[HorrorScience] Ebirah Horror of the Deep (1966)

Reading time: 6 minutes

Qualification

Gojira, Ebira, Mosura Nankai no Daikettō

Year

1966

Duration

87 minutes

Director

Jun Fukuda

Distribution

Akira Takarada, Toru Watanabe, Toru Ibuki, Choutarou Tougin, Hideo Sunazuka, Kumi Mizuno, Jun Tazaki, Akihiko Hirata, Hideo Amamoto, Shoichi Hirose, Hiroshi Sekita, Haruo Nakajima

Script

Shinichi Sekizawa

Leaving aside the issue of titles, we are faced with a movie with quite a few changes off the screen, since the director's position falls into the hands of Jun Fukuda and the soundtrack to Masaru Sato, thus ending the tandem formed by Ishiro Honda and Akira Ifukube in almost all the previous films.

The story begins with a boy desperate to find his brother (who disappeared in a shipwreck weeks ago). The situation leads him to try to get his own boat to try to search for it himself, so he decides to participate in a dance contest, where one is given to the one who dances the longest. Because the contest had already started, his stupid plan fails, but there he meets other boys who decide to accompany him to the port to take a look at the boats.

Without hesitation, our protagonists enter one of the boats, which causes the owner to wake up and confuse them with thieves. The owner of the boat, in an act of kindness and absolute foolishness, decides to leave the boys who stay, as long as they don't wake him up, after which he goes to sleep. The next day he discovers that they have started the boat and are on the high seas, but the biggest surprise is yet to come, since the owner of the boat is actually a thief who had stolen it to escape from his latest crime.

Because they are on the high seas, they decide to look for the protagonist's brother, but the storm worsens and in the middle of the storm an enormous giant pincer appears that breaks their boat and makes them shipwreck near a strange island.

[HorrorScience] Ebirah Horror of the Deep (1966) — Ebirah's clamp will interrupt the protagonists' journey

Shortly after, they discover that the island is inhabited by a strange organization that holds the natives of Infant Island as slaves and that, in some way, seems to control a giant monster that lives in the sea.

Our protagonists are discovered by the organization's guards and while they hide among the caves, they find Godzilla dozing inside the mountain. The siege tightens on them and some are captured, so they decide to wake up the giant monster to use it as a distraction while they look for a way to escape the island.

Ebirah Horror of the Deep It is a curious film full of contrasts. On the one hand, it once again tries to offer something new compared to what was seen in previous films, as it abandons combat with 2 or more already known monsters, to focus on a simple two-way combat, with one of the monsters being completely new.

It also moves the action away from the big city, to place it on a tropical island and introduces some new scenes when presenting the monsters (Ebirah's claw coming out of the sea, Godzilla asleep) and new concepts (the yellow liquid that repels Ebirah).

Another nice change is in the human characters., who stop being the typical astronauts, scientists, journalists or inventors, to become a thief, a normal guy looking for his brother and some boys who were participating in a dance contest.

The soundtrack also offers a notable change from what we have seen, Masaru Sato is not the great Akira Ifukube, but his compositions are much fresher and crazy, in a way they fit quite well with the style of the film.

On the other hand we find that The film's script is full of situations that are resolved magically. by a stroke of luck (it's a sunny day, but when it occurs to them to create a lightning rod it starts to rain; the guy who is left hanging from the balloon arrives at Mothra's island where the lost brother happens to be; the thief's master key works for all the locks of a military base with the latest technology) and some situations that make no sense at all (even compared to the standard of this kind of movies).

When it comes to the Godzilla saga, Jun Fukuda is remembered as one of the worst directors who have passed through it, however this movie is a breath of fresh air (despite using Mothra and the natives of Infant Island). It is true that to enjoy it you have to see it with the eyes of a child, coincidentally the kind of audience that Toho was looking for and which has absurd scenes, but it does not reach the level of ridiculousness seen in King Kong Vs Godzilla.

Curiosities of this movie.

The reason why it was decided to set the film on a tropical island was to save costs. It was much more expensive to create models of cities than of a tropical environment.
The evil organization is called Red Bamboo, due to the tension with communist countries.
Originally this film was going to be called Operation Robinson Crusoe: King Kong vs Ebirah and it was going to star King Kong. That explains some of the strange things that happen with Godzilla, such as him gawking at the girl or the protagonists deciding to wake him up using electricity (remember that in King Kong VS Godzilla, electricity made Kong stronger).