This isn't what I got into giant monsters for. For me, for most giant monster lovers, I think the main attraction of kaiju films is the simple and pure joy of watching and imagining impossibly gargantuan beasts march through concrete and steel, smoke and fire, with chaos and madness erupting all around before a second (or a third or fourth) towering titan emerges, dust and dirt falling, raining down, claws bared, the roars exploding across the skyline. Windows shatter, glass shards fall, cars are crushed underfoot in gouts of stinging smoke and fire as the beasts engage in snarling, roiling, chaotic combat. I love the clean, sharp awe of the gigantic, god-like leviathans and their thundering, stumbling combat and soused devastation. I love the imagination and the giddy unreality and, yes, even the flagrant shameless silliness that often pervades these films.
I certainly did not get into Godzilla for the sex. Yet as I have dug deeper into the sometimes seedy recesses of fandom, I have at times been quite shocked at what I found. I was surprised by the plastic breasts in Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975), then the pin-up girls in Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973), then I discovered there was a movie called Kinky Kong (I have avoided actually watching that one so far). More recently as I started collecting the wide range of Godzilla manga, I have found several officially licensed comics that were basically pornographic—one comic was all about a couple getting it on while Godzilla destroys the city around them, and another featured human-alien sex while floating in outer-space, perhaps inspired by Bye-Bye Jupiter (1984). There was also that Robot Chicken short that made fun of Godzilla's sex life. After writing an article about Godzilla's love life, I was even interviewed for an article about whether or not Godzilla sports a monster weiner, which came away inconclusive, despite the existence of a manga in which Godzilla's sperm cells were used to create a monster...
None of that prepared me for Debbie Does Monsterland, the first in a series of short stories by Emma Steele, appropriately titled the "F*** All Monsters" series (minus the asterisks). Now, Debbie Does Monsterland is not an officially Toho licensed title, but Emma Steele actually had the gall to include actual Toho monsters (as well as Gamera) and put it up for sale on Amazon and even included an image of Godzilla ravaging a naked woman on the cover. How does this even exist? (Okay, rule 34 of the Internet, right? But usually that just refers to fan art, right? Right?)
I should probably warn you now that this review is likely going to get somewhat graphic, though nowhere near as much as the book itself. However, given that nearly the full content of the story is all about sex of various stripes and colors, it is difficult to discuss in any detail without, well, bringing up some monster boot-knocking. Still, I am going to try to keep things pretty tame.
The story, for what it's worth (not much), depicts Peggy "Debbie" Archer (the 50 foot woman—yes, from the classic 50s film, except this time with a nickname from a porno) after she has been captured by the Hollywood Organization for Medical Experimentation (HOME). All the scientists there are horny perverts who enjoy watching her naked. Peggy has a problem—along with her increase in size, she has had a concomitant increase in libido—and when she acts on that sex drive, the scientists really like to watch. As fortune would have it, one day Peggy sees some documentary footage of Monsterland, wherein she spies the oversized male genitalia of the local monsters and their mating rituals, and she escapes from HOME, swims across the ocean, and presents herself sexually to the local megafauna—first to Minilla, and then to a series of other kaiju. Finally Godzilla shows up, but before she can engage in wild monster sex with him, the book suddenly ends—they basically cut out the climax.
Now… this short story has very little to recommend it if you care about anything beyond nasty, nasty sex. Every single character in the story is essentially wild for sexual stimulation and nothing else. Peggy can basically think of nothing but satisfying her libido, which she does in grotesque and even sometimes deadly fashion—the story includes not just graphic descriptions of engorged body parts and sex acts, but is also quite mean-spirited. For example, the scientists just want to exploit Peggy (apparently their main goal is to masturbate while watching her), and she gets her revenge by using one scientist as a human dildo, killing him in the process. To me, the whole story was frankly tiresome because there is really nothing to the story except multiple, panting, steamy sequences and overly detailed descriptions of body parts and bodily fluids. Sure, there's some humor. She has something like a nuclear orgasm that takes out a submarine. Yeah, apparently Gamera's manhood has a secondary little turtle on the end. And, two years before Shin Godzilla (2016), Godzilla (in "book" two of the series) shoots a secondary nuclear beam out of a secondary piece of his anatomy—though not his tail this time. But it's all an exercise in excess that was just too much for me.
Look, it's all puerile and silly but also just horribly distasteful. Sure, no one should take this book seriously, and it's all just for a laugh and for those with really strange sexual fetishes, but I don't find anything meaningful in just that laugh, that slap and slime and grime. I don't want to see my favorite fictional characters this way, and I definitely don't want to read about a fully grown woman engaging in sex with Minilla, making for a sort of insane mix between bestiality and pedophilia. Are we supposed to laugh at that?
The entire story is essentially one long sex joke, but I never found it particularly funny, and frankly I don't like to look at sex this way—as something to merely titillate, as something to gross people out with, as something just for pleasure devoid of love or meaning. Sex is more than just sticking pieces of bodies together and feeling good about it, and I just don't like stories that demean the miracle of life that way, especially if the story is only that, with little or no characterization or interest outside of the lewd-icrous spectacle of monster mating. No thanks.
Admittedly, I am not in the target audience for monster smut, but I can't imagine the market for this stuff to be very large either. Do fans really get excited about the prospect of monster fornication? Certainly many fans will declare on social media (humorously, I suppose) that they are sexually turned on by this or that new monster model or recent movie trailer—I cannot count the number of times I have seen fans write about their fan boners or needing to change their pants after seeing some new release. Then again, I have seen many fans balk at the very idea that Godzilla or monster toys turn them on, lambasting author William Tsutsui for sharing in his first book an anecdote about meeting a particular fellow at G-Fest who claimed he took showers with his toys in order to soften the plastic, which makes it easier to assemble the pre-dissected beasts. Whatever. With Debbie Does Monsterland, I have had more than enough of that side of the fandom. Let's get back to the explosions and dinosaurian spectacle, where the boom and the bang mean pretty explosions and nuclear rays, not sex moves. |
