Warning:
This review contains spirited ranting, sarcasm,
and multiple uncensored examples of horrendously
mangled English.
Back in the years of my adolescence, I treasured
most every visit to the big city (well, Des Moines
anyway), even though usually my family's reason
for going had something to do with a doctor or two.
The source of my happiness, then, despite the prospect
of long hours sniffing antiseptic smell in hospital
waiting rooms? Why, the reward of materialistic
excess afterwards, of course! If it wasn't Toys
"R" Us or Children's Palace, it was the
Half Price Book Store. Few things could get me more
excited than a monster collection of cheap used
books, comics, and movies—especially if that
collection included cheap used monster books, comics,
and movies. It was Half Price Book Stores where
I would frequently purchase informational paperbacks
on movies and dinosaurs, from Hot Blooded Dinosaur
Movies to Hong Kong Action Movies to
The Dinosaur Scrapbook. With so many victories
under my movie-loving belt, when I saw Giant
Monster Movies by Robert Marrero there, even
despite the ghastly cover art, I decided to take
a chance and blow eight bucks of my scarce teen-years
moolah on the work. Even back then, when perhaps
I was (somewhat) less discerning in my reading habits,
it only took a few minutes before the prose in this
book made me want to scream, and a weight hit in
my chest. My eight dollars was gone forever.
But let's not get into the pain too quickly. First
off, it's important to look at what exactly Robert
Marrero has for his readers in this tome. Along
with the introduction (in which Marrero claims that
his book is a "classic collector's item"),
the book includes five chapters: The Silent Giants,
King Kong: The Eighth Wonder, Prehysteria at the
Movies, Godzilla and Friends, and More Giant Movie
Monsters, which, according to the contents page,
is followed by a "filomgraphy" and index.
For our purposes here at Toho Kingdom, the chapter
Godzilla and Friends will be receiving the most
attention, but it's worth giving a little overview
of what else is available for the curious—I
suffered through the whole book, so don't think
I'm not going to at least mention what else is there.
The Silent Giants is pretty much self-explanatory,
being a record of giant monsters (mostly dinosaurs)
in silent film. King Kong: The Eighth Wonder is
a break down of all the giant gorilla movies, a
sub-sub-genre at best. Prehysteria at the Movies,
predictably, is about dinosaur movies; due to the
somewhat contemporary release of Jurassic Park
to his book's publication date, Marrero feels the
need to bring up JP and compare it to any number
of movies in these first three chapters. More Giant
Movie Monsters is a mishmash of everything else—giant
humans, miniaturized humans, giant bugs, aliens,
and fantasy (which for some reason doesn't rate
its own chapter), all squished together and treated
with a merciful lack of detail in comparison to
the initial chapters. After wading through all that
dreck, quite suddenly the book ends, without even
an attempt at any form of conclusion. The problems
in the book are pretty well universal throughout
the text, but, either because I had resigned myself
to my fate or because of a miniscule increase in
writing quality, the book seemed to improve slightly
towards the end, which doesn't diminish the terminal
troubles of the text.
The biggest problem, far and away, is the stunningly
awful writing prevalent from the first page. I wrote
before that The
Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture had
a lot of errors in the text, but Schilling's book
was nigh flawless next to this. It reads like a
sloppy first draft, and though an editor is listed
(some poor soul named Rick Schanes), whatever his
editing practices were, they certainly didn't help
the writing much. At one point, Marrero even points
the reader to a nonexistent biographies section
in the back of the book. The errors are so ubiquitous
and so gapingly obvious that I got tired of recording
even the knee-slappers after a while. In addition
to doubled periods, period/comma combinations, bewilderingly
bad paragraph structures, incorrect use of parentheses,
brain-scarring sentences, and rigorous abuse of
capitalization, Marrero has some of the most jaw-dropping
spelling and incorrect word usage I have ever seen
outside of an early elementary school paper. For
the morbidly curious, I have compiled a list of
some of the funnier ones: King Kong, which
Marrero worships, includes "the single most
greatest moment in movie history," (pg. 28)
and Kong's son was "a lot more friendlier than
his father" (pg. 39). Jurassic Park's
"scientifically computer synthesized special
effects" were "supped-up" (pg. 113).
Consistently throughout the entire book, Marrero
uses "weather" in place of "whether,"
and "statute" instead of "statue"—including
six times in one paragraph describing the plot of
the original Godzilla
vs. Mechagodzilla (1974). In the movie The
Creatures the World Forgot, Marrero describes
a "doggie-dog world" (pg. 96)—meaning,
of course, dog-eat-dog, but sounding more like a
rejected Snoop Dog song. Somehow Marrero managed
to include three O's instead of zeros when writing
out "The Beast from 20,OOO Fathoms"
on page 69, and in The Crater Lake Monster,
a "snow plot" (instead of a plow, pg.
106) finishes off the stop-motion animated plesiosaur—which
might be a more clever way to express the ending
than he intended, since the monster's demise was,
after all, written into the plot. In perhaps the
most imaginative spelling error, Marrero writes
that the Australian movie Razorback features
a monstrous "wild Bohr" (pg. 204), but
unfortunately the film's villain is not a mutated
Danish atomic physicist, but just an oversized porker.
At least three times in the book, Marrero misspells
"roster" with two O's—and thus in
one instance Marrero proclaims that "the monster
Atragon was dropped from the studio's rooster"
(pg. 138), conjuring up a very strange mental picture,
and missing the fact that there is no monster named
Atragon. In his comments for Frankenstein
vs. Baragon (1965), Marrero asserts that
the character Dr. Bowen could prove his theory about
the Frankenstein monster by "decapitating the
boy's arm" (pg. 139), which implies that the
monster's arm had its own head! Godzilla, meanwhile,
is described as the "savor" (pg. 162)
of humankind. King
Kong Escapes (1967) is paradoxically "much
better, but not by much" (pg. 151) than Son
of Godzilla (1967). On the Daiei side of
things, Gamera produces a feat that I never thought
I would see in a monster movie when he "manages
to destroy a massive damn" (pg. 148, 149) in
War of the Monsters. Thanks for fighting
against bad language everywhere, Gamera! He truly
is the friend of children.
Then we come to perhaps Marrero's most maddening
prose affectation. See, Giant Monster Movies
was written in the early nineties, and there was
a particular mode of sarcastic slang usage fairly
popular among certain sections of the youth at that
time. Anyone who survived the time period should
know what I'm talking about: the infamous "not."
You know how it works. Say a statement that isn't
true, add on a layer of mocking derision, and then
pause dramatically before declaring loudly, "NOT!"
For example, "The American Godzilla movie was
perfectly faithful to the spirit and mythos of the
Japanese original. NOT!" Perform this particular
routine, and you're almost guaranteed to annoy any
refined ear within a five mile radius. It's not
particularly hard to master, and younger siblings
are especially good at the practice. Yet somehow,
Marrero even gets stupid 90's slang fads wrong and
writes, concerning the much-maligned flying sequence
in Godzilla
vs. Hedorah (1971), "can it be possible
that this was Toho's way of comparing Godzilla to
Gamera? NOT!" (pg. 158, 159) What exactly is
he negating here? That he's asking the question?
Is he saying it's impossible for Toho to compare
Godzilla with Gamera? Why? The fact that this isn't
the only time Marrero employs this abominable practice
in the book makes me wonder how he got published
outside of amateur fanzines printed on toilet paper.
Marrero's fact-gathering skills are almost as
poor as his writing. This is especially obvious
in his Godzilla chapter, in which he claims Godzilla
is a mutated tyrannosaurus released from Antarctica,
and states that "Today, Godzilla is looked
upon as Inoshiro Honda's epic translation of KING
KONG" (pg. 122), begging the question of who
exactly holds to that rather dubious belief. As
has been pointed out many times before, the original
Gojira was largely inspired by The Beast from
20,000 Fathoms, not the popular big ape. In
his synopsis of King
Kong vs. Godzilla (1962), Marrero gets a
lot of events out of order or just plain wrong;
later on he makes several jabs at Toho for supposedly
killing off Godzilla in the first four films and
not explaining how the monster keeps coming back
to life, even going so far as to make the assertion
that Godzilla drowns at the end of Mothra
vs. Godzilla (1964). Godzilla, drowning?
Marrero must not have understood much about who
Godzilla was, or what he was capable of. The author
makes a number of embarrassing blunders about Destroy
All Monsters (1968), writing that the film
has extensive stock footage (it has hardly any),
that Ghidorah lives on Monster Island (he does not),
and that Anguirus, Minilla, and King Ghidorah are
unpopular monsters! In the same chapter, Marrero
unbelievably goes to some length to mock Shochiku
studios' The X from Outer Space, claiming
that the monster literally is a giant X, a "fact"
he repeats and underscores several times. Now, Guilala
may be many things, but he isn't an oversized letter
of the alphabet. Marrero also blunders through his
description of Monster from a Prehistoric Planet,
calling the film a remake of Gorgo ("inspired
by" might be better), and even goes so far
at one point to insinuate that Gamera was created
by Toho—although he corrects himself later
on. The factual mistakes seem somewhat less prevalent
in the chapters about non-Japanese fare, although
I wasn't as careful checking over them.
Even beyond the extensive writing and factual
mistakes that Marrero makes throughout the book,
most Toho and Japanese movie fans will find Giant
Monster Movies infuriating due to the author's
scathingly disdainful opinions about those films.
Again and again Marrero slams Japanese movies, and
Toho films in particular, guffawing over the fantastic
elements that are so common in them ( Mothra gets
particular hate) and decrying the films as unintentionally
funny—apparently not realizing that a lot
of the Godzilla entries were supposed to be fun
and amusing. Marrero sneers that "Toho writers
were notorious for throwing in ridiculous and meaningless
subplots that had nothing to do with the film"
(pg. 128), and blasts Invasion
of Astro-Monster (1965), writing that the
"feeble plot is aimed towards adolescent viewers…with
very little in the way of escapist entertainment
to offer the imagination" (pg. 144). Even the
highly regarded Matango
(1963) can't escape his scorn; Marrero labels the
movie "infantile" and "disastrous"
and tells the reader to "Thank Toho for not
making a sequel" (pg. 210). (How Matango
counts as a giant monster movie comes from Marrero's
loose definition of the genre, including just about
any monster bigger than a human being.) The author
at least concedes that the original Godzilla
(1954) film is good, even complimenting the special
effects and plot, but he feels the nuclear parable
aspects of the film are insubstantial at best, finding
more commentary on nuclear warfare in a brief scene
in The
Return of Godzilla (1984) than in the entire
original film!
All of that being true, it would be bad form to
neglect the good points of Marrero's work here,
and there are a few aspects worth noting. Despite
the crippling problems of the text, Giant Monster
Movies is impressively comprehensive and includes
information on a wide variety of sometimes painfully
obscure films that I have found rarely even mentioned
in other similar books. Marrero was also the first
author that I've come across to point out a possible
inspiration for Mechani-Kong—the giant robot
gorilla from The Monster Gorilla (or Gekko
Kamen: Kaiju Kongu), a Toei film, and one that
I very much wish to view now. The path of inspiration
may not be so clear, however; Mechani-Kong was first
featured in the Rankin-Bass King Kong cartoon
series which, while animated by Toei, would have
been written by Rankin-Bass writers, who were just
as capable and likely to come up with the robo-ape
from their own imaginations. Regardless of Mechani-Kong's
true inspiration, it would be interesting to see
how Toei handled a similar giant monster situation
some eight years before Toho did it. Giant Monster
Movies also includes a large collection of sizable
photos and posters from dozens of different movies,
a number of which are rather uncommon, presented
on nice glossy paper which, while it doesn't help
the reading process due to glare, displays the visual
element well. Not all of the photos are great, but
enough of them are quite fine as to make the book
seem attractive—although for some reason two
identical shots of a Gammera the Invincible
lobby card are included on page 147. Then again,
Giant Monster Movies sports some laughably
incompetent cover art, complete with lousy binding
and a badly designed spine. The old adage that you
can never judge a book by its cover was never proven
less true.
In a sense, I can't help but respect self-proclaimed
film historian Robert Marrero, in a similar fashion
that I extend a certain respect to the infamous
German director Uwe Boll. Much like Boll and his
absurdly awful/amusing video-game movies, Marrero
(if we can take Giant Monster Movies as a
representative sample) writes bad books, and then
somehow manages to keep publishing more despite
his gut-bustingly egregious previous efforts. A
quick search on Amazon reveals a fairly large number
of Marrero's books dating as far back as the early
eighties, including several vampire movie surveys,
a tome on silent film, and another on Spielberg.
After Giant Monster Movies, he went on to
write an entire book about Godzilla (titled Godzilla
King of the Movie Monsters which Toho subsequently
sued into relative obscurity), a surprising effort
considering his marked distaste for J-films displayed
in Giant Monster Movies. For the adventuresome
thick-skinned reader, Marrero's works can provide
a distasteful, derisive pleasure, but be warned;
Giant Monster Movies hurts. While I was reading
this one, the book, which had by some manner achieved
sentience and realized I was prepping to write this
review, managed to slice my wrist as I brushed the
crumbs of my breakfast away from its side. I'm sure
I had an uncommon experience with a particularly
violent specimen, but Giant Monster Movies
is brain-eatingly bad. Not even worth half-price. |