It’s your worst nightmare and you don’t even realize it yet. The contents of your lunchbox come to life and grow to three hundred times their normal size. Gigantic Cheez-Its terrorize your city. The largest salad you’ve ever seen rumbles around downtown, covering everything in ranch and leafy greens that they will never recover from. The most diagonally-cut sandwich roars towards your local port to wreak its peanut butter and jelly havoc.
That becomes the reality for Yuta Tanuma as his seafood lunch falls into the river and begins to grow exponentially into a giant octopus, squid, and crab. Minoru Kawasaki’s Monster Seafood Wars is a glorious ode to kaiju movies and Japanese seafood as these monsters destroy Tokyo.
Yuta, a disgraced scientist, is working at his father’s sushi shop when the accident occurs and his food grows to the size of a skyscraper. He had invented a vitamin that was meant to make food more enjoyable and larger in size, although it worked just a bit too well. The giant monsters of Takolla, Ikalla, and Kanilla are equally delicious and ferocious and Yuta soon finds himself cautiously joining SMAT (Seafood Monster Attack Team) to try and stop the monster’s rampage. Though giant monsters aren’t the only threat to Yuta as he battles a professional rival on the team for the affection of a girl and the respect of their leader, they are the most delicious threat.
Classic kaiju movies are hard to come by these days. Sure you can find your big budget Godzilla reboots (everyone say thank you to King of the Monsters and Shin Godzilla) but they seem to skew towards a more serious tone and message of global destruction that isn’t found in a large selection of kaiju eiga from Gamera to later Godzilla Showa era films. These monsters can be seen fighting space aliens that float and want to take over Tokyo or weird, spiky, dog creatures that breathe fire. The stakes are still high, just not end-of-the-world levels and the fun being had takes precedence over all.
In Monster Seafood Wars this manifests in Yuta’s desire to solve world hunger using his magic food pill. As the first battle with Takolla and Ikalla ends with large chunks of monster meat left on the ground, the SMAT team prepares to taste it because WHY WOULDN’T YOU TRY THE BIG MONSTER MEAT IF GIVEN THE CHANCE??? It is, of course, delicious and the entire country of Japan, and even the world, would go crazy for Monster Meat Seafood meals. It’s this level of such a bizarre premise that keeps Wars fun and interesting to enjoy, even when the giants aren’t on screen smashing the city.
And smash the city they do. The suits and special effects of the giant octopus, squid, and crab are basic compared to large budget, CGI-based effects but I wouldn’t want it any other way. The sparks that fly and debris that’s thrown into frame make every scene with the monsters real in a way CGI truly has yet to make me appreciate. You really can’t beat the slow motion flying of a monster limb hitting another monster limb in all its rubbery inflated glory. The actors inside do a marvelous job controlling these bulky suits and are never distracting from their “terror”.
The film captures the feeling current kaiju productions (especially US based ones) seem to forget and that’s that monsters are just monsters and our heroes will figure out how to deal with them. In the end, Yuta and his friend call on a giant robot literally named Jumbo Cook to come and serve up the monsters in a stadium, creating the largest seafood bowl in the country to, you guessed it, solve the hunger crisis. It is simply the most enjoyable battle scene I’ve seen this year and I was cheering on Jumbo Cook with every slice of his Japanese knife-sword arm.
This flick exudes a level of pure energy and joy missing from a lot of monster movies of the past decade and has a blast taking you on the ride as well.
Also, I would watch a million Jumbo Cook movies. Maybe an animated Netflix series? A cookbook featuring his best recipes? A battle royale video game where you drop with 30 other Jumbo Cooks to fight? Anything please. I love my big husband Jumbo Cook.
