Death Kappa (2010)

Death Kappa (2010)
Director: Tomoo Haraguchi 

So, Monster X Strikes Back was more or less a sequel-cum-remake-cum-parody from the start. Big Man Japan was something of a satire of both the genre and Japanese society until the final reel, at which point it became an outright parody. Death Kappa, which came out two years after Monster X Strikes Back, sort of straddles the line between "affectionate homage" and "genre parody", with some of the human scenes being played more or less seriously, others not, some of the FX being good (by suitmation standards), and some of them almost looking intentionally fake.

The film stars Misato Hirata (of the Ultraman Mebius series) as Kanako, a woman hailing from a small village in Northern(?) Japan who is returning home after a disastrously failed bid to become an idol. As soon as she returns home, her grandmother is killed in front of her by reckless, drunken youth. Kanako takes it upon herself to continue her grandmother's legacy and become a miko (or shrine maiden) and tend to the local kami, a kappa. Thanks to the the aforementioned youth, one of the kappa idols is knocked into sea, which awakens into a real kappa. Funnily enough, the creature is enamored by the stupid pop single that Kanako released--lyrics like "I'm wearing panties again today" and "I promise I'll bleed for you as I wait on the beach" suggest that Kanako was the Japanese equivalent to Rebecca Black.

Anyway, there is an evil outfit known as the National Guard operating inside the same village. They are creating a race of evil fish men in order to restore Japan to its Nationalists, militaristic roots--watch for Shin Godzilla director Hideaki Anno as the director of the Guard. The evil scientist is a black-clad lady (Mika, of Abashiri Ikka: The Movie) who sometimes dresses as a witch, and sometimes as a dominatrix. She is the granddaughter of a WW2-era scientist who had started the fish man project and wants to continue his legacy. We are meant to draw parallels between the two women with regards to continuing their grandparents' legacy: one good, one evil.

Anyway, Kanako is kidnapped by the National Guard, who try to transform her into fish girl. She is rescued by the kappa, who sumo wrestles the guards into submission. Evil Scientist Girl goes insane and shoots everyone--including her grandfather's dessicated corpse--with a machine gun before detonating a nuclear weapon inside the base. The explosion mutates one of the fishmen into a Godzilla-esque monster called Hangyolas, who attacks "the city". After all the military hardware fails to destroy it, a kaiju-sized Kappa shows up. Let the monster wrestling begin...

On one hand, the monster suits are really detailed and look great on screen. There are some good miniatures and old school kaiju fans may enjoy the old school effects (tanks, maser cannons, jets, etc.). The monster wrestling is also more entertaining than the Guilala-vs-Take-Majin fight in Monster X Strikes Back. And the first half is strange enough that some might find it entertaining. The monster Hangyolas is very reminiscent of Titanosaurus from Terror of Mechagodzilla--and Kappa's entrance into the final fight by blasting Hangyolas from offscreen with a blue-colored blast is a callback to that movie. Director Tomoo Haraguchi, who did creature design on the Heisei Gamera films and directed Sakuya, Slayer of Demons, really knows his way around the genre.

The problem is the rest. The human element disappears almost entirely from the second half of the movie, except for the nameless military brass. There is a running joke of the soldiers being asked to shoot the monster with their standard-issue assault rifles, only to get scared and scream out for their mothers. The movie ends with Kanako reappearing out of nowhere to charm and calm down an angry Kappa, which begs the question: "Wasn't she killed in the atomic explosion?" And the early scenes of the fishmen killing youth are rather graphic for an otherwise cheesy, goofy film. And speaking of goofy, as good as the miniatures are, the scenes of fighter jets attacking Hangyolas show the piano wire suspending them, which makes me wonder if it was intentional (making it a parody) or something they just didn't know how to hide (which just makes it bad).

In the end, this movie is a lot like how I view Eight-Legged Freaks, which didn't know if it wanted to be Tremors (an update of 50s, desert-set sci-fi) or a spoof. Although both types of films can have humor, the humor of each is of a different sort. And that is how I felt about Death Kappa. It needed a clearer idea of its own identity.

Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (2008) + Bonus micro-review

Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (2008)
Director: Minoru Kawasaki

Director Minoru Kawasaki has carved out a niche for himself as a maker of super low-budget kaiju eiga, with films ranging to this to Kaiju Mono to Monster Seafood Wars. One of his most recent films was Super Legend God Hikoza, and he did a remake of Planet Prince (aka Prince of Space), which longtime fans of MST3K will be familiar with. The man has been making low-budget genre comedies since the late 1980s, so I applaud the man's ability to get funding for his ideas, like The World Sinks Except Japan and Executive Koala.

Monster X Strikes Back is a sequel-cum-remake of Shochiku's Uchu Daikaiju Guirara, which was released stateside as The X from Outer Space. In that film, a flying saucer fires spores onto a rocket (the film is set in an alternate timeline where mankind has built a base on the moon before the turn of the millenium), which absorb the heat during reentry, causing them to grow into a giant monster, Guilala. The titular beasts looks like Godzilla but with a head that resembles a flying saucer mixed with a chicken. It is one of the more "unique" kaiju to grace the big screen.

This film is set in its own timeline, centered around the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan. The world leaders--the USA, Great Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Japan--have gotten together so that European countries can bitch at the Japanese Prime Minister about not being the agreed climate change goals from the last summit. While that is going on, a meteorite strikes and unleashes Guilala, who immediate destroys (what I assume to be) Sapporo. The world leaders decide to stick around and try to defeat Guilala with one cockamamie scheme after another (eg. giant holes in the ground, secret venom formulas, poison gas, etc.). In the end, a tabloid reporter (Natsuki Katou, of Eko Eko Azarak: The Awakening) and her photographer (Kazuki Kato, best known playing "Kamen Rider Kabuto"), help some villagers in a nearby forest awaken the local god, Take-Majin (Takeshi Kitano), to fight Guilala.

Much of the humor is derived from racial stereotypes, at least the Japanese view of how these foreign cultures act. The American president is all "Ra! Ra! Militarism!" and very much an Alpha Male. The Russian president is sneaky. The Italian president is coasting entirely on the reputation of Ancient Roman civilization. The French president (clearly a parody of Nicolas Sarkozy) spends most of the film trying to get into the knickers of his cute interpreter...which leads into one of the film's bigger twists. Let's just say that when the current Japanese Prime Minister steps away and lets his predecessor step in, the "new" guy has a reason for wanting to resort to nuclear weapons.

Interestingly enough, the scenes involving the reporter and her photographer feel like a reaction to Godzilla-Mothra-King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001), from her working at a tabloid to the use of native Japanese guardian monsters to scenes set in foggy forest. There is even a scene where people are being interviewed about Guilala's rampage and one guy says that he wishes it were Varan and Baragon who were doing the rampaging, which is a callback to the original script for GMK.

The early destruction scenes are actually stock footage from the original The X from Outer Space, although the new footage is sorta decent. They did a great job of recreating the original Guilala suit. But the humor is OK at best. The lack of a score worthy of Ifukubi, Oshima, or Ohtani hurts the film. And in the end, it is little more than a curio for the hardcore kaiju enthusiasts.

Earth Defense Widow (Japan, 2014: Minoru Kawasaki) - High-concept film whose premise is: "A former geisha becomes a jet pilot to fight against monsters following her husband's death and discovers that fighting kaiju makes her aroused." Despite the luridness of that description, this film is reasonably chaste in its execution, with the gorgeous lead actress (Mitsu Dan) mainly showing the viewer her bare back. After the opening monster sequence, in which the female protagonist almost kills herself by orgasming mid-flight, the film becomes a whole of talk until the final 15 minutes.

As there are no subbed or dubbed versions available as of now, I had no idea what was happening. There is some running joke of the American embassador--a Japanese actor dubbed to speak English with a British accent--always having sexy time with an African-American girl whenever the Japanese authorities call him. The film climaxes (har!) with the main girl performing a naked sexy dance in front of the kaiju. The monster--which looks like a cross between Godzilla and Gyaos, with a couple of extra horns and crests--puts its claws over its crotch and jumps up and down until it keels over. I'd like to think that it was trying so hard to not bust a nut that it simply had a heart attack. But beyond that, there isn't much to recommend this film.

Big Man Japan (2007)

Big Man Japan (2007)
Starring: Hitoshi Matsumoto, Riki Takeuchi, Ua, Ryûnosuke Kamiki, Haruka Unabara, Tomoji Hasegawa
Director: Hitoshi Matsumoto

Interesting mockumentary/satire on both Japanese culture and Tokusatsu films from comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto (he wrote 594 episodes of the series "Gaki no Tsukai", which ran for about 34 years). The film follows a never-seen documentarian (Tomoji Hasegawa) who follows a seemingly boring man around asking him all sorts of questions. The subject of the filming is Masaru Daisato (Matsumoto himself), who as it turns out, has a monstrous alter-ego: Big Man Japan.

Big Man Japan is the title given to certain people in Japan who have the ability to grow to giant sizes when exposed to electricity in order to fight giant monsters, which have been terrorizing Japan for at least six generations. Daisato's invalid grandfather (Taichi Yazaki) represented the peak of the popularity of the Big Men, but things are different now. The Japanese people are no longer wowed by the monster-fighting antics of the Big Man and tend to see him as a nuisance rather than a hero. And since Daisato's identity is widespread, he has to deal with graffiti on his house, dirty looks and staring, and falling TV ratings ("The weather report is more popular than your fights," the interviewer observes at one point). And a series of scandals just seem to make the Big Man's popularity even worse, even though it's him who's fighting the monsters, not the people.

The first part of this film is dry. Very, very dry. So understated, in fact, that I almost fell asleep watching it. It picks up a little and the monster sequences--done through an unconvincing-but-endearing form of motion capture--become more frequent. I'm sure there are lots of commentary on Japanese society amidst all of this, although as a gaijin, it is not all that apparent. Perhaps it is a comment on the declining popularity of tokusatsu as Japan's dismal birth rate means that there are less and less kids to consume the product. Perhaps it is a comment on Japan's bully culture, in which anyone related to someone unpopular is expected to be mistreated by everyone else. Perhaps it is a comment on how traditional stars--kabuki, sumo, etc--are losing popularity as demographics, culture, etc. shifts.

The film switches gears in the last 15 minutes, when it inexplicably becomes an outright parody of traditional tokusatsu shows, especially Ultraman. Even the special effects switch over from modern CGI and mo-cap to miniatures and suits, with the low quality that most Westerners assume that all tokusatsu and Godzilla movies have. And even then, there is some commentary on America in this sequence, but I'm not really sure what it is supposed to be. I think Japanese people--or people who have lived in Japan for an extended period of time--will get Big Man Japan more than people who simply casually "visit" the country when they need to scratch their kaiju itch.