Toho Kaiju series

(On Cable TV, May 2021) I’m not really a big fan of classic Japanese kaiju films: a little goes a long way on these things. But they’re fun to revisit once in a while, and the appeal of the later entries of the Toho filmography isn’t so much the tone (which steadily declines toward kid-friendly plotting), but the colour cinematography, the increasingly large menagerie of monsters, and the increasingly demented plotting that builds upon every dumb thing in the series to lead to some seriously crazy material later on. In Invasion of the Astro-Monster, for instance, we have aliens coming to Earth to borrow monsters for help against their own problems, then mind-controlling the monsters to attack Earth after having themselves a good laugh at the expense of the earthlings’ gullibility. The crazy plot, of course, doesn’t make much of a difference when director Ishirō Honda gets down to those scenes justifying the existence of the film: the building-stomping sequences featuring the man in the suit. Owing to budget and production speed issues, the effects here are inconsistent — sometime recycled from earlier films, sometimes made on the cheap, sometime innovating with bigger stomping feet and more detailed miniatures. Alas, this was also the film in which Godzilla did a victory dance, clearly marking the series’ intention to go for much younger and less sophisticated audiences. None of this really makes me look any more fondly on the Toho kaiju films—but it does make Invasion of the Astro-Monster an interesting-enough film to watch—although jumping all around the series chronology in my viewing order isn’t doing me any favours.