Dir. Jun Fukuda (1966)
The search for a missing fisherman leads to Infant Island, terrorists, and a giant killer crustacean.
Part of the appeal of the Godzilla series is the continual introduction of more and more interesting (and, let's be honest, silly) monsters. Even just to this point, we've got a giant moth, an ankylosaur, a pterodactyl, and a giant monkey, and we're only scratching the surface of the series so far. As we continue to progress and the series is forced to dig deeper into the "animals that might be scary if they were much bigger" concept, eventually you're going to run into some that are a bit ridiculous. Case in point: Ebirah, a giant lobster (but actually a shrimp... more on that in a minute).
Four men go looking for a missing man on the high sees when their boat runs afoul of a giant lobster claw sticking out of the ocean. This forces them to crash onto an island where a terrorist group has taken as their captives the same Mothra-worshipping tribe from a few of the previous films. They discover that the terrorists are manufacturing nuclear weapons, and their only hope is to wake the nearby sleeping Godzilla to stop the group from destroying Japan. Oh, and also that lobster dude is back.
Ebirah, Horror of the Deep is much more of an action/adventure than some of the previous films, and it features a lot of the tropes from that genre in ways that a lot of the previous films don't. We've got normal people jammed into an extraordinary plot, brief moments of comedy to punctuate the moments of action, and some interesting characters with varying motives that brings them into the action. Ebirah is like a kaiju version of the Goonies, which I guess makes Godzilla the Sloth character. And Mothra One-Eyed Willy? I dunno, I'm mixing up my metaphors here a little.
I love the idea of the Mothra character, this beautiful monarch moth that contrasts with its ability to destroy entire villages with the power of its wings. But as we've discussed before, the entire mythos behind it, and its island of cult-like worshippers, is incredibly strange and not always enjoyable. Singing to summon your moth god is bizarre at the best of times, but adding in the slightly racist context of an undiscovered island tribe (being told in the 60's, no less), you're bound to have some issues from a modern context. Thankfully, its easy to dismiss a lot of the weirder aspects when you're already talking about a film series about giant lizards, alien civilizations, and junk pseudo-science.
The creature Ebirah, who appears to be a giant lobster but is actually a giant shrimp if you take his name literally in Japanese, is actually really fucking cool. The way that newcomer director Jun Fukuda, who replaced the legendary Ishirô Honda from the previous installments, initially shows the creature is outstanding. The giant claw raising from the surface of the ocean and capsizing the boat is legitimately terrifying, at least adjusted for film era. It's also just a really cool monster, exactly the type of thing that you'd see in the "Irradiated Animal" subgenre that was popular in America during the Cold War. It may seem like it's not going to stand a chance against the much more dangerous Godzilla, and of course it doesn't, but it's a rad monster nonetheless.
Fukuda lacks some of the firepower of Honda, at least from a technical perspective, but Ebirah, his first of five films in the series, fits very well into the era of films in which it was released. It's got a great 60's soundtrack with surf music and the eerie sci-fi score (except for the annoyingly earworm-ey Mothra tune), and the nuclear weapon subplot is like something out of a 90's Steven Seagal flick. It's a ridiculously fun monster movie, it's got some great action scenes, and it's got Godzilla fighting an enormous fucking lobster. What's not to like? And the monster ping pong scene is not to be missed.
Who this movie is for: Kaiju movie fans, Action adventure junkies, Slightly racist tribespeople
Bottom line: Ebirah, Horror of the Deep is a fun kaiju flick that falls much more closely to the action adventure genre than it does science fiction, a welcome departure after the strangeness of Invasion of the Astro-Monster. It also didn't particularly need Godzilla, and would've worked well as a giant monster movie on its own. It is, indeed, a Godzilla movie though, and it's a heck of a lot of fun besides. This is a great one for people looking to get into the franchise, because it doesn't have the serious emotional weight of some of the previous installments and it's still got some great monster-on-monster action.
