So, my next Kaiju Appreciation turned out to be Hedorah, the Smog Monster. It’s a little surprising, since Hedorah is one of those characters that I tend to forget about, despite his comparative popularity. Probably because he’s only really in one movie, and it’s one of the worst of the series (his only other appearance is an extremely brief cameo in Godzilla: Final Wars, which is so short and pointless that you wonder why they bothered). Anyway, here’s the video.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah is a heavy-handed and fairly idiotic environmental film, so I picked a song from another heavy-handed and idiotic environmental film: Ferngully. Fortunately, the song Toxic Love is absolutely perfect for Hedorah (it helps that the character who sings it in Ferngully is also a living pile of pollution. Got to make things simple for the kids, you know). It’s basically just a song from the point of view of pollution itself, which is what Hedorah is. Add in that it’s sung by the marvelous Tim Curry and it’s a pretty fun little number that might have been written for Hedorah.

As for the video, I’m pretty satisfied with it. The film quality is still terrible (that won’t change for a while), and since so much of the movie takes place at night it’s sometimes hard to see anything. I had to fill up a good deal of the running time with shots of random pollution, but the film does that too, so I’m not bothered. I do remember holding off on making this one until I could get the thirty-seconds worth of footage from Final Wars, which is a good indication of how anal I can be. Worked out well in the end, though, since I think that footage fits in nicely and helps liven things up a bit.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased. It’s not one of my favorites, and Hedorah isn’t an especially interesting character (again, heavy-handed environmental metaphor: nothing more), but I think the video turned out pretty good. What do you think?

Wow, that footage is grainy. And dig the ‘Unregistered Hypercam’ notice in the upper left.

My very first appreciation actually features someone from the Gamera series. I like Gamera, though he doesn’t grab me as much as Godzilla. Hailing from Gamera III: Revenge of Iris, the third film in the brilliant Gamera trilogy from the nineties, Iris is a sinister, parasitic creature. Seeking power, he psychically bonds with a troubled girl named Ayana who blames Gamera for the death of her parents during the events of a previous film. Feeding on her hatred, Iris grows stronger and begins to prey on the people around her, finally emerging as a towering, tentacled behemoth prepared to destroy Gamera, but not before fully absorbing Ayana.

Iris is an impressive monster, one of the most evil of all the kaiju in either the Gamera or Godzilla series. Unusually, his evil is not just that of violence and destruction, but of actual deception. He tricks Ayana into thinking that he cares about her and intends to act as her servant while slowly destroying her mind and killing her remaining family. When she finally wakes up and tries to stop him, he shows her who was actually in charge the entire time.

If the greatest evil kaiju of all time formed a Five Bad Band, Iris would be their Evil Genius. He’s a cunning, manipulative demon of a monster.

Poor Unfortunate Souls, therefore, was an obvious choice (using the Jonas Brothers’ version because it was shorter, and because I read Iris as a male character). I’m not sure it was the best I could have done, but it certainly captures Iris’s deceptive, mephistophelean character. The short length and fast pace suits the paucity of footage available (Iris doesn’t have much screen time), and the words and tone are such that I can picture him saying, if he were to sing. The driving beat emphasizes the overwhelming power of the monster, as well as the strength of his temptation and the contempt with which he ultimately holds his victim. All in all, despite certain reservations, I’m still quite pleased with this one.

In particular, I’m rather proud of some of the editing tricks I managed, even as inexperienced as I was. For instance, the scene where Iris swats a couple of Gamera’s fireballs out of the sky is actually two shots in the film: there’s a brief reaction shot from the watching humans in between impacts. I cut that scene out and found, to my delight, that the result is pretty seamless and fits the lyrics perfectly.

I’m a massive Godzilla fan. I’d call myself a fan of a lot of different things, but by far the one that is closest to my heart is Godzilla.

As a matter of fact, Godzilla was what got me interested in film. I started out loving the Godzilla series, and that led me to look into other, similar films like King King, the Harryhausen flicks, or the Universal Monsters. From there, of course, it was only a brief step to a full-blooded love of cinema.

Why do I love Godzilla so much? Well, it isn’t the reason a lot of people love him. I don’t laugh at the dubbing or the questionable special effects (in fact, some of the effects work is really quite impressive, but that’s another story). I don’t even go to see Godzilla and his co-stars smashing stuff. I keep coming back because I simply love the characters and the world and the story. I love Godzilla, and Mothra, and Rodan, and King Ghidorah, and Anguirus, and all the rest: I love how, to me at least, they come across as real personalities, with virtues and vices. Godzilla especially I find to be a fascinating figure: a tortured, ferocious soul yet possessed of an essential nobility which causes him to side with the right when faced with true evil.

As an expression of this love, I began to make short music videos, pairing footage of each monster to a song that I thought fit his personality. My first went up back in 2009 (six years ago. Wow). My most recent just went up a few days ago, and I’m still not nearly done yet.

Just as a bit of self-indulgence (and because I really need to get to blogging again), I’ve decided to go back and do a kind of ‘director’s cut’ commentary. Each week I’ll present one of my videos and do my best to describe the process of making it (as well as I can remember) and my reason for picking the specific song. Hey, it’s my blog: I can do what I want with it.