Director: Ishiro Honda
Cast: Yosuke Natsuki, Yoko Fujiyama, Hiroshi Koizumi, Nobuo Nakamura, Robert Dunham, Akiko Wakabayashi, Jun Tazaki, Seizaburo Kawazu
Running Time: 83 min.
By Z Ravas
While watching those classic Godzilla movies where hundreds of civilians are fleeing the city due to an imminent kaiju attack, did you ever think about how there are detectives down on those streets who still have cases their bosses expect them to solve, despite the King of the Monsters’ impending arrival? Well, you feel like this idea must have occurred to Godzilla director Ishirō Honda because he went and made a movie about it. Dogora is an unconventional kaiju film: the Criterion Channel’s description for the movie states that the A plot concerns the attack of a radiated cellular monster from space while the B plot focuses on an inspector’s (Yōsuke Natsuki) attempts to thwart a ring of diamond thieves. I’m going to suggest they’ve got that backwards, as the supposed B plot about cops ‘n crooks really plays like the A plot since it receives the lion’s share of screentime.
It feels like Ishirō Honda wanted to make a swingin’ gangster picture, in the vein of the Nikkatsu crime films that were popular at this time (films like Red Pier and Cruel Gun Story), but he was perhaps limited by the fact that Toho studios and audiences in general knew him best for his giant monster movies. His solution, then, was to combine these two flavors—the kaiju and the crime tale—into one movie. And it actually works, in part because the script Continue reading




























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