The Nature of Mothers

As someone who had to wait to see the original Godzilla until Channel 4 showed it in the wee small hours of Christmas Morning 1999, it was a source of some irritation to me that my father would occasionally make casual reference to having seen the film when he was younger. This lasted until I took the trouble to actually enquire as to what he’d thought of the film. ‘Oh… well…’ he said, vaguely. ‘I think they caught a monster and put it on display, but they didn’t realise it was really a baby… and then Godzilla came to get it back… it was all right.’ The mystery was solved: he hadn’t actually seen Godzilla at all, but the 1961 British film Gorgo. I’m not sure this quite qualifies as an instance of the Mandela effect, but it’s a fairly understandable mistake for someone to make: it’s very tempting, and far from inaccurate to refer to Gorgo as the British Godzilla.

After a properly stirring set of titles, the film gets under way off the coast of Ireland, where a small freighter is going about its business. Captaining the vessel is Joe Ryan (William Travers), along with his business partner Sam Slade (William Sylvester). The duo are a pair of opportunistic salvagers, but their efforts are disrupted by an underwater volcanic eruption which causes a severe storm, damaging their ship. Needing repairs and supplies, they call in at nearby Nara Island, noting as they do some grotesque fish floating dead in the water.

The reception at Nara is not especially warm, except perhaps that of Sean (Vincent Winter), a young orphan who basically just follows Joe and Sam round for the rest of the movie (Social Services are not to be seen anywhere). It turns out the local harbour master is doing some illicit treasure hunting of his own and is keen to see the back of them, but since the storm there have been problems – one of his divers was fished out of the bay in a doornail-like condition, apparently scared to death, while another has disappeared entirely. The mystery is solved when the sea froths and the head of a sixty-foot-tall reptilian monster emerges!

Sean recognises it from local legends of immense sea beasts, but no-one listens to him much; instead, Joe and Sam bully the harbour master into paying them to get rid of the monster. A resourceful duo, they manage to ensnare it in a suitably large net and lash it to the deck of their boat – but now what? The University of Dublin is very interested in taking this unique scientific specimen from them, and a deal is struck for it to be delivered to the mainland. However, Joe is far from impressed with the money on offer and promptly reneges on this arrangement in order to sell the monster to a circus in central London. (One of the many unexpectedly satisfying things about Gorgo is the way in which it gradually reveals that its main human characters are actually quite unpleasant individuals.)

Having thus pulled a fast one on the Irish in the time-honoured English style, Joe and Sam deliver the monster, now christened Gorgo, to London where it is installed behind an electric fence. Astonished crowds are soon swirling around it (not much sign of Health and Safety, either). Some concerned boffins are soon on the scene, and eventually impart some worrying news to Joe and Sam (it’s not really clear why, given they’ve sold the monster by this point, but it certainly helps with the flow of the story) – their examinations have revealed that Gorgo is only a little baby monster, and the adult version will be vastly bigger and more powerful. Could this explain why all contact has been lost with everyone on Nara Island…?

Calling Gorgo ‘the British Godzilla‘ does have a degree of accuracy to it, as already noted, but things are actually a little more complicated than that. Gorgo‘s director was Eugene Lourie, who eight years earlier had been in charge of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, an American monster movie in which a dinosaur, resuscitated by an atom bomb, ends up running wild through New York. As is now quite well-known, this film was enthusiastically seized upon by a well-known Japanese film studio who did their own uncredited remake of it, which was of course Godzilla itself. So accusing Lourie of doing any sort of version of Godzilla seems to me to be very probably putting the cart before the horse. We should also consider the similarities between Gorgo and any main-sequence version of King Kong you care to mention – in both films, the monster is dragged unwillingly off to civilisation, and is basically sympathetic.

My point is that Gorgo isn’t as lazily derivative as it looks, for all that it concludes with a performer in a rubber monster suit lumbering through a model city – indeed, there are a couple of ways in which it anticipates the way this genre would end up going – firstly, it is one of the first colour English-language monster movies in this tradition, beating the first colour Godzilla film to the screen by a year. Secondly, and more importantly, it is the first notable movie where the monster wins, delivering an admonitory smack to human civilisation before returning from whence it came. It may not have the extraordinary bleak intensity of the original Godzilla, but this is still a film with a thought-through and serious message about the relationship between humans and the environment, and one which is still timely today – thoughtless exploitation is bound to end in disaster.

The fact that Gorgo’s script is so good – apart from the slow reveal of Joe and Sam’s real characters, it also manages the killer twist at the heart of the story with great aplomb – may explain why it was able to attract an equally good cast – William Travers was a bona fide film star at the time, being relatively fresh from the sentimental hammer-throwing melodrama Geordie. One suspects the American William Sylvester is mainly there to help sell the film in the States, though he is also an actor assured of a tiny piece of cinematic immortality, thanks to his role as Dr Floyd in 2001. Most of the rest of the cast are made up of the kind of distinguished British character actors who bring extra heft to whatever they appear in, including an uncredited Nigel Green – I have to say that this is a film very much of its time, with only one credited female performer (a stuntwoman) – there is, of course, one very crucial female character in the story, but she is three hundred feet tall and has no dialogue beyond roaring a lot.

If there is a department in which Gorgo falls down somewhat, it is of course the special effects: we are in the realm of suitamation and dodgy compositing, and this is before we even get onto the film’s voluminous use of stock footage (the US Marine Corps play a surprisingly large role in attempting to defend London from the looming threat of Ogra, Gorgo’s mum). But the film has picked up sufficient interest and charm for this not really to detract from the entertainment value of the climax, which is very impressively mounted, the population of London fleeing in panic and terror as Ogra tours various landmarks, demolishing each one in turn (the moment where Ogra tears down Big Ben is as iconic as any in the history of pulp British movies), the London underground collapsing and flooding, and so on. I would say this is as good as sequence as anything comparable in the genre.

‘Like nothing you’ve ever seen before!’ is the proud claim of the poster for Gorgo – well, even at the time that almost certainly wasn’t true. But Gorgo hits the sweet spot of genre film-making just about perfectly, balancing respect for the conventions of its genre with the need for intelligent innovation and a few genuine surprises. When this kind of film is made nowadays, it usually has impressive special effects and a script which is often only marginally coherent – Gorgo, on the other hand, may not have the greatest production values, but it does have a strong story with heart and something to say for itself – and I will choose that any day. A minor classic, as monster movies go, and a personal favourite of mine.

Read Full Post »

Join the…

At one point during the recent trip to New York, Significant Other and I found ourselves enjoying the truly spectacular views available to visitors to Roosevelt Island, looking south and east towards Manhattan and the bay. I was particularly impressed by the fact that so many iconic buildings were in such close proximity to each other, and – feeling, as ever, that knowledge is best shared – thought I would pass on a few pertinent facts about their history.

‘There’s the UN building, which was demolished by Godzilla in Destroy All Monsters in 1968. Just behind it you can see the Empire State Building, which was vandalised by King Kong in 1931. And there’s the Chrysler Building, which was decapitated by the army while fighting Godzilla again in 1998, and also where Q the Winged Serpent was roosting in 1982…’

That tell-tale glazed quality which people so often develop when talking to me about not-entirely-mainstream movies had crept into Significant Other’s eyes, and it occurred to me that while nearly everyone knows what’s what if you mention Godzilla or King Kong, when it comes to a movie like Q (aka Q – The Winged Serpent), you have kind of gone down the rabbit hole a bit. If the movie has attracted a bit more attention recently, it is for the lamentable reason that its creator, Larry Cohen, recently passed away.

Cohen was the kind of film-maker who never really achieved anything more than a kind of cult status, even though his name was frequently on films and TV shows that most people have heard of: he created and wrote the first episode of The Invaders, but moved on when the producers decided to focus more on sci-fi action adventure than the paranoid thriller he had envisaged; he also wrote episodes of Columbo, The Fugitive and NYPD Blue, and a lot of exploitation movies, such as It’s Alive – possibly the greatest killer mutant baby film ever made – Phone Booth, and Captivity. Cohen’s favourite of his own movies was apparently Q, though, and it is easy to see why:  put together in under a week after Cohen was fired from another film but left with a pre-booked hotel room in New York, the film has a kind of mad energy about it which is very engaging.

Q opens with a cheerful scene of a man cleaning the windows of the Empire State Building, forty floors up: apparently this role was played by the building’s actual window cleaner, presumably because no-one else would go out in the harness. Anyway, the man’s attempts to flirt with an office worker run into trouble when something swoops down on him. His decapitated corpse slumps against the window, gorily. Hard-bitten cops Shepard (David Carradine) and Powell (Richard Roundtree) are soon on the case, but find themselves baffled by the absence of the key body part. ‘I don’t know! Maybe his head got loose and came off by itself!’ cries Shepard.

Meanwhile, small-time crook, would-be jazz pianist and all-around craven coward Jimmy Quinn finds himself pressured into participating in a diamond robbery by his underworld associates (the target of the heist is a company named ‘Neil Diamonds’), but things go awry and he finds himself on the run from both the police and his former colleagues. While attempting to visit his lawyer, whose offices are in the Chrysler Building in midtown Manhattan, he finds himself up in the building’s iconic art-deco spire – but he is not alone there, as he discovers a number of bloody skeletons and a large nest containing an even bigger egg…

People are continuing to vanish from the tops of high buildings – we are treated to various scenes of people in the street reacting unconvincingly to fake blood and viscera raining down on them from the sky – and Shepard’s investigation has linked up with another case: that of various people turning up mutilated (skin flayed off, heart cut out, and so on). He comes to the conclusion that an Aztec death cult is operating in New York and has summoned an avatar of the god Quetzalcoatl into existence – it is this dragon-bird-god which is chewing its way through the city’s high-altitude populace. But can he persuade his superiors of this? And just what is it going to take to persuade Jimmy to give up his information about the location of the monster’s lair? (A heap of money, the copyright on all the photos of the creature, and having his picture taken with Rupert Murdoch, apparently.)

A movie like Q should, obviously, be a disaster: the story sounds like a rejected Kolchak script written by someone who’s eaten too much cheese, while the film’s central conceit – an enormous monster flying around present-day New York without anyone noticing, snatching people off rooftops and devouring them – is clearly far beyond the scope of a budget of only $1 million. However, the monster itself, while used very sparingly on screen, is a pretty good one – if there are problems, they arise more from the iffy back projection than the stop-motion special effects themselves.

More important to the film’s success is the way that it is clearly meant to be a tongue-in-cheek, deadpan comedy as much as a serious film. I don’t think anyone, himself included, would ever have described David Carradine as one of the world’s greatest actors, but his chilled-out demeanour and laconic line-readings are exactly right for some of the dialogue he has to deliver – he goes from the stock arguing-with-his-pen-pushing-boss scenes to discussions about deeply unorthodox theology and somehow his performance is pitched just right for both. Carradine is superficially taking it seriously while really not taking it seriously at all, which is basically this film in a nutshell: the script does just the barest minimum possible to explain why millions of people haven’t noticed a dragon flying around New York (apparently the monster makes sure people are blinded by the sun when they look in its direction: hmmm), but you buy into it because you don’t really have any other choice.

On the other hand, the extraordinary thing about Q is that Michael Moriarty seems to be taking the whole thing so seriously it almost becomes ridiculous in an entirely different way. This is, as noted, a tongue-in-cheek horror movie about window cleaners and high steel workers being snatched by a huge flying monster, and yet Moriarty turns in the kind of performance that – in a different genre – could well have attracted awards nominations. He seems to think he’s in a John Cassavetes movie or something like that, obviously giving his absolute all to make Quinn a plausible character. The clash of acting styles between him and Carradine should be very ugly, but again somehow it works.

Now, there are some elements of Q which are great because they work so well, and there are some elements of it which are great because they’re so knowingly cheesy, but this does not quite result in an entirely great movie. The two main plot threads, about the monster’s reign of terror and Quinn’s various travails, are both fine, but there’s an additional storyline about an Aztec cult carrying out human sacrifices which never quite feels fully fleshed out; the way this plot line is resolved also feels like a bit of an afterthought.

This is fairly small potatoes compared to the sheer entertainment value the rest of the film provides. It is gory, sometimes crude, and unashamedly an exploitation movie, but also enormously fun. This isn’t really a message movie, but the plot is obviously tied up with the power of prayer – and it really does seem to me that the existence of the film, especially given its sheer quality, is some kind of miracle.

Read Full Post »

The Long Kong

Not for the first time recently, we went on holiday only to find our arrival coincided with regrettably unseasonal weather conditions: ‘WINTER STORM EXPECTED SUNDAY PM/MONDAY AM’ flashed every roadside information board all the way from JFK into Manhattan. Probably just a coincidence, and I suppose it could have been worse: it was only the first day or so of the trip, when we were taking it fairly easy and trying to get over the jet lag.

The prospect of spending the evening in the hotel room was brightened a bit when Travelling Companion spotted that the movie on BBC America was King Kong. This seemed (potentially, at least) a very appropriate film for the situation – it’s one of the great, iconic New York movies, and we were staying just round the corner from the Empire State Building. The only slight cause for uncertainty was that there was no way of finding out which version of King Kong we were going to be treated to, because personally I find that my mileage differs radically (I have written in the past about my very unfashionable fondness for the reviled 1976 version). Well, we settled down in front of the TV, and I have to confess that my heart sank a bit when it became clear we would be going through the experience that is Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of this classic tale.

Surely everybody knows the basic plot of this archetypal fable: it is the early 1930s, and many Americans are struggling with the consequences of the Great Depression. Amongst them is vaudevillian Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), who is out of work and struggling to even eat. Hope glimmers when she encounters maverick film-maker Carl Denham (Jack Black, playing the part as Orson Welles at his most Machiavellian), who whisks her off to star in his new movie, to be filmed on location on an uncharted island. Also shanghaied for the trip is earnest young playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody). Soon enough (well, maybe not, but we shall return to this) everyone sets sail for Skull Island, little anticipating the unusual ecosystem that has survived there: arthropods of unusual size, relict dinosaurs, and a large gorilla population (there’s actually only one gorilla, but it is very large).

Well, the natives take a fancy to Ann and end up sacrificing her to the ape, known to them as Kong (Andy Serkis does the mocapping essentials). Even as her colleagues mount a desperate attempt to rescue her, Ann finds herself realising that Kong is not quite the savage beast he first appears to be, while Carl reaches the conclusion that the ape could be just what he needs to make his career – all he needs to do is get Kong back to New York. What could possibly go wrong with an idea like that…?

Peter Jackson is quite open about the fact that the original King Kong is his favourite film of all time – well, there’s nothing wrong with that, it is an essential classic and one of the foundation texts of the fantasy and monster movie genres. He initially wanted to make it in the late 1990s, when I seem to recall it had acquired the title The Legend of King Kong, but for various reasons the project got put on hold while he pushed ahead with his noted jewellery-related triptych.

Personally I would quite like to look into that parallel dimension where Jackson made King Kong before Lord of the Rings, as I think the version they have there would be very interesting and quite possibly better. For me the extant version feels very much like the movie equivalent of one of those brick-sized mid-to-late Harry Potter novels written when J.K. Rowling had become so successful she could do anything she wanted and nobody, it seems, was brave enough to suggest that more is sometimes less.

It’s hard to imagine that the pre-Rings Jackson would have been indulged in making a version of Kong that runs for over three hours, nearly twice the length of the original film. Certainly, the 1933 film moves along at a brisk clip and skimps a little bit when it comes to things like characterisation, but it’s a pulp monster movie and that is the source of most of its charm. Blowing the movie up to proportions even vaster than that of the title character changes it entirely, making it ponderous and a source more of bathos than genuine pathos.

It is, for example, an hour into the movie before they even arrive at Skull Island, and obviously more than that before we see any monsters: Jackson has cast a trio of hot young stars (Brody was relatively fresh from his Oscar win, making this a curious inversion of that phenomenon where successful young actresses are almost instantly cast in fantasy and superhero movies – cf. Halle Berry, Charlize Theron, Brie Larson, etc), but they struggle with a script that simply feels bloated – Peter Jackson and his collaborators clearly have their hearts set on making an epic movie, perhaps rather in the same vein as Titanic, but they struggle to find anything appropriately profound to say, and the film feels like it’s taking itself very seriously considering it is essentially about an island full of dinosaurs and a giant gorilla rampaging through Manhattan. It also feels like there’s an awful lot of filler (a subplot about Jamie Bell and Evan Parke’s characters doesn’t contribute much of anything and could easily be snipped entirely).

Despite being essentially a homage, the movie seems to have a curious and by no means uncritical attitude towards the 1933 film. There are, of course, a number of in-jokes and references scattered throughout it, but one gets a general sense of Jackson and his writers attempting to update and ‘fix’ the original story. This is fair enough: the 1933 Kong‘s presentation of the islanders is horribly awkward and dated, which the newer film acknowledges by modelling Denham’s ugly and garish stage extravaganza on these scenes. But again, this is hardly done with the lightest of touches.

The really successful element of the 2005 film, at the heart of the sequences where it genuinely feels as if it’s coming to life, is its handling of Skull Island itself: what’s a fairly generic ‘Lost World’ backdrop in the original has obviously been the source of much (maybe even too much) thought and imagination, with new species of dinosaur and creepy-crawly developed to populate it. The bits of the film where Jackson genuinely feels like he’s enjoying himself all derive from this, and diverge considerably from the source: the sauropod stampede, the nightmarish chasm scene, and the fight between Kong and the vastatosaurs.

The special effects are, of course, state of the art, but again one has to wonder about some of the creative decisions involved – it’s shorthand to describe King Kong as a gorilla movie, but the makers of most films involving this character have played it a little fast and loose when it comes to presenting the giant ape – the most recent Kong movie, for instance, opted to make him more bipedal and humanoid, simply because this suited the feel they were going for. The Jackson-Serkis Kong, on the other hand, is the most authentically gorilla-ish Kong in movie history, but it’s not really clear what dividend this pays.

What does feel like a definite misstep, motivated perhaps by that decision to go for a Titanic kind of vibe, is the choice to make Kong an almost entirely sympathetic character from much earlier in the film. It’s only comparatively late in the 1933 version, when it becomes obvious he is doomed, that Kong becomes the icon of pathos and tragedy he is best remembered as – prior to this, he is an ambiguous and often frightening figure. Jackson and company clearly want us on his side all the way through, one of their main tactics being to get Naomi Watts to do her sad-open-mouth face whenever Kong is in trouble (which she ends up doing a lot). The problem is that by trying to solicit pathos rather than thrills, the film usually ends up generating neither.

Despite all of this negative talk, I would still have to agree that King Kong is a case of a great director producing a magnificent folly more than an outright failure. There is all the material here for a potentially great fantasy film, but there’s just too much of it, along with plenty of other stuff which wouldn’t ever normally appear in a conventional monster movie. In the end, this is a lavish, impressively-assembled film, but it’s saddled with an inappropriate tone and a misconceived sense of its own significance that makes it a tough slog to get through.

Read Full Post »

G-Team Assemble!

Before we go any further: Ishiro Honda’s 1964 movie Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster is one of those which exists in various different versions depending on which country you’re in – the changes extend as far as certain plot elements (mostly ones communicated by the dialogue, which is of course dubbed for the English-language release), but there is also the question of the title, which is given on screen as Ghidrah (etc). As any fule kno, the three-headed monster spells his name with an O near the middle of it, and the title card therefore contains a blatant typo which I will be ignoring. So, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster it shall be.

The movie may be short on vowels but it’s certainly not lacking in plot, or outrageous coincidences. Things get under way at a meeting of the Flying Saucer People, which is also attended by perky young journalist Naoko (Yuriko Hoshi). The assembled goofballs mostly spout gibberish but also give ominous warnings of impending disaster, pointing out the unseasonal heatwave afflicting Japan. Actual flying saucers do not turn up (this being a mid-60s Toho monster movie, this is probably something of a surprise), but a shower of meteorites does fall to Earth.

It just so happens that in charge of the scientific expedition that hikes off to examine the largest of the fallen meteorites is Naoko’s friend and possible suitor (things are never allowed to get particularly soppy in these movies), Professor Murai (Hiroshi Koizumi). Murai is startled by the size of the rock, and also the weird electromagnetic anomalies that periodically manifest around it.

Also relevant to the story is Naoko’s brother, police detective Shindo (Yosuke Natsuki), who is given the important but strangely under-resourced job of protecting Princess Selina (Akiko Wakabayashi), heir apparent to the remote Himalayan kingdom of Selgina. The cultural distinctiveness of the Selginan people is amply established by the fact that the ruff remains an important part of their national dress, to the point where they resemble an entire country of birds who’ve swallowed plates. It seems that the former king has recently been assassinated in a communist plot, and the killers now have Selina in their sights. Chief assassin Malmess (Hisaya Ito) signifies his evilness by always wearing sinister dark glasses, which is an odd combination when paired with his ruff. But I digress.

The assassins succeed in blowing up Selina’s plane (bits of charred neckwear flutter down over many square miles), little suspecting she jumped out at the last minute, guided by a disembodied voice. Soon enough she resurfaces as a mysterious prophet, claiming to come from Venus (or Mars, depending on which version you’re watching), with no memory of her former terrestrial life.

As you can see, there’s a lot going on, but not much sign of any monsters so far. This changes (sort of) when Shindo and Naoko pause to watch TV, settling on what seems to be a sort of 60s Japanese version of the Michael MacIntyre show (God knows why). Making an appearance, for no adequately explained reason, are the Shobijin fairies, who provide an update on what Mothra’s been up to (in short, not much: just lying around being worshipped by the natives of his island – Mothra is male in this movie).

The plot does start to pick up pace now, as Selina the prophetess’ various predictions of disaster start to come true: tourists at the volcano Mount Aso are alarmed by the emergence of the giant pterodactyl Rodan, who has been hibernating in the crater, while her prophecy of doom for one particular ship comes to pass when Godzilla surfaces and nukes it. Unfortunately the only people who seem to pay her any attention are the Shobijin, who were due to go back to Infant Island on that ship and wisely changed their travel arrangements.

Worst of all, the meteorite cracks open and disgorges a golden, three-headed dragon, which Selina announces is called Ghidorah. It appears that, thousands of years before, Ghidorah devastated the ancient and advanced civilisation of Venus (or Mars), and Selina has actually been possessed by the spirit of one of the survivors who fled to Earth (the English dub, at least, is really not very clear on this point). Anyway, Ghidorah is now all set to lay waste to earthly civilisation as well – or at least that part of it not already flattened by some playful tussling between Godzilla and Rodan which is already in progress.

The reaction of the Japanese authorities does not really inspire confidence, and so our heroes propose an alternative to the committee in charge of Monster Crisis Response – given that Mothra managed to halt Godzilla’s last rampage (in Mothra Vs Godzilla), could the Shobijin persuade him to tackle Ghidorah as well? The fairies are dubious, given the new Mothra is still young and larval. It will take all three of Earth’s monsters to deal with the menace of Ghidorah – always assuming that Godzilla and Rodan can be persuaded to play ball…

Toho’s shared world of monster movies had got under way earlier the same year with Mothra Vs Godzilla, but in many ways this is the film that established the template for the Japanese monster movie as it is generally known today: freewheeling monster wrestling action in the background, a rather preposterous B-movie plot going on in the foreground, some bonkers sci-fi and fantasy ideas incorporated into the plot, marginal turns from the human cast, and so on. To be honest, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster deviates from this last point a little, as Malmess’ gang of hired killers give notably terrible performances even by the standards of a Godzilla movie. Possibly making up for this is the presence of a genuinely great movie actor, in the form of Takashi Shimura, whose celluloid immortality was assured by his appearances as Kambei in Seven Samurai and the central character in Ikiru. This is technically Shimura’s fourth appearance in the Godzilla series, having played one character in the first two films and a different one in Mothra – here he is someone else again, playing a brain specialist who wanders about with the heroes through the second half of the film. It’s hardly demanding for a performer of his calibre but he seems to be enjoying himself.

The film is probably more notable for the way it handles its monster characters, anyway. The big innovation, obviously, is the creation of Ghidorah, who would go on to appear in a pile of other movies and could make a decent claim to be Godzilla’s greatest enemy (Mothra’s too, come to that). I have to confess that – and here we go down the rabbit hole – I’ve always found Ghidorah to be a rather two-dimensional character, certainly compared to other monsters like Mothra and Mechagodzilla. It’s a striking design but the concept of the character – evil space dragon! – isn’t as engaging as many of the other Toho kaiju.

The other, less obvious innovation comes in the way that the film genuinely does start to treat its monster characters as characters. The original movie treats Godzilla as an implacable force of nature, not something with a personality that could potentially be reasoned with; here there is a scene in which Mothra, Godzilla and Rodan have an actual conversation (sadly, we only hear the Shobijin’s translation of it, but apparently Godzilla has a bit of a foul mouth) – it’s a relatively short step from here to the scene in Godzilla Vs Gigan with Godzilla and Anguirus talking to each other by speech bubbles. Perhaps this also explains why the film also displays the signs of the jokey tone first introduced in King Kong Vs Godzilla, which would become more and more prevalent as the series went on.

For the most part, though, this is a film which takes itself just seriously enough to be fun, without feeling ridiculous, with plenty of incidental pleasures to go with the grandiose kitsch of the monster battles. If you were going to show a kaiju movie to Hollywood in the hope they would really understand the attraction of the genre, then this might very well be the one. Always assuming someone hasn’t already done so – Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and Ghidorah have been working for a big American studio recently, after all, and the trailer for their new movie is already running in theatres. We can only hope it is quite as charmingly entertaining as their first film together.

Read Full Post »

Nothing but the Neck

It was with a due sense of resignation and expectations bordering on the actually subterranean that I sat down to watch the third and (hopefully) final part of the Godzilla trilogy which has been loitering on a market-leading streaming site for the last year or so, Godzilla: The Planet Eater (directed as before by Kobun Shizuno and Hiroyuki Seshita). Honestly, just the thought of watching another of these things gave me one of my very infrequent moments of existential self-doubt – why do I put myself through this kind of experience? The first chapter, Planet of the Monsters, was terrible; it’s a close thing as to whether the middle instalment, City on the Edge of Battle, was actually worse or simply just as bad; despite the implication that there would be appearances by Mothra and Ghidorah in the concluding episode, was it really worth the investment of ninety precious and unique minutes from my finite store?

Oh well: I’d gone this far, after all, and it would truly be an exceptional feat to take characters as storied and iconic as Godzilla, Mothra, and Ghidorah and put them in a film together and still produce something as tedious and misconceived as the first two films in this series. It would also be a very cheering moment were the Toho Animation people to actually manage to turn things around and produce a worthy Godzilla movie. So it kind of felt like a win-win situation, although it almost certainly shouldn’t have done. Possibly I should just own up to my own innate masochism, I don’t know.

The film opens not long after the conclusion of the previous one, with Godzilla having battered Mechagodzilla City into submission and the human survivors having serious differences of opinion with both their sets of alien allies: the gruff militaristic ones are annoyed with our hero Haruo for interfering with their plan to use ‘nanometal’ to defeat Godzilla, even though this would involve people being absorbed and assimilated by the living metal. Meanwhile, the spiritual ones have concluded that Haruo, and in particular the purity of his hatred for Godzilla, is the perfect vessel to summon their god into existence. Said deity, Ghidorah, has the power to finally defeat Godzilla once and for all. He will also annihilate the planet, but you can’t have everything your own way.

As in the previous two Godzilla animes, the title character spends the first half of the movie standing around off in the background not actually doing anything, while the human-scale characters stand around and flap their mouths at each other. On this occasion, they spend the first half of the movie discussing – oh, something or other. It’s so dull and pretentious I appear to have blanked it from my memory. The film makes various eager swipes at big philosophical issues, contemplating whether it’s better to live in harmony with nature or as part of a technological society, and then contemplating the nature of God and religious belief. Fair play to the makers of Planet Eater for being willing to engage with these sort of themes, but on the other hand the debating seems to go on forever in the most abstract manner. Most of the plot of the first half of the film just consists of people having this kind of static philosophical discussion.

Things briefly perk up ever so slightly as Ghidorah finally manifests himself from a black hole which forms near the humans’ colony ship, still in orbit over the monsterfied Earth. This is almost certainly the best sequence in the whole trilogy, as the familiar dragon-head on a sinuous, seemingly endless neck snakes out and coils around the huge spacecraft. From here we move on to what is clearly intended as the main event – yet another battle between Godzilla and Ghidorah.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, the makers of this trilogy have hit upon a way to make kaiju battles nearly as dull as the theological debates going on around them. This new version of Ghidorah is almost all neck: three more black holes form in the upper atmosphere of Earth and each one produces a Ghidorah-head on a long, golden neck. There’s no sign of Ghidorah’s actual body, legs, tails or wings. I suppose Ghidorah should just be grateful he’s not been reconceived as a piece of urban planning in the same way Mechagodzilla was. How does Godzilla proceed to fight an enemy who is mostly neck? Well, he blasts his nuclear ray at him, but this new Ghidorah has gravity-warping powers and he just bends the ray so it doesn’t strike him (this, I suppose, is not actually a bad idea). Then the dragon-heads of Ghidorah clamp onto Godzilla and start leeching his energy. Which takes about fifteen minutes mostly consisting of the two monsters standing there almost stock-still, while the other characters stand around and watch, and discuss what’s happening.

All right: the animation and production designs on these movies is not awful, although it is a very mixed bag, and you can kind of see what they are trying to do by introducing such radically reimagined versions of many of the classic Toho monsters (their new version of Mothra is actually pretty traditional, compared to the others, but then everyone’s favourite giant mystic lepidoptera barely gets a cameo in this new trilogy). But it’s almost as if they don’t actually understand or don’t care what a Godzilla movie is usually about.

Writing about the other two films I have explained what I think a really good Godzilla film (or kaiju movie generally) should incorporate: excitement, fantasy, spectacle, hopefully a sense of grandeur. These are cheerful, upbeat films, not least because of their essential absurdity. The animated trilogy, on the other hand, quite apart from being slow and talky and pretentious and lacking in any sense of humour or fun, are notable for their essential nihilism: the implication is that modern technological civilisation inevitably spawns giant destructive monsters and (on a more metaphorical level) devours the souls of its citizens. These films end up advocating a rather simplistic back-to-the-land philosophy about living in harmony with nature. It feels glib and insincere.

Well, as luck would have it, we are going to get another outing for Godzilla, Ghidorah and Mothra this year (Rodan will be in it too), and if nothing else the new version of Godzilla: King of the Monsters can only look better compared to the animated trilogy. Someone has already described these films as by far the most boring interval in the entire 65 year history of the Godzilla franchise. I can only agree, and might even suggest they are being too generous in saying that.

Read Full Post »

The Lady is an Ape

Here we go, folks: finally, it is Frank Agrama’s 1976 movie Queen Kong, which (mainly due to my unreasonable fondness for monster movies, particularly ones realised through the miracle of suitamation) I have been curious to see ever since I became aware of it. This is not a movie with a high profile: the odd thing is that while I was aware of Dino de Laurentiis’ 1976 remake of King Kong from a fairly early age (this was a high profile movie with a lot of merchandise, if memory serves), at least two other films which were to some extent contigent on it ended up languishing in extreme obscurity. One of these was de Laurentiis’ own sequel, King Kong Lives, which didn’t so much make an impact on the world of cinema as bounce off it and disappear without a trace; the other is Agrama’s movie, made in 1976 as a cash-in spoof of the remake. De Laurentiis didn’t see the funny side, unleashed his lawyers and litigated Queen Kong into oblivion, at least as far as English-speaking audiences were concerned: it got a limited release in Italy and parts of Germany, but that’s all. (Apparently Agrama is an old mate of Silvio Berlusconi, which is interesting but not particularly pertinent to the movie.)

This is, as I say, a cash-in spoof, made for a clearly inadequate budget, and starring certain individuals whose very involvement with a film instantly cause one to drop one’s expectations to a subterranean level. And so, when I finally settled down to watch the version of Queen Kong in general internet circulation, I was expecting a dubious and possibly quite gruelling experience to ensue.

The film opens with a man being chased through a jungle (the jungle is played by a typical English wood) by scantily-clad young women. The scantily-clad young women are a bit of a continuing feature of Queen Kong, which is rather curious, for reasons I expect I shall eventually come to. They catch the man and string him up over a pot in classic cod-cannibal style. But it is revealed that none of this is real – it’s all a screen test being overseen by tough film-maker Luce Habit (Rula Lenska, who had just risen to prominence in Rock Follies at the time) – this is the only instance of a character being saddled with such a painful pun in place of a name, so one wonders why they bothered.

It seems that all the men they’ve auditioned have proven too weak and delicate for the job, something Luce is understanding about: they’re only men, after all. So she resolves to find a proper leading man for her forthcoming film, to be shot on location in Africa (don’t get your hopes up, folks). As she is explaining this, we see various crates being carried onto the expedition’s boat, labelled ‘GUNS’, ‘BOMBS’, ‘MONSTER TRANQUILISERS’, ‘ETC.’, which genuinely surprised me by being rather funny (or at least much closer to funnier than anything I was expecting in this film).

Luce heads off to London as the opening credits roll, and the lyrics to the theme song are, once again, rather unexpected: they include lines like ‘Queen Kong is the chick with all the hair’, ‘She’s a genie who ain’t teeny’, ‘She’s a queeny queeny for my weeny’, ‘When I’m feeling kinda spunky, I want to do it with my funky monkey’, and so on (on the other hand there is also the line ‘Kong kong kong kong kong kong kong kong kong,’ not to mention ‘Queen queen queen queen queen queen queen queen kong’, which just goes to show that it’s consistency that’s the real challenge in any creative undertaking).

On the Portobello Road, Luce encounters feckless hippy Ray Fay – do you see what they did there? – played by Robin Askwith, who at the time, God help us, was something of a genuine movie star in the UK, mainly off the back of a string of soft-core comedy films. Ray is introduced in a scene where he steals an original movie poster for the 1933 King Kong, not that this informs the plot much. The whole film functions on a camp, cartoonish, but also somewhat knowing level like this. Impressed, Luce recruits Ray (by drugging him) and off they go to Africa (this is either taken as read, or the sequence with them actually travelling to Africa has been cut from the version of the film in general circulation).

Here they arrive in the remote country of Lazanga-where-they-do-the-konga, ruled by the statuesque figure of Valerie Leon (pretty much reprising her role from Carry On Up the Jungle). If you’re remotely familiar with any version of King Kong, you can probably fill in the bulk of the rest of the plot yourself: the natives kidnap Ray and decide to marry him off to a giant gorilla-like ape living in the jungle nearby; she is known as Queen Kong. Various battles with prehistoric monsters feature in a cursory sort of way (though, given how indescribably awful the monster suits are in this film, that’s probably for the best).

In the end, Queen Kong is taken back to London where the plan is to put her on show; there is a subplot about making the giant ape wear a bikini so as not to outrage public sensibilities. In the end Kong escapes (as usual) and climbs Big Ben, carrying Ray after rescuing him from Luce’s amorous advances. Here the film makes a genuine deviation from its source material, as Queen Kong becomes an icon of the Woman’s Lib movement, and female crowds waving placards gather in her defence. In the end she and Ray return to Lazanga, making this one of the few non-Japanese Kong films to have an unequivocally happy ending.

It’s still a fairly crappy movie, though. There’s a scene early on with Askwith running through the Portobello Road market waving the stolen poster over his head, pursued by the irate original owner, who in turn is followed by Lenska, while an up-tempo saxophone tune plays on the soundtrack – and even if it isn’t a conscious attempt to ape (sorry) the style of The Benny Hill Show, then it certainly looks like one. That’s the level of the comedy here – there are some unexpectedly clever or offbeat jokes, but there are also a lot of broad sight gags and lazy one-liners. The resemblance to Benny Hill’s style extends to the way the film is packed with scantily-clad young starlets (needless to say, the camera is positioned around torso level for many sequences).

Needless to say, this rather lubricious treatment of most of the cast is very much at odds with the film’s non-Laurentiis-related satire: namely, its handling of Women’s Lib and gender politics in general. Or is it satire? It’s hard to tell whether the film is being sincere or quietly laughing up its sleeve at the point when Askwith makes a speech saying Queen Kong represents ‘Woman, trying to find her place in a society which treats her as a kitchen slave or a sex object’. Only the context makes it absurd, and even then it’s not actually particularly funny. Maybe the film-makers weren’t entirely sure themselves and were trying to keep their options open.

In the end, I don’t think it will come as much of a surprise to anyone if I suggest that Queen Kong is a terrible film: for the most part it is clumsy, primitive and silly. But, despite all that, there is the odd funny moment, and flickers of self-awareness that do a lot to make it reasonably palatable viewing. It’s not actively depressing or offensive to watch, for all that much of it is clearly dated. As I have frequently said in all manner of situations, and about much more significant movies than this, I find it much easier to forgive a bad film than a boring one.

Read Full Post »

We Built This City On Second-hand Mechagodzilla Parts

All good things must come to an end, but, for the time being at least, Toho’s series of animated Godzilla movies rumbles onward. These suckers are getting theatrical releases in Japan before turning up on a market-leading streaming site, which I suppose is something; it’s just a shame the movies themselves aren’t slightly, erm, less awful. Moderately hot on the heels of Planet of the Monsters, which appeared around the start of the year, here comes the follow-up, which was at one point going to be called Living Robot City Final Battle (gotta love these literal Japanese translations) but has actually appeared under the title Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (which I presume is a tip of the hat to either Star Trek or, less likely, Blake’s 7).

As before, proceedings have been overseen by Kobun Shizuno and Hiroyuki Seshita, and events pick up pretty much directly after the conclusion of the previous film. It says something about the thorough-going incoherence of Planet of the Monsters that I couldn’t actually remember exactly how it ended, beyond a big battle and a really, really (300m-tall) big version of Godzilla turning up, but picking up the threads is not that challenging.

The story so far: refugees from the planet Earth have arrived at, um, the planet Earth, twenty thousand years in the future (it’s time dilation, or something). They have been dismayed to discover that the whole ecosystem of the planet has evolved to mimic the unique biology of the giant nuclear monster Godzilla (whose appearance was the whole reason they left in the first place). Nevertheless, a landing party under the command of stroppy Captain Sakaki engages and manages to kill one Godzilla, before a second, bigger one turns up and stomps them all.

The sequel gets underway with the survivors regrouping, uncomfortably aware that the mother ship may well just fly off and abandon them all there with the monsters. But there is hope on the horizon as they make contact with natives, who, if not exactly friendly, are not exactly hostile either. There is some heavy and not exactly subtle foreshadowing going on here, for those in the know: it seems the natives also have monster DNA, but rather than that of Godzilla it’s that of some kind of insect. They say their god was killed by Godzilla, leaving behind only a giant egg. Translating on behalf of the egg are a couple of twin girls with psychic powers. All this left me feeling rather conflicted: I do love me a decent appearance by Mothra, which is what all this is clearly setting up, but the prospect of seeing my favourite giant lepidoptera mucked about in a film like this one is hardly appealing. As it turns out, the Mothra appearance, should it come to pass, will be in the next film in the series (which looks like it will also have Ghidorah in it).

This film has other classic kaiju characters to muck up. Our heroes discover that the locals are using arrowheads made of highly advanced ‘nanometal’, which it turns out they have been harvesting from the ancient ruins of the launch site of Mechagodzilla (who was not ready in time to fight Godzilla back in the 20th century). Investigation of the site reveals that… actually, I should say fasten your figurative seat-belt at this point… the wreckage of Mechagodzilla has, over the intervening twenty thousand years, grown into a living, artificially-intelligent city composed of nanometal.

A plan is hatched to lure Godzilla (the 300m version who’s just been standing around up to this point) into attacking Mechagodzilla City (as this rather unlikely piece of urban sprawl has been christened), which should have the ability to kill him, thus reclaiming the Earth for the refugees. Or something. But, given the tendency of the nanometal to go about assimilating and absorbing people, could this not just be a case of trading in one menace for another?

Now, the idea for this movie is a bit out there, but there’s a sense in which that’s what you expect from a Godzilla movie. And the idea of a Godzilla movie where the city itself actually resists being stomped and fights back against the monster (rather than useless toy tanks trundling into sight to do the job) is one that has a certain degree of promise. It almost goes without saying that City on the Edge of Battle does not realise this promise in any meaningful sense.

I think the problem may just be with the nature of the animation in these films. As before, there is a mixture of traditional cel animation, 3D CGI, and what looks very like some form of rotoscoping. The human-scale action is fine, as these things go, and there are some scenes with mecha attack craft in this movie which are also well realised. The problem is that Godzilla himself is almost wholly static; all he does is occasionally blast out a heat ray. The set pieces in this movie mostly consist of Godzilla just standing there being shot at. This is not good. There is no sense of scale or grandeur, and no scenes of Godzilla tearing down the towers of the living city bare-handed.

To be honest, Mechagodzilla City turns out to be a major disappointment: it doesn’t even look anything like Mechagodzilla (you would expect the odd piece of visual reference in the architecture). I was expecting the climax to be Godzilla razing the surface structures of the city, only for the ruins to reconstitute themselves as Mechagodzilla in a more traditional form and a proper monster clash to take place; this does not happen.

(I am aware that this rather negative review of City on the Edge of Battle is perhaps inordinately focusing on things which don’t happen, rather than things that do, but it is the case that this one of those films where not much happens, especially in the first hour. This is taken up with laboured exposition and the script taking vague swings at whatever SF ideas happen across its path.)

I suppose this is still something of an improvement over Planet of the Monsters, in that it is not quite such a nihilistic bore of a movie; it also has the beginnings of a fairly interesting subtext about the place of humanity in the world – on the one hand, the Mothra-worshipping inhabitants of the future Earth are clearly at one with nature, while the refugees’ alien allies are absolutely on-board with the notion of bonding with the advanced technology of Mechagodzilla City and beginning a cyborg phase of existence – this is the kind of theme which pops up in all sorts of Japanese SF and fantasy, and it’s a shame it’s not better realised here.

Still, in the end this isn’t just a bad movie, it’s also a dull one, with any improvements over the first film marginal at best. Normally I would say that the prospect of seeing Mothra and Ghidorah in the next one would be enough to give cause for optimism, but these films have been so flawed in both concept and realisation that it’s difficult to imagine how the next instalment can offer much in the way of redemption.

Read Full Post »