August 2010
12 posts
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)
From the time the Greeks invented drama to Piranha 3-D, from Shakespeare to Stephanie Meyer, every story has either conformed to or subverted the conventions of its genre. The movies I’ve covered here over the last few weeks are no different. Giant monsters are slaves to their genre as much as femme fatales, superheros, or psychokillers are to theirs.
In King Kong, we saw a monster...
Kronos (1957)
It’s a cliché to say that communism had an influence on American b-movies of the 1950s, but it’s a very true cliché. Every flying saucer, every ray gun, every man in a silver jumpsuit exudes the Red Menace. Genre movies reflect the fears and anxieties of their time, and it’s safe to say that most invaders from space were the children of Sputnik and McCarthy.
Kurt...
Rodan (1956)
Two years after Godzilla destroyed Tokyo and a few months after he came to American shores, Ishiro Honda directed another great kaiju (Japanese giant monster) film, 1956’s Rodan. Designed to one-up Gojira, Rodan is a bigger film than its inspiration in many ways. The sets are more expansive. There are more monsters, and, of course, one of them can fly. It’s shot in glorious...
Godzilla, King of the Monsters
When a disaster occurs, it rarely happens in any one way. Reporters saw the aftermath of Katrina differently than people trapped in the attic of their houses. New York City firefighters saw 9/11 differently than those who watched it happen on TV a thousand miles away. Everything happens a thousand different ways. The only time people’s reactions seem to be unanimous is when they’re...
Godzilla Raids Again (1955/American Version 1959)
Making a sequel to a movie like Gojira can’t be easy. Sure, it was sci-fi movie, and sci-fi and sequels go together like Netflix and wasted lives. But Gojira was the rare science fiction movie that told a story so completely and with such gravity that making a sequel to it would be like making a sequel to Schindler’s List or Citizen Kane. What more is there to say?
However, they...
Some context on the power and horror of the atomic... →
Gojira (1954)
What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? -W.B Yeats
Tragic. Elegiac. Mournful. These are words rarely associated with giant monsters. Gojira, however, embodies these words so well, that it’s impossible to avoid them while you watch. It’s a movie about a monster attacking a city, but it’s so much more.
Gojira was released in 1954, the same year as Akira...
What really happens when radioactive animals start... →
Them! (1954)
When The Cat People was released in 1942, Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur proved that, with film, a lot can be done with a little. Instead of relying on a puppeteer or a guy in a costume to create a realistically terrifying monster, they used the power of suggestion. It’s the rare case where telling is more effective than showing. A rustling in the trees, a shadow against the wall, or the...
THE MASTER LIST
For anyone who’s interested, here is the master list of the films I’ll be watching.
King Kong (1933)
Mighty Joe Young (1949)
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
Them! (1954)
Gojira (1954)
Godzilla Raids Again (1955)
Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956)
Rodan (1956)
Kronos (1957)
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)
Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958)
The Blob (1958)
The Giant...
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
We finally come to the Bomb. When dealing with giant monsters, the nuclear bomb is as influential as it is destructive. It creates them, it wakes them, and it kills them. It is the driving force behind so many of the creatures we will see.
Sometimes, however, there’s a curve ball. Instead of a parable about how destruction can only lead to more destruction, 1953’s The Beast from...
July 2010
5 posts
Mighty Joe Young (1949)
Not all giant apes are bad. Some just don’t know when to stop. One bottle of whiskey? You’re fine, Joe! Two bottles of whiskey? Easy slugger; you’re only 12 years old. Three bottles of whiskey? Now you know why calling a cop “Sugartits” is a bad idea.
16 years after King Kong took New York by storm, Merian C. Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack and Willis O’Brien reunited to make...
King Kong (1933)
On the most basic level, there are two kinds of films. Films that are meant to show you the world as it is, or at least an approximation of it; and films that are meant to show you the world as it could never be. The western, the documentary, and the drama; the fantasy, the science fiction, and the musical.
King Kong is obviously an example of the latter, but what sets it apart from so many...
Introduction
Since the Age of Enlightenment, when science and reason took the mantle of explaining the phenomena of nature that religion had held for so many centuries, we have created monsters.
There had been monsters before the Age of Enlightenment: the Cyclops, Leviathan, and the Grendel, to name a few. These monsters were not, however, the monsters we know today. They were real. In the mind and heart of...