by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Monster
from a Prehistoric Planet, a 1967
Japanese monster movie from a short-lived studio called Nikkatsu, which was the
double-bill companion on the “Internet Drive-In Shocker” package that also
featured Yongary, Monster from the Deep, but was a considerably better movie. The fact that it was a Japanese production was the initial surprise —
the archive.org page on the download had hinted that both features were Korean,
but the names of the cast members gave its true origins away (and incidentally
at least two people in it, including the leading lady, were played by actresses
named Yoko; it’s not than
unusual a female given name in Japan!) — and though it had the usual messy plot
and tacky effects, it was also clearly the work of a director, Haruyasu
Noguchi, with a good camera eye. The plot is basically a fusion of King Kong and the 1957 Boris Karloff vehicle Voodoo
Island — in which he played a
professional debunker of phony spiritualists hired by a developer who wants to
build a mega-resort on a deserted island and seeks to put an end to all this
nonsense being spread by the natives that the place is cursed (which, of
course, it is). In this version, Playmate publisher George Inoue (Tatsuya Fuji) wants to
build “Playland,” a super-resort on a South Pacific island, and in order to
stock his island with suitably exotic flora and fauna to draw in paying
customers, he sends out a scientific expedition headed by young scientist
Hiroshi Kurosaki (Tamio Kawaji) and his photojournalist girlfriend Itoko
Koyanagi (Yoko Yamamoto — see, I told you the leading lady was an actress named Yoko!). Also along is the
obligatory “comic-relief” idiot, Daize Tonooka (Yuji Okada), who for some
reason came off (at least for me) as a Japanese version of Paul Lynde. The first
half of the movie is a farrago of shipboard scenes and native dances once the
expedition lands on Playmate Island (or whatever it was called before Inoue
bought it), and director Noguchi shows his readiness for biggers and betters
with overhead shots, daring editing and some quite artful angling and color in
the native dance sequences. The natives, it turns out, worship a godlike
creature called “Gappa,” a prehistoric remnant (there’s no indication, pace the American title, that the creature is from another
planet, prehistoric or otherwise), and while exploring a cave the expedition
discovers an egg from which Gappa hatches.
It turns out there are actually three survivors of the species — a Papa Gappa, a Mama
Gappa and a little Baby Gappa — and when Inoue insists that the Baby Gappa be
taken to Tokyo, where he intends to suppress any revelation of its existence
until the next issue of Playmate is ready for the presses and he can scoop the world, Papa and Mama
Gappa understandably get upset and come to Tokyo. They start doing their
Godzilla impressions and stomping out the city (I was amused when they crushed
all the big apartment buildings but left one whose neon sign identified it as
“Bar” — shades of The Leech Woman! — in place) until finally Kurosaki (whose name, almost inevitably, I
kept hearing as “Kawasaki” and wondering why he was named after a Japanese
motorcycle or SUV) figures out that the only way to make them go away, since of
course no human weapons affect them at all, is to give them back their kid and
have them high-tail it back to the island. (Apparently Kurosaki, or the film’s
writers — Ryuzo Nakanishi and Gan Yamazaki — had seen the original Mothra, another film in which a presumably invincible
monster is persuaded to leave urban Japan alone by being allowed to return to
his place of origin with his pets, the nine-inch-tall women in a cage around
whom much of that film revolved.) Alas, once the Gappas (flying creatures with
bird-like wings and beaks grafted onto the basic Godzilla-style Japanese
mega-monster template) come on the scene and start stomping out Tokyo, Noguchi
seems to lose all interest in coming up with interesting visuals and shoots it
as flatly as most of the competing films from bigger Japanese companies,
hamstrung by the fact that the Gappas are people in ill-fitting monster suits
stamping out balsa-wood model buildings and easily fending off attacks from toy
tanks. (As with Yongary, one
suspects the local Woolworth’s or whatever the Japanese equivalent is was the
production’s prop department.) Still, it’s a good deal more interesting and
more fun than many of the competitors in the genre, and though it was hardly a great film it was the sort of mindless fun that helps you unwind
after a long and tiring day.
