The Asylum put this out one day after Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Your grandmother would have bought you this for Christmas and said, “I know you love that Godzooky so much.”

Directed by Mark Atkins (Planet of the Sharks) and James Thomas with a script by Atkins, this has an industrialist named Billy Ford (Adrian Bouchet) is drilling on the ocean floor — the Kermadec Trench off the coast of New Zealand , if you want to be precise — when there’s an accident. He sends two of his people, Cherise (Donna Cormack Thomson) and Riley (Chris Fisher) to learn the truth, along with a government agent and myth expert Sarah Murray (Natalie Robbie). They find a kaiju that looks like a giant winged starfish, which means that they need to awaken The Living Mountain to fight it.

General Horne (Eric Roberts) is also involved, as he leads the Navy. Wouldn’t he be an admiral? And what’s he going to do against a giant monster with magma for blood? That said, the starfish looks good, but this is a movie that gets all the parts of giant monster movies wrong. Forget humans and their problems, give us a quick reason why two monstrous beings must battle and let them go at one another.

I am a simple man and I understand these rules.

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This begins with a bomb threat on an airplane, which is soon hijacked, with pilot Ei Sugisaka (Teruo Yoshida) and stewardess Kuzumi Asakura (Tomomi Sato) held at gunpoint. As the plane changes course to Okinawa, a UFO smacks into their flight path and causes them to crash, killing everyone except Mrs. Neal (Kathy Horan), Senator Mano (Eizo Kitamura), weapons dealer Hirofumi Tokiyasu (Hideo Ko) and his wife Noriko (Yuko Kusunoki), space biologist Professor Saga (Masaya Takahashi), psychiatrist Dr. Momotake (Nobuo Kaneko), the boy who called in the bomb threat and the hijacker, who takes Kuzumi and makes his way toward the UFO, which splits his head open and sends a blob into his body.

Dr. Momotake is attacked by the teenager and knocked off a cliff, where he finds the hijacker, who drains the blood from his body. It soon kills Tokiyasu and possesses Noriko, speaking with the voice of an alien race through her body. The Gokemidoro have invaded Earth and no human will survive. She falls off a cliff and instantly turns into a corpse.

The survivors lock themselves in what’s left of the plane, but the teenager explodes his bomb, allowing the hijacker to kill Mrs. Neal. Mano locks all of them out of the plane as they set the hijacker on fire, but even that won’t stop the alien, which kills everyone but Sugisaka and Kuzumi, who find every car empty on a highway and every human dead.

Nearly every character — other than the survivors — is a horrible person and does just as much to kill people as the aliens. As it is, even when the two characters survive, they only will live long enough to see the invasion begin, unless a miracle occurs after the credits.

If you ever wondered why the sky is so red when the Bride lands in Japan during Kill Bill Volume 1, this movie is the reason. Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of it.

Directed by Hajime Satô, who also used the Westernized name Terence Ford and also  directed The Golden Bat, this was based on the tokusatsu series Gokemidoro. This feels like The Blob meets The Thing and then space vampires in a world where everything is neon and even birds realize that things are hopeless and commit suicide. 1960s Japanese science fiction horror made by people that know that mankind is hopeless because while other filmmakers made movies about the horrors of nuclear war, they had already survived it and knew everything was darkness.

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Director, writer, producer and ape costume wearer David L. Hewitt made some wild movies like The Wizard of Mars, Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, Girls from Thunder Strip, Journey to the Center of Time and Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors before doing effects for films like Syngenor, It’s Alive III, Shocker, Superman IV, Willow and many more.

Shot in Bronson Canyon and Simi Valley in California, this is a movie filled with stock footage and stolen monsters, like the cave monster coming from Goliath and the Dragon. There’s also a plastic dinosaur at one point obviously being held by someone’s hand, which had to have been the same effect from One Million AC/DC. 

Circus owner Mark Remington (Anthony Eisley, who in addition to campaigning for school prayer ended up being in some bafflingly goofy movies that I love, such as The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals and Dracula vs. Frankenstein) is losing money and sure he’s about to go out of business.  He goes to Africa to find Gorgo, a giant ape, who is known by April Adams (Megan Timothy), one of those white women brought to the jungle by her older scientist father.

I was not expecting her father to be named Tonga Jack (Kent Taylor), but this movie is just ridiculous — and I’m not being so bad it’s good here, this movie is just ready to eat your brain — like having Bruce Kimball play a clown and a witch doctor who is — you knew it — in brownface. Supposedly, the costumes are from a real headhunting tribe. This may also be William Castle ballyhoo.

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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.