Review: THE MYSTERIANS (1957)

The Mysterians (1957) is the next movie and it features the Toho Triple Threat: Ishiro Honda (director), Eiji Tsubaraya (special effects) and Akira Ifukube (music).

My thoughts first:

This movie inspired Rudy Martinez to name his band ? and the Mysterians. That’s really all you need to take away from it. 

I’m kidding. 

The movie looks great (Tohoscope), sounds fantastic and has superb effects. It just suffers from a weak story. 

Aliens named Mysterians come to Earth and ask for a little piece of real estate to settle down and maybe, just maybe, hook up with some fine human ladies. 

I take that back. They’re not coy about it. They want our women. 

With a yawn-worthy plot, that leaves characters. Do we care about them? Well, three of the leads are played by actors we’ve already seen multiple times before on this list. One’s a jerk … there’s a scientist … we never really see the aliens except for their colorful helmets so there’s no face to attach to any sense of horror or dread. 

The only scenes worthy of note are the ending battle (full of great models slugging it out) and an early sequence featuring a kaiju robot. Named Moguera, the giant robot is a demonstration of the Mysterians’ power. It’s pretty impressive for a few minutes until it tries to walk across a bridge. The military detonates the bridge and Moguera falls. And that’s it. 

Of course, you may recognize Moguera thanks to its inclusion as an Earth military vehicle named M.O.G.U.E.R.A. in Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla. This Moguera was inserted at the last minute by a producer who felt the movie needed a kaiju scene. There’s a second, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance for Moguera in the end battle. It rises from the pit, ready to kick butt … and then a satellite dish bonks it on the head. Oh well. 

The Mysterians. Looks nice; a few cool scenes. That’s about it. 2.5 out of five atomic breath blasts.

OK. Now here’s my son, James:

It was a cheesy movie, but the only two good parts like when they were asking for their women :) (the Mysterian boys must be ugly or something) You are right happy face!! So, they were asking for women :( (but i want to keep my wife!!) SHUT UP UNHAPPY FACE!!!  

Anyways … and another funny part was when Moguera wanted to come back … WHOMP!! MORGUERA GOT HIT BACK DOWN BY A SATELLITE DISH!! BWHAHAHAAA!! Comedy GOLD!! O_O(awkward.) SSHHUTT UUPPPPPPPPPPPP!! 

Anyways.. I give it a 3.7 atomic breaths of awesomeness!! O_o :( :) <:( >:) >:( ( EVERY FACE IN THE WORLD… GET HIM!!) (YAAAHHHHH)

And here’s the trailer:



Up next, Varan.

Review: RODAN (1956)

Working our way down the big list, today’s film is Rodan (1956).

James, my son, will type first:

When I saw it, I noticed that in the airport tower, a plane was landing, right? It rolled forward and went backwards and forwards again! I thought it was so weird! 

And plus, Rodan, when he flew, he sounded like a jet, and again, weird :(?? X2 

So, about the beginning with the bugs, the beginning wasn’t even a Rodan movie. But those bugs were everywhere!! They also know how to hunt!! 

:(! (so were all going to die?) Yes, unhappy face. 

For awesome effects and mutated bugs :0 (Ahh!!! ) Stop screaming screaming face!! Anyways, i give it 4.1 atomic breaths of awesomeness!!

So now the emoticons are talking. Can’t say I’ve seen that before.

My turn:

Tohoscope. Oooooh. Color! Ahhhhhhhh. 

Rodan certainly has a great look and sound. James is right, though. In the beginning, there’s nothing Rodan-like about the film at all for quite a while. Giant Meganula larvae are eating miners and that’s fun enough. Then comes the reveal: the larvae are just food for newly hatched giant pterosaurs. 

These first few kaiju films seem to want to ground the monsters in some sort of reality. Gojira is a dinosaur theropod; Anguirus is an ankylosaur; Rodan is a pterosaur; Varan, as we’ll see, is a giant “varanopode” (pre-Triassic lizard). It’s a nice thought, but I don’t think it’s a necessary one. 

Fun trivia: in Japan, Rodan is “Radon,” a name kind of derived from “Pteranodon.” It was changed in the US to avoid confusion with the deadly gaseous element. 

With two Rodans attacking Kyushu, there’s lots of good model fun. I particularly love one moment where we see people, inside model windows, “running” past as destruction levels the street and the building around them. (It’s in the trailer below.) And Ifukube’s doing the music, so you know it’s good. 

Here’s something new I’ve noticed, though. This “Kaiju Movie Challenge” will be our third time through all of these movies and I’m beginning to more easily recognize actors. Not really a big deal, except … Toho really seems to like certain actors. Akihiko Harata, who played Dr. Serizawa in Gojira, is back. He’s in fourteen Toho kaiju/tokusatsu films. Kenji Sahara, who plays the lead miner, Shigeru, in Rodan, is in a mind-bending twenty-one of the films on our list! Now, look. I’m glad you liked the guy, but c’mon.

Rodan. Introduces a great monster and steps up the film quality and effects work, too. 4 out of five atomic breath blasts.

And here’s the trailer for Rodan:



Up next, The Mysterians.

Review: WARNING FROM SPACE (1956)

Here’s the first color movie on the big list (HERE).  It’s Warning from Space (1956), made by Daiei, the studio behind the Gamera series.

James, my eleven-year-old son, will go first:

My life is a lie!!!! I thought they ripped off Justice League with these aliens because they look like Starro but then I found out this came first! And the planet coming to crash into earth is like Gorath but that movie came later too!! And the sound effect of the space ship was copied from Gamera BUT THIS MOVIE CAME BEFORE THAT TOO!!!!!! 

Story wise I thought it was boring most of the time. The aliens looked cool even though the stars looked like pajamas but they shapeshifted into humans. Boring. 

So rating wise I give it 3.0000003 Atomic Blast Breaths of Awesomeness!

My turn:

TL;DR?  It’s not that great … just interesting. 

Rogue planet’s coming toward Earth, aliens show up to help (which is rather novel for scifi films of this era) and then it all goes to hell. Part of the movie is made up of the aliens trying to figure out how to get their message to Earth’s scientists without freaking out the population. Smart concept but it feels stretched too thin in the movie. 

The plot beings to really stretch credulity in the last half as the “World Congress” is hesitant to try to stop the planet. That’s dumb enough. But then the scientist with the world-saving formula is kidnapped and left for dead. Sure, I get that governments would want the weapon, but sacrificing the entire planet to do so? Also, at one point, a couple dozen schoolkids are hiding out during the apocalypse in a basement with some of the scientists … for some reason. I must have missed why. 

Warning from Space … some cool concepts even if it wasn’t executed so great. 2.75 out of five atomic breath blasts.

Here’s the opening minute of the film (I couldn’t find the trailer):


Up next, Rodan.

Review: GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN (1955)

The second film on our list of kaiju/tokusatsu films to watch before the new Godzilla film opens in May, Godzilla Raids Again (1955).

My thoughts first; my ten-year-old son James’ thoughts after.

After watching a classic like Gojira, I guess it would be easy to end up disappointed. 

Godzilla Raids Again is not directed by Ishiro Honda and does not feature music by Akira Ifukube. That’s two strikes right there. 

Add to that the fact that the first time I saw the film it was as the bastardized American version, Gigantis the Fire Monster, and you might be able to understand why I’m down on the film.

Upsides? Well … it features the debut of Anguirus and the first monster-on-monster action we’ve seen. It also has Dr. Yamane back from the first film. 

Motoyoshi Oda directed this movie and, for whatever reason, decided to speed up the film for the scenes featuring the monsters fighting. This is the exact opposite of what most films featuring giant monsters do. The result is, as you might expect, silly. It is fun, though, to see Anguirus. A bit odd to see him killed so mercilessly, too. 

The famed battle scene at Osaka castle is poorly framed, I thought, and doesn’t fully show off the fantastic model being demolished by these guys in suits. That’s a shame. (On another special effects note, the “cute” puppet, as James puts it, is back and is employed when Godzilla uses his atomic breath. Apparently, the big suit wasn’t able to open its mouth sufficiently for the job.) 

Musically speaking … I’m drawing a blank. The score is just kind of there. That’s no good, especially when I’m trying to compare you to Ifukube. 

As I type, I realize I’m sounding harsh. That has to be because we watched the 1959 American re-edit Gigantis the Fire Monster the first time we watched this about five years ago. In case you don’t know, for whatever stupid reason, American distributors wanted to sell “Gigantis” as a new monster, so his name was changed in the marketing and in the dialogue. Plus, Godzilla/Gigantis was given Anguirus’ roars and Anguirus was given Godzilla’s. George Takei (Mr. Sulu) voiced one of the newly dubbed characters and Yogi Bear himself, Daws Butler, tried his best to do a non-offensive Japanese accent for another. It was very distracting. AND, the American edit made the hero of the Japanese version, Kobayashi, into a goof. Just bad choices all around. 

I’m willing to think that Gigantis has colored my perception of the film and that it may be better than I’m giving it credit for. But just having watched the Japanese version again, it’s not too much better. 

Thanks to Anguirus and the possibility that I’m being too hard on it, I’m going to go middle-of-the-road on this one: 2.5 out of five atomic breath blasts.

OK. Now here’s James:

I thought it was pretty good, but my dad was right, it was sped it up a little.
And the american-version made me pissed >:(! Godzilla’s roar was wrong and so was Anguirus’s roar!!! 

And how did they beat Godzilla w/ ice?!! He survived a h-bomb for pete’s sake!!!!!!! 

I give (the Japan version) 3.7 atomic breaths of awesomeness!!

I’m going to have to talk to him about his language.



Up next: Warning From Space.

Review: GOJIRA (1954)

As outlined a while back, we’ve got 70+ daikaiju/tokusatsu movies to get through before Godzilla opens in theaters on May 16, 2014.

We started with Toho’s 1954 classic Gojira. We watched the Japanese version and not the one with Raymond Burr.

Here are James’ thoughts first:

I think the guy in the suit had a rough time with all the weight and firecrackers up in his face :(! But, it was worth it for a great movie. Toho should edit all Black-And-White movies they made and make them Color. I did not know that this was made right after a war <:( . 

I know that they are making a new Godzilla movie in 2014 and there are hints. Like in Pacific Rim in the beginning a kaiju roared like beginning of Godzilla’s roar. And skreeonk.com used to have set of pics and letters and some of the letters were red and they either spelled: rise :0 (CRRREEEEPPYYY) or the beginning of Dr. Serizawa, so I guess he’s back. 

I give it 4 and a half out of five atomic breath blasts of awesomeness.

I asked why he was writing like a jerk and he said it was because I was haranguing him to stay on topic. Lesson learned.  And he wasn’t around for the Ted Turner colorization debacle of the late ’80s / early ’90s, so please forgive him for that.

OK, here’s mine:

Ever since I was a little boy, I had this one dream … Usually, I was at home but sometimes I was at the mall or at school or, later in life, at work. I could hear and feel the rumbling of giant footsteps. They began soft and distant but became louder and closer. I ran or drove or tried to ignore them, but they always seemed to be coming after me. 

Most of the time, I never actually saw what was making the noise. Sometimes I did. In the dreams set at my childhood home, I would run out to the front porch, where we had a view of trees, a lumber yard and a nearby thoroughfare. A huge swath of the sky was visible and, invariably, whatever was chasing me filled that view. Occasionally, it was a group of Imperial AT-ATs, far larger than their size in Empire. Sometimes it was a dinosaur, often a Tyrannosaurus. And then there were times when it was Godzilla himself. 

When James was just four, he came into the living room as I was watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, specifically the episode wherein they riffed upon Godzilla vs. Megalon. He was entranced. Not only by MST3K but also by the monsters. And so it began. 

We started by watching the Japanese version of Godzilla (Gojira, of course). I had only seen the American version before so I was truly surprised at how serious everything was treated. It was, for all intents and purposes, a war movie. Long scenes set in shelters and hospital triage centers, people with radiation contamination, the troubled Dr. Serizawa with a weapon so dire it led to his suicide … 

To top it all off, the movie began with footsteps. Well, drums as footsteps, but still. 

When it comes to Shōwa era Godzilla films, there are certain things I’m looking for, effects-wise. Naturally, this includes the models that shoot bottle rockets at the poor dude in the suit. Gojira does it first and with a level of restraint compared to later films. The bits with the train are particularly well done, I thought. And I liked the way the objects of his breath melted. This film employs a puppet for some of the scenes with the monster and, unfortunately, it suffers a bit in my eyes because of it. 

Still, it was the first and easily the most serious of the franchise until 1984. That only adds to my enjoyment. Akira Ifukube’s music is top notch and you can hear hints of where it will all be going in future films. 

So, like James, I’m giving it 4.5 out of 5 atomic breath blasts.

There you go. One down; five or six dozen more to go.



Up next: Godzilla Raids Again.

Reviewing Monster Movies ...

Starting on Monday, I'll be posting the reviews of nearly eighty Japanese-style monster movies as my son and I gear up for Godzilla, opening May 16.

I hope you'll enjoy it.

Binding My Books

Via @twinsthings on Twitter ...

"don't like to read e-books..or to use an e-reader...which is why we had our @LordsOKobolBook copies bound together! ... BTW, took us 4.5 hrs to get all (797) pages printed on our home printer LOL - it took the guy 45 mins to get them bound"

As flattered as I was and am, I can't help but be fearful that they don't like the books enough to justify the expense.

Fingers crossed.