Godzilla (and Friends)—UK Television Screenings
For the benefit of any overseas readers (and possibly some younger Brits) the background context here can be briefly outlined. During the period under discussion, British viewers only had access to three TV channels: BBC1 and BBC2 (state-funded and broadcast nationally), and ITV (privately-owned and made up of a network of separate regional franchises). Between 1968-82 there were fourteen ITV regions, most named after some aspect of their geographical location. Heading south from the Highlands these comprised Grampian, Scottish, Border, Ulster (Northern Ireland), Tyne Tees, Yorkshire, Granada (Lancashire), Harlech, ATV (the Midlands), Anglia, Southern, Westward and Channel (Islands). London was uniquely split between Thames (weekdays) and LWT (weekends). All these regions operated independently of each other, and could acquire films either from a shared central ‘pool’ (run by chief ITV film buyer Leslie Halliwell), or autonomously from outside sources. Some neighbours would share resources and screen films on a joint basis—for example Yorkshire, Tyne Tees and Border in the north, and Westward and Channel in the south—but this was not typical, and many films were effectively one-offs, seen only once or twice in the region that had originally bought them.
Map of the ITV regions 1968-82.
All this is relevant, because all five Godzilla films screened on British television between 1972-1980 were only shown on ITV. In other words there was no national audience, and where you lived determined what you got. And if you lived in the Scottish or Southern regions, you actually got nothing at all.
Leslie Halliwell had bought King Kong vs Godzilla for the pool in late 1972, and over the next eight years every region (barring the aforementioned Scottish and Southern) screened it at least once. The first wave (up to June 1975) were prime-time evening slots, but the repeats thereafter shifted to afternoon matinees or Saturday-morning kids shows only. The easiest way to convey this is simply to catalogue the fifteen individual screenings (additional research courtesy of Sheldon Hall):
1) Fri 22/12/72 Granada 8.30pm
2) Sat 20/01/73 LWT 6.15pm
3) Thurs 26/04/73 Westward & Channel 7pm
4) Thurs 15/07/73 Grampian 7pm
5) Thurs 27/09/73 Yorkshire & Tyne Tees & Border 7pm
6) Sat 17/08/74 Ulster 6.45pm
7) Fri 06/09/74 LWT 7pm
8) Sun 19/01/75 ATV 8.20pm
9) Sat 28/06/75 Harlech 5.20pm
10) Mon 24/11/75 Westward & Channel 2.30pm
11) Sat 27/12/75 Grampian 10.55am
12) Sat 31/12/77 Tyne Tees 9.30am
13) Sat 01/07/78 ATV 10am
14) Sat 06/01/79 Yorkshire 9.20am
15) Sun 09/03/80 Anglia 3.30pm
Ebirah and Son of Godzilla were also bought for the pool by Halliwell in 1977 but this time screened by ATV and Thames only. Thames showed the pair once, and ATV twice (with repeats in 1980):
16) Thurs 03/02/77 ATV 4.20pm Ebirah
17) Thurs 03/03/77 ATV 4.20pm SoG
18) Thurs 28/04/77 Thames 4.20pm Ebirah
19) Thurs 20/07/78 Thames 4.20pm SoG
20) Sat 10/05/80 ATV 10am SoG
21) Thurs 28/08/80 ATV 4.15pm Ebirah
Finally, War of the Monsters and Monsters From An Unknown Planet were bought by Halliwell in 1980, but uniquely screened by ATV once only:
22) Sat 17/05/80 ATV 10.50am WotM
23) Sat 24/05/80 ATV 11am MFAUP
TV Times listings for ATV’s original quintet of Godzilla broadcasts. Only War of the Monsters is missing, as a printers’ strike cancelled that week’s issue.
Of course, what this bland listing doesn’t provide is the vital context. The first and most obvious point to make is that only Midlanders got to see all five films (the reason this essay exists, effectively). Londoners saw three, and the rest of the country saw just one. This quirk is entirely due to ATV’s genial film-scheduler of the era Barrie Wood (discussed more fully in my companion ‘Invitation to Terror’ essay), who enjoyed programming eclectic film seasons, and thus picked up many of the more oddball network-purchases overlooked by regional colleagues. ATV ran two branded children’s film-series during his tenure: The ATV Saturday Morning Picture Show (seasons in 1976 and 1978), and The ATV Thursday Picture Show (seasons in 1977 and 1980), both of which screened Godzillas. (The Saturday slot filled the gaps when Tiswas was off-air, and other regions—Grampian, Tyne Tees, Yorkshire etc—had their own similar versions). But the real coup for ATV was a short one-off season it ran over three consecutive Saturday mornings in May 1980 (in the tight gap between the end of Tiswas season six and the start of Granada’s insipid rip-off Fun Factory)—branded The Monster Movie (a title conveniently borrowed from an earlier Friday-night horror season), this opened with a repeat of Son of Godzilla, following that up with the sole UK TV screenings of War of the Monsters and Monsters From An Unknown Planet (both of which the present writer had already seen at the cinema, though that hardly made it any less exciting).
Screenshots from the animated opening titles of the ATV Thursday Picture Show. The hapless gong-smasher was a mickey-take of Rank’s celebrated trademark (seen on several earlier posters)
Ad-break title-cards for another pair of branded ATV film-series. The latter is a contemporary artist’s impression – if the original still exists in an archive somewhere, the author would kill to see it.
For the sake of completeness (though falling just outside our timeframe) a further three films screened over the early 80s can be briefly noted: The Green Slime got about half-a-dozen regional ITV showings 1980-84, including ATV (June 80), Harlech (Jan 83), Westward and Channel (Feb 83), Yorkshire (Apr 84), and finally ATV again (Aug 84). Godzilla vs the Smog Monster was premiered on the recently-launched Channel 4 on Sat 26/11/83 at 11.30pm (as part of its Worst of Hollywood season hosted by Michael Medved). And lastly Latitude Zero got a rare BBC1 showing on Sat 23/06/84 at 10.45am.
To try and add a little more flavour, the relevant TV Times reviews for each of these can be quoted. These would all have been penned by the magazine’s resident film critic David Quinlan, and (whilst superficially throwaway) his capsule comments would in fact have carried considerable weight with the nation’s casual viewers:
King Kong vs Godzilla: “Monsters meet each other in what Toho Company describe as the ‘battle of the century’. The highly spectacular special effects are by Eiji Tsuburaya, the Japanese master of Monster presentations. Heroine Mie Hama went on to become Kissy Suzuki in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice.”
A contemporary review of ATV’s July 1978 screening of King Kong vs Godzilla by a very promising young film critic. The school topic mentioned was a history of monsters. What a surprise, eh?
Ebirah Terror of the Deep: “Another of the Japanese monster films, but parents need have no fears: this one bore a ‘U’ certificate and features a splendid giant lobster and a friendly giant moth. The familiar Godzilla makes a belated entry, and the encounter between him and Ebirah, starting as an almost friendly ball game played with a massive piece of rock, is delightful.”
Son of Godzilla: “The famed Japanese screen monsters, including Godzilla, are here at their spectacular best. But when the film reached British cinemas in 1969, everyone lost their hearts to little baby Godzilla, who has as much charm as any monster could muster. Best of all is the scene where, following many failed attempts by youngster to follow father’s tuition in fire-breathing, young Godzilla finally succeeds—by producing a tiny smoke ring.”
Monsters From An Unknown Planet: “Made in Japan at an untraceable date, this typical ‘monster’ film is in fact an addition to the famous Godzilla cycle with all the usual spectacle and special effects.” [The preceding Saturday’s WotM went unreviewed, as a printers’ strike had cancelled that week’s TV Times].
The Green Slime: “Smashing title, but something of a disappointment for what was one of the first genuine Japanese-American co-productions. This is junior-style science fiction although well enough done: the slime reproduces itself at a frightening rate and ultimately transforms itself into electric shock-dealing monsters, which are soon swarming all over poor Robert Horton’s orbiting space station.”
Godzilla vs the Smog Monster: “The film features an odious child telepath who knows the secret of life, a professor who never gets out of bed, a hippy love-in on Mount Fuji, and a superhero who is a 400ft Tyrannosaurus Rex who wiggles his hips! This riotous monster movie is an odd entry in The Worst of Hollywood season, since it’s a product of Japan’s prolific Toho Studios where Godzilla made his bow in 1954.”
Latitude Zero [Sheridan Morley in the Radio Times]: “Japanese fun and games with hybrid monsters, way-out submarines, an anti-radiation serum, and imported Americans cheerfully casting their careers to the wind (Joseph Cotten, Cesar Romero). It could only come from Toho, Godzilla’s creators; heaps of delicious absurdities compensate for some uncertain special effects”.
Godzilla (and Friends)—Other Media
(i) Super-8
Although now practically forgotten, Super-8mm ‘Home Movies’ were a major fad in the 1960s-70s prior to the arrival of domestic Video Cassette Recorders. Their origins date back to 1949, when US company Castle Films (a subsidiary of Universal) began issuing ‘abridgements’ of classic movies: between 150-175 feet of silent black-and-white film on a 200-foot reel, lasting about eight minutes and packaged in a slim 5¼ x 5¼ cardboard box with colourful pasted-on illustration. Vintage horror extracts were notably strong sellers, though Castle could at first only offer titles from Universal’s (formidable) back-catalogue, with these slowly being imported into Britain from the mid-50s.
Ken Films’ six Super-8 Toho extracts. It’s uncertain whether Destroy All Monsters was actually distributed in the UK—if so, it must have been after Denis Gifford’s 1973 checklist was compiled.
In about 1962 a rival to Castle appeared—Ken Films, run by Bob Lane in Fort Lee, NJ. Ken specialised in cheap exploitation (notably from AIP’s expanding backlist), with the eye-catchingly packaged results being advertised in Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine from 1964 onwards. Ken’s first two Toho titles—Rodan and Varan—appeared in FM that September, retailing for $5.95 each (a basic silent projector was a bargain $9.99). These were soon followed by others, all swiftly imported into Britain by the handful of emerging UK distributors, notably Walton (est.1948), Mountain (1960) and Derann (1964). In April 1973 Denis Gifford’s landmark Pictorial History of Horror Movies book was published, containing a meticulous Appendix-checklist of all 165 Super-8 monster movies then available in the UK. This featured six Toho titles—five from Ken (Rodan, Varan, Godzilla vs the Thing, Ghidrah the Three Headed Monster and Ghidrah Battles—the latter a separate extract from GtTHM), and one from Columbia (Battle in Outer Space). Gifford had in fact been light-heartedly reviewing new Super-8 releases for Amateur Cine World magazine since March 1966, and in 1974 a book of his collected writings was published as The Armchair Odeon. This features three relevant (and typical) critiques:
Rodan: “Smashing, crashing cut-down of the climax from a Japanese (Toho) epic of 1956 of the type usually designated as ‘a field day for the effects men!’ The destruction of a suspension bridge, railway trains, and most of a city is excellently handled, but the monstrous instigators, a couple of outsize flying dragons, are less likely. Checking the original synopsis, I discovered that the creatures were supposed to be relics of the Mesozoic Era resurrected by atmospheric changes caused by H-bomb tests. I should have guessed! The phoenix-like finale with one rodan flapping around in an erupting volcano is rather inspired, but Ken Films can’t be congratulated on the print. I thought mine was duped from a scratched showcopy until I found that the several parallel lines running over the picture continued after ‘The End’ and onto the attached trailer for a Little Rascals film.”
Godzilla vs the Thing: “A violent storm hits a forgotten island and unearths a huge egg: ‘which flunged into the sea!’ A misprint for plunged or flung? Who cares; flunged is better than either! ‘Suddenly–!’ A tail lashes up from a sandy beach and guess who: Godzilla, no less, everybody’s favourite monster. Evidently fancying the outsize egg for breakfast, Godzilla is about to roll it home when… flapping through the sky comes Mothra (remember him?), out to protect his / her / its eggy offspring. A battle of the beasts (is a moth a beast?) ensues, and to add to the fun, everyone and every-Thing is tall and thin, thanks to squeezed Cinemascope. Poor old Mothra conks out, embracing the egg with limp wings—and the film conks out too, without even so much as an end title! Never mind, it was all great fun.”
Ghidrah the Three Headed Monster: “‘Too many space predictions, once laughed at as wild imaginings, have developed from fantastic fiction into amazing fact.’ So says Eiji Tsuburaya, Japan’s top special effects expert. Luckily there’s little chance of his latest package-release developing into amazing fact. Twenty years after Republic’s meteorite from Mars comes Toho’s meteorite, smouldering and sparkling until it hatches a fireball that shapes into a three-headed, two-tailed flying dragon. Flapping its great batwings, the backdraught from which blows over buildings, Ghidrah makes for the big city, blasting rays of fire from its three mouths at everything in sight. The Japanese are about as prepared for this as we are when the annual snow strikes; you’d think they’d know better by now. Then, with the superb subtitle, ‘Aroused by all the noise’, who should come round the mountain but Godzilla! The fight starts in earnest; Ghidrah’s red-hot rays just tickle our hero’s tummy! After a momentary setback, crashing down a bridge and a mountain side, Godzilla returns to the fray, bringing with him his old sparring partners, Mothra and Rodan! Like three monster musketeers, the creatures combine forces to rid their stomping-ground of the intruder, and the extract ends with Ghidrah flapping off into space, apparently defeated. This absolute orgy of destruction, lightened with laughter, is almost a must: I say almost, as it is here presented in a squeezed Cinemascope picture that makes everyone, monsters included, look like those nostalgic old ads for Instant Postum. Director: Ishiro Honda of course.”
Gifford’s infectious enthusiasm represents the Super-8 craze approaching its peak—just four short years later, a new arrival on the home-entertainment scene would render such scratchy eight-minute extracts instantly redundant.
(ii) Video
Although the home-video boom technically falls just outside our notional timeframe it would be pedantic to ignore it, particularly when its early, most exciting phase had an abrupt (and very clearly-defined) end point. Britain’s original mass-market VCR—JVC’s HR-3300 machine—was launched with a splash in the UK in Feb 1978. The leading Super-8 distributors—Derann, Mountain, plus new arrival Iver—quickly set up video-subsidiaries within a few months to begin transferring their Super-8 stock onto tape. Other small start-up labels swiftly joined in, as the rights to obscure international exploitation could be acquired fairly cheaply—£700—£1,000 per title was not uncommon—and in a suddenly-exploding market there were quick fortunes to be made. However, being initially completely unregulated, much of the already shady material grew steadily sleazier, particularly in its often gleefully lurid packaging.
A backlash started in summer 1982 when a sequence of graphically violent horror films—dubbed Nasties in the trade—began to be prosecuted for obscenity. With the press whipping up outrage, Britain enthusiastically threw itself into one of its periodic Moral Panics and the result was a hastily-passed Act of Parliament—the Video Recordings Act—which became law in July 1984. This required ALL prerecorded videotapes to be submitted to the BBFC for certification, with an attached fee of about £600 per tape. For many of the original indie-labels—already squeezed by the increasingly dominant Majors and now obliged to submit their entire back-catalogues at a crippling overhead—this was the final straw. Most just gave up, and simply folded before the Act even became law.
Derann’s original April 1982 release…….
……and their Sept 1982 reissue on the Ambassador label
This shortlived five-year period is now generally referred to (with considerable nostalgia) as the Pre-Cert era. The fact that it was all over so quickly has undoubtedly contributed to its latterday cult appeal—in many ways it resembled the Wild West, with scores of tiny fly-by-night labels issuing hundreds of often ultra-obscure films in the hopes of turning a quick profit. About 10,000 individual pre-cert tapes were released overall, with a large proportion of the titles concerned never having been seen before (or often since) in Britain. And of those 10,000, twelve were Japanese fantasy films—five of the Godzillas, plus seven others:
Godzilla vs the Cosmic Monster Hokushin Dec 1980
The Mysterians Kingston March 1981
War of the Monsters Derann May 1981
Monsters From An Unknown Planet Derann May 1981
King Kong vs Godzilla EVC June 1981 (???)
The Human Vapor Iver Dec 1981
Gappa the Triphibian Monster Derann April 1982
Goke Bodysnatcher From Hell JVI June 1982
Matango Fungus of Terror JVI June 1982
The X From Outer Space VUL Oct 1982
Ghidrah the Three Headed Monster Mountain Nov 1983
The War in Space Mountain Dec 1983
The first point to make is that four of these films—Ghidrah, The Human Vapor, The X From Outer Space and The War in Space—had never gained a British theatrical release, so were previously completely unseen in this country. Ghidrah has of course already been discussed, but we can pause briefly to consider the other three.
The Human Vapor was the second of Toho’s loose ‘invisible men’ trilogy (like its predecessor The H-Man another Honda / Kimura collaboration), released in Japan in Dec 1960. The version on Iver’s tape was (inevitably) the later, drastically re-edited US dub, distributed in the States by Brenco in May 1964 (on a double-bill with Gorath). The plot concerns a mild-mannered librarian (obsessively in love with a retired kabuki dancer hoping to make a comeback), invited to participate in a scientific test by a crazed doctor who claims it will help him re-apply for his old (much-missed) job as a test-pilot. When it emerges our hero has been duped (all the previous subjects in fact having inconveniently died mid-experiment) he becomes understandably enraged and suddenly transforms into a cloud of gas, engulfing and suffocating the terrified doctor. Realising he can control this new-found power he then goes on a wild bank-robbing spree, using the proceeds to fund his innocent idol’s planned return. The police work out his identity and stage an elaborate trap in the Tokyo theatre he’s booked for her big comeback show, but it all ends in melancholy tragedy.
The Human Vapor—Japanese poster 1960
With a typically downbeat Kimura script, The Human Vapor is a neat and involving thriller, playing out like a sci-fi-noir cross between the Invisible Man and Phantom of the Opera. The US dub tightens up the plotting but eliminates much of the atmosphere, with a typically stolid voice-over narration in particular stifling the original’s sense of mystery.
The X From Outer Space, on the other hand, is flat-out hilarious. Shochiku’s sole kaiju, it was released in Japan in March 1967 but sold direct to US TV (by AIP) the following year. Western star Peggy Neal was a 19-year-old Economics student at Tokyo’s Sophia University, who had been modelling since her Mississippi childhood but seems to have fallen into acting (she only made three films 1966-67) more or less by accident. Her lively, amused performance as a sassy space-biologist is a major asset in one of the most engagingly jolly films of the entire genre.
Japanese domestic and international posters 1967
Careful adjustment of deeley-boppers in progress.
Exploratory flights to Mars are being stalked by mysterious UFOs, and after one dramatic encounter the latest craft’s damaged hull is found to be coated with strange alien spores. A sample is ill-advisedly taken back to Earth for analysis, but transforms overnight into a giant monster dubbed Girara, an indescribable reptilian chicken with red goggle-eyes, a snorkel sticking out of its forehead and (best of all) a pair of wobbly deeley-boppers that make it look as though it is on its way to an interplanetary hen night. This terrifying vision feeds on energy sources, merrily crashing from one nuclear power-station to the next until our heroine isolates a new element (Giraranium—what else) which handily blocks energy-absorption. The air force bombard the creature with this until the helpless Girara (oozing copious quantities of foam until it appears to have recently emerged from a luxurious bubble-bath) shrinks to its original spore-size and can be safely loaded onto another spaceship to be dumped in permanent orbit around the sun.
Nothing else really needs to be said about this masterpiece, which basically has to be seen to be believed. If you don’t like this film, you don’t like ice cream.
The War in Space (1977) was a transitional film for Toho, and requires some brief discussion on this basis. Star Wars – the breakthrough ‘event movie’ which transformed modern cinema – opened in the US in May 1977 to general hysteria. Tanaka, Nakano and other key members of Toho’s team flew to Hawaii in June to catch an early screening and see what all the fuss was about. With SW’s Tokyo premiere delayed by a full year until June 1978 (but domestic anticipation already buzzing) there was really only one question in Tanaka’s mind: how quickly could he get his own cash-in version into Japanese cinemas?
Japanese international poster 1977
The War in Space is essentially a slapdash remake of the first half of Battle in Outer Space, with bits of Atragon thrown in. Directed by Jun Fukuda (over two months in autumn 1977), from a script by by Ryuzo ‘Gappa’ Nakanishi, the plot (set in near-future 1988) details a hostile invasion of Earth by aliens in globe-shaped UFOs based on Venus. Our scientist-inventor hero is persuaded to swiftly complete his abandoned battleship, the space-cruiser Gohten (closely modelled on Atragon), and fly this to Venus with a small hand-picked team to defeat the alien plot. His daughter is briefly kidnapped by the alien leader and forced to wear a leather bondage outfit by an axe-wielding Chewbacca lookalike with enormous horns, but is happily rescued before the relationship can develop inappropriately.
Although Star Wars is a clear reference point (particularly in the explosive dogfight climax), The War in Space is really just a shameless rehash of Honda’s earlier (better) space-opera adventures, while also featuring strong visual echoes of Gerry Anderson’s UFO and Space 1999 UK TV series. It isn’t in any sense good, but (rushed out for Xmas 1977 release) still did pretty well at the Japanese box-office. It was Toho’s last ‘tokusatsu’ (SPFX) extravaganza of the 1970s, and in this sense represents the end of an era, but also points the way forward in terms of its slavish imitation of newly-popular US originals. As another writer has phrased it, following this, Toho’s fantasies lost their distinctive “Japaneseness” – that indefinable quality that gave them their own unique cultural identity – and after twenty years of quirkily doing their own thing would become steadily (and blandly) more Westernised.
The eight pioneering video-labels responsible for distributing this (very) mixed-bag in the UK can be briefly discussed. Hokushin (based in Streatham SW16) were established in 1967 by Joe Gatt, initially to import the eponymous Japanese 16mm projectors. Like his Super-8 contemporaries, Gatt spotted the approaching video revolution early on, setting up his own label in 1979 to kick-off with a quartet of tacky (but popular) British sex-comedies starring Mary Millington. Hokushin released about fifty tapes in total, of which by far the best-remembered are three of the infamous Nasties: Bloodbath, Prisoner of a Cannibal God and Toolbox Murders, all of which (no doubt to Gatt’s frustration) had previously enjoyed successful UK cinema releases (courtesy of Miracle / New Realm etc) with attached BBFC ‘X’ certs. Godzilla vs the Cosmic Monster was a similarly popular (rather more family-friendly) early title, but the label was gone by the end of 1984.
Kingston had an unusual business model and as a result are today almost completely forgotten (even by many Pre-Cert enthusiasts). Established in Soho (on Windmill St W1) in Dec 1980 by ex-16mm distributor Robert Kingston (who set up a major rental library in 1968), they (like Hokushin) only released about 50 tapes, though this in fact amounted to a total of 100 individual films as they pursued a unique policy of double-billing two features on one cassette. Furthermore they only handled vintage Hollywood classics (mostly from RKO’s back-catalogue), thereby avoiding the problematic newer exploitation that would soon cause their rivals such headaches (The Mysterians was thus double-billed with 1952’s Sons of the Musketeers). Whether this ‘value for money’ angle really paid off is debatable however, since video’s chief USP at the time was that most of the films involved generally hadn’t be seen on television, whereas nearly all of Kingston’s offerings were long-familiar from cosy BBC2 matinees. In any event, the label was defunct by the end of 1983.
Derann were one of the biggest firms of the lot, with their shop at 99 High Street Dudley becoming a landmark, not just in the Midlands but eventually for film-buffs across the UK. Derek and Ann Simmonds began renting Super-8 from a spare bedroom in their Stourbridge home in 1964, opening the Dudley shop in 1978 and starting to produce their own-label material as the market steadily expanded (later even buying out Bob Lane’s remaining Ken Films stock when the latter retired in the early 80s). Derek had shrewdly set up a video subsidiary in 1978 and Derann eventually released about 90 tapes, including Miracle’s two Godzillas plus Gappa the Triphibian Monster (not to mention three Nasties: Deep River Savages, Don’t Look in the Basement and Mardi Gras Massacre). But the video wing eventually came to be viewed as a distraction and was shut down in 1985 when the firm decided to refocus on its core Super-8 business. (Both Gappa and War of the Monsters subsequently reappeared—with new BBFC certs—on the Stablecane label in June 1986, though Monsters From An Unknown Planet was never seen again). Following Derek’s death in 2002 his son Adrian took over, but the later Recession proved terminal (the shop’s utility & business rates practically doubled in early 2011), and a decision was taken to cease trading while the firm was still solvent. Derann finally closed for good in Sept 2011, though the shop—a locally Listed building—still stands intact at the time of writing.
There is some controversy over our next label. EVC—the European Video Corporation—were a major Dutch firm run by Crena Uiterwijk from a base in Nijkerk in the Netherlands, but boasted regional offices in Belgium, Denmark, Sweden—and the UK (in Ashton under Lyne, just outside Manchester). The Ashton subsidiary—the European Video Company Ltd—released about 60 of its parent’s titles over summer 1981, supposedly including King Kong vs Godzilla (catalogue number EVC136)—but this tape is now incredibly scarce and can only have been very briefly available. The suggestion is that EVC didn’t actually hold the UK rights, and were promptly slapped with a Cease and Desist order from CIC, forcing the tape’s almost immediate withdrawal. CIC eventually released their own ‘official’ version in Jan 1987 (VHA1224), though even this is now fairly hard to find.
Iver Film Services were launched in 1976 by George Davis (originally a Production Accountant at the old Merton Park studios) to speculatively fund independent film production. IFS were based at Pinewood (in Iver Heath, hence the name), and soon moved into Super-8 distribution, then in 1978 additionally set up a video label to begin transferring some of their Super-8 titles onto tape. They eventually boasted an impressive catalogue of about 170 tapes (with a heavy emphasis on sex and horror including a couple of Nasties, Night of the Bloody Apes and Night of the Demon), but were subject to ill-considered financial takeovers, and—having badly over-reached themselves—were defunct by Sept 1983. The back of The Human Vapor’s sleeve actually advertises Gorath (its original US double-bill partner) as also being available, but it never ultimately appeared, probably due to rights problems with original distributor Brenco.
Moving from a big firm with a catalogue of 170 titles to a tiny outfit boasting just eight, JVI—Javed Video International—were run by David Meddick and Raj Hassain from an industrial unit on Milkstone Road, Rochdale. Their first two tapes were Goke and Matango (JVI001 and JVI002 respectively), quite possibly bought direct from Nat Miller for a couple of quid each. By the time they’d got all the way up to JVI008 (German prison-break thriller Strike Back) in July 1982 they’d reached the end of the line, but Meddick and Hassain’s place in history is nevertheless assured by JVI006, The Beast In Heat, a quite impossibly tacky Italian Nazisploitation epic now generally recognised as the rarest of all the Nasties. No more than a few hundred copies of this masterpiece can ever have been duped, and completist collectors will now pay an arm and a leg to own one.
VUL were Video Unlimited, established in Sept 1981 by Barry Goddard in Poole, Dorset. VUL were quite a big outfit with a catalogue of about 100 tapes and (unusually) a chain of four video libraries dotted across the south, including one on Guernsey. However (similar to the unfortunate Iver) they were subject to over-ambitious takeovers, and crashed disastrously in April 1984 with debts of almost £200k, a mere two months after being bought out by rivals Video Brokers. Still, no company prepared to bring the delights of The X From Outer Space to unsuspecting British audiences can be criticised too harshly.
Lastly, Mountain were the oldest firm of all, originally set up in 1960 by Peter Burt and Aubrey Ross in Bloomsbury W1 to distribute Super-8 (later opening a popular shop, Portland Films, at 45 New Oxford Street to sell direct to the public). In 1979 the duo set up a dedicated video label, and over the next five years released about 100 tapes including a dozen (double-billed) episodes of the 1971 Spectreman TV series (a shameless Ultraman rip-off). Ghidrah itself was opportunistically released twice, with a later reissue as Alien Monsters on the subsidiary Portland label. For all this activity, the video wing was defunct by early 1984, and the last of the Portland shops (at 55 Shaftesbury Avenue) closed in 1986 (by which time Derann had cornered the remaining Super-8 market anyway).
END OF PART 4