10 Monster Movies That Totally Screw With Your Brain

Most Asian creature features that might make it on a list like this are distinguished by their manic, intense creativity. Yakuza Apocalypse, for example, deals with the vampire lord of Japanese organised crime, who faces a challenge to his rule in the form of a legendary terrorist in a frog costume, who becomes a giant cthonic frog creature and tries to destroy the world.

As I pointed out in the introduction, I’ve had to limit myself to a single slice of Asian cinematic gold just to allow the other countries of the world a chance. When so many Korean and Japanese genre movies are that insane, that lurid and that inventive, which do you pick to be on a list like this? What criteria determines what makes the cut and what doesn’t?

Well, I’ve gone for a movie that’s not really manic at all: a film that apes the conventions of a day-in-the-life documentary, one that’s slow, measured, thoughtful, and of course batsh*t insane.

Because, make no mistake, Big Man Japan is madder than a bag of broken biscuits in a blender. Daisoto is the last in a long line of a family of monster slayers, an unhappy middle-aged man whose wife has abandoned him and taken their daughter with her. His bachelor pad is squalid and untidy, and he lives in fairly miserable solitude - that is, until the monsters show up.

Every so often, something huge and unstoppable arrives in Tokyo, and it’s Daisoto’s calling to meet them head on. Once he receives the call, he’s charged with electricity and transforms into a 100 foot tall giant with a huge steel club, which he uses to defeat this latest threat to the Japanese way of life.

The monsters this ‘Big Man’ faces are typically imaginative: there’s a guy with one huge foot that stamps on things, a fire-breathing demon-creature, another with extending steel arms that pulls down towering buildings to throw at people. And let’s not forget the one with the giant eyeball hanging from its groin that gets used as an offensive weapon.

The contrast with all these action scenes couldn’t be more jarring. Daisoto is a working stiff, a peon. The rest of the film is simply a fly-on-the-wall documentary about how much his life sucks. He doesn’t get holidays, and he isn’t paid enough to justify the danger he throws himself into, so he sells space on his body for advertising agencies to tattoo him, and sells TV shows on his latest monster fight like a haggling, down-at-heel wrestling promoter: special events that are tumbling in the ratings.

He gets bureaucratic flak for accidentally stepping on people’s property when he’s huge and people yell at him for disturbing their days with his fights.

The whole thing is played completely straight by leading man (and writer/director) Hitoshi Matsumoto, and the movie exists as a perfect satire. Whether you believe it’s satirising the documentary format or the kaiju sub genre (or, more likely, both) is a matter of perspective.

Any other monster movies that belong on this list? Share your favourites below in the comments thread.