By Drew Dietsch
| Published
I love Godzilla. The Big G and I go way back to my salad days of playing with action figures, crafting stories between Godzilla, King Ghidorah, and whatever Batman toy was handy. Unfortunately, the recent American output for Big G has left me underwhelmed in the extreme. While Japan has been knocking it out of the park with Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One, the American films have been on a downward slope of quality since Godzilla: King of the Monsters (what I could see of it).
So, in an effort to imbibe some American Godzilla cinema that wasn’t the animated emptiness of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, I looked around on YouTube to see if there were any creators doing something interesting with the Godzilla universe.
Thankfully, I found just that.
Living with Monsters
My search led me to the channel Lost Utopia Films, an outlet that has been making a number of videos and animations based around Godzilla and other giant monsters. The video that crossed my path was Living with Monsters and it immediately won me over.
Living with Monsters is presented as if it’s a legitimate documentary film made in the 1960s. The concept is that Living with Monsters acts as an introduction and explanation for a new world where giant monsters run amok. The dedication to the bit is what hooked me with this. Seeing a low-to-no budget video try something I hadn’t seen fully executed before was exciting. Why hadn’t an official Godzilla movie or series tried something this aesthetically correct?
What I also enjoyed about Living with Monsters is that it can be freed of any copyright worries and pull together monsters from many different movies and properties. It means that the Lost Utopia Films gang is getting to build their own unique monster world with its own mythology.
Which leads to Shelter 54.
Shelter 54
The next video from Lost Utopia Films I watched was the follow-up to Living with Monsters. Instead of another riff on the old-timey documentary, Shelter 54 takes the form of an official government video detailing a horrific incident that led to the creation of another monster.
This one takes the concept to some unexpectedly freaky areas and offers yet another interesting interpretation on a classic monster. It’s this kind of ingenuity that you don’t see fostered in the American Godzilla outings. Shelter 54 proves there is still legitimate horror to be mined from these many monsters.
Lost Utopia Films just put out another Godzilla video that acts as if it’s a tourist ad for a monster safari. It’s this kind of fresh approach that I feel is missing from so much of the modern American Godzilla output. If Hollywood was smart, they’d scoop up writer/director/editor Tarrell Christie and let them make some kind of full-length faux doc or a series. This is some of the most creatively stimulating stuff I’ve seen from a Godzilla story/universe in a while.
Here’s hoping for more from Lost Utopia Films and their Godzilla output.
