[HorrorScience] Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965)

Reading time: 6 minutes

Qualification

Furankenshutain Tai Chitei Kaijū Baragon

Year

1965

Duration

94 minutes

Director

Ishiro Honda

Distribution

Nick Adams, Tadao Takashima, Kumi Mizuno, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Yoshifumi Tajima, Takashi Shimura, Susumu Fujita, Kenji Sahara, Yoshio Kosugi, Koji Furuhata, Haruo Nakajima

Script

Reuben Bercovitch, Takeshi Kimura

Today I am going to talk about a tremendously strange film, since it brings together monsters from the West with monsters from the East with a somewhat picturesque result.

On the part of the West we have the monster of Frankenstein, created by Mary Shelley for her book Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus and brought to the screen dozens of times, turning it into a popular icon as I explained in this article. On the eastern side we find Baragon, the typical giant monster from Japanese movies, looking like a dinosaur and capable of spitting fire from its mouth. Both will take part in a film known as Frankenstein Vs Baragon, although it was also named as Frankenstein Conquers the World, a much more misleading title, but why deny it, also more striking.

And who was in charge of directing a film with such a mix of concepts? Well, the lord Ishiro Honda, responsible for many of the Godzilla and Toho films.

about:blankClick to accept marketing cookies and allow this content

The film begins in Nazi Germany, when some soldiers force a scientist to give them something of great value to him, which is immediately transferred to Japan. This object is the heart of Frankenstein's monster, which despite not having a body to protect it, continues to beat to the amazement of the Japanese scientist who wants to study it. Unfortunately, his intentions will be cut short in the most radical way possible, because at that moment the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs fall, ending the Second World War and devastating Japan.

Years later we find ourselves at a Japanese hospital where an American doctor (James Bowen) and his two Japanese colleagues (Dr. Sueko Togami and Dr. Kenichiro Kawaji) are treating some of the Japanese people affected by radiation.

[HorrorScience] Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965) — The leading scientists

At the same time, stories begin to appear about a homeless man who is stealing animals to eat them, Sueko and James will discover that he is just a kind of hungry wild child, a situation that will make them take pity on him and give him something to eat.

A few days later, the boy is cornered on the beach by onlookers and police. The doctors (who happened to be passing by) decide to talk to him and take him to the laboratory where they will see that he has a rather particular appearance.

While they take care of him in the laboratory, the boy begins to grow excessively. There is not much explanation for this fact, so they decide to investigate and end up coming up with the hypothesis that this child may be a new version of Frankenstein's monster, created through the heart and the radiation of atomic bombs.

The monster goes crazy after being exposed to some journalists and due to its size it easily manages to escape from the laboratory to hide in the mountains. The military wants to kill Frankenstein's enormous monster, while the doctors aim to save it due to the scientific interest of the creature and what it could mean for medicine to discover the secret of its cellular regeneration.

Unfortunately, any intention to save the monster goes to waste when devastated towns begin to appear, acts that are attributed to the giant Frankenstein's monster despite not being found near the destroyed areas. Some witnesses claim to have seen something bright come out of the ground, which would mean that there is a second monster rampaging through Japan.

I don't need to explain that the clash of colossi is inevitable.

Frankenstein Conquers the World It is a film that, despite having a crazy script (even by the standards of these movies) what he does, he does well.

It seems incredible that a film that mixes so many meaningless things (Nazis, dinosaurs, atomic bombs, Frankenstein's monster...) can take itself seriously, but it does and I think that is why it works much better than other films by the same director such as King Kong VS Godzilla. The seriousness reaches the point that the beginning of the film (with the victims of the radiation of the atomic bombs) is slightly reminiscent of what was seen in the original Godzilla movie.

The actors do not overact (compared to other similar films) and despite eating up a lot of the footage, it makes some sense that this is the case, since they are the ones who have been taking care of Frankenstein's monster. Despite this, the film tries to balance the time between humans and monsters quite successfully.

When it comes to special effects, they are at the level of the Godzilla films of the time, it is true that some animal models look extremely fake, that Baragon's design is too funny and that Frankenstein's monster looks more like a kind of giant troglodyte than any incarnation of the character we have previously seen on film, but on general levels, the effects are good.

Curiosities about the film:

This film is “related” to King Kong Vs Godzilla and War of Gargantuas, since all three were created based on a story by Willis O Brien (the person in charge of the special effects of king kong 1933) where Kong faced a giant Frankenstein's monster created from animal parts. The project took many turns and ended up becoming King Kong Vs Godzilla, but the ideas discarded for that film were reused in the others.
The film has two endings, in one of which a giant octopus appears similar to the one seen in King Kong Vs Godzilla and War of Gargantuas. This octopus is usually known as Oodako or Daidako.
Baragon became quite a popular character in Japan, to the point that he was included in the Godzilla saga and in many of the merchandising products.