Mr. R, I HATED ZEIRAM (I *thought* that's how it was spelled here, but you might be right.) No accounting for taste, but when I DID see it, I couldn't at all understand how it had become a cult item. I understand a little bit better why TETSUO THE IRON MAN has done the same thing, it's very stylish, but also, I felt, very empty. As for DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN, I haven't seen that one in a million years. Someday I will get back to it, but ... Poor old J. Carroll Naish in his wheelchair, and Lon Chaney Jr. reduced to acting like a lunatic in a cage, this was as bad if not worse than Lugosi's posthumous appearance in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. I haven't seen WARRIORS OF THE WASTELAND, what's it got to recommend it? Is it particularly nuts? Please advise!

Gae: Ishiro Honda (not "Inoshiro" Honda, although the way the Japanese language reads, many Japanese make the same mistake) did indeed direct both the original BARAN and KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, but he is NOT the unifying person I was mentioning. Nobody's going to get this, it wasn't really a fair question, I suppose. I'll just explain:

BARAN was released in Japan in October 1958; ABC-TV sat on it until 1962. They assigned a young German (Austrian? not sure) named Peter Zinner to do the music editing. He took nearly the entire Akira Ifukube score off the soundtrack, and replaced all the sound effects. He was not responsible, to my knowledge, for the general reediting of the picture. Then, a year or so later, he was given by Universal the job of both reediting AND music-editing KING KONG VS. GODZILLA. He did a competent job with this, and had better music to replace Ifukube's score with than he had had on VARAN.

On both VARAN and KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, he allowed Ifukube's tribal-march chant cues to remain in the film. This interests me still. I guess he couldn't find anything suitable in the various libraries to replace them. (Since BARAN and KING KONG VS. GODZILLA are two of Ifukube's VERY BEST scores, they should have been left intact, but this was probably not up to Zinner.)

It's not like Zinner has bad taste in music; on the one film he directed, THE SALAMANDER (completed in 1981 or 1982, but unreleased until May or June of 1983), he zeroed in on Jerry Goldsmith to score the picture, and Goldsmith did a big, rich, wonderful piece of work for it (Prometheus, where are you?)

Anyway, Zinner won his Oscar for the film editing of THE DEER HUNTER; the Russian Roulette sequence is rightly regarded as one of the best-edited in the history of cinema (and it must have been more Zinner's work than director Michael Cimino's, especially if you look at Cimino's subsequent Zinnerless work.) Zinner also cut the first GODFATHER, and a host of others, including, most recently, the 1992 GLADIATOR (which reunited him with Goldsmith, although that score got thrown out.)

One last thought about the grossly underrated Ishiro Honda: he certainly never received an Oscar nomination, but he DID appear on the Oscars once, by satellite: when Kurosawa was honored by the Academy for his body of work, he was also surprised by a congratulatory video from the cast and crew of his latest picture. Honda, his oldest and best friend, led the salute.

Kurosawa also received Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film (THE SHADOW WARRIOR, 1980) and Best Director (CHAOS, 1985, released here under its Japanese title RAN.) Honda ghostwrote and ghostdirected parts of those films, but not nearly to the degree he would do the same on Kurosawa's final three pictures, DREAMS, RHAPSODY IN AUGUST, and NOT YET. Honda's fingerprints are all over these three, and I've always wondered precisely WHY he chose to hide his involvement (usually behind a rotating series of vague credits like "Creative Consultant.") Even his widow does not understand why he felt this way. But it's an open secret in the Japanese film world, especially among those who worked with both (this would be almost everyone, their industry is far smaller and less various than ours.)

THE "ZERAM" VIDEO-STORE EXPERIENCE: AN EXAMPLE

Zeram gives birth to some kind of green goo-monster, which is apparently retarded, and Zeram promptly squashes the little kiddo with his foot. Good cinema? No. Downright hilarious? Yes! So, ol' Todd Reifinger and his video-store cohorts start laughing hysterically from behind the counter.

However (and here's the funny part)...

Standing near the monitor is some middle-aged conservative type who can't find humor in anything beyond "I Love Lucy" reruns, and who immediately gives the whole lot of us a scathing look that can only be interpreted as, "Are you nuts actually getting a kick out of this nonsense?" Sometimes the customer will even try to reason with us on his way out.

Now, as for "Warriors of the Wasteland"...

Funny, I first started paying attention to Leonard Maltin because he was much kinder to the Japanese stuff than his main competitor Steven Scheuer was ... a whole two-and-a-half stars for the original GODZILLA! That's a hell of an improvement over anything the late Scheuer had to say! (Although Scheuer did like Mr. Honda's HUMAN VAPOR, even as poorly reedited and rescored as that version is. It does benefit from evocative narration by James Hong, though.)