Kaiju Mono Can't Quite Make the Pin

The worst part of being an American kaiju fan is the waiting. With the exception of Crunchyroll’s Ultraman simulcasts (may they rest in peace), every new offering from Japan takes months or even years to wash up on our shores—and spoilers can strike at any moment. The latest, Kaiju Mono, took over two years to arrive in the States and saw its Blu-ray release by Section23 repeatedly delayed for two months. Fortunately, in this age of yearly Hollywood kaiju blockbusters, not many people cared, so I went into it virtually blind. (If you want the same experience, skip the fourth paragraph.) The trailer didn’t give away much, focusing on pro wrestlers Kota Ibushi and Minoru Suzuki fighting an ornate kaiju in briefs.

The last Minoru Kawasaki movie to get an English-friendly release, Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit, caught a lot of flack for its lack of action. Local kyodai hero Take-Majin didn’t wake up until the end, while Guilala’s rampage across Japan used a remarkable amount of stock footage from the decades-old The X from Outer Space. Weak political satire filled the void. This time, Mono (Hiroyuki Taniguchi) melts tanks, terrorizes Shibuya, and takes on Ibushi and Suzuki in no less than three bouts. Kaiju fights have long featured wrestling moves, but having experienced wrestlers actually execute them is another thing entirely. Mono, constrained by suitmation, mostly gets by with electrified strikes and poison fog. It’s great fun.

Does all this dynamic violence make for a better movie? Well, sort of. For the first forty minutes, Kaiju Mono is a fine throwback. Kawasaki packs in every stock character he can think of: the disgraced scientist (Ryu Manatsu), the scientist’s beautiful daughter (Miki Kawanishi), the naive lab assistant (Syuusuke Saito), the reporter (Kikurin), the military men (Bin Furuya and Eiichi Kikuchi), the mystic (Shinzo Hotta), the biologist (Takumi Tsutsui). There’s ominous pronouncements and nonsense science aplenty, plus composer Ryo Nakamura channeling Masaru Sato at his jazziest. Ibushi enters the picture when the scientist shanghais his lanky assistant into taking a dose of his greatest invention, Setupp X Cells. Forget making him a man in just seven days—this injection does it in seconds. With a blizzard of wrestling moves, he sends Mono packing and becomes an instant celebrity.

Unfortunately, Kawasaki doesn’t know where to take the story from there. Fame inevitably corrupts the assistant in a dull montage. A foreign spy (Saki Akai, another wrestler) tries to seduce him, but her goal is his impossibly stretchy briefs, not the Setupp X Cells. Once her benefactor betrays her, she gives them right back. After the scientists return Mono’s egg and she defeats the assistant in Round 2, the mystic trains him to stop the flow of a waterfall. Mono deflects this attack, however, forcing the scientist to inject him with an “evil gene,” which is where Suzuki comes in. Incredibly, there are no side effects; he just beats the monster and reverts to Ibushi. At least he convinces Mono to leave Shibuya rather than kill her, but at that point things have dragged on for so long, you’re wondering why she didn’t leave on her own after Round 2.

The comedy in Kaiju Mono is of the same caliber as Monster X Strikes Back, which is to say it’s sporadic, sophomoric, and periodically hysterical. The movie’s English dub removes “sporadic” from that sentence; Section23 bucked the recent trend of faithfully boring kaiju dubs and crammed in as many extra jokes as possible. Between the American pop culture references and the incredibly horny characters, it makes for surreal viewing. Sample dialogue from an environmental activist: "This sexy-ass kaiju has come because nature is pissed off."

The dub also shatters the fourth wall a few (more) times to comment on the movie’s stunt casting, which includes alumni from the Ultra Series, Super Sentai, and Kamen Rider, along with an assortment of artists, authors, and comedians Kawasaki managed to get in front of the camera. The name-drop of Sandayu Dokumamushi (Arashi in Ultraman), who later appears as himself, is the first time I can recall official subtitles for a kaiju movie including a translator’s note. Unfortunately, it flashes by too quickly to read, and I remained confused until I Googled him afterwards.

As uneven as Kaiju Mono can be, in the end it knows exactly why someone would add it to their Amazon cart, and delivers on that strange promise. Kota Ibushi is no thespian, but he makes a hell of a (phoenix) splash as a kaiju-fighter, and I wouldn’t mind seeing him return to this genre. Just maybe with a different director… and a different setting too. Isn’t it about time we had a Kaiju Big Battel movie?

★★½ / ★★★★★