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Mothra (1961)
Topic Started: Jun 5 2010, 07:42 AM (229 Views)
Laughing Gravy
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Shipwreck survivors are rescued from a tiny island in the Pacific; the island was used for nuclear tests, so the guys should be burned and grotty and stuff, but they're fine, thanks, due to a weird elixer that the natives of the island gave them. The Japanese government sends a convoy in to meet the natives and get some of the elixer; after a run-in with the natives (who aren't too friendly and who bang coconut shells together, approximating horse-hooves, I guess) and a man-eating plant, settle down to business: meeting two itsy-bitsy tiny fairy princesses who live on the island and who sing songs about the native goddess, Mothra. One of the scientific expedition guys is evil, and he sneaks back and kidnaps the li'l things and puts them on display and charges admission to hear them sing. Bad idea, because they summon the goddess, who turns out to be a giant egg from whence comes a giant silkworm that swims to Tokyo and does a lot of damage before spinning itself into a cocoon from whence comes a giant moth, who does a lot of damage again before grabbing the fairy princesses and headin' for home. The end.

Suffers from King Kong syndrome, which hardly any other monster movie does as well as Kong did: you know, barely showing the monster for the first 2/3 of the film, and then letting all hell break loose. Usually, it's pretty boring while we wait for the hell breaking loose part, and this has some of that going on. Frankly, I loved Frankie Sakai and Kyôko Kagawa as the journalists on the track of Mothra; Frankie is a plump short guy, the antithesis of your usual movie hero, and Kyôko has a beautiful smile she uses a lot as she sneaks around trying to take pictures.

We watched this in the dubbed English version, then watched sequences of it again in Japanese (which is a longer version, too). Fun stuff for our annual Japan monster night on FNF, and the DVD is very, very good, widescreen Tohoscope and all.

We also watched Elmer Fudd invent a potion to turn bunny wabbits into fewocious beasts, only the potion attracts a grumpy bear; pretty good cartoon, very colorful. Alfalfa thinks his aunt is trying to kill him in "Alfalfa's Aunt", one of the later (1939) Our Gang comedies in which the cast is aging none-too-gracefully; poor Porky is just shooting up in size and you know you won't be seeing THAT kid any more. Biggest laugh: Buckwheat gets a-scared and his hair stands on end. We watched a bonus short, "Is This Love?", that contrasts the college students (who appear to be in their 40s) who hold hands for 18 months before thinking about kissing and the students who meet for the first time in the cafeteria at lunch and are engaged to be married before sundown. Hmmm. Oh, yeah, and The Shadow, naturally. Huge laugh this week, as one of the Black Tiger's henchmen - waiting for the boss to appear - asks another, "Tell me that story about Little Red Riding Hood again. I like that one."
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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