Original title: Gojira, Ebirâ, Mosura: Nankai no daiketto
Having given their best loved monster stars a share of Godzilla’s spotlight in recent films, Toho unleashed their first new one in a few years in the shape of the giant mutant lobster Ebirah for this seventh Godzilla film, known in the English speaking world as either Ebirah, Horror of the Deep or Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster. Perhaps nervous about how a new monster would fare with the public, they kept the much-loved Mothra in reserve just in case.
When his brother Yata (Toru Ibuki) is lost at sea, Ryota (Toru Watanabe) steals a yacht and sets off in search of him, unaware that one of his travelling companions is a bank robber. They are capsized by Ebirah and find themselves castaway on the remote Letchi Island where the terrorist organization Red Bamboo are manufacturing heavy water and a special liquid from local plants that keeps Ebirah at bay. Red Bamboo’s slave workforce is mostly made up of people abducted from nearby Infant Island where Mothra has transformed from the larva seen in San daikaijû: Chikyû saidai no kessen/Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster (1964) into a fully grown giant moth. Back on Letchi, Godzilla has been found sleeping in a cave and Ryota and his companions decide to use Godzilla against the Red Bamboo. Godzilla battles both Ebirah and the giant condor Ookondoru before Mothra turns up for the final showdown.
Gojira, Ebirâ, Mosura: Nankai no daiketto was the first Godzilla film not to be directed by Ishiro Honda, Jun Fukuda stepping up to the plate to direct Shinichi Sekizawa’s script, which originally hadn’t featured Godzilla at all. It was originally conceived as a King Kong film, to have been tiled Operation Robinson Crusoe: King Kong vs. Ebirah, but rights issued put paid to that and Godzilla was written into the script almost at the eleventh hour. This explains Godzilla’s out-of-character sleeping arrangements – finding Kong in a nest in a cave would have made more sense than finding Godzilla there, especially after all previous films implied that Godzilla returned to the sea between films. It also goes some way to explaining its unusual interest in a young woman, Daiyo (Kumi Mizuno), a trait it’s never displayed before but which would be entirely in keeping with Kong. So it’s no surprise then that Godzilla often feels like a guest star in its own film.
Sadly, the effects aren’t up to scratch. They were created by Sadamasa Arikawa who stood in for Eiji Tsuburaya (the latter oversaw the effects but was busy setting up his own production company, Tsuburaya Productions, at the time) and once again the budget was slashed. In Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star: The Unauthorized Biography of the Big G by Steve Ryfle, Arikawa is quoted as lamenting that “There were major limitations on the budget from the studio. Toho couldn’t have made too many demands about the budget if Mr. Tsuburaya had been in charge. The studio knew I was also doing TV work then, so they must have figured I could produce the movie cheaply.” The decision to set the film on a remote island also seems to have been a budgetary one, the generic beach, sea and jungle settings avoiding the need for too many costly miniature sets.
Because of the setting, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep inevitably feels like a smaller film than its predecessors. Virtually the whole film is set on one tiny island and inside the Red Bamboo’s hi-tech base – one of those installations which, for no reason other than a explosive climax is needed, comes fitted with its own nuclear self-destruct mechanism. It has the feel of a weak James Bond rip-off with a few giant monsters thrown in here and there, and it wouldn’t be the last time that the series would look to the exploits of 007 for inspiration.
But a lack of money can’t explain everything that’s wrong with Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. There’s an awful lot of padding (one inexplicable shot finds the camera lingering for what seems like an age on a shelf of canned food), there’s some nonsense about a dance marathon and that seemingly endless yacht journey to Letchi that drags on for an eternity. Then too there’s the mystery of the giant bird Ookondoru who flies into shot to menace Godzilla, who promptly shoots it down with his atomic breath, the bird crashes in a pile of smouldering plumage and that’s pretty much it for Ookondoru’s kaiju career. It’s never seen or heard from ever again.
Dreadful comic relief blights the mostly dull human characters and the monster stars are fatally treated little better. The suits are starting to look a little threadbare and the big fights are ridiculous, Godzilla reduced to throwing rocks at Ebirah (a trick he picked up from Kong in Kingu Kongu tai Gojira/King Kong versus Godzilla (1962) perhaps) and swatting at the Red Bamboo’s jet fighters with its tail. The battle scenes, always the key moments in these films, are poorly directed and are further undermined by Masaru Sato’s score – the attack by the jet fighters for example is accompanied by a wholly inappropriate 60s guitar and saxophone rock instrumental. Ebirah, a constantly screeching giant lobster, is a disappointment and overall the film is by far and away the dullest of the series so far.
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