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Info Also Known As: Beauty and the Liquid People (original Japanese); The H-Bomb Monster (Brazil) Director: Honda Ishiro. Screenplay: Kimura Takeshi, from a story by Kaijo Hideo. Director of Special Effects: Tsuburaya Eiji. Composer: Sato Masaru. Runtime: 87 minutes. Release Date: June 24, 1958 What’s It About? A wanted member of a drug gang disappears, leaving his clothes behind; to all intents and purposes, he seems to have melted away on the spot. This may be exactly what happened, as the man’s lounge singer girlfriend Chikako (Shirakawa Yumi) sees another mobster who had come to intimidate her meet the same fate. Naturally, the police suspect her of lying and hiding her boyfriend, but Dr. Masada (Sahara Kenji), a university professor working with radiation, proposes a bizarre theory: the murderers are H-Men, former humans turned into gelatinous carnivores by exposure to nuclear fallout. As evidence mounts in favor of the H-Men’s existence, the creatures seem to be converging on ...

Info Also known as: Earth Defense Force (original Japanese); Barbarians Invade the Earth (Argentina and Brazil); Space Beasts (Austria). Director: Honda Ishiro. Screenplay: Kimura Takeshi, based on Shigeru Kayama’s adaptation of a story by Okami Jojiro. Director of Special Effects: Tsuburaya Eiji. Composer: Ifukube Akira. Runtime: 89 minutes (original), 85 minutes (U.S. cut) Release Date: December 28, 1957 What’s It About? Abnormal forest fires and landslides rock the Japanese countryside, soon revealed to be the work of a giant burrowing robot that shoots energy blasts from its eyes. The robot, Moguera, is eventually destroyed, but prominent astrophysicist Ryoichi (Hirata Akihiko) disappears during its rampage. He reappears in the company of the Mysterians, an alien species he had been writing a theoretical paper on. The Mysterians are refugees from their home planet Mysteroid, which they destroyed thousands of years ago in an atomic war. Now they just want a small plot of land on ...

  Info Also Known As:   Radon, Great Monster of the Skies (Japan); just plain Radon (Japan); Invasion 2034  (Belgium) Director: Honda Ishiro. Screenplay: Kimura Takeshi and Murata Takeo, from a story by Kuronuma Ken. Director of Special Effects: Tsuburaya Eiji. Composer: Ifukube Akira. Runtime: 82 minutes (Japan), 74 minutes (United States), 70 minutes (United States TV prints) Release Date: December 26, 1956 What’s It About? (Note: significant spoilers here) A remote mining community experiences strange accidents that culminate in disappearances and brutal murders. Prehistoric dragonfly larvae are discovered to be the cause, but a missing miner comes back with even worse news; the creatures that eat the insects have hatched from their eggs. Two Rodans, giant mutant Pteranodons  (flying prehistoric reptiles), have been awoken by hydrogen bombs, and now they’re soaring around the skies of Japan at supersonic speeds! Also, unlike what Belgium seemed to think, the film ...

This is a preview of the blog's first Patreon-exclusive essay. As a backer, you'll be granted access to this essay and other exclusive content, as well as also early access to each regular essay before they're published on this site. Kindly consider backing for as low as $2 ! Enemy Monsters is a sub-series focusing on non-Toho films inspired by, intended to compete with, or otherwise relevant to the Godzilla movies. Daiei Film’s 1956 Warning from Space, known in Japan as Spacemen Appear Above Tokyo , is a highly significant entry in the history of Japanese tokusatsu (special effects) films. This is even though Warning from Space (I shall use the international title for the sake of brevity, even though the Japanese title is obviously way more awesome) is not a giant monster movie in the traditional sense - monsters are featured, but they are more or less human-scaled. Nor was the film even the first major science fiction production by Daiei; way back in 1949 the company had ...

Info Also Known As: Jû jin yuki otoko  aka Beast Man Snow Man (Japan) Director: Honda Ishiro. Screenplay: Murata Takeo, from a story by Shigeru Kayama. Director of Special Effects: Eiji Tsuburaya. Composer: Sato Masaru. Runtime: 94 minutes (Japan), 63 minutes (U.S. Re-cut) Release Date: August 14, 1955 What’s It About? When two zoology students go missing on a ski trip in the Japanese Alps, their classmates and professor launch an expedition to the area on the evidence that an unknown animal was involved in the disappearances. The expedition discovers the existence of two Abominable Snowman-type creatures, an adult and child of the same species, similarly the last of their kind. They also discover an unknown village whose deformed, backwards residents surely couldn’t be based on harmful stereotypes of the Burakumin caste in Japan, you guys. An exotic animal dealer and his goons are also hunting the creature, with tragedy sure to ensue… Monster Appearances: Adult Snowman, Junior Sno...

Other Shores is a sub-series focusing on Godzilla’s appearances in non-film media. Shigeru Kayama was a prolific genre writer at the height of his career when he was tasked with developing Tanaka Tomoyuki’s pitch for Gojira into a full story outline. He would do the same for its first sequel. More to the point, he would adapt both finished films into novellas that were published in 1955, long before home video made it easy to revisit the films themselves. These novellas have remained in print in Japan ever since, as part of Kayama’s enormous body of work that remains popular in the country to this day. However, In the english-speaking world, these novellas were only made available for the first time in October 2023, via translations by Jeffrey Angles for University of Minnesota Press. Therefore, We Call It Godzilla is proud to be one of the first series retrospectives in the west to feature this important part of Godzilla’s media history: the first two films, filtered through the lens...