War of the Gargantuas – 1966 – Japan
The history of this movie is probably more interesting than the movie itself. War of the Gargantuas is a sequel to Frankenstein vs. Baragon (1965), which was a collaboration between Toho (the Godzilla people) and an American company. The resulting movies have some oddly American flourishes. The monsters (called “gargantuas”) are hairy neanderthal-like giants, and unlike Godzilla, Mothra, and Gamera that just like to smash buildings, the gargantuas eat people! And then they spit out the shredded human clothes!
Like the worst kaiju movies, War of the Gargantuas is slow and boring. The human characters are uninteresting and given very little to do (even compared to other kaiju movies). Most of the movie is about the Japanese military battling the monster. However, there is a conflict because one gargantua likes humans and the other eats them, so they have to fight to the death. Both end up being suddenly destroyed in an erupting volcano.
Gargantuas are afraid of light, which is inconsistently applied in the movie, but as a result, there are a lot of low-light scenes. One memorable scene involves a gargantua wrestling a giant octopus in the dark ocean. In another visually exciting bit, the army barrages a gargantua with lasers, cutting down a forest in the process. After this scene, the monster is covered with burns and scorched hair, which makes a striking image.
War of the Gargantuas suggests that a full-sized gargantua can grow from even the smallest piece of skin that gets severed from them. The army is afraid to bomb the monster because if it is blown to pieces, those pieces will grow into a legion of gargantuas. Sadly, this never happens.
Rating: 4/10 Shrunken Heads. Watching this move made me realize the giant lobster-like “Gargons” in Teenagers from Outer Space are named after the word “gargantuan”.
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