Monster From a Prehistoric Planet

There’s a certain type of fun to be had watching B-grade horror movies, especially those done really badly. However, there are those that just don’t translate or age that well and Monster From a Prehistoric Planet is definitely one of those ones. 

The film tells the story of a Japanese expedition that travels to an island in the South Pacific with a mission to bring back exotic birds and animals for a magazine’s theme park in development. But they get more than they bargained for when they discover a huge, prehistoric egg that hatches. The team take the baby reptilian monster back to Japan to study it, unaware that the parents are not deceased, as they thought. Soon baby’s mother and father are terrorizing the cities of Japan and will stop at nothing until they find the infant. 

It could be because I have seen that many movies or it really could be because this film is so horrendously dated; both are likely reasons for my lack of interest in it from start to finish. The story is hugely predictable: you know exactly what dramas are coming within the first ten minutes. There’s a lack of any interesting or unique characters that aren’t clinging to a cheap stereotype, and whatever other stories are happening underneath are buried by the ‘dramatic’ scenes of the monsters wreaking havoc on civilization (which go on way too long). 

But on a more annoying note, this movie really does not translate well. It’s a Japanese film, Daikyoju Gappa, and I’m not sure you can get the original because the one that I have (part of a collection of 50 B-grade horror flicks) is dubbed over in English, really badly. It’s not just the lack of sync between the actors’ mouths and the dialogue dubbed over the top, but the difference in cultural attitudes. The film has a clear cultural attitude towards women, which I don’t agree with but is reflective of the time and culture. But these lines about women spoken in English with an American accent just brings this misogynist tone to certain scenes and rubs me the wrong way. 

The datedness of the movie is pretty self-explanatory. It’s a film where the ‘special effects’ are toy boats in fish tanks and lumbering robots that couldn’t scare or impress a dead person let alone cause the amount of damage and destruction that they do. It’s all in the same vein of ye olde Godzilla, but just not cool in any sense. 

You can live a full and happy life without watching Monster From a Prehistoric Planet. 

Starring: Tamio Kawaji, Yoko Yamamoto, Yuji Kodaka, Koji Wada, Tatsuya Fuji, Keisuke Inoue, Zenji Yamada, Bumon Koto, Saburo Hiromatsu, Binnosuke Nagao, Masaru Kamiyama, Kokan Katsura, Shiro Oshimi, and Yoko Oyagi 

Rating: PG 

Year: 1967