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31 Days of Hell: Dogora (1964) - Reviewed
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| Courtesy of Toho |
The story of a kind of space amoeba percolating in the Earth’s
atmosphere before coming into contact with a radiation pocket over Japan and
mutating to skyscraper size which descends to the Earth’s surface to suck up
its nutrients and spit out what it can’t digest, Dogora from the
beginning is innovatively weird. From
the jelly-fish protozoa-like design of the creature by Father of Tokusatsu visual
effects artist Eiji Tsuburaya and Keizo Murase to the sound design reportedly
rendered by samples of clams on the ocean floor, Dogora was one of the
first if not only kaiju films that looked and sounded unlike anything filmgoers
have encountered before or since.
Visually the film lensed in splendid Tohoscope by King
Kong vs. Godzilla cinematographer Hajime Koizumi and an ever wild and
evocative score by longtime Honda collaborator Akira Ifukube (Gojira), Dogora
while sporting all the tropes of Honda’s frequent kaiju offerings is still something
of an outlier in the director’s career.
Though the tentacled floating balloon-like monster would invariably be
reworked through a myriad of ways in other films over the years, Dogora like
eventual director Bong Joon-ho’s The Host presents a somewhat formless
shapeless creature which even glanced at in broad daylight is difficult to describe.
Performance wise the ensemble cast of notable actors
including Yojimbo actor Yosuke Natsuki and Red Beard actor Yoko
Fujiyama is generally good though the one that will catch kaiju fans’ attention
is the presence of American actor Robert Dunham who spoke Japanese and made an
entire film career out of starring in Toho kaiju flicks. Known best for Godzilla vs. Megalon as
the guy who ignites the kaiju fight, Dunham’s presence as a bilingual speaking diamond
broker who gets involved in gun battles with yakuza members was an attempt to
introduce a recurring character who’d appear through a series of impending kaiju
films but the plan never came to fruition.
Either way, it would’ve been an interesting human character to have show
up again and again in Honda films.
Debatably the most bizarre creature feature of Honda’s
career after already having delivered Matango about an island of
mushroom people and among the strangest kaiju flicks ever attempted from sight
to sound, Dogora follows in the footsteps of Honda’s own work involving
a mashup of yakuza gangsters fighting while a kaiju attack is ongoing while
delivering arresting visual effects work.
While scientists are trying to figure out a way to deal with the
invading organism, a diamond-heist is in effect which as it turns out is a much
sought-after delicacy for the film’s shape-shifting monster. As with the simultaneously released Mothra
vs. Godzilla, the in-fighting between the film’s human characters continues
all the way through the creature ravaging the city they’re in.
While never officially crossing over into Godzilla lore,
Dogora did however make a couple of appearances later in the television
series Godzilla Island and Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters and
remains a still largely unexplored curiosity in the director’s career. Perhaps the most innovative kaiju film
attempted from how it looked to how it sounded to how it tried to include
important recurring characters, Dogora remains wholly unique in kaiju
lore and undoubtedly paved the way for what would eventually become Jordan
Peele’s lovingly made IMAX tribute to the most unusual Japanese space monster
movie in existence. Where so many of the
Toho/Honda produced kaiju films existed as a kind of guys-in-rubber-suits
diversion, Dogora decades later remains fresh with a most bizarre and
terrifyingly unearthly creature at its epicenter.
--Andrew Kotwicki
