Mothra was fun. I liked Zen, the chubby reporter; he was a good comic hero. And it's interesting how it's kind of a
King Kong pastiche, with baddie Carl Nelson being basically a more malevolent and powerful Carl Denham. Also kind of a clever twist that they took the scale-changing special effects in the other direction this time out, giving us not just giant monsters but tiny people. That, plus Mothra being more a protector and avenger of injustice than a malevolent predator, gave us some new variations on the
kaiju formula -- and the latter would influence many other movies in the genre.
I'm used to seeing old American shows and movies that feature imaginary foreign countries that are stand-ins for real ones and where everyone speaks English (they were a staple of the
Mission: Impossible TV series). But it's kind of freaky to see it the other way around, with "Rolisica" as a thinly veiled stand-in for the United States, a powerful, English-speaking nation east of Japan whose key metropolis is "New Kirk City" -- yet Nelson and his goons often speak Japanese to each other even when alone or back in their own country.
The H-Man was an interesting departure, but not that great. The crime story and monster story didn't mesh all that well, and the monsters proved far too easy to defeat, being rather passive in the climactic sequence aside from conveniently taking out the human bad guy. Also, why did so many people think that shooting at a moving puddle of ooze would accomplish anything? Did they think ooze had any vital organs?
I wonder if the title had a double meaning, with the heroin dealer being the other "H-Man." Although the original title of the film,
Bijo to Ekitainingen, means "Beauty and the Liquidman."
ETA: The dubbing of a 50s torch singer on a very Japanese woman in H-Man is frickin' hilarious.
Actually I think that was the only part that wasn't dubbed. Or rather, the actress was overdubbed by (according to IMDb) a Japanese jazz singer named Martha Miyake, but the song we heard was the same one used in the original. There's no doubt the actress we saw was lip-synching the same English words we heard. And if the song was in English in the original, there was no reason to redub it here.
By the way, several of the voices here were clearly dubbed by Paul Frees, a ubiquitous announcer and voice actor from the '50s-'60s.
It's about a bunch of Japanese schoolgirls (and, yes, there is brief nudity) with descriptive nicknames ("Fantasy," "Kung Fu," "Prof" et cetera) who get stuck in a haunted house with one of the girls' aunt, who...
