I came in early to work today only to find that the boss wouldn't let me clock in. So I went to the breakroom and turned on the TV and clickered through the "Movie and Event" channels. Everything was ending. Why watch the last twenty minutes of a movie if you've never seen the first and second acts?
But one movie was just beginning. Mothra. Get this. An American visits an island near Japan where nuclear bomb testing took place years ago. Somehow or another, it left these twin girls fully matured but only a few inches tall. So the American steals them and puts them in a show for people to pay and see. They sing well, you understand, and they're freaks. But their songs have an underlying telepathic effect that calls upon the god those crazy miniature islanders worshipped - a giant moth called (you guessed it) Mothra (or Mosura in Japanese). The giant moth wreaks havoc on a cardboard Tokyo for awhile Godzilla-style (no, seriously) until the girls are finally returned to it.
So I got to thinking about the movie. After all, I had an hour to do it and the only other thing on TV was Rachel Ray and I can't stand her. It occurred to me that Mothra is really a way for the Japanese to voice their anger with we Americans for nuking their country. See, an American came over and kidnapped some very small Japanese folks, then displayed them for money - a prime example of that capitalism stuff we all love so much - but the result of his actions was the destruction of the bulk of Tokyo. To state it even more briefly: a self-proclaimed American displaying American traits portrayed in evil light uses said evil trait to bring about the destruction of Tokyo.
I guess they forgot they bombed us in Hawaii.
But that's okay. We made a worse film about that.
Enough.
The point is, I saw something in Mothra that I didn't expect to. I analyzed Mothra. I analyzed a B-movie. Is that possible? That's one of the things I thought about before and after I clocked in. I thought maybe I should define what a B-movie is, at least as far as my thought process (and this article) is concerned. Like any genre film, a B-rated horror should meet certain criteria.
- Involve a creature/monster/haunting of some sort - something supernatural, but tangible.
- That creature (or whatever) should look really, really cheap onscreen.
- Have bad acting or a poorly dubbed language track. Take your pick. For Mothra, the latter. (For the record, have you ever noticed that it's difficult to judge the quality of acting when it's in another language?)
- Contain poor, cheap special effects.
- Begin as a bad script with a poorly constructed story arc and almost no subplot written by a guy who didn't get paid much. (Notice how cheapness is a trend?)
- At least one plot point must make absolutely no sense, even once you've suspended belief to adapt to the fact that you're watching a movie about a highly implausible creature. (In Mothra's case - humans somehow survived nuclear fallout on the island and became tiny. This is hard for me to believe, even though I'll believe a giant friggin' moth is decimating the vast majority of Tokyo, unstoppable even by some super-radio-heat-wave-ray-rifle-thingy.)
Mothra meets these criteria. So does Godzilla. So do Child's Play and Plan 9 from Outer Space and Manos: the Hands of Fate. So what is there in a B-movie worth analysis?
I think to get to the bottom of this, you have to ask someone who's a total crappy movie nut. Fortunately, you're in the immediate prescence of the Spout.com Filmblog of just such a one.
Look beyond the crappiness. That's the key. B-movies are cheap. Not as glitzy as Hollywood might make them. Outdated. Look past it. Accept it as a genre in the same way that you categorize movies like The Poseidon Adventure and Twister with other "disaster flicks." These are all films about disasters happening to unsuspecting victims. They have their own criteria and "rules." Yet we find a connection to Gene Hackman, the preacher who gives his life, in The Poseidon Adventure. There's moral there. There's commentary.
So look through the title "B-movie," which I think gets a bad rap because one the major criterion for the aquisition of that title involves a certain magnitude of crappiness. Mothra is still a story about Japanese people who are done a horrible injustice by an American. Agree with the message or not, that's it. Some would say I'm overthinking this, but what's a guy to do when he's got a couple of hours before the boss will let him on the clock?