Never change, Japan.

Never change, Japan.

Rina (AV actress Rina Fukada) grows big when exposed to electricity. When her father is kidnapped, she’s forced to become a kaiju woman and destroy the city. Not even tanks can stop her. But can a tentacle monster? Or a metallic lobster?

Look, I get it. These movies are weird. However, don’t you owe it to yourself, just once in your life, to see a gorgeous Japanese starlet get raw frogged by a giant amphibious kaiju?

What blows my brain out is the care that was given to the city set. We know this has been made for jerking off to, yet the city looks as good as a real kaiju movie. The monsters look better than several I’ve seen in real movies. What was the tentacle and lube budget? And ah, there’s that pixelation so that even though this is as perverted as it gets, you never see any real genitals.

The fact that this exists gives me hope.

The last Amicus film, The People That Time Forgot, is a direct sequel to The Land That Time Forgot and is based on two Edgar Rice Burroughs books, The People That Time Forgot and Out of Time’s Abyss. 

Major Ben McBride (Patrick Wayne) travels to Antarctica in search of his friend, Bowen Tyler (Doug McClure), the hero of the first movie. Along with his crew — Norfolk (Thorley Walters), Hogan (Shane Rimmer) and Lady Charlotte Cunningham (Sarah Douglas) — they make it to Caprona just in time to nearly be eaten by a pterodactyl.

They meet both the samurai-volcano-worshiping army of the Nargas and Ajor (Dana Gillespie), a cave girl who has been taught English by Tyler. As for Tyler, he’s been taken by the Nargas and needs to be rescued, but when the volcano erupts, maybe no one will survive.

American International Pictures took all the credit for this when it was released, as Amicus had already closed.

Directed by Kevin Connor and written by Patrick Tilley, this is a blast. A pre-Darth Vader David Prowse even shows up as an executioner, as does Richard LeParmentier, who was General Motti in that movie. Plus, there are several Frank Frazetta paintings.

Gillespie spoke of her costume with some humor, as she was a bit more curvy than your usual cavewoman. No complaints! She said, “Well, it’s mainly because they always seemed to give me the chamois-leather bits that Raquel Welch had discarded from One Million Years B.C. My costumes were actually much bigger than hers; she’s got the right shape for a bikini, which I clearly haven’t, really. But if you play a native girl, there’s only one sort of costume you can be put into: it’s either bits of fur or bits of suede leather.” 

Someone noticed. I love these IMDB goofs: “Prehistoric Ajor is clearly wearing eye shadow, eyeliner and false eyelashes, has manicured fingernails, tailored clothing and what looks suspiciously like a professional hairdo. – All highly noticeable once one takes one’s eyes off of her main assets.” and “After Ajor has freed them, they are climbing a hill. If you look closely, you can see Ajor is wearing modern white panties.” 

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.