Review: VEOH and the Search for Rubber Suit Monster Videos

One of our peeps at MovieFanCollectibles was doing an online search for an old sci-fi flick.  He found an interesting viewing website at video aggregator VEOH.  VEOH doesn't provide new content, but brings videos together in a user-friendly full screen format, once you download their player.  It's supposed to make finding and watching content out on the net easier.

VEOH is free (for now, anyway) and has a strange mix of old movies, with a fair selection of sci-fi and horror, early and obscure animation, and hygiene or social guidance clips about the dangers of drugs.  We're guessing that's because VEOH thinks old movie fans like other contemporaneous film genres for their querky outlook and sketchy production value.

Originally a California start-up, VEOH has since been acquired by an Israeli company. VEOH received attention early on when Michael Eisner, retired from Disney, became an angel investor in the company's second round of venture capital infusions.  VEOH is also somewhat unique because of limited viewership inside the US.

Hard to know what the niche VEOH is going for in the expanding on-line movie viewing market.  But they have lots of fun-looking content, sort of what would be great for late night intoxicated viewers.

The dreaded? Killer Shrew

Rubber Suit Monster Blog recommends checking out the site because of hilarious monster costumes in VEOH's movie line-up, such as:

"Killer Shrews" An unbelievably bad low-budget horror film with dogs running around dressed up in throw rugs that are supposed to make them look like giant carnivorous shrews.

"Creature from the Haunted Sea" This rubber suit looks like a combination of cookie monster and a live action Homer Simpson crusted in barnacles.

But at MovieFan we really like VEOH because it brought together a lot of Godzilla footage ready to view, thus it's a winner.  A word of caution if you go there - the website is so absorbing that it can make time disappear - be prepared to surrender an hour or more looking around.

Tip: be sure to search VEOH by "length relevance" as well as genre, to find rubber suit monster movie-length vintage videos available there.

Thanks to Wiki and About for the 411 on VEOH as a corporation.

Godzilla, Gojira: What's in a Name?

Fully understanding the charm and timeless appeal of a movie monster like Godzilla may not be entirely possible. It's campy Japanese old school FX allure is at times inexplicable. Is it the ungainly rubber suit?  Is it the film-makers' conscious pandering to fans with silly vulgarity? Here at MovieFanCollectibles, the fun starts with the name. We love the name. It has a power all its own. Anything that is ungainly or uncooperative in a mildly annoying way, for us, gets "-'zilla" attached to the end of its noun or proper noun (like "cat-zilla).

Where did such an evocative name come from? According to recently deceased (February 2010) pop culture historian and pulp SCI-FI writer Jim Harmon, there is much lore flying around about the naming of Godzilla. Apparently it all started, as these things often do, as a nick-name turned working title for the designers and writers developing the film's concept.

In film, concept often comes before plots, names of characters, or titles of finished movies in the can. A recent example was with the wonderfully bad disaster movie "Snakes on a Plane," or "SOAP" for short. SOAP was the working title for a high concept (i.e. light on plot) Hollywood action movie being shopped around to well-known actors. Samuel L. Jackson agreed to do the film, but only if they kept the silly working title.

The dynamic dino was first known as "Gojira," which Harmon says was a play on words from the first film's crew at Toho International productions (東宝株式会社 Tōhō Kabushiki-kaisha), who married the English word gorilla with the Japanese word for whale, "kujira." There you have it. To the Japanese, Godzilla looks like a big old "moby-kong."

For Western audiences, Gojira was translated by distributors into Godzilla. Harmon recounts further naming legend which says that Godzilla is supposedly a cross between a "god" or awesome creature of impressive size, and "zilla,"  which refers to the monster's lizard-like qualities.

Even if none of this is true, Harmon deserves major chops for spinning a good yarn in his tome, "The Godzilla Book."

Fun factoid: Toho International also produced the films of Akira Kurosawa.