The Monster Project, a band

Check out The Monster Project, it's the Web site of a band that plays faithful versions of music from monster movies. Most interesting to people who come here would be "Kaiju Daisenso," the group's take on Akira Ifukube's Godzilla scores. There are samples of the music and it really is good.
Here's how the band describes itself:

An evolutionary offshoot of the New York City progressive art-rock collective, the Project presents creative but faithful rock arrangements of monster movie scores. Influenced by such ground-breaking acts as Fantômas, John Zorn and Mr. Bungle, the project's current songbook includes: Swan Lake, Act II Scene X (from Karloff's The Mummy and Lugosi's Dracula); The Slasher Suite (a medley of themes from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and Halloween); and most significantly, an extensive survey of Godzilla music from 1954 to 1975 all from the original acclaimed composer, Akira Ifukube.

You can download the Godzilla music at these links: Godzilla Comes Ashore; Namikawa on Planet X; and Battle on Mt. Fuji. Enjoy.

UPDATE: For those in the New York area, The Monster Project will be appearing Wednesday, November 2, 2005 at 9:00 PM at
Knitting Factory
The Tap Bar
74 Leonard Street
New York, NY 10013
Tel: (212) 219-3132
http://www.knittingfactory.com/kfny/
Admission: $8.00
Write me if you go.

Giant monsters and the Hummer H3

A new advertisement for the Hummer H3, "Monster", pays tribute to my favorite genre. If you haven't seen it, it features a giant monster (sort of reptilian, but with hair) and a giant robot meeting and falling in love. The product of their love is the H3, a "little monster."
It's a cute ad. The monster is an odd design, but the giant robot looks great. I can't tell if they are suits and miniatures or if everything is done with computer animation. Either way, it's good stuff, check it out.

King of Kong Island

King of Kong Island (just called Kong Island in the film and was originally released as Eve the Wild Woman) is a true stinker of a film. I own it in my 50 Movie SciFi Classics box. I wouldn't be reviewing it here if it weren't for the descriptions I've seen of the movie. Here's John Stanley's summation in the book "Creature Features Strikes Again":

King of Kong Island (1968). Also known as EVE THE WILD WOMAN. With remote control devices, giant gorillas become robot killers. A descendant of the King himself happens along and decides enough is enough already and starts crunching skulls -- and remote-control devices. Left to its own devices, this Spanish-produced job (made as EVE THE WILD WOMAN) would fall flat on its ugly kisser. Directed Robert Morris. Brad Harris, Marc Lawrence. (VCI)

Wow, a giant ape "crunching skulls", how could that be bad? Here's the one on the DVD box:

A diabolical team of scientists land on Kong Island determined to implant devices in the brains of the gorilla population that will transform them into an unstoppable army. Their plan for world domination runs amok when a descendant of King Kong arrives and the mayhem begins.

That last sentence makes you think there will be a giant gorilla in this movie, right? Nope. In fact, there's no monsters larger than man-size (besides the many, many stock footage shots of lions, crocodiles, hippos, ad nauseum). Actually, there's not even an island in this movie. There are man-sized gorillas however. In fact, they are the worst gorilla suits I've ever seen. And the people wearing them make no attempt to be even slightly animal-like.
The plot is a total mess with one subplot after another being introduced. That is until the end when the movie just kills off one person or another (usually by rifle fire) putting an end to each silly plot line.
This is truly a bad movie. Enjoy at your own risk. You can find other reviews here, here, here, and here.

Godzilla Final Wars DVD

Godzilla: Final Wars has a DVD street date of Dec. 13, pre-order now. This site has images from the DVD. I'm hoping these are early versions because there are almost no extras. On the other hand, it appears we will have the Japanese language track. It will be nice (I hope) to see this after hearing so many raging debates about it.

Toho/Universal King Kong news

Apparently Universal will be releasing King Kong vs. Godzilla and King Kong Escapes on DVD, according to Monster Zero. Here's more info on KKvsG and KKE.
With all this great stuff coming out, my budget is going to be stretched into the holiday season. Both DVDs are being released on Nov. 29.
(Unfortunately, I'm sure we're not getting the Japanese version of KKvsG, which is infinitely better. C'est la vie.)

Atragon on the way

Media Blasters will do it again come this December, according to Henshin!Online. The company has already released Matango, Mysterians and Dogora. Now they plan to release Atragon, one of my favorite non-Godzilla Ishiro Honda films. It's about a submarine that can fly, an undersea kingdom that plans to take over the world and the angst of Japan's role after World War II. If Media Blasters includes the extras from the region 2 DVD (as they have with the other films), we'll get a commentary track by Koji Kajita, Honda's assistant director. This is a must have.

Dinosaur Samurai

I have no idea what this is, I happened to chance across it while looking for info on another book at the ibooks Web site. Here's the description:

Eckels, a psychotic time traveler, has shot a dinosaur and meddled with history, destroying the future and trapping himself in the past. Transported to an alternate prehistoric period by a savage timestorm, Aaron Cofield manages to link up with a Travis, a lost Time Safari guide. Together, they must hunt down Eckels and restore the shape of history. Attacked by sentient dinosaurs, Aaron and Travis escape to an alternate medieval Japan. Caught between dinosaurs, ferocious samurai warriors, and the cold-blooded Eckels, the two must fight for their own survival—and to restore the timestream of our future!

So "Ray Bradbury Presents Dinosaur Samurai" is apparently something loosely based off of Bradbury's "Sound of Thunder" and just filled with as many crazy things as the authors (Stephen Leigh and John J. Miller) can throw at it.
It includes both dinosaurs and samurai and so seems built for me. I may have to pick it up.

Roger Corman sells out?

Stephen Bissette writes an informative post about the end of an era. Apparently, Corman has given Buena Vista (a Disney corporation) rights to distribute 400 of his films, movies like "Little Shop of Horrors", "It Conquered the World" and his Poe films.
This is good in the sense that we'll probably get beautiful new reissues of some of these films. It's sad because now Corman is working with the major studios, something he hasn't needed to do in 50 years of film making.
I'm not all that upset about it, after all we could get some great DVDs of some great old giant monster movies. But Bissette writes well about it and about Corman's history.

Giant Monsters Journal

Something called Ghostface Jackson Productions is offering a Giant Monsters Journal. I must say, it looks pretty cool. Here's a pic:



Check out some of this guy's artwork too. Lots of giant monster interest there.

Gamera news

Monster Zero has a couple of interesting posts about news on the new Gamera film. The most important of which is a new trailer posted here. Secondly, they have some artwork of Gamera and Jidas. Here's Jidas:

Yummy Godzilla eggs

Watermelons are really Godzilla eggs
(Link found at BoingBoing.)

Stephen Bissette blogs

Wow, this is great news, comics great Stephen Bissette has a blog, called Myrant. Bissette's first post includes his first inspirational comic books, giant monster books Gorgo and Konga among them. I love Bissette's work and much of it has to do with giant monsters and dinosaurs. I've always been sad that his epic "Tyrant" was never completed. I can't wait to see what he does with this blog.
Check it out.

"It came out of a damn chicken egg!"

"Carnosaur" was as much fun as I remember. It was weird and wild and a total cheap exploitation film. Roger Corman produced the film, which was released in 1993 to cash in on the big budget release of "Jurassic Park."
The film stars Diane Ladd (of movies like "Chinatown," "Christmas Vacation" and "Wild at Heart") as Dr. Jane Tiptree (a reference to James Tiptree Jr., the science fiction writer?) a mad scientist creating an apocalyptic virus that will wipe out the human race and make way for dinosaurs. Her work is funded by an evil corporation, Eunice, which is in turn funded by the government (and thereby, the movie creates a trifecta of B-movie villains: Mad scientist, evil corporation, evil government.) Ladd spends most of her time in a dark control room talking to people in gray rooms by camera. I imagine all her scenes were shot in one day.
Our hero, Doc, is played by Raphael Sbarge, an actor who started his career co-starring with Tom Cruise in "Risky Business" and now spends most of his time doing voice overs on Star Wars videogames. Here he plays a drunken night watchman at a quarry site. What the quarry is digging for, I have no idea. Apparently, the site is environmentally important, so the company's equipment is constantly under attack by a commune of environmentalists.
Doc drinks all the time, carries a rifle and yet has books about Gandhi and sketches the landscape. His trailer includes a poster of Alfred E. Neumann saying "What Me Worry?" as well as Doc's medical license, crossed out with the words "Just Do No Harm" written over it.
Eventually Doc meets one of the environmentalists, Thrush, (Jennifer Runyon who apparently hasn't done any work since this movie). Her only role in the plot, besides vague love interest, is to get in the Carnosaur's way.
Enough with the actors. The movie begins with a batch of chickens on a truck getting out of Ladd's lab just as quarantine begins. Among the chickens is a baby dinosaur, which of course kills the driver and escapes. Meanwhile, everyone is getting sick.
Apparently, Dr. Tiptree's plan has two parts. The first is the spread of a disease which makes women give birth to a giant green egg. The birthing process kills the infected women. The second part is baby dinosaurs born in chicken's eggs.
It's the loopiness of this plan that really makes the movie fun. A couple of dinosaurs get loose while feverish women give horrible birth. Neat.
The special effects are humorous but effective. There seems to be a combination of stop motion, puppets and animatronic models. If you've ever seen the TV show "Land of the Lost," the dinosaurs are about one step up from those. There's also some gore as the baby dinosaur rips the intestines out of people, but nothing spectacular.
The movie rips off scenes from "Alien," "Night of the Living Dead" and, believe it or not, a satirical final shot reminiscent of "Citizen Kane."
The movie is ridiculous, but a lot of fun. It never gets boring (though it veers close with static scenes in Ladd's lab and Eunice's board room.) Best of all, Clint Howard is in the first half hour of the film. Clint Howard makes any movie better.
The director, Adam Simon, also wrote the film "Bones," starring Snoop Dogg. The last two films he directed were "The American Nightmare," a documentary about horror films, and "The Typewriter, the Rifle & the Movie Camera," a documentary about director Samuel Fuller.
The film is based on a novel by Harry Adam Knight, which is apparently a pseudonym for John Brosnan, an Australian writer well known in science fiction fan circles. He died this year of acute pancreatitis. Apparently, the book is very different from the movie. In fact, some of the Amazon reviews claim Michael Crichton ripped off this book when he wrote "Jurassic Park."
The "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" says about Brosnan's pseudonymous works "these written equivalents of exploitation ovies are slightly self-mocking but quite exciting as sf horror; all are variants on the humans-being-destroyed-by-monstrous-things theme." The Encyclopedia also points out "The initials of the pseudonyms were no accident." Brosnan also wrote as "Simon Ian Childer."
I'll have to pick up the novel and see what I think.
Finally, here are some other reviews of Carnosaur:
Dino-Source; Trash City; The B-Movie Film Vault; Cold Fusion Video Review; Stomp Tokyo; Bad Movies; At A Glance Film Reviews; Night of the Creeps; Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review; Mutant Reviewers; Broke Down Cinema; DVD Cult and Rotten Tomatoes.

Godzilla: Return scheduled for 2013

According to a Monster Zero translation of a news report, Godzilla won't come back to the silver screen for another 9 years. Apparently, the producers want to wait for a new generation of fans to revive the films.

Giant monster drawings

Check out Our Bullets Are Useless, a collection of monster drawings based on the Atlas (later marvel) comic books that almost always featured giant monsters. Very cool.

Kong documentary, DVD details

Peter Jackson is making a two-hour documentary about the original King Kong for the DVD release of that movie. Apparently, the original King Kong will be released in November in three different packages:
1. The two-disc special edition.
2. A two-disc collector's edition that will be packaged in "a collectable tin and including a 20-page reproduction of the original souvenir program, postcard reproductions of the original one sheets, and a mail-in offer for a reproduction of a vintage 27-by-41-inch movie poster."
3. The above special edition will also be sold packaged with "Son of Kong" and "Mighty Joe Young."
Also of note, Ray Harryhausen will be doing a commentary on the "King Kong" (1933) disc.
Apparently, a two-disc special edition">Korean disc is for sale right now with just the original movie.

Carnosaur!

Deep Discount DVD has a good bargain on the Carnosaur collection. This is the three Roger Corman produced "Carnosaur" movies. These are not what you'd call high art, even for giant monster movies, but they're fun and, now, cheap to buy! The films were produced to cash in on the "Jurassic Park" hype. Personally, I love the films. I can't wait to see them again and will write more after I've viewed them.
UPDATE: Carnosaur review here.

Blogcritics.org: The Mysterians DVD Review

Blogcritics.org reviews the Mysterians DVD. Overall, they weren't big fans. But apparently, they felt more Mogera would have made it a better film:

It's also a mystery to the film, seemingly defeated within the opening half hour, then making a barely noticeable appearance near the finale, only to be crushed by the armed forces machinery. It feels like it was added at the last moment, and that ends up being a significant piece of trivia. There should have been more scenes involving the robot, especially to break up the war involving a stationary dome.

Of course, most films could benefit from giant monsters and robots. But maybe that's just me.

Dogora

"Dogora" is now out from Media Blasters. It's the story of jewel thieves and a giant jellyfish desperately in need of carbon.
It's a strange movie. The jewel thief story seems to go on despite what's happening with the giant monster. If I understand the history of the movie correctly, a movie about jewel thieves was melded with the giant monster theme early on so Eiji Tsubaraya and Ishiro Honda could try some new technology of the time.
The new technology doesn't look so new now. The title creature is mainly jellyfish arms hanging from the skies, with only a couple of shots of the entire creature. The creature is matted in to the film - there's no rubber suits here. Unfortunately, some of the special effects near the end of the film - when the monster has been broken up into smaller "space cells" - are downright awful.
Still, the story was fun, if bizarre. Unlike "Varan," I was never bored with this movie. The disc is more basic than most of the Media Blasters releases. It only has the theatrical trailer and a photo gallery. Still, the transfer is excellent and this is the first time this movie has been released in its original Japanese form here. So another good job for Media Blasters.
Next up from the company is "Yog: Monster from Space." No release details are available yet. That's another film I've never seen and includes three giant monsters! I hope it's worth it.
There's also talk of Media Blasters looking to pick up "Atragon." Although it only has a minor giant monster part - Manda! - it's one of my favorite Ishiro Honda films. Let's hope Media Blasters is able to bring a new version here.

Varan the Unbelievable

For years I've owned a video tape copy of Varan the Unbelievable put out by Something Weird. It was the U.S. version, starring Myron Healey, and it was awful. I tried watching it about 10 times and managed not to fall asleep about twice. But those images of the monster, Varan, always intrigued me. I wanted to know, what were the secrets of the original film, how had Americanization screwed it up.
Thanks to Media Blasters, now I know. The company's Tokyo Shock division has been putting out some great Japanese films of late, including The Mysterians and one of my favorite films, Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People. Varan is the first giant monster movie in the series (well, Mysterians features a giant robot, Mogera, but is really focused on the alien invasion).
And I've come to find out that Varan is still not a great giant monster movie. The first part of the film, set in the "Tibet of Japan," has some atmospheric looking locations and includes actual danger to the protagonists. But the rest of the film is bogged down in military movements and Varan thrashing around in the water. Even the smashing of buildings near the end isn't all that exciting.
Varan, itself, is a pretty good monster, as long as it stays on four feet. In those scenes, it moves like no other monster in the Toho canon. It seems to move like a cat, slinking back and forth, and often pulls its front two legs up on to a structure or mountain to get a better look at flares shot off by the military. On two legs, which only seems to happen near the end, it's just embarrassing. Varan's arms move side-to-side like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and really, it just doesn't look stable.
Then there's the flying. Completely excised from the American version, Varan flees from his homeland by getting on top of a mountain and spreading flying-squirrel-like wings. It makes the monster seem all the more interesting, but it seems to come out of nowhere and is never used again.
Still, this version is a far better film than the American, and it certainly deserves a look from all dedicated monster fans.
The disc is terrific. You get Japanese language with subtitles on the movie, plus there's a second version of the movie as it was originally edited for television. There's also an audio commentary.
But the best extra I've seen is a short video about the molding of Varan. Keizo Murase, the original molder of Varan, teaches this little course in the making of scales and skin. It makes me want to build my own Varan at home!
Media Blasters isn't finished yet, either. They've got two more giant monster movies lined up, both of which I can't wait to see. The first is Dogora, giant jellyfish that come from the sky. That DVD is out now. The second is Yog, the Monster from Space, which will go under its original American title Space Amoeba. Details on both films can be seen in the HenshinOnline archives.