Known to Americans under its dubbed title of Majin, the Monster of Terror, the Japanese fantasy Daimajin doesn’t really kick in until after the first 30 minutes, when the requisite precocious youth with bad hair is attacked in the forest by skeleton hands and superimposed bedsheets standing in for ghosts.

But that’s nothing compared to the havoc wreaked by the giant mountain god Daimajin. For the first half of the movie, Daimajin is simply a statue to be worshipped. But when angry villagers start hammering away at his head and cause it to bleed, well, who can blame Daimajin for opening up the ground so he can spit fire and swallow fat guys whole?

What heretofore was a blank face as threatening as Holly Hobbie is replaced with a blue-green demonic kabuki glare with one wave of Daimajin’s stone arm. The big guy frees himself from his mountain home and goes to town to — in the finest tradition of Far Eastern genre cinema — smash some shit up.

The balsa wood flies as Daimajin destroys houses and randomly stops to impale citizens. At the end, he turns to dust, thus ending the carnage, but quite clearly driving home the moral of the story: Don’t stick steel spikes into the foreheads of a statue in the mountains unless you want it to come alive and fuck up your village. Got it? No one did, because two sequels immediately followed. —Rod Lott

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