Godzilla Raids Again (1955) directed by Motoyoshi Oda

This is the second Godzilla film, coming only months after the first was released and it already gave us a signal of what was to come next for series in the next decades. While the first was a moody, political tale of the atom bomb, this one goes in the simple "giant monsters fighting"  direction pretty much immediately.

A plane is down on an isolated island and the pilot's best friend has flown there to save him. They immediately run into Godzilla, who has inexplicably survived dying in the first film, fighting Anguirus who resembles a porcupine/dinosaur hybrid. They fall into the ocean and soon are taking their personal issues to the coast of Japan. At first Godzilla arrives and is lead away from the sure by "light bombs" but that plan falls short when escaped convicts crash a truck into some sort of oil refinery causing a much bigger sours of attention for Godzilla to latch onto. Anguirus arrives and they go on a rampage, destroying everything in their paths.

There is a love story of sorts where the bridegroom gets killed trying to stop Godzilla and a big company relocates as a result of the monster damage so we get to hear about that... but who cares about the human parts? Unlike the first outing where human interactions actually meant something, this movie created the path all others would follow... threadbare human story to pad out the master battles. And there are plenty of monster bottles in this one! Known for "man in a monster suit" effects this film seems to have its share of that mixed with equal amounts of hand puppets. I would not say it is ineffective, however. The effects overall are pretty good for such a quickly produced, low budget production.

In the end Anguirus is defeated and kill by the king of the monsters and the king himself is buried in a mountain of ice. Never to return again, Well until 1962 when Godzilla VS King Kong came out.

I had to confess this was the first time I saw this film. I grew up seeing the Godzilla series at the local Everett Park theatre just outside of Boston and on TV when we got a TV in the side 70s but I somehow missed this gem. I think the local movie house limited itself to colour films and this is black and white and this might have somehow fallen through the cracks in the TV creature double feature distribution deal.

If you like Godzilla films... you'll love this one. It is not to be taken seriously but it's a lot of fun and doesn't disappoint for monster on monster action.

Shin Godzilla 2016 Directed by Hideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi

Shin Godzilla (Godzilla: Resurgence) marks a new beginning for the Toho studios Godzilla films. While it is the 31st in the series it re0imagines the creature’s origins - basing them more on the Fukushima disaster rather than the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in WWII. 

The results are mixed. 

Overall, this is your typical Japanese monster flick in style and substance and would not have been out of place on a Saturday morning’s Creature Double Feature TV show. There is a lot of filler exposition with government officials debating and running around trying to decide what to do about the giant monster attacking Tokyo. Two hours is little long for this sort of thing, but it’s a fun film to watch and the special effects are far above some of those earlier efforts in the 60s and 70s we all remember so fondly, and even better than more recent efforts as the mix of monster suits, CGI and puppets gets more sophisticated. 

Visually, Godzilla is huge and the redesign is interesting… but doesn’t always work. In this film it evolves quickly from a sea creature to the two legged creature we all know (more or less) but some of the earlier versions are a bit weird looking. The eyes are on the line between creepy and cartoon-like. The fully formed monster is a mess, mostly in a good way. It looks like a rotting corpse and that may be intentional. The atomic breath is well done and gets a slight laser beam upgrade at one point as well. 

The plot is where this, and many other movies like it, falls apart. It’s fun to watch but really makes very little logical sense. Godzilla is attacked repeatedly by missiles and bombs - which actually do have some effect - and is eventually crushed by knocking buildings over on top of him (her? Who knows?). They use the time he is on the ground to pump fluid into his mouth that will « freeze him »  when he uses his atomic breath and it works. The freezing solution is better than the military one which was to basically destroy Japan with atomic bombs so I guess considering the alternative, a giant decomposing monster in the middle of the city is the better choice. 

The film ends with a shot of Godzilla’s (comically long - seriously - it’s incredibly long) tail frozen while in the process of bursting open and revealing some sort of human-like creatures emerging from it. Creepy, effective looking but confusing and dumb - why on earth would that be happening? We know the monster is continually evolving according to the plot but that just comes out of nowhere. 

Watch it? Sure, if you like traditional Japanese monster flicks (and I do) this fits that need nicely. 

King Kong 1933 directed by Merian C. Cooper

The story, which has become the basis of most of the later King Kong remakes, is simple. A down on her luck actress is hired by a somewhat sketchy film producer to star in an adventure film on a mysterious lost island that only he knows how to find. When they get there, they discover a lost world of savage natives and prehistoric animals ruled over by a legendary figure - King Kong. The natives capture the actress in order to sacrifice her to Kong but when he arrives, he is smitten with her and take her into his care, fighting all sort of creatures as her human love interest follows and attempts to free her. When he succeeds, they rush back to the boat with Kong in hot pursuit and the monstrous ape is captured and brought back to New York City to be exhibited as the 8th Wonder of the World. Opening night the beast escapes, gets the girl back and flees to highest structure he can find, in this case the Empire State Building where he is shot down by bi-planes and falls to his death.

Kong’s lasting popularity, I will argue, stems completely from his first film appearance. Not one of the re-boots comes close to the original. The monstrous ape is not so monstrous in the hands of legendary animator Willis O’Brien who infused a small puppet moved one frame at a time with such real emotion and personality that he became not an amazing special effect but as real as any human actor that has graced the silver screen.

The 1933 film started not just the legend of Kong but giant monster movies in general. This film developed a look and style of its own - partly from the limits of the era and partly from the incredible imagination of Willis O’Brien who not only animated Kong and the other creatures but did the matte paintings and overall design. Skull island is at once a real place and a fantasy world. 

On release, this film was a blockbuster. No one had ever seen anything like it and they flocked to theatres for a decade… literally. The film was re-released in 1938, 1942 and again in 1952, a release that out paced not only the previous ones in profits but also most of the new movies released that year. Looking at the movie with modern eyes, it might be hard to imagine, but this was a terrifying  and shocking motion picture, so much so it was censored for violence and sexual content after its debut. My Aunt Helen saw it back then and she often recounted to me how scared she was each time she saw it. It was her favourite film. 

While the film’s effects are legendary, it was also the first film with a totally original music score. The sets of the film were also amazing and were used for another production, The Most Dangerous Game, filmed in tandem and using many of the same actors. 

Is King Kong a perfect film? 

Some might say it’s THE perfect film and it’s hard to argue it isn’t. In its favour is its longevity, the story is still being told and retold as recent as last week. It does have plenty of flaws, but even they are hard to criticize. Kong’s varying size throughout the running length is an often stated problem with the production - but is it? I would say no as the director Cooper deliberately changed the titular character’s height (to the chagrin of Willis O’Brien and the effects team who wanted it to be a real as possible) to match the content of the scene. On the island the great ape is smaller, more human, if that can be said of a monstrous monkey, and in the big city he is 3 times that size to avoid him looking small among the skyscrapers. Kong must look like the king of his surroundings at all times for him to work as a character and frankly, while watching the film you would be hard pressed to notice his leaps in grandeur. The film is just too compelling for the viewer to be distracted by anything but other than what is happening on the screen. The effects are dated, but also they are so stylized looking that Peter Jackson’s 2005 overly long and somewhat over the top remake tried to recreate the look and feel of the 30s version to sell the idea better to modern audiences. Yes, you can see where the animators fingers moved the fur on the puppet as it moves about and the dinosaur designs are out of date by today’s Jurassic Park standards (which are in turn now out of date as well) but it really doesn’t matter one bit. The acting is definitely from it’s time, but it is a style of acting we all accept and in many ways expect see in films. What makes this movie at least seem perfect is how it plays. We buy it all. When Kong breathes is last after falling from the Empire State Building, we feel it in our bones and even though Carl Dedham tells us it was beauty that killed the beast, we know it was us and our pride that brought him to his fate and if he was real today, the same thing would happen. The success of King Kong comes not just from it’s innovation but the universality of it’s story which is just as relatable today as it was almost 85 years ago. 

Hooray for Holly(Ed)Wood

If you think that Ed Wood's era of low budget filmmaking and laughable rubber monsters died by the mid-60s, think again.

One stoned-out Sunday, I decided to watch the indie sci-fi film SKY LINE on Netflix because mainly it had sexy hipster Eric Balfour battling aliens.

The film cost up to $10 mil to make (mainly due to the CGI digital effects) which returned that investment sixfold with a world-wide take of $67 million.

Eric Balfour told interviewers how he became involved with the independently financed film directed by special-effects supervisors turned directors."I was invited to come down to the Hydraulx office. And the guys… We did a small reading and we went over a couple of scenes. Then they showed me the trailer that they had cut for the movie with their friends. They basically said, "So you want in?" After seeing the trailer I was like, "This looks amazing. I'm totally in."

Most of the action was shot in the high-rise condo where director/producer Greg Strause lives for $500,000. The visual effects in Post jacked the budget up to $10 million. The Brothers Strause say that they have a sequel in mind. They will do it with their own money if they have to and try to find a distributor after that. Somewhere Ed Wood is smiling.

In the true Ed Wood tradition, SKY LINE offer actors in a one-set, claustrophic setting (ie: a Hi-RISE in LA's Marina) due to budget limitations - as well as featuring crow-barred "emotional" moments for the cast to chew on - which is laugh inducing because they are on the verge of extinction but cannot get past their petty hangups. One actor has a rather noticeable and distracting speech impediment. While playing macho - he has to utter lines with way too many R's for him to handle. Oh, and the aliens are  brain-gulping flappy vagina monsters.

Best of all, Eric Balfour has a beat down scene with an alien monster on the rooftop that brings a flashback to Ed Wood's BRIDE of the MONSTER ("Just roll around with the octopus.").The CGI effects are decent - but unfortunately CGI (or in Ed Wood's case : stock footage) cannot do everything a director needs to tell a story, and a group of actors must always fill in the gaps. As we all know, this is where the real low-budget comedy comes in. Some things never change.

Don't Look Up (at the screen!)

Night of the Demon

It's pouring rain here today and reminds me of England. I'm pouring myself a cuppa and curling up with Dana Andrews and the spirits.

The Creature of the Black lagoon

The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) is by far one of the best monster movies of all time. Filmed in 3D as many new are now I thought it was a good time to remind people of not only a great film, but a pretty good trilogy. Many people don’t realize that «Creature» was a trilogy. «Revenge of the Creature» and «The Creature Walks Amoung US» followed up, with limited success at the box office but actually expanded teh mythos of the gillman in ways you just don’t see in today’s monster flicks. Many classic monsters we not just villians, in fact humans were usually the evil force... going into nature and distubing it’s natural balance, attacking things they didn’t unsterstand and sometimes people were just plain sadistic jerks in the name of «science».

The creature is no exception and even expands on the theme. In the first film, explorers go into the jungle find a living gillman and think of nothing but capturing him to make money off it, the second film, they bring him back to an aquarium and «experiment» on him by giving him electric shocks (where did these scientist go to school? Was Illsa - She wolf of the SS a professor there?). The third film really gets poignant as the gillman loses his gills and is made to wear clothes and become «one of us». In the end he finds his way back into tthe ocean... and drowns.

Technically, the costume of the monster is fantastic, scary and not at all like a cheap halloween costume some people expect from films from that era. The music is memorable particularly since the theme is played literally HUNDREDS of times through the film which sadly lends itself to parody despite the fact that little riff is quite jarring to hear. The 3D is as annoying as always (only the 1st 2 films use it BTW). 3D is almost always, without fail, a headache inducing, distracting experience, even with today’s «advancements» in the technology.

In short... spend a Saturday afternoon watching all 3 before it gets remade by Micheal Bay... seriously.

Monster Mouth a Go-Go

Stephanie Rothman (more on her in another post!) directed "It's a Bikini World" in 1967. Here's a groovy clip, featuring the Castaways and Carolyn Brandt in a red fringy bikini:


They're playing inside a sabre-tooth tiger's(?) mouth! Then I saw this clip from Ted Mikels' "Girl in Gold Boots":


(Thanks, Butch!)

Coincidence? Was this a location or a set that was recycled? A YouTuber commented that it was shot at a place called the Haunted House on Hollywood Blvd. Any LaLa Landers know? And why should I care? Both clips are FANGTASTIC!

Queen Kong

Featuring Robin Askwith, Saucy British Cinema star of the Confessions... series and 'Carry On Girls'. The British, despite being under the delusion that they hold the benchmark for irreverent comedy and intelligent drama, have occasionally proved that they are exceedingly good at being really bad. Which is nothing to be ashamed of.
Father Christmas gave me the book many years ago and I still haven't got round to reading it yet - I may take it with me if I ever need a lengthy stint in hospital.
Thanks to Donna for inviting me here, and hello to the rest of you. I've already been introduced to Mavis today, which was a pleasure!

Damn you all to HELL!

Charlton Heston had to go kick it, which means that "Attack of the Crab Monsters" got kicked off TCM's schedule tomorrow night.