Godzilla vs. Science Mumbo Jumbo

A recent (as of June 17, 2017) article written by Dan Zinski on Screenrant.com had famed (and darned entertaining) celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining why the existence of Godzilla is scientifically impossible. And yet we have over 50 movies featuring Godzilla stomping all over science. Why would movies lie to us?

Dr. Tyson goes on to say that “Godzilla could never exist outside of a fictional universe because the laws of physics simply would not allow for it. Essentially, a lizard-like being as huge as Godzilla would be too heavy for his limbs and would collapse under his own weight.”

Did he just call Godzilla fat?

“As you get bigger,” he says, “your weight goes up according to your column. But the strength of your limbs goes up only according to your cross-sectional area — so it’s a matter of area versus volume.”

“Godzilla would collapse under his own weight into a puddle of guts. It’s why heavy animals have thicker legs. So you can’t just scale up an insect and make them big.”

Try telling that to those bus-sized grasshoppers in The Beginning of the End (1957). But I’m skeptical over his cross-sectional statement because, depending on the species, a mere ant can lift 10 to 50 times its own weight. Scale ‘em up to 7-Eleven™ size as in Them! (1954) and the physics go out the window.

But Dr. Tyson’s argument flames the fans a bit more: “It completely negates half the horror movies of the 1950s…”

Perhaps. But Dr. Tyson does allow for a loophole that allows the Godzilla movies to get away with having a giant lizard who, in reality, would not be able to support his own weight. And this clause is radiation.

From the article: “Godzilla was awakened by radiation and given super-powers. Like Spider-Man, Godzilla was altered on a sub-atomic level and is now capable of doing things that he should not be able to do, like stomp on buildings, breathe fire and withstand endless attacks with missiles, bombs and all the other weapons humanity can concoct.”

Swish— nothin’ but net! So yes, Godzilla can exist outside of a fictional universe. Now we can all calm down. Watch Shin Gidzilla (2016) with its annoying sub-titles, and marvel over nature’s miracle as it squashes us like we’ve been doing to ants for millenia.

P.S. The Megalodon shark — PROVEN by fossils — grew up to 60 — 75 feet long. Where’s your science argument now, lab coat?

The Day The Earth Drew Mud

X The Unknown (1956) is a British sci-fi kickstarter about a sentient pile of liquid meatloaf that oozes up out of a fissure (or “crack”) in the Earth in search of radiation nutrients on which to feed. Good thing we Earthers have a lot of uranium laying around.

Discovered during a Scottish military training session to teach soldiers how to use Geiger counters, the crack appears in a dirt pit that looks more like a moto-cross playground full of whiskey throttlers than the scene of a potential holocaust. Get close to the hole, you get flaky waxy skin and pancake sized herpes sores all over your back/face/short life. (Always wash your hands after getting close to holes.)

Dr. Royston, an English scientist from the conveniently located Atomic Energy Laboratory, investigates when several townsfolk melt after encounters with the chocolate colored couscous. He hypothesizes (guesses out loud) that the living energy form is prehistoric in nature and got trapped underground when the Earth’s pancake crust cooled in its pre-people days. Now it’s really freakin’ starvinated and wants a steaming pile of radiation with a human side salad to feast upon. Good thing we Earthers have a lot of uranium laying around.

The scientist, military and local police figure out a way to lure the fudge brownie mix back into the crack and blow it up for the benefit of all mankind. And to think all they had to do was drop a car-sized roll of toilet paper into the hole and let the monster wipe itself out.

X The Unknown, though, was the precursor for 1958’s The Blob, which beget a sequel (Beware! The Blob/1972), a remake (The Blob/1988), and was the source material for the R.L. Stine Goosebumps™ rip-off book, The Blob That Ate Everyone (1997).

Still, I can’t shake the nagging feeling that I’ve seen this gravy-stained lumpy pile of mashed potatoes before. Sigh. It’s gonna stick in my crack all day long. Oh wait, I know! It looks just like…Dairy Queen™!

Sun-burned Demon

In 1958’s sci-fi classic The Hideous Sun Demon (aka, Blood on his Lips), prior to that “being exposed to radiation” incident, Dr. Gilbert McKenna was just a normal kind of well-groomed and educated guy. But once an experiment with a new radioactive isotope wrecked his face and skin, Gil is definitely hideous, with the sun’s normally healthy rays transforming him into a scaly reptile fish thingy creature monster. Here’s the rub – he stays in non-beast form while indoors and out of the sun. But once he steps outside, bam! – insta scaly reptile fish thingy creature monster.

This makes him mega upset as there are so many beach bikinis left to ogle. Once given the news by his colleagues that there is no cure, Gil heads to the nearest bar to get fish stinking drunk. Excellent thinking. And it’s here he puts the sore in psoriasis. A non-sober man thinks Trudy, a glamorous gal with two really big talents performing at the club, is a hooker and tries to man date her. Gil steps in and punches the drunk sideways, grabs Trudy and heads down the ocean coast in his sweet convertible.

Gotta give it to Gil – he’s so smooth he talks Trudy into the ocean and out of her wet clothes. Of course, this is all in the dark. After they fall asleep on the beach and the sun comes out, Gil’s inner sun demon rises as well. So much for a second date.

From there it’s a lot of emoting, feeling sorry for oneself, hiding in the shadows, getting in another bar fight (and losing this time), and choking the life out of the neck of that guy who earlier beat him sideways with the help of some thug-like gangstas. No going back indoors for Gil.

Alerted to his monstrous skin condition, the police chase Sunny Jim up stairs surrounding a huge natural gas tank. By my calculations they made it to the top. You might wanna avert your eyes at this point in the movie; the camera follows Gil as he climbs and you can see a big stain on the back and front of his trousers. I found this to be quite hideous.

Mistake #1: Nowhere to go but down. Mistake #2: Firing a gun around a natural gas container. Mistake #3: Not having enough bullets. Mistake #4: Nowhere to go but down.

The cop manages to get the gun nozzle right into Gil’s chest as he’s trying like hell to strangle the hell out of the officer. Now fully air-conditioned, Gil takes the fast way down and makes a splashy exit. Emotingly, this is the end of the Sun Demon. But it still doesn’t explain why one of his shoes having been blown off by the impact, reveals a bare human foot. (Sun Demons don’t wear socks.) I guess radiation only affect oneself from the waist up.

Irradiated Sci-Fi

Fifties sci-fi remains some of the coolest, cheesiest, wildest and excitingest movies ever made. Besides uninvited UFOs and alien b-holes showing up like holiday relatives, a large portion of ’em have to do with the effects of radiation-gone-wild on everything from ants (Them!/ 1954) and spiders (Tarantula/1955), to octopuses (It Came From Beneath The Sea/1955) and lizards (Giant Gila Monster/1959) – and all creatures in-between – including rats, bunnies, grasshoppers, salad tomatoes and people. Heck, just watching these movies gives you radiation poisoning. (OK, not really. But my glowing epidermis sure feels like it sometimes.)

I love the “mutated creature” stuff – quite a bit, as it turns out. But where radiation really earns its keep is when it turns humans into death metal monsters. Take for instance The Cyclops (1957), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and War of the Colossal Beast (1958), all created by B-movie legend Bert I. Gordon.

The monster is essentially the same in all three, with the actor Duncan Parkin playing the pitiful reconfigured giant – in two of the three with a mangled face and one presumably good eye. (Maybe the “I” in Bert I. Gordon is a subtle reference. Heh.) Duncan, by the way, is credited as a stagehand in The Beginning of the End (1957), that infamously bad giant grasshopper movie. Maybe he got a dose working on that one.

Amid all of them, The Cyclops, with its lava-lamp faced monster and shredded pants (apparently radiation mutates clothes as well), is one of those mega-cheesy guilty pleasures – and the first giant human monster movie. No, Gulliver’s Travels in 1939 doesn’t factor in because his size was regular – the people who f’d with his mind were super small. (Note: There may have been a giant human monster movie before The Cyclops, but I’m too busy combing my hair to do research. Note: v.2: 1952’s Jack and Beanstalk had a giant, but that one was not a monster movie – it was a comedy starring Abbott & Costello, the Laurel & Hardy of their day.)

A test pilot goes missing. Probably fell down a hole. So they go looking for him in one of Mexico’s deep, hole-filled jungles. Arriving via a small plane that looks about as sturdy as a two-seater kite, they encounter giant birds, lizards, bugs and a 50-foot giant human with a face distorted by radiation, of which there is plentiful in Mexico. This is why to this day people traveling there are warned not to drink the water, what with its f’d up face melting properties and such.

And what a mutated giant hey is – one eye is completely melted over with dripping skin gelled into place like a flesh curtain. The other eye, bulging to the point of popping, looks like it was too big to begin. Go big or go home, I say. And the all-angle teeth? Probably got that way chewing on small airplanes.

Of course, the search party has to bring along the missing pilot’s girlfriend so that the monster has something to distract him from the giant snake wrapping around his food chute, ala King Kong (1933). Even with only one kinda sorta maybe good eye left, he seems to recognize her. Get where this is going?

The craptacular special effects were slightly refined for Duncan’s next two roles as a homeless giant everyone wants to kill because he can get Frisbees™ off the roof without a ladder. Regardless, in order to fully understand yourself, take a look at these sci-fi classics and see if you can’t discover a part of you in them.

OK, that just sounded plain dumbass. Must be the radiation kicking in.

Mexican Octopus Man

I’ve been looking for years and finally found the Rent-A-Center™ Holy Grail of rubber suited monster movies: Octaman (1971). I’m gonna go ahead and give it four stars because hey, when you have a creature called Octaman, there’s simply no way it could suck. I found the movie poster as well. Looks like someone tinkled on it.

There’s a lot of anti-healthy radiation in the waters around a Mexican fishing town causing those little detectors to make crazy clicking sounds. Think tap dancing crickets on Red Bull™. A science field trip, or “expedition”, heads south to find out what’s causing all that noise. (Crickets, probably.)

What they find besides roadside margaritas is a small mutant octopus that can hang out on the beach as well as in it. Well hey, this needs to be studied. But that costs money. Where to get it? From a wallet fat circus owner who wants to financially exploit wet wiggler at his carnival. No wonder he owns a circus – that’s a really cool idea.

Before you can say “10th Wonder of the World” the head science dude returns to camp to discover his entire crew of lab interns has been slaughtered into petri dish chunklets and that the cash creature is missing. I have so many theories about what may have happened, my head stings.

Following a lead given by a young gossip-y villager, they find the octopus in a local lake, now grown to over seven feet tall with, as the poster says, amazing strength and a lust for killing. Sounds like me if I was soaked in radiation water and had nothing to eat but cricket tacos.

Octaman is eventually cornered in a ring of fire and, after a blanket-clenching stand-off, looks as though his killing lust days are over. Not so fast, land walker – Octaman lives to wiggle his arms menacingly in your general direction another day, and goes abut re-killing people. What happens next? Let’s just say there are guns involved, followed by a calamari feast of community-feeding proportions.

Of all the world’s travesties, I’ll never understand why there wasn’t a sequel.

This Shark Is The Bomb

It used to be we were justifiably afraid of sharks, what with their emotionless biting off of limbs and/or employable extremities. Now that our ferocious friends of the foamy sea have been tornado’d, tomato’d, super-sized and mechanized, the continuously-mocked apex predator has been relegated to a one punch line cinematic joke. Shame on everyone except me.

And the knee-slapping continues with the impending Atomic Shark (coming 2014), wherein a terrorist and a biologist devise a device that makes great white sharks attack a variety of anything. As if sharks ever need an excuse to chew you out.

To add some padding to the plot, criminal humans attach bombs to the sharks, kinda like what the Navy’s been doing with delicious dolphins for decades now. The terrorist’s target? A nuclear sub that, once bitten by a shark that thinks it’s a heavy metal hot dog, would explode and smear everyone except me in a cloud of radioactive hair product.

I’ll say this about Atomic Shark, though – at least they didn’t turn the hapless eating machine into a comedy act hybrid, ala Sand Sharks, Sharktopus, Ghost Shark, Snow Shark, Psycho Shark, Avalanche Sharks, etc., etc., etc. Why can’t we pick on oysters for a change?

P.S. Do not confuse this movie with The Atomic Sharks, the educational kid’s music  ukulele duo comprised of Kris Hensler and Kenny Taylor, both of whom still have employable extremities.

Transparent Aliens

Dr. Noymann blew himself up in a lab. Ka-BOOM! The explosion formed an atomic mushroom cloud and probably took out half the neighborhood. That’s what happens when you mix Alka-Seltzer™ with baking soda and Mr. Pibb™.

During Noymann’s funeral, invisible aliens, who’ve been on the moon unnoticed for 20,000 (!) years, arrive to inhabit the recently dead (including Noymann, though his corpse should’ve been turned into puzzle pieces from the ka-BOOM!) and use the ripening bodies to proudly announce their intentions to end all life on Earth and that all resistance is useless, blah, blah, blah. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said that to my neighbors.

To make Earth prep their asses for kissing goodbye, they provide an example of their superior skills by making a plane crash. Buttholes. Then they use more dead bodies to warn people at sporting events and even TV broadcasts to tell us to prepare for a deathly invasion, and blow up Finland to emphasize their message. But our scientists are smarter than anyone from the moon or Finland, and theorize their weapons are about as effective in our atmosphere as non-alcoholic beer is on 99% of the known universe.

Invisible Invaders (1959) is loaded with plenty of bone-headed science dialogue, which kinda makes sense in the context of invisible extraterrestrials. (Talk about saving a ton on space costumes.) The aliens meet their match with scientists who advise that the cab of a pick-up truck will sufficiently protect you from radiation. I’ll have to remember that. Can’t be too safe from invisible invaders.