Is Moby Dick the original kaiju? Maybe. But anyways, Moby Dick 2010.

Back in 1969, Captain Jonah Ahab (Barry Bostwick) lost his left leg, his sub and his crew to a giant whale. Now, in 2010, he believes that monstrous thing was Moby Dick, “a legendary sea creature of evil and immortality.” I had to take that line from Wikipedia because I liked it so much. 

Anyway, this whale keeps taking out U.S. Navy ships, and we can’t have that. The USS Essex gets wiped out, but the Pequod is where Ahab and a crew of marine scientists are, searching the seas for Dick, Moby Dick.

When I was a kid, there was a book-on-record ad that played one line from every novel adaptation. The only one I remember is “There she blows! There she blows! A hump like a snowhill! ‘Tis Moby Dick!” For decades, I’ve yelled this for no reason, always thinking it was “a hook like a snowhill,” which makes so much less sense. What’s wrong with me?

At the end of the movie, Moby Dick has killed almost everyone, sunk multiple ships, lost an eye and then dodged nukes. I’m going to write that again. It dodges nukes. These idiots wipe out an entire island, and Moby Dick swims away, and only Dr. Michelle Herman (Renee O’Connor, of course, you know her as Xena’s wife, Gabrielle) survives, but again, if you didn’t get it above, they just nuked the entire area, so she’s going to end up like the cast of The Conqueror. 

The whale can walk on land, and Bostwick built his own weapon, telling MediaMikes, “I didn’t want to be embarrassed by the fact that they only had a dollar and a quarter, you know, to make that movie. I still have that gun mounted in my workshop. I felt the gun had to be something reflective of the character…much larger than life.”

The IMDB facts for this movie all come from what I can only imagine is a disgruntled Navy veteran, who left notes like “None of the uniforms and insignia (or lack thereof) are appropriate for U.S. Navy personnel in the situations shown in the film.” and “The characters constantly state that this event in the film happened between Naval vessels of the 3rd Fleet off of San Diego, CA. Any and all United States Naval ships in and around San Diego are in the 7th Fleet. The 3rd Fleet is located much farther north, near Washington State.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Before Motel Hell, Kevin Connor made some wild movies in England, like From Beyond the Grave, At the Earth’s Core, The People That Time Forgot, Warlords of Atlantis and Arabian Adventure. Beyond this movie, he made another I really like, The House Where Evil Dwells.

Here, he’s working from a script by Elric creator and The Final Programme writer Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn, based on The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Bowen Tyler (Doug McClure) and Lisa Clayton (Susan Penhaligon) have barely survived their boat being torpedoed by Captain von Schoenvorts (John McEnery). At that point, Tyler and some of the other survivors take over the German U-boat, but battles between the crews cause them to be lost. They end up on Caprona, an island lost in time, a place where cavemen and dinosaurs exist. So does oil, and the idea of being rich allows the British and Germans to work as one.

That would be the idea, but Lt. Dietz (Anthony Ainley) starts a mutiny that ends with his whole crew being boiled alive in the ocean. As for Tyler and Lisa, well, they’re now part of Caprona.

The U-boat and ships are models, while the dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals are hand-held or on-string puppets, which sounds ridiculous but totally works.

Produced by Amicus, there was a sequel, The People That Time Forgot, and At the Earth’s Core, which teamed McClure with Peter Cushing and Caroline Munro. All three of these movies were distributed by American International Pictures over here in the U.S. There was even a Marvel comic adaptation, which appeared in the only issue of Marvel Movie Premiere.

Directed by Jack Bernhard and written by Robert T. Shannon and Jack Harvey, Unknown Island has Ted Osborne (Phillip Reed) and his fiancée, Carole (Virginia Grey), looking for dinosaurs. Good news. They find them.

Along with drunk Captain Tarnowski (Barton MacLane) and even drunker PTSD-having John Fairbanks (Richard Denning), who survived a previous dinosaur attack, they head out. Maybe Fairbanks wants to cuck Ted, too. Who can say?

When they get there, Tarnowski gets into the whiskey, starts shooting crew members and won’t leave the island until he brings one of these giant lizards back alive. And you know, as much as this is about dinosaurs, it’s also about how Tarnowski, Osbourne and Fairbanks all have it bad for Carole. So bad that they continually put her life in danger, but she can take care of herself. One time, when Tarnowski passes out, she grabs his gun and blows away a dimetrodon (which is not technically a dinosaur, but instead a reptile that went extinct ten million or more years before the dinosaurs appeared).

If you see some of these dinos and feel some deja vu, this footage was reused in the American version of Godzilla Raids Again and Adventure at the Center of the Earth. When the crew is firing grenades, there’s a bit of realism in that scene. The two-legged dinosaurs were actually rubber suits worn by actors in the hot desert of Palmdale. When one of them fell, it was actually the actor passing out from heat exhaustion. He died later and the film uses the footage. This is a dinosaur snuff film.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Something is causing the rattlesnakes in Southern California to mutate to enormous sizes, and it’s up to Dr. Kaye (Mercedes Peterson) to stop their growth before they destroy Los Angeles. And yes, Dustin Ferguson already made Rattlers 2, but sure, he’ll make it again.

Most of the cast of the Ferguson movies show up. Dawna Lee Heising and Shawn C. Phillips are killed during a 4th of July party, and Brinke Stevens gets into a bathtub full of snakes, which soon kill her. 46 minutes or so of snake mayhem follows, including a big snake, and then ends with nature footage. And no real ending. You expect that by this point. But did you expect nearly ten minutes of nature footage?

Take a look at the box art. You’re about to make fun of it. Well, you’re not the person that this movie is for. Judge accordingly.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Birth of Japan was produced by Toho as their celebratory thousandth film. At the time, it was the most expensive Japanese film ever made. Based on the legends of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, and the origins of Shinto, it was released in America as The Three Treasures and in the rest of the world as Age of the Gods. That said, those versions are 70 minutes shorter.

Directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and written by Toshio Yasumi and Ryuzo Kikushima, with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya, this stars Toshiro Mifune as Prince Yamato Takeru and Susanoo. That second name is essential, as most of this film is about the battle between Susanoo and the legendary dragon Orochi. In fact, this film is a series of legends told by an old woman to her village, such as the story of how marriage was invented.

I wonder what American audiences thought of this, a movie undubbed with subtitles, a film in which the hero dies only to be transformed into a bird that causes a volcano to kill all of his enemies, and where women drown themselves to please the gods.

While I watched this as a kaiju movie — and yes, it has giant monsters — this is an epic movie. From Japan’s creation to the symbols of the emperor, this is a very symbolic story. 

Toho would later remake this as Orochi the Eight-Headed Dragon.

Confusion at the start of this.

This was first released in 1936 as The Great Manta and shown in Great Britain as The Sea Fiend. Also, a Spanish-language version, El diablo del mar, directed by Juan Duval using some of the same actors and footage, was released in the United States.

Ten years later, it was re-released with a little something for daddy: stock footage inserts of topless native girls. But what about the Hays Code, you may ask? Well, they tolerated partial nudity in native scenes, so this was all good for them.

This is filled with stock footage of nature, fishing and even more nature. Somewhere in here, a giant manta ray is attacking villagers. They tell us it’s big, but we never see it at the same time as humans, so who are we to say?

Barry Norton, the hero of the Spanish version of Dracula, is the lead. And the Spanish-language version has Movita in the cast. She was married to boxer Jack Doyle and to Marlon Brando, who left her for another actress in Mutiny on the Bounty with both of them, Tarita Teriipaia.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

Jim Wynorski gets the assignment.

In the sequel to Attack of the 50 Foot CamGirl, Beverly Wood (Ivy Smith) is working to repay all the damage she did in the first movie. She even has a boyfriend, Mike (Brian Gross), the foreman in the quarry where she works. However, a chance to repay all of her debts comes when Anna Conda (Masuimi Max) is super-sized to fight her on a pay-per-view, with $50 million to the winner. She’s been given her powers by Brian (Steve Altman), the father of the ex-boyfriend whom Beverly killed back in that first movie.

Yes, continuity. Lisa London and Frank Cullen also return as their characters from the first movie.

But wait! Aliens get involved, as Spa-Zor (Kiersten Hall) from the planet Buxomus, a place where they’ve obviously all seen Star Trek, because they repeat dialogue from the episode “The Corbomite Maneuver.”

I do love how IMDB nerds—well, like me—leave goofs on movies. This one seems ridiculous. “While Anna Conda and Spa-Zor have their first battle, the number of times their tops are on and off keeps changing.” Come on. Do we expect this?

This is way better than you’d ever think it could be: a goofball, less than an hour giant woman as kaiju romp that recalls the softcore of the past. Is there still a market for that? Well, I watched it!

You can watch this on Tubi.

A remake of Yongary, Monster from the Deep, when you look at the poster art for this, you can see that they were trying to get ahead of the Godzilla remake. The 1999 version has never been released in the U.S.; the U.S. cut is taken from the 2001 remix, Yonggary: 2001 Upgrade Edition. Why it wasn’t released under that name—the original played on American TV—is a mystery.

Dr. Campbell (Richard B. Livingston) and Dr. Hughes (Harrison Young) find an alien corpse, a dinosaur skeleton and a diamond inside a cave. A few years after that, a UFO appears and starts destroying satellites. This brings in a soldier named Parker (Briant Wells), General Murdock (Dan Cashman) and a journalist, Bud Black (Brad Sergi), who wants to find out exactly what happened in that cave.

Everyone thought Hughes was dead, but he’s been detained by the government. He appears at a new dig, surprising Campbell and his assistant, Holly (Donna Phillipson). She doesn’t believe his stories of aliens and a reanimated dinosaur until Yongary shows up and kills almost everyone. The rest of the film finds the aliens sending their kaiju all over the world to smash cities and kill humans, which means the U.S government decides to drop nukes on them. Well, they would, but the aliens lose control of Yongary and send another kaiju, Cycor, to fight it. 

If they had two kaijum, why didn’t they just send both?

This was the most expensive Korean movie ever made, but it had plenty of help. Financial support came from Hyundai Capital Corp. and Korean Technology Finance Corp., and technical support from the Korean government, which gave filmmakers access to military bases, hardware, and locations such as the Historic War Museum in Seoul. Initially, they were going to use rubber suits, but they replaced all of that with CGI, then redid that for the 2001 version.

Director Shim Hyung-rae would go on to make an even more expensive kaiju movie, D-War, the first Korean movie released in America in thirty years. There was a plan to have Bud Black create a Mecha Yongary for a sequel, which was never made. As you can see when you watch this, it has nearly all Western actors in it, in the hopes of being a worldwide success. It only offered video and cable in the U.S. and was not well-received.

You can watch this on Tubi.