“Frankenstein vs. Baragon” Theatrical Poster
Director: Ishiro Honda
Cast: Nick Adams, Kumi Mizuno, Tadao Takashima, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Yoshifumi Tajima, Takashi Shimura, Susumu Fujita, Peter Mann, Koji Furuhata
Running Time: 89 min.
By Ian Whittle
“A nomination for me means that Twilight of Honor will bring in another million dollars and supply funds for more Hollywood pictures. Next, it means I, as a Hollywood star, can make more films in Hollywood and stop this runaway production which is killing Hollywood. I will never make a picture abroad”
– Nick Adams, campaigning for an Oscar win in 1963.
1965 – Nick Adams, Oscar-less, makes Monster of Terror in the UK, then Frankenstein Vs. Baragon and Invasion of Astro-Monster in Japan.
His loss was clearly our gain.
So Adams plays Dr Bowen, studying the long-term effects of radiation in Hiroshima – and if you think I am being a bit tasteless reviewing this movie so close to the 80th anniversary of the bombing, well, this movie was released the same week as the 20th anniversary! Interestingly, the movie takes place in 1960, 15 years after the bombing, but there is a reason for that…
…so in 1945, in a German front that looks weirdly more like a re-creation of the Somme in winter from 1916, the Axis powers realise the tide is turning. So they arrange to send the Frankenstein Monster’s immortal heart via submarine courier to Hiroshima.
No wonder they lost. Oh, and the heart arrives just in time for the date immortalised in Family Guy.
Back to 1960 – Bowen and his assistants Dr Kawagi (Takashima Tadao) and Dr Togami (Mizuno Kumi) discover a feral teenage boy (Nakao Sumoi – see why it’s 15 years later?) who has been living off stolen pets. And in one of those classic sci-fi instances of the scripted dialogue not being communicated to makeup, everyone comments on him being Caucasian… despite him clearly being played by a Japanese actor, and being bright green and with a large jutting brow! And nobody says “He looks like Boris Karloff” disappointingly enough.
Thanks to the memories of a former submarine crew member (Tsuchiya Yoshio), and an interview with a wacky German scientist (Peter Mann) who seems to hail more from Transylvania, the doctors soon suspect that the boy is the Frankenstein heart mutated by the Hiroshima bomb. But the only way to prove it is to cut off a limb and see if it grows back… who knew the Frankenstein monster was a salamander? Dr Kawagi is all for this, the others less so. But this becomes academic when the Monster, now growing to Amazing Colossal Man proportions and a new actor (Furuhata Koji), escapes from his chains by tearing his hand off! And not only does the hand re-grow, the original starts moving on its own!
And THEN the movie gets weird.
A giant subterranean dinosaur, with a glowing nose horn and floppy dog-like ears, and known as Baragon (Nakajima Haruo), suddenly emerges from underground and starts laying waste to the countryside (including the fakest horse you ever did see)… whilst being canny enough to eradicate all witnesses, thus leaving Frankie to get the blame!
And this all climaxes in a ridiculously silly ending that was even more ridiculous when the US backers insisted that Frankenstein then fight a giant octopus (which somehow lives in a mountain range)! Said octopus was then removed prior to release (shades of The Goonies!) but stills of it cropped up for years in monster magazines and books, and it has now been restored as a DVD extra!
It’s rather fascinating to ponder what was going through director Honda Ishiro’s mind when he began his cheezy monster movie with a direct callback to the nuclear holocaust that, as a demobbed soldier returning home from China, he saw the aftermath of. This film began as a proposed Frankenstein vs. Godzilla project by US sci-fi writer Jerry Sohl (itself derived from Willis O’Brien’s King Kong vs Frankenstein idea, which was mutated by Toho into King Kong vs. Godzilla), so I’m going to assume the Hiroshima idea was US in origin, but you never know. It is surprising in a way that Toho never seems to have suppressed this film, whereas other Japanese sci-fi project depicting humanoid monsters affected by nuclear radiation (an episode of Ultra-Seven; Toho’s own Catastrophe 1999) have gone the way of Disney’s Song of the South.
It is hard to get a grip on this movie as it jumps from a potentially eerie melding of Gothic horror with modern sci-fi to a much more kid friendly monster movie, leaving me sort of frustrated that the promises of the first half are terminated in favour of silly antics. Even the two main monsters of this movie show a gulf in tone: The Frankenstein Monster is rather creepy looking, with his child-like screams and rotting teeth. But Baragon is, even by Japanese monster movie standards, extremely goofy looking; as if someone crossed Godzilla with Falkor from The Neverending Story. A very brief cameo in Destroy All Monsters aside, Bargon was off-screens until 2001’s Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. But Frankenstein, and that darn octopus, would be back in 1966. Well, sort of…
Ian Whittle’s Rating: 6/10
