In Which I Watch Several Lesser-Known Kaiju Movies

New review, What to Do with a Dead Kaiju.


Confession, I would've reviewed this sooner but I had mixed it up in my head with Day of the Kaiju, a short film about, well, a dead kaiju.... hm, and checking I didn't really say a lot about that one. So I'm going to start with that! Since I think a side-by-side is fitting here, as both are obviously Shin Godzilla inspired.

Day of the Kaiju is a half-hour film taking place shortly after the defeat of 'Giant Creature No. 1' by the self-defense force near a small coastal town. Our lead, Nagamine, is put in charge of declaring the kaiju officially dead, and he's pushed by the mayor to sign off on it. Leery of doing so about a very unknown organism, he eventually resigns in protest as they decide to build a permanent research facility around it without what he feels is safe confirmation.


What to Do with a Dead Kaiju similarly starts with a dead kaiju, though while Day's kaiju was stopped before major damage was done, What to Do's kaiju was a real city-wrecker, we see major shots of destruction. Furthermore, the military didn't stop it- a literal beam of light came down and killed it, leaving a major wound.

What to Do focuses heavily on the government/political angle, because we pretty soon get a fight over which agency has responsibility- in the sense none of them want to do so. Though as talks progress and analysis comes- and just like in Day there's a rush to declare the kaiju corpse safe- in the Japanese government begins to see it as the biggest tourist trap ever, and give it an ill-fitting official name as a reflection of that.

The overall tone was clearly inspired by Shin Godzilla but also definitely has more comedy and levity in it.

Meanwhile there's some rivalry between the military anti-kaiju unit and... special forces, I think? It wasn't exactly clear to me what each unit was (this was largely due to translation I think), but some definite inter-service rivalry going on separate from the political ministry battle, made more complicated by a love triangle going on.

The tourist talk begins to fall to the wayside as problems begin to arise. While there's no real question this one is dead, there is a matter of, ah, you know what happens to dead whale carcasses sometimes on the beach? That is to say, they fill up with gas and explode? Well there's worries of that, and meanwhile apparently it's hard to tell whether the insides smell more like feces or vomit. So that, and other concerns like it not being entirely safe and having some kind of fungus that grows in it, start to take higher priority as it becomes clear they have a real mega-scale environmental issue on their hands.

The pacing's kept pretty good, there's enough conflicts going on that even with meetings taking up a lot of time it kept interesting (despite me not exactly knowing what all of them are about), definitely learned from Shin, and the tone's mix of characters taking it seriously and humor worked pretty well. Oh! I should also mention this is a full-on proper movie with a budget, co-distributed by Shochiku and Toei (why co? No idea). So the actors are real actors, and the effects on the kaiju are reasonably solid too. Not Shin level, but they do the job well enough.

I will say I saw a fansub of this and, uh, it was not a good sub. It's watchable if you can translate bad dub to english, but it even has a 'do not want,' in there. So this is an interesting movie but for most of you I'd recommend waiting for a more proper english release.

So good movie, but wait on seeing it.
 
Space Monster Wangmagwi!


Good news? It's good! Or at least, I liked it.

To start off with it has a budget, and to follow that up, tone-wise it surprised me a bit by being a comedy, tone similar to 62's Kong Kong vs Godzilla.

Getting to the plot, we have aliens planning on conquering earth, wiping the inhabitants, and moving in, and to do that they need to, well, get rid of the inhabitants. Their world is much heavier and with a denser atmosphere than ours, so they take a creature and send it to Earth- specifically Korea because there's a typhoon at the time and they want it to land under cover of storm, which makes as much sense as any plan. South Korea picks it up and calls all it's active duty pilots back to base, including the husband of a soon-to-be-married bride, who's one of our humans.

Wangmagwi begins his rampage and when she faints, he picks her up and, uh, she spends a lot of time there. Eventually becoming plot relevant again waaay later.

The bulk of the movie then follows a couple different stories- two men bet on who will flee from Wangmagwi first, even one betting his house and wife. They're thus suck in place by the bet as the monster approaches, and then later, when the meet up with the wife, you get the natural followup to that skit- complicated by Wangmagwi showing up at the house too! The wife at first objects to marriage-swap-by-bet but ends up wanting to keep both of them.

There's a homeless kid, Squirrel, who does the logical thing and loot rich people's places while they've fled from the monster. Unfortunately, Wangmagwi hits one of the buildings he's in at the time! Fortunately, he manages to get on Wangmagwi, and even climbs in it's ears. If anything, Squirrel's the main lead of the piece, and he does a lot of stuff, eventually getting in contact with the bride when she wakes up.

We get various other small bits of people fleeing the area too, often comedic in nature.


Stuff happens, the military and the pilot finally get involved (in the last 1/4th of the movie), and with no small contribution by Squirrel (turns out while most of a kaiju is quite resilient, ear drums? Less so!), the day is saved.


This is good, original kaiju movie. Stuff like betting the wife is a bit dated and the effects could be better, but on the plus side it is not just a paint-by-numbers formula kaiju film, but rather a sincere effort probably pushed by comedians who were likely popular at the time. I rate it a point or two above the original Yongary, which after all was pretty much the original Gamera redone in Korea. Wangmagwi's more willing to stand on it's own feet and deserves more recognition. Big props to SRS for finding this and going to a lot of effort to getting this made available.
 
The Great Yokai War: Guardians by Takashi Miike has graced my eyes!

The first one was good. This one was good and had kaiju! The plot is about sea creatures from an ancient sea that split Japan- when the land rose, many sea creatures escaped, but of course many could not. The spirits of all this ancient life has coalesced into a giant 'Yokaiju'. Their term! It's like a giant rolling trilobite with a manifested face, it's huge, and it is, unfortunately, headed for Tokyo and the seals there.

This news arrives during the World Yokai Conference, currently convening in China- and we see that 'Yokai' cover not just Japanese Yokai but Chinese creatures, a greek Medusa, Vampire, Frankenstein, and so on. The foreign 'yokai' are only there for the one scene but it's very cool to see them in this style.

The Japanese Yokai return to deal with the problem and come up with drawing upon 'the child from the house with no gables,' aka a descendant of Watanabe no Tsuna, famous yokai hunter. They find Kei Watanabe by using a fortune in a shrine- only to pretty soon get a bit of confusion if the prophecy refers to Kei or his far-braver younger brother Dai, kids both (again, Neverending Story vibes a lot like the first film). Long story short, the Yokai want to use him to wake up Lord Bujin- who you may also know as Daimajin, the statue kaiju from Daiei's samurai-era kaiju films which, as I've posted, are fantastic. Some yokai object, but the mission is on, with, before long, Kei taking the quest with the help of a Fox woman, and meanwhile the other yokai intent on bringing Dai.

There is one issue- see, the job of the Tsuna descendant is to wake Lord Bujin by stabbing his representation and angering him, getting crushed, and then hoping he goes on to deal with the real problem. And both brothers separately learn of this! Knowing the truth, they both try and be the one on the grounds of, one, Tokyo still needs to be saved from the Yokai, and two, they don't want the other brother to do it! Eventually one does so and fortunately Lord Bujin is impressed with his bravery (yes, they weren't gonna smush a child).


Lord Bujin takes on the Yokai, and as a note, is about 10 meters tall. The Yokai is far bigger, so picture a fight which is an 'attack on titan against the giant,' where the smaller fighter is Daimajin! It's rather awesome.

Not to spoil the end, but it had both the awesome action scene and dealing with the spirit's grudge in a thematic matter, as well as dealing with why Lord Bujin is so fraught to awaken.

Solid film, I enjoyed it. The makeup and effects is fantastic, and while the first one had a real villain, this one was about dealing with more natural forces, sacrifice, and that sort of thing. Good movie.
 
That was real? I thought it was just some of the many Japanese giant monster movies I saw as a kid blending together.
 
Oh yea, I haven't watched Yong-Gu and Dinosaur Zzu-Zzu, the first movie by the director of Reptilian/Yongarry, and D-Wars! I can fix that.

Watches

Ok, this is clearly a kid's comedy film, and being untranslated Korea, a lot of the jokes of course flew right by me, but there's plenty of slapstick and silly-faces, a criminal in makeup so imposing it makes him look like a Frankenstein (construct, not creator), etc..

I had put this off because I was under the impression there wasn't that much kaiju action, and, turns out that was wrong! The first half has baby Zzu-Zzu, a t-rex ish dinosaur just about human size, but around the halfway mark Eomma, aka Momma Zzu-Zzu shows up! Yes, this is a Gorgo plot.

Starting off we follow our lead- I presume Yong-Gu- who's a comedian who, I guess, is playing a kid? He goes to school with actual kids. First he finds an egg in a cave, and after some hijinks it hatches into Zzu-Zzu. Yong-Gu goes to school in between checking on Zzu-Zzu, and at one point Zzu-Zzu wanders out and some kids stone him (yikes!), and Yong-Gu comes to his rescue- meanwhile the aforementioned band of criminals also catches sight and spends awhile chasing Yong-Gu and Zzu-Zzu before finally catching them, around when Eomma shows up.

How is Eomma? As a costume, rather stiff, though has some detail. I've seen worse but it's a fairly low-tier kaiju suit due to the stiffness. On the bright side they have no hesitation attaching sparking squibs to the suit, so she gets hit a lot more often than most suit kaiju. Ability wise, she has a dangerous heated-gas breath- so when she flames a helicopter full of actors, they can just blow smoke at them and they can act like they're dying rather than deal with flames, see?

The military attack is mostly stock footage of helicopters firing (80s choppers, this came out in '89), but they do occasionally use models. A helicopter model with fireworks to indicate it's damage crashes, we see some POV camera-over-jet model stuff, etc.. Actually reasonably creative photography on occasion, in the low-budget work with what you got sense.

The battle starts in the mountains and travels some way, worst part of the rampage is probably the city part, as they made the model set too wide open and it's mostly Eomma on the street- but it does have the climactic scene where she rescues Zzu-Zzu by sticking her head into the building where her kid and Yong-Gu are held captive, and melts two of the criminals, Indiana Jones/Raiders of the Lost Arc style (i.e. melted wax figures), which is kinda awesome.

The military eventually takes down Eomma (so not exactly like Gorgo or Gappa), and starts shooting at Zzu-Zzu but Yong-Gu stops them, and it turns out Zzu-Zzu isn't dead after all. They presumably live happily ever after, the end!

You know, this movie would make a pretty fitting prelude to Daigoro vs. Goliath, come to think of it.... mamma kaiju dies, kid kaiju is alive but needs humans to take care of them.


So how was it? While it's not great- and hindered by me not understanding Korean- it does clearly have movie production values and I could tell everyone involved was an actual actor. The pacing was mostly good, stuff moved at a solid clip and you'd have one comedy scene followed by another, interspaced with some serious ones. Suits looked good but way too stiff. While I've seen a ton better, I've also seen plenty worse, so it's high in the low tier, if that makes sense, it's not actively painful like an Asylum flick. I kinda wish the director had stuck to making Korean Kaiju Comedies and not had his later ones be more bog-standard action movies with C-list American actors in the leads. At the least, it's something of an interesting artifact- though Wangmagwi is solidly better if you want to see a Korean Kaiju comedy!
 
I have now seen Son of Kong, the nine-months-after sequel to the original King Kong.

For a rushed sequel, it's not bad. They probably got it out so fast largely by keeping the runtime low- it's 69 minutes long, thirty minus less than the original. Denham and the ship captain return from the first movie, and they're joined by Helstrom, the scummy ex-captain who sold Denham the map to Skull Island in the first place and who ropes him in with a tale of more treasure on the island, and Hilda, a performer at a traveling circus with her dad, til an incident with a certain scummy individual leaves her alone and her show burned down, with the monkeys she worked with in the wild.

Issues with the depiction of race remain. The village chief from the last movie was here, just to tell Denham to F- off for being the cause of Kong wrecking their village last time, which is both satisfying and why they go to a different part of the island. There's also the Chinese character Charlie, who's main job seems to be to decide when to nope out of a situation and stick with Denham. Not as bad as some of the time, but be warned.

Just like the first, they don't get to the island until spending half the time on drama, it's just that's a lot less time. When they do meet little Kong (they comment on how he must be Kong's son but little Kong is how they refer to him), they rescue him from quicksand and bandages a wound he has, and for the rest of the movie, he helps them in fights with the other island animals, with two quite solid battles. There's some comedic elements in betwee. The effects are all Willis O'Brien and despite the lack of time, they hold up really well, probably aided by not having nearly as much size work to do with Little Kong's smaller scale.

This is one area which I find better- Hilda, being used to animals, interacts with lil Kong and while nervous around him at times has a general positive view. Ann Darrow famously had a rich character in the first half of the first movie and just yelled and fainted a lot in the second half, so Hilda gets the nod from me.

There's split-ups, betrayals, and human drama too, of course.

On the minus, the ending is a bit of a downer. There's an earthquake and at least a large chunk of the island sinks under, with only our surviving main cast seen getting away. Considering how light the Kong scenes were, it feels unnecessary and drags things down, like they just decided to do a really big effects earthquake scene before thinking about if it fits the tone.

So yea, that's my thought on Son of Kong, the last major studio King Kong release I hadn't seen. Not bad, better than I was expecting even, but it does show the signs of it being a fairly quickly made sequel.
 
MC_Lovecraft said:
I've had Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (and sequels) on my to-watch list for a while now. I hadn't realized the franchise was still going strong. I might have to bump it up a few notches.
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I mean, "going strong" is a bit of an exaggeration, this anime is the first new material the franchise has put out in 17 years, and only the second major release in my lifetime. Hoping it gets a popularity boost though!
 
Attack of the Giant Teacher

This is another low-budget kaiju film, but this time with a creator with some pedigree, director Ishii Yoshikazu worked as an assistant effects director on Final Wars as well as directing several Ultraman Ginga and Ginga S episodes.

That said, it's not really a kaiju movie in form, but rather it's the story of a teacher at a night school for adults. His school is closing soon, and his boss has asked him to step it up so he can get a job at one of their different campuses. Meanwhile his students have their own problems, like debt, being deep in a MLM scheme, or, well, aliens. Which is where the kaiju come in! The class sets up a final play (which to it's credit, seems to be a legitimately entertaining telling of Momotaro), his students having mixed feelings when they find out he didn't tell his job is on the line, and other issues. Then the evil aliens show up and the alien classmates have no-one to turn to to help fighting them but their teacher!

It makes sense in context.

This is one of the better micro-budget movies, as one would expect from a Ginga director (the series made back when Tsubaraya was working on a figurative shoebox full of money due to the lawsuit thing going on), and it being a school drama first works. It's still not a high grade production by any means, but if one is interested in seeing something cheap, it's a pretty good choice. I'd put Monster Seafood Wars higher, but it beats out Raiga, God Raiga vs. King Ohga, Monster X attacks the G8, and a number of others by a good margin. Having an actual pro at the helm helps, even if the acting is rough at times.
 
Ok so I watched Reptilian aka Yongarry aka easily the biggest budget kaiju movie I've never seen, which came out a year after Tristar's Godzilla '98.


Where we start, there's a dig being run by Campbell, an asshole who's convinced it'll be the find of the century despite an increasing number of fatal accidents with the workers (and Campbell threatens to have anyone who reports it deported- like I said, HUGE asshole!), and warnings from his old (both former and older) partner Hughes of great danger written as a prophecy in the writings they found years before. The dig's second in command Holly quits, and then, around the time some aliens (Galaxions) show up, the skeleton, fully uncovered, first restores it's missing bones, and then regenerates it's flesh and revives. Campbell gives it a 'I created you!' speech and gets stepped on! Before the monster vanishes.

We find out Hughes was in the custody of a US agency for the last few years before sneaking away, said agency being more interested in the 'alien' part of the prophecy than the 200 million year old dinosaur 50 times the size of a T-rex; especially as there's an alien ship in orbit that killed a space shuttle and some satellites!

The monster, now known as Yonggary, does his appear and disappear thing a few times, one time in front of an army officer driving Hughes and Holly, which convinces him, and those two become the military's Yonggary consultants, while a shifty guy from the agency advises them on the aliens. They eventually realize it's the aliens beaming Yongarry around, and as it's sent to the city the military goes on the attack; a lot of destructon ensues, aided by the fact that Yonggary has a field that helps make missiles miss, but Hughes eventually deciphers the prophecy and realizes there's a control gem in his forehead the aliens are using; and the US military sends their elite jetpack unit after it before Yonggary can hit a nuclear power plant!

When the crystal is destroyed, the Galaxions send their second monster, Cycor, which was initially intended for later in the plan, to beat Yonggary. A battle ensues, limbs are blown off, Cycor doesn't go down easy even when decapitated, the agency guy tries to get them nuked anyway because he thinks if all the kaiju are dead the aliens will land and his agency will have a chance to study them, but eventually agency guy is stopped, nuke averted, aliens flee in case Yonggary unlocks it's 'true power,' and Yonggary gets carried to a new island home.


Honestly, better than I thought it'd be. I mean, not good, the fact the director was Korean, not American, probably played a role in a lot of the line readings, but in a B-movie way it worked. The acting and delivers weren't great, but the actors weren't asleep and nor were they doing the 'wink at the camera because we know we're in a bad movie,' thing, some of them were alright, some were super hammy, it worked. The asshole Campbell turned out to have no bearing on the main plot but kept things from getting boring before Yonggary woke up, and the alien agency guy gave the control room scenes stuff to do other than commentate.

Reptilian was a lot more Independence Day inspired than I thought, with the aliens being pretty active, this is 'ID4 with kaiju' way more than it is the Godzilla '98 ripoff I'd assume it'd be.


The CGI was pretty bad, 1999 tech on a Korean movie budget and all. That said, they made suits first as a base design for the kaiju, and there's a few shots of the full sized models (maybe suits? and they were actually really good! The CGI probably allowed a lot more monster shots (this movie had way more monster screentime than average, to it's credit) and allowed the monsters more flexibility, but still, would've liked to see this done with suits, it'd have been amazing. There was a lot of building destruction done with practical effects, destroying miniatures with pyrotechnics and such, which was legitimately impressive work It really showed the CGI being not-there-yet for this budget scale was the big visual flaw in the film.

I think this is pretty solidly in the good-bad movie sweet spot. There's a lot of scenes you could tell would be dramatic if done better, and very hammy action, with dramatic speeches by C-list actors that could've used a few more takes and such.

Has nothing to do with the classic Yongary aside from the name and a few details of the design (breaths fire, has a nose horn, etc.), but I ended up kinda liking this one, which they do call Yonggary often for whatever reason.


This is also easily the biggest budget kaiju film I'd yet to see, which knocks a pretty big milestone off my list. No longer do I have to worry about, if I say "I've seen every kaiju movie ever!", someone asking, "Oh yea? What about the second South Korean Yonggary flick?". I've seen it all!

Now I just gotta find a copy of The Great Buddha Arrives, Bulgasari, and Gogola....
 
Short film time!

Akari by another ultraman director, Takeshi Yagi, who made a short film with an Ultraman-style heroine as a proof of concept in the hopes of developing it into something.

It's only a 6 minute film so not much room for plot, but both the kaiju and the heroine have solid designs and the choreography's good, so it's worth a watch.

Alas, the original, while publicly released, is no longer up at it's original source, so it's impossible to find.... unless you have this archive link riiiiight here. Enjoy!
 
I picked up and watch another small-budget Tokusetsu flick, Super Legend God Hikoza, by Minoru Kawasaki of Monster Seafood Wars and some Ultraman work.




Now when I say 'Tokusetsu', I don't mean kaiju. I thought they might turn giant at some point but they don't!


So the story is there's a research agency working on telepathy helmets, they get a new hire to help with the work, etc.. However, while out one day they discover an artifact that allows two of them, working together, to summon the guardian Hikoza, who defeated the Space Devil Shachihokon 400 years ago, but as Shachihokon has returned, so must Hikoza!

The first problem is, with their initial attempt, they only summon Hikoza's core, leaving him basically a pillar with no limbs...

Fortunately, a research institute that makes functional telepathic helmets is pretty ideal for helping activate Hikoza, but it does require two of them, which leads to some drama, especially when they become local celebrities after beating Shachihokon's first monster- not realizing the real Shachihokon is still at large!


There's some good humor, the cast is likable enough, and the tokusatsu action is pretty good. It's small budget but as Minoru Kawasaki has made a number of these at these points, he's gotten better at working within the limitations. I will also comment that, to my knowledge, it's not a reference to a particular Toku show, or at least none I know. Not Kamen Rider, Sentai, or whatever, just an original concept the director had fun with.

Also the opening spoils a fair amount but in a, 'hey, we know you're here for the good stuff, don't worry, we'll get to it!' way. It's a breezy 70 minutes as well, so quick watch.


Yea, I enjoyed this one!
 
So I've bragged about watching any kaiju movie with a release of any note. In this, however, there is an unspoken asterisk, because there is one kaiju movie I've seen but only the version without the kaiju. Until now!

Yes, I speak of having now seen, Gorath, and more specifically, the Walrus Cut of Gorath!

For those unfamiliar, Gorath is a science fiction disaster movie about a dwarf star on course for Earth. After a rocket gets drawn in by it's immense gravity (Gorath is dense), there's a scramble to save the earth. There's some clever bits like a young scientist come and makes a claim that it's not enough but gets shut down by an older scientist saying it's sufficient and we think it's the latter guy being hidebound... but no, he knows it's not enough to really be safe and they will have to rely on luck, he just wants to be reassuring.

And at one point, a walrus kaiju showed up, and this was cut from the US version- who wanted to sell it as a serious SF movie and felt, at the time, it'd be distracting. I'd always heard it was small, insignificant, and random-feeling, but actually seeing the scene? It fits very well in the logic of showa era Toho SF films. Their actions in antarctica- gigantic jets- melt ice and free the creature, which rampages and causes trouble, forcing them to respond. In context it's shown as one of unforeseen environmental consequences that such a radical action is sure to cause, so metaphorically? It fills a good role. It's not strictly necessary and I can see why they cut it- 60s US audiences were legitimately not ready for this kind of thing, but nowadays I think people'll have no problem with it and it doesn't feel silly or out of place if you're reading this thread.


Now earlier in the thread I mentioned Warning from Space, a lesser known but earlier movie with a similar plot by Daiei. I didn't go into much detail at the time, but in short, a rogue planet is coming, aliens bring not just a warning but a device to stop it. However a group of spies attempt to steal plans for the device (.... not the time, guys), and help it get done.

Warning from Space focuses more on the devastation of the approaching planet and feels bleaker, what with humans fighting while Earth is on the line, contrasted with Gorath, that while also showing vast damage, somehow retains a more hopeful turn. And the spy plot doesn't work too well nor does the aliens not really paying attention to how things are going til the last minute. Of the two, it's not surprising that Gorath is the more remembered, though Warning isn't bad.
 
Q99 said:
And at one point, a walrus kaiju showed up, and this was cut from the US version- who wanted to sell it as a serious SF movie and felt, at the time, it'd be distracting. I'd always heard it was small, insignificant, and random-feeling, but actually seeing the scene? It fits very well in the logic of showa era Toho SF films. Their actions in antarctica- gigantic jets- melt ice and free the creature, which rampages and causes trouble, forcing them to respond. In context it's shown as one of unforeseen environmental consequences that such a radical action is sure to cause, so metaphorically? It fills a good role. It's not strictly necessary and I can see why they cut it- 60s US audiences were legitimately not ready for this kind of thing, but nowadays I think people'll have no problem with it and it doesn't feel silly or out of place if you're reading this thread.
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IIRC, Honda didn't want to put the Walrus in, but Toho made him add a giant monster because all of Honda's previous scifi movies had one.
 
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