Check out this cartoon from 1958. With its theme of a monstrous little cannibal loose in Cincinnati, it’s definitely a horror story… but who exactly was the audience? It looks like it’s for kids, but that would surely be the stuff of nightmares. Note the zombie-esque ending.
Chew Chew Baby (US-1958; dir. Izzy Sparder)
Jade Warrior [aka Jadesoturi] (2006) is a kung fu fantasy film made in Finland by director Antti-Jussi Annila. Its bizarre lineage is enough to pique one’s interest, being based on both Chinese and Finnish mythologies — in the latter case the epic work The Kalevala, a collection of tales somewhat like the Arthurian legends or The Odyssey. The Kalevala features a hero and a mystical device called the Sampo, as well as a love story, demons and an apocalyptic threat in the form of a battle of Good and Evil for control of the world. The film uses these elements, interweaving events in ancient China with events in modern-day Finland, as the hero is re-incarnated in order to find his love and save the world. Or something like that.
Plot summary from Cine-east.com:
Inspired by a well-known Finnish epic called The Kalevala, the story opens with a down-on-his luck hardware merchant who gets dumped by his girlfriend. She tries to dispose of his collection of Asian artifacts at an antique dealer, but this sets off a mythical series of events that turns the merchant into a warrior prince, fated to battle a demon in icy northern Finland, responsible for enslaving all of humankind. The prince is abetted – and then ultimately betrayed – by a two-faced female warrior who has captured his heart and thus carries his greatest weakness in her hands. The battle involves enchanted boxes, spectacular swordfights, and supernatural events that come together – simultaneously – in an isolated cabin on the outskirts of Helsinki and in the Chinese mountains.
And yes, that is a mummy in the foreground of the previous shot.
So I went to the website and looked around and eventually watched the official trailer. Looks good.
Here’s a different trailer with English voice-over:
But amidst all that did you catch the hint of a giant monster?
He shall rise… indeed! Let’s hope so!
from Rectuma
(US-2004; dir. Mark Pirro)
Now, you may rectum… I mean, reckon … that a giant ass [aka arse] doesn’t offer much by way of creativity in its design — and you’d be right. Butt … sorry, BUT what justifies its inclusion here is the sheer, crazy, ASStonishingly tasteless audacity of making a movie that features a Godzilla-sized atomically mutated rear end attacking and destroying a major city. The concept is too bizarre NOT to be included in our list of Crazy Kaiju. It may not be a very “sophisticated” film (see trailer below), or even as good as it could have been — and it may be true that it takes way too long for the giant-monster ass to appear. But it’s probably the only giant-monster ass movie you’ll ever see — and all the references to Godzilla/Mothra (especially the two singing fairies that provide a musical commentary throughout) stamp it as kaiju through and through. [Backbrain]
Trailer
Coming Tomorrow: Kaiju Search-Robot Avery’s Top 20 Craziest Kaiju Countdown Number 15!
Top 20 Craziest Kaiju Countdown articles:
from The Trollenberg Terror [aka The Crawling Eye]
(UK-1958; dir. Quentin Lawrence)
“O-On a mountain, uh, dese things sometimes happen. “
Here’s one very weird entry about evil sentient telepathic fiends from space. They live in a mysterious cloud on a mountain top, re-animate the dead and make some folk attack other folk. In the end they are revealed to be giant tentacled eyeballs!
A trailer for “The Crawling Eye” (US version of The Trollenberg Terror):
Coming Tomorrow: Kaiju Search-Robot Avery’s Top 20 Craziest Kaiju Countdown Number 16!
Top 20 Craziest Kaiju Countdown articles:
Talk about giant monster nerds! Cloverfield producer J.J. Abrams and/or director Matt Reeves are certainly in the terminal stages of Kaiju Obsessiveness. The DVD release of their US giant monster hit has revealed that the film is riddled with subliminal images of famous American giant monsters of the past. Look vewy vewy closely and you’ll see King Kong, the Rhedosaur from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and one of the giant ants from Them! — at least these. There are probably others as yet unrevealed.
It’s almost as though Rob’s digital camera (which was supposedly filming the events as they happened) had at one time had in its memory clips from the various old films, and some of them weren’t quite recorded over — just as the earlier shots of Rob and Beth managed to survive into the scenes of monster rampage.
Unlike those scenes, however, we’re talking single frames here, so it’s only by the use of DVD pause functions that you’ll see them clearly — though many claim to have noticed them in the theatrical print… and the credit sequences at the end did include the relevant acknowledgements as a nice clue to the more perceptive (or more obsessive) in the audience.
If you want to know about the abundant esoteria packed into Cloverfield this is a great place to look.
More of the hidden monsters can be found here.
from Uchu daikaiju Dogora [lit. Space Giant Monster Dogora] (Japan-1964;
dir. Ishiro Honda) [aka Dagora, the Space Monster (US-1965)]
This entry from the famed Toho Co. Ltd [creators of ‘Godzilla’] definitely stands out as one of their zaniest creations. It features giant flying jellyfish-like creatures that have an appetite for coal and diamonds. Sucking vehicles, buildings, people … everything … up into the air as they float ethereally through the upper atmosphere, along with a semi-comedic crime subplot involving diamond thieves and pursuing cops, make for some bizarre and surreal scenes.
Watch the original Japanese trailer:
This is a beautiful painting of Dogora painted by Bill Gudmundson (click on it to see it full-size):
Coming Tomorrow: Kaiju Search-Robot Avery’s Top 20 Craziest Kaiju Countdown Number 17!
Top 20 Craziest Kaiju Countdown articles:
Today I came across mention of a 1980 Czechoslavakian film, Brontosaurus (Czechoslavakia-1980; dir. Vera Plívová-Simková), which I’d never heard of. But while looking for information on it, I instead stumbled upon these clips from an earlier Czechoslavakian dinosaur flick called Cesta do pravěku [aka Journey to the Beginning of Time] (Czechoslavakia-1955; dir. Karel Zeman, Fred Ladd [US version]), for which some seem to have a nostalgic fondness.
IMDB describes the simplistic sounding, and rather static, plot thus:
Four young boys visit a dinosaur exhibit at the New York city Museum of Natural History. They then row out onto Central Park Lake where they find a secret cave and paddle into a wondrous prehistoric world filled with the very dinosaurs they had just seen.
A proto-Discovery Channel docu-drama perhaps? At any rate, the animation is rather nice.
Brontosaurus!
Mammoth!
The 1980 Brontosaurus film? Nothing as yet.
By the way, before someone comes on and starts complaining that there’s no such thing as a Brontosaurus, I know that the name has been replaced by “Apatosaurus” in scientific circles, but chose to ignore the fact as the good ol’ Thunder Lizard was known under the Bronto-moniker back when these films were made.
A while back the Backbrain reported that an old short-run giant monster comic series, Reptisaurus the Terrible, was being made into a hopefully not-so-terrible live-action film by Fred Olen Ray’s son, Chris.
Now the Howling Moon Productions website has announced that principal photography is completed and that the post-production creature animation is taking place as we speak. The site includes some production shots, of which the following are a sample:
[Note: Director Chris Ray tells me this one is a promo shot
for the film Ninja Doll rather than Reptisaurus.
Never mind… it adds colour to this page!]
The site gives precious little information on the film, but these, and other shots, give some indication of what is to come…
The poster for the vikings vs alien giant monster flick, Outlander, has surfaced!
Click here for a large version: Outlander poster large.
