Way back in 1995 you may recall hearing a whole bunch hooey about how Godzilla was finally going to die once and for all. He was facing a monster called Destroyer and Destroyer was going to kill him off. Godzilla vs. Destroyer was destined to be the last Godzilla movie ever! And it was until Godzilla Millennium came out four years later!
Like most of the worst Godzilla movies I’ve ever seen, this one starts out like it might have a little something in the tank. You get Godzilla havoc right out of the gate. So I’m thinking alright! There’s not any monkeying around going on here, Big G’s coming out and stomping everyone from start to finish. And as a bonus, he’s radioactive! This means that a good portion of Godzilla is glowing bright red!
So Godzilla’s heart is a nuclear reactor and he gets his energy from fission inside of him. What’s the big deal? The big deal is that his temperature is rising and once he hits 1200 degrees a week from now, he’s either going to explode and destroy the world or he’s going to melt down and destroy the world. That news led to numerous scenes of Japanese scientists making scaredy-cat faces.
At this point in the movie, I could still understand what was happening. Things then started to get fuzzy. You see this is called Godzilla vs. Destroyer, so we have to introduce another giant monster. To that end, we have a group of scientists researching how to stop Godzilla. They start going on about microoxygen which I never understood, but they claimed they used it on the first Godzilla in the 1950s and it did something to the water that killed off Godzilla. At least until the following year’s Godzilla Raids Again.
These scientists muck around with soil samples that have been exposed to radiation or the microoxygen or something and a little teeny-tiny creature escapes! This thing gets loose in an aquarium and turns all the fish to bone! Oh my god! If I was a fish, I’d be so scared!
This thing is referred to as an oxygen destroyer. There’s more than one of these things and we have to endure a boring battle between them and the army. At this point in time the creatures are about the size of buffaloes, but then they all combine to become Destroyer!
As far as giant monsters go, Destroyer is really pretty pathetic. He’s reddish and has a bunch of legs and pinchers. He’s got some spines or horns on his ugly mug and he has this extra set of teeth that he can extend from his mouth to menace pretty young television reporters (back when he was only a baby Destroyer). He’s basically an uninspiring combination of a giant lobster and one of those things from Alien.
Destroyer also flies around in a really fake manner. With all those legs and his body structure, he really doesn’t sell the flying bit effectively. And he’s not a good match for Godzilla from a visual standpoint. Big G needs someone he can go toe to toe with, not some sort of flying multi-legged clumsy lobster.
With two big monsters on the loose those brilliant minds that thought up the “armpit bullet” in Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla come up with another plan to beat Godzilla. Since Destroyer has something to do with destroying oxygen and that seems to be able to kill Godzilla, they decide that they need to have Destroyer fight Godzilla. I guess they’re assuming that Godzilla will lose and then Destroyer will quietly retire to the south of France to spend the rest of his days basking in the glow of his big win.
They contrive to get Godzilla involved by using his kid, Godzilla, Jr. They telepathically (huh?) lure Junior to Destroyer and then assume that Godzilla, Sr. will notice that Destroyer is beating the tar out of his kid and come ripping up the coast to teach that big lobster a lesson he wont soon forget.
To ensure that the film doesn’t just carry the stink of a regular old Godzilla movie, the humans also have deployed the Super X III. The Super X III is a really fake looking model plane that has been designed to fight radioactive monsters by shooting freezing missiles at them. When they show this thing flying around, the effects are so “special” my mind traveled back in time decades years ago to the old puppet show “Thunderbirds.” I don’t care what Godzilla’s official cause of death was in this movie, it’s obvious to those of us that knew him that by the end of the film, it was just straight up suicide brought on by acute embarrassment.
© 2009 MonsterHunter
