David Vining's Blog, page 52

Frankenstein vs. Baragon

Toho was always searching for the next monster to add to its pantheon, wasn’t it? Taking and modifying the particulars of the Creature birthed from Dr. Frankenstein’s work and throwing it together with another giant lizard thing, hidden away from the ravages of time and coming up because coincidence drives all of this stuff. Bringing back some of the more irritating habits of Honda’s earlier monster movies, Frankenstein vs. Baragon mostly ambles around slowly for most of its runtime until it...

Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster

Toho takes the monster mashup to the logical conclusion: turning the familiar ones into good guys to fight the new monstrous bad guy. These sorts of franchises can’t go on forever making a huge threat repeatedly defeatable. The threat loses its sense of danger by the tenth time. So, if you’re going to bring Godzilla back, don’t find another way to kill him or put him under ice. Get him to win the day for humanity instead. Then you can focus the idea of the threat on some new creation, perhap...

Megalopolis – Trailer

I’ve been hearing about this movie for decades. Conceived of in the 70s, rewritten endlessly, hopelessly expensive, it was never going to get made.

And then Francis Ford Coppola sold his winery and just made the thing. I gotta see this.

Please, American distributors, pick this up.

It’s sure to be better than Jack, at least.

Farewell, Theoden King…

Bernard Hill died on Sunday. I was sad to hear of his passing. It’s weird that people from one of my favorite films that came out during my relative youth will be passing away now, and it had to be the man who played my favorite character.

Go now to your fathers. And even in their mighty company shall you not now be ashamed.

Dogora

Most of Ishiro Honda’s science-fiction films have started out as another kind of film before moving into the genre promised on the posters. Dogora is the first that…never really leaves the genre it starts out in. I liked that. This film seems to be negatively viewed for a couple of reasons, the first being that it never really fully commits to being a monster movie, the other being that the English language version is apparently incomprehensible nonsense, but seen in the original Japanese ve...

Mothra vs. Godzilla

I’m of two minds on this one. On the one hand, this is typical monster fare from Ishiro Honda, especially the early efforts to shoehorn in another kind of film into the first act. On the other hand, this is also the purest kaiju film I’ve seen so far in this series of Godzilla films as well as Honda’s overall efforts at making science-fiction spectacles. It’s really captured in the film’s two halves, and while I appreciate the continued efforts by Honda to make something other than a kaiju m...

Atragon

I’m always most interested in how Ishiro Honda is going to take his next bit of science-fiction nonsense in the limited new direction he could find. It’s almost always in the setups, usually in the first act, and Atragon, the story of a Nemo-like captain who built a powerful submarine, puts a toe back into the realm of the Japanese culture’s continuing efforts to deal with its legacy after WWII. And then there’s science-fiction nonsense buoyed by adorable model work that almost never makes a...

Matango

It’s the smaller films by Ishiro Honda since he got pigeonholed into the sci-fi/horror genre that I’m finding far more interesting than the bigger ones. This and The Human Vapor are missing the grand scale of something like Gorath or Rodan, but in place we get a stronger focus on character and atmosphere. That ends up combining with Honda’s strong technical skills, never in doubt even in his lesser work, to create more complete packages of genre thrills that simply work better overall.

I ...

King Kong vs. Godzilla

Now, the monster mashups begin. Godzilla’s first squaring off with another creature is the result of a script that originally pitted King Kong against Frankenstein’s monster that Toho got their hands on and retooled for their marquee monster that they were discovering they could bring back repeatedly without turning off their Japanese and American audiences. They also brought back the original filmmaker behind Godzilla, Ishiro Honda, though without his original writing partner, choosing inst...

Gorath

I never knew that Ishiro Honda made a prequel to Moonfall. Okay, this is slightly less stupid, but it’s still pretty stupid. Also, I much prefer miniature effects to CGI, so this has some charm to it in overdelivering special effects. This isn’t near the top of Honda’s science-fiction oeuvre, but it does provide a nice platform for Eiji Tsuburaya to showcase his skills on some kind of weird ideas.

A star, named Gorath, has been noted as heading towards our solar system, and the crew of th...