Welcome to Toho Kaiju Monogatari, a year-long weekly series that hopes to not only share the joy of these Godzilla movies, but all the kaiju movies that came out of Toho Studios from 1954 to 2004. Not just Godzilla, but Rodan, Mothra, Japanese King Kong, kaiju-Frankenstein, and dozens more! And you can play along with the adventure, following the full weekly schedule HERE, as we watch men in suits stomp miniatures of famous cities flat for not just our entertainment, but for the history of cinema itself!

So we’ve been firmly entrenched in the early years of kaiju films so far, the wave of movies that appeared after Godzilla all more or less embracing the model of Godzilla with horror elements and a focus on the destructive power and inevitable suffering that’s caused by our own scientific hubris. But on the tail end of this first wave, a new screenwriter would appear: Shinichi Sekizawa, who had a new concept for where to take kaiju films, an idea that would reshape the direction of the genre.

And with it would come the first emergence of the new trend for these movies: successful, relatively cheap adventure films, that eschewed the sobering social commentary of the 50s for something much more adventurous, something much more light-hearted, and something much more fantastical.

Of all the kaiju movies we’ve seen thus far, none of them have felt as instantly King Kong inspired as Mothra. From the outset, we’re given a mysterious irradiated island where a fishing boat accidentally crashes. The rescue party, heading to this Infant Island expecting to find bodies, finds the fishermen not only healthy but unaffected by the radiation sickness. When they admit that they came across natives that gave them some sort of concoction that cured them, it becomes clear that Infant Island might hold the much-desired secret of curing the affects of radiation. Too bad the press broke into the lab to hear the discovery, and is ready to tell the world the exciting news.

The discovery, however, is also discovered by the Russian-American amalgam/stand-in called Rolisica, who were originally the ones who conducted the nuclear tests and who technically own the rights to whatever is on Infant Island. The Rolisican government then quickly forms a Japanese-Rolisican coalition, roping in the reporters before they can get their story out too far and wide, that is tasked with heading to the island to discover the source of this mysterious power and, if possible, find a way to exploit it. Heading this task force is Clark Nelson (Jerry Ito), a huckster capitalist with a penchant for making money by any means necessary.

A bunch of Japanese people in blackface. Sometimes these movies are gross.

Once the expedition lands on Infant Island, they quickly discover not only indigenous natives, but the shobijin (translated to small beauties), two women only a foot tall who communicate through song. They seem to be worshiped in some way by the natives, who also have caves full of hieroglyphic writing that the expedition struggles to decipher, seemingly speaking about a guardian spirit called Mothra. The entire expedition seem instantly protective of the identity of the shobijin, outside of Nelson who decides that he can use them to further his own gains by capturing them and bringing them back and putting them on display to sold-out concert halls who will pay to see magical tiny women sing. Needless to say, the expedition isn’t into this idea, and are happy to leave the shobijin in peace, so Nelson takes them in secret and smuggles them back to Tokyo.

All in all, this whole plot is essentially what happens in King Kong, with the shobijin standing in for the gorilla. It’s pretty shameless, but in many ways its the best part of the movie, if only because Nelson is such a scummy guy and the shojibin are the best part of the movie, iconic not-really-performances by musicians The Peanuts. It’s also the start of some really problematic stuff in these films, as the ‘natives’ are an assortment of Japanese actors playing ambiguous ethnicity with the kind of grass skirt, dumb stare stereotypes that belong back in the 1930s but read as really weird here. It’s not quite openly offensive (at least comparatively) yet, but we’re going to see a lot more of this in future movies, so it’s worth noting how big a role it plays here.

Either way, the shojibin begin to perform against their will, singing a song that became instantly famous and video of which will be linked below. The Mothra song is pretty indeible, more so in some ways than the monster itself, which only is revealed halfway into the movie when the natives pray around a mountainside that gives way to reveal a giant egg that slowly begins to crack open. What was hidden away was the eponymous moth-monster itself, who emerges from the egg in a larval state and immediately makes a beeline for Tokyo and the shojibin, connected by telepathy and ready to rescue them to the exclusion of everything in its path.

Really the stars of this movie.

The joint forces of the Japanese and Rolisican military aren’t nearly enough to stop the larval form of Mothra from swimming from Infant Island into Tokyo where it proceeds to headbutt the hell out of everything before wrapping itself into a cocoon up against the confines of Tokyo Tower. In the meantime, Nelson takes this opportunity in between the chaos to smuggle the shojibin out of Tokyo and to New Kirk City, a strange fake-New York where everything looks like a set that’s part American city and part European village. It’s here that the reporters and police finally confront Nelson, leading to a shootout where Nelson is killed and the heroes finally get the shojibin back. Just in time, too, as in Japan the cocoon bursts open and suddenly the fully mature adult Mothra takes off, leaving devastation in its wake as it rushes for the shojibin with renewed purpose.

It’s here that the movie hits its weirdest point, as the Rolisicans decide to pray in front of a clearly Christian church for sanctuary from the wrath of Mothra, even as the shojibin send out calming thoughts in order to keep it from destroying New Kirk City when it arrives. Their prayers include a pan up the church itself, until it lights upon a cross with a halo from the sun behind it, which matches a hieroglyphic that the reporters found all the way back on Infant Island at the start of the film, a sort of symbol for Mothra’s protecting godhood. Nobody ever stops to consider the implications, as they rush to get the shojibin to the air field where Mothra is going to land, but essentially the movie collaborates Mothra with some sort of greater mythological deity, a sense that Mothra is an eternal myth and its wrath or protection has echos even in Christian myth.

What Japan thinks America looks like.

And that might seem rather trivial, but it’s a decided move away from the prehistoric creatures mutated by the hubris of nuclear technology and into the realm of full on adventure-fantasy. Mothra isn’t a metaphor for our own foibles as a people, but a creature from forgotten history, a spiritual mythic legacy that comes back into our modern lives to readjust our perceptions of what is or isn’t possible. The horror of Mothra (if you can claim the movie has horror elements, because it really doesn’t) isn’t that we create our own destruction, but that we bring destruction upon ourselves by forgetting our heritage and not respecting the cultural foundations of others. It’s more socially conscious, and decidedly apolitical, and there’s little surprise that it breezes into the genre and takes a firm hold as the movies begin to step more and more into the realm of the fantastical as kaiju enters the 60s.

Zilla’s American Counterpoint

The American version of Mothra manages to cut ten minutes out of the Japanese release, removing a lot of the more overt implications that Rolisica is the United States and managing to remove the entirety of the religious connotations towards the end. Which really just leaves it as another monster movie, which is honestly the weakest part of Mothra as a whole.

I decided to save my general impression of Mothra until now because it’s even more apparent in the US cut, but Mothra is a movie that lays better groundwork than it does work on its own. It’s interesting in themes, but ultimately the story is just a weird rehash of King Kong with the monster mostly removed from the movie. Mothra doesn’t even emerge from its cocoon into the colorful monster everyone knows until the movie is nearly over, and most of the time it’s just flying somewhere. There’s no personality, a general dearth of cool ‘moth destroys stuff’ effects, and just an air of disinterest. It ends up feeling monster-wise like a cut rate retread of Rodan, which did flying monsters infinitely better than Mothra bothers to do.

Mothra egg! I think the kaiju eggs are all really cool in general.

Not that the movie is terrible. It’s not as immediately interesting as many of the films that surround it, but Mothra is a cool monster design and the themes that it brings to the genre feel fresh after so many of the serious first-wave kaiju films with their heads firmly stuck in 50s moralizing alarmist tales of science gone awry. It’s great to have some fun and fantasy put on the screen, but it just doesn’t feel like enough. A step in the right direction, but really what the world needs is something ridiculous. Something monumental. Something … like King Kong vs Godzilla.

MONSTER BESTIARY

Mothra - larval

length: 80 meters
mass: 15,000 metric tons
origin: guardian of Infant Island, hatched from egg

abilities

• unstoppable by conventional weapons
• silk spray
• telepathic link with the Shobijin

weaknesses

• ???

Mothra - adult

wingspan: 250 meters
mass: 15,000 metric tons
origin: metamorphosis of larval Mothra, emerged from cocoon under Tokyo Tower

abilities

• super speed
• destructive gusts from wings
• telepathic link with Shobijin

weaknesses

• ???

So welcome to Raging Rapidity, the season of Serious About Series where I get down on Vin Diesel and Paul Walker and the gang of street racers, cops, thieves, and other sundry ne’er-do-wells. This is not just to crack wise about how dumb Paul Walker is in general, but also to try to explain exactly why I’m so into this series and why I’ll be the first in line for Fast Six whenever it decides to come out this year.

Strap in, put on some sunglasses, and get ready to let those who are fast and those who are furious drift their way into your heart, one last job and one last quarter mile at a time.

Fast Five (2011)

Fast Five is majestic. It’s hard to put it into context if you haven’t seen the movies, but I’m operating under the assumption that anyone who has read these probably has, so I’m going to grant that you know. After the floundering and moderate successes of prior movies, Fast Five picks up literally right where Fast & Furious left off with a whole new level of ridiculous.

By now you know the score: Paul Walker and Mia spring Dom from prison and all them go on the lam to Brazil, where they try to put their past behind them but have to keep pulling jobs in order to make ends meet and say ahead of the law. Running afoul of the drug dealer that controls seemingly the entire country, suddenly team Dom & Paul are getting heat not just from this guy and his private army, but the US Federal Government who sends in their star agent Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to lay the smack down on their candy asses in grand Rock fashion.

The whole thing spirals into a convoluted plot that finally throws all vestiges of being a race movie out the window in favor of a straight up heist plot. In fact, the movie seems to relish gleefully ripping off the Ocean’s Eleven formula right down to the getting-a-team-together montage and ridiculous 11th hour twist where they reveal that they’ve been a step ahead of the audience the whole time—just instead of it involving Matt Damon, it involves driving cars and doing really dumb things with them.

Which sounds like I’m selling it short, but I can’t stress enough just how well this formula works for them. Especially since the getting-the-team-together moment involves pulling in people from literally every prior movie, including people who seemingly barely mattered or in some instances should really be dead (like Han, because of course Han is still alive. And thank god for that, too). It’s so many people that instead of my normal jokey graph I’m going to include a real legitimate reference sheet at the bottom so you can play along at home and go “Really? That person was from a previous movie?”

Not quite the full team, but they look particularly cool here.

And all this is on top of a movie that gives up the bad CG for really solid practical stunts, including some very real car wrecks, some very dumb fight scenes, and a final setpiece involving dragging a (admittedly probably not real, but it’s hard to tell) bank vault through the streets tethered to two cars like a flail. It’s very stupid in the very specific way that movies that put entertainment first and logic second can attain through verve and gall, which Fast Five totes about in excess, slung in bursting bags of machismo over each shoulder.

Which isn’t to say that Fast Five trades simply on being stupid. That sense of abandon is what gives it a lot of its charm, but the point I want to drive home at the end of this general summary of what I think about the film applies not just to this movie, but the whole franchise. Fast Five is not just a good action movie, it’s the fifth entry in an evolving action franchise that consistently is improving in quality and isn’t based on a book, a toy, a comic, or a video game. Fast Five is, in many ways, pure cinema. You can’t have a car book. You can’t make street racing and heisting into a series of action figures.

This is what romance looks like.

The things that make the Fast and the Furious great as a franchise are inherently cinematic: the oversized personalities, the shifting tones and styles, the delight in seeing actors crop up in cameos and age into and out of their characters, and the relentless pursuit of big action setpieces that carry on the legacy of 80s and 90s action films far better than Michael Bay’s bank of computers will ever be able to accomplish. They aren’t the most cerebral movies in the world, but making good popcorn entertainment that is original and not bland corporate product is seemingly a lost art. So anyone who would sniff at these movies and still complain about the lack of original films while they line up to see yet another superhero summer film? Fuck those people. They’re the problem. Elitism has no place in movie watching.

That’s the joy of movies: they are the most democratic of art forms, because everybody can watch nearly every movie available at any time. My point is this: if you’ve gone this far and haven’t watched these movies, what is wrong with you? If you’re against any movie with explosions and energy, then fine. Taste is taste. But if you dutifully line up for your Avengers or Transformers or even god-forsaken Battleship and haven’t cracked a Fast and Furious movie yet? Re-evaluate your priorities and start back up your Netflix disc plan. You have a whole lot of good fun to experience, and just in time for the sequel that is undoubtedly going to be a spectacle to behold.

Most Unintentionally Funny Bullshit, Bro

This movie is fully aware of itself, so calling anything unintential would be selling the whole movie short. The winner for ridiculous nonsense comes at the very end of the movie, though, after the heroes have won and had another montage about how they spent the ridiculous amounts of money they stole. The credits run for a few minutes, before the movie drops us back into a credits stinger: the Rock is busy being a supercop (but not Jackie Chan’s Supercop) when Eva Mendes walks in reminding us that she was in one of these movies before.

Bank vault! What more is there to say?

Before we can think too hard about that, she drops a file on his desk, and talks about someone pulling heists in Europe. The Rock is too busy pining over the escaped Dom, but then she insists. Flipping through it, he lands on a picture. “Do you believe in ghosts?” Eva Mendes asks, as it reveals the picture to be of Letty! That’s right, she’s supposedly not dead! And she’s somehow off running another heist gang? Which must make her a villain, right?! WHO KNOWS?! FAST AND FURIOUS SIX IS OUT IN MERE WEEKS!1!

I’m No Expert, But Cars Probably Don’t Do That

There isn’t a bunch of car stuff in this movie, honestly, but there is that final scene involving a safe that probably actually couldn’t actually happen from a sheer physics and weight perspective. But math is boring, and I’m not going to look up some article Slashfilm undoubtedly posted in 2011 about how impossible that safe stuff is, because I don’t give a single shit about what is real and what isn’t. Instead, let’s talk about cliffs and driving off of them.

Early on in the movie Dom is driving a car next to a speeding train Paul Walker is on, as Paul Walker hangs on a truck that is stuck in the train (don’t ask), hanging out over the side watching as the train rushes towards a truss bridge that will undoubtedly squash him like the blue-eyed bug he is. He leaps into Dom’s waiting convertible just in time, only for the two of them to sail that car right over a cliff into a river in the gorge below. The two of them look at each other and then leap out of the car, splashing into the water in a moment of pure buddy comedy hijinks.

Dumb shit about to happen.

The thing is, while I’m not an expert about cars I’m an expert about MythBusters, and they did an episode where they pointed out that falling from the height of bridges and the like into water would undoubtedly kill you because hitting water at that speed is just as bad as hitting a solid surface. So what should have happened is Dom and Paul Walker should have had their knees shoved up into their shoulders as the rest of them turned into a bloody paste inside a skin bag. Ah, who am I fooling? These are the movies: anything can happen.

The Slashfic Award for Best Homoerotic Moment (presented by Tumblr)

Let’s talk about the sweatiest fight in all of film. The Rock and Dom are paired off as the rivals right from the beginning, with both of them being bald and muscular and the clear leaders of their respective domains. So by the time they actually get to square off they’ve already ran over favelas and glared at each other across armed standoffs; all that’s left is the fighting. And like any good wrestling fued, the main event doesn’t disappoint.

The fight takes cues from the Elle/Bride fight in Kill Bill vol 2, in that the two men grab each other and smash through a variety of small rooms, causing as much wreckage and chaos as one could possibly imagine. More, if you consider they’re doing this all from a fairly abandoned building, and suddenly stumble into all the things to scatter around the wake of their wrestle-fest. That’s what they call it, right? Wrestle-fest? I know all the lingo.

Either way, it ends with Dom actually getting the better of the Rock, which seems ridiculous except that Dom already has Car-Jedi powers and stuff, so he could probably fight anyone. And it ends with Dom on top of him, grunting intensely into his face as they stare into each others souls and recognize, deep down, that they’re the same driven-yet-sensitive man. And then Dom nearly beats him to death, but let’s not split hairs.

No joke here. I’m going to give you an actually useful reference chart.

Welcome to Toho Kaiju Monogatari, a year-long weekly series that hopes to not only share the joy of these Godzilla movies, but all the kaiju movies that came out of Toho Studios from 1954 to 2004. Not just Godzilla, but Rodan, Mothra, Japanese King Kong, kaiju-Frankenstein, and dozens more! And you can play along with the adventure, following the full weekly schedule HERE, as we watch men in suits stomp miniatures of famous cities flat for not just our entertainment, but for the history of cinema itself!

Today’s movie is something of an aberration on this list, and is perhaps one of the few movies on this list that technically doesn’t count as a kaiju movie. There’s no giant monsters, and the genre veers much more sharply into the broadly sci-fi (or even space opera). That said, there are reasons to cover it, not least of which is because it’s a pseudo-sequel to one of the movies we’ve already covered. Also, it furthers the secondary development in the history of these movies of embracing a broader cultural pallate in telling these stories. So let’s hop on the international space train (no, that’s just a euphamism, sadly the movie doesn’t have one of those) and check out…

The year is 1965, and several years have passed since humanity’s first brush with alien life when they encountered the hostile Mysterians (as seen, surprisingly enough, in The Mysterians). Now humanity is blossoming under a space golden age, already having made the trip into orbit where the huge international J-SS3 Space Station is currently hanging in space, with people going about their days doing science and watching for further evidence of alien visitation. Suddenly, the radars flare up with sudden signs of life: a few unknown ships, small and fast, fly out of nowhere with lasers blazing. The space station tries to put up a defense, but its feeble experimental beam weapons have no effect. The station explodes, killing everyone aboard, and setting off an international incident.

How far we’ve fallen. #PenniesforNASA

At the Japanese Space Research Center, a whole bevy of international diplomats meet to discuss the crisis. Not only did this happen, but around the world strange incidents are occurring nearly simultaneously: a levitating railroad bridge causing a wreck, a ship lifted out of the ocean to be deposited on land, and more. Something is causing weird gravity disturbances, and that something is everywhere on the planet at once. Thankfully, Japan’s top scientists (who have names, but they’re just some actors who don’t really matter so whatever) have a theory: aliens are among us, and affecting the flow of human life.

The science, which is all very scientific (and actually supposedly period-accurate, showing you just how far science has come since 1959), runs thus: the aliens have some sort of freeze ray, as evidenced by the frostbite victims seem to suffer. When they hit something with the freeze beam, it slows the kinetic energy of the atoms as they lose heat, which in turn changes their weight until they are no longer affected by gravity and simply float away. Science! And since human technology can’t do that yet, obviously it must be aliens. In fact, humans have just barely begun to improve upon the crude beam weapons they used several years prior to fight off the Mysterian threat—simple heat rays that don’t make anything float so much as explode.

Prescient look at international politics in the 21st century.

At the same time, the Iranian delegate is abducted from the balcony of his office only to appear and try to sabotage the heat ray experiments. He’s caught before he can do too much damage, but the scientists discover the truth in the scuffle: he was under the influence of aliens, who appear briefly as they try to vaporize evidence of their meddling. Everyone’s worst fears are true: aliens are not only here, but they’ve been here and have means to control our minds. Quickly, an international team is put together to go to the Moon, where they theorize these aliens must be hiding in order to avoid detection from orbit.

What follows is this: an international team gets put together to head to the moon. Among them? The older professor and the younger man who has a heartfelt goodbye in a field with the professor’s daughter who he’s dating, a thing the professor seems to disapprove of. They take two ships to the moon, where they land and depart in two giant moon buggies to try to approach the alien base from two separate angles for redundancy’s sake. This is wise, because one of the crew members is incapacitated by space madness (alien control) and manages to nearly kill everyone on one of the two buggies. But everyone manages to pull together, and at great cost of personal life (including the older professor sacrificing himself in a last stand) they manage to get the job done.

“We’re doing science!”

Now here’s my question to you: did I just give you a rundown of Battle in Outer Space, or did I poorly summarize Armageddon?

Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but it’s kind of amazing/hilarious/bewildering to recognize one of the defining summer films of the eve of the Willennium in the blood of a strange, semi-obscure Japanese science fiction movie. It’s all there, not played for as many laughs and without the gross butt rock power ballad, but enough to be instantly recognizable to anyone who’s paying attention. One of those finds that reminds me why I do the things I do: making dumb connections like that is the most rewarding part of movie nerdery.

Either way, the stuff going into space is actually really fantastic. 1959 was before people had even been far enough into space to do a lot of great orbital photography, but the way space and the Earth and the Moon are depicted are stunningly detailed and have a verisimilitude that’s surprising given the typical cornball nature of these types of movies (especially The Mysterians). Deep down, this is a movie that tries to be very scientific about everything it does, to the point of making up landing procedures for rockets on the moon that isn’t that far removed from what NASA eventually did with lunar landers a decade later when they accomplished the real thing.

This is probably the coolest Earth model in all of movies.

Sadly, once they get into space and onto the Moon the movie takes a turn for the silly. The aliens turn out to be these short helmeted humanoid creatures called the Natal, who don’t really have any sort of identified purpose because they never manage to really make contact in a meaningful way. There’s a big shootout, and then the humans retreat to warn Earth forces, and the movie ends with a big space battle involving flying saucers and Earth rockets that is basically the big kid version of what I imagine children in the 1950s did every day with their toys. Hell, I would have done it too, except I was the nerdy child who wanted to play Captain Picard and talk to all the aliens instead of shoot at them.

More interesting than the plot, though, is the increased focus on the international group that the Japanese lead. There’s an interesting nationalistic bent that feels very Japanese, in that the team is going to be a big United Nations sort of group, but the Japanese will lead it. Not a huge deal, but it’s in stark contrast to most American versions of this, which involve the international group dragging their feet until the Americans go it alone, a trope we’ve seen so many times that Cowboy Diplomacy is more fact than fiction now, if it ever wasn’t more than just a thing that happened in the movies.

The alien base looks more or less like Pop-o-Matic Trouble.

This international bent serves two purposes, though: not only does it open up the scope to locations more exotic than Japan, but it allows them to cast foreign (usually English) actors, which means that the movies are easier to sell to an international audience that is dominated by English focused film distribution. Sure, there’s only a handful of Europeans or Americans in this movie, and they’re hardly the focus, but they’re always there and they always have a key thing to do, enough to cut a trailer around for any international market you desired to sell the film in.

While it’s a curiosity now, this will become increasingly a part of many of these movies, as they become more than just domestic money-makers but sources of licensing revenue both in Japan and abroad, which requires a sort of adaptability that means stripping a lot of the specific national and cultural flavor out of it in favor of something unique to these kaiju movies, a sense of the world that doesn’t quite depict reality as it is, but as it would be in a world where people were regularly banding together to fight giant monsters. Regardless of your opinion on whether that’s good or not (at this point I’m fairly ambivalent, and amused at the Japanese version of European ethnicity), it’s certainly a far cry from the very topical, specific origins of Godzilla only five years prior.

Landmarks get destroyed! Yeah, okay, so barely. But it counts!

Zilla’s American Counterpoint

Not much to say here. There’s some music changes, but for the most part it’s a straight if fairly uninspired dub job. I have to say, though, I don’t understand the thinking behind these dub jobs. Everyone has these awful Asian accents that aren’t quite racist but definitely sound like you got actors (probably Asian-Americans who could speak perfect English, ironically enough) to dub over these lines that are supposed to be in native tongues in English that isn’t broken but is certainly heavy on the accent. It doesn’t make sense. The movie still seems to more or less delineate that everyone is speaking different languages, but it presents it in the context of everyone just speaking various forms of accented English. At least the Japanese version has the decency to give everyone their own language and subtitle the hell out of it.

Regardless, it’s not like this is an emotion-heavy movie either way, though I’ll admit it’s far harder to take movies like this seriously when everyone’s overplaying every single line that was delivered straight and soberly on the day. But if you’re into making fun of old movies for being old (and thus being an asshole, but that’s your right I guess), then go nuts. You won’t lose a thing.

MONSTER BESTIARY

Natals
size: 4 foot nothin’
origin: Spaaaaaace

abilities

• technology
• space ships
• laser beams
• remote mind control

weaknesses

• being humanoid and thus squishy
• also kinda lame
• hubris

So welcome to Raging Rapidity, the season of Serious About Series where I get down on Vin Diesel and Paul Walker and the gang of street racers, cops, thieves, and other sundry ne’er-do-wells. This is not just to crack wise about how dumb Paul Walker is in general, but also to try to explain exactly why I’m so into this series and why I’ll be the first in line for Fast Six whenever it decides to come out this year.

Strap in, put on some sunglasses, and get ready to let those who are fast and those who are furious drift their way into your heart, one last job and one last quarter mile at a time.

Fast & Furious (2009)

Fast & Furious is the moment when the entirety of this franchise starts to come into focus. After three very different movies of varying qualities, they finally had resources to get everyone back together for a real sequel to the first movie. At the same time, Tokyo Drift is in many ways the epitome of teenage race movies. So trying to recapture the thunder of the youth culture in The Fast and the Furious would probably be impossible, which leaves them with very little: some characters that nobody was that fond of (at that point), a car theme, and a sense that things had to change.

Fast & Furious, then, strips out most of the racing in favor of a pretty straightforward crime story that is in some ways a bigger, more self-serious version of The Fast and the Furious. Paul Walker has graduated from goofy surfer cop to suit-toting FBI agent, and Dom goes off to Mexico to become a Robin Hood type, stealing gas and giving it to poor people, landing on federal Most Wanted lists for his variety of crimes and prison escapes. So when he disbands his entire crew (including a not-dead Han, cementing at least part of this movie as occurring pre-Tokyo Drift), it takes Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) dying while doing some sort of shady crime shit to get him back in the states and back on the radar of Paul Walker and the US government.

Dom tries to infiltrate the criminal organization that Letty was working for in order to discover who killed her, while Paul Walker goes undercover to try to bust the drug cartel, which brings both men together. Paul Walker still has a chip on his shoulder about Dom and Mia and letting them all get away years ago, and Dom is still pissed Paul Walker is a cop. It’s a bubbling cauldron of tension! Especially as both men end up kind of working together to try to bring down the cartel and find Letty’s killer. It’s here that the movie thrusts them into the partnership they never really had before.

Paul Walker finally learns in this movie how to be charming.

This all does a great job of recontextualizing The Fast and the Furious as an action franchise first and a car franchise second. That’s great, because ultimately it wandered as far as it could go in the gearhead direction. That said, it’s not a fully comfortable shift, and the movie feels very uneven at times. The death that kicks off the plot is handled with a seriousness that seems out of place compared to Paul Walker and Dom glaring at each other and continually trying over and over to best each other in races. That tonal inconsistency goes to the rest of the movie, which juggles some haphazard CG set-pieces with a crime plot predicated on boring twists and turns, as well as a set of villains that are utterly forgettable. As plot-driven as these movies are, the hero characters are why we’re here, and Fast & Furious doesn’t seem to really understand that yet.

Which is to say that Fast & Furious just isn’t very good. It’s a solid setup for the movie to come, but it feels like a piece that exists only to cleave the future of the series out from the spectre of what came before. It’s an interesting gear shift (sad_trombone.wav) but it’s more a curiosity and a stepping stone into Fast Five than a great movie on its own. Of course, that’s really an appraisal made in the shadow of what is coming. At the time, when I saw this in a theater, I thought it was fine. Dumb, and way too much CG, but fine. It’s certainly not as bad as 2 Fast 2 Furious!

Most Unintentionally Funny Bullshit, Bro

So let’s talk about that CG. Does anyone remember The Wheelman? Probably not. It was a Midway-published video game for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 that came out in 2009 shortly before Midway went bankrupt. In it, you play as Vin Diesel (who produced the game), who takes on the role of some sort of driver for some criminals or something. I don’t quite remember the full details (who does?) but what I do remember is that the game had a dumb core mechanic: Vin Diesel could switch cars at any time by leaping out of the one he was into and taking over a nearby car, a move known in the game as Air Jacking.

Imagine my surprise, then, when in a moment of pure cross-media synergy that undoubtedly got some marketer paid handsomely, Vin Diesel at the very climax of the film is racing down the bad CG tunnels underneath the US-Mexico border. The car next to him is blocking him from taking the safe road, and his car is about to crash. He opens the door so that it gets torn off, he pulls close to his opponent, and then he leaps out of his car and into their open passenger side window! A real live action Air Jack ™! (Well sort of, since I’m pretty sure the only thing real in the shot is a leaping stunt man.)

This is an actual shot from the movie, but you wouldn’t know it for how fake it looks.

I’m sure it sounded like a good idea at the time, when you had Vin Diesel starring in a movie and putting out a video game, but given the fact I had to just explain to you at length what The Wheelman was should tell you how useful that idea was. And the idea that you would co-opt your plot to shove in the extravagant bullshit of video game stunts makes the whole thing feel gross, especially given how much of a non-entity The Wheelman is. Fast & Furious, bafflingly, lives on in our hears.

I’m No Expert, But Cars Probably Don’t Do That

There’s a lot of weird car stuff in this movie, especially given that it has a weird reliance on CG crashes that the other Justin Lin-helmed movies do not. Be it a tumbling gas tanker that Vin Diesel narrowly drives under as it bounces down a mountain road, or the incredibly stupid aforementioned cave racing, the movie just relies too much on a spectacle that doesn’t feel real enough to sell as interesting.

The worst bit of car-based nonsense comes early on in the movie, though, when Dom first hears about Letty and insists that Mia take him to the crash site. He stands there, examining crash marks, and suddenly turns into a Forensic Jedi, capable of reading a bunch of old tire tracks and telling with absolute certainty not just how the crash happened, but how the people reacted once they got out of the cars. This is told through superimposed flashback, involving a scene with a ghost car literally driving through Vin Diesel as he pensively looks on in dismay.

Letty clinging to the bus this series throws her under.

I’m not sure where Dom got his magical CSI powers, but they seem to only exist in this one moment before disappearing into smoke, much like the phantom cars he sees.

The Slashfic Award for Best Homoerotic Moment (presented by Tumblr)

The truth is that anytime Vin Diesel and Paul Walker are in a movie they are going to spend a large amount of time making lovey eyes at each other. Yes, Han is in this movie, but he’s only in it for about two minutes and is totally eclipsed by the mental grudge-fucking Dom and Paul Walker give each other each time they share a scene together. They’ve had this rivalry going for eight years now, and suddenly Dom’s a federally wanted man and Paul Walker isn’t just a cop, he’s a federal agent. You can feel the tension.

It’s hard to pick exactly one moment when there are so many gems. The winner, then, has to be when Dom and Paul Walker head to a club to meet with the bad guy to get vetted for their drug-running jobs. As they sit there trading barbs with one another between the Big Bad while drinking beers, it becomes obvious that there’s more to their rivalry than friendly racing. Obviously they have A Sordid Past. So the Big Bad asks them “Hey, you guys know each other?” Paul Walker looks sheepish at being so obvious when he’s supposed to be a serious undercover cop, but replies “I used to date his sister.” Because that’s a much more convenient answer than trying to psychoanalyze the sexual tension between Dom and Paul Walker that has defined them.

Sadly, by the end of this movie Paul Walker runs off with Mia and cements his heterosexuality, leaving Dom abandoned by both of his true loves. Thankfully, there’s a new romance looming on the horizon for Dom. And it is the MOST …. electrifying homo-eroticism in action entertainment!

A Venn diagram was inevitable, right?

Thanks everyone for your patience.

So welcome to Raging Rapidity, the season of Serious About Series where I get down on Vin Diesel and Paul Walker and the gang of street racers, cops, thieves, and other sundry ne’er-do-wells. This is not just to crack wise about how dumb Paul Walker is in general, but also to try to explain exactly why I’m so into this series and why I’ll be the first in line for Fast Six whenever it decides to come out this year.

Strap in, put on some sunglasses, and get ready to let those who are fast and those who are furious drift their way into your heart, one last job and one last quarter mile at a time.

The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

Trying to explain exactly why I adore Tokyo Drift is difficult, because in many ways it takes the problems of the Fast and the Furious franchise and runs with them. New director Justin Lin was handed a well-known franchise without the stars, so to make up for this, he decided to double down on the core concept: kids sure are into that street racing! For some added spice, he moved the action off the American streets and set it deep in the land of the rising sun.

Enter Sean, ‘played’ by Lucas Black’s ridiculous southern accent, who finds himself banished from America because he’s too rebellious and sent to Japan to live with his Bad Dad. Bad Dad turns out to be a military man who insists Sean go to school and clean up his act, which is just fine and dandy, until he gets pulled into this whole new world of street crime: drift racing. This is cool enough, but then the yakuza show up, including Yazuka Boss Sonny Chiba, riding a brief period of post-Kill Bill cameo cred, and again doing his best to remind you he doesn’t know a word of English every time he opens his mouth.

The thing I want to emphasize with Tokyo Drift isn’t that it reinvents the wheel on this stuff. This movie is as steeped in cliche as the others, if not moreso; but instead it takes those ideas of teens and cars and crime and extrapolates them out into a self-referential throwback, a movie that’s anachronistic in just how straightforward it is. You could make a 1960s version of Tokyo Drift and nobody would bat an eye, that’s how well-trod this yakuza plot is. It’s not the content, but the context, that makes Tokyo Drift work.

Sean wrecks a whole lot of cars in his quest to learn to drift.

The context, of course, is Japan. Everyone of a certain generation and a certain background has an affinity for the country. As a child of an era of Nintendo games and the first crashing wave of Anime in popular culture, Japan was a nigh-magical place where all the cool things came from: video games, robots, anime, and more. Tokyo was the white-hot center of that nexus of nerdiness and weirdness, where a person could get lost in endless amounts of wild new experiences. Tokyo Drift knows that, and so assembles a vision of Tokyo that is part childlike dream and part cinematic fantasy; a gleaming modern Utopia where the downtrodden from around the world gather to make a new start; an international port of call that’s home to a ragtag group that end up as Sean’s support system.

Which brings us to Han (Sung Kang), the real reason Tokyo Drift is great. The wise-cracking, apathetic, Zen version of a racing mentor, Han is the Korean Obi-Wan Kenobi to Sean’s Luke Skywalker. He’s seen it all: after pulling mysterious jobs in his past, he’s a washed-up crook already in his 30’s. He can race, but doesn’t have to, because he’s moved beyond the young man’s need to prove himself. Han is cool. Han is so cool that him getting killed halfway through the movie is the first time in three films that I actually give a shit about any story beat in these movies, and it immediately helps cement Tokyo Drift as the watershed moment where The Fast and the Furious began to grow up.

Bow Wow being as ridiculous as Bow Wow can.

I think it’s telling that this movie, with its focus on a younger cast, manages to approach everything with a greater earnestness than the prior two films. It’s not about cops and drugs, it’s not even really about crime. It’s about these people who live to race and love to win, and what kind of culture represents. Sure, it’s adolescent, but Tokyo Drift is built around an adolescent setting. Hell, it’s the only movie in the entire series where parents play any part at all. It might go out of its way to be a Stranger in a Strange Land type of story, but ultimately it’s the most at home in young rivalry tropes of the entire series.

Which is why in many ways, it’s still my favorite of the series, because it’s the most silly and most in love with the racing tropes that spawned this series in the first place. Tokyo Drift is ultimately like a very stupid dog: you know it’s stupid, but you love it because of it, maybe even more than you would if it wasn’t. It might seem like a small thing, but merely embracing silliness carries a movie far in my eyes.

Han and Twinkie, chillin’.

Most Unintentionally Funny Bullshit, Bro

I’m actually convinced all the dumb things in this movie are 100% intentional: Sean’s ever-present lack of tact (and accent), Bow Wow’s enthusiasm, Sean’s love interest being the sole non-Asian woman in sight, Han calling him out on it, and the elaborately excessive Sonny Chiba cameo: Tokyo Drift is full of some dumb shit, but manages to carry it adorably.

Sonny Chiba: Yakuza Boss

So the award goes to all the little details: like how Sean has the most cliched bad parents in the world, or how he’s in a race one day and finds himself sent to Japan immediately to start school the next morning. And it’s not like they help him out! No, he’s just given a uniform and told to go to school, where he doesn’t speak Japanese. Good thing this is an American movie and thus, he has a bunch of English-speaking sidekicks to meet!

Deliberate use of lazy ‘new-kid-in-town’ cliches shoved into a Japanese context feed into the overall goofy vibe. It’s part post-modern wish fulfillment of all of us who grew up thinking Japan was the coolest, and part ridiculous use of narrative to sidestep any sort of realism to make the plot go, which is pretty great. It’s nice to see this series step into self-awareness. But it kind of makes the ‘unintentional’ part go away. Will it ever return?

I’m No Expert, But Cars Probably Don’t Do That

Drifting is an exercise in ‘oh god cars do that?’ all on its own. The mere act seems to go against what we’re taught about how cars work when you first learn to drive, so just watching them actually do the things they do is enough to break this category wide open. If cars can drift like that, what’s next? Flying cars? Actual Transformers? Magic is real and it lives in the hearts of every drift racer!

I watched a lot of Initial D at a very impressionable time in my youth, okay!?

My initial choice here was going to be the Mustang that Sean takes out of Bad Dad’s garage in order to fix up for the last big race. It’s a big-ass American muscle car that they tear apart to fit a Skyline’s engine and drive system into, which, if you know just enough about cars to fool people who don’t know anything sounds like EVIL MAGICKS. Especially when it turns the Mustang into a drift machine that Sean slowly learns to control in order to ride it into the final race to ultimate success.

The idea of a Mustang drifting on the mountain roads of Japan seems insane, against the very notion of what the differences between these types of cars are, but I looked it up, and apparently they did make a drift-able Mustang for the movie. It took a bunch of custom work, but they bolted a Skyline engine into a car like that and locked it into rear wheel drive so it drifted like it should. And if you can do that, then anything is possible, and Superman is probably right now flying so fast the Earth rotates backwards so he can make sure Han doesn’t die. Wait a second . . .

The Slashfic Award for Best Homoerotic Moment (presented by Tumblr)

There actually isn’t one of these this time around because everyone seems pretty sexless in this movie. Maybe it’s the high school setting, or maybe it’s how impossible I find it to take anything that’s going on seriously. Nobody’s super bro-y, and outside of the fact that the villain frequently gets real close to everyone’s face like he wants to make out, there really isn’t anything that doesn’t read like typical teen movie puppy love and friendship. I know, pretty lame, but sometimes a movie just isn’t interested in going homoerotic.

Haaaaaaaaaaaan.

That said, there is the wonder that is Han, but he mostly just seems ‘out of the game’ in terms of hooking up, maybe because he’s the one adult in a world full of high school kids. Also, because he dies. That being said, I’ve got your back, and if you want, you can read my 12-part Mary Sue fan fiction about me and Han street racing on the moon. You can reach me at my deviantart, where I go by the name HanDriftIntoMyKawaiiLessThan3.

Charts! Graphs! There’s no clever way to make a drifting joke in graph form!

Welcome to Toho Kaiju Monogatari, a year-long weekly series that hopes to not only share the joy of these Godzilla movies, but all the kaiju movies that came out of Toho Studios from 1954 to 2004. Not just Godzilla, but Rodan, Mothra, Japanese King Kong, kaiju-Frankenstein, and dozens more! And you can play along with the adventure, following the full weekly schedule HERE, as we watch men in suits stomp miniatures of famous cities flat for not just our entertainment, but for the history of cinema itself!

One of the most interesting parts of this project is realizing just how unfocused production of the kaiju movies was post-Godzilla. When Godzilla Raids Again! didn’t exactly set the world on fire, it seems like Toho was at a loss on how to proceed. They were trying everything, from color and new technologies, to much more typical 50s science fiction films. Pre-Godzilla as a franchise, it seemed like the guiding principle was to throw literally every idea at the wall to see what might stick.

What makes today’s movie so interesting, then, is that it was originally going to be produced specifically for American television, an hour-long kaiju feature that would be made for relatively cheap and work as an exclusive to the rapidly growing business of showing genre fare on TV. Toho went ahead with producing this version of the movie, only to have the American money back out while it was mostly done. Left with a lot of money dropped into monster design and effects shots, Toho went ahead and finished the movie, and gave us one of the more obscure entries in kaiju history.

A very rare specimen of butterfly, native only to Siberia, is spotted in the forests of Japan. Puzzled, a group of scientists heads into the unknown on an expedition along the unexplored Kitami River, only to end up coming across something offscreen that horrifies them seconds before it leads to their deaths. The police investigate and turn up no clues outside of a local legend the villagers have of an angry spirit of legend called Baradagi, who they pray to in hopes that they will be spared.

A bigger expedition, this time funded by a film company and containing several journalists, heads out into this region in order to solve the mystery of the Baradagi legend and figure out just what caused the deaths of the prior team. In doing so, they get warned multiple times by the locals, all wearing masks to try to scare off the scientists and press, but of course our intrepid heroes of rationality press on to the very source of the Kitami River. There, on the edge of the lake from which the river flows, they find the source of their problems: Varan!

Varan’s an interesting monster, being basically an amalgam of Godzilla and Anguirus, but without anything in the way of powers. He’s the second four-legged kaiju we’ve seen at this point, and even given the small budget and scope of Varan the monster itself is a massive improvement on the suits in Godzilla Raids Again. Varan’s much less bulky, naturally moves on both all fours and while standing on its hind two legs, and it looks great and gross, with its warty skin and giant single row of spikes coming out of its spine. Given this is one of the more obscure Toho kaiju, I feel like it’s a pretty memorable design, even if it’s essentially Godzilla-lite.

Including the title because A) there aren’t a ton of pictures from this movie and B) it looks cool. I’m at the point where I miss black and white kaiju movies.

Varan, so named because it appears to be part of the ancient species of dinosaurs called Varanopidae by one of the scientists, emerges from the lake and chases the expedition all the way back to the village, which it proceeds to destroy in grand kaiju fashion. This is one of the first heavily forested kaiju scenes, something we’ll see more and more of in later films, and here Varan really stands out as an impressive monster. Watching it tear apart rocks and dig up mountains of dirt and trees to get at the hiding heroes is a highlight of the movie and feels radically different than the usual city-stomping you’d get in other kaiju movies.

Varan eventually destroys the village and then reveals its secret ability: it can fly utilizing skin flaps to glide, which it uses to get out of there and leave our heroes baffled about what they just saw. Heading back to Tokyo to report, they instantly begin building up an armed military response for if or when Varan decides to follow them. This being a kaiju movie, Varan doesn’t disappoint, soon spotted in the ocean swimming towards Tokyo. Even the navy and air force can’t do anything to stop it, as Varan simply swats jets out of the air and dives deep underwater to avoid the normal explosives that the military has. The ammo runs out before Varan’s patience does, and once again the monster heads for Tokyo.

It’s here that the movie becomes a more typical kaiju film, with the military trying to fight off the monster as it makes landfall. And here where the plot twist happens in grand Godzilla fashion, as one of the scientists was working on a new explosive for mining that might be able to kill Varan, but only if they could somehow penetrate its skin. Once they realize that Varan is attracted to flares and tries to eat them like giant fireflies, they attach the bomb to a parachute and a flare and have Varan swallow its own destruction, the explosion causing Varan to demolish a large chunk of the city in its death throes before it plunges back into the water never to be heard from again.

Varan stomps the shit out of everything in both upright and all-fours modes. He’s versatile like that.

What’s interesting about Varan is just how much it feels like the formula of Godzilla laid bare, redone with a smaller budget and smaller scope but still something that works. A lot of it has to do with the movie being black and white, giving it a lot of the feel of the original movie, but with the added benefit of the advances in technology and adoption of a widescreen format. Compared to all the other kaiju movies, Varan looks great, sharp and full of shadows and with a great if under-used monster design at its core.

The problem, then, is that it’s basically another Godzilla movie without the big monster itself. In some ways, it feels more like a low budget Godzilla sequel than the actual Godzilla Raids Again does, which is meant as a compliment. But for a movie that’s supposed to have its own identity it struggles to be anything more than another one of those. A lot of that has to do with its modest origins, to be sure, but it’s also a problem with the increasing demands on these monsters to try to find new niches. And Varan is kind of a goofy monster, what with his random flight and lack of powers, not to mention the crazy scenes depicted in the pictures today where he’s waving at planes (no, not really, he’s trying to murder them) and creeping under the ocean (that one’s legit).

Also? Swatting planes out of the sky! And way better at it than Godzilla was in Godzilla Raids Again!

But honestly, I still think it’s a far more charming film than some of the ones of this era, without any of the moralizing and with a real sense of joy to the monster stuff. In some ways it feels like the first movie that is about the monster for the sake of the monster, just letting it be there and cool and do things that are fun to watch. And maybe that’s enough. Ultimately, I like to think it can be, when it’s done as well as this.

Zilla’s American Counterpoint

So remember when I said this was originally going to be on American TV? Well, eventually the US got a hold of this movie, but only after it was already made. And someone decided to go ahead and pull a Raymond Burr and shoot essentially an entirely new film about an American military scientist played by Myron Healey who encountered the monster while performing experiments at the lake. This movie managed to cut out nearly everything but the effects shots from the original, including the one flying shot and some of the Tokyo attack at the end.

It is supposedly really terrible, but sadly not included on the DVD I watched, and otherwise unavailable as far as I could tell. So just know that it exists, potentially somewhere in some bootleg form, and that I can’t imagine it’s anything other than hilarious garbage.

More importantly, for some reason Toho decided to go ahead and use the finished film to reconstruct the original TV version of Varan as it would have been, a pretty radical re-edit that shortens nearly everything in the movie and jams it all into a crazy jumble of compression. It’s a very strange curiosity, though it’s certainly not better than the original film, but it’s definitely a curiosity. It feels very much in the bad sci-fi vein, though, rife with overwrought narration and a lack of quiet beats that the original film was quite liberal with.

MONSTER BESTIARY

Varan

height: 50 meters
mass: 15,000 metric tons
origin: potential mutation of Varanus, or Monitor Lizard

abilities

• impervious skin
• gliding powers

weaknesses

• swallowing bombs

So welcome to Raging Rapidity, the season of Serious About Series where I get down on Vin Diesel and Paul Walker and the gang of street racers, cops, thieves, and other sundry ne’er-do-wells. This is not just to crack wise about how dumb Paul Walker is in general, but also to try to explain exactly why I’m so into this series and why I’ll be the first in line for Fast Six whenever it decides to come out this year.

Strap in, put on some sunglasses, and get ready to let those who are fast and those who are furious drift their way into your heart, one last job and one last quarter mile at a time.

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

So the first Fast and the Furious movie was a big hit, and everyone decided that the best way to proceed was to go ahead and make a new one. Unfortunately, director Rob Cohen and star Vin Diesel were off making the equally stupid xXx, so everyone was forced to carry on without them and take frosty-tipped Paul Walker and put him firmly in the starring role. You might say that’s a terrible idea (and you’d be right). Though for the role of his partner, they scoured the entire world to find someone who was less believable on screen than him. And you know what? They succeeded. Enter Tyrese.

Tyrese (Gibson, for those of you who aren’t masters at singers-turned-actors trivai categories) plays Roman Pearce, Walker’s former friend who was put away once our hero went cop. So Roman is basically the poor man’s Dom, a racer/thief with temper control issues and a big chip on his shoulder from being sent to prison by someone he trusted. Unfortunately, Tyrese manages not one iota of gravitas, and instead turns Roman into something akin to comic relief compared to Walker’s bro-y self-seriousness.

To be fair, that’s in keeping with the rest of the movie. 2 Fast 2 Furious is much more lighthearted than the first one, a buddy cop movie about two crooks who are tasked with going undercover to bust some drug running (or something?) in order to get their extensive criminal records expunged. Along the way, there’s some boring intrigue about getting found out. Oh, and Eva Mendes is there, playing an FBI agent who goes deep deep undercover as the Big Bad’s girlfriend. Shocking nobody, both Tyrese and Paul Walker are into her. Even less shocking, she ends up hooking up with Paul Walker, leaving Tyrese to eat burritos the entire movie.

You think I’m kidding now.

2 Fast 2 Furious is a John Singleton movie, and displays the kind of lackadaisical mercenary direction that you’d expect from the guy who managed to ruin a Samuel L Jackson-led Shaft remake. 2 Fast 2 Furious isn’t really a car movie, even though it features far more driving than the first. Instead, it’s basically Miami Vice, and I mean that both in tone and set up as Michael Mann’s own Miami Vice film. It manages to make it all feel like flabby comedy, drawing an already dull movie out with endless scenes of needless action. By the time the giant car chase unfolds at the end of the movie, I was left feeling exhausted that I had to sit through more set pieces. That’s the last thing you want for your big finish.

This is, to date, the worst of the Fast and the Furious movies. So you’ll forgive me if I’m brief about it.

Most Unintentionally Funny Bullshit, Bro

So the villain is an Argentinian drug smuggler named Carter Verone (thanks Wikipedia), who is played in slight bronze-face by Cole Hauser. That’s already enough to get him into this category, because Cole Hauser looks like the whitest man on earth even before he tries a faint South American accent. Even with his blatantHestoning of that shit, he’s only vaguely threatening because he is frequently seen trimming cigars like that bad guy from Darkman, though he never goes so far as to cut off anyone’s finger with his cigar cutter. No, Verone has far dumber ways to torture people.

This guy isn’t from South America, movie!

Somehow along the way he ends up with a crooked cop in his employ, played by that paragon of crooked cops, Mark Boone Jr, slumming it in between Chris Nolan movies. Verone decides to mess him up as a lesson to Tyrese and Paul Walker that he is capable of messing them up if need be. He does this by taking off Mark Boone Jr’s shirt, dropping a live rat on his stomach, and then covering it with a bucket. That’s gross enough, but he then begins torching the bucket, driving the rat to supposedly burrow through Mark Boone Jr’s. Which is a really fucked up way to kill someone, if the movie didn’t cop out completely in the middle of everyone going into hysterics the moments it’s suggested.

I don’t mind that you want to make your villain a little cartoonish, but you can’t have everyone suddenly act like he ate a live baby the minute he thinks up an elaborate and probably unrealistic plan like that. It just doesn’t work. Instead, it makes everyone look bad, and Verone looks even worse because he can’t even be bothered to carry out his novel torture methods properly. You suck, Verone.

I’m No Expert, But Cars Probably Don’t Do That

The Dukes of Hazzard. No, seriously. Somewhere along the way, when they realized they didn’t know how to end the movie, someone turned to someone else and said “What if we just do a ‘Dukes of Hazzard’?” And nobody said no. I swear to you, this is the climax of the movie, coming at the end of a dull, 30 minute driving sequence. I don’t even have words; I’m just going to show you how dumb this is.

Just because the movie admits it’s doing The Dukes of Hazzard doesn’t make it okay.

The Slashfic Award for Best Homoerotic Moment (presented by Tumblr)

This is in some ways the most homoerotic movie. While it doesn’t feature the heaving testosterone of Vin Diesel or (heaven help us) The Rock, it does have Paul Walker and Tyrese fighting like old lovers who have one too many bad hookups between them, but ultimately kind of still care for one another. And boy does the movie ride hard on that, pitting them into shouting matches and fist fights that almost always look ready to break out into a bout of furious hugging and emo-teen crying.

But it truly descends into dewey-eyed longing at about the two thirds point where Tyrese and Paul Walker are standing on a pier reflecting on how different their lives have gone in the intervening years. Paul Walker mocks Tyrese for constantly eating burritos, which he’s been doing essentially the whole movie, because prop acting. Tyrese flexes his carefully sculpted model-arms that have been presented in an array of sleeveless shirts and cut off denim vests, and notes that he has a fast metabolism. Also that after being in prison, he’s going to take the chance to indulge in as many comfort pleasures on the outside as he can, convinced that someday he might end up back behind bars.

AND THEN THEY KISS

To this Paul Walker longingly nods, drawn in by Tyrese’s bad boy past, wondering if maybe he will fill the void that was left by Dom heading off to who knows where with his gang. Paul Walker, once a cop, now understands the allure of crime—he knows that Tyrese is playing with fire, but he likes fire. The two face each other in front of the setting sun, the waves crashing behind their chiseled silhouettes, and as Paul Walker turns to him Tyrese sets down his burrito and says “Enough of that, time for dess-”

Er, wait, what? Sorry. I don’t know what came over me.

How Much Fast is Too Fast? How Much Furious is Too Furious?

More charts!

Welcome to Toho Kaiju Monogatari, a year-long weekly series that hopes to not only share the joy of these Godzilla movies, but all the kaiju movies that came out of Toho Studios from 1954 to 2004. Not just Godzilla, but Rodan, Mothra, Japanese King Kong, kaiju-Frankenstein, and dozens more! And you can play along with the adventure, following the full weekly schedule HERE, as we watch men in suits stomp miniatures of famous cities flat for not just our entertainment, but for the history of cinema itself!

We’ve been dealing primarily with kaiju-focused movies up until now, but part of what happened after Godzilla hit the stage was an explosion of all sorts of science fiction and special effects films. In fact, Japan has a word for these types of movies: tokusatsu, which translates roughly as a special effects film. Giant monsters, alien invasions, mechs, even superheroes all fall under this genre distinction that more or less doesn’t exist clearly in English.

I’m not planning on covering every tokusatsu movie, obviously, but sometimes they will be movies that aren’t giant monster focused but contain a giant monster. And sometimes those monsters would eventually show up way down the line in later Godzilla movies. So for the sake of prepping everyone with as much information necessary to enjoy all the Godzilla movies, I’m going to cover them if they seem particularly relevant. Which is why today’s movie is different than the others we’ve covered before.

By 1957, the tokusatsu movies that Toho was putting out were big business, and the champions of the genre were the team of director Ishiro Honda and special effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya. For this small, golden period, they were given incredible resources to create increasingly ambitious stories and set pieces that would lay the ground work for a whole culture’s genre film making. Every film went further and pushed harder against the limits of budget and the capability of men in suits and miniatures to represent the increasingly wondrous events that these films depicted.

And with those pushes come the push for new technologies, from the revelatory advances in compositing and matte work that Godzilla made to the introduction to color film in these movies (in Rodan). In this movie, there were two significant technological advances: the use of TohoScope, an anamorphic widescreen format that had been developed by Toho but had not yet been used for a color or a tokusatsu film; and the use of stereophonic sound mixing for the picture. Maybe not as staggering on the surface, but part of the gradual march of technology that these films were married to.

The most holey of moons.

If that seems to be a lot of not-talking-about-the-movie that’s because I feel the movie is kind of terrible outside of the effects and the technologies on display. The story of scientists in Japan who discover alien life, The Mysterians is a 50s alien movie that feels much more American than the kaiju movies, which (to me anyway) is a pretty terrible sign. It opens with scientists discovering evidence for something called the Mysteroid, a mysterious planet that used to exist but was long ago destroyed.

At the same time, a dome emerges from underground and from it comes an invitation: the five scientists who were our heroes have been designated the speakers for all of humanity (very convenient) and are asked to enter the ship. Inside the ship they meet the Mysterians, a race of humanoid aliens with crazy color-coded costumes, sunglasses, and giant motorcycle-helmet/daruma heads. No, seriously, look at that picture. I can’t even tell if that’s a real face or a plastic face inside on some of those guys. Either way, when they aren’t being devastatingly fashionable, they talk in weird robot voices and are generally weird and wise alien folk.

They lay out a tragic story for the scientists, where they were once residence of the Mysteroid, a planet that prospered technologically, until they invented nuclear weapons and had a series of wars that lead to the destruction to the Mysteroid and irradiated their race so irredeemably that 80% of their race is born with deformities and they’re in real danger of becoming extinct. So they decided to come to Earth for three purposes:

1. warn of the dangers of nuclear weapons
2. live somewhere that isn’t an irradiated ball of rock
3. marry human women and have non-mutant babies.

A simple demand.

Which seems kind of reasonable, I suppose, and that’s exactly how the scientists feel about speaking for human women like they’re a friend they know really well when they nod and say “Sure, whatever, that doesn’t seem like a problem.” Which is kind of creepy enough, but then the Mysterian Leader pulls out a list, complete with photos (!), of the five women their top leaders would like to marry. And the guys, being 50s science types, nod and rub their chins and go “This is highly irregular” until one of them realizes that his girlfriend is on said list.

You can imagine what happens next.

So suddenly the Mysteroids are here, already have a giant house set up, and are ready to make Mystery Men (just go with it) and now the humans are going to shut them down over a little something like (kind of) respecting the individual right to choose? The Mysterians decide to just abduct the women on their list, and to hell with the humans. When people get upset, and the Mysterians respond by summoning the Moguera, a big robot bug/chicken thing that apparently was hiding out in a hillside waiting to make humanity an offer it couldn’t refuse. It bursts out of the side of a mountain and proceeds to shoot and melt all sorts of military structures and buildings, stomping its way around a town and generally being a proper kaiju menace.

That is, until it stands on a bridge that collapses under it and is destroyed. You see, when it’s not being impervious to all conventional weapons, the Moguera is a dainty robot menace who doesn’t like heights or things falling on it. Later in the film, during the only significant battle of the Mysterian/Earth War, a second Moguera rises up out of the ground seemingly out of nowhere, summoned as a last ditch effort by the Mysterians only to have one of the Marcalite Farps (we’ll get to this, don’t worry!) fall on it. It is so undignified an end for a cool robot thing that someone must have been bullied by a giant space bug/chicken as a kid. Poor Moguera.

This is what the death dome says right before it shoots a bunch of beams.

Either way, what’s most interesting here is that without their Moguera the Mysterian dome goes crazy and starts shooting heat rays out of the dome, which manage to wipe out most of the conventional Japanese military by melting tanks and missile batteries. It’s one of the best parts of the movie, watching these tanks melt, a great miniature effect that works way more than you might think. That said, it’s relatively actionless, since it’s a stationary target, but then again this isn’t really an action movie by normal standards.

The incredible Earth defeat bolsters the entire militaries of all the powers of the planet, who decide to set aside all of their differences and unite to form the Earth Defense Force, a coalition built to create a weapon capable of countering the Mysterians. What they come up with is the Marcalite Farps, an amazing name for what is essentially a parabolic dish that can focus radiation into beams similar to the Mysterians’ heat technology. What’s more interesting than the technology is that name, which I can only assume was picked because it’s the only words that don’t make sense in every language, but it’s certainly evocative of something. Like … yogurt.

These are used to fight the dome to a standstill, as the EDF rolls out their other superweapon, a heat beam attached to some sort of rocket/jet, which they use to puncture the dome. This, coupled with some of those scientists infiltrating the dome to rescue the kidnapped women and sabotaging some of the Mysterian equipment, is enough to make the Mysterians second-guess their intentions of colonizing Earth and they pick up their domes and fly off into space to find a planet without bridges or yogurt where they can steal women at will.

If this sounds silly, that’s because this whole movie is pretty dumb. No, I’m not going to try to make excuses for this one. I didn’t like Godzilla Raids Again but this makes it look like high art, with its bad (more like rad) alien designs and stupid, paper-thin invasion plot. It’s not even like the Moguera stuff looks particularly good, so all you’re left with is some heat rays and some melted military and the brilliant of Marcalite Farps, which should probably be the name of a band if it isn’t already.

What’s most interesting, then, isn’t the badness of the movie, but that this is the first movie that suggests a unified Earth response to a threat. I haven’t seen movies past this one yet, admittedly, but I somehow doubt this will be the last time the Earth Defense Force or some permutation of it crops up in a kaiju movie. And it all starts here, though admittedly outside of one guy who speaks hilariously broken English, it’s not exactly a cornucopia of international representation.

Zilla’s American Counterpoint

So this is the first movie without a really significant English cut. Apparently there was a really terrible dub back in the 50s upon release, that was panned up and down, but it doesn’t exist anymore that I can find. Toho claims to have lost the rights to it, and the DVD I have has a re-recorded dub that’s essentially just the subtitles spoken in English, so ultimately this is one time that poor Zilla doesn’t have much to contribute. Not his fault, the movie’s bad in any language.

MONSTER BESTIARY

Moguera

height: 50 meters
mass: 50,000 metric tons
origin:underground caverns, originally the Mysteroid

abilities

• being a giant robot
• eyebeams
• radiates searing heat

weaknesses

• goofy legs
• susceptible to things fall on it and out from under it