Dogora DVD

 Unique kaiju flies
A bizarre, middle-tier Toho daikaiju eiga, Dogora survives through technically competent film-making, generally appealing performances (even from an almost unrecognisably young, and somewhat annoying, Robert Dunham as the "Diamond G-Man"), and one of monsterdom's most beautifully weird titular characters. However, if you try to take the proceedings too seriously you won't enjoy yourself; this is cartoon stuff, made with a sense of humour and a monster-tongue firmly placed in cheek. In his excellent book, Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo!, Stuart Galbraith goes so far as to see it as a "satire". I don't know about that, but it certainly seems that Honda's aim was to join together two popular genres (crime-melodrama and monster), to play with the forms, and to see what happens. What he produced was something less than a successful monster movie but more than an outright dud. In fact, for all its flaws Dogora proves to be an interesting experiment as the separate plot threads of diamond-thieves-after-a-big-haul and space-monster-on-a-rampage interweave both thematically and in terms of incident, finally bringing about a resolution that is either anticlimactic or ironically appropriate, depending on your point-of-view. Personally, I liked the fact that space-thief Dogora's demise directly contributes to the end of human-thieves' ambitions, and that the police-hero, who has dogged them throughout the movie, has little to do with stopping the gang. Eiji Tsuburaya's SFX are, of course, generally excellent even when low budgets make the going tough. Dogora itself, unusually for Toho, is created through a combination of animation and puppetry rather than man-in-a-rubber-suit, and its one scene of unabashed destruction -- when floating tentacles grab a bridge and tear it from its foundations, flinging it back onto the harbour foreshores with distinct malice -- is a beauty. The main flaw in the film is that there isn't more of this sort of thing. From conceptual drawings included on the Media Blasters DVD, the main appeal of the floating space jellyfish idea was clearly the unique images of destruction that could be garnered from it: battleships dragged from the stormy sea, buildings torn up by flailing tentacles, an army of Dogoras bringing destruction from above. Alas, these images didn't eventuate. Not that there aren't evocative scenes of Dogora's drifting bulk appearing out of churning cloudbanks; coal deposits, trucks, debris and people sucked up to feed its hunger; buildings collapsing as it passes overhead. But much more could have been done in this area and if it had been, the film could have been a classic. As it is, it remains a minor, though diverting effort. Without the awful dubbing on the US Dagora version, it succeeds in being unique enough in its kaiju sensibilities to interest most fans of the genre, even though they may feel that the comic crime/diamond-theft scenes take up too much of the film's running time. This new DVD version is, however, beautifully produced.
Submitted by Robert Hood (Wollongong) 
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