar with the Rankin/Bass cartoon this is based off of, so I can't say whether the plot of this film references a specific episode or story arc or if it's made up specifically for the movie. There was a previous screenplay that got rejected by Rankin/Bass for not following the series closely enough, so an attempt was clearly made to have some faithfulness to the cartoon. In any case, the basic framework of the film is that its villain, Dr. Who (not that one, and one of few elements of the animated series that I know was carried over into the film), is trying to mine a radioactive substance called Element X on a remote island somewhere in the Java Sea. He is of course not being terribly scrupulous about this. It's implied that his first couple of attempts didn't go so well, so he invents a robotic replica of King Kong, a creature who had already been living on Mondo Island, in the hopes that sending a robotic creature with super-strength and endurance down into the mines will produce better results. It doesn't - something about being in proximity to Element X makes it go haywire, and so, eventually, Dr. Who kidnaps and sticks a mind-control device on the real, living Kong to force him to do his bidding.

This is all played in a way that's mostly kid-friendly, but there is something kind of horrifying that underlies it. Kong is explicitly a friendly or at least docile creature, characterized as not very intelligent but also not malicious at all, just an animal living his life in his native environment until somebody comes along and forces him into servitude. Dr. Who has absolutely no qualms about subjugating living beings and also no qualms about just straight up murdering people - it is surprising that the downfall of the bad guys in this film doesn't come from their constant pulling guns on each other at the drop of a hat. Another thing that speaks to how thoroughly evil Dr. Who's enterprise on the island is is the presence of your requisite indigenous islander who comes to warn the good guys of his culture's taboo against entering the island. It's curious that we only see one single islander (played by Ikio Sawamura); we know this isn't an issue of budget or cultural sensitivity, because you usually see a whole bunch of people in brownface any time a Toho movie is set on a fictional island, so it leaves one wondering if he's the last of a people who were all either killed or forcibly relocated at some undisclosed point in the past when Dr. Who and his entourage occupied the island.

The good side is made up of Akira Takarada, Linda Miller, and Rhodes Reason driving around a submarine and a really nifty little hovercar after catching on to the existence of a giant ape on Mondo Island. In the process of their scientific research they get caught up in Dr. Who's operations and kidnapped a couple of times, but ultimately this is one of those movies where it doesn't feel like any of the human characters matter too much. If anything, Linda Miller's character, Susan Watson, is the most important member of the good side, representing a link between Kong and humanity, showing that this outwardly menacing, inconveniently huge ape is at heart gentle and not dangerous when not threatened. I don't want to say that no human characters in this matter, because Hideyo Amamoto's Dr. Who is - I say this with 99% confidence despite never having seen the series - a way better Dr. Who than the Rankin/Bass series ever had. But he's not working entirely for himself: Mie Hama plays Madame Piranha, a mysterious, ultra-wealthy woman throwing money at Dr. Who to get Element X for her country, though she ultimately has a change of heart near the end. It is also really funny that Dr. Who is apparently an internationally wanted criminal, because I like to imagine said wantlist being a bunch of terrorists and murderers and then a guy who's building a giant robot ape to mine radioactive substances.

The practical effects are especially charming here. As I said, I really like the hovercar, which is the only "futuristic"-seeming vehicle in the film; there's submarines and stuff but nothing too fantastic about them. Optical effects are used heavily to superimpose human-sized characters against the backdrop of Kong and Mechani-Kong, and it doesn't look spectacular but I love it anyway. This is just a perfect slice of '60s sci-fi, with all the drab colors and tactile knobs and buttons you expect from it. There are three creatures portrayed with suitmation: King Kong, Mechani-Kong, and Gorosaurus, and then the nothingburger Giant Sea Serpent, who was a puppet. All of them are extremely memorable, with Haruo Nakajima taking on the King Kong role like he did in King Kong vs. Godzilla. 

Leave it to Ishirō Honda to take children's media and turn it into something that, while very fun and never outright traumatizing, is still really serious when you think about it. It's disturbing to think about how Kong sees Mechani-Kong as another of his species - he sees Mechani-Kong as competition, but the robotic version of him is also a vision of what he would have been if Dr. Who's mind-control had worked successfully. I think the scene where Kong rescues Watson and then proceeds to absolutely beat the stuffing out of Gorosaurus was really compelling, because you've got Watson being saved by this creature who treats her so gently despite being the size of a mouse in comparison to him, and then she watches a display of his unreal strength when he kills Gorosaurus, realizing the power of the animal who decided to be gentle to her instead of as brutal as he's capable of being. There's definitely nuance here, not as much as any of Honda's Godzilla films or his other work, but a crucial amount of depth that elevates it beyond just a corny adaptation of a kid's cartoon. By the time I post this, June 19, it will be the exact anniversary of its US release.

Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001)

directed by Shusuke Kaneko

Japan

105 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I rewatched this recently and as is often the case I don't know why I didn't just rate it five stars the first time I saw it. This is basically a perfect movie. I don't agree with everything I wrote in my initial review anymore, so I guess I have to update it to be a more current reflection of my feelings about this, one of the best and arguably an outlier of the Godzilla series.

As often happens, this is a "no Godzilla since 1954" scenario. There has been peace for a long time, but unlike other examples from the franchise that take place in this situation, people don't seem quite as flippant. Maybe it's only the central characters who are alert, intelligent people instead of the inept bureaucrats we often see, but it seems like the awareness of the possibility of a second Godzilla (or the first, returned) is not lost on most people. This is the tone that the film sets from the beginning: A feeling that something has been building for fifty years, that although no giant monsters have menaced the world since that time (unless Gorgo is canon in this timeline, you never know), the fact that one has, ever, removes the ability for most of Japan's citizenry to sleep easily. This movie draws very clear parallels between the existence of Godzilla and the use of nuclear weapons in war. It is not shy about it whatsoever and this is just one of many things that make me appreciate it so much.

But the peace is not to last. We're told that Godzilla sightings are starting up again after the accidental (?) sinking of a nuclear-equipped ship. At first Godzilla is reported as having attacked America, and this starts up a sense that it's now only a matter of time before he finds his way to Japan again. At the same time, other strange events linked to other monsters are happening with increasing frequency across the country. Like I said, the tone for this entire film up until it reaches peak action is a sense of building, of things in progress, of a cyclical, unstoppable process that can only end once the forces of destruction, in this case embodied by Godzilla, have been put to rest... but it will always start up again, eventually. As a sidenote, I love Hideyo Amamoto as the only character who knows what's going on, but no one believes him. He's one of my favorite actors who pops up from time to time in pretty much any tokusatsu series you can think of and his role in this is a great one. I love the mystery around his character, how his appearance is left as kind of an unsolvable mystery, something a little bit more explicitly supernatural than the franchise typically gets. And it had to be Amamoto in this role, it couldn't have been anybody else; it had to be somebody who you would see and immediately think of all the other times you'd seen him in tokusatsu going back 40 years.

(There are also a lot of easter eggs in this movie that call back not only to the Godzilla series' history but to other Toho/Tsuburaya productions. The main character being a reporter named Yuri, like Yuri Edogawa from Ultra Q, and working at a newspaper called "Digital Q" is the biggest one. But my absolute favorite is that during the recreated flashback to the first Godzilla's attack in 1954, for a split second you can see a poster on a wall for Farewell Rabaul, another Ishirō Honda film that came out the same year. I highly recommend it, by the way.)

This is really different from any other Godzilla movie I can think of. I'm positive that this is down to it being in the hands of Shusuke Kaneko, who lends an extremely distinctive, refreshing, and original spin to a series which has re-invented itself countless times already. For some reason this was his only Godzilla film, though he has of course made the best Gamera films of all time (you can fight me on this) and also written and directed for the Ultra series. This idea of kaiju that we, the audience, already know about getting re-invented as "guardian monsters" is such a new concept that for the 20-plus years since this film first came out everybody has been wishing for a sequel that revisits it. Many fans know that, behind the scenes, Varan was originally slated to be one of the guardian monsters, and some maquettes were made that show his updated design would have been absolutely beautiful, but he got the boot in favor of more recognizable kaiju.

I said in my first review that this was "almost heinously early-2000s in aesthetic", but I take that back because upon second viewing I believe this is honestly one of the least dated Godzilla films. The internet definitely still feels new and the idea of digital reporting and livestreaming is treated as an unusual novelty, but overall, when I think of this in comparison to movies that were coming out even just five years previously, the difference is really stark. Despite the swift transition into a digital age, there remain warning signs from the past in this film, and I think it's interesting that the core concept of Godzilla as a representation of nuclear power can go from being espoused as a known truth by everyone involved (the way it is in the original film) to a fading memory that survivors are trying and failing to pass on to their children. The idea of what Godzilla is is still here, but it's nested within what seems to be a differing worldview, because so many of the main characters are young people who grew up well after Godzilla had "died".

And Godzilla himself takes on a bit of a different role than usual here, which is incredibly compelling. I've kind of specifically chosen the most terrifying screencap of him I could get for the header photo just to show how really unique he looks here. Again, this is pretty much the only time I've seen him depicted from this specific angle, and it's just begging for a sequel or some other expansion. Godzilla is MEAN in this one, and it's for good reason. In this film he represents a literal amalgamation of all the souls of all the people who, regardless of nationality, were killed as a result of WWII. He is a walking embodiment of hatred and vengeance, motivated largely by a desire to burn humanity down, but moreover to not let us forget - which, in this film, people are starting to do. Even his body language is markedly different here. Mizuho Yoshida is in the suit this time, and you will not recognize that name as one of the "big three" Godzilla suit actors, but if I told you he's the guy who plays Zeiram in Zeiram, if you know what I'm talking about, you'd be like "oh yeah, that's why Godzilla is like that". Even though he's never returned to this specific role, he brings something to Godzilla that I am really just in awe of because of its subtlety; an expression of calculated rage that we usually never see. Godzilla is noticeably faster when he really gets mad than we ever see him, and there's a specific moment that is so small but so fascinating to me that I need to mention it. When Baragon, the first of the guardian monsters, goes up against Godzilla and gets absolutely creamed, right when Godzilla delivers the coup de grâce, he doesn't just blast Baragon point-blank with atomic breath; there's this thing he does where he starts blasting a little bit in front of Baragon and then moves upward towards him, so this is not a quick finish, this is drawn-out, done with relish. His stance afterwards is not one of a monster but a very human look of having just done something strenuous. There is just so much rage in him and you can absolutely feel that. Right down to him clenching his fists. The fact that Yoshida as a suit actor has mostly played humanoid characters might have a lot to do with Godzilla's very different portrayal here.

Even though Godzilla is the antagonist in this film, he is not "the bad guy", and this fact alone is why I love this movie so much. It has the brains and nuance to show us that even though this is not a Godzilla you can root for, it is still one you sympathize with. You understand that his motivation is incomprehensible pain and agony, a pain and agony that is endless and recurring. This isn't a good vs. evil story. Even the guardian monsters aren't fighting explicitly for humanity, they're fighting on the side of the land that they inhabit, and whether or not humanity has built our skyscrapers and warehouses and factories on that land is irrelevant. This is a story of forces much, much, much bigger than us, but that we have nevertheless had a hand in creating. Again, Kaneko's direction and writing brings a depth to this film that I really don't see from Godzilla that often. The destruction in this one is also a lot more personal, we see multiple individual people getting killed, not just wide shots of cities burning where we have to assume people are dying but cannot see them. This choice to bring the violence down to a personal level was deliberate, and I understand why it isn't done more often, but it's so good when it's used sparingly.

I'm sorry to be so hyped about it but this is, I'll say it again, basically a perfect film to me. I've gotten used to a rhythm when I watch Godzilla movies: Usually something big will happen at the beginning, then things will go quiet and we'll get stuck with a human story for the majority of the film until a big battle at the climax. This is completely different in tone from that. It only builds and builds, never stopping for a second and - crucially, and unusually - never having the human side of things feel like it drags, or is imbalanced against the monster stuff. I just love this one, everything about it.

Gappa, the Triphibian Monster (1967)

directed by Haruyasu Noguchi

Japan

84 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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I watched this several years ago and had a fairly negative opinion of it, but that was back when I was not as familiar with tokusatsu as I am now, and I may have also been watching the dub, which is generally not the optimal way to watch a Showa-era kaiju film. This is fairly easy to find in gorgeous quality (on archive.org), and I'd recommend watching it that way just for the miniatures, if nothing else. More on that later.

Nikkatsu is the oldest film studio in Japan, but they're not known for their kaiju output. It is very obvious that this movie represents the studio trying to cash in on the kaiju boom on film and television. Just looking at the director's previous work should prove that: Dozens of nothing but crime films, and then this. Watching the movie itself does give one a sense that this isn't intended to be particularly deep or sentimental material; it kind of just... hits all the right beats, does all the right things, accomplishes mostly what a kaiju film should accomplish, all without ever feeling like it's doing anything unique. The things that it does are by and large taken from other sources: The plot is nearly identical to 1961's Gorgo, which is itself, arguably, a ripoff. Tokusatsu has a long, long history of recycling plots, and for that reason I don't think a film's originality should have much bearing on what sort of value it has to you, the viewer. Just because something's been done before doesn't mean it can't be done good again. And judging from a couple of YouTube commenters saying things along the lines of "Thank you for uploading this, I saw it when I was a kid and it scared the boogers out of me", Gappa at least achieved its goal of being appealing (?) to small children.

So the film begins with a set-up we've probably all seen before. A developer announces pie-in-the-sky plans to open a theme park based around a sort of amalgamation of South Pacific island culture, in Japan, so that consumers won't have to go far to get the "exotic" entertainment they're looking for. At the same time, volcanic activity and strange events have been reported occurring on an island. A few groups are sent to investigate and are met with an isolated culture living on the island, who have "legends" about a large creature living inside a cave protected by a stone idol. The seismic activity on the island breaks the idol and opens a passage into the cave for the outsiders to stick their greedy little hands into, and they find inside a giant egg, which quickly hatches into a baby monster - dollar signs in the eyes of all involved. If they can bring back the monster, along with the people of the island, and exhibit both in the new theme park, it'll make bank. The monster is captured and brought back to Japan to be experimented on before its unveiling. As viewers, we've been counting all of the mistakes being made thus far, and we know a reckoning is about to come.

The racism in this film is very typical of kaiju cinema of the time, but that doesn't make it any less gross. As happens often, the outsiders ignore all the warnings of the indigenous people on the island, and when it comes back to bite them, they look pretty stupid. There's this weird cognitive dissonance in plots like this where whatever made-up indigenous culture the film portrays are shown as intelligent and (sometimes) helpful, and it's the Japanese outsiders who are clearly in the wrong, but the film goes about presenting this using Japanese actors in blackface and cheap tatty clothing. The general idea is there - respecting indigenous knowledge and lifeways - but it's presented through the worst possible means.

If we've seen Gorgo we kind of know what's coming next, but we can figure it out either way. Baby Gappa's parents come looking for it, and they're huge. The destruction they cause is almost entirely collateral, there's no real sense of anger, just two animals looking for their baby and oops, there happens to be a human civilization in the way. No matter how much damage is done, the theme park developer refuses to give up baby Gappa. This is probably the most realistic aspect of this film: Somebody who knows something will make him money refuses to give that thing up, even when he can see that it is actively destroying the world around him. But in an interesting turn of events, both the guy we're supposed to hate and one of the film's main "good" characters are sort of in agreement about not giving up Gappa. In spite of some characters seeming more measured and rational than others who are just greedy and stubborn, nobody is exactly embracing the idea of giving baby Gappa back to its parents, except - in Gamera fashion - for a little girl, the developer's daughter, who immediately recognizes her own pain of having lost her mother in the separation of Gappa from its parents.

When I first reviewed this I said it felt like a "one and done" kaiju movie for me, and it still does. I enjoy it as an artifact of the "golden age" of tokusatsu, but there's not really much here. A thin plot; stiff, uninteresting characters (big fan of the woman who just randomly decides to quit her job at the end to be a housewife and have babies); and a heaping helping of racism keep this from ever feeling memorable. But I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the miniatures, because, like, oh my god. I had actually been starting to fall asleep a little around when the Gappa parents made landfall, but when I saw the miniatures I snapped to attention. They built a city set here that is absolutely stunning in its detail. The scale is relatively small; it's only a small area that the Gappas rampage around in, but the amount of work that was put into the buildings is just some of the most incredible miniature-building I've ever seen. The city just looks like a city, not a city in miniature. To my knowledge this is pretty much the only time Nikkatsu ever did a tokusatsu film of this scale, but when they did, my goodness. I like to imagine they had a practical effects team on hand who were all huge tokusatsu nerds and knew in their bones that their time had come as soon as they got wind of this project. Considering that Nikkatsu had come up with five other kaiju projects and this was the only one that got made, said practical effects team was probably raring to go by the time production actually got under way.

I'll end by talking about the Gappa suits themselves, as I like to cover suit design when talking about kaiju films. I'm not too hot on these guys, but their appearance is interesting and strange and actually somewhat eerie. The moniker of a "triphibian" monster references the way the creatures can fly, swim, and walk on land (Gamera can do all this as well, of course, as can Godzilla - do not let anyone lie to you and tell you Godzilla cannot fly). They sort of look like gargoyles. Not quite avian, not quite anything else. Baby Gappa in particular is straight up unnerving - its eyes are too human. In the middle of such unbelievably detailed sets, the clunky, awkward Gappa suits look a little out of place. imdb does not credit the suit actors, so I'm going to name them here, because suit actors are always underappreciated and these folks deserve to be remembered: Hiroshita Atami and Takashi Konagai played the male Gappa, Ken Misugi and Shiro Tonami played the female. I am not sure if one of them also played baby Gappa, but I can't find information on who was in that particular suit.

Phantom Monster Agon (1964)

directed by Fuminori Ôhashi, Tokuo Mine

Japan

96 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Oh yes. KaiJune raids again.

I'm starting the month off with something that, I have to admit, I'm reviewing more because it's an oddity than because it's good. Phantom Monster Agon is a TV mini-series that is most notable for having been scripted by Shinichi Sekizawa, writer of many Shōwa-era Godzilla films. It's also been edited into a movie, but I recommend watching it in episode form, the way it was intended. All four episodes are easy to find with subs, and I'm constantly surprised that nobody ever talks about this when it's so readily available. Perhaps that's a testament to how middling it is.

So this is essentially Godzilla. Agon is a prehistoric reptile that was woken up by atomic testing and grew to abnormal proportions from consuming uranium spilled into the ocean. It's not just these characteristics that make him resemble Godzilla, though; the overall message of what Godzilla means as a symbol is also cribbed (can I say "cribbed" if it's the same writer both times?) here. The scientist du jour maintains a strong opinion that humanity deserves Agon, that it's our own mistakes coming back to haunt us. Repeatedly, every time it seems like Agon is beaten back, either the narrator or one of the characters is there with a warning that as long as we continue to abuse science, Agon will continue shadowing us.

The only face I recognized from the small main cast was Asao Matsumoto, who I probably remember from Ultraman, but I couldn't tell you what part he played in it. I'm sure I've seen him around. As for the directors of the series, neither of them seem to have made any films aside from this, but according to some trivia on imdb, Ôhashi assisted in creating the '54 Godzilla suit, which ultimately stopped Toho from suing Japan Radio Pictures, the studio who produced this film. Whether or not they'd sued, though, doesn't look to have made much of a difference, as the studio seems to have made this, two movies about judo, and then disappeared off the map.

I'm gonna be honest - most of the reason I want to talk about this at all is because the score is so bizarre. Far away is Akira Ifukube's compelling orchestral work or the jazzy energy of Masaru Sato. This sounds like an avant-garde performance in an abandoned industrial warehouse. You could stick this soundtrack in Begotten and it wouldn't be out of place at all. It's so discordant and jarring that it makes the whole thing downright creepy.

The storyline itself is thin, though aided by Sekizawa's writing. The first two episodes address the discovery of Agon, what it means for humanity, what we can do about it (basically nothing), and introduces us to our main characters, though we spend little time with them. There's a very, very slight romantic angle that's endearing in its old-fashioned-ness; the male lead teasing the female scientist after she breaks her ankle, calling her a scarecrow woman. The third and fourth episodes involve a pair of shady characters who have misplaced a suitcase full of drugs that happens to end up wedged under Agon's foot, which they enlist a terrified diver to recover, and then a bunch of stuff ensues that leads to the conclusion of this unmemorable series, which is that Agon gets too stoned to function, sets itself on fire, and wanders off into the sea.

I do not think this is good, but I do love it a little. I love every kaiju. (Surprisingly, we have the suit actor's name! Etsuji Higashi - like almost everyone here, this is his only credit.) This is just a really weird relic of the kaiju boom as it was starting to shift towards television, and it's kind of fallen by the wayside over the years. Toho themselves has released it on home video multiple times, so one can't even say it's been "forgotten", per se - it's just not very good and nobody really pays it any mind.

Bedevil (1993)

directed by Tracey Moffatt

Australia

86 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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A lot of sources name this as the first feature film directed an Aboriginal Australian woman, but I'm wary of claims like that. Is it really the first, or is it just the first to get any kind of wide recognition? Even if it is the case that this is truly the first, the reasoning for that shouldn't be framed as a supposed lack of Aboriginal filmmakers, but with a society that has for so long prevented Aboriginal people from making films. Relevant to my specific interests, Bedevil also purported to be a horror film, or at least a creepy, supernatural film. That claim, at least, I can validate.

The film is split up into three segments, each dealing with a piece of local lore as told by the people who witnessed whatever event is at the center of the story. The first two segments are presented in almost a mockumentary style, a mix of present-day interviews with the people in question and flashbacks to the event they're describing as it actually unfolded. But there's something about the way these two stories are told - and I am deliberately focusing on the first two, because the third was a bit more inscrutable, and I'll get to it in time - that is entirely unlike the way you would typically think of a documentary or found-footage style film as being. These aren't formal, sit-down interviews, they're patchy recollections told almost as an aside while the interviewees are doing something else. Barely "interviews" at all, really; that term may be too formal for what in essence feels like a friend or at least an acquaintance telling us something that happened to them. It's almost like the focus is not on the story itself but on the people who lived the story - not the specific people, not in a biographical sense, but in the sense that at the heart of every legend shown to us in Bedevil is a real person who eventually grew up, moved on, and continued to live their life.

In "Mr. Chuck", two people relate parts of the same story. The story centers on a swamp that was rumored to have been haunted by the ghost of an American GI who drowned in it during WWII. The swamp as a physical location is a meeting place between three cultures: the Aboriginal people who have lived with it for tens of thousands of years; the white Australians, hungry for progress, building on the swamp like it's any tract of vacant land; and, only in ghostly form (or maybe as something worse) the specter of the American presence on the island. One of the storytellers is an Aboriginal man who, as a boy, fell into the swamp and experienced being physically touched by the spirit inhabiting it. The other is a white woman, the child of one of the developers who built a movie theater right on top of the swamp. While the woman manages to tell her story in a detached, impersonal way, describing with no facial expression how everyone knew that the boy who fell into the swamp had a bad home life and everybody could have helped him, but they didn't, the man seems physically haunted by his experience. He laughs about it, almost hysterically, but the way his face is downturned sometimes makes it look like he's crying. There's something incredibly, incredibly haunting about this segment - that feeling of what was once a human having been subsumed by the land that did not want him and turned, over decades, into something else. Something worse. I also find it really compelling that what was built on top of the swamp was a movie theater - a place where people go to live and relive stories, some of them, eventually, probably, being war stories.

"Choo Choo Choo Choo", the second segment, partially covers the Min Min Lights, an interesting phenomenon that I've known about for a while, but also involves a more personal story about a phantom train and the ghost of a little girl accidentally killed on its tracks. This is by far the most intimate telling: no formal, sit-down interviews; just the woman who witnessed the ghost train giving us tidbits of information when she's not rocking out in the bed of a truck with her netball group or busy cooking a wild pig underground. We feel familiar with this woman - at one point she comes up to the camera and wipes off the lens, like we the viewers are a messy child who's come to her with chocolate on our face. Everyone in the immediate vicinity seems to know about the story of the train, as we see that the people living around the tracks have actually developed a gesture to reference it - pumping one arm for the chugging of the wheels, then covering their eyes to represent the ghost girl who is inexorably paired with the train. Again, there's something deeply haunting about this, about hearing but not seeing disembodied noises in the night, knowing something is there, but not being able to touch it. But in the present, the woman is not haunted by it. She tells us how irritating it was to have the ghost girl come around, and then she has a little spat over the correct plating of seafood with her friend in their native language. What she experienced is a part of her life that she's conveying to us, and she's at ease with it.

The third segment, "Lovin' the Spin I'm In", has no interviews whatsoever and is entirely dramatized. It's also my least favorite segment, although it is as well-made and interesting as the previous two. It's the story of a landlord who owns a building inhabited by two Torres Strait Islander tenants who've been dead for many years, and the perspective is mostly through the eyes of a 14-year-old white boy in the building across the street. I think maybe the self-reflective nature of the first two stories was what made them engaging to me, because I had trouble getting into this one that was a more conventional narrative. It is eerie, unusual, and memorable, with the same gorgeous cinematography as the rest of the film, but it felt less interesting overall.

To talk of cinematography: this movie doesn't look like anything else I've ever seen. Moffat was heavily influenced by the aesthetic of Kwaidan, and it really shows, but at the same time Bedevil is its own thing. The film itself is unfortunately woefully obscure and your best chance of finding it is a garbage VHS rip that strips a lot of the visual intricacy from it, but you can still tell how innovative and unique the set design is. At first I thought the use of painted backdrops and what looks like just a bunch of Astroturf and fake shrubbery on a soundstage was something we were meant to not really see, but now I think it was very deliberate, and a brilliant choice. The parts of the film set in the present are filmed in a space that's clearly real, lucid, but the events of the past take place in a liminal zone that feels like a dream. The painted sunset looks more perfect than a real sunset could ever be, because it's not a real sunset, it's the way a sunset is captured as a static moment in our memory. The past segments feel like reenactments. The stories being told exist in an un-visitable eternal single moment that lives on not as an empirical truth but as a bodily, lived experience held within the tellers.

I was really taken in by this beautiful and strange film. People do know about it within certain circles, but it seems pretty obscure in the overall picture of Australian cinema. I'm not familiar with Tracey Moffat's other work as a video artist, but Bedevil has definitely left an impression on me, and I want to explore the other things she's created.

The War in Space (1977)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

91 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I really dropped the ball by not posting this review on May the 4th, but for some reason I was certain I'd already posted it. Anyway, here it is now, for your delectation.

I'm going to come right out and say that this is not my favorite Jun Fukuda film, nor my favorite sci-fi film from Toho in general, but that isn't a recommendation to avoid it, because even if it's a little lacking plotwise, it's still got some of the best practical effects around. I'm not going to talk much about the things I disliked here; instead I'm going to focus on the good things (of which there are many), because really there's not that much that's bad about this film so much as there is stuff that it just doesn't have, like for example any interesting characters.

The first act sees The War in Space at its most Jun Fukuda-y, by which I mean there's some spying and crime going on, and multiple people are either shot or at risk of getting shot. It's a little eerie for a while because the aliens can imitate humans, so we don't know what's going on or what the aliens' grand plan is, just that there's people who are not people and they could be anywhere. Most people know Fukuda from his Godzilla films, but I've seen more of his crime movies than most people would probably care to watch (though he is brilliant as a toku director, don't get me wrong) and as such I've slowly come to associate him more with the crime genre. You can definitely tell, if you're familiar with his work in that area, which parts of this film are most strongly under his influence. It stuck out to me that this movie on the whole is almost startlingly beige; Fukuda has worked in black-and-white, but I know him mostly as someone who tends towards a sort of vibrant, hyper, very colorful aesthetic, so to see The War in Space be so monotone and boring was a bit of a departure from usual.

Like I said, there is not much plot. All of Earth's major cities suddenly come under attack by unknown alien forces, large armadas of tiny little orbular ships raining laser fire down on all our landmarks. A last-minute transmission from a space station gives firsthand info, right before they're destroyed, that the enemy is some kind of "Roman ship". More on that later. The source of the invaders is eventually determined to be Venus, and only one thing is strong enough to make the journey there and fight the enemies - the Gōten, but it's not quite finished, and the race to get it up and ready as more and more of Earth's cities become ruins is thrilling. Except for some dragging in the middle, this is not a boring movie, despite whatever else it may be. The Gōten is launched in the nick of time, and for the remainder of the movie (a little over half) we will never go back to Earth; everything either takes place on the ship itself or on Venus.

I am a die-hard fan of the Gōten. I will not get into all of the reasons why at the moment, but since its earlier appearance in Atragon (also one of my favorite movies, which I get wildly enthusiastic when talking about and will refrain from expanding upon here) it became one of the most striking ships in tokusatsu as well as a personal favorite of me and many others. There is just something about its appearance that so perfectly encapsulates the future-thinking of Showa-era science fiction: This ship that takes pieces from existing vessels but combines them into something that is sea-, air-, space-, and ground-ready, an impossible dream of technology that is, even in the context of the technologically advanced future that spawned it, looked upon as a crowning achievement. There's something so iconic about that giant drill at its head. When it's used to tunnel through the ground I always feel childishly excited. I'm not a weapons dude, I've only recently started studying specific machinery in tokusatsu, but the Gōten is as beloved to me as some living characters are.

It's difficult to describe the breadth of the practical effects in this film in just a couple of paragraphs, and anyway it would probably be boring if I did. But just imagine that every mid-century fantasy about what Venus might be like is put to film here. Toho was already doing incredible things on soundstages and miniature sets in the 60s, and this represents what I feel is the height of their imagination made physical. Everything looks very convincing: Scenes where miniature ships traverse the miniature landscape of Venus actually look like the ship is navigating miles of terrain, when in reality it was feet or inches. Same goes for the sets when humans are walking around Venus, although despite all the other wacky stuff in this film I do find it difficult to believe that such dinky, flimsy spacesuits are enough to protect anyone from getting instantly crushed and boiled to death. This is like watching movies where people imagine what it would be like to walk around on the moon, before we actually did go to the moon, except we're probably not going to be landing people on Venus any time soon.

This is kind of a weird movie in that parts of it feel very cobbled-together. It doesn't feel like it has a cohesive aesthetic. It feels like the idea of going to Venus was the root of it all and then other stuff was added in, not necessarily with a specific look in mind, but just because aliens and whatnot were needed for the setting. But this cobbled-together feeling leads to some of my favorite non-recurring aliens in the Toho universe. This is an incredibly niche thing, but I love when aliens appropriate a Roman aesthetic (see also: Romulans), which is what the guys in The War in Space do, or at least presumably they do; we don't see much of them beyond their ruler and a couple of mooks in a mostly empty palace. I find something really weirdly compelling about the idea of a civilization replicating the height of Roman society in parallel, millions or billions of miles away on another planet. I love the idea that Rome developed twice, that Rome is a common element in the universe, or even something that galactic civilizations might default to as a base template. It's just funny to me and also interesting. Another thing I love is the image of a ship flying through space that is an actual, physical ship, like a wooden sailing ship, and we get to see one of those face off against the Gōten, so that makes me pretty pleased. The scant bits of the Galactic Empire that we do see hint at a complex aesthetic tradition that I was dying to know more about. (Commander Hell is also played by Goro Mutsumi, who recently passed away and who I always love to see in stuff.)

Overall, this is mostly an ideas movie, I think. It follows a pretty standard "invaders attacking > invaders are routed out > invaders are destroyed" progression. The Gõten is treated as a superweapon that should not be used again (or at least the planet-killer bomb on its drill-tip is), which gives the plot a little more weight, but this doesn't come into play until the very end. It's not the best movie, but it contains some as-usual stunning practical effects, and I do heartily recommend it to fans of older science fiction.