Movie Review: Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monster All-Out Attack (2001)

Japanese movie poster

One of the interesting things about the last round of Godzilla films, known as the Millennium series, was that none of them had to have much continuity with the previous films, other than the original Gojira (1954). There was also none of the sixties and seventies' Godzilla,  who was a friend to children and protector of the planet. With Godzilla Mothra King Ghidorah: Giant Monster All-Out Attack, the Big G goes further back than the original; he's not just a force of nature in this one - he's a mean bastard out to destroy everything in sight.

While Godzilla was ostensibly destroyed in the original movie (with a little retroactive continuity for this one), the monster in this movie is given a much more mystical origin and is basically Zombie-Godzilla for all intents and purposes. The lack of pupils and irises makes him even more evil-looking in my opinion.

Godzilla now exemplifies all the lives lost to Japanese forces during the Pacific War. He's come back to take revenge on the islands of Japan for those deaths, since the Japanese people (or at least the Government) is more than willing to consign those acts to a forgotten corner of their history. To protect the land (the actual land of Japane, not the people), the Guardian Monsters rise up: Barugon (from Frankenstein Conquers the World), Mothra (from almost as many movies as Godzilla), and King Ghidorah (ditto). It is interesting to see Ghidorah as a hero, as usually the space monster is one of the ultimate bastards. Barugon is still a popular kaiju in Japan, which explains his inclusion, rather than the more popular Rodan or fan favorite Anguirus (Angillas).

The human side to the story features the commander of the Japanese Self-Defense Force dealing with his often-drunk daughter, a reporter for a cheap digital TV station producing sensationalist dramas. She's the only one who has contact with an old man who knows everything about the Guardian Monsters, and the coming battle.

There's a lot of great action and destruction in this one, as Godzilla, left loose for the first time in his cinematic career, gets a free hand to destroy Tokyo. Nothing accidental about this rampage ... he's there to kick ass and take names! He decimates the Japanese land forces in less than a minute, and nearly destroys everything on the water as well. The battles with the Guardian Monsters show there's no quarter given to the populace of Japan. Hundreds, probably thousands of people are shown being crushed under the debris of the monsters' swath of havoc. The only way this could be worse for Japan is if Godzilla was hungry and started eating people.

Godzilla facing King Ghidorah and Mothra
(Barugon already met his end about
twenty minutes earlier).

Barugon gets a bit short-changed in the end, but does have a pretty long battle with the Big G in the movie. Mothra's role is apparently just to die and supercharge King Ghidorah a couple of times. Ghidorah is at his most impressive (short of his brief Mecha-King Ghidorah phase, which was simply too cool for words), but it is Godzilla's show all along. And one of the few instances in the long series that the efforts of the human forces actually play a major role in the villain monster's defeat, much like the original 1954 movie.

This is definitely a must-watch for the kaiju fan, and it is a very accessible film for the average movie-goer.

Movie Review: Destroy All Monsters (1968)

When I was a kid, Destroy All Monsters was the gem in the kaiju eiga crown ... that Holy Grail that every Godzilla fan wanted to see. Luckily, back then in the seventies, TV stations actually played stuff that people actually wanted to watch. The CBS Late Night Movie, The ABC Friday Night Movie, WLUK's T.J. and the ANT (All Night Theatre), and Saturday afternoon movies on the local stations in Central Wisconsin finally got me to that goal. And then the early days of TNT and The Sci-Fi Channel (I can't being myself to call it SyFy out of deference to the days when it actually played science-fiction) Channel buttressed it in the mid-eighties by replaying it. It took nearly twenty years to see that film twice.

Of course now, I have it on DVD and can watch it anytime I want. And two nights ago, it was my Kaiju fix. This 1968 flick is what you would call a "monster fest", much like Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman or House of Dracula  twenty five years earlier. it featured almost all of the popular giant monsters created by Toho Studios, battling on both sides of an alien invasion. In the far-flung year of 1999, space travel with the moon is common and all the world's monsters have been confined to an island for study. The invading Kilaaks take control of the island and the monsters, wreaking havoc on the world's cities. Earth isn't defenseless and fights back, culminating in a monster brawl at the base of Mount Fuji. The aliens bring in the space monster Ghidorah as a last ditch effort, but hey, you know how this ends, right? Godzilla, good guy, aliens, smucked all over the place.

Godzilla is, of course, the star of the movie, but a good number of his kaiju cohorts get a lot of airtime, namely Mothra (in caterpillar form), Rodan, Angilus (a.k.a. Angurus of Gigantis the Fire Monster fame), Manda (from the sci-fi movie Atragon) and Gorosaurus, who's only previous appearance was as the dinosaur that the giant ape kills in the Rankin-Bass/Toho production of King Kong Escapes. The monsters Varan (from Varan the Unbelievable) and Barugon (from Frankenstein Conquers the World) make brief appearances, usually at a distance, since the rubber man-in-a-suit-a-saurus costumes for those two creatures had degraded to the point that they couldn't be used for close-up, active city stomping. Gorosaurus does the subterranean monster bit instead of Barugon in Paris, destroying the Arch de Triomphe. Godzilla's son is on hand for a little comic relief in the final battle, blowing a smoke ring onto one of Ghidrah's flailing heads as he gets stomped by his dad and friends.

On the whole, the special effects are pretty good in this one, with a minimum of stock footage. Godzilla gets to stomp New York for the first time, and the monsters attack cities that aren't Tokyo for the first time. The story's fine, too. Don't bother deconstructing it; I mean it is just a monster movie and if you're watching a monster movie like you'd watch a Scorsese or Tarkovsky flick, you've got something wrong in the cabeza to begin with. The plot is adequate for the movie's intentions, and gives lots of opportunities for spaceships, monsters, aliens and wanton destruction to appear on the screen.

Sure, it's dated, but this is a fun movie and wastes an hour-and-a-half quite efficiently!