Attack of the Monsters

Attack of the Monsters, also knows as Gamera Vs. Guiron, is a late-‘60s giant Japanese monster (or kaiju) movie for kids.  It stars a gigantic, jet-powered flying turtle with really large tusks.  He fights a gigantic lizard-thing with a head shaped like a giant Buck knife and knees that clearly hadn’t been reinforced, because they start to tear in the film’s later stages.  It’s all great fun, with nice model scenery just waiting for destruction and monsters scary enough for an eleven-year-old yet fake enough for a two-year-old.

Here’s the story: Gamera (the turtle) rescues a couple of boys who explore a flying saucer that had touched down near their home (And really, what self-respecting boys wouldn’t?).  See, the saucer is a trap!  It’s remote controlled by evil, brain-eating aliens who look just like attractive Japanese women in shimmery silver leotards!  When the saucer takes off and flies to the Planet of Attractive Japanese Women in Shimmery Silver Leotards, Gamera pursues and does battle with Guiron, the aliens’ attack knife-lizard thing.  Meanwhile, the boys, brave and resourceful, must find a way to escape the clutches of the attractive Japanese women in shimmery silver leotards.  Stuff like this is what popcorn was made for, and my kids ate up every minute of it.

Me?  Well, I had a good time!  Attack of the Monsters so earnestly tried to entertain my kids that it charmed the heck out of me. The Gamera franchise occupies a pleasant sphere as Daiei Studios’ child-friendly answer to Toho Studios’ more teen-oriented Godzilla.  This outing’s aliens were just menacing enough, its sets and costumes just good enough, to help me suspend my disbelief and roll with it.  This isn’t half the movie that my next entry, The Earrings of Madame De… can boast of being.  But it isn’t trying to be.  It’s trying to be light entertainment for monster-hungry preadolescents, and it succeeds.  Attack of the Monsters is a winner.

Monsters

Monsters posits a world in which extraterrestrial animals wind up in Northern Mexico.  US and Mexican authorities establish a “quarantine zone,” in which they use chemical and conventional weapons to try to eliminate enough creatures so they don’t gain a foothold in our ecosystem.  The film convincingly creates and ages this world, making us feel that this isn’t a new phenomenon and that the two governments have been fighting the monsters for quite some time.

Our audience surrogates in this alternate world are a news photographer and his charge, the boss’s (adult, and rather fetching) daughter.  They’re trapped on the wrong side of the quarantine zone, you see, and they need to get to America.  Why they don’t just catch a commercial flight from Mexico City is never explained, but just play along – Monsters is trying to tell a story, here.

What happens?  Well, it’s kind of a mix of It Happened One Night and Sin Nombre, with the two Americans hiring a gang of coyotes to escort them through the quarantine zone and across the US border.  Is it good?  It’s fine, I suppose, but I never bought into it.  This isn’t because the film makes Northern Mexico look like Central America, and it isn’t because it places a Mayan pyramid within walking distance of the Texas border.  It’s because the movie couldn’t decide if it wanted to be Apocalypse Now, any of a dozen movies about illegal immigration, or the aforementioned Frank Capra movie.  And you know what?  I could have accepted that if it weren’t for the film’s big, climactic moment, the moment in which we’re supposed to feel awed at the aliens’ beauty and empathy with their plight as unwanted interlopers.  See, all I saw were creatures of Lovecraftian horror that needed to be eliminated, even if it meant the irradiation of all of Northern Mexico and much of South Texas to make that happen.

I can credit Monsters for originality and craft.  Its aliens look alien and its world looks convincing.  But in the end, it’s just a road movie with an unsuccessful climax.  Pass this one by.

Monsters, Inc.

I have kids, so I've seen MONSTERS, INC. enough times now that I know its every beat. I've looked in every corner of every frame to spot all the little details. There just doesn't seem to be anything new there for me any more - I'm practically a MONSTERS, INC. -ologist.

And you know what I've learned? I've learned that MONSTERS, INC. is a well-crafted, beautifully realized, heartfelt, and funny movie. It does everything right, from the jaunty opening number that tells its juvenile audience not to get too scared by the opening scene to the absolutely perfect, absolutely heartbreaking closing shot to the fun outtakes that run with the closing credits. From the perfectly realized monsters that manage to stay just on the funny side of scary to the terrific voiceover work by Goodman, Crystal, Coburn, Buscemi, and the rest of the cast, the movie just plain nails it.

Bring on the next 25 viewings.

The Host

THEHOST violates the first rule of monster movies: it shows us the whole monster, in daylight, in the very first act. The film gets away with this infraction because the monster is a masterpiece of computer animation. The monster moves like a real creature might, it looks like a real creature might, and its integrated so well into the live-action shots that we never stop to think, "Eh, it's just a bunch of pixels."

Here's the setup: the Han River is horrbily polluted, presumably thanks to the uncaring U.S. Army and its Korean lackeys. Eventually, something mutates; something big, with three mouths, several tails, and a whole lot of appetite. This something eats some people on the spot. Others, it captures for later dining. Will a family from the fringe of Korean society, a family barely keeping it together themselves, be able to work as a team and effect the rescue of little Hyun-seo, daughter of the most wayward of the family's three siblings? Oh, yeah? How about if the Korean and U.S. armies are looking for
them? Oh, yeah? How about if Korean Society has been informed that family hosts the virus that led to the evolution of the creature? How about if everybody -and I mean everybody- is trying to capture them before they can infect the world? Oh, yeah? How about if the creature has stored the girl in its inescapable lair within the sewers of Seoul? Well, the little girl's aunt is an archery champion, even if the aunt does have a tendency to choke at the critical moment. And the family is really, really dedicated ...

This is a setup for a terrific monster movie. It has a creatively imagined beast, sympathetic characters, a resonant theme, and some wonderful images. For some reason (and I can't quite figure out what that reason is ... give me a break, I'm an amateur), however, it didn't resonate with me. I never fully engaged with little Hyun-seo's wayward father and his quest to rescue his daugher. I knew how the movie was going to be resolved before the monster even appeared. I think the Koreans sometimes like to have it both ways, vilifying the American presence while never quite working up the courage to ask us
to leave.

I dunno, maybe I was just having a bad day when I sat down to watch this one. Everyone else seems to have loved it, and I admired much about it, but it just didn't hook me. That said, if the film's description captured your attention, you may want to give this one a shot. After all, your mileage may vary.

Mad Monster Party

MAD MONSTER PARTY (1967) is a stop-motion picture picture with a vaudevillian's philosophy: if you don't like the current joke, don't worry - there's another coming right on its heels.

Here's the setup: Dr. Frankenstein is having all the best monsters (Dracula, the Wolf Man, Phyllis Diller) over to the castle for a bash. Like any good party, this one is a hotbed of machiavellian maneuvering, cynical doublecrossing, and animated-skeleton rock bands ripping off the Beatles.

It's cute, it's inventive, & my kid loves it as much as I did when I was five. What more could you ask for?

Gojira

Takashi Shimura had a wonderful 1954. First, he starred as Kambei Shimada in The Seven Samurai, one of the greatest films ever made. Then he starred in another Toho production, the original Gojira. The latter film would later be recut and renamed Godzilla for an American audience, and that version (the one with Raymond Burr) would be the only Godzilla the American audience would know for quite some time.

What a shame, and what a blesssing that Sony chose to release the original version in a new U.S. DVD. Gojira is my favorite Godzilla movie, more than making up for its clunky effects and sometimes hamfisted acting with a genuinely scary and thought-provoking tale that recalls and reflects the Japanese sensibility in the wake of WWII.

Two events overshadow Gojira: the nuclear bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fire bombing of Tokyo. While Godzilla is, obviously, a radioactive monster awakened by nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands, his destructive rampage invokes the horror of the fire-bombing, an event that (if I remember my 1993 reading of Kurosawa's _Something Like an Autobiography_ correctly) gutted Toho Studios and personally affected the lives of those who worked there. Consequently, Gojira pulls no punches. The monster's rampage isn't cute, or played for action beats. It's horrific, people die, and those who survive the onslaught must deal with the effects of radiation poisoning afterward.

Takashi Shimura anchors this film. Surrounded by overacting young stars and giant latex monsters, Shimura brings a level of maturity and gravity to the situation that makes us believe in both it and him. The actor plays things straight, and paleontologist / wise man character keeps the proceedings anchored in reality when they could very easily descend into camp.

Gojiira. It's the first. It's the best. It's not to be missed. What were the odds that one man could star in two classics in the same year?

House of Frankenstein

Clocking in at just over an hour, HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN is a rather anemic finale to the Frankenstein films. It's a combination Dracula / Werewolf / Frankenstein movie, and it does a singularly clumsy job of weaving its threads into a coherent whole. If this is the best Universal could do with its monsters, the studio chose well in giving them a rest.