The film John Carpenter calls “the ultimate Japanese monster movie”
Given the early aesthetics of the films of John Carpenter, it’s no surprise to learn that he has a penchant for the kind of movies that so many film fans would call guilty pleasures at best or B-movies at worst. In other words, the iconic director enjoys the kind of genre movies that are so bad that they end up being rather good.
Carpenter once expressed his admiration for his favourite “guilty pleasure” movies, and there was no shortage of the strange and the eerie with the inclusion of movies such as Attack of the Crab Monsters, From Hell It Came, The Giant Claw and Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, the names of which ought to give big clues as to their kind and style.
Of all the guilty pleasure genres that Carpenter loves, though, it may come as no surprise to learn of his fascination with the Japanese monster movie, the kind that the likes of Godzilla and Mothra belong to. When discussing his top guilty choices, the director named his favourite monster movie from Japan, Ishiro Honda’s The War of the Gargantuas.
Discussing the film, Carpenter called it “the ultimate Japanese monster movie,” adding, “actually a sequel to Frankenstein Conquers The World. Russ Tamblyn and Kumi Mizuno battle two gigantic hairy monster brothers, one good and one evil. First they trash the countryside, then they trash the city.”
The film is a co-production between Japan and America and serves as a quasi-sequel to the 1965 kaiju movie Frankenstein vs. Baragon, starring Russ Tamblyn, Kumi Mizuno and Kenji Sahara in a narrative about scientists looking into the sudden arrival of two giant hair-covered creatures that battle one another in Tokyo.
Carpenter continued to profess his admiration for Honda’s film, “Airport night-club singer warbles ‘The Words Get Stuck In My Throat’ just before the Gargantua kills here. Great battle scenes. Lots of phony miniatures destroyed. Tension mounts as the audience waits to see if Tamblyn and Mizuno get it on. They don’t.”
As Carpenter professes, Russ Tamblyn was found to be incredibly difficult to work with on the set of the movie and often did the opposite of what his director asked him to do, improvising his lines without permission. But perhaps this created some of the tension that Carpenter admires and is why he finds the film so fascinating.
Check out the trailer for Honda’s The War of the Gargantuas below.
