Monster from a Prehistoric Planet

The comparatively less popular little sibling of the much more famous Godzilla and other monsters from the endless series of kaiju-eiga movies. Its final rating is positively influenced in my eyes by the memory of when I devoured Gappa as a child in the cinema, quite popular in our country (unlike the rest of the world). In the context of genre-related films, it’s sub-par, but even after all these years, Gappa is still fun, but in a different way than the filmmakers intended. There are a lot of unintentionally comical lines, a funny script and especially Gappa itself (with its companion and a little gappie), who looks like an giant cross between a chicken and a lizard. The effects are what you would expect from a film of this genre: an actor dressed in a costume stomping on a cardboard city and landscape, while models of tanks, cannons, planes and ships try to stop him. And on top of that, there’s the overly sweet happy ending with the meeting of the Gappa family and the "conscious awakening" of a female journalist who, with a serious face, says she won’t be a journalist anymore, that she realised that she’s an ordinary woman whose place is in the kitchen. (02/08/2004)

Considering the age of the film and taking into account my age, any talk of "nostalgia" is unthinkable. If Monster from a Prehistoric Planet had lasted an hour, we could talk about a sympathetic "guilty pleasure." However, even the relatively short 84 minutes makes for quite a long watch in this case. Particularly the opening half hour, packed with imbecilic dialogues and exploration of a mysterious island (where a volcano is spouting at full speed and the inhabitants around it are acting like nothing is happening), is absolutely boring. That’s because a walk among the cardboard, in which the greatest experience is the cameraman's epilepsy, meant to evoke an earthquake, is only going to excite masochists. The trampling of the city, tanks firing, or fighter jets being shot down is a bit more fun, but everything gets boring after a while and in this case, even ten minutes is too much. Monster from a Prehistoric Planet is a bad film and it's a pretty unfortunate choice to watch as your first classic kaiju film. (01/05/2006)

To realistically evaluate Monster from a Prehistoric Planet would mean deciding between a 1 star and a Boo! rating, and most likely the Boo! category would prevail. It is an incredibly naive and silly film, technically outdated even at the time of its creation. However, nostalgia plays an irreplaceable role in my assessment and certainly in the assessment of others. Monster from a Prehistoric Planet was the first film I saw in the movie theater as a little boy and I was thrilled by it. I was immensely scared of those monsters and the low-quality special effects shocked me at the time. In the 70s, Monster from a Prehistoric Planet was very popular in my country and it was shown three times in movie theaters, each time with great interest. There were simply not many films in this genre at the time. Today, it is only a part of film history, interesting only for genre collectors and fans of film history. Overall impression considering nostalgia: 30%. (13/01/2008)

Studio Nikkatsu simply did what normally happens in film. If something is popular, I will make something similar and maybe even make a little profit from it. However, the kaiju film "Gappa" definitely did not become something that would dazzle the studio, so it remained that kaiju was primarily left to the studio Toho and possibly Daiei. Unfortunately, the monster itself doesn't stand out too much among what was created in the 60s. (14/12/2014)