I never had a Barbie Dreamhouse. I had a way, way better dollhouse. It was the Weebles Haunted House and I loved it. I still love it – so much that it occupies prime real estate in my office.
Sadly, this isn’t the one I had as a weird 70s kid. It’s a yardsale find, but that’s ok. I was going to post more photos but this commercial, which appears to be from 1976, is much more fun:
All of that said, there’s a decent chance the haunted house is haunted. One day while I was sitting here with my back to it, the front door snapped open. The cap on the roof also fell off, but that’s not unusual because that thing never stayed on and you had to remove it to open the house anyway so that always struck me as a bit of a design flaw. I decided that whatever walked there was tired of walking alone, so I tracked down a few replacement Weebles for the ones I was missing and the house has seemed peaceful ever since.
In 2 weeks (July 17, 2021) I’ll be at Romancing the Gothic giving a free virtual talk (twice, because time zones!) on a pair of peculiar Japanese/American films from the late 1960s which make deft use of a number of genre conventions and storytelling modes to explore both personal and national trauma. Well, one of them does, at any rate, but I’ll get back to that after some background.
Monstrously transformed bodies rampaged across movie (and television) screens throughout the Atomic Age. Brimming with disfiguring laboratory accidents, wacky mutations, and extraterrestrial invasions, in these Hollywood movies figuring out how to obliterate monsters was every heroic scientist’s duty.
Japanese director Ishiro Honda reinvented the Hollywood monster movie form, bringing forth movies that spoke not to existential fears of atomic disaster but to the lived experience of atomic devastation and the long-term consequences of trauma and radiation exposure. His monster movie, Gojira, was released in Japan in 1954. The following year, American producer Edmund Goldman acquired the worldwide rights to the film and hired director Terry Morse to radically re-edit the film, inserting newly shot footage which transformed Gojira into the less overtly political Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956). This Americanized version of the film was the only version officially distributed outside Japan until 2004.
A decade later, Honda directed a pair of films in which Mary Shelley’s novel is re-imagined as non-fiction, the catalyst for a series of slowly unfolding disasters.* Unlike Gojira, Honda’s Frankenstein movies were produced in a partnership between Toho and American International Pictures and were dubbed, not re-edited, for American release.
Promotional Poster for Frankenstein Conquers the World. Actor Nick Adams name is featured prominently on the poster, which depicts a large Frankenstein Monster with a battleship tucked under his arm, locked in destructive combat with the gigantic reptilian monster Baragon. Nick Adams is depicted in the lower right of the image aiming a machine gun, despite the fact that he portrays Frankenstein’s friend and defender, the kindly Dr. Bowen, in the film.
In Frankenstein vs Baragon (1965, released outside Japan in 1966 as Frankenstein Conquers the World) a child consumes Frankenstein’s monster’s immortal – and irradiated – heart in 1948 Hiroshima and grows to monstrous proportion. The figure of Frankenstein, as the child is known, is ambiguous, first pitied and studied, then feared, before ultimately become a savior when a powerful ancient mythological being re-emerges to threaten civilization and the project of capitalist expansion in post-occupation Japan.
In the sequel, Frankenstein’s Monsters(1966, released in the U.S. in 1970 as War of the Gargantuas), the Frankenstein monster’s cells regenerate into a gigantic pair of mortal enemies, Gothic deadly doubles and fragmenting identities writ large.
This talk includes historical background and cultural context and a discussion of how Honda’s use of Gothic conventions contributes to a politically and socially complex story. And also a second movie. If you’d like to sign up, here’s the link.
I’ll be focusing primarily on Frankenstein vs Baragon, but, to be fair, War of the Gargantuas also employs Gothic tropes in interesting ways. While it’s not a particularly substantive film, it is bizarre and truly delightful. Whether or not you sign up for my talk, I encourage you to visit the Cultural Gutter to learn more about the confoundingly catchy lounge number which occupies an interminable segment of War of the Gargantuas: In Memoriam: The Words Got Stuck In My Throat.
Familiarity with the films I’ll be discussing is not required but will be helpful to you. Be aware: there will be spoilers, but hopefully what you learn will enrich your viewing. No specialized knowledge of the Cold War, Nuclear History, or Gothic film and literature are necessary and the live sessions will include ample time for questions. And likely also for answers.
If you haven’t seen the original Godzilla, I highly recommend the Criterion Collection’s restoration (of both versions), which is also currently available in the US both on their subscription service, the Criterion Channel and HBO Max and is also available for rent or purchase through a variety of streaming services.
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* A Slowly Unfolding Disaster would have been an excellent alternative title for War of the Gargantuas.
Donuts? Doughnuts? Whatever. If they have powdered sugar on them, I find them deeply frightening.
“Frightening” might be a slight exaggeration.
I definitely find them deeply unsettling.
I definitely don’t eat them.
But I don’t break out in a cold sweat when I see them. Not anymore.
It all began when I was a very small child. I went over to a neighbor’s house and all the Big Kids were watching Dr. Paul Bearer’s Saturday afternoon Creature Feature double-feature on WTOG (Channel 44, St.Petersburg, FL) because that’s what you did on a Saturday afternoon if you lived in Southwest Florida in the 1970s.
I didn’t know what the movie was, I only knew that it was very scary and the one scene I saw was enough. It’s a shame I didn’t stick around because I’m sure I wouldn’t have been nearly as traumatized if I’d seen the whole movie.
Or any other scene in the movie.
Any scene at all.
The scene I saw involved scary alien women feeding a pair of boys poisoned powdered donuts and then eating their brains. At least I thought the women ate their brains. I saw the scary alien women preparing to cut the boy’s heads open and I took off running for home.
Later in life, I would recount this story to people but no one was able to figure out what the movie was. Media librarians. The MST3K gang. Film historians. Everyone thought it was vaguely familiar but no one could put their finger on it.
If only I remembered more details. Like it being Japanese, or involving a guy in a giant rubber turtle costume, because I’m pretty sure those details would have been very helpful. The kaiju tend to be the memorable parts of these movies for most people.
The movie that gave me a lifelong phobia about powdered donuts was none other than Gamera Vs Guiran.
Thanks to the internet, I can pinpoint the day my powdered donut phobia began: April 17, 1976. That’s the date Gamera Vs. Guiran aired on Creature Feature, according to The Crazed Fanboy’s database.
I understand that powdered donuts are not, inherently, dangerous. Except when they are.
In his 2013 novel, The Circle, Dave Eggers leaves the specifics of how The Circle’s technology works to the reader’s imagination, a gambit that can be generative in the hands of certain writers. However, Eggers wrote a 500 page book about an Internet company but seems to understand neither the Internet nor companies. That’s a whole other ballgame, particularly when he embeds his imaginary techno-nightmare in reality by name-checking Steve Jobs, Facebook, Google, and the like. Furthermore, Eggers has written a female protagonist, Mae Holland, but doesn’t seem to understand women very well.
That said, if I were teaching my college course on cyberculture again any time soon, I would almost certainly put it on a supplementary reading list because I believe it raises some interesting question, even if accidentally. (privatization of government, voter protections, and the right to opt out among them). Nevertheless, I wavered over whether to give it 1 or 2 stars.
I can accept that the idealistic young tech workers of The Circle truly believe in what they’re doing. I can believe that they have no concerns about the economics, access to private land, the digital divide, literacy, or any of the other factors that would in reality hopefully prevent the whole world from buying in to the kind of technology being developed. I have met these people and they are legion. I think that Eggers does capture that sense of excitement, exhaustion, and optimism that fuels ambitious workers at young companies, especially young people with expensive educational debt, and limited job prospects. Additionally, and without spoilers, I think that Eggers captures the desperation of the chronically ill in the current American healthcare and insurance system. When the Circle puts Mae’s father, whose MS is not being managed or treated due to lack of insurance, onto her health plan, Mae has strong motivation to hold on to her job no matter what is asked of her. That premise gets stretched increasingly thin as the book progresses, and eventually the way Mae treats her family increases my alienation from her rather than garnering sympathy.
The plotholes and authorial pratfalls undermine elements which are the stuff of good satire, but are too spoilery to outline here. Even these fall short, however, because the plot is predicated on the idea that most of the world will buy into The Circle’s technology because the Internet magically became a civil place when the Circle rolled out TruYou, an authentication system that removes the possibility of anonymity or privacy from online comments, commerce, or social interactions. Seriously? What? No.
Now I know why I read the first half of this book the week it was released and then banished it to a distant corner of my office. When the trailer for the feature film adaptation starring Emma Watson/Tom Hanks was released, I decided to finish the book. If the movie is even slightly as naive as the book, it must be a trainwreck and, when I wrote this original review in 2017 I fully intended to catch a cheap matinee, but then apparently came to my senses. It has a 15% tomatometer rating! That’s actually a lot higher than I expected.
View all of my reviews at Goodreads or read the full versions with embedded links here. This review was originally posted on Goodreads January 02, 2018 and has been updated with links and additional information for this post.
