Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)

PG for '60s James Bond style villainy and some death.  There's actually one moment that is a pretty gnarly death if it wasn't for the incredibly rough special effects.  These two guys are skewered and then fall into the gaping maw of Ebirah, a giant crab monster.  But the rest of the movie is just silly. We're still on that kick of treating the residents of Infant Island as backwards natives, so keep that in mind.  That entire trope isn't disappearing as of yet.

DIRECTOR: Jun Fukuda

I really want to swear. I've worked really hard to make this blog completely family friendly.  Part of that comes from the fact that it started as a school project for my students that went off the rails and became this monstrosity.  The other half is that I don't want to fall into the habit of writing with cursing.   But what the heck is going on here.  This...this is chaos.  Someone along the way had to say "This is not how storytelling works."  My goodness, for a franchise that is infamous for not really having a coherent plot within films, we now have Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, a movie that has too much plot to make even the slightest bit of sense.

I'm going to gripe about this because my brain hated this while my heart --I can't say "liked" --didn't hate this.  Any griping you get from me should be put with an asterisk because, as absolutely bananas as this film is, it's not unwatchable.  It's just one of these movies that I acknowledge is a train wreck, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it has no value.  The issue that I'm mostly having with the movie comes from the same scripting issues that The Simpsons often presents.  If you watch a Simpsons episode, there's a good chance that the Act I sting will be a complete misdirect.  The Simpsons will be doing something completely unrelated to the main plot.  If you tried to figure out what that episode was going to mostly be about, you wouldn't have a clue.  The same goes for Ebirah.  We're a bit in medias res when we start the film.  Ebirah has already destoryed Ryota's brother's boat.  He's looking for him.  But Ryota has already gone to a psychic to confirm that his brother isn't dead.  Okay, we get some characterization from this.  I don't hate that.  It's weird that we don't spend time with the psychic and Ryota coming to grips with his brother's questionable mortality, but whatever.  Instead, we go to the police, who don't help Ryota. It's actually weird that we see the police station because the police don't play a part in this movie whatsoever.

Instead, we have Ryota going to a dance marathon.  Not day one of a dance marathon. In a weird way, that would almost make sense.  The only reason that Ryota was there is because he heard that he could win a yacht by winning this competition.  This is where I completely lose the logic of this film.  Is Ryota a weird dude?  He knows how competitions and marathons work, right?  He gets there on Day Three of the marathon.  There are only a few people left on the dance floor.  Why does he think that he can just join this marathon in the last moments of the competition?  This raises so many questions about Ryota.  He's a weird dude throughout.  I get it.  But narratively, the only reason to get Ryota to a dance competition is so he meets the other supporting characters who are just fun teenagers.  They wanted fun teenagers on Devil's Island, so they had to go to a dance competition.  The thing about Ryota, he doesn't even get the boat from the competition.  They get it from stealing one from the harbor.  Why are they at the harbor?  It isn't because Ryota is looking for a boat there, which is probably the most natural reason to go to the harbor.  No, they're there because the two NPC characters that Nyota meets want to tease him about boats.  That's the whole story.  They end up stealing a boat because Ryota believes that God put him there.  Oh, and there's a safecracker on board.  He's going to be needed later.

All of these Ryota moments would be interesting if we explored what made Ryota neurodivergent or something.  Once they're on the island looking for Ryota's brother, Ryota basically becomes a normal dude.  The people writing this movie were just trying to connect a lot of dots.  Honestly, I thought that they were just trying to get scenes in  that the hip younger crowd might like.  And all of that Ryota chaos doesn't end the chaos of what this plot is.  It just changes where the chaos comes from.  The island is packed with the Japanese version of SPECTRE, an evil organization known as Red Bamboo.  The only evil thing that I understand that Red Bamboo does is that they keep the inhabitants of Infant Island prisoner so that they can make this yellow substance that keeps Ebirah away.  I'm not sure what their evil plan actually is, but they're obsessed with completing that evil plan.  Oh, and Godzilla is there too.

Why is Godzilla there?  Because this is a monster movie and someone needs to take out Ebirah. But here's my real complaint about the movie.  Ebirah absolutely does not matter to the movie named Ebirah, Horror of the Deep.   That creature is an afterthought and a poorly constructed one at that.  This movie doesn't know what it wants to be.  Ebirah is an excuse why people can't leave the island by boat.  That's it.  It's not like Ebirah is coming to destroy mainland Japan.  Nope.  Ebirah is just there.  How do you defeat an Ebirah, you may ask?  You get a Godzilla.  Does Godzilla really care about Ebirah?  Nope. He just happens to be there next to another kaiju and the two of them fight.  Also, Mothra.  Why not throw a Mothra in there?  I'll tell you this.  Mothra need to stop being these movies' get out of jail free card.  So many of these movies just have Mothra save the day because he's the nice one out of all of the kaiju. But people don't even hate Godzilla...even though they should absolutely hate Godzilla.  

I'm really locked into this place with Ebirah, Horror of the Deep where I'm quoting Glass Onion.  "It's so dumb it's brilliant." "No, it's just dumb."  That's where we are.  Aesthetically, especially when it comes to the color palate of this movie, we have a good time.  Ebirah is all good times, but golly, I don't know if you can sink a movie lower when it comes to being dumb.  These characters, none of whom are particularly smart, are constantly coming up with plans to foil the evil Red Bamboo.  But their plans work for no reason.  Red Bamboo, this really ambiguous villains organization, is so undefined that their entire threat to the movie is just "We're evil."  They come from a place called "Devil Island."  That's what makes them bad.  I don't understand.  Does Red Bamboo come back?  Is this something that I'm going to have to make peace with the more I watch these movies?  I mean, I just started the latest artificial trilogy (a trilogy for me simply because three movies are on the same disc).  Is this just part of the story?  The worst part is that I know that these movies will get dumber.   Mystery Science Theater doesn't even touch Ebirah, which makes me think that when I get to Megalon, I'm going to be so darned frustrated.

Again, pretty colors and a good time made me not hate this movie.  But this movie is so phenomenally stupid that it's even hard to write about.