“So we do have an effective defense.” “ I certainly hope you’re right.”
Satellites launched into Earth’s orbit are being destroyed. No one knows why. Soon after that a diamond heist is foiled when, during the robbery, an entity enters the bank, melts the door to the vault and takes the diamonds. Inspector Kommei (Yosuke Natsuki) is investigating. He suspects Mark Jackson (Robert Dunham), a supposed diamond broker of being involved. Mark, on the other hand suspects a diamond theft ring led by a vicious boss (Seizaburo Kawazu).
Dr. Munakata (Nobuo Nakamura) believes there is something else at work. In addition to the diamonds, large quantities of coal are being sucked up into the air. All around the world the same thing is happening. Diamonds are disappearing. Also coal is disappearing.
Then an entity is seen descending from the sky and sucking up coal. Dr. Munakata believes that a single celled organism living in the Earth’s atmosphere has been mutated due to a high amount of radiation in the atmosphere over Japan. The creature appears to be a gelatinous blob with long tentacle-like appendages. Sort of a jelly fish in mid air. The scientific community names it Dogora. The creature grows at a tremendous rate. Dogora eats carbon. That includes coal and diamonds. Not good, but at least it is keeping the creature busy until it runs out of carbon. And then looks to carbon based humans for sustenance.
The military fire on Dogora and believe they have destroyed the monster. What they did was blast it into a million little Dogora’s. Back to the drawing board.
“Dogora” was released in 1964 and was directed by Ishiro Honda. This is a rare TOHO monster production where the monster is not a guy in a suit. In scenes where you actually see the full fledged monster, the monster prop was placed in a vat of water and worked by puppeteers. The day they filmed the prop the water in the tank was cloudy. Trying to keep the water clear proved to be difficult. This resulted in very little footage being shot. Although it is a cool monster, you don’t get to see it much. Except in all the marketing materials.
Dogora goes through several phases in the movie. At first it looks like a sparkly blue amoeba, the single cell prop was made by sandwiching liquid glass between plates of solid glass. sometimes it’s invisible. Once it gets large it takes on the shape of the greenish, milky jelly fish.
The crystallized monster was created by attaching a light bulb to a polyvinyl chloride miniature. An electrical current sent to the bulb through piano wire, caused it to illuminate giving the effect of the miniature flashing and emitting light.
There’s a sub-plot with gangsters and diamonds and police chases. It takes up a good chunk of the movie but it has nothing to do with the film. It’s just some fun cops and robbers action added to the movie. Well, maybe.
The movie is much maligned. Ishiro’s idea was to combine two movie genres that he was famous for, gangsters and monsters. As far as I could find, the movie was intended to be a comedy. The lame dialogue proves that. I’m not sure if the concept just didn’t work or if the US mucked it up with the dubbing and the repackaging. So, was the movie suppose to be monster movie with gangsters or a gangster movie with monsters? I guess it depends on what you’re looking for. I prefer to think of it as a monster movie with a really cool monster that has some gangsters thrown in.
English dubbed