Schlocktober: Attack of the Super Monsters and Return of the Dinosaurs

Last week on Schlocktober, the films I talked about, while not exactly common names in movies, are still probably somewhat known to anyone who's familiar with science fiction. Them! was a downright hit in its day, after all. This week however, I'm going obscure....really, really obscure. Attack of the Super Monsters and Return of the Dinosaurs. If you've ever heard of, or watched these two pieces of cheese....well, then congratulations on being as strange as I am.

While both of these productions originally came from Tsuburaya Productions in Japan (the creators Ultraman, a series in which a normal man could turn himself into a costumed giant to fight off raging giant monsters from beyond the stars. No, really, stop laughing!), their brief moments in the American spotlight came during the initial VHS boom back in the 80's. The long and the short of it was that there was a shortage of content actually on video for some genres of fiction, back in the day. And as such, there was plenty of opportunities to make money on importing something from Japan or Italy (Yes, Italy did a whole slew of both knock off and original sci-fi movies that got American releases), doing a quick dub and releasing it to the market.

Return of the Dinosaurs was the first of these two. In Japan it was a TV series known as Kyoryu Tankentai Born Free (Dinosaur Exploration Team Born Free), which is the much cooler title in my opinion. The plot? Well, it all begins with a large comet doing a drive by on earth, without actually hitting us. However, its gravitational pull was still somehow strong enough to make volcanoes explode, cause tidal waves to wash away whole cities, and split and up heave the ground enough to release whole swathes of vegetation and creatures from the Mesozoic Era back to the surface world. But as soon as they re-appear, they begin to die off again, because (surprise, surprise) ancient plants and animals can't survive in the modern era. How they survived under ground is never explained. My personal theory is that the earthquakes uncovered the rich veins of Dinosaurinium that criss-cross the planet.

Here's where things start to get kind of ridiculous. In the wake of some manner of world wide disaster (remember some of these tidal waves have washed away *cities*), the world decides to go and create a team to round up and protect the dinosaurs. ....Because that's a thing we should be worried about when a comet has decided to redecorate large swathes of the planet earth. Really, the whole thing is just an excuse to have our characters go traipsing through jungles to capture dinosaurs with their very toyetic vehicles.

And toyetic is really the word. For you see, this show is a mix of three different styles. The vehicles really are toys/models that were put together. The dinosaurs? Stop motion animation and puppets. And the humans in this little drama? Animation. The result is...downright surreal to watch really, a fact that's not helped by the dub on this one. It's one of those early anime style dubs where everything is delivered in a kind of deadpan lack of emotion. And as this is a compilation of episodes re-edited into a movie, it follows a very similar pattern across its hour and a half run time. But if you really want to see just how silly this thing gets....

Someone uploaded the whole thing onto YouTube. Dinosaur Exploration Team Born Free would run for twenty-six episodes in its native Japan, before being replaced by an even more out there premise. Kyoryu Daisenso Aizenbogu, loosely translated into English as Dinosaur War Izenborg, and known in the US as Attack of the Super Monsters.

While Return of the Dinosaurs was more of curiosity in my mind Attack of the Super Monsters is the kind of absolute balls to the wall insanity I've come to know and love from Japanese science fiction. Much like Return, it begins with a sudden cataclysm, but the cataclysm this time is the sudden re-appearance of the dinosaurs themselves, who have apparently been hiding under ground for millions of years, evolving intelligence, the ability to talk, and fearsome supernatural powers. Now, under the leadership of the mad Emperor Tyrannus (Emperor Tyrannus!), they seek to destroy all of humanity.

They are opposed by a response team that drives a set of even more ridiculous looking toy based vehicles. They are also hand drawn animation and break down along the standard Japanese stereotypes for this kind of arrangement. The stern and humorless leader, his more emotional sister, the tall nerdy looking smart guy, the bumbling fat comic relief guy, and the exposition delivering doctor who stays back at home base while everyone else does the actual work. What's notable about this one is that the brother and sister in this one have the ability to fuse together into one composite being known as Gemini, which gives their toy plane such an effective upgrade in power that you wonder why they just don't do that in the first place! (Yes, there is a time limit on their power, but they always kill the monster so fast you wonder why it matters.) Ever notice how escalating transformations with different stages of power is a very Japanese fiction thing? Weird huh?

This is another episode compilation "movie", so we get to see the Gemini response team kill four different dinosaurs turned kaiju before we get a quasi ending. Personally, my favorite bit of this whole production is Emperor Tyrannus himself. I know that he's just a T.Rex puppet, but the over the top performance from the voice actor with his constant calls of "YOU WILL ALL BE DESTROYED!" and "KILL THEM! DESTROY!", never fail to crack me up. Nick Cage doesn't chew scenery the way this T-Rex puppet does and it is *glorious*!

And look....

Attack of the Super Monsters

Someone was nice enough to upload it to DailyMotion! Seriously, if you have a chance, at least watch the opening five minutes or so, where they give the back-story of this insane universe. It is well worth a look, if for no other reason then to see the madness.

Next week....something else!