My brother and I attended the Godzilla convention known as G-Fest in Chicago earlier this month. After I had paid for my registration in mid-May, I decided to rewatch some old kaiju movies I hadn't seen for a while and even watch some kaiju material I had yet to experience. I kept notes and figured I might as well type them up and share them with the universe here.
For decades this has been my favorite Godzilla movie, and I decided to start with it; happily I still found it to be quite fun. I watched a version on youtube, and afterwards listened to Stuart Galbraith IV's commentary. I like all the actors in Invasion of Astro-Monster--Nick Adams is fun and the female leads are attractive--and I love the rocket ships, flying saucers, space special effects and sets depicting alien interiors. The human plots--the tragic relationship of Nick Adams and the alien spy and the happier love affair between the Terran female lead and the comedy relief inventor--are better than average for these kinds of movies.
I watched a version on youtube in Japanese version with English subtitles, which was not ideal, because my general practice is to do housework or look at comic books and play video games and read magazine articles on my phone while I watch TV, and this is a hard habit to break, so I missed a lot of the dialogue of this one. Luckily I'd seen (English dubbed) versions of this before. Like everybody I love Ghidorah, and the idea that a soul from ancient Venus possesses an Earthwoman and tries to warn us about Ghidorah is fun, plus the assassins all have fascinating faces; this is a good one.
This was on youtube, in Japanese with English subtitles, so I missed almost all of the dialogue because I watched it while washing dishes and folding laundry and cooking lunch. This is a kid's movie, full of schoolchildren, singalongs, and slapstick involving hapless adults as well as a maudlin environmentalist message. The hero monster is meant to be cute, and a main plot point is that he is hungry and kids have to solicit donations to buy food for him. Even though the film is directed at kids, there is a brief scene with a burning city and jet fighters launching missiles and a memorable gag involves a fat construction worker almost falling off a skyscraper because he is daydreaming about beer and a bikini girl.
This youtube presentation, billed as a "reconstruction of the Japanese version," doesn't even have subtitles so the only words I could understand were "arigato" and "sayonara." There are many scenes of little boys dancing among ruins I took to be Angkor Wat or someplace similar. These children find themselves in a fight against relic thieves, and some of the kids actually get shot or otherwise seriously injured. There is more bloodshed and death in this film than I might have expected, and it is presented cheek by jowl with goofy undercranked slapstick. The Ultra people reach down from heaven to aid the kids. Many of the images and plot elements in this film seem to have been inspired by Eastern religion/mythology about which I know nothing; a white monkey is quite prominent. I found the first half of the picture to be kind of a drag, but the second half picks up a little with rocket ships and fighter planes and lots of monster suits, inferior to those you see in a Godzilla or Gamera movie, but better than those in Diagoro vs Goliath, though I am not crazy about all the king fu-style fighting, to be honest.
We are scraping the bottom of the barrel here; apparently this is four TV episodes of a kid's show cobbled together, four adventures in which intelligent oversized dinosaurs try to exterminate mankind and are opposed by a four-person human team who have two fancy vehicles. This was the worst thing I had yet watched as part of my kaiju marathon, though it had the virtue of being dubbed in English. The interesting thing about Attack of the Super Monsters is that the dinosaurs and pterosaurs and vehicles are all depicted via photographic means--some are men in suits and some are models, sometimes depicted via stop-motion animation techniques--but the human beings and conventional animals, like dogs, are depicted via cartoon-style animation and the cartoon people and model monsters sometimes appear in the same frame.
Gyaos is a very fun monster, what with his beam that cuts things in half, his fire fighting ability, and his vampire characteristics. And you know I have an abiding love of pterosaurs. The pervasive bloodshed and constant threat of dismemberment add to the excitement. I thought the human subplots about guys trying to get photos of the monsters was OK, but the main human plot about villagers protesting highway construction was a snooze.
This one is a real mixed bag. I like the design of Mechagodzilla, but I think King Caesar is pretty lame. The photography of this one, which I guess was influenced by spy and crime films, is better than average, both among the humans and the monsters: I thought the opening shots of Anguirus and the first fight between Godzilla and Mechagodzilla, in which Mechagodzilla starts off still clad in his Godzilla disguise, were really very good. Unfortunately the aliens are terribly lame, far inferior to those in Monster Zero or the Gamera films.
As a kid I had to turn the channel while watching this one; seeing innocent people killed and reduced to skeletons was just too upsetting. Like Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, this one is a mixed bag. I think Hedorah and its various forms are all great, and the special effects that bring the thing to life are very cool. The drawings and animated sequences depicting the smog monster's life cycle are surprising and compelling, and the photography of symbolic garbage (e.g., a broken clock, a dismembered mannequin) floating on the water is really good, and the psychedelic images at the dance club are also fun. The horror elements that distressed me as a kid are quite effective. So, much of the film looks great. But the film's pacing is bad--the fact that one of the heroes spends the movie on his sick bed drags things down, and the final battle between Godzilla and Hedorah is too long and too repetitive--it takes an eternity to get Hedorah into the trap, and then they spring the trap again and again and again. Also, Godzilla acts too goofy, with weird little mannerisms like wiping his face and swinging his fist like a cheerleader or something that might be OK if he did them once but which he does again and again.
I was amazed when I looked this movie up on wikipedia and found that it, apparently, has a bad reputation, because I love Gamera vs. Guiron and have since I saw it as a kid. I like the models and sets depicting the alien city; Space Gyaos and Guiron are great monsters; and the gruesome monster fights are terrific. The science fiction and horror elements are brilliant, and the two evil alien women are sexy. Central to the film's appeal is the fact that the boys aren't just spectators or victims, but actual adventurers, struggling for their lives and making decisions that matter to the plot. This may be my favorite kaiju movie of all time.
Viras the tentacled space monster and his yellow and black sphere spaceship are great, and this film has many of the virtues of my beloved Gamera vs. Guiron, namely the many horror and SF elements and the special effects that bring them to life. However, Gamera vs. Viras is inferior to the '69 film because it has fewer monsters, no alien city and no sexy alien space villainesses. Still, candidate for my top five.
According to wikipedia, this is a Korean movie, all of the monster and military action of which is lifted from Japanese TV shows. I saw a version with English subtitles at G-Fest. The Japanese parts have fun monster designs (including a giant chicken with elephantine legs, a thing like a starfish with a bat's head, and a bipedal triceratops), cool aircraft, and good explosion and gunfire effects and so are worth the viewer's time. The human plot and characters may be totally divorced from the war with the monsters, but are pretty crazed and so not totally boring. A woman reporter impersonates a maid to sneak into the house of a scientist who is a single parent--this ambitious journalo is seeking the scoop on the academic's theory that dinosaurs are being revived by global warming and these revivified reptilians threaten to kill us all. An odd subplot concerns the efforts of a masher to grope the journalist. Another odd subplot is about a medical doctor who believes all the people who are seeing dinosaurs are hallucinating because they have caught a virus from handling dinosaur bones. Yet another odd subplot concerns how the scientist hasn't told his daughter that her mother is dead--instead, he tells her Mom is just on a trip to America. Anyway, after a lot of character stuff about the scientist's psychological problems and the little girl's relationship with her father and the journalist, many different monsters rise from the ocean and cause mass destruction. Military aircraft defeat the monsters, and the scientist and the journalist, we are led to believe, will soon get married.
Another I saw with my brother at G-Fest. People perhaps remember this one as the one into which is integrated what amounts to a long commercial for the 1970 World Expo in Osaka; the Soviet pavilion appears prominently, and whenever I see the film I hope Gamera will "accidentally" burn it to the ground, but these hopes are never realized. Gamera vs Jiger has most of the virtues of Gamera vs Viras and Gamera vs Guiron, and I really like the X-ray of Gamera and the boys' Fantastic Voyage-style adventure inside Gamera, and the female lead is also charming; however, Jiger isn't nearly as "outside the box" as Viras, and there are no aliens or space ships, so it's a runner up behind Viras, though maybe better than Gyaos, which is dragged down by all that business about building a highway.
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