Varan (1958)

Item: Varan
Rating: 1.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★½ — Varan (1958)

There's a version of Varan that could've been genuinely interesting. A giant, ancient creature, somewhere between a crocodile and a flying squirrel, dragged blinking into the modern world after centuries underground. A beast that glides. That's a strange enough hook to work with. But Toho, somehow, managed to make almost nothing of it, and what we're left with is one of the dullest entries in the kaiju catalogue: a film that feels less like a finished movie and more like a rough assembly cut that nobody got around to polishing.

The formula by this point was already well worn. Panicked scientists. Military brass barking into radios. Civilians sprinting in slow motion through collapsing miniature sets. There's your post-nuclear monster, your scenes of institutional hand-wringing, your earnest but forgettable protagonist explaining what we can already see on screen. It worked in the original Godzilla because there was genuine dread underneath it, a film still raw from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It worked again, in a lighter key, with Rodan. By the time Varan lumbers onto the scene, the template is showing serious wear, and this film does absolutely nothing to freshen it up.

The creature design doesn't help. Varan himself is a goofy-looking thing, and I don't mean that affectionately. The suit looks clunkier than usual even by the standards of late-fifties suitmation, and the much-advertised gliding ability amounts to little more than a bloke on wires jerking stiffly across a miniature skyline. It's the kind of effect that kills menace stone dead the moment you see it. Any tension the scene might've built evaporates on the spot. Compare that to something like Mothra vs. Godzilla, where the creature effects have a genuine sense of scale and weight behind them, and the gap in ambition is pretty stark.

What really finishes Varan off, though, isn't the dodgy wirework. It's the lack of personality. Godzilla is tragic. Rodan has momentum and fury. Even the more obscure Toho monsters tend to have some quality that lodges in the memory. Varan has none of that. He's not angry. He's not sad. He's not even particularly threatening. He simply exists, stomps around for a bit, and then the film ends. There's no emotional throughline, no weight, nothing that makes you feel the creature's presence as anything other than an inconvenience to the script.

The human characters fare no better. I couldn't tell you a single name or motivation by the time the credits rolled, which is saying something given how short the film is. Even when Toho was churning these out at pace, they usually managed one memorable face in the crowd. Not here. Everyone is pure function, moving the plot from one monster sighting to the next without anything resembling character.

I've sat through some rough patches in this era of genre filmmaking. I reviewed The Mysterians and found things to enjoy there despite its wobbles. Even Space Amoeba (1970), which is nobody's idea of top-tier Toho, has a certain scrappy charm going for it. Varan doesn't even manage that. It's not offensively bad. It's just dull, which is almost worse.

If you're doing a completist Toho marathon, it'll tick a box. Otherwise, there's genuinely no pressing reason to seek this one out. Varan can stay unbelievable.

One and a half stars.

Rating: ★½ | Year: 1958 | Watched: 2025-10-30

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