Yog Monster from Space (1970)

Yog Monster from Space, on the other hand. Oh man. You guys have no idea how close you came to this “review” just being the word “dude” in boldface and all caps with a couple of exclamation points and then a link to the trailer.

For those who aren’t aware, the poster for this movie is on my living room wall, but I’ve never seen it before last night. That’s because it’s been damn hard to track down. As far as I know, there’s only one US release, and that’s a pricey DVD released by Tokyo Shock under the maybe more sensical but less awesome title Space Amoeba. That’s what I watched last night, because I finally managed to snag a copy via interlibrary loan.

I remember I used to own the Godzilla Nintendo game, and one of the first monsters you fight in it is Gezora, and I never had any idea where he was from. Turns out, he’s from here, and he’s, I dunno, very possibly my favorite kaiju suit from all the Toho kaiju movies ever! I mean, I know Godzilla is the better monster, but man, Gezora is just… well, he’s a big muppety squid with googly eyes that walks around on land. He’s fantastic. The other two monsters are pretty great, too. I said a while back that the trailer for this movie was probably as close as I would ever get to seeing Mike Mignola’s Ogdru Hem done as Toho style rubber suit monsters, and yeah, watching the movie, that’s pretty much so, even if they’re quite a bit smaller, and confined mostly to smashing thatched huts on a South Seas island. Anyway, here’s that trailer again:

Anyway, I loved this movie, and it did my somewhat premature poster-hanging proud. I love the monsters and the spy who obviously went to the Bela Lugosi School of Face Twitching, and even the island setting that eliminates any big cities for the monsters to smash. And more than anything else, I love Gezora. I want to be him for Halloween.

Shout! Factory, or somebody, this needs a Blu-ray release, like yesterday!