Jewel Thieves & Giant Monsters

by Kimberly Lindbergs | June 3, 2010

Categories | Movie Reviews, Japanese Cinema, Crime, Science Fiction, Ishiro Honda

dogora24

dogora1

After recently reading and writing about Peter H. Brothers’ book Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda, I was motivated to watch one of Honda’s lesser-known films that I hadn’t had the opportunity to see yet, Dogora (1964). I’m not sure how I managed to overlook this little gem involving a giant jellyfish from space with an appetite for diamonds but I’m glad that I finally caught up with it on DVD. It’s undoubtedly one of the oddest monster movies produced by Toho Studios in the ’60s and it has quickly become one of my favorite Ishiro Honda films.

Want to read more? You’ll find the rest of my post over at the Movie Morlocks.

7 Comments »

  1. Mike Jones says; June 4, 2010 @ 11:57 pm

    Love the jellyfish, it looks so good sweeping across the skyline. I think they make a good subject for horror movies.

  2. john says; June 5, 2010 @ 6:25 pm

    What an image - it looks like some of the artwork I am currently making.

    A combination of beauty and kitsch - I will have to track down this movie.

    Thank you for the added boost!

  3. Sergio says; June 5, 2010 @ 8:00 pm

    Last time i watched it, i did indulge myself in a late double session with Space Amoeba, which though not in the same daring, genre-mixing league as Dogora surely is another fun piece from master Honda.

  4. Kimberly Lindbergs says; June 10, 2010 @ 5:08 pm

    It’s a great movie and I’m glad I finally got the chance to see it.

  5. Christianne Benedict says; June 24, 2010 @ 7:34 am

    I haven’t seen Dogora in a while, but I remember it being great fun. It’s one of those kaiju movies (Godzilla vs. Biolante is another) that you could re-dub as a Lovecraftian horror movie if you had a mind. I love that screen cap of the jellyfish in the sky.

  6. exliontamer says; July 13, 2010 @ 6:50 pm

    This is the very first movie (in any genre) I remember seeing, way back when I was no more than three. It was late at night — or so it seemed to me at that age — and I stayed up watching it with my mom and dad one night when I couldn’t sleep. They shooed me back to bed when the jellyfish turned up; too scary for a kid, don’t you know.

  7. chris says; July 15, 2010 @ 2:54 pm

    I think I saw this as a kid in the ’70s and completely forgot it. Thanks for reminding me, I need to see this again NOW.


RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>




Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Movie Posters 1960-1979

see more in Cinebeats' Flickr Gallery




CREDITS

  • Cinebeats chronicles one woman's love affair with '60s & '70s era cinema. Or as she likes to call it, cinema's Platinum Age! Blog design, updates and all original content is provided by Kimberly Lindbergs. She can be reached by email at:
    kimberly@cinebeats.com. This site is a review site and claims no ownership over the images used to promote the films reviewed here. All original blog content is copyright © 2006-2011 by Kimberly Lindbergs and can not be directly copied or distributed in full without her permission.

    • INFORMATION