Mosura

TCM had a "Monster of the Month" for October, this time being the Japanese monster Godzilla. One of the Godzilla movies is Godzilla vs. Mothra, which was an opportunity for TCM to segue into the original Mothra (Mosura in the original Japanese, which is the version TCM ran) in TCM Underground.

We don't see the monster for some time; instead, the movie starts off with a Japanese ship getting caught in a typhoon and capsizing, with the survivors getting shipwrecked on Infant Island, a Pacific island that belongs to the country Rolisica and which is abandoned because of atomic tests that had been performed there.

Eventually the shipwrecked men are rescued and, back in Japan, are put into isolation while they're examined for radiation poisoning what with all those atomic tests. But surprisingly, the men don't seem to have any ill effects at all! Naturally everybody wonders why this would be the case, so the authorities decide that a scientific expedition is in order to find out what's going on on Infant Island.

Heading that binational expedition is Nelson (Jerry Ito), a businessman of Rolisican descent; also on the expedition as a stowaway is the journalist Sen-chan Fukuda (Furanki Sakai), who has an oddly jolly look throughout and indeed provides a bit of comic relief during the movie. Nelson doesn't want any of the other scientists publicizing their research results without his explicit approval, which irritates them and implies that Nelson is up to something less than virtuous.

On the island, the men find an odd egg-like thing in a cave, with a couple of tiny young maidens around, the "Twin Fairies" as they're called. And when I say tiny, they look like humans but are only two feet tall if that. Nelson immediately sees a business opportunity similar to what happened in King Kong, and I'm not the first reviewer to make that connection So Nelson kidnaps the Fairies and takes them back to Tokyo for his new nightclub show.

He shouldn't have done that. The egg hatches revealing what looks like a hairless caterpillar, and it wants those Fairies. They, for their part, are kept in a cage at the back of the nightclub, but have some sort of telepathic ability by which they're able to sing a song with the word "Mosura" and have the caterpillar come to rescue them. The caterpillar understandably feels threatened, so when it homes in on the Fairies' call coming from Tokyo, it's going to stop at nothing to get the Fairies back, engaging in Godzilla-like (or Kong-like, if you prefer) destruction of Tokyo.

That is, until it gets to the Tokyo Tower, a broadcasting tower that looks a lot like the Eiffel Tower and was only a couple of years old at the time the movie was made. At this point, the caterpillar does what caterpillars do, and spins a cocoon. The authorities are thrilled by this, since they believe that Mosura's dormancy will allow them to destroy the cocoon. Of course, it doesn't work that way, and now Mosura is going to cause more damage as it goes back to Rolisica.

I have to admit that the monster movies aren't my first choice if I'm looking for something to watch. But I certainly enjoyed Mothra. The plot actually works fairly well, although that shouldn't be a surprise considering the similarity to King Kong. I personally found the Mothra effects to be laughable, especially Mothra as a moth. But the idea of lightening the mood with the journalist and his photographer worked well.

If you haven't seen Mothra before, I'd certainly recommend it.