The Japanese version, now in general U.S. release to mark the film’s fiftieth anniversary, is a bad film, but with an undeniable urgency. I learn from helpful notes by Mike Flores of the Psychotronic Film Society that the opening scenes, showing fishing boats disappearing as the sea boils up, would have been read by Japanese audiences as a coded version of U.S. underwater H-bomb tests. Much is made of a scientist named Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), who could destroy Godzilla with his secret weapon, the Oxygen Destroyer, but hesitates because he is afraid the weapon might fall into the wrong hands, just as H-bombs might, and have. The film’s ending warns that atomic tests may lead to more Godzillas. All cut from the U.S. version.
In these days of flawless special effects, Godzilla and the city he destroys are equally crude. Godzilla at times looks uncannily like a man in a lizard suit, stomping on cardboard sets, as indeed he was, and did. Other scenes show him as a stiff, awkward animatronic model. This was not state-of-the-art even at the time; King Kong (1933) was much more convincing.
When Dr. Serizawa demonstrates the Oxygen Destroyer to the fiancée of his son, the superweapon is somewhat anticlimactic. He drops a pill into a tank of tropical fish, the tank lights up, he shouts “Stand back!” The fiancée screams, and the fish go belly-up. Yeah, that’ll stop Godzilla in his tracks.
Reporters covering Godzilla’s advance are rarely seen in the same shot with the monster. Instead, they look offscreen with horror; a TV reporter, broadcasting for some reason from his station’s tower, sees Godzilla looming nearby and signs off, “Sayonara, everyone!” Meanwhile, searchlights sweep the sky, in case Godzilla learns to fly.
The movie’s original Japanese dialogue, subtitled, is as harebrained as Burr’s dubbed lines. When the Japanese Parliament meets (in what looks like a high school home room), the dialogue is portentous but circular:
“The professor raises an interesting question! We need scientific research!”
“Yes, but at what cost?”
“Yes, that’s the question!”
Is there a reason to see the original Godzilla? Not because of its artistic stature, but perhaps because of the feeling we can sense in its parable about the monstrous threats unleashed by the atomic age. There are shots of Godzilla’s victims in hospitals, and they reminded me of documentaries of Japanese A-bomb victims. The incompetence of scientists, politicians, and the military will ring a bell. This is a bad movie, but it has earned its place in history, and the enduring popularity of Godzilla and other monsters shows that it struck a chord. Can it be a coincidence, in these years of trauma after 9/11, that in a 2005 remake, King Kong will march once again on New York?
Good Boy!
(DIRECTED BY JOHN ROBERT HOFFMAN; STARRING LIAM AIKEN, KEVIN NEALON; 2003)
Millions of Dog Owners Demand to Know: “Who’s a Good Boy?”
—HEADLINE IN THE ONION
If a child and a dog love each other, the relationship is one of mutual wonder. Making the dog an alien from outer space is not an improvement. Giving it the ability to speak is a disaster. My dog Blackie used his eyes to say things so eloquent that Churchill would have been stuck for a comeback. Among my favorite recent movie dogs are Skip, in My Dog Skip, who teaches a boy how to be a boy, and Shiloh, in Shiloh, who teaches a boy that life is filled with hard choices. Hubble, the dog in Good Boy! teaches that dogs will be pulled off Earth and returned to their home planet in a “global recall.”
I’ve told you all you really need to know about the movie’s plot. Owen Baker (Liam Aiken), the young hero, adopts a terrier who turns out to have arrived in a flying saucer to investigate why dogs on Earth are our pets, instead of the other way around. This will be a no-brainer for anyone who has watched a dog operating a pooper-scooper, nor do dogs look like the master race when they go after your pants leg. But I am willing to accept this premise if anything clever is done with it. Nothing is.
Having seen talking and/or audible dogs in many movies (how the years hurry by!), I have arrived at the conclusion that the best way to present animal speech is by letting us hear their thoughts in voice-over. Sometimes it works to show their lips moving (it certainly did in Babe), but in Good Boy! the jaw movements are so mechanical it doesn’t look like speech, it looks like a film loop. Look at Babe again and you’ll appreciate the superior way in which the head movements and body language of the animals supplement their speech.
But speech is not the real problem with Good Boy! What they talk about is. The movie asks us to consider a race of superior beings who are built a few feet off the ground, lack opposable thumbs, and walk around nude all the time. Compared to them, the aliens in Signs are a model of plausibility. The dogs live within a few blocks of one another in Vancouver, and we meet their owners. I kept hoping maybe Jim Belushi had moved to the neighborhood with Jerry Lee from K-9, or that I’d spot Jack Nicholson walking Jill. (Jack and Jilclass="underline" I just got it.)
But no. The humans are along the lines of Kevin Nealon and Molly Shannon, as Owen’s parents. The dogs are voiced by Matthew Broderick (as Hubble), Brittany Moldowan, Brittany Murphy, Donald Faison, Carl Reiner, and Delta Burke. Voicing one of the dogs in this movie is the career move of people who like to keep working no matter what. At least when you do the voice of an animated animal, they make it look a little like you, and your character can be the star. But when you voice a real dog, do you have to stand around all day between shots talking to the trainer about what a good dog it is?
The Grudge
(DIRECTED BY TAKASHI SHIMIZU; STARRING SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR, JASON BEHR; 2004)
The Grudge has a great opening scene, I’ll grant you that. Bill Pullman wakes up next to his wife, greets the day from the balcony of their bedroom, and then—well, I, for one, was gob-smacked. I’m not sure how this scene fits into the rest of the movie, but then I’m not sure how most of the scenes fit into the movie. I do, however, understand the underlying premise: There is a haunted house, and everybody who enters it will have unspeakable things happen to them.
These are not just any old unspeakable things. They rigidly follow the age-old formula of horror movies, in which characters who hear alarming sounds go to investigate, unwisely sticking their heads/hands/body parts into places where they quickly become forensic evidence. Something attacks them in a shot so brief and murky it could be a fearsome beast, a savage ghost—or, of course, Only a Cat.
The movie, set in Japan but starring mostly American actors, has been remade by Takashi Shimizu from his original Japanese version. It loses intriguing opportunities to contrast American and Japanese cultures, alas, by allowing everyone to speak English; I was hoping it would exploit its locations and become Lost, Eviscerated, and Devoured in Translation.
An opening title informs us that when an event causes violent rage, a curse is born that inhabits that place and is visited on others who come there. We are eventually given a murky, black-and-white, tilt-shot flashback glimpse of the original violent rage, during which we can indistinctly spot some of the presences who haunt the house, including a small child with a big mouth and a catlike scream.