The original Final Girl.
Long-time readers and those who know me personally know I’m a lifelong Godzilla fan (Showa era only; I don’t care all that much for the others, except 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars, which I’d argue is the most Showa-like of the modern Godzilla films). I have all the Showa Godzilla films on video (all VHS tapes, originally, then DVD) and even ran a Godzilla Film Club in college. Giant monsters were my thing. When I was little, I wanted to grow up to make Godzilla movies. Not movies in general — Godzilla movies.
With Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla coming to movie screens this weekend, now is the best time to be a Godzilla fan. My favorite giant monster is getting press everywhere, even respectable newspapers like the New York Times. Godzilla: he’s not just for articles in Starlog anymore! (Okay, I’m dating myself, but still.) Here are some great examples of Godzilla in the mainstream media recently:
CNN.com has a great slideshow of Eiji Tsuburaya, who did the visual effects for the classic films, posing with his rubber-suited creations.
The New York Times is running a retrospective on Godzilla’s different designs over the decades.
This one’s one of my favorites: The New York Daily News interviewed Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Joseph Bruno, among other government and military personnel, about whether New York City could withstand a Godzilla attack. It’s a fascinating and hilariously deadpan read.
I’m sure you can find plenty more with a little Googling. In the meantime, I’m so excited about the new Godzilla movie. Judging from the trailers I’ve seen, it looks phenomenal. Edwards knows his giant monsters; his previous film, 2010’s Monsters, was the best recent giant monster movie until Pacific Rim. And now this! I can’t wait to go see my favorite giant monster return to theaters!
As you probably know, Giger created the seminal designs of the classic 1979 film Alien, including that of the alien itself. Later, he would try to replicate that success in his design of the alien life form in the 1995 film Species, but he didn’t even come close. It just wound up looking kind of like the other alien but with dreadlocks and boobs. Perfect for the film itself, I suppose, which is all about men being scared of women and sex, but the creature design is nowhere near as iconic. I haven’t seen Prometheus, so I can’t judge, but I did see Jodorowski’s Dune, and I can tell you his design work for that film-that-never-was looked absolutely stunning.
But Giger was more than the movies he worked on. He was an artist first and foremost, and numerous Giger art calendars graced my walls in the past. His work was fascinating, a mix of the organic and mechanical, and often sexual in nature, sometimes overtly, sometimes in a more Georgia O’Keeffe kind of way. He painted album covers for the likes of Debbie Harry and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. He was so influential that Giger-themed bars opened around the world. (One was scheduled for New York City, but alas, it never came to fruition. If it had, I would be there daily.*)
Giger was a colossal talent. His death is a loss to the world of art, the world of science fiction, the world of music — hell, just the world in general. I’m sorry we won’t get to see any more of his beautiful and nightmarish “biomechanics,” but his impressive body of work remains for us and future generations to enjoy.
* I stand corrected! The NYC “Giger Room” did exist from 1998 to 2002 at the Limelight!
Multiple sources are reporting the death of British actress Kate O’Mara at the age of 74. She was best known for her role in the 1980s primetime soap Dynasty, but I knew her as the Rani on Doctor Who.
As a villain, the Rani was an interesting character. Yet another in a long line of renegade Time Lords, she wasn’t evil the way the Master was. Where the Master was a megalomaniac who wanted to rule the cosmos, the Rani was merely a dedicated scientist who treated everyone and everything as secondary to her research. In her quest to extract and study human brain chemicals, who cared if a few humans died along the way? She hated the Doctor, presumably for his morality, but hated the Master just as much. She thought the Master’s ridiculous rivalry with the Doctor had turned him stupid, saying about him once, “He’d get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line.”
Unfortunately, this was 1980s Doctor Who, which meant that even if she was an interesting character, nothing all that interesting was ever done with her. She only appeared in two serials (I’m not counting 1993’s “Dimensions in Time,” because no one should). The first was 1985’s “The Mark of the Rani,” in which she, the Master, and the Doctor all wind up in Killingworth during the Luddite riots of the 19th century. The Doctor saves the Industrial Revolution while his companion Peri, wearing a hideous, ill-fitting yellow and pink dress that looks like she bought it from a blind, deranged dressmaker at a Renn Faire, is menaced by stagehands dressed as trees in a field. The Master doesn’t do much of anything except try to team up with the Rani to defeat the Doctor once and for all, or something. His presence is completely superfluous to the story. The whole thing is terrible.
Her second appearance, 1987’s “Time and the Rani,” is even worse. (Both serials were written by Pip & Jane Baker, a writing team that I think bears most of the blame for the awful Doctor Who scripts of the 1980s.) This is also the first appearance of Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, taking over for Colin Baker, who was the Doctor in the Rani’s previous serial. The story is such a disaster (the Rani tries to trick the newly regenerated Doctor by impersonating his companion Mel with the help of nothing more than a curly red wig, which I guess she had lying around somewhere) and the Rani’s plan is so ridiculous (gathering the minds of all the greatest thinkers of the galaxy into a giant brain) that “Time and the Rani” is best left to the dustbin of history, where it can be rightfully forgotten.
As you might imagine, the Rani was hardly my favorite Doctor Who character. Both serials she was in were really bad, but Kate O’Mara herself was such an amazing actress, and such a strong presence, that she turned every awful line into gold. In the hands of better writers, I’m convinced the Rani could have been a lot more than she was. But O’Mara did the best she could with what she was given, which wasn’t a lot, and she still managed to blow everyone else off the screen.
I also remember O’Mara from the 1970 Hammer film The Horror of Frankenstein, which, while not as revered as the Frankenstein movies Hammer did with Peter Cushing, is still a lot of fun. In that one, she plays Alys, the villainous chambermaid who tries to blackmail Dr. Frankenstein. That same year, she starred opposite Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing, again for Hammer, in The Vampire Lovers, which is one of my favorite vampire films. As the governess Mme. Perrodot, she is enthralled by the beautiful vampire Carmilla and becomes her willing tool in wreaking havoc. (O’Mara also appeared in an episode of The Avengers in 1969, but it was a Tara King episode, and who remembers those?)
Kate O’Mara was an incredibly versatile actress. She didn’t always have the best scripts to work with, but she brought a lot to every role. Her death is a sad loss to the acting world. She will be missed.
