This week’s release of the original 1954 Japanese Godzilla (Gojira) on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection is a major step in recognition for the film in the U.S. Yes, that’s the Criterion Collection, the premiere quality home video release company, acknowledging that Godzilla is a world cinema classic.

As a life-long Godzilla and giant monster fanatic, I can tell you what a long journey we’ve taken to get to this point. When I became feverishly interested in Japanese fantasy cinema, beyond the boyhood love, in my early twenties, Godzilla and its brethren had almost zero respect in North America. And zero quality home video releases. Even as the awful Roland Emmerich Godzilla hit screens to howls of hatred, there was no corresponding move to get the real films out to North American viewers in editions with subtitles and decent widescreen presentations.

In the mid-2000s, the shift started. The original Godzilla, not the Americanized version with Raymond Burr, got a theatrical stateside release, and then a DVD from Classic Media. G-Fans such as myself were finally freed from having to see the movie on bootleg VHS tapes and could recommend it easily to friends, promising them that the Japanese original it would blow their mind with its quality. Now, we’re getting into the big-time cineaste world with Hi-Def and the Criterion Collection.

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I am not a huge fan of Star Wars.

Now, wait.  Before you start sending me emails of an aggressive variety allow me to say that there are aspects of the movies I like; quite a few actually.

However, I have to say that Lucas lost me with the whole militant teddy bear angle, and being that story line was fairly early on in the series, I never really got my Jedi mojo going.

But if there was one part of Star Wars that did consistently attract my attention it was…

Bet you can guess.

The Sith.

I suppose it’s the whole shadows – darkness – evil thing.  It resonates.

And you can bet George Lucas is well aware that even if there are people like me, who aren’t hard-core acolytes that can speak Wookie, he can still find a way to get me to buy in.

Literally.

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Although there are still eight more books to go in the Mars series, with The Warlord of Mars I can bring to a conclusion Phase #1 of the saga: this completes the “John Carter Trilogy,” and the books that follow it take different paths with new heroes. John Carter will not return to the protagonist role until the eighth book, The Swords of Mars, published twenty-one years later.

At the end of the thrill-ride of The Gods of Mars, John Carter lost his love Dejah Thoris in the Chamber of the Sun within the Temple of Issus. A whole year must pass before the slow rotation of the chamber will allow Dejah Thoris to escape. She may not even be alive, since the last moments that John Carter witnessed, the jealous thern woman Phaidor was ready to stab Carter’s love. Did she kill Dejah Thoris? Or did the noble Thuvia take the blow instead?

Readers hung on through the middle of 1913 until Burroughs brought a conclusion to the John Carter epic at the end of the year and made his hero into The Warlord of Mars.

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. A dry and slowly dying world, Barsoom contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with nine novels, one volume of linked novellas, and two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: The Warlord of Mars (1913–14)

Previous Installments: A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913)

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And the amazing movie news just keeps coming.

Okay, so maybe Hollywood is seeing the lowest ticket sales in their collective history and perhaps that has caused a lack of story-line creativity.

However, if we’re going to need to sit through some things more than once, at least money-guys know what keeps us coming back.

This is a fine example.

Today I am as thrilled as I ever get to report that after more than a 20-year hiatus, one of my favorite characters (and Goth Chick dream date) Beetlejuice is finally returning to the big screen.

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There are those who will maintain that in order to call yourself a “fan” of something, you must be a complete expert on that topic.

I, however, would not be one of those people.

Those bits of trivia I retain about my favorite subject matters is sheer coincidence born of seeing, hearing or reading it multiple times until it stuck. Because of this there has been more than one incident where I inadvertently insulted a “real fan” of said topics by not being immediately aware of some “critical” bit of information related to them.

I am about to commit this exact sin, so if you’re one of those “real fans” of Alfred Hitchcock, then you may want to avert your gaze before you are forced to slam your keyboard down in disgust.

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Occasionally a project comes along that is so cool, that you find yourself trying not to get your hopes up too much.  Comic-Con is a great place to discover fantasy books, series, and movies that fit this profile.

Recently, a feature film that somehow flew under the radar premiered its first trailer in Hall H at the San Diego Comic-Con, and now I can’t spend 10 minutes on Facebook without hearing friends rave about it.

The film is Knights of Badassdom, and was made over the course of summer 2010 in Spokane, Washington by director Joe Lynch and a talented dream cast that has everyone drooling.

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I’m so excited about this news that I almost don’t know where to start.

Back in the late summer I got wind of some tantalizing rumors about a new project from the companies who last combined animation with gothic themes; two of my favs.

Focus Features and LAIKA, the folks behind the Academy Award-nominated animated feature Coraline were rumored to be re-teaming for a new project, ParaNorman. Details were maddeningly scarce but the name, which went from “working title” to the actual title in early October, had me pulling out my best cyber-stalking techniques to learn more.

Now, just when it started to look like entertainment in my favorite genre was going to be disappointinly thin in the New Year, Focus Features opened the information floodgates and I’m spinning around the office like Julie Andrews on top of an Austrian hillside.

No, you don’t have to picture that if you don’t want to.

ParaNorman is currently in production and being directed by Sam Fell (The Tale of Despereaux and Flushed Away) and Chris Butler, storyboard supervisor on Coraline and storyboard artist on Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.  So right there is enough reason to be quivering in anticipation.

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Mysterious Island (1961)
Directed by Cy Enfield. Starring Michael Craig, Herbert Lom, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan, Gary Merrill, Percy Herbert, Dan Jackson, Beth Rogan.

I have no qualms admitting I enjoyed the 2007 Walden Media adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth. It surprised me how much of Verne’s novel made it onto the screen in a contemporary setting. However, the prospect of a sequel, riffing slightly (at least from what I can detect from the first trailer) on Verne’s 1874 classic The Mysterious Island, does nothing for me other than as a reminder to read that recent translation of the novel from the Modern Library that’s been sitting on the “to read” stack for over a year. The new film is called Journey 2: Mysterious Island, which explains exactly what the filmmakers intend: the same thing as the last film. Maybe some younger viewers will go find the book after watching the movie, although the novel is less child-appealing than some of Verne’s other works, such as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, which children should read first anyway because Mysterious Island is a sequel to it. Will Captain Nemo show up in the new film? Who cares.

However, the marketing for Journey 2 coincides with the Blu-ray release of an earlier adaptation, the Ray Harryhausen-Charles H. Schneer 1961 Mysterious Island. A number of Harryhausen’s classics have reached Blu-ray already, but Mysterious Island makes its high definition debut in a limited edition from a small direct distributor, Twilight Time, which specializes in film soundtrack albums. This concerns me for the release of other of Harryhausen titles. Mysterious Island is a Columbia film, and Sony Home Video released The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts to Blu-ray. Apparently, they preferred to farm out Mysterious Island to an independent—and on the film’s fiftieth anniversary! I might not have found out about the Mysterious Island Blu-ray if I wasn’t a soundtrack collector on mailing lists for numerous small labels. (If you want to buy the Mysterious Island Blu-ray, go here. It’s limited to 3,000 unit, and I have no idea how fast they’ll sell.)

Mysterious Island is the third of Ray Harryhausen’s and producer Charles H. Schneer’s color films. It followed the global success of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and the tepid The 3 Worlds of Gulliver. Like Gulliver, it goes to the well of classic public domain literature, but Verne is better suited to Harryhausen’s animated antics than Swiftian satire is.

Jules Verne was hot property in the late ‘50s because of Disney’s spectacular smash with 20 000 Leagues under the Sea and Michael Todd’s enormous 70 mm roadshow of Around the World in Eighty Days, which featured every actor alive at the time. George Pal scored a hit in 1959 with Journey to the Center of the Earth (despite terrible-looking lizards with fins glued to their backs). For Harryhausen and Schneer, picking up Mysterious Island was a no-brainer.

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Destroy All Monsters (1968)
Directed by Ishiro Honda. Starring Akira Kubo, Jun Tazaki, Yukiko Kobayahsi, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Kyoko Ai, Kenji Sahara, Yoshifumi Tajima, Andrew Hughes, Haruo Nakajima.

Last month, the second Godzilla film to reach Blu-ray in North America made its thundering, skyline-flattening debut, courtesy of Media Blasters: the 1968 science-fiction monster mash Destroy All Monsters (Japanese title: Kaiju Soshingeki, “Charge of the Monsters” or “Monster Invasion”). The only Godzilla movie to beat it onto Blu-ray is the 1954 original, which will get a re-release as part of the Criterion Collection in January 2012. (The Criterion Collection! Godzilla has gained a well-deserved highbrow victory and sits on the same shelf with Kubrick and Bergman!) Later this month will see the third Godzilla Blu-ray release, 1973’s Godzilla vs. Megalon. This is arguably the worst movie of the long series, but I welcome it onto Hi-Def nonetheless: three cheers for glittering mediocrity!

But Destroy All Monsters is anything but mediocre: like Universal’s House of Frankenstein over twenty years before, it pulls together all the science-fiction candycorn goodness available to give audiences a mad monster party for the ages. The plot is simplistic, the characters even more so, but the movie pops with color and spectacle of a bygone age of entertainment without irony. It isn’t the best of the Godzilla series, but until 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars, no monster movie could boast a larger monster cast. Eleven of Toho Studio’s stable of big beasts crowd into its hundred minutes, and the result is a giddy confection no ten-year-old or ten-year-old at heart can resist. If geekdom has a defining film, here it is.

Destroy All Monsters was one of the first of Japan’s giant monster films to reach DVD in North America. At the time it seemed like a miracle to have a Godzilla film available in a letterboxed edition. However, the 1999 disc from ADV Films is the textbook example of a barebones release: the only language option is the inferior of the two English dubs (I’ll explain the dubbing situation later), the picture isn’t enhanced for widescreen TVs, and the disc doesn’t even have a menu. As better quality Godzilla DVDs came out in the 2000s, Destroy All Monsters became a black hole on collectors’ movie shelves. ADV re-released the movie to DVD in 2004 packaged with a soundtrack album as part of Godzilla’s Fiftieth Anniversary, but the movie disc is exactly the same.

The Media Blasters/Tokyo Shock Blu-ray fixes all these problems: not only is the film in glorious Toho Scope 1080p, but the disc contains both English dubs, the original Japanese mono soundtrack, a 5.1 lossless re-mix, and commentary from two Japanese fantasy film scholars, Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski, who have done informed and lively commentaries for previous Godzilla DVD releases.

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Over the long weekend I received an anonymous email entitled “Goth Chick Fodder” which at once triggered several different responses in my tryptophan-addled mind.

First, I was wary.  I mean, there was a real chance this could be some sort of nasty virus reminiscent of what the character of Dennis Nedry did to Jurassic Park in the first movie, and undoubtedly visited upon me by some Fundamentalist Christian group (Goth Chicks are in constant peril of this sort of thing for some reason).

Then I became skeptical. It could just as easily be an advertisement from a purveyor of medieval restraint devices and clothing made from petroleum products; which happens so frequently it’s gone from being interesting to boring and is now swinging back to mildly interesting again.  After all, who doesn’t like a good, sturdy set of wooden stocks and a rubber corset?

Finally, curiosity got the best of me and being woozy from a carb-overdose, I threw caution to the wind and opened the email, crossing my fingers that the contents would be simply what they said they were: something interesting to tell you about.

I’m still not sure how to qualify what I found but here it is; you decide.

It was a major media announcement.

Frankenhooker Now Available on Blu-ray!

Wait.  What?

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