Movielogr

Varan the Unbelievable (1962)

Directed by Ishirō Honda, Jerry A. Baerwitz

Science Fiction | Horror

Overview

In an effort to find an economic means of purifying salt water, a joint U.S.-Japanese military command is set up on an isolated Japanese island where an unusual salt water lake is situated. However, their purifying experiments arouse the prehistoric monster Obaki from hibernation at the lake’s bottom, and it proceeds to attack Japan. Although made by a U.S. independent film company, this film was based on a Japanese Toho monster film of 1958, “Daikaiju Varan”, from which all of the monster effects scenes and a few incidental dramatic shots were edited into it.

Length 70 minutes

Actors

Myron Healey | Tsuruko Kobayashi | Clifford Kawada | Derick Shimatsu | Koreya Senda | Kôzô Nomura | Ayumi Sonoda | Fumito Matsuo | Akihiko Hirata | Fuyuki Murakami | Yoshio Tsuchiya | Minosuke Yamada | Hisaya Ito | Yoshifumi Tajima | Nadao Kirino | Akira Sera | Akio Kusama | Noriko Honma | Akira Yamada | Fumindo Matsuo | Yoshikazu Kawamata | Yasuhiro Shigenobu | Shôichi Hirose | Takashi Itô | Hideo Shibuya | Toshitsugu Suzuki | Haruo Nakajima | Katsumi Tezuka

Viewing History (seen 1 time)

Date ViewedDeviceFormatSourceRating
01/09/2014PhoneStreamingVideo on Demand6 stars
 

Viewing Notes

I REALLY REALLY want to see the Japanese cut of this movie. Ishiro Honda directed all the JP scenes much of which were truncated in the US release. Basically 17 minutes were dropped which is astounding. This is not a bad movie but I feel like there’s a better movie missing… and wonder if that’s the JP cut.

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