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.

Redman: The Kaiju Hunter Will Steal/Carve Out Your Heart

Something weird happened in 2016. No, besides that. I meant on Tsuburaya Productions’ YouTube channel. Ultraman’s 50th anniversary was on its way, but all they seemed to post was this weirdo in a cheap-looking superhero costume fighting even cheaper-looking kaiju. After a few terrific pieces of fanart crossed my Tumblr dashboard, I decided to give it a watch.

That was all it took. From April to October, Redman had me -- and many other tokusatsu fans -- in his grip. Like the kaiju who kept coming back no matter how many times he stabbed them, his show had found new life 44 years after it ended. We gifed, drew, theorized, roleplayed, cosplayed, filmed. Though the whole series had been released on LaserDisc in 1996, it felt like it had been discovered in someone’s attic after they mysteriously vanished. There was no context for anything that was happening, just endless brawls in the middle of nowhere, set to music that oscillated between chipper and eerie and approximately five sound effects. The idea that this originally aired as part of a “children’s variety show” was as unbelievable as Tsuburaya’s claims that Redman was a hero. To any clear-eyed viewer, he was nothing less than a kaiju slasher… except he always won.

Tsuburaya has yet to launch any live-action projects with Redman in the wake of his unexpected resurgence, despite having a new suit ready to go. Fortunately, they’ve joined with Phase Six and Night Shining to publish something even better: a graphic novel written and illustrated by Matt Frank and colored by Goncalo Lopes. With Volume 1 of Redman: The Kaiju Hunter, they’ve unlocked the character’s hidden potential, while teasing even stranger stories to come.

Season 2 of Kong: King of the Apes Gets Stranger, Remains Dull

Arad Animation and 41 Entertainment announced Kong: King of the Apes in 2014, with a premise that seemed tailor-made to geek site headlines. The Eighth Wonder of the World would be fighting robot dinosaurs in San Francisco circa 2050, a fugitive from justice thanks to the machinations of the scientist who created them. The 13-episode first season premiered on Netflix in early 2016, but I doubt most fans of the character made it through episode one. The CG animation was mediocre, the dialogue seemed to have been written by a predictive text generator for action-adventure cartoons, and its tame, jetpack-wearing Kong was unrecognizable. I watched all of it for two reasons: because, as previously established, I am a masochistic, completionist dolt, and because of Botila.

I envision a scenario in which a brave, principled screenwriter hacked into the computer responsible for cranking out this show’s scripts, but only had time to change one character. Botila is out of sync with Kong: King of the Apes in the best ways possible. She’s an android created by the human villain who barely tolerates him, heckling his schemes and always on the brink of declaring herself the leader of the Decepticons. (In the last episode, she finally shoves him off a cliff.) It’s not an exaggeration to say she gets all the best lines either. So my interest was piqued when the Season 2 trailer suggested she would be the main antagonist.