Alternate Titles: Dagora the Space Monster
Year: 1964
Director: Ishiro Honda
Special Effects Director: Eiji Tsuburaya

What if we threw a kaiju party and no kaiju showed up? Well, i guess we could animate some kind of blobby thing...

*groan*

...and have it float around a little, superimposing it over various scenes.

And we could dangle a jellyfish looking thing that we could operate with strings.

I wanted it to be a giant space dog!

But it can't actually interact with anything, so we'll have to use cartoon animation for that.

And that doesn't look so good so we better not do that too much. Uh, fuck it, let's just throw up some screens with random lights and colors.

And dangle some crystals from strings in a smokey room.

Seriously, this is what would be left behind if you cut everything that made a Godzilla movie cool out of the movie. We have our normally reliable Toho creators, including director Ishiro Honda, special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, scriptwriter Shinichi Sekizawa, and soundtrack composer Akira Ifukube, and a cast of Togo regulars. And the human scenes are perfectly fine and would fit well enough in any Toho kaiju film. And we have the military scenes and crowd evacuation scenes. Just no monster.

The basic plot here involves international jewel thieves. This lady is on stakeout, but the cops tell themselves that she's just sitting around because, "I think she needs a man".

Grrrrrrr...

The jewel thieves' local boss is this guy, but they are part of an even larger international ring. I include all these screens just for actor identification since a lot of them appear in other Toho films.

He includes these screenshots because when these actors are shown i start shouting, "That's so-and-so from the other movie. Remember?" and he just stares at me blankly.

On the trail of the thieves are the stalwart police operatives Komai (played by Yosuke Natsuki)...

...his not so-good partner, Nitta, and their boss (Toho regular Jun Tazaki).

Also in the mix is the awesome Mark Jackson.

Jackson is first thought to be an independent thief but then it turns out that he's working for the World Diamond Insurance Association. You can call him a Diamond G-Man; everyone else does. Jackson is a white guy but speaks fluent Japanese and enjoys "coarse" Japanese tea and edamame beans, and he administers a deadly karate chop (Min says it's terrible but the movie tells me otherwise). He's the master of the "hide a pair of shoes behind a curtain so people will think you're standing there" trick, and he's got a fake gun that shoots confetti. This was actually supposed to be the launch of a series of Mark Jackson movies but unfortunately with this one being such a stinker nothing came of that and the actor Robert Dunham instead will be reduced to playing the toga-wearing Emperor of Seatopia in Godzilla vs. Megalon.

All of the above are stymied by another party that is stealing all the diamonds, and it turns out to be a giant space jellyfish (not a dog) that was affected by radiation while it was floating over Japan. Now it wants to suck up all the carbon on Earth.

It seems to have started by robbing jewelery stores for their diamond supplies, but eventually moves up to sucking up Earth's coal deposits as it grows in size. There's a nod to the fact that all life on Earth is also made of carbon, but it's merely a passing concern.

Clearly a space jellyfish would start by robbing jewelry stores.

The creature first makes itself known by causing people to float, seemingly at random or perhaps because they are near large sources of carbon.

The floating scares the jewel thieves away from their first big job of the film. Our main cop character is pretty convinced that it's the work of a monster right away, and he doesn't mind sharing his confusion when after another mysterious event a monster doesn't show. "A monster should have appeared at the same time." His boss takes that in relative stride and asks what he's talking about, and the cop responds with, "The idea of monsters should not be so easily dismissed." When pressed, he states, "I won't jump to any conclusions, but it's the only explanation I have for this." In fact, you just did. You did indeed just jump to a conclusion. However, his boss still is pretty calm about this theory and doesn't send his employee for a psychiatric evaluation. Instead he just asks "For what reason?" a monster might be attacking. For once, the idea of monsters isn't quickly dismissed only to prove true later. The characters of the Tohoverse are learning! Hopefully the fact that there isn't really what you could call a monster in this movie won't discourage them.

In addition to the badassery of Mark Jackson, one of the highlights of the film is this doctor...

...who repeatedly berates the cops for being completely incompetent and later shares his unflappable disdain with the rest of the cast as well. His secretary (a reappearance of Yoko Fujiyama, who plays a slightly more verbal human being in this movie than she did in Atragon)...

...is also sister to a UN scientist (another Toho vet, Hiroshi Koizumi), who is the one who delivers all the exposition on the jellyfish creature. He shows up, completely unfazed by room full of cops in various disguises (due to the shenanigans around the jewel thief plot), barely acknowledges his sister, and then says, "Doctor, we've discovered the monster's true identity. The Space Planning Committee at the UN reported it. In their conclusion, the monster is a cell from space mutated by massive amounts of radiation."

Of course it is.

The UN is a much more awesome agency in Toho movies.

Our scientist continues, "There's a pocket of radioactivity in the atmosphere over Japan. A certain form of cell that lives there was mutated by the presence of strontium and cobalt."

Uh huh. Makes sense. *nodding*

The giant space cell has been named "Dogora". A public announcement is made.

One of the potentially coolest parts of the film is when Dogora invades a coal mine that happened to be full of wasp nests, and the wasps retaliating, flying into the upper atmosphere to sting the giant jellyfish. Unfortunately this is just depicted like this:

And then we just see dead bees and rocks falling from the sky.

This is all sadly unrelated to the beekeepers from Mothra vs. Godzilla.

The rocks are because Dogora turns out to be vulnerable to wasp venom - it turns Dogora into crystals - and that is how the creature is ultimately defeated. The world bands together and devotes all its factories to manufacturing synthetic venom, which they deploy with these cool guns...

...and also somehow flying above the creature and dropping barrels of the stuff on top of it.

As with the rest of the movie, the final battle is terribly uninteresting. Just scenes of the military doing stuff to a random blob of color.

When did it turn into an oil painting?

Actually, when Dogora launches its final attack, we're told that it will take 20 minutes before the wasp venom can be deployed, and i swear the movie makes us sit through all 20 of those minutes as we watch the army futilely shoot at colored smoke.

I think this one's Van Gogh's Starry Night.

Will the excitement never end?

Our subplot with the diamond thieves ends up with the lady thief betraying the others and stealing a set of diamonds (that will turn out to be fakes). However, after giving her former allies the slip she heads to the same getaway location that they had all been planning to meet at, so they find her there and chase her around on the beach, and she eventually gets shot and dies. But the police show up at the beach as well, and engage the other thieves in a gun (and dynamite!) fight long enough to make it to the end of the movie when Dogora is poisoned by the wasp venom and giant colorful "crystals" start falling out of the sky...

...and eventually crush the thieves.

And you thought raining wasp venom onto the world's population might be unhealthy.

When it's over, a headline assures us that "World will get through crisis. Dogora stamped out completely at North Pole." We missed the North Pole battle but that's ok.

If only the whole movie happened off screen like that.

Our doctor is invited to give a "UN lecture on peaceful applications of the Dogora experience".

The sad thing is that our dvd includes some concept art that actually looks pretty cool...

...but i guess it was too ambitious and Toho wasn't able to pull it off.

I found the whole "we need to manufacture wasp venom" thing confusing because if Dogora was turned into crystals during the initial wasp attack, shouldn't it already be defeated? Why do they need to shoot more of venom into the sky? Looking at the concept art, it's apparent there are several jellylfish in the sky. Dogora is Many. Dogora is One.

Dogora is a real tangent to the Godzilla line and i've only included it because the jellyfish creature appears in the NES game.

Godzilla Drinking Game
	Someone thinks it's a good idea to drag a giant monster across the ocean on a raft (giant eggs count).
	Attacking planes fly directly at a monster, with no possibility of avoiding a crash even if the monster didn't swat them down.	Somehow they manage to fly helicopters over the giant space jellyfish with no casualties.
	People refuse to believe in the existence of a giant monster even though they've already acknowledged that Godzilla exists.	Quite the opposite. We're all pretty open to the idea of monsters in this movie, and this isn't even a mainline Godzilla film.
	A submarine explodes.
	Teens have a dance party on a boat. Two drinks/head smacks if they get attacked by a monster during the party.
	The government is completely ineffective when faced with a corporation doing something illegal.
	A humongous lumbering monster manages to sneak up on someone. Two drinks/head smacks if it's the army and they're supposedly using radar.
	A scientist suddenly figures everything out with little-to-no information and explains it all to everyone.	Our good doctor, a mineralogist, can tell you everything about anything, including bees. And it's unclear how the UN figures out that there are monster cells floating in space, too.
	A monster suddenly grows in size just because.
	People expose themselves to major amounts of radiation with no concern.
	Everyone suddenly knows a monster's name. Two drinks/head smacks if everyone else nods appreciatively and repeats it.	I'd count this as a partial. The monster's name is officially announced on the radio, but only moments after the UN scientist tells the docotr what they've determined. Word gets out fast.
	Army missiles can't seem to hit a 150+ foot monster and instead explode harmlessly around it.	Explosions all around and especially in front of the giant blobby thing, but no noticeable hits.
	A woman falls down for no reason.	You have to work with me a bit on this one. Sure, the lady falls on the beach because she is wearing dress clothes and is being shot at. That doesn't count as a "no reason". But there's no reason for her to be on that beach in the first place! I think we deserve a drink just for sitting through the beach scenes.
	Bad dinosaur science. You have to give a little leeway for the time period, but pretending a children's picture book is a scientific journal is always worth two drinks/smacks.

Monsters Appearing: Dogora