Check out the trailer for "Raki vs. Gramuda." This is the latest in a long-running series of films made by a group (TG2WAC) of giant monster fans in Ohio. The group is well known for holding "how to build a monster" events at GFest. For more information on TG2WAC or Raki, check out the TG2WAC Yahoo group.
Director Shin Sang-ok has died. He was a ground breaking director in South Korea before he was abducted by Kim Jong-il and made to direct films in North Korea. During his stay, he filmed the giant monster movie Pulgasari. He later escaped and lived in the U.S. for years, filming 3 Ninjas movies. Salon ran a fascinating article on his abuction you can read here. Allegedly, his last interview can be read here.
Happy 80th birthday to the master of independent cinema, Roger Corman. Unfortunately, I haven't seen many of his giant monster movies, but others have, so here's a few reviews for your reading pleasure:
Attack of the Crab Monsters
It Conquered the World
DinoCroc (includes reviews of a few more classic Corman films as well.)
Attack of the Giant Leeches
Little Shop of Horrors
And my favorite non-giant monster movie:
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
Also, be sure to read Corman's biography How I Made Millions in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime.
And finally, check out VideoWatchBlog for an updated list of bloggings about Corman today.
The first "Carnosaur" was muddled but ambitious. It featured dinosaurs hatched from chicken eggs -- and occasionally people. The dinosaurs grew from small bitey critters to T. Rex like monsters. It featured Diane Ladd as a mad scientist who tricked the government and a corporation into backing her crazy scheme. There was lots of goo and a military takeover scene at the end.
"Carnosaur 2" loses all of that. In fact, the only references to the first film is a huge triangle cage that once held the T. Rex sized monster and a reference to the military keeping some dinosaurs "on ice" after the cleanup at the end of Carnosaur.
The movie is set at a government facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. In this facility are: atomic waste, nuclear weapons and dinosaurs. But the dinosaurs are on a top secret level, so very few know about them. In the intro to the movie, the dinosaurs escape and kill everyone in the place, except for Jesse -- a precocious kid who knows all about the facility -- who is traumatized by seeing his father killed by a dinosaur.
Our "heroes" are a systems repair group. Apparently, when things break down, these guys are called in. They have the demeanor of a grizzled Army troop. It makes me wonder what kind of systems they are normally repairing. The main character is Jack Reed. Actor John Savage does his best Harvey Keitel in the role as Jack takes a father-like role over Jesse. The whole movie is set in the rooms and hallways and outside heliport of the Yucca facility.
I almost can't call it a giant monster movie as most of the dinosaurs are raptor size. But in the last few minutes of the movie, we get the big T. Rex dinosaur to chase the heroes around, and Jesse has his revenge thanks to an "Aliens" ripoff and the line "Eat This Barney!"
The movie is an entertaining slasher flick with dinosaurs (which, if you think about it, so was the first "Jurassic Park"). There's more focus on character than the first movie in the series, but less ambition in what it tries to pull off.
There's few other reviews out there for me to link to. Also, there's little to say about the crew. It is, of course, produced by Roger Corman (happy birthday!) to tap into the dinosaur craze created by "Jurassic Park." This movie came out after the first movie, but a year before "The Lost World," which despite better production values isn't much better than these movies. The writer is Michael Palmer whose only other credit appears to be "Watchers III," also produced by Corman. (The Web offers a unreliable credits because searches seem to bring up medical thriller novelist Michael Palmer quite often.) Louis Morneau has a few more credits (also mostly Corman-produced efforts), the most famous of which is Bats.
Tim Lucas suggests bloggers write about Roger Corman for his 80th birthday Wednesday. A whole blog tribute. I plan to do something, though I haven't seen a single one of his most famous giant monster movies. Maybe I'll finally post my review of "Carnosaur II." We'll see. But I'd to encourage every blogger to join in on the Corman celebration Wednesday!
There's a new trailer for Gamera: Little Braves. It looks good. It's totally different in tone from the early '90s films and picks up the idea of a defender of children from the '60s series. I'm hoping this will be excellent.
If you haven't checked out the Negadon Attacks Web site yet, go do it. It's got a new trailer for the film and a personal message from director/creator Jun Awazu. It looks like they are trying to add more features to the site. I hope we learn more about the DVD, which will be released "Summer 2006", sometime soon. Considering this is a short film, how are they going to pad out the disc? Or are they going to sell it at a cheaper price point? Regardless, I'm looking forward to seeing a new film from a real kaiju fan.
According to ScifiJapan, Classic Media has announced it will release a Godzilla 2-pack DVD of the original Gojira with the Raymond Burr version. This is good news. It will be released in September.
There is talk of adding extras to the DVD. I hope they do, because I am still seriously considering buying the BFI version of Godzilla from the UK. But I will wait to see how Classic Media handles this. Cross your fingers G fans and hope for the best.
There's a new site on the Web that I think my readers would be very interested in: SciFi Japan. It purports to offer complete coverage of Japanese SF films. It's staff, which includes experts such as Ed Godziszewski, Richard Pusateri and Steve Ryfle among many others. I'm looking forward to what this site will have to offer.
King Kong Escapes was one of the first giant monster movies to infect my young mind. It and Destroy All Monsters were shown during Channel 38's (or was it 9, or 11?) "monster week." Those two films are probably responsible for my fascination with giant monster movies and kaiju in particular.
To my pre-adolescent self, there was nothing more fascinating than the giant mechanical monster known as MechaniKong. He looked like the famed giant ape, but was metal head to toe. In the movie, both he and King Kong fight a T-Rex -- at least I thought it was a T-Rex, it turned out to be a Gorosaurus, a creation of Toho. There was a lot to love in this film.
Now, it's been released in a two-pack with King Kong Vs. Godzilla. I can still see what affected me as a youth, but the movie really pales in comparison to the rest of the Toho canon, and certainly with other Kong movies.
The film was actually a sequel to a 1960s Rankin-Bass cartoon, which has recently been released on DVD. I've never seen that series, so I can't comment on how the two compare.
The good: The movie is filled with neat ideas. There's a sleek submarine that the heroes patrol the waters with. There's MechaniKong, of course. The mechanical monster would later be the inspiration for MechaGodzilla. There's a crazed evil leader, that "international Judas" Doctor Who, and a conflicted agent of a unnamed Asian country. There's a mysterious Element X that could power the world, or lead to its destruction. There's electronic mind control devices. There's an Arctic command center.
And despite all these things, the movie is just not very good. Nothing in the movie is left for the viewer to figure out when a lump of exposition can be used instead. The building of MechaniKong makes no sense. It's built to dig up Element X. But it is immediately shorted out by that element. Shouldn't that have been tested before you spent millions on building a mechanical monster? Seems like a waste of resources. And for that matter, is building a giant mechanical ape any way to run an excavation site?
Logic aside, the movie just seems listless. Things happen and there's the occasional giant monster battle, but they all seem rather boring. The effects have their moments, but are generally poor. This movie came out between Godzilla Vs. The Sea Monster (initially intended to be a King Kong film) and Son of Godzilla, films that are generally considered to be the start of G's downward trend. If you look at the effects, particularly the tropical island settings, those two films are much better than some of what's seen here.
Still, the absurdity of the film is fun and I still love MechaniKong. If only Toho could bring it back. King Kong Escapes is really only for giant monster movie completists.
Image found at KensForce.
Technorati Tags: King Kong, daikaiju, kaiju
Horrible news, Godzilla music composer Akira Ifukube has died. Ifukube was one of the three people who were the heart of Godzilla, along with director Ishiro Honda and special effects director Eiji Tsubaraya. In fact, Ifukube was Godzilla's voice. It was his idea to run a metal glove down a bass string that created the distinctive sound of G's roar.
Even people who don't know about who scored the Godzilla films intuitively know Ifukube. When you hear those first bass notes of Godzilla's theme, you know the giant monster is about to arrive. For me, his themes for the movements of the military and the actions of the heroes always cheer me up. They are march songs, stirring and moving. I could listen to them at any time.
Here's what Steve Ryfle says about Ifukube in his book "Japan's Favorite Mon-Star" (which is a classic book about Godzilla, a must read):
A KAIJU CACOPHONY: The illusion of Godzilla's size and irrefutable power was reinforced by the thundering sounds of Akira Ifukube, who wrote one of the most memorable musical scores in sci-fi movie history and who supervised the creation of Godzilla's distinctive, immortal roar. Despite his background in classical music and as a composer of serious dramatic films, Ifukube never shied away from [G producer Tomoyuki] Tanaka's oddball monster movie, not even when his contemporaries said it was beneath him and urged him not to do it. After just a few introductory meetings with Tanaka, Tsuburaya, and Honda to discuss the project, Ifukube enthusiastically accepted the assignment. "Something monstrous comes out and makes you jump out of your wits!" Ifukube said. "It is sheer fear, not an abstraction, and it is global. Moreover, my specialty was biology. [Ifukube had worked in forestry.] I couldn't sit still when I heard that in this movie the main character was a reptile that would be rampaging through the city."
Ifukube's compositional style, which creates music with distinctly Asian qualities whileusing the instruments of traditiona European classical music, is one of emotional extremes and operatic values. During World War II, the Japanese military commissioned him to compose nationalistic hymns for the Pacific islands the Japanese "liberated" from the white people. Ironically, when General Douglas MacArthur arrived at Atsugi Air Force Base in August 1945 at the end of the war, the band performed Ifukubes brass band march for the Filipino people, much to Ifukube's surprise.There's a lot more about him in Kalat's book, another essential text for Godzilla fans. You can also find information on Ifukube on Wikipedia. Tim Lucas writes a well thought out piece on the composer here.
...
At the peak of his career, Ifukube scored as many as fifteen films per year, eventually scoring more than two hundred features. Ifukube's themes would make an indelible mark on listeners and would be used frequently over forty years, although ironically, he composed the Gojira soundtrack in under a week, without having seen any of the footage. Ifukube simply relied on Honda's assertion that Godzilla would be "one of the biggest things ever on the screen."
Negadon
will be released theatrically this spring and on home video this
summer. Central Park Media will make further announcements at New York
Comic-Con at the end of February.
I recently got an iPod, so I went searching for giant monster music on iTunes. It was a quick search, but I came up with a few things, besides soundtracks. 
First of all, there is a surf rock/metal band called Daikaiju. I've been aware of them for a little while now and they seemed like great fun. I downloaded two songs from their self-titled album: "Super X-9" and "Daikaiju Die!" It's great stuff. The band is kind of interesting too. They wear kabuki masks and all their press materials sounds like words translated from Japanese by an Internet translator.
The second thing I found was a podcast by Infinite Sector Collective.
The infinite sector is a non-profit collective and netlabel dedicated to sharing and promoting free experimental music, noise, and electronica. Our members include musicians, bands, and artists from all corners of the globe.In honor of 50 years of Godzilla, their first podcast episode is dedicated to kaiju eiga. So members of the collective do songs about Rodan, Hedorah, Biollante and others. Most of it is very experimental. If you like static and Metal Machine Music, you might like this. I like a lot of weird music, and I had a tough time with most of the songs. The song "Jet Jaguar," however, was more approachable than the rest of it. It was performed by the group Terminal Shock. The podcast is not for everyone, and clearly not intended to be, but check it out and see what it does for your ears.
Finally, something I didn't find on iTunes, but wanted to mention: King Geedorah, "Take Me to Your Leader." King Geedorah is actually MF Doom, an underground hip hop artist who has gotten much praise for his purist stylings. The album is a lot of fun and can be enjoyed even by non-rap fans. Quite a few of the songs on the album are "instrumentals" made up of sounds and clips from giant monster movies. If you do like rap, there's some great work on the album as well. Some well known rappers are here, but hidden under giant monster pseudonyms. I recommend it.
Two new DVDs of "Godzilla: The Series" have been announced. Like the "The Monster Wars Trilogy" I don't think there will be much in the way of extras, but it will add more of the series to your collection. You can find my thoughts on the original disc here. I enjoy the cartoon and am looking forward to picking up more.
I am so excited about getting "Atragon" on DVD. It's one of Toho's classic science fiction films and probably second only to "Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People" among the non-Godzilla films. There's a review here of the new DVD. They give it a thumbs up.
Gamera has its own blog. It's all in Japanese, so I have no idea what's being said, but there are some cute pictures of a stuffed Gamera visiting various sites.
