
Daikaiju Mono is a 2016 Japanese giant monster wrestling comedy. A giant monster has appeared on the scene and a mad scientist has a way to fight it. He's invented a serum that turns the victim test subject into a giant human. With endlessly expandable shorts. He fights the monster but can't seem to beat it. The science solution is to make a new serum with evil cells. That works.
The movie is directed by Minoru Kawasaki and he co-wrote the script with Takao Nakano. I've seen three of Minoru's other movies, The Calamari Wrestler, The World Sinks Except Japan and The Monster X Strikes Back: Attack The G8 Summit. The last two were better than this movie, which in turn is better than TCW. Still even at his best the comedy is hit and miss for me. Part of that is cultural differences and part of that is the jokes just weren't that good. DM is fairly good fun but it's lacking in the gag department. It's fights are a bit weak but there are some pretty girls. I wouldn't recommend it to most, fans of Daikaiju movies might get a kick out of it, but the average schmoe isn't going to find as much there. I'm likely not going to buy it, so many others higher up the list.

We watched The Cyclops as our second movie. It was written and directed by Bert I Gordon. It's the second film he wrote and the third he directed. I've seen a few of his 2 dozen films, he's been known to turn up on old episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and I like them. They aren't great films by any stretch of the imagination but some do have a bit of imagination. Just no money.

I found the Blu-ray of The Cyclops Thursday and thought I'd splurge a bit. It's going for $22 on Amazon, it's part of the Warner Archives Collection. The used Blu-ray was just over 9 bucks, after a 20% off coupon and some tax. The disc played perfectly fine. There's nothing by way of extras but a trailer. That's OK, I don't mind a bare bones disc, the extras eat up a lot of time, and I don't have to feel guilty if I didn't take to time to watch them. I certainly don't listen to as many commentaries as I used to when the format was new.

I know I had seen the movie before but I didn't remember seeing it on a FNM night back in June of 2011. Here's the text of that post, the accompanying art has changed, but I feel pretty much the same way about the film. Tonight I commented on the four seater plane issue while we were watching the movie. I hadn't seen the movie before and the opening sentence is in reference to the previous movie we watched back in 2011.

I can't say as much about Bert I Gordon's The Cyclops. I hadn't seen it before and I'm always interested in seeing 1950's SF movies. This is from 1957 and it's fun enough and short. That's the best thing about it, at 65 minutes there isn't much time to waste on padding out the story. Gloria Talbott is trying to find her missing husband. He crashed his plane in the mountains in an uninhabited part of Mexico. She's joined by her friend and hopeful suitor James Craig, hired pilot Tom Drake, and a uranium hunter, Lon Chaney Jr, who supplied some extra travel expense money. The plane has some trouble and lands in a flatish spot surrounded by mountains. Lon's scintillator tells him there's 8.5 on the meter and that gets him all excited. He's thinking to get rich selling the stock option on the claim. If he gets back to put the claim in that is, turns out Gloria owns the plane, and she's sticking to that valley until she finds her husband. They find part of his broken plane. Could he be alive? How would they get him back with 4 people already packing the four seater plane? Bert is like a lot of film makers when it comes to story. You know, film makers who don't care much about the details in their stories. The important thing is to get the giant monsters into the movie. Turns out the highly radioactive area has more than uranium.

That's James, Gloria, Tom and Lon in the plane. Soon after the group lands they encounter some of the local fauna and it's crazy big. A field mouse the size of a dog and a 12 foot hawk. We also have a giant , nearly transparent spider, a couple of huge, slightly opaque lizards and a giant one eyed husband. Yep, the husband is still alive and he's huge. They should have brought a cargo plane but who knew. The guy playing the giant guy is Duncan Parkin who would play a similar character in another Bert I Gordon classic War Of The Colossal Beast a year later. The script is pretty poor but at 65 minutes it goes by quickly. It was fun enough, even though the effects are pretty cheezy. It's barely worth watching for those that are less of a fan of the low budget science fiction film but I enjoyed it enough to be glad that I picked up a copy off of Turner Classic Movies the other night. Now I can watch it again later.