50's-60's Dubbed Toho Monsters As Accidental Avant Garde

[HerrSchreck]

Here's one that's only partly intended as Amusing Good Fun:

I've been a longtime lover of monster films... course, what boy growing up watching American network television in the 70's (ABC "4:30 Movie" after school) wouldn't be? Like many folks I'm sure, this served as my original route into films... seeking out in my teens copies of all the then-rarely shown on TV silents (CAT & CANARY, NOSFERATU) & the usual early-30's Universal Horrors, etc.

Lately I've been picking up, as usual, my fair share of low budget horror... but this time, for nostalgia's sake, specifically sought out the Americanized versions-- cropped, dubbed in a fashion so hilarious that these prints, along with dubbed 70's Kung Fu flicks, created their own form of spoofing-- of the older Honda monster flicks: RODAN, GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA, etc. I've been specifically seeking out the poorest versions available, made by Sony Classics, with horrible tv-antenna-esque color, thick with chroma, mono sound that sounds like it's been pumped through two tin cans connected by string. They cost 8 bucks prior to my discount.

Viewing these nowadays brought back visceral reminders of the weird feelings I used to get while watching these films (or, more appropriately, these edits of these films) as a kid. I'd be glad to see them listed as 'upcoming' in the TV Guide (first thing I'd do when my mom brought the following week's edition home was check The 4:30 Movie for the whole week to see if any monster/horror movies were coming on), but then when I'd watch them, I'd always take them in with an oddball combination of repulsion and entertainment. Seeing those poor gents in their ass-droopy, wrinkly rubber suits choking on gunpowder smoke used to make me so chauvanistically proud of of what I considered to be my countrymen's equivalent efforts, i e KONG & JOE YOUNG... and the meticulousness, the great professional patience of the stop motion animation in these films... proudly rambling on at length to anyone who'd listen "That's not wind in Kong's fur, those are fingerprints because they'd touch those miniatures hundreds of times a minute!!".

Looking back now after all these years with a pair of eyes that are after the passage of a couple decades (and an understanding of the vast amount of slop produced in this country during the same era, and also of the American occupation of Japan), I still get an unusual, though different (hence this post) combination of Unease and Entertainment from these films... they trigger the same ejection from belief-suspension that many avant garde films do... Jodorowsky... the similarly ex-post-facto-appellation of "avant garde masterpiece" to a picture such as Dwain Esper's 1934 MANIAC.

I've certainly not been a stranger in my adult life to the concept of Accidental Avant Garde-- certainly I've appreciated unintentional moments of sublime unpleasantness, strange Normalcy bordering on the surreal, found Masterpiece Moments located accidentally in all manner of unexpected areas... everything from the evening news to pornography-- and with the advent of the Unseen Cinema programming effort by Posner & Shepard, the loose appellation of Avant Garde has become rote.

Certainly to me a large chunk of avant work concerns an element that can be described as vaguely masochistic aesthetics: the location of a salutary artistic experience in zones that are not agreeable to the self and do not, at least at first, permit your standard escapist sinking-into/belief-suspension... some seem to make an unseen connection into the subsurface grammar of one's actual nightmares and thus the actual , seemingly inexplicable unpleasantness. The way certain smells make your hair stand on end; the hideousness of uterine tumors composed of teeth & hair... all manner of instinctual and deep psychological real life aversion-- this vs your standard elements of "horror".

There are moments for me in these old dubbed, cropped Toho's where the badness gets so bad, and is punctuated by other elements in the film which I process as genuinely/successfully haunting, that the experience replicates a fine avant garde viewing session. The bleeding color, the heavy chroma creating a hazy mud-palatte (example: the color RODAN winds up becoming, like the color of coagulated blood surrounded my noxious green-grey haze; sometimes the lack of clarity, even graininess & unfaithful color, can add an unintentionally impressionistic quality to films, the way that some beautifully photographed old films-- think 30's French poetic realism-- in my opinion, benefit from the less-responsive-than-today film stock, which adds to the painting-like quality of the images by Not Reproducing Everything Possible... a la the rule in painting & lighting what you leave out/don't light is at minimum just as important as what you include/do light)... the disconcerting mixture of bad & good miniatures, the terrible cropping, the bouncing around through languages-- and thus lip-snyched and non-lip-synched dialog-- the nightmarish roars of the monsters (the instrumental processing which created Godzilla's cry is still a haunting triumph of sound in my book) with the to-me truly haunting music filled with genuine terror & blatant pathos (one of the most successful aspects of these movies is the music, particularly the original Godzilla)... these all collide in my viscera and unnerve my guts in a Very Special Way... leaving me feeling like I've just witnessed something rather Wrong, or perhaps not right is a better term... it's an accidentally successful messing with the head that very few of only the very best of the avant garde can manage to pull off... and something that the subtitled, un-dubbed, widescreen versions of these films cannot do, particularly in pristine transfers.

So, on the release-crest of the restored Gojira to the Western World:

Cheers to cheese! A purpose to (almost) everything under heaven & hell. I mean, for heaven's sake, those tiny little Mothra-emissary Japanese women in the pink business suits & fluffy pillbox-hats! Can we talk?

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Question:

Which movie had the tiny "twins" in the nightclub who were telepathically connected to the monster? Was it one of the Gamera movies???

That was Mothra.

[atcolomb]

I was happy to see my favorite monster movie "The Mysterians" released on dvd by Media Blasters. The movie is great fun with lots of action and the image and sound is very good with a audio commentary.

[knives]

Maybe this should be changed into a general Kaiju thread. Anyways I'm posting mostly because I want to know if all of the Gamera films were made on this much LSD or if Attack of the Monsters is a special case. It's my first time watching non-Toho Kaiju cinema and the differences are just weird. Like I think they're primarily using animatronics with close to no suitamation. The result is breathtaking in well to use the name of this thread it's accidental advant-gardeness.

Also while I know the reputation for these films gore I wasn't expecting purple condom explosions. I thought it would be like the Godzilla pictures of the time with realistic blood and stuff like that, but this is so cartoonish that it defies typical logic. Speaking of logic the humans here are the dumbest I've seen in a while. I know they're just kids (though the mum is easily the most useless character) but my god do I have no proper response to this.

[CSM126]

The "Save the Earth" number from the opening of Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster comes to mind reading this. Very...bizarre.