a review of 科学怪人的怪兽 山达对盖拉

HOOPTOBER, NIGHT SEVENTEEN: You only need to know three things about this movie going in:

1. Although it looks like it might be a mainline Toho kaiju production, it's actually a coproduction between Toho and American animation studio UPA (the creators of Mister Magoo!) and does not tie in to the Godzilla mythos.
2. The film stars an oddly sedate Russ Tamblyn, whose character is introduced, apropos of nothing, as an internationally-respected "Frankenstein expert."
3. It features a lounge singer performing the song "The Words Get Stuck In My Throat", which was later repurposed by the 70s/80s new wave band Devo as a weirdly touching encore song sung by their mascot, Booji Boy. Beyond that, this movie will feel pretty familiar if you've seen any of the contemporaneous Toho kaiju films, but it does have a couple of other interesting twists. First is the nature of the titular beasties themselves; Instead of being depicted with actors waddling around in bulky costumes, the gargantua actors instead wear mossy-looking ape suits that grant them a fuller range of motion. Sometimes this works and sometimes it looks fairly comical, as when the green gargantua appears to merrily skip across a populated area without appearing to encounter any resistance from buildings/trees/etc. There's also a slight difference in how the military and scientific response to the gargantuas is depicted. In a lot of these kinds of movies, we see the military being stymied by the monsters' invulnerability, whereas in this one they actually come up with a highly effective set of weapons and tactics pretty early on, with the main complicating factor being the appearance of the second gargantua.