DAIMAJIN [MAJIN - MONSTER OF TERROR]
release date: April 17, 1966
DAIMAJIN IKARU [RETURN OF THE GIANT MAJIN]
release date: August 13, 1966
DAIMAJIN GYAKYUSHU [GIANT MAJIN'S COUNTERATTACK]
release date: December 10, 1966
Daiei Motion Picture Company 84′ / 79′ / 88′
directors: KIMIYOSHI YASUDA, KENJI MISUMI, KAZUO MORI
cast: MIWA TAKADA, YOSHIHIKO AOYAMA, JUN FUJIMAKI
cast: KOJIRO HONGO, SHIHO FUJIMURA, TARO MARUI
cast: SHINJI HORI, SHIEI IIZUKI, MASAHIDE KIZUKA
The mid 1960s was a very profitable time for the Japanese giant monster film – Toho had struck gold with GOJIRA in 1954 and had since turned the titular creature into a powerful franchise while simultaneously unleashing unrelated but equally successful kaiju efforts like SORA NO DAIKAIJU RADON and MOSURA. Rival Daiei seems to have been the first of the other Japanese studios to get in on Toho’s action, bringing their rubber-suit star Gamera to theater screens in 1965′s DAIKAIJU GAMERA. It was popular enough that the following year saw them producing an A-list color sequel to their black and white B-list original, DAIKAIJU KESSEN: GAMERA TAI BARUGON, at their Tokyo facilities – the series didn’t look back until bankruptcy forced it to in 1970.
But Daiei’s Kyoto studio had more interesting things in store for 1966. The chanbara picture had been a staple of the country’s film output for decades [less so in the years immediately after World War II due to the occupational forces dislike of their subject matter], and Daiei’s own Zatoichi series was going strong by the time the mid 60′s came around. Seeking to capitalize on two of the most profitable trends in popular cinema of the time, Daiei head Masaiichi Nagata pushed a short series of what can only be described as daikaiju jidaigeki [giant monster period films] into production at their Kyoto facility, which handled the majority of their period pictures. The first, titled simply DAIMAJIN [literally "Giant Devil"], saw release alongside the second Gamera effort in April of 1966 – its two follow ups, featuring unrelated narratives but the same title monster, would reach theaters before the end of that year.
Not surprisingly, there is a remarkable consistency to be had throughout the Giant Majin trilogy – undoubtebly attributable to writer Tetsuro Yoshida and special effects director Yoshiyuki Kuroda. All of them follow the same basic premise – an hour of unjust human suffering is remedied by the thunderous appearance of the giant Majin, who spends the remaining fifteen to twenty minutes of the picture dishing out his violent breed of cosmic justice. While the narratives are formulaic in the extreme [I doubt much of anything that occurs within the first two films, in particular, will surprise a viewer already familiar with chanbara], but are handled with class by a trio of Daiei’s most bankable directors. The results are phenomenally entertaining – a trilogy of genre mash-ups of Lewton-esque inspiration [they remind me of that producer's Jayne Eyre-with-zombies classic I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE] unlike anything released before* or since.
DAIMAJIN begins with a plot rather reminiscent of what is to be found in Toei’s KAIRYU DAIKESSEN, released that same year [a coincidence, to be sure, as it's the kind of story that's been a mainstay in the country's culture since the time in which the films are set] – evil chamberlain Samunosuke sets his eyes on the peaceful kingdom of his master, Lord Hanabusa. He kills the Lord and his wife as well as their servants, takes control of the kingdom himself, and promptly forces the citizenry into slavery so that his palace can be built. Escaping the insurrection are the young prince and princess – ten years later they, with the help of a local priestess and loyal vassal Kogenta, plot to take back what is rightfully theirs. Not surprisingly, toppling a warlord isn’t that easy for so small a clan, and the priestess is dead and Kogenta and the prince primed for crucifixion by the time the devilish Majin, possessing the statue of a war god, thunders down from its mountain home for an insane display of righteous blood-letting.
DAIMAJIN IKARU plays as a variation on the same basic premise – the peaceful kingdoms of Nagoshi and Chigusa, which thrive on the banks of a lake on which their guardian Majin resides, are conquered by the greedy Danjo, who’s tired of his citizenry defecting from his desolate kingdom to the comparably heavenly one that borders it. Young prince Jiro escapes, along with his future bride Lady Sayuri and a few loyal subjects, to the island to plot the taking back of the kingdom. Again, things are tougher than they might have hoped, and the whole lot of them [including an enterprising young boy] are up for execution before the Majin, having been destroyed with dynamite by Danjo’s men earlier in the picture, reconstitutes himself in an effects tour-de-force that rivals and is often superior to that of the first film.
DAIMAJIN GYAKUSHU bypasses the kingdom-conquering angle and turns up a more original story than the previous two. Here, an evil despot is kidnapping healthy woodsmen from a neighboring kingdom and bringing them to his sulfur pits to work manufacturing weapons so that he might conquer their homeland [and, if he is to taken seriously, the rest of feudal Japan]. Discovering that the adults that remain are too afraid of the mysterious mountain on which the Majin resides to do anything to help, four of the kidnapped woodsmen’s children and siblings take off on their own in a dangerous bid to cross the Majin’s home and rescue their kin. After one of the children drowns, the Majin sends its harbinger, a hawk, to protect them from further trouble. But with a brutal mountain snowstorm baring down on them and death by freezing all but inevitable, the leader of the remaining children sacrifices himself so that the Majin might save the rest. The purportedly evil god goes one further, however, saving both the would-be martyr and his friends and putting an end to the despot of the sulfur pits for good.
Though the narratives may be unrelated there are any number of elements connecting the trilogy – not the least of which is the Majin itself, played by Riki Hashimoto in all three films. Majin itself is a rather non-specific term meaning only “devil” or “demon”, and the nature of the character changes drastically depending on which of the three films you are discussing. In DAIMAJIN the evil spirit is said to have been defeated by war god Arakatsuma, and is imprisoned in a statue of the god. Staying true to its namesake, once the Majin is unleashed [retaining the fearsome form of Arakatsuma] he proves a force to be reckoned with – gleefully dispensing with the bad guys who attempted to destroy him earlier and just as happily turning on the innocent villagers once that deed is done. It is only when the princess offers herself to sate his lust for blood that he thinks better of things and leaves the village in peace, with the statue in which he was contained crumbling to dust.
DAIMAJIN IKARU varies greatly on this point – the Majin is never referred to as such, and is instead a kami worshipped by the peaceful kingdoms as thanks for his protection. But war gods didn’t earn their prefix for nothing, and the good god here is every bit as destructive as the Majin from the first film. Here, though, his considerable power is focused squarely on getting even with those who have wronged either him directly [by, say, dynamiting his effigy] or the kingdoms that serve him. The good villagers follow the giant about during his rampage, with him playing the part of a cosmic guide on a tour of violent retribution. As soon as his job is done, the god dissolves into water and sinks into the lake, where he tolls a bell to signify that a new era of peace has begun.
The mythology is tweaked once more in DAIMAJIN GYAKUSHU, with the Majin being more misunderstood and feared than worshiped. The impressive montage of natural disasters that begins the picture reveals that the people living around Majin’s mountain home blame him for the torments that befall them – the children, in contrast, seem to see him for what he is. Their understanding is rewarded with protection after one of them dies, and direct intervention when the leader of the pack offers himself as sacrifice. Once again, it’s only the bad guys who are on the receiving end of Majin’s unique justice this go around, and the sulfur pits prove as good a place as any for the Majin to finally unsheathe the sword seen around his waist in both of the previous films. Once the baddies are disposed of and his reputation is restored, the Majin disappears poetically in a flurry of snow as the sky behind him changes from dark to light [bar none, the best exit the monster has in any of the three pictures].
Those only familiar with the substandard effects tinkerings in Daiei’s Gamera series will find themselves floored by what technical wonders the company was capable of at the time. Special effects director Yoshiyuki Kuroda, who also worked on Daiei’s Kyoto produced 100 GHOSTS series, is nothing short of a technical wizard whose techniques look to rival those of EFX wunderkind Eiji Tsuburaya. The Majin itself is relatively small by daikaiju standards, at around 30 feet, which allowed for miniatures to be constructed on a much larger scale and with much more detail than is possible with their smaller counterparts. Another up side is that the Majin is allowed considerably more interaction with people, typically only seen fleeing in efforts featuring larger monsters. In order to accomplish this, a full-scale mock up of the Majin was constructed along with the suit, a pair of legs, and what looks to be a pair of arms. All of these elements are combined rather well for DAIMAJIN and are nearly perfected for DAIMAJIN IKARU – DAIMAJIN GYAKUSHU looks to have been handled with a bit less care in this department, and its effects sequences suffer a bit because of it.
Then there are the process shots – while blue screen is present and expectantly a bit rough around the edges in all three efforts [it's still handled better than in any number of contemporaneous productions, Japanese or otherwise], they all achieve wondrous things in this respect before their running times are up. When the giant Majin marches forth from its rock outcroppings in DAIMAJIN and DAIMAJIN GYAKUSHU, with people watching from the foreground, the illusion is flawless. His entrance in DAIMAJIN IKARU is less convincing on a realistic level but trumps either of the others in its power – as the island crumbles to the bottom of the lake, the Majin is revealed, standing between two towering walls of falling water in a sequence ripped from the frames of Cecil B. Demille’s THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and handled at least as well. DAIMAJIN GYAKUSHU allows for a similarly impressive but decidedly more low-tech entrance, with the Majin, bathed in brilliant orange light, rising up from beneath the snow.
There are other technical aspects that hold the trilogy together as well, not the least of which is the consistently fine cinematography of Fujio Morta – some of Morita’s other credits include a good number of the Zatoichi films as well as the fourth installment of the Lone Wolf and Cub series. While his best work is to be had in the first and, particularly, the second Daimajin efforts, Morita lends class to Kazuo Mori’s less inspired direction for DAIMAJIN GYAKUSHU and renders the frequent location photography for that outing brilliantly. Direction is consistently good throughout the first two films, with Kimiyoshi Yasuda making the most of the more sublime and spooky nature of DAIMAJIN and Kenji Misumi picking up the pace considerably for the action packed sequel. Misumi had already directed a number of chanbara actioners by the time DAIMAJIN IKARU came along and it shows – it’s much more a traditional samurai film than its predecessor and his direction is both assured and exciting.
Writing is also consistent across the first two efforts, which are ostensibly two variations on the same story anyway, but Tetsuro Yoshida takes something of a nosedive in DAIMAJIN GYAKUSHU. I like the overall idea of the story unfolding from the perspective of the four dedicated children, but Yoshida’s script offers them little to do for much of their screen time – something that would have been much less noticeable had director Mori been able to pick up the pace a bit for the opening forty minutes or so [DAIMAJIN GYAKUSHU, on the whole, seems more rushed than the previous two films - perhaps Mori is less at fault than the production schedule?]. Mori still manages a number of stellar moments in his outing – the opening disaster montage is exceptional, as are the giant Majin’s face-off against the evil-doers’ cannonade and his later snow-filled exit.
Then there is the musical score – 1966 was a busy year for the much acclaimed Akira Ifukube and the fact that some of the themes on display here sound like those we’ve heard before [there is a piece from DAIMAJIN IKARU that sound uncannily like a bit of his scoring for CHILDREN OF HIROSHIMA] is forgiven easily enough once one realizes that he was tasked with no fewer than nine film scores, excluding the three he composed for the Daimajin trilogy, that year alone. His main theme is both thunderous and appropriate and becomes all the more thunderous the later you go in the series. Those interested in these scores should pick up the Japanese CD re-issue of the Daimajin soundtrack LP, which can be had for around $12 at Amazon.co.jp [it's available at Amazon.com as well, but at a higher price].
There is a lot of confusion about the giant Majin trilogy online, thanks largely to a few glaring errors in listings for the films to be found at the IMDB and Amazon.com – the order in which the titles are listed at the top of this page as well as the order in which they are discussed is the order in which they were originally released to theaters. Ultimately responsible for the confusion there and elsewhere are two things – the original A.I.P. television release of the first two films and the US home video releases from ADV that occurred much later. A.I.P. T.V. released the first two films in 1968 [at least according to all I've been able to find] under the titles MAJIN, MONSTER OF TERROR and RETURN OF THE GIANT MAJIN respectively.
Thirty years later, ADV came along and released the series on VHS, with the first film going by its actual title of DAIMAJIN. Rather than take the A.I.P. title for the second film, ADV dubbed it WRATH OF DAIMAJIN and gave DAIMAJIN GYAKUSHU the retitle of RETURN OF DAIMAJIN – confusing only because of A.I.P.’s title for the second film. Through this utterly insignificant action, ADV has managed to confound what are apparently droves of people about just which of the latter two films they are seeing. The confusion was compounded further with the 2003 DVD release of The Complete Daimajin, in which the last film in the series is placed ahead of the second – nothing of major concern, but enough to help solidify the issues people already seem to have with keeping the pictures straight.
As for the North American video releases of the films, they’ve been something of a mixed bag. The A.I.P. T.V. prints circulated through various grey-market VHS labels for years before ADV purchased distribution rights and released the English subtitled versions to video in 1998. While ADV’s early VHS releases were fine for their time, their 2003 release of The Complete Daimajin was something of a disappointment. The masters they used were the same as for the earlier VHS tapes and even earlier Daiei laserdiscs, even though Daiei itself had released remastered and anamorphic transfers of all three in 2001. 2005 saw another batch of ADV discs of the series, this time using the Daiei remasters – the results were, again, mixed. While DAIMAJIN and DAIMAJIN GYAKUSHU were presented just fine, DAIMAJIN IKARU was cropped from its original Cinemascope to around 1.85:1 standard widescreen, marring the majority of its compositions. Rights to distribute the giant Majin trilogy have since reverted back to the studio and the ADV discs have gone out of print.
Gray-market trash distributor Retromedia – infamous around here for mucking with their film prints for no reason other than to solidify the shaky copyright claims they’ve made of their equally shaky transfers – entered the giant Majin market in 2006 with their release of The Giant Majin Collection. The single disc release contains the first two films in their A.I.P. T.V. forms, cropped to 4:3 and dubbed in English – I have no idea if the films have been altered or not, but given the company’s recent track record it wouldn’t surprise me. The disc costs as much as the earlier [and superior] ADV DVD collection of all three films – I recommend giving the Retromedia disc amiss and tracking down the ADV releases [or better yet the Japanese discs, which are English subtitled and were recently re-issued].
In terms of quality monster mayhem, the Daimajin trilogy is hard to beat with its off-kilter combination of period action and giant monsters, and it’s been a favorite around these parts ever since I picked up ADV’s VHS of DAIMAJIN while on vacation in 1999. In fact, Wtf-Film’s first online endeavor was an awful website dedicated to the films [Wrath of the Website of the Daimajin, for those six of you who might have seen it]. DAIMAJIN and DAIMAJIN IKARU are bonafide kaiju classics all the way and, even at its worst, DAIMAJIN GYAKUSHU is still a good solid notch above much of its competition – they would make for a great late night triple feature. If you’ve made it to this point in the article then you really owe it to yourself to check them out, so go out and do your war-god given duty. Highly recommended.
* One has to wonder how they compare to the lost 1938 period film KING KONG APPEARS IN EDO, Japan’s first giant monster movie and, ironically perhaps, also a jidaigeki.
