Frankenstein vs. Baragon

Toho was always searching for the next monster to add to its pantheon, wasn't it? Taking and modifying the particulars of the Creature birthed from Dr. Frankenstein's work and throwing it together with another giant lizard thing, hidden away from the ravages of time and coming up because coincidence drives all of this stuff. Bringing…

Atragon

I'm always most interested in how Ishiro Honda is going to take his next bit of science-fiction nonsense in the limited new direction he could find. It's almost always in the setups, usually in the first act, and Atragon, the story of a Nemo-like captain who built a powerful submarine, puts a toe back into…

King Kong vs. Godzilla

Now, the monster mashups begin. Godzilla's first squaring off with another creature is the result of a script that originally pitted King Kong against Frankenstein's monster that Toho got their hands on and retooled for their marquee monster that they were discovering they could bring back repeatedly without turning off their Japanese and American audiences.…

Gorath

I never knew that Ishiro Honda made a prequel to Moonfall. Okay, this is slightly less stupid, but it's still pretty stupid. Also, I much prefer miniature effects to CGI, so this has some charm to it in overdelivering special effects. This isn't near the top of Honda's science-fiction oeuvre, but it does provide a…

The H-Man

Moving away from giant monsters for a moment, Ishiro Honda brings Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects skills on a smaller, perhaps more effective, scale in service to a monster movie disguised as a gangster film. It's a curious mix where we get Honda's now expected over-explanation of scientific nonsense in combination with underwritten characters who never…