October is a super busy month for us, so we’ll be off this site until November. We’ll be back with our review of Gorath and The Three Treasures. (yes, we have copies of those)
Author Archives: hisandhergodzilla
His: Varan the Unbelievable
Varan the Unbelievable
In 1950s Japan, mankind’s meddling has awakened an indestructible terror from the past. A dinosaur arises from a mysterious body of water and wreaks havoc on a small village that worships the beast as a god. After its attack on the village, the monster swims toward Tokyo, despite the military’s best efforts to stop it. Once it arrives in Tokyo, conventional weaponry continues to be ineffective. Only the secret weapon of a scientific genius has a chance to destroy the beast. Coming to theaters this summer, you won’t want to miss…Godzi….wait….I mean Varan, the Unbelievable.
This movie is pretty much Ishiro Honda saying “Alright, the first Godzilla went pretty well, so let’s make it again, but half-ass the whole thing”.
“Half-ass” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, just not about half as good as what’s it’s imitating. Varan the Unbelievable was the last Toho sci-fi movie to be filmed in good ol’ black and white, and also introduces one of Toho’s weirdest, and arguable most underused creations. The film actually starts off with one of its most significant features. The opening statement Akira Ikfukube writes to be played on English horn became one of the most recognizable themes of the series. The theme would later be most commonly associated with King Ghidorah. The opening credits in general create a kind of “lost world” vibe, which prevails through the first half of the film.
Or an “Up” feel for our younger readers.
After the credits, we blow through the obligatory footage of rocket ships and other spacy tech things, and then we’re in a lab. Dr. Yamane…er…Professor Sugimoto shares with two of his employees that a butterfly native to Siberia was found in an isolated portion of Japan. The two other scientists are dispatched to see if there are more of these rare butterflies in the area. They arrive in the isolated area, find samples of the butterfly, and are subsequently get killed by a big mysterious thing that emerged from a lake. I thought the butterfly thing was an interesting springboard to the movie, and it’s pretty much forgotten after this scene. Like, the natural order is so off that butterflies are migrating to strange places or something like that could have been an interesting theme throughout the film, but it’s dropped. The makers of the DVD even made the cursors on the menu a butterfly.
Cut back to the lab. We’re introduced to our trio of protagonists. Kenji (the guy), Yuriko (the girl), and Horguchi (the comic scared guy). Kenji and Horiguchi are scientists who are sent to investigate the deaths of the two earlier men, and Yuriko is a reporter and the sister of one of the deceased. She’s pretty broken up her brother’s death too. She mentions it once, and then talks about how she’s hoping to get the big scoop on whatever the huge mysterious thing is at the lake.
Our trio of heroes travel to the lake to begin their investigation. The scared guy is scared of absolutely everything that moves, particularly a kid that jumps out of a bush with a crazy mask. I suppose we can give him that one.
The boy leads our heroes to his tribe, which in engaged in a ceremony to worship their god “Baradagi”. In an effort to break the ice, Kenji immediately starts belittling their religion.
I’d like to see him in action on a first date.
This is of course not well received by the old guy running the ceremony.
No worries though, Kenji smooths everything over.
The masked boy has a dog and that mangy little guy takes off in the direction of the mysterious lake. The boy takes off after the dog, and the old man deems that the boy is doomed to be killed by Baradagi. The trio of heroes decides “screw that” and goes to find the boy, but not without getting one more dig in.
I think you have a future in politics, dude.
Well, they find the boy, who has not been eaten by Baradagi, thus proving the superiority of 20th century reason, when the lake starts stirring up. Low and behold, a big ass dinosaur emerges.
Truly the last of the Mohicans.
The dinosaur (Baradagi or Varan, depending on where you are in the movie) starts laying waste to the surrounding village. Once Varan shows up, he’s onscreen for much of the rest of the movie. So fans of frequent monster action will definitely not be disappointed by this movie, at least not in that aspect. The heroes inform Prof. Sugimoto and the military about Varan, and they decide that it’s totally on. They launch some chemicals into the lake to scare Varan out and then they start away at him with tanks. This is about as effective as it normally is. Prof. Sugimoto takes a hint from Dr. Yamane three movies ago and gives everyone some words of encouragement.
Dude, we’re only five movies into the series. It’s a little early to assume a defeatist attitude.
The whole attack on the village and the surrounding valley is really the best part of the movie. Honda really is able to maintain the lost world feel throughout this whole sequence, though for some reason, it’s constantly windy whenever we see the people. It would be kinda cool to have a wind storm be happening during this part of the movie, but there doesn’t seem to be any wind whenever we see Varan. A lesser man would make a fart joke here, but I’m going to pass it up. The military continues to try to take Varan down, but then…
This Shit Happens:
- You know, excess skin is a common side effect of large-scale weight loss. There’s a relatively simple procedure to…
Holy hell, he can fly!
Okay, not exactly the body plan of a monster I’d expect to be able to fly, but it’s a pretty cool hidden ability. Problem is, it’s never used again in the entire movie. It’s like if there were a Batman movie where he had a high-tech knee brace that gave him a super strong kick, demonstrated it on concrete, and then never used it again….oh wait.
Varan flying is kinda like the Fonze jumping over the shark. The movie gets less cool after this. There’s a really long sequence where Varan is heading via the ocean towards Tokyo. The military continues the proud tradition of firing at the monster and not actually hitting it.
Damn! Somehow we keep missing the enormous reptile!
They succeed like twice, and decide that their methods are ineffective. The military teams up with the scientists to try to figure out how to destroy Varan. A new scientist, Dr. Fujimura (who is of course played by Akhiko Hirata, who played Dr. Serizawa) has developed a new weapon that might work. And of course, he doesn’t want to use it. But not for any sort of far reaching apocalpytic implications, he’s just not sure if it’s going to work. So, I imagine that the internal monologues of the two scientists must have gone something like this:
Dr. Serizawa: “I could use my weapon on Godzilla, and possibly save millions of lives. But if it falls into the wrong hands, it could kill millions, if not billions more. I may have to face the most important decision any human being has ever encountered”
Dr. Fujimura: “Nah”
“Seriously, I got shit to do”
But, with a simple “No, we’re using your weapon”, Dr. Fujimura rolls over and says okay. The new weapon can supposedly blow up Varan from the inside out. And with that, Varan comes ashore. The shipment of Dr. Fujimura comes in, and for some reason, instead of sending one of several soldiers who happen to be around, Kenji take it upon himself to get the truck and drive it right into the monster. Kenji drives the truck up, jumps out, and runs away as slowly as he possibly can, falling along the way.
“Sorry, I thought I was a woman in this ’50s sci-fi movie for a moment there”
The truck explodes and Varan falls down. Everyone immediately assumes that he’s dead. If they had waited literally like five seconds, they would see that this was not the case. Varan is more pissed than ever, and he lays siege to Tokyo. And by “lays siege”, I really mean he destroys like two buildings. The scientists then remember that he’s attracted to flares (I forgot to mention that earlier), so they attach the bomb to flares and dropped them over Varan. The monster then gobbles that shit right up and dies.
The whole attack on Tokyo is really underwhelming. Due to the unavoidable comparisons with the original Godzilla, this destruction sequence just doesn’t measure up. Some of the destruction sequences are actually stock footage from the 54 Godzilla.
Hell, Godzilla’s tail even makes a cameo.
As for Varan himself, he’s actually kind of a cool monster. Unfortunately, he never gained much popularity, and other than his two second cameo in Destroy All Monsters (why bother?), this is his only film appearance. Varan almost made it into several other movies, the most noteworthy being Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack. He did show up in a few video games though. He’s actually my favorite character in Godzilla: Unleashed.
So, in conclusion, there’s a lot of monster action in the movie, and overall, it’s really not that bad. It’s biggest drawback is that it’s a clone of a much better movie. Don’t get me wrong, lots of these movies share similar plots, but this one is a little too similar. Well, since I’ve deemed this movie to be half as good, I think it’s fair that it gets half the rating.
Hers: Varan the Unbelievable
Guess what guys?
You’re never going to guess this one– another monster has invaded Tokyo, and conventional weapons don’t work on it!
I’m just going to lay this out on the line.
I respect formula. In fact, formula is awesome because I always know that Meg Ryan is going to end up with Tom Hanks and The Doctor will always save the day because that’s just how things work.
But there comes a point when the formula is SO predictable that even 5 movies in, I’m starting to dread what’s to come.
The magic of Doctor Who is that even through the formula, there’s always a twist or suprize or Van Gogh getting to see his paintings, but there is never a sense of “Hooray, everything is done now and we can all go home”. I think that’s what’s been bugging me about these movies so far. In Toho films, the movie ends with “the monster is dead, we all go home *vauge speech about With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility*, roll credits. I never stop being interested in Doctor Who because there isn’t a solid end. There will always be a new companion. There will always be Daleks and Cybermen and whatever else they come up with– but there is never stasis.
But stasis seems to be the end goal in these films. “What is the thing we can do to go back to normal?” Sure, there are the odd throwbacks here and there to past films, but there is never a sense of “and now what? The city’s fucked, our economy is going to take a huge hit and we still don’t know who River Song is so we better keep watching!’
Varan the Unbelievable was just another in the same plot line. Except butterflies.
About that. Varan begins with some scientists going to study some Siberian butterflies.
Because nothing says “butterflies” like the inviting climate of Hoth. I mean, Siberia.
During their super-legit expedition, there is a huge landslide and the scientists are killed.
It is also revealed that there is a group of locals who believe in a mythical beast known only as “Baragi”, and then the real fun begins. The science lab sends a team of other scientists and one of the dead guy’s sister (who is a journalist dedicated to “solving the mystery of the 21st century”)
It’s how a cat can play the piano, isn’t it?
So they go to the village and immediately get stopped by a kid in a mask,
Sorry, Blue Barracudas, you’re out. Green Iguanas, you’re now in the lead.
which raises a lot of questions about child labor laws and responsible parenting. “Sorry, Billy, you can’t go to school like the other kids, you have to sit in this bush and wear this mask and make sure no one from the Outside comes in”.
“And make sure Kirk Fogg stays out of the moonshine this week!”
So the scientists blow past the kid and into the village to try and find out what Baragi is, and immediately start the conversation by insulting the High Priest and the religion of the villagers.
And your masks are just really inaccurate as well.
Now, I’m all for progress and science and that kind of good stuff, especially because Smallpox and Polio seem like a real bitch. However, this movie goes so far out of its way to make it clear that science > tradition that it really just makes the scientists look like douchebags.
But Jesus totally rose from the dead after three days and was able to change the chemical make up of water into wine. That’s just fact.
Meanwhile, the Temple Guard kid’s dog, Plot Point…I mean, Chibee, gets loose and runs into the set of the Lon Chaney Jr. Wolf Man Movie/The Forbidden Area of the Forest.
Good thing I brought my stick with a silver handle.
and of course our brave rescuers go off to find him. After an inspiring “fuck your religion, Science is superior” speech,
Is no one else bothered by this?
the entire village immediately abandons their lifelong system of beliefs and traditions and joins in the search…just in time to witness the appearance of Varan.
Sweet mohawk, bro.
The monster suit in this one is pretty decent, which is a nice plus, especially because it moves a lot better than a few of the earlier ones we’ve seen.
So the entire village runs off, and the ONLY GUY not to make it is the High Priest of the village because of his obvious ignorance about how to run away when a giant monster is coming because…religion is stupid I guess? Which really, just is kicking a dead horse at this point. I kind of feel bad for the guy.
Frankly you’re not the one who should be apologizing.
So Varan fucks up the village and kind of wanders off, and the world’s most nonchalant research team declares him a “big lizard” and moves on.
The requisite Science Meeting is called and the researchers delare him a Varanopede. Ah. I hate those. They also decide that it’s a bad idea to let him get near the city. I’m glad they’ve got someone around to tell them these things.
The science team sends a “Chemical Team” in to the village to lure him out with…the secret dinosaur repellent they’ve been working on for years? “Now’s your shot, Harry! You were right all along! There are dinosaurs in underground lakes!”
And behind sofas.
Here’s the issue. Literally three minutes before, they say they don’t know anything about the dinosaur, and their plan is to dump a whole bunch of chemicals into a lake and…what? Hope for the best? I’m not exactly Henrietta Hippie, but not a single person stops to think that poisoning a body of water is a bad idea?
Anyway, so Varan comes out of the lake, unharmed and the “oh shit conventional weapons don’t work” montage happens, and the explorers find themselves trapped in a cave and the army uses flares to distract the monster away from the cave. Remember this, it becomes Important Later On.
Oh, and then Varan can fly.
He’s got weird webbing like the creepy kid from swimming class.
So Varan flies away and then the BEST THING EVER happens.
Captain Eyepatch comes back. Hold onto your hats ladies, the smooth, smooth looks and sultry sounds of Captain Eyepatch has returned, just to reassure us that if it bleeds, we can kill it, we just need stronger weapons.
He’s like the Cary Grant of Japanese men.
So Varan shows up again in the ocean, and the military attempts to use “Rocket Bombs” to kill him.
Here’s the thing though. I get that actually blowing up a man in a rubber suit is impossible, but some of these sequences look absolutely ridiculous. They shoot the air, the water, the areas near and around him, but not a single shot hits the actual monster. I realize most of these movies rely on suspension of disbelief, but you’re telling me that out of the ENTIRE JAPANESE Army, Air Force and Navy, there isn’t a SINGLE pilot who can land a hit? It’s like watching drunk stormtroopers try and hit a major character. It’s just not going to happen.
Good job, Gary, you almost got him, buddy!
The “rocket bombs” don’t work, and Varan is headed into Tokyo Bay, so they decide to use depth charges to stop him.
This is also the point where I realized that part of my issue with this movie was how many montages happen. There’s hiking, conventional weapons, rockets, depth charges, evacuation scenes– and they just serve, really, to take up time. They don’t establish anything new or reveal anything particularly interesting– the depth charge scene, in particular, takes about 10 minutes to set up and finish, and in the end, it doesn’t work. I know you’re surprised.
Oh, and then this happened.
So the handsome Captain Eyepatch finally gets around to mentioning that he’s invented an explosive that is designed specifically to explode INSIDE of things. …See where this is headed? But he doesn’t want to use his bomb because people might get hurt or whatever, but then the military is like no…we’re going to use it, and he’s all like…okay. 20 pound Varan steaks are about to be crushing Hyundais all up in this bitch..
After yet another goddamn montage in which none of this stuff used has any chance of killing anything but seven more minutes of screen time, somehow, one of the reporters winds up driving the truck with the bomb on it, parks it in front of Varan and runs, where it explodes underneath him, and everyone packs up and heads home…except that oh wait, it didn’t work because THEY JUST FUCKING SAID IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE INSIDE HIM.
So Varan gets ups and moseys on past the tanks firing at him and starts the Fucking Shit Up montage #3, until someone thinks to use flares again, because they “noticed him eating them last time”.
Like…WHY DID NO ONE MENTION THAT BEFORE??
So Varan eats the bomb, he explodes, the end.
This one wasn’t a total piece of crap, there were some really cool moments. The monster suit was cool, there were some obvious advancements in special effects that led to some cool camera work (with the exception of the exact same scene being played twice within 2 minutes), and once again, the destruction scenes were fantastic.
This movie just had way too many problems to overlook.
First, one of the biggest issues I have with this film was that this almost seemed like a reboot of Godzilla focused on religious allegory instead of dire warnings about nuclear holocaust. “Let’s shit on tradition in favor of Science”, but the problem was that science didn’t really get them any further in terms of understanding of knowledge, it just led to the destruction of the monster, which, if we’re being realistic, probably wouldn’t have showed up if the scientists hadn’t shown up at the village and scared the kid’s dog away and woken him up in the first place.
Second, this movie is full of contradictions that don’t make any goddamn sense. “Here’s the exact species of the monster!/We don’t know anything about the monster”. “It’s indestructible, there’s nothing we can do/here’s a way to kill it!” There are also weird contradictions with the monster itself– which isn’t necessarily a big deal, but it’s weird because they can’t seem to decide on what, exactly, Varan is and does. He swims, flies, walks on two legs, crawls on four– I think what makes monsters interesting is when it’s limited.
I also feel there were a lot of problems with losing things in translation. I feel like in the original Japanese, there is a sense of comic relief between the team of journalists, but here, they just come off as bumbling idiots.
It is perhaps a weak arguement to say that you could tell me that “Varan” is a mistranslation of “Godzilla” and I would believe I was watching the same movie– I suppose you could tell me that Citizen Kane is actually The Hangover– but my point is that it seems like I was watching a near identical film. There wasn’t enough draw to keep me interested and the already tired formula didn’t do it any favors, either.
Sorry, Varan.
His: The Mysterians
The Mysterians
It’s the 1950s and movies are dominated by nuclear paranoia, Communist paranoia, and UFO paranoia. Toho had already delved into nuclear paranoia, and the U.S. more than had Communist paranoia covered, so UFOs it is! Were they successful? Let’s find out!
We start off with an astrophysicist named Shiraishi, his ex-fiance, her sister, and our protagonist Atsumi having a night on the town at a festival. Everyone’s dancing and having a good time and then Atsumi pulls the proverbial record off the needle and suggests that Shiraishi dance with the ex, because nothing breaks the ice like suggesting that ex finances dance with each other. A nearby forest catches fire, and just like in Rodan, three red shirts jump into action. Again, this goes about as well as you’d expect. Astrophysicist/apparently park ranger jumps into action.
Fast forward-We see our protagonist Atsumi talking with another astronomer named Adachi. Adachi talks about Shiraishi’s theory about a hidden planet in the solar system cleverly called “Mysteroid”. Oh yeah, and they casually throw in the information that Shiraishi died in the fire.
Well, crazy things start happening after that. Flying saucers appear from the moon, earthquakes destroy a lot of real estate, and the ground where the earthquakes occur turns out to be radioactive. So radioactive in fact, that when they investigate the site, the tires on the jeep start to burn!
“Good think I wore my radiation- proof pants today”
After a quick Geiger counter inspection of the ground, the doofiest looking robot in cinematic history busts out of a mountain.
The giant robot (Moguera) starts blasting the hell out of everything in sight. This also begins a proud tradition that would be continued in King Kong Escapes of giant robots that make irritating noises the entire time they’re on-screen. The military gets together Japan’s top scientists and determine that someone is behind these events, yes even the robot. Cut to Moguera wrecking a nearby village’s shit. The military goes through their obligatory conventional weapon battle with the monster. This is about as effective as it usually is, but then they employ a never before tried strategy: knock the monster over. And hey, guess what, it works!
Seriously?
Team science decides to look further into the matter. Adachi decides to do this dressed as a distinguished Southern gentlemen for some reason.
“I do declare, these doin’s are powerful mysterious!”
At this point, a big ass mysterious dome and a mysterious voice mysteriously requests to see the very five scientists that looking at it. The military guys smell a trap, so they ask if the mysterious people in the mysterious dome are going to kill the scientists. They said no. That story clearly checked out, so the scientists were on their way.
Insert Wizard of Oz joke here:
The brave fellowship of scientists approach the dome, where they are treated to some good ol’ extraterrestrial hospitality.
Once inside and caped-up, the scientists meet the aliens within, who claim to be from the planet they call Mysteroid. They refer to themselves as Mysterians. So, did they not have any sort of identity until some jackass named them? It could have just as easily gone like this:
Scientists: Who are you?
Aliens: Were from the planet Butthole. We’re the Buttholians.
Scientists: Pffft!
Aliens: What?
Scientists: Nothing, nothing…it’s nothing.
The Mysterians claim that they don’t want war, and they only want a two-mile strip of land to live on. Their other requirement is that they be allowed to…wait for it…marry earth women! Apparently their bodies are full of radiation and most of their babies are deformed. They also demand five specific women, two of which happen to be one of the scientists girlfriend and her sister!
“That’s right, we demand to procreate with your girlfriend. Also, as soon as an African-American joins our team, we’re clearly going to make him the Black Ranger”
Man, these guys have no game at all. They never really specify why they need those five. Like if they had said that they had superior genes, or they were compatible with their blood type, or hell even if they just liked their hair, it would have at least justified it somehow. They really just wanted those five women to needlessly raise the stakes in the movie. And really, they didn’t have to demand any women. If the Mysterians had just advertised that they needed women to procreate with, I guarantee there would be women somewhere that would step up to the plate. And at the risk of sounding sexist, if there are lady Mysterians, I’m sure there are guys that would be more than willing to pony up too.
Mankind collectively decides “nuh uh” and launches an all out assault on the Mysterians mystery dome. For some reason, the film departs form Ikfukube’s music and Berlioz starts playing. French composers always make me think of space battles. There’s a pretty prolonged battle sequence in which the army gets its ass handed to it and the mystery dome remains unscathed. Then as a retaliatory measure, some of the Mysterians show up at their target ladies house and:
This shit happens:
Descent
Ascent
So, now the Mysterians have their women. The military unveils their newest weapon in the fight against the Mysterians: Marcalite Farps, which is probably the most ridiculous name for a weapon ever conceived. I tried to see if “farps” was some sort of cultural thing I was missing. No luck. Maybe it was an acronym for something really badass like:
Friggin’ Awesome Raygun Power System
or
Forced Arbitrary Ridiculous Plot Surprise
Nope, just a dumb name.
Anywho, the marcalite farps (which will be henceforth referred to as “farpy”) are sent into action. We don’t get to see exactly what farpy looks like, until we see this:
Intimidation gives you the edge in any battle.
So, we sit there, waiting to see this crazy ass robot kick some ass, but instead it just breaks up into a couple of satellite dishes. These farpys sit around the mystery dome and reflect the dome’s deadly rays right back at it. One would assume that after getting their rays reflected back at them once or twice, the Mysterians would change-up their tactics, but no. They just keep blasting away again and again. Their one tactical variation is they send a second Moguera to burrow underneath a farpy to destroy it. The farpy falls on the 2nd Moguera and destroys it instead!
Honestly, Moguera, you are the shittiest robot in cinematic history.
Okay, maybe not THE shittiest…
Dear God, this battle scene goes on for a long time. Mystery dome fires at farpy, farpy fires back. Meanwhile, the supposedly dead astrophysicist helps the captive women escape, teaches all of us a lesson about the dangers of misused science, the military blows the Mystery Dome up, and boom, end of movie. The scientists ride off into the sunset in their environmentally friendly rocket ship.
Seriously, is Uncle Buck driving this thing?
The pace of this film is pretty slow. The battle sequences against the dome are really stretched out and not that interesting. Big deadly machines that are totally stationary just aren’t that intimidating.
Exhibit A
The acting is pretty par for the course. There are a couple of white guys in this movie, one of which speaks fluent Japanese. This is a good thing, because his acting in English is horrendous. “Fire…the..ray”…It’s like those three words take every bit of effort he has to get out. The special effects are pretty decent for the time. If nothing else, Toho puts up some pretty amazing destruction sequences. There’s one scene with a flood in particular that’s pretty amazing.
Sploosh
This movie was the first of many Toho sci-fi movies that involve aliens. One thing that the studio would do much better with in later movies was giving the aliens some sort of personality. If they’re riddled with radiation, a dramatic reveal of what they look like would have been effective, but no. It’s difficult to fear an antagonist who’s only discernible identity is “cape”.
“Our belts are awesome too!”
That brings us to Moguera. Yes, he looks ridiculous, but he’s kinda gloriously ridiculous. Like, if there’s a poster child for 50’s sci-fi, it’s Moguera. There’s one sequence where a woman in a bathtub sees him silently walk by her window, while she stays quiet as to not attract the robot’s attention. It’s actually kind of an eerie scene. Really, the movie could have used more Moguera. It could have made for a more badass battle at the end of the movie instead of making it into the most easily defeatable monster in the history of film.
For Toho’s first foray into aliens, it could have been worse, but it also could have been a lot better. Later films would use aliens much more effectively. This is another movie that I would absolutely recommend to the hardcore fan, but that’s about it.
Hers: The Mysterians
The Mysterians is…well, of all the movies I’ve seen, this is one of them.
Let’s just get this over with.
So the Mysterians is less of a Godzilla movie, per say, and more of “hey, there’s a monster in this for about 3 minutes so I suppose this counts”. It’s also…well, it’s…something.
The Mysterians opens with a Japanese Festival celebrating…something. Exposition maybe? During the celebration, we find out that the Very Serious Astrophysicist Shiraishi has recently broken off his engagement to Generic Love Interest and something…Mysterious….is going on.
Also during the festival, a forest fire breaks out, but thanks to some Exposition Firefighters, we learn that this is No Normal Forest Fire– the trees are burning from the roots!
Remember kids, only YOU can prevent forest fires fueled by an alien base buried underground!
So it turns out…somehow…that Shiraishi has been doing research on Mysteriod– a small star that used to be a planet but it like, exploded or something so now it’s a star. Or something.
Then a local village is destroyed by a landslide, and the Exposition Detective thinks that someone may have land-slided the town on purpose. Question 1: How is this possible? Question 2: Who looks at a landslide and thinks “obviously, this was planned”? — Anyway, so they go to investigate the site where the landslide happened, and they discover that the ground is hot–and radioactive!!
You’d think the sign would be a dead give away.
During their investigation, a giant mantis robot …thing…shows up.
He’s about 2 degrees away from playing the adorable washboard in Beauty and the Beast.
The robot attacks the power plant and develops the Power of Fire and uses it to destroy all of the army’s weapons.
I’m sorry, sir, this phone is for Exposition Only.
During this mess of a movie, one thing that I did appreciate was the awesome soundtrack. It’s really pretty great– it helps fuel the action and the main theme has a spectacular “old time monster movie” feel. However. During most of this robot sequence, some jackass sound designer decided “hey, fuck the soundtrack, I’m going to put in SCIENCE NOISES”…which are really just horrible high-pitched beeps and squeals that serve no purpose except to give me a headache and obscure the awesome score. It’s frustrating, because I want to enjoy the movie, but with a horrible, unnecessary high-pitched noise on top of an already incomprehensible plot, it greatly takes away from the action.
So the robot invades town and the army blows the bridges to stop the creature from invading the mainland.
It appears victory….you know what? never mind.
The government calls a Science Meeting, where they reveal that their tests on the squished washboard robot have discovered that the robot is made from chemicals not yet discovered on earth. Uh-oh.
Further studies discover that there are aliens living on the dark side of the moon, which reminds me, how fucking excited am I for Iron Sky?
TO ZE MOOON!
The scientists also discover that there is an underground alien stronghold near the base of Mount Fuji, and the aliens conveniently declare that they will only negotiate with the 5 main protagonists…but they have to be wearing capes.
Also, the aliens are Power Rangers
The Orange Ranger reveals the aliens’ back story– their planet was destroyed by atomic war **HOW TOPICAL DON’T YOU THINK?** and now they want to make peace with Earth and live here among us, and all they ask is for 2 miles of land and the right to marry the main protagonists’ girlfriends. How convenient.
Here’s the thing though: WHY do they need these 5 specific women? I’ve been on Craigslist, and I would be willing to bet money that there would be a number of women down for a casual encounter with an alien. Your pic gets mine.
Also, the aliens’ base looks like a boob.
So instead of saying “A race of aliens far more advanced than our own wishes to come and live peacefully among us and breed with our species? Awesome! There must be so much they can teach us!” They say FUCK THAT LET’S BLOW THEM UP.
The Ministry of World Defense (which, by the way, why isn’t this a thing?) decides to attack the aliens.
I imagine it looks a lot like this on the inside.
In the meantime, Shiraishi (remember, he supposedly died in the forest fire?) shows up in a TV and tells them to stop the war.
Just like this.
Predictably, no one listens, and they attack the alien’s base. It doesn’t work. At all. The aliens lower their base back underground and the army comes up with plans to build an electron gun, but OH SNAP, the Mysterians are planning on taking over Japan!
The problem with reviewing this movie that it’s just fucking incomprehensible. I feel like we started in the middle of Breaking Bad or something, but there isn’t any…before. It just…starts…and then goes on, and then switches to something else, and then something else, and then oh wait, something else. There’s like 47 different weapons and a bunch of uninteresting characters and indistinguishable events that just make it absolutely ridiculous to watch.
For instance, the Earth Defense Force brings out their heat ray for attack round two, but oh whoops, the base is invulnerable to heat.
No, the other Earth Defense Force.
So when that doesn’t work, they have a meeting to decide whether or not to use an H-Bomb on them. HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING, JAPAN? What the hell. They of course decide not to, and an awkward American actor who speaks Japanese pretty well and acts like he failed it in college comes in with plans for an electron gun with a giant lens to increase the heat ray.
Then the aliens kidnap what’s her face and her generic friend, so the protagonists are PISSED.
I don’ t have a joke– her dress is just ADORABLE.
So then the army sends in the never-previously mentioned “marcalite farps”. I don’t even know. Apparently they’re a thing.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/3-04-104/fm3-04-104.pdf
At this point, I just stopped giving a shit because I was sick of trying to figure out what the hell weapon/plan they were trying to use.
So far, these movies have worked releltively well because there’s one Big Thing to Stop The Monster. This time, there are like 10 Big Things that don’t work so we need to get another Big Thing. Annoying.
So then Protagonist #2 finds a back way into the alien base and rescues the girls, and then there’s a flood, and Shiraishi double-crosses the aliens and helps them escape and presents the moral of the story pretty hard. Shiraishi destroys the base from the inside while the army destroys it from the outside and then the Mysterians escape back to space, but it’s okay, because Japan launches a satelite to monitor earth and make sure they don’t come back.
Then it’s over.
I don’t even…you know what? I’m just done with this one. I’m not even going to bother with any jokes. I realize all of these aren’t going to be the best, but this movie felt like the writing staff just threw darts at some plot points and taped them together and forgot to add any sort of, you know, rationale and/or explanation.
Fuck this movie.
His: Rodan
Rodan
Well, chronologically the next movie we should be watching is Half Human, but that film is nigh on impossible to find. Toho banned that movie for its racist depiction of the Ainu people. It’s kinda like the Song of the South of Toho Sci Fi.
“We all have movies we’d like everyone to forget, right Toho?”
-Disney
So that brings us to Rodan. We watched the Americanized version, which fell into some of the standard pitfalls that Americanized Godzilla movies tend to do. We start off with stock footage of some nuclear bombs going off, which really has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.
Behold: A Missed Point
After that, we condense a lot of the early scenes to feature the main character narrating in a vaguely “Asian” accent. In this case, our hero is a miner named Shigeru. Tensions are running high in the mining company and the first bit of action we see is Shigeru’s friends Goro and Yoshi duking it out.
I cannot have been the only one that pictured this.
Well, after their little altercation is broken up, both of them disapear. Yoshi’s body turns up in a flooded mine shaft and everyone assumes that Goro performed a fatality on him. In fact, everyone keeps saying how Yoshi was “hacked to pieces”.
Pictured: Hacked to pieces
Shit gets more complicated when we find out that Shigeru is dating Goro’s sister, who I can only assume is named Sheeva (I swear that’s the last Mortal Kombat joke). Some of the nameless characters then decide they’re going to solve the mystery and tie themselves together to explore the flooded shaft. This goes about as well as you would expect.
The redshirts get all killed up too and now the whole mining village is in a panic. Shigeru goes to comfort Sheeva and he gets cock blocked by a giant killer bug called a Meganulon.
They totally said the bug’s name in the movie. I didn’t know that from looking up this stuff on the internet for years….
Everyone assembles to take out the new-found giant-bug menace. The Meganulon ices a few of the security guards, and the village doctor uses some CSI level forensic science (he glances at the corpses) and determines that everyone else had been killed by the bug as well. Shigeru mans up and leads a troupe down into the shaft to take on the bug. Of course guns don’t work, and Shigeru had apparently been playing Donkey Kong Country all afternoon, so he jumps into a mine cart and slams into the bastard.
Dammit, I missed the ‘G’!
The mine caves in and Shigeru gets separated. Meanwhile, a mysterious UFO starts wrecking everyone’s shit all over the world. We go back to Japan to find Shigeru, who has escaped from the mine and has terrible amnesia. The doctors show him pictures of dinosaurs, because apparently by now they’re just anticipating that anything weird is dinosaur related. Well, Shigeru gets his memory back, which involves a flashback of a gigantic Pteranodon hatching from an egg and gobbling up the Meganulons.
Shigeru reports his encounter, and a scientist makes a bunch of wild ass assumptions (which are all true) and informs the world that the UFOs are actually a gigantic form of Pteranodon called Rodan. They go to find Rodan and OH SNAP, TWO RODANS!!! The Rodans fly to a nearby city and totally waste it. The army decides that it’s totally on now, so they concoct a plan to destroy the beasts. The Rodans are conveniently nesting on a mountain that tends to erupt, so they decide to blow the shit out of the mountain and kill them. The plan works pretty well and we’re treated to watching a pretty extended scene of the Rodans burning to death, so long in fact that the army peaces out before the monsters are even dead.
“Alright boys, we’re gonna call that good”
As we continue to watch the monsters burn, Shigeru (more accurately the American guy dubbing him) waxes philosophical to a pretty excessive level about the symbology the burning Rodans.
“They sunk to the earth like weary children”
Seriously, that’s what he said.
There’s really a lot to like about this movie. The opening theme is one of Akira Ikfukube’s least used, but most menacing themes in the series. The acting is pretty decent. The relationship is pretty trite, but no one is watching these movies for romance.
“You comPLEAT me”
The Rodan suit really good. It’s my favorite look for Rodan in the series.
I should say the suit looks great, but the puppets look like this.
Just go with it
The destruction sequences are pretty amazing. If Godzilla destroying Tokyo is reminiscent of an atom bomb, Rodan’s attack is like a living typhoon. This sets the convention that many other of these movies will use that shit looks awesome when it’s being destroyed by wind.
Rodan has as a much different feel in this movie than most other Toho monsters in that it’s one of the few that actively goes after humans. In fact, they find human bones at the mountain that the Rodans are nesting at. (sidenote, you’d go crazy if you worried about scale in these movies, but if you compare Rodan to the Meganulon and the Meganulon to a human, that would be like you eating the flesh off a gnat. You know, if a gnat had bones). Rodan is actually kind of scary in a way. I read an article one time that tried to explain why giant flying predators are the subject of so many films and legends. There’s a professor that argues that its residual memory from our ancestors who lived in trees. Our tree-bound ancestors actually did have to constantly be concerned about being eaten by predatory birds. Whether you buy into that or not, you can’t deny that giant things flying out of the air to eat you is a pretty terrifying concept, and Rodan conveys that concept pretty successfully.
Some other movies were less successful.
Rodan went on to become a mainstay in the Toho universe, appearing in all three series. The character wouldn’t have had its staying power if it hadn’t gotten such a strong start though. The film certainly has its issues, but it’s a solid entry in the early part of the series.
HisandHerGodzilla 