There is a tension in pop filmmaking between being what you are and following a trend. A franchise needs to keep its basic identity, but also keep an eye on what’s drawing audiences. It’s a delicate balance, and usually in retrospect later entries in a film series err towards the latter—drifting too far from their core identity and becoming derivative. But sometimes that produces a pleasure of its own.
You can see it in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (occasionally known in the USA as Godzilla versus the Sea Monster). The seventh entry in Toho’s redoubtable Godzilla series, it came out in 1966, a time when the biggest thing in movies was a franchise from another island nation, on the far side of Eurasia from Japan. We get an exotic location, a uniformed paramilitary organization with a sinister name (the Red Bamboo), a boss with a distinctive appearance (an eyepatch with a red dragon on it), a sleek base with a big self-destruct button, and an attractive young lady who spends the whole movie in a bikini top and short skirt.
We don’t get a giant radioactive lizard in an oversized tuxedo swilling a massive martini. Instead, there’s a giant lobster.
The story starts incoherently before stumbling into a James Bond pastiche. A fishing boat’s sunk; Ryota (Toru Watanabe), the brother of one of the missing fishermen, believes his sibling Yata (Toru Ibuki) is alive and sets out to find him. This leads him to a dance-a-thon where he meets two other young men, Ichino (Chotaro Togin) and Nita (Hideo Sunazuka), and together they steal a yacht with a safecracker on board. They sail to where the brother’s ship went down, only to meet the same fate: capsized by a giant monster.
They’re washed up on a nearby island, and the fun begins. They find the compound of the Red Bamboo, and see enslaved islanders trying to get away. A woman, Daiyo (Kumi Mizuno), succeeds. They flee with her, learning that the islanders are from nearby Infant Island, home of the giant lepidoptera-like creature Mothra, and the Red Bamboo is using them to make a yellow liquid that repels the giant monster in the ocean, Ebirah, who was mutated by waste from the nuclear weapons the Red Bamboo are making.
Then the escapees stumble across a sleeping Godzilla (Haruo Nakajima). The only thing to do is wake Godzilla, and set him against the Red Bamboo. Complications ensue; Godzilla battles Ebirah twice, a giant condor shows up for no clear reason, Yata turns out to have drifted ashore on Infant Island but joins the battle against the Red Bamboo nevertheless, and finally Mothra comes in and saves the day.
The movie began as a collaboration with Rankin/Bass Productions, who were making a King Kong cartoon; Ebirah was originally to be a live-action King Kong movie to tie in with the show, but various disagreements led to the Americans dropping out of the production and Godzilla being substituted for Kong. Perhaps as a result of this shuffle, for the first time since 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again a Godzilla movie is directed by someone other than Ishiro Honda, in this case Jun Fukuda. Shinichi Sekizawa contributes the script, and Eiji Tsuburaya’s credited with special effects though various sources state he acted as more of a supervisor to Sadamasa Arikawa.
Fukuda’s Godzilla isn’t massively different from what Honda’s has become. The film’s a bit brighter, there are more hand-held shots, perhaps a few more close-ups. Much of that can be explained by the tighter budget. Godzilla doesn’t flatten a major city in this movie because Fukuda didn’t have the money for detailed models. Instead we get the Red Bamboo base, a classic Bond-villain lair complete with evil lab, evil atomic research, and that big red self-destruct button.
The titular kaiju is a bit lost, though Ebirah does provide a useful plot function—he gives the Red Bamboo a reason to be on the island, and for them to have enslaved the Infant Islanders. As a monster in his own right, he’s underwhelming. When seen only as a giant claw emerging from the ocean, he’s visually impressive. When he stands up and you can see the giant-lobster whole of him (Hiroshi Sekita is the man in the unfortunate suit), he’s difficult to take seriously.
More interesting is Godzilla, who’s almost entirely helpful, no longer even slightly the villain of earlier films. He’s an unintentional hero, and once or twice menaces the human leads, but fundamentally is here to squash people who need a good squashing. He also fights Ebirah, and there are in-jokes now largely lost; Ebirah poses like a contemporary wrestler, while Godzilla rubs the side of his nose the way another popular character of the time did.
That’s fine. You don’t go to a movie called Ebirah, Horror of the Deep looking for insight into the human condition. You go for fun, and you get that. The movie is small, almost like a TV episode, and the early set-up for the characters is nonsensical. But there’s a good pace to the movie, and once the Bondian aspects start appearing the story really kicks into gear.
This is pure pop cinema. It’s a movie about entertainment, not morals or themes. And it succeeds, however simple that is. There’s a line at the end about hoping atomic bombs are used wisely or not at all, paying off the Red Bamboo’s development of nuclear weapons, but the moral’s perfunctory. If we didn’t have a world with nuclear weapons, we wouldn’t have Godzilla. And wouldn’t we be the poorer for that?