dimfuture.net

Statistics

Japanese Title: Gojira no Gyakushu (“Godzilla’s Counterattack,” roughly)
Toho Studios’ Official English Title: Godzilla Raids Again
Other American Titles: Gigantis the Fire Monster (original U.S. release title);
Godzilla’s Revenge
Noteworthy International Titles: Le Retour de Godzilla (French; “The Return of Godzilla”); Il Rei di Monstri (Italian; “King of the Monsters”); Godzilla Kehrt Zuruck (German; “Godzilla Returns”)
Director: Motoyoshi Oda
Producer: Tomoyuki Tanaka
Screenplay: Takeo Murata and Shigeaki Hidaka, from a story by Shigeru
Kamaya
Music: Masaru Sato
Special Effects: Eiji Tsuburaya
Japanese Release: 4/24/55
American Release: 5/21/59
U.S. Distributor: Warner Brothers
Review Copy DVD Distributor: Classic Media
Running Time: 82 min./ 78 min. (American version)
Monsters: – Godzilla (Japanese: “Gojira”) – A second oversized, imaginary
dinosaur, awakened and presumably mutated by atom-bomb tests, very similar to the first
- Anguirus (Japanese: “Angirasu”; also called “Anguiras”, “Angilas,” “Anzilla”, “Angurus”, and “Angiras”) – another oversized, fictional dinosaur, this one an ankylosauroid quadruped; also awakened and mutated by atom-bomb tests
Principal Cast: – Godzilla – Haruo Nakajima
- Anguirus – Katsumi Tezuka
- Shoichi Tsukioka – Hiroshi Koizumi
- Hidemi Yamaji – Setsuko Wakayama
- Koji Kobayashi – Minoru Chiaki
- Dr. Kyohei Yamane – Takashi Shimura

(continue reading…)

Of the new breed of super hero movies, none is as divisive as Hulk. You either like it or loathe it. There are few that claim to actually love it, and I doubt there are any out there who love it as much as the detractors seem to hate it. While I don’t categorize myself with the small fanbase of people who love it, I do like it quite a bit, and view it as a failed-but-fascinating experiment in filmmaking. I’d certainly take Hulk‘s avant garde (and maybe even pretentious) comic / movie amalgamation over paint-by-the-numbers flicks like The Fantastic Four and Ghost Rider.

(continue reading…)

Hey, everyone. I ended up not having time to do a No One Reads Fridays this week — I have to go out of town for a funeral. I’ll be back next week, hopefully with a review of Spider-Man 3, The Fountain, and Pan’s Labyrinth — all of which I had the pleasure of viewing this week.

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

In the 23rd century, a mysterious cataclysm has sent the last survivors of Earth into a massive domed city, where everyone lives for pleasure and a cryptic supercomputer with a soothing, feminine voice rules society with a velvet fist. “There’s only one catch,” the film’s tagline reads — “life ends at 30.” On their thirtieth birthday, the citizens of the city report to “The Carousel,” a quasi-gladitorial arena where they are supposed to be “renewed,” to new life, but instead are hit with squibs and die.

Peter York plays Logan 5, a “Sandman” whose job it is to hunt down and eliminate the “runners” who, for some picky reason, want to live past the age of thirty. Logan and his associate Francis 7 (Robert Jordan) perform their jobs with manic glee, making railing kills and crowing over their downed quarry like a couple of good old boys hunting antelope. Then it’s off to the sex teleporter and the mind-gas for some psychedelic distractions, and all is right with the universe. But Logan’s world is upset when the mysterious supercomputer orders him to find and infiltrate “Sanctuary” — a rumored haven for escaped Runners — and destroy it. To properly motivate him, Logan’s life clock is set ahead a few years, making him one of the shunned thirty-year-old pariahs, and now he must… well, run.

(continue reading…)

One difficulty with the catalogue of Loch Ness Monster sightings – and one of the reasons so many identities have been proposed for the creature – is that they tend to vary widely. Sometimes the head is small and rounded, sometimes it’s horse-like; sometimes the skin is brown and smooth, sometimes green and scaly; and so on. Nessie detractors often use this fact as evidence that the monster doesn’t exist. But this is unfair. There exists no context, no frame of reference for Loch Ness Monster sightings; real witnesses literally wouldn’t know what they were seeing. And as such, even the most careful, scientifically educated observers would become as the proverbial blind men describing an elephant. And all this is to say nothing of the inevitable mythologizing of a huge, prehistoric-seeming creature of the depths. If there is such a creature as the Loch Ness Monster, this kind of variation of description would be entirely to be expected at this stage.

One unfortunate result of this is that there really cannot be an identity proposal for the creature that is going to neatly explain all of the sightings. Nessies either have small, rounded heads or horse-like heads, and presumably not both. There are, however, certain overall tendencies in the sighting reports, taken as a group, and these tendencies can be instructive.

(continue reading…)