Welcome to Tubi Tuesday. An ongoing experiment where we dig into some of the weird, underrated, and downright abysmal movies we don’t think our real life friends would let us talk at length about. At the time of writing, this movie is streaming for free on Tubi, the home of Super Bowl LIX!
Mixed media in animation is so cool. Don’t we all agree after watching all of Smiling Friends three times that there’s nothing cooler than when a weird 3D or live-action character pops into a 2D animation? When Fred Willard is live-action in Wall-E, we’re hooting. We all agree on that. That’s the core of why Attack of the Super Monsters has been on the short list of “movies I’m convinced will change me as a person so I want to make sure I watch them in the best setting possible.”
That list is almost entirely loaded with AFI top 100 bullshit I somehow missed while getting my useful and impressive cinema studies degree, but there are also a couple of true oddballs on there like this movie, that seem so bizarre or unique that I think they might be genuinely as important as, uh, I don’t know, Sorcerer.
Is AOTSM (I’m not about to type that full title every time. I need the seconds it’ll save me to watch more movies on Tubi.) actually special? Kind of! It’s weirdly not insane or “bad” enough to leave your jaw agape for more than a few minutes, but it’s also not “good” enough to be above boring.
It’s arguably not a movie. AOTSM is a classic case of “multiple episodes of a tv show edited together to be long enough to be released as a movie on VHS. I tend to like these. They’re often charming despite them being formulaic and structured like tv shows, with storylines fully stopping and restarting every 20 minutes.
This “movie” is four episodes of the Japanese series Dinosaur War Izenborg. An anime and live-action hybrid about evil telepathic dinosaurs who return from extinction with the sole purpose of destroying cities and conquering the Earth. Lucky for the Earth, there is a team of super heroes who pilot super-powered tanks and helicopters and take on the dinos. The dinos consistently overpower our heroes, until the two leaders, Jim and Gem, do a Dragon Ball Z fusion to become “Gemini,” also combining their vehicles into a giant flying Saw Trap covered in saws and one huge drill.
That’s right, it is also a classic “Japanese kaiju movie, or show in this case, being dubbed and re-edited for an American release under a more marketable title. I am one of the only people who actually loves these. Nothing gets me quite like having an American actor in a suit show up after every big set-piece to explain that he just happens to be in Japan at the same time that Varan is attacking and he can easily sum up everything we’ve seen so far.
Unfortunately, the hodge-podge nature of this movie’s creation doesn’t translate to on-screen chaos and comedy. I think it’s because the biggest and weirdest swing, was part of the original Japanese series long before it was Frankensteined into whatever this is.
The show has a visual format I’ve never seen before, where the sets are all live-action miniatures or photo backgrounds, but all the humans are 2D animation. The dinosaurs are puppets or full size suits, smashing their way through miniature buildings until super-powered mecha vehicles show up to stop them. These vehicles are filmed in live-action with some stop-motion, but are fully piloted by anime heroes, similar to the Power Rangers.
When I saw this was how the movie’s action is portrayed, I had assumed this was some sort of meshing of two shows done by whatever American distributor wanted to make a quick buck here, but nope, it’s all in the series, which means it weirdly works just well enough for the movie to get boring and lose the steam it builds early on by proxy of looking wacko. The movie is so clearly just episodes of a show put end to end, with multiple finales and story restarts. I found that by the third “episode” I had almost entirely moved past the amusement of the 3D / 2D collision.
There are still a few moments so surreal they made me look around the room in an “are you seeing this?” kind of way despite being completely alone in my living room watching this at 7:50 A.M. The biggest example being a scene towards the middle where the Gem, the heroine of the super team goes to the laundromat to pick up her blouse. The laundromat is fully live-action, except for Gem and the person working. Her blouse is an animated blouse glowing on a giant pile of live-action clothes. Then, when it is handed to her, a massive 2D rat jumps out of the pile of clothes. It totally rules.
I wish the movie had more of this. When the team is taking on kaiju in their little toy ships, it almost makes sense, whereas the one brief scene of “regular life” in this universe was some of the most captivating stuff I’ve ever seen. I need a spin off in this point and click FMV game universe that follows a banker or something.