X marks the Monster

I remember the first time I saw Guilala.  there was a picture of it in Famous Monsters of Filmland (from hereon referred to as "FM"), on the inside cover, or back, or inside back, I forget now, of it holding a boat aloft.  looked incredibly cool, that's for sure.  this is a great scene of it chasing a truck.

but as happened often back then, there was nothing ABOUT the movie in the accompanying blurb.  which really was frustrating at the time, I'll tell you what.

I think the next time I saw a picture or two was in Starlog's "Spaceships" book/magazine (one I still have.  boy, it took forever to find that link, and I didn't know Starlog had ceased print publication) which featured a picture of the cool "Atomic Astro Boat Gamma".  this is one of my favorite spaceships of the movies.

this Japanese movie by Shochiku Studios was populated by several gaijin, or non-Japanese "actors", many of whom appeared in a lot of other Japanese movies when they needed a token foreigner.

the star of this movie was the lovely Peggy Neal.  these images came from the trailer of the movie, so perhaps that's not the most flattering picture I could have picked.  doubtless some would want the shower scene, complete with synthetic water.

no, I don't know how they made that!

Peggy starred in two Japanese genre movies, this and the fun "Terror Beneath the Sea".  these days she seems to have vanished.  I would love to see or hear an interview with her.  it's hard to gauge her acting ability, since she's dubbed into English.  the R2 DVD has this very odd English dub, and the version we saw as kids was dubbed by Titra.

I finally saw the movie, I think in about 1980 or so, when Channel 4 was having movie themed weeks toward the middle of the year.  I loved it, thought it was well worth the wait.