The Frost Vark Is The Best Of The Original Monsterverse Kaiju In My Opinion, But The Generic Descriptive

The Frost Vark is the best of the original Monsterverse kaiju in my opinion, but the generic descriptive name does it little justice and it really needs a unique name with more pizzaz. An alternative I was workshopping was Moleran (モッラン, romanized Morran), a portmanteau of mole and Mårran, the Swedish name for The Groke from the Moomins, since both share an insatiable desire for warmth while spreading coldness everywhere they go.

Ok this might make people who've read ATOM laugh, but... I really think Shimo's name would work better as a kaiju name if it has a third syllable.

This is one of those things that haunted me in the leadup. The only explanation I can think of is that Skull Island Great Apes exhibited insular dwarfism. Even then Kong must have had an abnormal growth spurt after the 70s for some reason. Of course the real reason is that Jordan Vogt-Roberts had a certain vision of how big Kong should be that wasn't compatible with a future fight with Legendary Godzilla, and Adam Wingard proportioned all the other Great Apes with a 300 foot Kong as default. It doesn't help that scale has never been Wingard's strongpoint.

Having an existential crisis over Zuko from GxK being bigger than Kong was in the Skull Island movie, proportions and all.

I knew something was up when I saw 16 new posts on my Dashboard

Congratulations to Takashi Yamazaki and the entire effects time that worked on Godzilla: Minus One. It's amazing what they managed to accomplish with that low a budget, they definitely deserve that Oscar.

I only wish it wasn't confined to the technical awards gulag, but at least it cleared house once more at the Japanese Academy Awards.

Godzilla Minus One

If I had a nickel for every post New Century Toho Godzilla film with an inciting incident involving failure to fire an aircraft cannon at a potentially vulnerable early form of Godzilla, I would have two nickels. If I had a nickel for every post 2000 Toho Godzilla film ending with an internally injured Godzilla torn apart by its own atomic breath, only for a remaining piece in the depths of the ocean to show signs of life, I would also have two nickels. Bonus points (pennies?) for criticism of Imperial Japan and a heat ray that recreates the effects of the atomic bombings. Jokes aside, this movie was excellent. A return to basics yet bristling with themes and character depth, not just good kaiju eiga but great cinema in general. If it doesn't take the number 1 spot for best Godzilla films of all time, its definitely in the top 3.

The Mysterians are my favorite out of all Toho's seijin, they just have so much swag. I also like how they start with relatively modest goals before escalating to more conquest oriented ones: it gives them a bit more complexity then later seijin with the standard "conquer earth" plans.

After their 1957 film, The Mysterians went on the road as a rock-n-roll band. Here they are with their manager, Bernie Tanaka, right before playing a gig before thousands of screaming Japanese teenagers.

I’m really digging how this recaptures the style of older zombie films.  While focus is often put on slow vs fast Zombies, this cuts deeper by giving its zombies mournful moans over the more modern focus on rabid snarls.  It also doesn’t fall into the usual pitfalls of making the zombies easy targets for the heroes to slaughter en masse, instead making them a persistent threat to disempowered protagonists.  This is all wrapped up a lovely nightmare logic all to often discarded in the modern fixation on “realism”, with the robot becoming zombified and the classic undead pilot reveal ending.  A lesser show would have settled for the pilot revealing a zombie bite and then turning but Space Dandy went all in and had the zombie fly the helicopter from the start.  The only thing it was missing was the old favorite “person turns towards camera to reveal zombie half of face, to the surprise of character that had clear line of sight on said zombie face prior to the reveal” gag.

I’m glad tumblr’s video size limits are generous enough that I can make you watch just the entire six minute zombie hospital sequence from Space Dandy with no dubs or subtitles so you can enjoy the alien designs, retro 80′s horror soundtrack, and the bounty hunter fight animated by Masaaki Yuasa (best known for kaiba and devilman crybaby) !!

lol @ this thing somehow being a zombie and also wearing one of the mercenary hats