Jack Curtis, who directed this movie, was the voice of Pops Racer and Inspector Detector on the American localization of Mach GoGoGo, which we know as Speed Racer. He also wrote The Deadly Organ, which blows my mind, and did voiceovers for so many Japanese movies and shows. Sadly, he died at 44, as he had pneumonia and was allergic to penicillin. That’s 1970, I guess.

Using the name Carson Davidson, he directed, shot and did pretty much everything there was on this film, aided by a story by Arnold Drake, the creator of the Doom Patrol. How did they pay for it? Game show money. Drake also storyboarded the whole film, creating a comic book of sorts for Curtis to shoot from.

This film is also why Night of the Living Dead is public domain. No, really, go with me for a second. Its distributor, The Walter Reade Organization, was worried that the original title, Night of the Flesh Eaters, would be confused with this movie. When they changed the title, they didn’t properly copyright it.

Jan Letterman (Barbara Wilkin) is the personal assistant to wealthy actress Laura Winters (Rita Morley). Together, they are flying with pilot Grant Murdoch (Byron Sanders) to Massachusetts when their plane has to land after a storm. Ironically, a storm would destroy most of the original equipment needed for this film, doubling the budget.

There, they meet Professor Peter Bartell (Martin Kosleck), a marine biologist and Nazi sympathizer — Kosleck left Germany during the war and hated the Third Reich; his roles playing them in so many movies was him getting revenge — who is experimenting with flesh eating kaiju that live on the island. There’s also a beatnik named Omar (Ray Tudor), who shows up for the kids.

Where this movie gets away from the pack of others is that beyond having a huge flesh eating monster that floats on the beach, it has way more gore than you’d expect. This is a movie unafraid to stab a character, shoot them in the face and then feed them to a monster. And if you hate beatniks, stay tuned. Omar throws his guts up from the inside out.

Yet this is more than just a silly black and white horror movie. All of the characters have motivations and are complicated, not just cardboard cutouts of the same heroes and villains you’ve seen in films like this.

That said, it did have a William Castle gimmick when it played theaters. Only blood can stop the flesh eaters and you were given instant blood capsules in case a flesh eater got loose from the screen and attacked you.

When this was re-released in 1968 as a double feature with Macumba Love, a new sequence of Nazis using the flesh eaters was added. It was added by M.A. Ripps, who also produced Common Law Wife and All the Young Wives.

I nearly forgot! Radley Metzger edited this movie!

You can watch this on Tubi.

After being lost in the forest as a child, Gu Yao is saved by a giant gorilla named Kingkong. Yes, that’s his name, this was made in China and no, lawyers really do have better things to do than get involved. As Gu Yao grows into an adult, he meets an expedition that has Ma Ke and her family, but soon those stupid, horrible want to do what they always want to do with giant apes and that’s either put them in shows or kill them or, well, both.

Gu Yao is pretty much Tarzan. Kingkongis pretty much King Kong.  Youku is pretty much the Chinese asylum, minus getting Eric Roberts to be in their movies. Actually, give it time, because the minute you think his name, a director with a six figure or less budget calls him. It’s just the way our world works.

This is also King Kong as in the latest movies, facial scars and all. If you’re going to screw with IP theft, go hard, you know? Go all the way. The Yooku channel is filled with AI-drawn images of monsters fighting Asian women who are dressed like Tomb Raider and man, it’s as if they are accessing my id and saying, “These movies are only 60 minutes or so.” Yes they are. They’re barely films. I love it.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Produced by Taiwaan’s Tong Hsing Company Limited in 1976, this movie is based on the 1974 tokusatsu film Kamen Rider X, taking most of its footage from Five Riders vs. Kingdark and the earthquake from Godzilla vs. Megalon. It was re-released twenty years later in Taiwan, as well as many other countries, in this bootleg form.

Emperor Chi-Wu (King Dark), the leader of the Demon & God Organization, is the bad guy. And with a company name like that, he kind of has to be, right? It’s just moving around the Japanese name of the bad guys, GOD (Government of Darkness). His final form was taken from a stage show costume of another final boss, Great General of Darkness from Great Mazinger.

This is a Kamen Rider movie and I feel like me going too deep into its mythos will result in tokusatsu fans feeling like I do when I read uninformed giallo articles. But what I do know that is instead of Kamen Rider (Masked Rider, if you watched Fox in the 90s and 2000s), you get Super Rider X and four of his friends, including a never-before female Kamen. Or Super Rider. Or Masked Rider. This is a lot of Kamen Rider X and even has Riderman show up, who was dead. He got better.

This does, however, answer a thing I always wondered. What if Darth Vader — I know, this predates Star Wars — was super Satanic and also had fashion leanings toward both the samurai and a peplum movie? Also: What if he could turn into a gigantic demon and fought motocross dudes? And what if there was a monster called Franken Bat which is exactly what it sounds like, a Frankenstein’s Monster, painted silver, with bat wings, and he carries around beakers filled with the blood of young women that he drinks when he needs energy? Could all the mythological monsters show up, too? And what about the god Pan, who is now a monster by the name of Pannic, who has missile horns?

I have no idea what I watched but I loved it.

You can watch this on YouTube.

“Here in this face lies the key to your death

Touch it, see it

Here in this fist is the means to your end

Touch it, feel it

GREEN HELL!

You’ve come to this as no one could

I’ll bet you never knew you would

And don’t you run away from it I’ll bet you thought you really could

We’re gonna burn it up, it up

Like deviled hell but not afraid it up, it up

Time to face the facts of death it up, it up

Feel the ground to feel the searing up, it up

Your old world starts to shake apart it up, it up

Down upon your belly you must stay, get up

Get up and feel the torch of hell get up, get up

Hell is green and in it’s flames it up, it up

We’re gonna burn it up

GREEN HELL!”

Yet another movie I watched because of The Misfits.

Green Hell is an area of Africa where Dr. Quent Brady (Jim Davis) and Dan Morgan (Robert Griffith) have acted like dumb Cold War scientists and shot wasps into space, only to have them land in the jungle, get huge and start killing people, as Dr. Lorentz (Vladimir Sokoloff) and his daughter Lorna (Barbara Turner, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s mother) soon learn.

Why do old man scientists always take their daughters to the jungle?

After the death of Lorentz from a giant stinger, the guides Mahri (Eduardo Ciannelli) and Arobi (Joel Fluellen) take the team into Green Hell, which also has an active volcano. To stop them, as all American scientists usually do, they’ve brought bombs to blow them up real good.

Let me restate: This is all their fault and now they’re throwing bombs at a volcano, which just makes the wasps — which have killed so many people — even more enraged.

The volcano erupts and kills the wasps, which has Morgan exclaim, “Nature has a way of destroying its mistakes.”

You were the mistake! It was your fault! The wasps didn’t ask to get made huge!

In 1964, Remco made the Hamilton’s Invaders line of toys. These giant bug movies were big on TV, so they just made non-copyright friendly versions of all of them with Horrible Hamilton being the wasp from this movie. There was even a set that came with a volcano. Some of the monsters from this set ended up becoming a part of Remco’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea toy line, as these guys were big on recycling.

Speaking of recycling, some believe that this movie is 40% stock footage. Most of it comes from the 1939 movie Stanley and Livingstone, which is why Jim Davis wears the same costume as Spencer Tracy, but if you look at the gun he carries, it’s different.

You can watch this on Tubi.

As a kid, we only had Godzilla King of the Monsters! and as far as we knew, that was the definitive edition. We didn’t know that there was the Japanese original cut, the Luigi Cozzi-made Cozzilla or this French edition, which combines the American and Japanese cuts and dubs it all into French.

Made by Les Films du Verseau, this is a balancing act, as the Japanese version has so much terror missing from the safer American cut. What emerges as a little of each and in a world where we can choose to watch either the one we grew up with or the one true version, if you’re not viewing this as a curiosity or to test how much French you know, I’m not sure why you’re watching it. Being a completist? Doing a 24-hour marathon of giant monster movies?

I love that it exists, however, because it’s just another way to experience something that I love.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

As a small, fat and large glasses-wearing child, I was obsessed with Ultraman to the point that if I ever saw any Japanese tourists on vacation, I would try to leave with them instead of my family in the hope that they would bring me east and all I would have to do is watch monster TV shows and never have to go to school.

I’m 52 now and I want the same.

Anyways, Mirrorman was made in the wake of Ultraman except that it has the king of all kaiju movies, Ishirō Honda, directing it. Its also Tsuburaya Productions’ — the home of Ultraman — first non-Ultra show and was pretty dark for the first 26 episodes before the TV network said to make it for kids.

Set in the far future of the 1980s, this has the Invaders coming to Earth with all of their evil kaiju. The leader of the Science Guard Members, Professor Mitarai, has a foster son named Kyotaro Kagami, whose last name means mirror. He has a secret, that his father was an alien and his mother was human. His father may be dead after a fight with King Zyger , but his mom has been taken by the alien monsters. To top all that off, he is actually the son of a superhero with has the same powers and is known as Mirrorman. He doesn’t want to be Mirrorman — come on, dude — but when he stands in front of a reflective surface, holds up his pendant and says, “mirror spark” he gets his powers.

This short was released in Japan on March 12, 1972, where it was distributed by Toho as part of the Spring 1972 Toho Champion Festival along with Godzilla vs. Gigan, Pinocchio: The Series, Hutch the Honeybee: Hold Me, Momma and The Genius Bakabon: Night Duty is Scary.

After episode 26, this became more like Ultraman, as Mirrorman would have a bomb put in his heart by the Invaders that will kill him if he uses his powers for too long. Why didn’t they just kill him? Unlike so many robot heroes, he actually lives at the end of his series, as his father also survived and they go to the second dimension to fight the Invaders.

In 2010’s Ultraman Zero The Movie: Super Deciding Fight! The Belial Galactic Empire, Mirror Knight is Mirrorman. Well, inspired by him.

The kaiju in the first episode, The Iron, has a hug attack and a tail that seems a lot like an evil penis. Young me would never have consider this.

You can watch this on YouTube.