Project G-Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla (1974)

Alternative Title: The one that used all the fireworks in Japan.

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla!  Where do we start with this one?  For some reason, trivia on the development of this movie seems to be much less available on the internet than for the other films, so… well, we’ll have to resort to conjecture for some of this, probably.

What we do know is that the Godzilla franchise had been making largely kid-oriented fare since Destroy All Monsters saw the original creative team leave the series for various reasons.  It’d also been waning in popularity for a while, never reaching the lofty peaks of commercial success established by King Kong vs. Godzilla.  Meanwhile, other kaiju productions were soundly beating the film in the very genre Big G had established.  Some of them were kid-friendly, sure.  Others proved there were a sizable audience of adults out there for kaiju films.  So, dudes here saw that, and figured, ‘You know, the whole kid thing isn’t exactly working out for us.  Maybe we should go after that market.  Those who can enjoy the big dumb giant monster battles on a whole other level.

And so, this film was made with that in mind.  Adult oriented.  Actioned way the heck up.  No more stock footage, because they’re not just playing to dumb children for whom they can get away with that.  More violent and gory than the series has been before, and possibly has been since.  Explosions and pyrotechnics up the giant monster-sized wazoo.  Life and death stakes, and people getting straight up killed on screen.  And not a single childly shortpant to be seen.  

This… ends up being a really weeeeeeeeiiiiiiird movie to watch.  Inconsistency is rampant throughout.  Do you love explosions?  I hope you do, because they are HERE with a statement.  The pyrotechnic work here is gratuitous and glorious.  The overlays; the beams, atomic breaths, aliens transforming, etc., look cartoonish and absolutely horrible.  Mechagodzilla looks amazing!  King Caesar is kind of ok, and the aliens are absolutely awful.  The action between the monsters is strong and exciting and visceral.  Everything going on with the people makes no sense and has way too many moving parts.  And a lot of the things that happen just don’t make any darn sense.  It’s amazing in parts, and laughably bad in others, and almost never anywhere in between.

Also, I’ll say it again.  Explosions.  If you love things blowing up in your movies, man, the work here is obscene.  There’s one part in particular that had me in awe at just how spectacular it was.  There’s corners cut in this movie, yes.  But they did not spare the pyrotechnics in any way.

Let’s dig into this bombfest, shall we?

Project G-All Monsters Attack (1969)

Alternative Title: The bad one.  The really bad one.

So if you talk to anyone who knows Godzilla films, they’ll generally have their opinions.  They’ll have their unadulterated favorites.  They’ll have their guilty pleasures.  They’ll have their personal bombs.  Those lists won’t always line up.  There’s a lot of room for opinion variation on Godzilla.  And that’s really a beautiful thing.  Everyone gets their own journeys through these films, unique to them.  Except for All Monsters Attack.  Everyone, absolutely every single Godzilla fan, hates this film.  And not in a love to hate kind of way.  Not in a ‘it’s a pain, but watch it once to get it out of the way’ kind of way.  Everyone straight up just recommends you skip this one.  I told people I was writing up all the Godzilla films.  Everyone who knows Godzilla assumed I was just going to skip this one.  

So that’s how you know you’re in for a good time, right?

So lets rewind a bit.  Destroy All Monsters was the Godzilla team blowing everything they had on it.  All the monsters, all together.  The biggest, baddest conflicts they could come up with, serving as a massive denouement to their kaiju saga.  The story was resolved, and they gave Godzilla the sweetest send-off they could, before Toho kicked in its plan for shelving the movies for a while and launching the Godzilla Multinational Cartoon Universe.  Interest in Godzilla movies were waning, and it was drawing less and less money over time, so that decision makes sense.  Give the series new life in a different format.  But, said cartoon didn’t come out.  The companies Toho was going to be co-producing it with didn’t end up going through.  Meanwhile, longtime Godzilla producer Tomoyuki Tanaka was looking at the competition, particularly the Gamera series of films, who were making bank by producing incredibly cheap kaiju films and marketing them directly to children.  And he was like, you know what, we can do that too.

So he called up a screenwriter, and asked him to slap something together on the back of a napkin.  Then he called up Ishiro Honda, longtime Godzilla director, and told him to start digging through people’s couches, because whatever change he found there was going to be this movie’s budget.

And that’s how this magic was born.  A film where its questionable whether or not all the previous Godzilla movies actually happened and Godzilla et al are real in this universe, or they’re just movies in this world too.  A film where children dealing with typical kid stuff is the primary conflict.  A film where, although Eiji Tsuburaya is credited with the special effects out of respect, his health was too poor for him to work so all special effects had to be handled by his protege and by Honda on a shoestring budget, with rather poor results.  A film that makes extensive reuse of the footage from the previous handful of films rather than shooting anything new.  A film that centers on Minilla.

It’s not for nothing that this film is so hated.

Ehhhhhhhh, let’s do this.

Project G-King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

More memorable title: The Godzilla movie with bloody King Kong in it! OR The one with all the Japanese people in brownface.

So, let’s go back in time a bit.  1962.  Godzilla had one good movie, and one film that was kind of there, and largely wasn’t really a known property.  He hadn’t been seen in theaters for years.  King Kong, though, King Kong was the big time.  Household name.  Was already a classic movie monster.  And the writer behind King Kong had a new project he was wanting to move forward with.  The original plan was to do a King Kong vs. Frankenstein film, but the cost for that was prohibitive, so the producer on the project reached out to Toho, who had been having success with the giant monster movies, Godzilla and otherwise.  Toho was celebrating its 30^th anniversary with a whole bunch of high profile films, and wanted to give Godzilla a comeback, so they slipped Godzilla in there, brought back the team behind the original, and the rest is history.

Well, sort of.  The original Godzilla movie had started an America cinematic tradition of buying up the writes to Japanese movies on the cheap, filling them with large helpings of cheese, and bringing them over with a rather lackluster localization job, kind of creating a perception that Japanese movies were cheap tawdry affair because that’s how American artistes greased them up.  The producers behind this film didn’t want that, and so they took it a bit more seriously, but kind of in the wrong way.  Godzilla vs. King Kong itself is a decidedly more silly movie than the previous two affairs.  It stars King Kong, at the time a much more prominent figure, in the primary role, and seems to be designed more as a good, entertaining popcorn muncher than as the thoughtful horror pieces of the past.  Ishiro Honda still wrapped in his usual work of making the monster movies more meaningful by having the film be a satire on the Japanese TV comedy scene of the time.  That apparently wasn’t going to fly with the American version, and the producer there cut a lot of the satire scenes out, replacing them with transition scenes of some boring as stale milk schmucks in a newsroom talking about all the cool action that just happened, and interspersing it really weirdly into the film.  It ruins the film’s momentum in a really weird way to have all these kickass scenes with Godzilla destroying stuff IN COLOR for the first time, then to interrupt them in the middle with Mr. Whitebread saying something like “Our news satellite tells us that Godzilla has just destroyed a train, and is now heading for Tokyo.”  It’s galling.  And guess which version of the movie seems to be the only surviving copy.  Even the Criterion Collection… uhhh… collection, with as much work as the company did in making things as true to the originals as possible, still only manages the US recut.  They do foreshadow plenty of things and explain some plot stuff that otherwise would come out of nowhere, so it’s not like they’re without merit, these scenes are just really boring.  And some of the explanations in the US version don’t exactly match up with the overall canon of the series.  So as we go through the synopsis, imagine that that’s repeatedly going on.

Anyways, do you remember the end of the previous film?  Japanese military crushed Godzilla in an avalanche on an island covered in ice.  Except screw you, it wasn’t an island, it was an iceberg, and now it’s in the arctic.  A US military submarine is up there for some reason doing something and also has a bunch of civilians on board for reasons that are never really explained.  It looks like there’s an iceberg there that’s glowing with intense radiation.   As the military does in most films in which they’re not the protagonists, they proceeded to cock everything up and somehow accidentally rammed the iceberg.  This releases the beast, who does what all the giant monsters do and goes to destroy something Japanese.  Meanwhile, you run into the offices of what is ostensibly a pharmaceutical company but throughout the movie they’re only ever concerned about their TV show so who even knows.  Their show sucks and they want to make it not suck so the company president, who looks like he’d be named Nigel if he was born in any other country, decides to go get a giant monster to do something for his show because nothing could possibly go wrong with that idea.