The Secret of Signals

I rented Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People and I can comfortably say it is the oddest movie I have ever seen. Directed by the father of all the Godzilla movies, Ishirô Honda, the story is about a group of city people out for a yacht ride who get caught in strange weather and become stuck on an island. They find another ship, obviously abandoned from long ago, full of research equipment and covered in spores. As they look for food, they find mushrooms everywhere, but forewarned by the ship's logs, try to avoid eating them because they could be dangerous.

They camp on the ship and suddenly one night, they hear footsteps approach their door. Shining a light toward the door, a creature enters, shaped vaguely human but covered with mushroom like growths. That's the secret of the island: everything eventually consumes the mushrooms, and in doing so, becomes itself a mushroom–including the people from a previously stranded ship.

The story ostensibly focuses on the group trying to survive–trying to find enough food other than the mushrooms, trying not to be attacked by the mushroom people, and trying to find away off the island. More specifically, though, like other of Honda's movies, the movie is a fairly strong condemnation of the modernization of Japan: the bright lights, night clubs, and other adoption of decedent western ways.

In his review of the movie, Jaspar Sharp writes:

Honda portrays the way in which the rapid economic growth of Japan has resulted in a population divorced from these cultural and natural origins. The rigid mechanical efficiency of a modern society is revealed to be merely illusionary, as the hierarchy crumbles steadily the further this ship of fools is removed from it. Carried away by the forces of nature on a freak ocean tide, the film's irreversible conclusion is that of evolution turning full circle; man becomes mushroom as he reverts back to the primordial sludge.

Sharp also mentions the almost heavy handed references to the drug culture that was just beginning to take root in most modern cultures. Not only do the mushrooms turn people into creatures half-living, half-fungus, they also exert a hallucinogenic effect; making the people both fey and dangerous.

Where I may go further than Sharp in the analogy between the perils of the island and the perils of modern society on Japan is the movie's odd focus on the two women characters. One is a nightclub singer: glamorous, brave, willing to do most things; very uninhibited. The other is a student who is shy and proper; uncomfortable in unfamiliar circumstances, and dressed demurely in soft and quite safe pastels.

In the beginning, when the group was safely at sea and in no danger, the men noticed the singer and her obvious beauty and allure, admiring her boldness. However, once on the island, and as time progressed, the singer became rejected in favor of the studious, 'proper', young Japanese woman.

I would say that not only was Fonda condemning modern society, he was making a specific point of condemning society's influence on young Japanese women.

The contentiousness between the crew members, the odd mish-mash between scenes on the island and scenes of the Tokyo nightlife, and the effective background scenery–where no attempt is made to 'seem' real–make this a movie that, at a minimum, captures your attention if it doesn't capture your interest.

I recently received two new DVDs: This Island Earth and the original Godzilla, Gojira as it was released to a Japanese audience in 1954.

Gojira comes in a two DVD set with the original Japanese film and the Americanized Godzilla with Raymand Burr. There's also a small booklet with background information, all in a suprisingly nice case.

I had not watched Gojira before, but from my experiences with other Japanese films where there has been an original and a 'Americanized' version, I expected differences. I was amazed, though, in how much of the original movie was lost in the American version.

Gojira was made in a post-war Japan still reeling from the shock of extensive firebombing and having not one but two atom bombs dropped on it. We look at Pearl Harbor and talk horror. The bombings in Japan destroyed not ships in harbor but entire cities: from smallest child to oldest woman. Not just lives, but entire familes and their history destroyed in a land that revered both.

The movie was as much warning against war and such weapons of war, as it was a 'monster' film. In a way, the true monster in this film is war, represented metaphorically as Godzilla: the dark beast that walks the land destroying and burning all in its wake.

All of this was lost in the American remake. All of it cut out. I watched the original Gojira, and then the modified Godzilla, and cringed at how badly the film was edited–Raymond Burr added in to provide a clean, non-guilt inducing narrative to cover that ripped from the original.

In the effort to sanitize the film for American audience, much of the brilliance of the film was also lost. In the original, the director managed to create a sense of nemises of the monster, enough so that when it did appear, it became quite easy to ignore the lack of 'special effects'. This is true science fiction mastery: less a reliance on CGI than on talent and story telling, skill with camera and interaction of characters.

In Godzilla, Burr's presence tended to disrupt this flow, and kill the suspense. It was like watching a safari being held in a zoo. The fakery at which the original characters were 'seen' to be talking with Burr, when they were originally talking with others, becomes even more glaringly odd when you watch the two films, one right after the other.

I grew up with Godzilla and it was a beloved film. It still holds a special place in my heart for its role played, but I would have rather had the original all along. Thankfully future generations won't have to settle for less.

On a scale of one to five, with five being exceptional, I give Gojira a five and Godzilla a two, for old times sake.

I read the booklet that came with the Gojira/Godzilla twin DVD set and found that it was the director's original intention of equating Godzilla with war, or at least, nuclear destruction. The director, Ishiro Honda, wrote:

If Godzilla had been a dinosaur or some other animal, he would have been killed with one cannonball. But if he were equal to an atomic bomb, we wouldn't know what to do. So I took the characteristics of an atomic bomb and applied them to Godzilla.

I also found a bit of history new to me. The opening of Gojira features a fishing boat subjected to a blinding white light and in the next scene we see it on fire. In the movie, this is caused by the awakening of Godzilla. In reality, this was inspired by an actual event: the nuclear contamination of the fishing boat The Lucky Dragon.

This Japanese fishing boat was plying the waters around Marshall Island in spring of 1954, when the crew noticed a sudden light in the west and then a huge multi-colored ball of light that exploded into the sky. Ash fell down from the skies, which the crew gathered for souvenirs. By the end of the day, the crew was ill with radiation poisoning from being too close to a nuclear weapons test in the Bikini atoll. One crewman eventually died, and several suffered long term effects–in addition to others in the Marshall Island who also suffered such effects.

No one knew this testing was going to occur because the US kept such tests secret. It created a huge diplomatic incident.

Eventually the US compensated the Japanese government and the families of the impacted fisherman. While the negotiations were underway, out of worry about fallout, the government had all fish destroyed and none allowed to be sold in markets, decimating the fishing industry in Japan.

Several months later, when Gojira opened to movie theaters, it must have been a shock to see that opener–fact blending in with fiction, as it does uncomfortably throughout this film. I've always known Godzilla was one of the most important science fiction movies. I didn't realize until watching Gojira and reading more of its story that we should drop the 'science fiction'.

Returning to the movie as cinema rather than social commentary, what's especially surprising about the movie is how quickly it was made: about three months. It was, in part, inspired by Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (one of my all time favorites). But the production couldn't take the time to have the beast managed through claymation, so they invented the concept of a wearable suit–a move which was to follow Godzilla even into modern films.

I strongly recommend if you get this set–and you should get this set–that you read the booklet that accompanies it first before watching Gojira.

I watched Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and it took three starts before I discovered that it and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women shared much of the same footage and I wasn't clicking the wrong movie on the disc. Both movies are a rather amazing blend of barely related scenes added together into one not so cohesive whole.

According to Scifilm, the original movie was Planeta Burg (Planet of Storms) produced by the Leningrad Studio of Popular Science Films. It was then bought by the infamous Roger Corman, grandfather of B sci-fi flicks, and hacked as background footage to be combined with two more familiar faces: Basil Rathbone as lead scientists back on the moon, and Faith Domergue from the more acclaimed science fiction class, It Came from Beneath the Sea.

The story is about three rocket ships traveling to Venus for exploration, when one is blown up by an asteroid. This figures little in the movie and the only reason I'm assuming they added this to the story was to heighten the dangers of space exploration (and be able to add a 'ship blowing up in space' scene, which looks in the trailers). The other two ships decided to move on to Venus: one holding two men and a robot named John; the other carrying three men.

The ship with John crash lands and the second ship sets down to look for and rescue their comrades. The movie then segues between both groups as they encounter all sorts of Venusian wildlife, interspersed with shots of Basil on the moon, and Faith, in some form of Venusian orbiter.

What follows is classified as bad to very bad, but I found it to be rather fascinating and even a little endearing. The 'dangerous animals' were so funny that I stopped the movie a couple of times to go back over their scenes. However, all of these were shot against a backdrop that was both stunning and surreal–made more so by the juxtoposition between the very good and the very bad. The film deserves more respect than it has been given, if only for the stage settings and scenes of the planet.

Returning to the characters, our first exposure to John the Robot is when he's 'awakened' in ship one, by an actor who can't quite decide if he's in a science fiction film or one of the old horror pictures. Waken, John he murmers in sepulcher tones again and again, as the camera moves in on his intense and slightly demonic stare. John wakens, and though he is shown whole when on the ship, he's shown without his head when the crew first lands.

Robot by Microsoft

One advantage of having John headless at first is it does allow the two astronauts to be attacked by men dressed as dinosaurs who hop around like kids in a potato sack race at a picnic. I will say no more, because these creatures antics must be seen to be fully appreciated.

The other crew has a young man in it, Andre, who defies authority with brainless frequency, usually getting himself entangled in situations without any dire threat. This crew hears the haunting siren call that Andre believes to be a woman (and a beautiful woman at that), and he wants to go off searching for this damsel, but is restrained by older, wiser heads.

Andre's actions and the others of the second crew are those that demonstrate this to be a Russian movie, rather than American. One crew member continually reacts with pessimissm to any event, and all three act as if authority is to be give lip service, and then ignored. They are minimalistic heros, and refreshing for all of the bigger than life antics of their western compatriots.

The second crew also meets most of the wild life on the planet including big but unscary dinosaurs, man eating plants, and the oddest underwater octopus you've ever seen. I want one as a pet.

I don't want to give an impression that this is kiddy fare. There is suspense in this film, and a hint of danger. It doesn't, however, come from the man eating plant, the hopping dinosaur men, or the brontosaurus.

Nor the flying pterodactyl or the octopus underwater.

No, it comes from Marsha, the single female in the show, left in the orbiting platform and who served as conduit between the command center on the moon and the men on the planet. When she's cut off without communication with either party she's forced to consider making a decision on her own; potentially committing, the planet commander solemnly tells the other men, the worst mistake made by any of them.

Thankfully though, she connects with the lunar base before moving beyond her role of black haired buxom beauty without a brain, and the crew is spared such horror.

Which is as good a time to introduce Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, as any.

In Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women the story line is exactly the same, but this time we see the women of Venus. They are primitive (but beautiful) and superstitious and they invoke the gods of their planet to send the volcano's molten lava and rains that threaten the crew throughout both movies. There's never any interaction between the two because the second movie's scenes with the women were knitted into the original movie, which is itself, knitted together from Russian film and American parts.

What might surprise you when you see this film, and especially the scenes with the women, is to realize that the new bits were directed by none other than Peter Bogdanovich in what is probably his first solo directing debute (and one that I'm sure he'd like to forget). Yes, the man who did The Sopranos originally did babes on Venus.

Why the second film? Because science fiction and sex were big in Hollywood at the time, and the original movie didn't feature any women, and adding one women (and dark haired at that) was deemed not quite enough–not to mention that she didn't really show much skin. Besides, what better opportunity to feature blonde beauties in tight, torn pants, wearning bras made of clam shells? This must have been standard 'women from another planet' garb at the time, because the women resembled many of the alien women in the original Star Trek shows.

There's also an interesting bit at the end of the movie that differed from the original, but I wouldn't want to spoil your fun.

You can get both movies via Internet Archive (and here) and Bittorrent (and here).

These are classic 'bad' science fiction, with acting that's either wooden or overly dramatic, and special effect monsters that will make you giggle and guffaw. The quality ranges from blurry to scratchy, with either no color or bad color. However, the shows are worth watching for three reasons:

The first is that the very nature of the piecemeal effort on these movies is rather interesting to watch, with its very Russian components intermixed with the very American additions. Considering this all was done during the coldest of the Cold war, it makes for an intellectual exercise viewing the Soviet propoganda as compared to hollywood marketing.

The second reason is the film's monsters are wonderfully delightful. None are menacing, all are funny, and how could you resist that octopus? I would have liked to seen the original Russian film, as I have a feeling much of the 'suspense' (as well as other 'monster' scenes) was hacked out to make way for the Basil/Faith moments.

The last reason is the backdrops and some of the better directed and constructed scenes. Seriously in a movie with better (or no) monsters, not to mention acting–without the American hacks–this movie could easily win awards for the background and some of the stand alone scenes.

You could easily forgo the second movie with the addition of the ladies, but why deny yourself the treat? Go for both.

I watched the Japanese movie The Calamari Wrestler and it meets or exceeds all expectations when you consider the premise: wrestler dies and re-incarnates as a giant squid and goes on to challenge all comers in the ring.

There is no pretense about the creature–it is obviously a man in a squid suit, with eyes that move about (though they sometimes stick, which is a bit unnerving to see). He has his arms inserted into two of the tentacles and then waves them madly about. All emotional expression is managed with body movements, and the exaggerated nature of mannerisms typical in these types of movies works rather well.

Favorite quotes and scenes from the movie:

"I have no giant squid friends!"

The giant squid seated in zen meditation. The giant squid getting out of an elevator. The giant squid making love (what was all of that in the background?) The giant squid wrestling. The giant squid.

"Joint locks don't work on an invertebrate. They're too slippery."

The giant squid has a wet dream, and it literally becomes a wet dream. Nothing like a sweaty squid.

The giant squid trying to be incognito by wearing sunglasses.

"You want me to date a giant squid? But he has been banned from wrestling–how could he support me?" (Not exact wording but close.)

The scene where the romantically rejected squid is dejectedly walking home, tentacles waving about, back-lit by the setting sun was a kicker. But not as much as watching the squid skip about with the woman of his dreams.

Is it a 'good' movie? Define 'good'. From what Cinema Strikes Back writes:

Right up front, I have to say Calamari Wrestler is not a “good” movie. The budget is miniscule, the acting is broad, the plot meanders, and, obviously, the whole movie is completely ridiculous. However, none of that stops this from being a great piece of entertainment.

The writer went on to compliment the costumes of the creatures, and I agree: they weren't real, but they were art (something lost in today's hunt for 'realism' in fictional works.)

The Calamari Wrestler is both spoof and a commentary on the Japanese Professional Wrestling association, and from a wrestler featured in the movie and other scenes, must be as truthful and believable as our own American form of the sport. It is a silly movie, but played straight; increasing the entertainment value and the humor in my opinion.

However, there are some other aspects of the movie that seemed quite serious and I wondered how much of it reflects underlying Japanese perceptions and attitudes. For instance, Japanese professional wrestling is seen in the movie as the wind behind the wings of spirit (if I remember the term correctly) that gave heart to the Japanese when they were occupied by the US. No, the 'hated' US was the term used.

The movie also had, I thought, overtones of race and class differences–subtle, and not so subtle–such as the health of the giant squid being a measure of the 'whiteness' of its skin. I wish I was more familiar with Japanese culture and history because this movie is (for all its Saturday matinee cheesy monsters) subtly nuanced. I think the director targetted more than just Japanese professional wrestling with Calamari.

Do I recommend it? Yes! But only for those people who get to the end of this post and think to themselves, "I have to rent this!" If you do, don't suspend belief with this movie; you'll enjoy it so much more if you accept it completely at face value.

The movie is Dogora or to give it its full Japanese name, Uchu Daikaijû Dogora ("Space Monster Dogora"). Made in 1964, it was created by the famed studio, Toho: the studio responsible for most of the creature feature flicks, including the more well known Godzilla.

Dogora is about a monster from space that, like many Toho monsters, gets its beginning from radioactivity released into the atmosphere. Rather than stomp about Tokyo, though, Dogora wrecks havoc from the air, sucking up bridges and trucks along with its favorite food: carbon.

Dogora gets most of its carbon from coal, but it also roams the earth robbing diamonds out of mines and jewelry stores. It is this "diamonds are a monsters best friend" aspect of Dogora that forms an odd secondary story that runs throughout the movie: about a gang of diamond thieves, and the authorities searching for them. The directory, Ishirô Honda, decided to combine two forms of movies for which he was famous, gangster and monster, into one and Dogora was the rather unique result.

When I was looking for information on Dogora, I found there are two versions of the movie. The first unedited Japanese version was actually meant to be a comedy (another genre Honda was known for); however, when an American version was made, many of the comic elements were deleted in order to focus more on the monster bits and fans said this ruined the movie. Which version did I see? Hard to say, as there were comical scenes in the version I saw, but not so many that I would classify the movie as 'comedy'.

What I found interesting, though, is the differences in the movie between watching the English dubbed version and the original with English sub-titles.

In the English dubbed version, the voices of the characters were exaggerated and comical sounded, especially the so called Japanese diamond 'G' man. In the English subtitled version, though, this same actor had a strong, almost sinister sound, and it completely transformed his character. Returning to the English dubbed version, the only Caucasian, some form of investigator, had a deeper, sophisticated sounding voice; but in the subtitled version, his voice was higher, even slightly comical.

More, the words were changed between the versions, sometimes enough to alter the view of a particular scene. The only characters who seemed to be left alone in both was the heroine and her boss, the learned professor who belongs to an International Organization (organization of what is never said).

The monster is the same in both, though, and it is the monster that makes this a Saturday matinee movie. Unlike many Toho monsters, Dogora actually had an element of mystery and grace, as it's tentacles extend gently and gracefully out of multi-color clouds. Even when it's blown into bits, forming miniature bits of the monster that look like single cell amoebas, there's an odd beauty to this creature. At least, there is when compared to Godzilla or Mothra.

Watching Dogora, I was reminded of another space creature: the tentacled creatures from the original pilot for Star Trek Next Generation.

I'm not sure why the director introduced the American Mark Jamison into the movie. I think that much of the explanation for his role was part of the comic element of the movie and eventually cut for the American version.

I did find it odd how all of the characters in the movie referred to him by his first name, Mark, rather than his last. Even when they didn't know him, they used 'Mark'; adding a level of familiarity that I don't think was intended. It ended up sounding like everyone was a friend of Mark's.

The diamond question is: did I like the movie. The answer is yes and no.

I liked the imagery of the creature, making it one of the more beautiful of the Toho monsters. I liked the period clothing, including those absurd pointy toed shoes. I appreciated the characters. I also liked one scene where the hero is seeing the heroine home and when she gentle teases him, he says in all seriousness, "Don't make fun of me".

I was fascinated how different the movie was between the English dubbed version and the subtitled one.What I didn't like was knowing that I most likely only saw part of this movie. I wonder now how many foreign movies I've seen, that I've not really seen.

I also agree with another reviewer who thought that the two different plots made for a confusing story:

While watching this movie, you become aware that this should've been two movies. Veteran viewers of Toho style giant monster movies have seen this problem before. Toward the end of the movie, the two plot threads, monster story and crime story, become less dependent on each other. It takes several plot contrivances to keep these two stories together to the end. And since the cops and robbers subplot is more entertaining than the monster plot, the awkwardness of these contrivances become more pronounced.

I agreed, except that I thought in the very end, the twist to bring the two stories together was actually clever rather than contrived. Do I recommend this movie? Only if you can find the original, subtitled in English. And if you do, send me a copy.