All-Out Giant Monster Attack! Episode 9 - Godzilla Raids Again

One year after Godzilla destroyed Tokyo in "Godzilla", he's back, raiding again, in "Godzilla Raids Again".  Only one year after the smash success of "Gojira", Toho quickly moved forward with their sequel.  They were in such a hurry to get "Godzilla 2" made that they overlooked the fact that Ishiro Honda, director of the original Godzilla, was busy directing a different Kaiju film, "Ju Jin Yuki Otoko" (Monster Snowman), though that film is better known in the West under the title, "Half Human"*.  Instead the directing job when to Motoyoshi Oda, a fellow of Honda's, but obviously a far less talented filmmaker who would never make a kaiju film again.  Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka was back, and so was special effects master, Eiji Tsuburaya.  But composer Akira Ifukube was replaced by Masaru Sato, who created a far inferior score that lacked even the classic Godzilla theme.

Ultimately, it was seemingly predestined that "Godzilla Raids Again" (or "Godzilla's Counterattack" as its Japanese title reads), was destined to fall under the sequel curse.  Except for a single cameo from Takashi Shimura as Dr. Yamane, the original human cast was gone.  The principle creative talent behind "Godzilla" was missing, but Toho needed some kind of follow-up to capitalize on the blockbuster that was the kaiju genre.  Heck, even Godzilla's choice of target city, Osaka, feels inferior, its like if the aliens from "Independence Day", after blowing up New York, decided to attack Philadelphia next.  The grim disastrous tone of the original was not kept, instead Godzilla was merely a giant monster wrecking the city, not a living natural curse brought to the world because of the sin of the atomic age.  The human characters are mostly kitschy and entirely irrelevant, existing only to eat time, even by the second movie its obvious the real star has become the monsters.  Its a very confused movie, sitting on the crossroads between the serious horror of "Gojira" and the unembarrassed children's fair that the rest of Godzilla's Showa series was going to become.

There are some inspired ideas between "Godzilla Raids Again" though.  This is the first film where Godzilla fights with another monster, this one being the giant Ankylosaurus, Anguirus, one of the most popular giant monsters in the Toho line-up.  Anguirus as the series would go on would become Godzilla's best friend, teaming up him against a number of weird alien invasions, though Anguirus was usually the guy to get beaten up.  This time he's Godzilla's first enemy, and thus "Godzilla Raids Again" is notable as being the first Kaiju film marketed around the idea of a giant monster brawl.  Eventually those kinds of movies would be the main attraction of the entire Japanese giant monster industry.  Even with "Godzilla Raids Again"'s faults, which were obvious even in 1955 that Toho wouldn't make another Godzilla movie until the Sixties, its got that monster melee, which makes the whole thing feel worthwhile.

All-Out Giant Monster Attack! Episode 8 - It Came from Beneath the Sea

"It Came from Beneath the Sea" is a surprisingly well-made movie for a 1950s science B-movie mostly about scientists in a laboratory.  I'd actually rank this one as being, in terms of the human players and speed in which the plot moves, the best movie I've seen since "Mighty Joe Young" on All-Out Giant Monster Attack.  It compelling characters who do things other than simply stand around and battle the creature or discuss its powers from the sterile safety of a military office.  There's actually interpersonal conflicts, a watchable love story, and a female character who can accomplish something other than being the pretty sidekick of an elderly science nerd such as the lone female characters from "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" and "Them!".  And there's a spice and variety in the locations, dialog, and character relations that the previous American horror movies simply do not share.

Essentially "It Came from Beneath the Sea" is a film where a giant octopus attacks the Golden Gate Bridge.  Its origins come from right after "20,000 Fathoms" when stop-motion Archmage, Ray Harryhausen, was recruited by Colombia Pictures specifically to create a giant monster movie for them.  This was Ray Harryhausen's first time working with a producer by the name of Charles H. Schneer, who would become his long-time collaborator on ten movies for the next twenty-five years.  Harryhausen and Schneer would go on to create giant monster movies such as "20,000 Miles to Earth" and "The Valley of Gwangi", but also fantasy adventures like "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" and "Clash of the Titans", and even a SciFi fantasy film set in the Victorian era, "First Men in the Moon".

"It Came From Beneath the Sea", however, was pretty clearly designed with the sole purpose of being a rip-off of "20,000 Fathoms", only featuring a giant mollusk instead of a dinosaur.  The climax of both films are nearly identical, only with frightened crowds running from mile-long octopus tentacles instead of a rampaging rhedasaurus.  The monster in this version is considerably less emotive and interesting than the dinosaur, but the human characters are fascinating and sympathetic people.  Even though its not very expressive, how many movies can you honestly say feature a gargantuan cephalopod tearing its way through San Francisco's wharfs?  Or where nuclear submarines do undersea battle with a squishy beast several miles long?

Bullet to the Head

How can you say no to a title like that?  "Bullet to the Head"!  BOOM!  HEADSHOT!  In fact, they should have called it "BOOM! Headshot!"  Make that:  "BOOM! Headshot, Motherfucker!"  But "Bullet to the Head" is perfectly fine.  What kind of movie is this?  Oh, the kind of movie where people get shot... in the head.  Do they live?  Probably not.  They got shot... IN THE HEAD.  What part of this is hard to understand?  BANG!  BANG!  DEAD.  ¿Comprende?

"Bullet to the Head" is exactly what the titles tells you its going to be, and not a thing more.  Its not innovative, its not inspiring, its offers no pointed dialog on the nature of modern masculinity in a globalizing mass culture, it doesn't offer any solutions for the deficit, and it offers no practical life advise of any kind.  I imagine women will hate it, old folks will get disturbed by it, teens will want somebody younger in the lead role - probably somebody truly awful like Channing Tatum, young kids might enjoy it but their parents won't let them watch it, but as for you dudes, here you go, "Bullet to the Head".  Its Eighties action schlock, completely by the numbers and without anything new to say about anything.  Even among action schlock, its purely in the middle range, falling in the heap next to thousands of other movies from across time and space, offering little to separate itself from all those others.  And that's why I recommend it.

"The Expendables" has finally sparked off a series of imitations, taking its ancient stars and putting them back into their own movies.  I hated both "Expendables" movies, simply because they weren't very good.  They were directed so poorly that I wondered if Sylvester Stallone could even physically move anymore, and whether or not these actors should have retired around the time of "Demolition Man".  Arnold Schwarzenegger got his chance with "The Last Stand", which I skipped due to it looking terrible but mostly because Johnny Knoxville was there as the annoying sidekick.  Well, that movie bombed, so let's see how "Bullet to the Head" is doing... Oh, it got thrashed by the Superbowl and "Warm Bodies"*.  That's a shame.  Well, there's still "The Tomb", a film where Stallone and Schwarzenegger will team up to kill people, maybe that will sell.  Until then, if you have the time and are hoping for something incredibly but wonderfully stupid, something that will not challenge you, yet something that will not disappoint, there's "Bullet to the Head".

Stand Up Guys

This one is for all you old guys out there.

"Stand Up Guys" is the new movie starring Chistopher Walken, Al Pacino, and Alan Arkin, as the otherwise sublime poster garishly points out with labels on its silhouettes.  Its a movie with a pretty basic premise, mostly about a few old men enjoying a final fling before the inevitability of mortality takes them all.  Worn faces smiley remorsefully for the days when their skin was smooth, their eyes bright, and they starred in the greatest movies of the 1970s.  I figured it would be slow and reflective, even with the fact that it stars a group of defeated and retired mobsters.  Maybe something a little more intelligent, a little bit about life and friendship.  Just friends trying to figure it all out and get one last night together before a tragic deadline strikes the next morning.

Well, it was all that.  But it also had Al Pacino rushed into a hospital with a steel hard-on after fucking a Russian prostitute four times thanks to the rush of a fistful of Viagra.

Unfortunately, "Stand Up Guys" is a very mixed movie.  Overall, I'd say it was watchable and enjoyable, but it could have been far better if it wasn't so desperate to please everybody by pandering down.  This is an Old Dude movie, we don't need toilet humor, and yet there it is.  Most of the jokes come from Al Pacino snorting prescription medication, or breaking some other law, basically turning this into "The Hangover Part 67: We're Too Old For This Shit".  Its the sentimental portions that drive the movie for me, not the wacky antics.  Eventually the movie gets to the point that it seems to break all logic and reality, and not just in the insane stunts that Pacino and Walken pull.  After a deeply emotional and rather touching send-off of an ending, they felt the need to throw in a truly awful ending.  Maybe they wanted to be uplifting, maybe they just didn't want to make people sad, but instead they blew it, turning the movie into a comic book.  Worse, even though there's an incoming time limit, a classic technique of screenwriters to create tension, "Stand Up Guys" seems to flop around without a great deal of energy, and somehow never really gets going.

Luckily, "Stand Up Guys" does still feature some of the best actors of all time together, and what good moments it has are still worth it.  I'm glad to see Al Pacino in a movie that isn't "Jack and Jill".  Just the strength alone of Al Pacino working against Christopher Walken would be enough for a good movie.  You could have shoved these guys into a bustop and just had them shoot the breeze for an hour and a half, and it would have been great entertainment... and maybe "Stand Up Guys" would have been better if did exactly that.

All-Out Giant Monster Attack! Episode 7 - Them!

Make me a sergeant and charge the booze!

"Them!" is easily one of the best remembered SciFi B-movies from the 1950s, in many ways iconic of its time.  You got giant monsters in the desert, scientists in gray suits and gray offices working with the military to stop the threat, a no-nonsense leading man, and cheesy special effects, its everything you'd expect.  It has a splashy though grammatically-confusing title:  "Them!" - it just grabs you, doesn't it?  They even included an exclamation mark just to make the point clear.  The premise is as silly as they get, fitting of the ridiculous effects, but somehow every actor plays their part with deathly seriousness, nobody is winking at the camera as they scream at slow-moving clunky animatronics.  Film would not develop a sense of irony until the Sixties or Seventies.

The plot of "Them!" is succinctly described in just two words:  Giant Ants.  I imagine the movie began with those words in the mind of a screenwriter or producer, and it has endured through the ages because of the magnetic yet hilarious power of that concept.  This was the first giant monster movie to take something that should be very small and instead make it monster-sized, but it would definitely not be the last.  In fact, giant arthropods became one of the most popular villains of American SciFi movies in this period, with such films as "Tarantula!", "Attack of the Crab Creatures", "Beginning of the End" (locusts), "The Deadly Mantis", "The Black Scorpion", "Earth vs. the Spider", "Monster from Green Hell" (ants again), and finally, in Japan, "Mothra"*.  And they've been making giant bugs movies ever since, in my own lifetime there's been "Mimic", "Spiders", "Eight-Legged Freaks", and the SciFi channel's greatest idea for a movie ever, "Mongolian Death Worm".

Now as a movie, "Them!" actually isn't that bad.  The first half hour is actually rather inspired and very tense, legitimately scary.  Unfortunately, that's built on a mysterious lonely atmosphere that is ruthlessly abandoned for a more generic "scientists and military guys in a room" plotline.  It also hurts the movie greatly when the monsters turn out to be a huge silly ant prop.  But luckily the movie is speedy in its plot, it turns into something of a war movie against giant ants, and then it ends with soldiers fighting ants with flamethrowers, and who can complain about that?