Charles and I only watched three movies tonight, interrupted by a trip to Meijer where we bought a lot of pudding and some Americone Dream. This is what I thought of our lineup.

To recap, the whole point of this was to watch monster movies that were not made by Toho studios in Japan. Between the two of us we've seen more giant monster movies than we should probably admit, so we held these against that which came before. As criteria we established that the monsters must be large enough to consume a human being.

The Host (dir. Bong Joon-Ho, 2006. South Korea). This was the best of the lot, in my opinion. The Host's best quality, we decided, was that it gave us the monster early on rather than building the suspense at the expense of the story. That let the movie get on with being a kick-butt monster film without spending half of its length showing a glimpse of a leg or a close-up of the eye (an example that Roland Emmerich should learn from). Part of The Host's appeal for me was that, unlike any Godzilla film you'll ever see, that it was entirely seated in real-world happenstance. The monster isn't created/reawakened from something massively extravagant as nuclear testing and it isn't defeated by techy pseudoscience, super-soldiers, or reporters. In fact, the monster is so extraordinary because everything about it is so hum-drum and ordinary. Its creation is nothing we are unfamiliar with (based on a real-life instance of a massive dumping of formaldehyde), our heroes are nothing spectacular (a non-remarkable family, each with their own faults and issues), and the monster is brought down with the most basic weapons. Yet through it all, as the monster ravages its everyday world, the sheer insanity of this beast allows it to fit in without question. The monster is a product and member of our world every bit as much as any of us.

Cloverfield (dir. Matt Reeves, 2008. USA). I'll admit that I didn't go in expecting much out of Cloverfield, but I did come out pleasantly surprised. Though it didn't take The Host's quick method of reveal, instead making us wait nearly the entire movie before showing the monster close-up, I think it worked. Cloverfield wasn't about the monster. The Cloverfield monster was little more than an oversized McGuffin to shepherd the characters from one point to the next, so its actual purpose and actions were of little consequence. The movie doesn't ever answer the question of where it came from or even of whether or not it was ultimately defeated, neither of which is actually important to the story. I thought Cloverfield worked and did what it set out to do, which was to present the concept of a freak giant monster attack as a real-world situation and showing how people would react. Our heroes are barely heroic as they spend most of their time running in fear and, ultimately, there is no decided victory for anyone. True, The Blair Witch Project did a similarly-styled film a decade ago but that wound up being burdened by too much information. Blair Witch kept giving us more and more supernatural phenomenon that it never intended to answer: stick figures in the woods, strange sounds, cut-off ears, and people standing in corners of basements. In the end that film's lack of answers just felt empty; that it set up so much that something should have been cleared up. Cloverfield didn't set up quite as much, the only real question being the monster's origins. However, that this is never resolved isn't really that big of an issue.

The Giant Gila Monster (dir. Ray Kellogg, 1959. USA) Watched as Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episode 402. Watching our last monster movie as an episode of MST3K seems entirely fitting and Giant Gila Monster is one of those terrible classics from the Cold War. It's the charming tale of a singing tow-truck driver with a crippled sister who helps the overly-optimistic sheriff suss out that a giant lizard caused a crashed car to leave oddly-angled skidmarks. Or something. In any case, Gila Monster combines three elements that I praised from the previous two films. Firstly, the monster is shown in its entirety early on in the picture, within the first ten minutes. Secondly, it doesn't bore us with a lengthy origin story about nuclear testing or pollution or whatnot. The monster simply is and it's now our heroes' problem to deal with. Thirdly, the monster is stopped with nothing more than a hot-rod loaded with nitro-glycerin. While the movie plods along at its own pace the gila monster gets plenty of screen time to knock over Matchbox cars and stare bewildered at the camera. While it can't hold a flame to our earlier two movies, Gila Monster certainly isn't the worst from its era: those bygone days when monster movies were a dime a dozen because they frequently veiled a subtle message (often entirely unspoken but still much aware to audiences at the time) that Russia is bad. Gila Monster doesn't bother us with politics. It instead provides us ninety minutes of people with their legs up on every surface available to place their leg upon while our tow-truck driver hero sings his way into history. That we had Joel and the 'bots to lovingly guide us through only made it more palatable.

All in all, I thought this was a pretty good marathon even if we only got three films in. We're still planning to do a proper Toho Monster Day -- featuring The Mysterians (1957), Varan the Unbelievable (1958), and Matango (1963) -- but that's a marathon for another day.

Lastly, I decided not to do a fancy, nice-looking insignia in Illustrator for this. Instead I spent ten minutes of my life drawing this little ditty for the marathon. Click for larger.

Today we're going to be watching monster movies that were not made by Japan's Toho Studios. Heck, we may even stay away from Daiei Studios for all the good it'll do.

Our agenda so far only calls for Cloverfield (2008) and The Host (2006).

I've taken the liberty of setting out Night of the Lepus (1972) but who knows if we'll even touch that.

More than likely we'll stray away from monster movies, at which point we'll drift into random movie territory. Who knows what'll happen!

So, if'n you're interested, we'll be starting at 4:30 today at my pad.

P.S. For what it's worth, we are planning to have a Toho Monster Day at some later date.