The War of the Gargantuas

The War of the Gargantuas (1966)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)
Also discussed: Frankenstein vs Baragon (1965) (a.k.a. Frankenstein Conquers the World, the fantastically inaccurate US title).

On a stormy night, a Japanese fishing boat is attacked by an octopus as large as the boat itself. (This one’s a kaiju effect, not a real octopus matted onto the action like in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962).) The crew are saved by something large, hairy and apelike that emerges from the water and fights off the octopus. Their relief is short-lived, however, because the creature immediately turns on them.

We cut to a hospital room where the sole surviving crew member is being tended to. A delegation from the Yokosuka Maritime Safety Agency pushes into the room and tries to harass the patient for information, but he tells them that Frankenstein sank the ship and picked off the other four crew as they tried to swim for shore. The officials are sceptical, although not for the reasons we might expect, as we’ll shortly discover. They send divers down to search for signs of the missing crew members, and recover several sets of torn, bloodied clothes. It looks like the crew have been eaten. The maritime agency phones Dr Paul Stewart, an American scientist based in Kyoto and the number one authority on the subject of Frankenstein.

“Frankenstein” in this case refers to a hairy, humanoid creature Dr Stewart and his team discovered and brought back to their lab some years earlier. In a flashback, we’re shown a scene of Stewart and his colleagues Akemi and Mamiya simultaneously studying and hand-rearing the child-sized Frankenstein, which looks like a tiny ginger Yeti, or perhaps the Orang Pendek of Indonesian folklore. Frankenstein later ran away, grew to enormous size and died at Mt Fuji in an incident not detailed here. In conversation with the maritime agency, and then with a gaggle of journalists that invades his office immediately after, Stewart agrees that Frankenstein could have come back to life – he’d died and come back a couple of times before that Stewart knows of – but denies that there’s any chance he would be living in the sea or preying on human beings.

After another couple of coastal attacks, we get our first good look at the creature in daylight. It has a somewhat lumpy head, muddy green-grey hair all over its body with an abundant thatch on its head, and large, protruding teeth. The press and public continue to speculate that the creature is Frankenstein. Stewart thinks it more likely Frankenstein would be living in the mountains than the sea, and has received photos of large humanoid footprints found in the Japanese Alps. He and Akemi go off to investigate that while Mamiya investigates the salvaged wreck of a ship. Mamiya finds an organic substance on the wreck which, when analysed, proves to have the same cellular structure that Frankenstein had.

The creature is next seen at the coastal Haneda Airport, panicking passengers waiting in the terminal building, causing flights not to land, snatching an airport employee from the admin building and eating her. It’s an overcast day, and when the clouds clear briefly, the creature startles and runs back into the sea. This gives Mamiya the idea that it might have an aversion to light. Stewart, Akemi and Mamiya meet up and travel to an emergency conference in Tokyo to discuss the situation, although the scientists still insist the creature can’t be Frankenstein. The JSDF plan to deploy an electric barrier along the shoreline to stop the creature coming ashore.

They obviously don’t manage to get the barrier up in time, because the creature comes ashore anyway that night. It closes in on an open-air restaurant, possibly drawn to it by the sound of the singer performing there. (Yes, this film has a musical interlude.) It snatches up the singer, but the restaurant staff turn on all the lights, which startles the creature into dropping the singer and running away. As it makes its way into the mountains, the people living in the area light bonfires and evacuate. The JSDF deploys tanks to attack the creature. Conventional guns, mortars and artillery fire set its fur alight and enrage it – the troops retreat as the creature picks up the tanks and throws them into nearby houses.

The next day, the JSDF flies in more troops and begins to set up for Operation L, a plan to capture the creature. Lured into a prepared trap by low-flying helicopters that night, the creature is bombarded with beams from flatbed-mounted Maser Cannons (these look a lot like the fantasy weapons seen in Mothra (1961) and Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)). The JSDF have also electrified a nearby river, cutting off the creature’s probable line of retreat. Just as they seem to have the upper hand, a second creature with orange-brown hair appears on the scene. When Stewart and Akemi hear about this, they guess that this ginger giant must be their own Frankenstein. Frankenstein pulls the hostile creature to its feet and escorts it away. He seems to actually be waving the JSDF troops back as he does this. The Ministry of Defence announces later that it’s designated the green-haired sea creature Gaira and the brown-haired mountain dweller Sanda.

The three scientists scour the ruined mountain forest for tissue samples the next day. They recover material from both creatures, and lab analysis shows that the pair have identical cells. Stewart hypothesises that Sanda must have been wounded during his previous escapade and that Gaira, an entire second Frankenstein, grew from the tissue he lost at that time – one of Frankenstein’s defining features was his remarkable regenerative ability. Sanda clearly still has the gentle disposition the scientists were expecting, but Gaira has grown up untamed and violent. What worries Stewart most of all is the possibility that, if either creature is wounded by the JSDF, they might shed more tissue samples that could grow into more wild creatures.

Meanwhile, Sanda and Gaira have retreated to a lake near Mt Fuji where Gaira can lick his wounds and the pair can hide from patrolling helicopters. Completely unconcerned as long as there’s bright sunshine, hikers continue to wander about the area, as do Akemi and Stewart. A pleasant afternoon is ruined when a bank of mist rolls in and Gaira chases after the hikers. In the rush to escape, Akemi slips into a ravine and is left clinging onto a protruding tree root. As she loses her grip and falls towards the river below, she’s caught by Sanda, who returns her to the path above where Stewart is waiting. Sanda limps away, having hurt his leg when he scrambled down into the ravine. The JSDF now plans to napalm the forest as well as electrify the lake, in order to kill both creatures. They’re not against using chemical weapons to prevent the regenerative cells from splitting off and creating more creatures.

Sanda finds Gaira sleeping off his most recent meal, which has clearly consisted of several unlucky hikers. Appalled, Sanda uproots a tree and beats Gaira with it. There’s a brief scuffle and Gaira runs off back to the sea, leaving the limping Sanda behind. As he charges through the settlements at the foot of Mt Fuji, the scientists and soldiers realise he doesn’t seem to be afraid of fire any more. He also now seems to understand that where there are electric lights, there might be food.

Stewart still hopes to capture Sanda and keep him confined for further study, but the JSDF are determined to destroy both creatures. Gaira returns to Tokyo and Sanda closes in on him. The JSDF advise civilians to hide in the subway as they roll in the tanks and Maser Cannons. Akemi and Stewart head out to try to find Sanda and steer him away from danger, but they’re soon cornered in a subway entrance by Gaira. Sanda appears in time to save Akemi from being eaten and attempts to communicate with Gaira in a form of sign language. Gaira isn’t interested, and they resume their fighting. The JSDF attacks Gaira with tanks and then, as the two creatures move towards the coast, with Maser Cannons. Sanda and Gaira fall into Tokyo Bay and, wrestling all the way, eventually swim out to sea. Helicopters bomb the pair as they fight in the open water. Unexpectedly, the bombs trigger an underwater volcanic eruption, with Sanda and Gaira caught at the centre of the smoke and falling rocks. A little later, Mamiya reunites with Stewart and Akemi and tells them that, although no one can confirm anything, it’s assumed that Sanda and Gaira died in the eruption.

When is a sequel not a sequel?

The War of the Gargantuas both is and is not a sequel to the previous year’s Frankenstein vs Baragon. (Note: that’s the Toho kaiju Baragon, not to be confused with the Daiei kaiju Barugon, who clashed with Gamera in 1966.) This probably wasn’t anything to do with the “King Kong vs Frankenstein" script treatment that had led to the production of King Kong vs Godzilla – there seem to have been multiple Frankenstein-themed ideas knocking about at Toho in the mid-1960s. Without wanting to get into the full blow-by-blow detail of it, here’s the gist of the earlier movie:

Towards the end of World War Two, an object makes its way out of Nazi Germany, from a U-Boat onto an Imperial Japanese submarine and into the hands of an unscrupulous scientist in Hiroshima. That object is the still-living heart of Frankenstein’s Creature. You read that right the first time. It has supernatural regenerative properties, and the scientist is hoping to use it to engineer an army of immortal Imperial super-soldiers. Before he can start on that, the Enola Gay drops the “Little Boy” atomic bomb and destroys his lab, along with roughly three quarters of the rest of the city.

Some 15 years later, American scientist Dr James Bowen is studying the effects of exposure to radiation in Hiroshima with his colleagues Sueko and Kawaji. They both witness and are given reports of a feral male child in the area, which they capture and take back to their lab for study. They learn the history of Frankenstein’s Creature’s heart – implausibly, one of the Japanese submarine officers and the former Nazi scientist who provided the heart are still alive, at liberty and readily available for interview – and conclude that the heart has regrown an entire body for itself, namely the child in their lab. He’s immune to the harmful effects of radiation, has a prodigious appetite and is rapidly growing all the time. Dubbed “Frankenstein” by the press, the now giant-sized child escapes back into the wild.

Meanwhile, a kaiju referred to as Baragon is popping up around the countryside, levelling villages and eating the inhabitants. Baragon is a quadripedal, reptilian, burrowing creature with a single large horn on its head and a pair of large, floppy ears. Frankenstein is initially blamed for the attacks, but ends up confronting Baragon himself to protect his human friends. The two fight near Mt Fuji and, as an earthquake suddenly strikes and opens up a sinkhole beneath them, both fall in.

Gargantuas makes frequent references to this earlier film, yet makes some surprising revisions. The three main scientist characters are renamed and, with the exception of the female scientist and romantic lead, recast. Dr Bowen in Frankenstein vs Baragon was played by Nick Adams, who went on to star in Invasion of Astro-Monster later that year. There’s no obvious reason why he couldn’t have appeared in Gargantuas – he was in Japan and available, and he’d work for Toho again in a 1967 spy thriller. Instead he was replaced by Russ Tamblyn, the Mercutio substitute in West Side Story (1961) and Luke in The Haunting (1963), as Dr Stewart. To date, this is the only Japanese film Tamblyn has acted in. Like Adams, he was recorded speaking in English and then dubbed over by a Japanese actor. Mizuno Kumi, the semi-villainous Namikawa in Invasion of Astro-Monster, played both Sueko in Frankenstein and Akemi in Gargantuas. Dr Kawaji, played by Takashima Tadao (Sakurai in King Kong vs Godzilla) was replaced with Dr Mamiya, played by Sahara Kenji, who’d been a hero in Rodan (1956), a villain in Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) and, funnily enough, a bit-part lab assistant in Frankenstein vs Baragon.

In order to show a flashback scene of the scientists working with the young Frankenstein, the film-makers are thus obliged to reshoot it with their new scientists, and they take the opportunity to recast the monster as well. The 1965 Frankenstein was a fairly ordinary looking boy with an extremely pronounced brow, presumably meant to evoke Boris Karloff’s squared-off monster head but looking more like a depiction of a Neanderthal. The 1966 Frankenstein, later renamed Sanda, looks much hairier and more animalistic, in line with the realisation of the adult Sanda and Gaira. The overall effect of these changes, together with the vague callbacks to key events from the earlier movie, is to make Gargantuas seem like a sequel not to the movie itself, but to some approximated half-remembered version of it, perhaps a version Toho wished they had made in hindsight. The American dub increases the distance between the two movies by replacing all mentions of Frankenstein with the word "Gargantua", including in the title (which, translated from the original Japanese, would have been “Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs Gaira”). Toho have happily adopted the American dub title as their preferred Anglo title for this movie.

I think the most notable thing about this revisionism is that it erases any suggestion that the boy Frankenstein was made possible by the wartime collaboration of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, which is never hinted at Gargantuas. I’m not sure which is more remarkable, that a 1965 Japanese film would make explicit reference to this bit of history or that a 1966 film would so suddenly pretend not to have been listening, and I’m not aware of any major developments in either year that would explain these choices.

Considering Gargantuas on its own terms, the pacing’s very leisurely but the presentation is a success. The early scenes featuring Gaira are kept quite dark, which allows for some effective menace to start with and a big reveal around the 15-minute mark. And there are definite advantages to using humanoid costumes instead of animalistic ones in kaiju eiga, as Daiei’s Daimajin movies also show. You’re not asking your stunt actor to move in an awkward, unnaturalistic way. Seeing a 1960s kaiju actually run, as Gaira does, is an astonishing thing. It’s easier for the audience to suspend disbelief in a monster that looks like a person in a costume when it’s actually supposed to move like a person. (Incidentally, I think this might be part of the reason for the success of Godzilla and King Kong, both bipedal kaiju, in the days before CGI.) If your monster doesn’t have a tail or wings, you don’t need extra puppeteers to move those things around convincingly. You can use the expressiveness of the actor’s own eyes, perhaps even more of their face (although Sanda and Gaira’s big, protruding teeth hinder more than help), instead of having to rely on close-up shots of puppet heads or, if you’re lucky, animatronics. You might even end up with a lighter, more streamlined costume than the typical daikaiju, something that isn’t so likely to have your stunt actor fainting under those hot studio lights. When Sanda and Gaira fight, it doesn’t look like a carefully choreographed bout between two men in heavy costumes, it looks like full-on wrestling.

The human drama is a bit lacking, but who cares about that, eh?

Sanda and Gaira will be referenced in at least one Godzilla movie (just when you least expect it!) but probably this film’s greatest legacy to Toho’s kaiju eiga is the introduction of the Maser Cannons. These will end up being the fantasy JSDF’s anti-Godzilla weapon of choice in years to come.