 Mechagodzilla is "Japan's greatest hope for ending Godzilla's reign of terror" but there is also Rodan and Baby Godzilla to contend with in this one. 1993, 108 minutes, VHS
This is actually the third movie that features Godzilla's chrome Doppelganger, though it is the first time humans and not aliens have piloted it. They don't have any better results than when the aliens were in the cockpit, but they do manage to send Godzilla back to the ocean and award him custody of a cutesy baby Godzilla, so we can pretty much call Godzilla the loser in this one. Well, him along with the viewer since we ended up with custody of this horrid videotape all cropped and dubbed so that the movie's presentation is as rotten as the movie itself.
I didn't really get too hung up on Columbia TriStar treating this movie like Godzilla's bastard child since it deserved it, but if you're going to go all out and dub this thing, do you really have to have one of the characters talk about something being "really a gas" like was 1974? Did someone in charge think they were dubbing the first MechaGodzilla movie? The characters also used the word "shit" a couple of times which outraged me since these movies are clearly aimed at four year olds and we all know that kids don't learn the word "shit" until they're at least five and have started kindergarten. I thought I was watching NYPD Blue and kept waiting for Godzilla to walk around with his ass hanging out of his rubber suit.
But wait! Since this is a nineties update of the Godzilla franchise, the plot does revolve around Godzilla's butt! You may recall (or no doubt are cursing yourself for being unable to blackout) back in Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla how the plan to defeat Godzilla was to shoot him in the armpit with a special bullet. Well, in this movie they figure out what we've all suspected since the middle of the 1700s when the first Godzilla movie appeared as a Punch and Judy show at the Prague County Fair: Godzilla has two brains and one of them is in his ass! 
Every movie needs a laugh out loud moment and this is this one's. The people of G Force (the humans whose full time job is to get humiliated by Godzilla periodically and waste gobs of Japanese tax dollars coming up with high tech plans like the aforementioned "armpit bullet" and the old "shove a taser up Godzilla's ass" concept) mysteriously fail to see the humor in this and just point to a diagram of Godzilla showing one brain in his head and one much further down, obviously located in his poop shoot and blandly refer to the second brain as being located "there" and "in this location" and I kept waiting for someone, anyone, even a guy with a brain in his butt, to jump up and say, "you mean he has two brains, one of them is in his booty, and you want us to shoot a bunch of missiles up his Hershey Highway? Where do I sign up?"
The revelation that we people of Earth (well, the people of Japan specifically - I'd like to think that if we sent some of our special ops guys to Monster Island that we could take out Godzilla or at least injure him by crashing a Humvee into his leg or something) have been consistently outsmarted by a large reptile who literally has brain farts is perhaps the funniest, but is in no way the worst moment in the movie.
Where do I start with my "moments in this movie that caused me to have an expression on my face like I was Godzilla and just got a bunch of Stingers inserted into my rectum" list? Oh, how about the beginning? Putting aside the stunningly good idea of recycling chunks of the "robot monster from the future" King Ghidorah to build yourself the new 1993 MechaGodzilla, things really get rolling once we travel to an island where a giant fossil of what looks like Rodan is discovered.
Walking around a little more, a giant egg is discovered. Real Godzilla fans know that the presence of an egg the size of a Ford Focus usually portends the unwelcome appearance of a set of twins with migraine-inducing voices that speak in unison, but this movie bucked that trend by only having a pair of these vocally-challenged nitwits appear briefly as the head of an ESP school. (What does it say about your movie when you have an ESP school that gets so little screen time that it doesn't even qualify as one of the stupider moments?) 
So this egg glows red and looks pretty scary and who knows what the devil is inside it (Mothra? Rodan? Baby Huey?) so everyone immediately loads it up in their helicopter because Japanese environmental policy is to transport monster eggs to the nearest populated area for research and rampage purposes. Guess who shows up to object to having its egg thieved? Rodan! Guess who shows up because he's got that familiar feeling in his ass that there's another monster in the vicinity that needs a whuppin' put on it? Godzilla! Rodan and Godzilla rumble for awhile while the humans with the egg look on and eventually fly away after getting bored.
Back in the city, they figure out that the egg turns red when it gets upset or angry. Great. It's a mood egg. Is this series going to be mired in the seventies forever like some dinosaur without a brain in its caboose going for a walk in the nearest tarpit? Luckily for the egg's emotional well-being, there's a lady scientist there who has a calming affect on it. This woman is different than the woman in the movie that has a psychic link to Godzilla. That woman gets very little screen time in this outing, but if you like her work, she appears in almost every modern Godzilla movie (probably just to let Godzilla know when the movie's finished and can go back into the ocean for his patented farewell scene).
Along with the egg, there was some ancient plant life recovered and somehow or other it was determined by the students at the ESP school that the mysterious force the plant's leaves were giving off was music. (Uh, maybe this ESP school appeared in the movie a little too much after all.) They play a tape of the music and this causes the egg to hatch. Since I was too scared to read the back of the video box (watching a movie like this is a bit like removing a band aid from your scrotum - you don't want a lot of preparation or thinking about it - you just want to rip it off real quick like and hope that the pain doesn't last longer than a few weeks) I didn't know what was coming out of the egg and so when this thing that looked like a little Godzilla came out, I was a bit surprised. And when the scientists promptly announced that it was a Godzillasaur which was the same as Godzilla except you know, a wimpy vegetarian, I was flabbergasted.
The woman with the connection to the egg also has a connection to this thing and whenever it gets upset, its eyes turn red and she has to stroke its head to get it to calm down. (Um, you can go ahead and rub its ass since it has a brain down there, too.) She names the little bugger Baby and thus begins the worst moments of any Godzilla movie. Listening to this ninny prattle on about how "Baby is upset" and "Baby deserves to live like any other animal!" while this ugly little creature stands next to her with its gigantic eyes and two big fangs is enough to give your own butt brain a seizure (and if you're watching this film, you definitely have a butt brain). The lowest point in all this though has to be when Baby is told by his foster mom that she has to leave him and he has to go live with his biological dad (or mom or whatever sex Godzilla is this movie) and Baby starts to cry! It's one thing for me to be watching a movie about guys in rubber suits body slamming each other, but I ain't some kind of pansy who wants to see guys in rubber suits bawling their fake eyes out!
But what about MechaGodzilla? Oh right, there was something in this movie about a robot Godzilla being built as the ultimate weapon in man's yearly battle with Godzilla. Like most Godzilla movies, this one has a few early fights that those of us in the biz refer to as "prelims" or "qualifying heats" and after the first Rodan/Godzilla clash, the next one on the schedule is the first MechaGodzilla/Godzilla battle. This is before they know about Big G's ass-for-brains gimmick so they try shooting Godzilla full of energy, but they just end up getting feedback and the robot stands there stunned until Godzilla walks over to it, pushes it down and looks at it disdainfully before yawning and walking away from the heap of loser called MechaGodzila and straight to his attorney's office so that he can look into filing some sort of libel suit against MechaGodzilla for trading on his name and rep and being such a puss. 
MechGodzilla goes into the shop and gets its points and plugs changed and the plan involving goosing Godzilla's butt is formed. (It's officially called Operation G Crusher, because the guys at the print shop couldn't get "Operation Up Yours You Big Green Turd" to fit on the front of the folders.)
MechaGodzilla gets back into action with a warm up bout against Rodan who is still hanging around trying retrieve Baby. At one point some stupid scientist explain's Rodan's interest as being because he and Baby are half-brothers. Huh? I think it was just because Rodan was desperate for any bit part in a movie he could get. After all, he wasn't exactly in demand as the featured player in a Godzilla movie like a King Ghidorah and there certainly wasn't any interest in a series of films built around him like with Mothra (though I was never certain where the interest in a series of films built around Mothra was coming from either). Having to take whatever part comes his way, means that MechaGodzilla makes relatively short work of Rodan, freeing everyone up for the final showdown between Godzilla and MechaGodzilla. (Real fans will recognize this final showdown from when it happened in all the other movies that MechaGodzilla appeared in.)
Shooting Godzilla in the butt seems to work for awhile, but I was disappointed that there wasn't a better shot of Godzilla bugging his eyes out and his mouth forming a surprised "o" once he starts feeling all these nuclear suppositories being delivered into his lower brain. Godzilla is saved from his most embarrassing defeat when Rodan is revived by Baby being stressed out over something. Rodan gets shot down by MechaGodzilla but as luck would have it, he falls out of the sky and lands on Godzilla. You can pretty much guess what happens from there: he transfers all his "Rodan energy" to Godzilla which is sort of like when Popeye pops a can of spinach. Godzilla gets back up and wrecks MechaGodzilla, though I wasn't sure why this energy transfer required Godzilla to be covered in glitter.
There wasn't a whole lot in this movie that made any sense and it's always more entertaining to watch him beat up other monsters, not a robot made out of used Ghidorah parts piloted by a bunch of government employees. The movie didn't seem to have much focus, what with the relatively pointless appearance of Rodan and the embarrassingly inept Baby story line. At one point we had to watch Baby's foster mom feeding the vegetarian Baby cheeseburgers! There was also the precious moment when Baby was chewing on a tennis shoe.
Godzilla does what he can with things, getting in his signature spot where he incinerates that oil refinery they always rebuild in the same spot on the coast, but he doesn't seem overly motivated to do much of anything else in this movie. They try and say that Godzilla's motivation this time around is that he is after Baby which made me think that their plan should have been to drop Baby off on Monster Island and go back to tricking out MechaGodzilla and painting flames on it or something.
The special effects were no better than they ever were and there were scenes where you could see the strings holding up this gizmo that a few characters flew around in. Way too long and way too much Baby for anyone's taste. Exactly what you would expect from a series whose idea of character development is for their franchise character to develop a mind between its butt cheeks. Can't wait for the Talking Tush Godzilla action figure. Pinch its butt and it says "Stop it! You're giving me a headache!"
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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