Taro's Monster Hunt: A strange, grainy relic from 1936

If you enjoy movies that feel like they were dug out of a literal trunk in an attic, Taro's Monster Hunt is for you. It’s barely twenty minutes long, yet it manages to be both charming and completely incoherent. If you need a plot that makes sense, or even one that follows basic logic, skip this and go watch The Case of the Howling Dog instead.

Taro just sort of wanders into danger. There is no training montage. There is no explanation for why he’s fighting these things. One minute he’s standing in a field, and the next he’s staring down a cardboard dragon that looks like it might catch fire if you looked at it too hard. 🔥

The Monsters

• That one beast with the googly eyes that keeps wobbling in the wind.
• The tentacle thing that is clearly just someone in a damp laundry bag.
• The dragon that has a very stiff neck and clearly wasn't finished in time for filming.

There is a moment where Taro swings his sword at a creature, and the blade just... bends. He keeps acting like he’s striking a blow, but the prop is clearly made of something as sturdy as a wet noodle. Nobody cared. They just kept the camera rolling. I kind of love that about it.

I found myself thinking about Scotty Finds a Home while watching this, mainly because both films have this frantic, low-stakes energy. They aren't trying to be deep. They are just trying to fill the screen with stuff.

The pacing is all over the place. Taro encounters a monster, flails about, and then suddenly the scene cuts to him somewhere entirely different. It feels like the editor was just grabbing handfuls of film strips and taping them together in the dark. It’s not graceful, but it’s genuinely entertaining in a way that modern CGI-heavy stuff rarely is.

Is it a good movie? Probably not. Is it a fun way to spend a few minutes if you like grainy, old-school weirdness? Absolutely. Just don't expect a masterpiece. It’s just Taro, some monsters, and a whole lot of 1936 optimism. 🎞️