Movie Review: Gorgo 1961

I’ve featured the first two of Eugène Lourié’s “Sea Monster” films, so it’s time to talk about the last and most spectacular of them. It’s the one with the biggest budget, but surprisingly the most kid-friendly of them. While not a stop motion film, it made up for it with one of the most elaborate suitimation monsters and sets. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 1961’s British kaiju epic Gorgo.

Gorgo was not only third and last of Lourie’s directorial efforts, but also the last and third time a dinosaur wrecked London.  The transition from stop-motion to suitimation didn’t phase Lourie’s eye for art, but it was a sign of the times. While King Kong’s re-release and the Beast From 20,000 Fathoms ignited Ray Harryhausen’s career, their progeny Godzilla’s success showed that it could be done with a smaller budget with the right kind of effects team and director.

Top 10 Dinosaur fights in fiction

Everyone loves dinosaur fights. All the best dinosaur films have them. What’s better than big, bizarre prehistoric creatures? When they duke it out! They can be violent, they can be bloody, but they’re always exciting.  The very first would be the Ghost of Slumber mountain, where two Triceratops duel and one of them is then killed by a Tyrannosaurus in a fight. The last would be the Pachyrhinosaurus-Gorgosaurus brawl at the climax of Walking With Dinosaurs.  Hopefully this year’s Jurassic World will have the decency of giving us one.  Most of these fights are wildly anachronistic between supersized versions, and some of them involve animals that are not dinosaurs or even real animals, but it gives that element of fantasy that dinosaurs invoke by their very prescence. This list is entirely subjective, so I’ll leave a long list of runners up first-

Movie Review: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms

Last week’s viewing of Godzilla got me thinking about the origin of the kaiju genre. It’s ultimately related to dinosaurs and our awe of the huge and strange. King Kong certainly played its part, as it its own inspiration, the 1925 Lost World. However, one film tied King Kong with Godzilla, a missing link of movie monsters, between dinosaurs and kaiju. Today we’re looking at Ray Harryhausen’s  1953 opus, the Beast From 20,000 Fathoms

Movie Review: Godzilla (2014)

There’s very few dinosaur movies in theaters nowadays. The last time I saw one on the big screen was in December, and that in turn was the first in years. So when I see a film that can be described as a dinosaur film, I must watch it. Yes, I saw Godzilla last week, and I can assume most people interested have already seen it so I can discuss it spoilers and all. Just to be safe, I’ll put a cut here before I get into the details.

Editorial: Godzilla and the dinosaurs of Toho

Today we’re not going to do a movie review, but we are going to look at a popular movie figure that has represented dinosaurs in his own way for decades. Yes, Godzilla. I’m a big fan of the Godzilla series-yes, only the first and maybe Godzilla vs Destoroyah can be taken with an iota of seriousness, but they’re entertaining sci-fi/fantasy movies that I enjoy watching. I’m an attendee at the largest Godzilla convention, G-Fest in Rosemont, Illinois, and I always have fun going.

The question always comes up; is Godzilla a dinosaur? Well, sort of. You see, the Godzilla script from Tomoyuki Tanaka’s first story outline to Ishiro Honda’s shooting screenplay never clearly defined Godzilla as a dinosaur. The name Gojira comes from the idea of the monster being a sort of gorilla-shaped whale. Godzilla, was in fact, very much inspired by King Kong as a monster itself. Tanaka, Honda, and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya all were huge King Kong fans, and simply made Kong bigger and a metaphor for horror of war and the devastation of nuclear weapons. So ultimately Godzilla has more to do with his gorilla archnemesis (at least in 1962) than with the dinosaurs Kong fought.