Life Imitates Art
I've always had a special fascination for movies featuring frightening, bloodthirsty sea monsters.
"It Came from Beneath the Sea" was one of the scariest sea monster movies of my childhood. Until I was about 18, I was petrified every time I had to cross a suspension bridge.
"It" made this guy look like sushi:
But for my money, the title of "King of the Sea Monsters" forever belonged to Godzilla.
I'm talking about the classic and original 1954 version and not the score of awful remakes that were downright demeaning to the G-Man's image as a Mo-Fu of a city re-planner. The original film was titled Gojira and made exclusively for the Japanese audience. Unlike all of the subsequent Godzilla films, it was shot in Black & White which dramatically added to the fear factor while helping to hide the puppet wires attached to the monster.Gojira was nominated for two Japanese Academy Awards, winning one for special effects but edged out for Best Picture by Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Two years later, Godzilla, King of the Monsters emerged in American theaters with subtitles, some dubbing and a Hollywood-shot Raymond Burr cleverly edited into various scenes as an American reporter in Tokyo (to explain in English what the hell was going on). Godzilla's rise from the ocean floor was a post Hiroshima/Nagasaki statement on the monstrous horrors that mankind could unleash on the planet (sounds vaguely like something about the ocean floor in the news today). Like The 1952 original of The Day the Earth Stood Stiil and Forbidden Planet (1956), '50s monsters often carried social messages along with their carnage.
I was an 8 year old kid in 1956 when the American version of Godzilla was released. My big brother trotted off to the bus with me in tow, our destination - the huge, Art Deco-style theater in Upper Darby where an imperceivable horror awaited us on the giant screen. To this day, I have no idea what my parents were thinking. I had the living bejesus scared out of me and ended up with nightmares for a month. But that was the whole point, and it was wonderful.
I probably viewed the film another 20 times on the small screen before my 10th birthday.
Only King Kong exceeded that record (the original 1933 version, of course).
Later Godzilla films would recast the monster as the good guy while introducing a variety of hokey hellions to challenge his domain. The budgets seemed to get lower with each new film, and a few too many back lot publicity photos didn't do much for maintaining the scare factor.
The sad demise of the creature was almost unbearable for me. The monster that had once left me with a sleep disorder had become a laughing stock. It was like watching a hot Kirstie Alley as Saavik kill aliens in 1982 only to watch her kill whole wedding cakes in 2010. The transition wasn't pretty.
(I'll spare you the "after" image)
So future generations of horror film enthusiasts stopped taking Godzilla movies seriously. By the 1980s, Godzilla was about as omnipotent and terrifying as this fellow:
Actually, if you were ever forced to sit through 2 straight Barney episodes, you know what it's like to be unnerved to the edge of insanity - yet small children just laugh. Go figure.
By the 1990s, Godzilla was probably tame enough, and silly enough, to be cast as a hen-pecked dad in a suburbia-based sitcom.
The 1998 remake of Godzilla with Matthew Broderick should have been titled Ferris Bueller's Day Off to Exterminate Lizard Infestations in the Subway. The film was only slightly more disquieting than Inspector Gadget.
Of course, many creatures unsuccessfully vied for the title of Neptune of Sea Monsters.
Some were downright laughable.
While other Creatures continued to shock us with sheer ugly.
But when it came to slithering out of the depths of a Black Lagoon and paralyzing a mass audience with abject fear, no monster, not even Godzilla, could compete with this trio:
So what's your scariest sea monster movie?
Yeah. mine too, and it's turning out to be a documentary