Everyone knows the story of Frankenstein, right? Created in a lab by a mad German scientist, given the wrong brain by mistake, escaped into the countryside to do evil, destroyed by an angry mob, his still-beating heart transported from Nazi Germany to Japan in WWII, where radiation from the Hiroshima bomb caused the heart to regenerate into a 100-foot-tall Japanese boy with down syndrome and then he fought a fire-breathing bulldog-lizard-badger monster before falling into the ocean in the grip of a giant octopus. Wait, you didn’t know that last part? Dude, Mary Shelley did a LOT of fuckin’ drugs. Seriously, socialites in Victorian England? Are you fucking kidding me? Party animals, dude. Laudanum, cocaine, hell, they probably drank lamp oil like Jackie Chan in Legend of Drunken Master. Causes some pretty weird hallucinations, does lamp oil. Okay, okay, on with the movie.
So I already set it up for you. Nazi Germany is about to fall, but rather than have the heart of the Frankenstein monster fall into Allied hands, the Germans ship it to Japan to be further studied. Bad timing results in the heart being lost during the Hiroshima bombing, and no more is heard of it for fifteen years.
Fastforward to a young, pre-pubescent and freshly regenerated Frankenstein monster showing up on the doorstep of Drs. Bowen, Togami, and Kawaji. Being scientists studying radiation, they are of course very interested in a boy regrown from the heart of the Frankenstein monster.
In one of those strange little inconsistencies of suspension of disbelief, I am totally willing to accept that the still-beating heart of the monster survived at ground zero of a nuclear blast and regenerated itself like some crazy fuckin’ starfish into a fully-formed monster, and yet I yell at the TV in disbelief at the fact that every single scientist in the room repeatedly insists to the viewer that the lumpy, down syndrome Japanese boy sitting in front of them is Caucasian! NO HE’S NOT! HE’S FUCKING JAPANESE! HE DOESN’T LOOK EVEN REMOTELY GERMAN! STOP TELLING ME HE’S A WHITE KID!
So the monster develops a crush on Sueko Togami, and begins to grow super-size and unpredictable, so they chain him up. One night he breaks free of his manacles and heads off into the wilderness, leaving his chewed-off and still-living hand crawling around aimlessly in his cell. Bowen and Co. discover through studying the hand that the monster is, indeed, like a starfish, being able to regenerate any part of him that is destroyed. Which is strange for a creature stitched together from necrotic flesh in the first place, but what’re you gonna do? It’s Japan. Logic has never been a strong point here.
At the same time Frankie gets loose and runs into the hills to hide, a burrowing monster called Baragon digs his way to the surface after millennia of subterranean hibernation, and starts destroying oil rigs and farms. The military doesn’t know about Baragon, as no one who has seen it has lived except for a military advisor played by Jun Tazaki. The rest of the JSDF thinks Frank is responsible for all the deaths and set out to destroy him, while Togami and friends know that he may be a giant lumpy retard, but he’s basically a good egg. They set out to find him and protect him before he can be killed, and just when it looks like all is lost, Baragon makes his first public appearance and attacks the scientists. Frank runs to the rescue, vanquishing the goofy, flop-eared lizard and proving that he means no harm to anyone…just before a giant octopus jumps out from behind a mountain and drags him into the ocean. I can’t tell you how happy that last sentence makes me, because that’s seriously how the movie ends (well, the international version, anyway, and I really can’t imagine why they thought, of all the other crazy shit in this movie, that that was the part that was too goofy for American audiences). I think from now on every movie should end that way – random cephalopod attacks.
I’ve never seen a Toho monster flick I didn’t like. I could watch these damn things every day of the week. Every single one of them, even the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel crap has more entertainment value than just about anything being produced today. I think it’s because even the ones without the budget to pull it off were unabashedly bat-shit insane, pulling out all the stops, doing every crazy-ass thing they could cram into the run time, and more than that, the absolute conviction with which this craziness was presented. There was no sense of irony; there was no wink-wink self-referentialism, it was all done with a totally straight face because, dammit, it was just the right thing to do. No point in pretending your movie was something it wasn’t – it was a crazy-ass monster movie, goddammit, so let there be crazy!
Nowdays, it’s the exception rather than the rule. Everyone thinks they’re too cool to make a straight-up genre flick, so they have to make it all jokey and cram as many references in as they can. That’s all well and good a time or two, but when that starts becoming the norm, the actual movie gets buried under all the inside jokes and geek posturing and the entertainment value of those old flicks, that is intended to be celebrated , is lost.
Unpretentious insanity, people. Unpretentious insanity.
The Moral of the Story: If you deny the ethnic features of a deformed monster long enough, eventually they will just go away.
H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating: 
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