Posted in: Blu-ray, by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Essays

Godzilla: A Brief History of a Monster Phenomenon

Godzilla—the lizard king of the post-nuclear age—turns sixty this year. To celebrate, Hollywood is launching a second attempt to revive the Japanese kaiju (giant monster) franchise as an American spectacle.

Godzilla 2014 marks the thirtieth original Godzilla film but only the second American production (not counting the reworked American editions of the original Godzilla and Godzilla 1985: the Legend Is Reborn). Director by Gareth Edwards (whose only previous feature, Monsters, was an inventive take on the kaiju genre on a budget) exports the Big G from Japan to San Francisco by way of Honolulu and pays tribute to the franchise with a CGI creation that nonetheless recreates the ferocious majesty of the Japanese original and even embraces the monster smackdown formula of the classic series. It’s an American reworking of the Japanese conventions. But is it really Godzilla? Because stateside comic books and the odd animated series aside, Godzilla is a Japanese phenomenon. We Americans are simply bystanders to the artful artifice of its crazy glory.

Godzilla

The U.S. had its own nuclear-spawn giant creatures in the atomic scare of the 1950s—Them!, Tarantula, and of course the proto-zilla of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms—but Godzilla was very specifically born in the wake of Hiroshima and America’s nuclear tests in the Pacific, events that resonated deeply with a culture still dealing with the devastation of the war. That original devil-monster incarnation transformed over time from enemy of humanity to Earth’s protector and back again, and his story was rebooted twice in revivals that kept Godzilla and friends returning for monster mashes through Japan’s major cities until his Final Wars in 2004. Through them all, Godzilla was brought to life by a stuntman in a suit stomping through miniature cities and landscapes while an overcranked camera filmed it at high speed to give a dreamy, slightly-slow motion look and a sense of mass and size to the monster battles. The process is affectionately known as suitmation.

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Posted in: DVD, Science Fiction

Honda’s Sci-Fi, Cassavetes’ Husbands, Tati at Play – DVDs for the Week

Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection

Though his name is conspicuously absent from the cover, the Icon of Sci-Fi celebrated in Sony’s three-disc set is Ishiro Honda, the prolific director of the original Godzilla and a legendary run of giant monster movies. This collection from Sony highlights his science fiction output with the stateside DVD debuts of three films, a mere fraction of his genre filmography.

The H-Man (1957) is not a man at all but a gooey radioactive slime (the original Japanese titles translates to “Beauty and the Liquidman”) that slurps into Tokyo, starts oozing up legs of gangsters and digesting them in seconds flat. It’s a monster movie horror within a cop crime drama, with detectives investigating a drug ring where all the suspects keeps getting dissolved. Motivation for the hungry, hungry puddle is vaguely suggested by a scientist who reads a headline about a missing suspect and immediately suspects radioactive hanky panky, but it still doesn’t quite explain why it invades the nightclub where all the gangsters hang, unless it absorbs the instincts of its victims as well. At least it that would explain its obsession with nightclub singer Chikako Arai. There are some great ooze effects of the gelatin spill going up walls and some dummies that deflate in place of victims being boiled into mush. The optical effects with freeze frames and animated slime are far less effective and for some reason they periodically turn into big green ghosts.

Battle in Outer Space (1959) is a visually splendid and narratively pedestrian space opera, short on character and plot but full of great miniatures and dramatic effects in a film packed with spectacle. It’s not just ships zapping each other with lasers in the dark void of space; there’s a caterpillar surface transport crawling over the rocky volcanic moonscape, a shoot-out with a fleet of flying saucers, a mind-controlled assassin sabotaging a human rocketship and of course the alien assault on Earth landmarks in the final battle. They may look like toys in flight, but they are they best toys a sci-fi geek could behold on screen in 1959, which alone makes it a genre highlight.

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