Synopsis: A cargo ship traveling at night through a storm is attacked by a giant squid. The terrified pilot is astonished when the giant squid is in turn attacked by a giant green humanoid. After dispatching the squid, the humanoid turns its attention to the ship, destroying it.
A single survivor of the ship disaster tells authorities about the monster, who consult with Dr. Paul Stewart (Russ Tamblyn), an American scientist, and his assistant Akemi (Kumi Mizuno), who five years earlier had studied a similar giant humanoid creature. However, Dr. Stewart tells them that the creature they studied was native to the forests, not the ocean; moreover, it was quite gentle.
The green giant — called the “Gargantua” by the media — begins appearing off the Japanese coast. It finally ventures onto land at Haneda airport, causing extensive damage and even eating one unlucky traveler. However, when the sun comes out from behind the clouds the creature retreats to the sea.
Stewart investigates reports that the creature was seen in the mountains, leaving giant footprints behind. He discovers hair samples left behind by it; when examined, they are identical to those found on a boat destroyed by the gargantua.
Meanwhile, the military lays a trap for the gargantua, which has been more and more frequently attacking the countryside after dark. Running lines from electrical transmission towers to a lake, they lure the creature into the water, then pour enormous amounts of electricity into the creature. An assault with tanks and guns follows, topped off with an attack with laser cannons, which so badly cripples the creature that its death is imminent. But unexpectedly, a brown gargantua comes out of the woods, helping the green gargantua to safety. Dr. Stewart and Akemi recognize the creature as the one they had nurtured as a baby five years before….
Comments: My friends, I have seen a great many movies in my life, but War of the Gargantuas is the one that destroyed me. I’ve had more than 40 years to think about it, and I’m truly appalled that this crazy-ass movie was ever exhibited to children.
Don’t get me wrong. As a little kid I loved this movie. Anytime it showed up on the TV listings I would go bananas and I could not wait until it aired. It was only in later years that I realized the path it had led me down. If my parents had shown me proper supervision — if they had only kept me away from movies like War of the Gargantuas — I would have enjoyed a normal, well-adjusted life. I’d probably be running a successful TV station right now, living in an architecturally unique home in Saint Louis Park, driving a Chrysler Cordoba with rich Corinthian leather seats, and married to the most beautiful woman in the world. Instead, I am a gibbering wreck of a man who sits up all night writing about monster movies.
Yep, War of the Gargantuas is one goddamn weird movie. So weird, in fact, that we should take a moment to discuss its origins. Merian C. Cooper, who had produced King Kong, had long been unhappy with its lackluster sequel Son of Kong, and for years shopped around a nutty addition to the franchise: Kong would battle a giant named Prometheus, a creature sewn together from body parts of other creatures (it should be noted that ownership of the Kong character was a point of legal dispute between Cooper and RKO, one that wasn’t resolved until the 1970s). Toho bought the idea but then kicked Prometheus out, instead making King Kong vs. Godzilla. Around the same time Toho, apparently inspired by the Prometheus concept, became interested in making a kaiju about Frankenstein’s monster.
Now, if you’re thinking that Frankenstein’s monster is too short to be in a kaiju movie, you are underestimating Toho’s resourcefulness. Frankenstein Conquers the World employs a delightful Rube-Goldberg-esque sequence of events to get Frankenstein a) to travel to Japan and b) to grow to 400 feet in height. The movie starts out with Germany on the brink of losing the war in Europe. The Nazis deliver a top-secret cargo by submarine to the Japanese islands. This cargo is….the beating heart of Frankenstein’s monster!
The Japanese scientist tasked with studying it says that there is no doubt that much can be learned from the heart. But with the war and all, they’re kind of busy.
At that moment, there’s a tremendous flash of light and a mammoth explosion — the heart, we discover, has been delivered to Hiroshima, and it’s August 6, 1945!
Twenty years later an American scientist (Nick Adams) is studying the latent effects of atomic radiation on Hiroshima. He and his lab assistant / girlfriend (Kumi Mizuno) discover a feral child that has been living on small animals it catches and eats. The child is, we learn, Frankenstein’s monster, which has absorbed enough atomic radiation to reconstitute itself. As if that weren’t enough, it’s growing at a dizzying rate, and before long he’s 400 feet tall, and as luck would have it, another 400 foot monster shows up for him to fight (Baragon, a C-list monster in the Toho bullpen).
Frankenstein Conquers the World spawned a sequel, called War of the Frankensteins, featuring two creatures who, while humanoid, didn’t really look like Frankenstein at all. For the American release, all references to the previous film were excised. The creatures had names (“Sanda” and “Gaira”) in the Japanese version, but for American audiences they were referred to simply as the “green gargantua” and the “brown gargantua”. And of course, the title of the film was changed to War of the Gargantuas, released in the US in the summer of 1970, on a double-bill with Monster Zero.
The lovely Kumi Mizuno was in both films, in essentially the same role as the American scientist’s assistant / girlfriend, though she has different names in each film. She’s called Sueko in Frankenstein Conquers the World and Akemi in War of the Gargantuas. Sueko / Akemi is sweet and nurturing, and quite passive, with very little to suggest she has a life of her own. Her relationship with her boss / boyfriend is curious — she always calls him “Doctor”, even when they are alone together. The couple’s body language — holding hands when running together, or holding each other close when danger approaches — strongly suggests an intimate relationship, yet the relationship is never spelled out explicitly. And she is often treated more like a child than an adult — and while not unusual in American films of this era, it’s much more pronounced in Japanese films.
Instead of Nick Adams’ Dr. James Bowen, we have Dr. Paul Stewart, played by Russ Tamblyn. In spite of the change of name (and change of actors), it also seems to be the same character. It’s hard for us to buy either actor in the role of a sober American scientist, but Adams at least brought an intensity to the role. To call Tamblyn laconic is an understatement. He plays Stewart as though he had just been rousted out of bed at 3 am and is in desperate need of a cup of coffee. This must have been frustrating for the Toho producers, who liked big, over-the-top performances from their leads, but Tamblyn looks too disinterested to take direction from anyone; his eyes are hardly open in some scenes.
Nevertheless, War of the Gargantuas is a lot of zany fun, with Tokyo serving as a wrestling ring for the two giant monsters, who get a remarkable amount of screen time. Because the costumes are so much lighter than the rubber suits worn in other kaijus, the action scenes are much faster paced and the creatures have a wider range of expression than competing Toho monsters. And it’s refreshing to see the monsters actually taking some damage for once, as the perpetually winless Japanese military essentially defeats the green gargantua before he is bailed out by his twin brother.
And if this weren’t enough, we come to this film’s greatest delight, the scene everyone remembers: Kipp Hamilton’s big number. Kipp is inexplicably credited above everyone else in the movie except Russ Tamblyn himself. How is this possible? Did she (and her gargantuan cheekbones) sleep with the producer in order to get this role? It seems incredible; what woman would debase herself in order to get a cameo in a monster movie?
She is in exactly one scene, as a lounge singer who warbles the unforgettable love song, “The Words Get Stuck In My Throat” — and then gets the world’s worst review:
Man Made Monster
Synopsis: Late one night a bus is speeding along a rain-slick highway. It takes a turn too quickly and plows into an electrical pylon, electrocuting the driver and passengers. The only person to survive is a man named Dan McCormick (Lon Chaney, Jr) who performs in carnival sideshows as “Dynamo Dan the Electrical Man”.
In the hospital, Dan talks cheerfully about the various feats he performs that showcase his resistance to electricity — sticking his fingers in light sockets and so on — and while he clearly believes these are just simple tricks to entertain the gullible (“yokel shockers”, as he puts it) it appears that Dan’s life was saved by the resistance to electricity he has been building up over time.
This captures the attention of scientist Dr. Lawrence (Samuel S. Hinds), who invites Dan to stay at his home / laboratory complex and be studied. He’ll be paid for his participation, which Dan finds too good a deal to resist, and he accepts.
Dr. Lawrence shares his lab with his partner, Dr. Rigas (Lionel Atwill), a brilliant but somewhat obsessive man. It just so happens that Dr. Rigas’s pet theory involves turning human beings into slaves controlled by electricity.
When Dr. Lawrence is out of town for a conference, Dr. Rigas takes over the experiments on Dan, strapping him to a table and juicing him with larger and larger jolts of electricity. Dan becomes more zombie-like and taciturn — and completely under the control of Rigas.
When Dr. Lawrence returns he questions what Dr. Rigas is doing. Rigas explains that Dan is the first of his new race of electrically-controlled slaves. Lawrence objects to how the man is being abused just to prove Dr. Rigas’ theories (the declarative sentence “You’re mad!” gets thrown around) and Rigas orders Dan to kill Lawrence. Helpless to resist, the now-robotic Dan does as he is told.
Rigas then instructs Dan to confess to the police that he committed the crime. Convicted of murder, Dan is sentenced to die in the electric chair, which Rigas knows will not kill him, but will give him superhuman strength….
Comments: Man Made Monster clocks in at just under an hour and was made for even less money than its double-bill companion Horror Island. Perhaps for those reasons it enjoys less of a reputation than it deserves. But don’t be fooled: this deceptively modest film is less a generic 1940s horror film than it is the template for Universal’s future offerings. On the strength of this film Lon Chaney, Jr., heretofore known only for his father’s famous name and a solid performance in Of Mice and Men (1939), would quickly become the studio’s go-to horror star, appearing in The Wolf Man (1941), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), Son of Dracula (1943), Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and many others.
Chaney is quite good here; in fact, this might be the best performance of his career. From his very first scene he captures Dan’s McCormick’s character perfectly. We see right away that Dan is a friendly and innately decent guy, happy with his simple life working at shows and carnivals. This is important because the whole plot of Man Made Monster turns on Dr. Rigas’s contempt for people like Dan.
To him, ordinary people are nonentities, cattle who can and should be controlled by those he imagines are superior — unsurprisingly, people like Rigas himself. It seems clear that Dr. Rigas has been reading a bit too much Nietzsche lately, just more evidence that mad scientists need a solid grounding in the humanities to help leaven their Ubermensch impulses.
That Rigas just happens to be looking for a test subject who has built up an immunity to electricity in order to proves his crackpot theories seems a bit too convenient, but let’s cut the good doctor some slack: we’ve got a man-made monster to make, bucko, so let’s speed things along.
The movie hosts a bevy of familiar faces from the Universal bullpen. Lionel Atwill shines as the cheerfully mad scientist Rigas; Samuel S. Hinds provides his usual sturdy presence at Lawrence, and the lovely Anne Nagel provides the film’s warmth and humanity as Dr. Lawrence’s daughter June. Why June is slumming it with sad-sack reporter Frank Albertson as her boyfriend is anyone’s guess, but as we’ve noted before, reporters were often seen as good boyfriend material in films ca. 1940. They really haven’t been regarded as such at any other point in time, before or since.
The Horror Incorporated Project 