Bugs? Ewww! It isn’t bad enough that Godzilla is always stomping cities and roasting people with his bad breath, but he can’t even be depended on to keep his island free of creepy crawlies? Admittedly, there’s only about four or five bugs, but they are freaking huge and one of the first things they do is break Godzilla’s boy out of his egg and try to snack on him! It’s precisely this sort of gross child neglect on Godzilla’s part that is surely responsible for Minilla being the slow kid that he is!

While Minilla doesn’t demonstrate the consistently low IQ antics he did in Godzilla’s Revenge, the premature hatching of his egg is evident every so often in Son of Godzilla. He’s klutzy, talks like a sissy, and has problems getting his radioactive breath fired up until dad stomps his tail. That could all be chalked up to not hitting monster puberty yet, but his survival instincts are virtually nil, as he finds himself attacked by praying mantises, a giant spider, and eagerly accepts food from humans.

How did he know that he wasn’t being fed poison fruit? Because it was a sexy girl feeding it to him? Any guy will tell you that’s precisely who you need to be worried about the most!

None of this would matter to us humans of course if there wasn’t a bunch of scientists, a nosy reporter, and most importantly, that sexy girl stranded on the island where all this bug vs. lizard action is going on.

The scientists have set up an installation on the island to work on a project to combat overpopulation by finding ways of increasing food production. As you no doubt have already guessed, this means that they have to freeze the lush, tropical island they’re on.

If you haven’t done the research on crop yields, birth rates, and prevailing weather patterns like I have, you might be prone to dismiss such a plan as a bit nonsensical. After all, how does turning all our beautiful islands into arctic wastelands feed hungry people in the desert? Well of course it doesn’t! But what it does do is allow Godzilla and Minilla to fight the big, bad evil spider Kumonga in a raging snowstorm! And I’d trade a billion starving souls for that any day of the week! Don’t lie and tell me you wouldn’t do the same! We’re only human, you know!

The nice part of this plan is that plunging the island into a new ice age is the scientists’ second effort at completing their experiment. The first time they did it, Minilla’s egg interfered with it causing it screw up and plunging the island into a searing heat wave!

While the scientists survived in their air conditioned buildings, the intense heat had the expected results on the man-sized praying mantis population of the island – it made them into Godzilla-sized praying mantises!

This is actually good news though since it allows Godzilla to pound on a couple of mantises, called Kamacuras, as well as flame broil them. It was such an awesome fight that footage of it would be reused in Godzilla’s Revenge.

In fact, this movie is filled with awesome fights because some of Godzilla’s battle with Kumonga is reused in Godzilla’s Revenge as well! I didn’t mind one bit though because watching Godzilla just standing around staring at Kumonga until Kumonga injures his eye never gets old!

Just how much did I love watching Kamacuras and Kumonga rumble with the Big G in this movie? So much that I didn’t even care that I could see the strings on these mammoth puppets in virtually every scene they were in! The fact that the guy playing Godzilla never got tangled up in all those wires was a most impressive display of stuntman skill!

Strings or not, Kumonga was so hairy and shot out tons of yucky webbing to creep me out enough that I kept touching the back of my neck thinking something was crawling on it!

A fun, colorful, action-packed affair that ably mixes the violence you love in these sorts of films with the comedy of Godzilla being a single parent and trying to teach his son the ropes of being a big bad ass. Moments of suspense such as when Kumonga webs up Minilla and moments of sadness such as when little Minilla can’t go on anymore in the climatic snowstorm may leave the viewer feeling that this was way more emotion than he signed up for with a Godzilla movie! But don’t worry Godzilla lovers, as one of the humans pointed out at the end of the film, Godzilla and son will be fine even though they’re frozen since frozen is just another word for hibernation!

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Its message that the only thing bullies understand is having their ass beat is one that the morally relativistic liberals in charge of indoctrinating our kids find to be completely anathema to their belief that every aggressive screw up and spoiled brat is simply a misunderstood disabled child in need of more taxpayer money to handle.

Right thinking Americans everywhere though will agree with Godzilla’s parenting technique of stomping on his son’s tail to encourage him to stop being such a pussy and fight the evil bully monster Gabara toe to toe until that bumpy, horned jerk is taught a lesson!

Godzilla’s father of the year performance is just one of several reasons that Godzilla’s Revenge is highly recommended family viewing. Godzilla roughing up his pansy kid Minilla not only helps Minilla’s balls to finally drop, but also provides the guidance that the human child Ichiro needs in his confrontation with a pair of bank robbers!

Far too often, violence in entertainment is portrayed as being somehow harmful to young and developing minds, but here Ichiro’s fantasies of monsters beating the tar out of each other give him the idea to bite a kidnapper and provide him the opportunity to escape! So long as Democrats keep trampling on our Second Amendment rights and don’t allow our children to bring their guns to school for self protection, we need movies like this to demonstrate how kids can defend themselves in a hand-to-hand combat situation against villainous adults.

Ichiro’s life is pretty sucky. He’s a little twerp who gets picked up by the neighbor gang. He lives in the shadow of dirty factories. His parents work all the time and he has to go home after school to an empty house, his only contact is the kindly inventor how lives nearby.

If he were the coddled kid of a doctor or lawyer in America, he would probably be out stealing stuff, taking drugs, and raping other kids. Instead, he works on the computer he’s building and pretends that he’s best friends with Minilla.

Thankfully, he lives in a country that totally understands obsessions with giant monsters so the adults just laugh it off when they find out he’s inspired by Godzilla and company. In quick fix America, he’d be doped up to the gills and seeing a therapist to “process” his feelings. You know how they “process” stuff on Monster Island? By chucking boulders at giant spiders! I just processed your ass Kumonga and I feel great!

If Ichiro’s dream trips to Monster Island seem at once both awesome and vaguely familiar, it’s because Monster Island’s isn’t just filled with the biggest and best monsters ever, but with the biggest and best stock footage ever, too!

No less than four previous Toho monster movies are represented to varying degrees in Godzilla’s Revenge! If you like your Godzilla flick with just a dash of Gorosaurus or Manda, but don’t mind a bigger dose of Ebirah, you really can’t go wrong here!

Luckily for Ichiro, Minilla and us, Godzilla is in a pretty foul mood for most of the movie. Every time we’re transported to Monster Island, Godzilla is busy brawling with one of his fellow island residents.

If he isn’t getting squirted in the eye with some of Kumonga’s webbing, he’s shooting down Giant Condor with his radioactive breath or throwing around Kamacuras like a large praying mantis-shaped sack of crap! What’s so nice about it is that he’s being such a great role model for that little sissy Minilla! Leading by example is Godzilla’s parenting style!

Back in the real world, Ichiro not only puts his newfound toughness to use against the bank robbers, but also against the bastard kid that’s been bullying him! His confrontation with the bully is documented in loving detail through the use of freeze frame moments that allow us to see up close the pure rage that Ichiro’s monster-fantasy-fueled vengeance has unleashed!

Not content with merely humiliating the bully, Ichiro cements his status as the new bad ass on the block by harassing a guy painting a billboard and causing him to dump paint on himself! Somewhere Godzilla is pumping his fists in appreciation!

Roundly criticized by most fans of Godzilla for being a kiddie flick with hardly any original monster action, these views reveal that the cynicism here isn’t the naked money grab by the filmmakers, but lie within the critics themselves!

What’s wrong with stringing together a bunch of previously used scenes of monster fights to fill out a story with such an important message for kids? Kids are too stupid to know how many seconds of King Kong Escapes was used in this movie! They just want to know how jack up that older punk that keeps stealing their lunch money! Godzilla, Minilla and their big violent friends give them the answer! If you haven’t watched this film with your child, the next time he or she comes home all beat to hell by some other kid, ask yourself who the real monster is – Godzilla or you?

© 2009 MonsterHunter

The powerful scene between a scientist and the woman he loves where each has to confront their feelings for one another was one that all Godzilla fans speak of in reverential whispers. When he says that he loves her even though she’s a cyborg, you tear the freak up a little! And then a honest to gosh tear rolls down her cheek, too!

And when she says that Mechagodzilla’s brain is implanted in her stomach – well, you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t lose it right then and there, right? Heck, it was a love scene the Bard himself might have penned! If the Bard was a kick ass MechaBard!

Terror of Mechagodzilla wasn’t just a high powered drama of broads in silver spandex and guys in ugly checkered sport coats though. It was also a grossly underpowered monster demolition derby featuring one monster Godzilla already left at the bottom of the sea once before and another monster that should have just stayed there in the first place.

Mechagodzilla has been salvaged from his watery grave by yet another race of space aliens bent on taking over the world by destroying it with the evil monsters they control. Perhaps realizing the track record of past alien invasions hasn’t been very good, they decide not to go it alone this time and enlist the aid of disgraced scientist Dr. Mafune.

Dr. Mafune was run out of the science biz because of his crackpot theories about the presence of a dinosaur in the ocean named Titanosaurus.

His crackpot theories turn out to be true and even better than that, despite being unemployed, he manages to find the resources to locate the monster and invent a gizmo to control it. Of course he manages to kill his daughter in the process, but then that what’s alien invaders are there to fix, isn’t it?

In exchange for saving his daughter (by cyborging her all up), Dr. Mafune agrees to work with the aliens to destroy humanity. With him controlling Titanosaurus and them guiding Mechagodzilla, what could possibly go wrong? Nothing much except that when you’re dealing with a crazed, vengeance-obsessed mad scientist, sometimes he’s going to go and do what crazed, vengeance-obsessed mad scientists are prone to do. Like jumping the gun and get the monster rampage started early without his alien pals!

The initial confrontation between Godzilla and Titanosaurus doesn’t last long and once Mafune’s daughter gets herself killed a second time, he agrees to really work with the aliens. This is when his daughter gets the Mechagodzilla brain upgrade inside her belly and sets up the final two on one match with Godzilla.

Though the odds appear to be stacked against Godzilla, he gets some welcome help from Interpol who have figured out that Titanosaurus has a weakness to supersonic waves.

After Godzilla has been kicked in the head, booted into the air a couple of times, been blown up by a missile from Mechagodzilla and buried alive, Interpol finally gets around to firing up the supersonic oscillator and disorients Titanosaurus.

Once Godzilla dramatically breaks out of his shallow grave (which Titanosaurus had been jumping up and down on!), he makes pretty short work of Mechagodzilla (with the help of a cyborg suicide) and then of Titanosaurus by dumping his ass back into the sea.

The beatings Godzilla administered to these two were very satisfying since these monsters were so lame. Mechagodzilla just stood around shooting fireworks at Godzilla, while Titanosaurus just looked wimpy with its long, skinny neck and silly windstorms it generated with its tail.

Much of the movie is tedious to sit through due to both its overly-familiar alien invader/Mechagodzilla story line and the dearth of Godzilla-related action.

The first ten minutes of the American version is merely a highlight package of previous Godzilla antics with a never-ending commentary by an unseen narrator. Godzilla wouldn’t actually appear for real for the first time until a brief sequence in the middle of the film and then would only show up again for the final battle.

Everything else in the movie is a lot of talky scenes involving Interpol, the aliens, and the mad scientist and his daughter. It’s only marginally important if you have to know exactly why Mechagodzilla and Titanosaurus end up fighting Godzilla.

To paraphrase the Bard himself, “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in Godzilla, but in ourselves, especially those of us with robot brains in our guts and aliens with fake beards and maniacal laughs.”

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Past vehicles for Mechagodzilla had been notably lackluster and included Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Terror Of Mechagodzilla (so putrid they took the next decade off from making any Godzilla movies at all) and 1993′s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, arguably the most painful of the three to sit through.

The fact that we had the same guy writing the latest rumble that barfed up such concepts as Baby Godzilla and chicks with psychic links to Godzilla which were featured so shamelessly in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II only made me want to flee through the city streets like the big lizard himself was after me.

I hadn’t intended to actually watch this movie when I did – I just put it in to see if it looked like it was going to be as hideous as the last Mechagodzilla dust up. Next thing I know, it’s 88 minutes later, I’m at Toho’s web site looking for when the next scheduled Godzilla film is being released and I’m constructing my own Mechagodzilla in my kitchen out of a broken down dish washer and an ice tea maker! How was this movie able to grab my attention so easily? One word: typhoon!

What that means is this movie goes back to basics. Not Godzilla basics mind you, but story telling basics. Right back to the beginning with the classic, “it was a dark and stormy night” but they improve on it by making it “it was a dark and stormy night and Godzilla’s on the rag”.

So there’s this typhoon swirling all around, my subwoofer is straining to keep up with the punishing audio the movie generates and the next thing I know, the guy from the Japanese Weather Channel is doing a stand up in the middle of the typhoon and up from the depths, thirty stories high pops Big G! What’s his problem this time? Who knows? Maybe he’s just like those farm animals that spaz out whenever a storm approaches.

It doesn’t matter why he’s picked today of all days to rampage, you just have to like the fact that this time it’s not taking any sort of experimental device to wake him up, or some dumb ass stealing his eggs or this monster or other trying to steal his publicity by junking Tokyo without him. It just felt like rampaging time for him. And that’s the kind of Godzilla we all like to see. No agenda, just delinquent behavior.

Surprisingly enough, the prime minister of Japan complains about how they keep getting “raided” by not only Godzilla, but all his monster buddies. I always thought the Japanese were overly tolerant of all these monster attacks and having to constantly rebuild their largest cities so it was good to see someone finally acknowledge that these attacks went beyond mere inconvenience. They usually treat the devastation like we would a few potholes. The prime minister even starts going down memory lane, flashing back (via stock footage) to when the first Godzilla rampaged in the fifties, one of Mothra’s attacks, and inexplicably to that rarest monster of all, Gaira, from War of the Gargantuas.

You’ll notice that I mentioned a “first” Godzilla. That’s because the Godzilla running amok today is a different one than the one that harassed them back in the fifties. In fact, that first one is dead and they just discovered its bones in the ocean and are going to use it as the basis for a brand new Mechagodzilla named Kiryu.

Kiryu is equipped with a brand new super duper weapon sure to waste Godzilla called the Absolute-Zero Cannon. This is your basic freezing ray and while it worked well enough on a bunch of sky scrappers when Godzilla fired his breath at Kiryu and messed up its aim, it doesn’t do a whole lot to kill Godzilla.

It does irritate him enough that he eventually wanders back out to sea at the end of the movie, but I’m guessing that the Japanese were hoping their tax dollars would do more than what usually happens once Godzilla gets bored with wrecking their cities and swims off for a nap.

Kiryu and Godzilla hook up a couple of times and Kiryu actually shows us a new move when he ducks out of the way of one of Godzilla’s radioactive beams, but then he goes and shows us an even newer move when he goes on the fritz and rampages through the city himself!

Godzilla sees this fool tearing everything up on its own, so he figures Kiryu can handle things and leaves. That is one great weapon! Build a cyborg to tear up your own city so that the real monster won’t! Why didn’t that cross anyone’s mind in the previous twenty-five movies?

Though hampered by the usual less-than-stellar special effects, the movie succeeds more often than not due to its serious tone, music, and pacing (it’s a welcome twenty minutes shorter than the last Mechagodzilla epic). The acting doesn’t distract you and is commensurate with the idea that Godzilla is a menace to not only flee from, but to actually fight off.

This is the best Mechagodzilla of any of them and doesn’t look nearly as klutzy as the other ones. The chest-centered cannon is a nice touch (even if it doesn’t really bother Godzilla) and this thing has all kinds of beams and missiles to fire which is good because I like to see stuff blow up.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Going into this one, I have to admit that I was pretty jacked up about it all. I mean, here you had Big G battling his most heinous and unexpected foe: Space Godzilla. An evil spawn of a creature if there ever was one, Space Godzilla was born in one of two improbable ways (for some reason the movie put forth two competing theories). Either Godzilla’s DNA got shipped off to the far, far, evil and strange reaches of deep space by his titanic, most epic battle of 1989 against Biollante or Mothra carried it into space after her titanic most epic battle of 1992 against Godzilla.

However G’s DNA got out there, it combined with a bunch of bizarre crystals, fell into and out of a black hole and out popped a Space Godzilla! And now Space Godzilla is embedded in a bunch of crystals and hurtling toward Earth! There’s no good reason why he would be hurtling toward Earth from the far, far, evil and strange reaches of deep space of all places, but he is anyway.

Along the way, Earth gets a report of some disaster aboard an American space station. The Japanese officials say that the Americans have no explanation for this and so they (the Japanese) can only speculate that it was caused by a giant monster. At first, that sounded a wee bit beyond speculation, but the Japanese do have an extensive history with giant monsters, so I figured they would know the signs of an impending giant monster attack better than anyone.

As Space G is hauling his crystal butt to Earth for a showdown with his DNA donor, we go to a mysterious island (probably not Monster Island – only two monsters here) where scientists are working on some ridiculous plan to control Godzilla. Known as Project T (short for Telepathy – catchy isn’t it?), they are going to implant a device on Godzilla and use it to order him around with their thoughts. Of course, there are doubters like myself who think that Godzilla might be a prima donna and not take kindly to that idea. And the Anti-Project T folks have their own just-as-idiotic plan to take care of Godzilla!

A guy whose brother was wasted by G back in a prior movie has come up with the ultimate revenge scheme against Godzilla. He is going to shoot Godzilla with a special bullet full of anticoagulant in Godzilla’s most vulnerable spot – the armpit!

As you can see, Godzilla’s biggest challenge is to try to stay in character and not laugh when these idiotic plans are brought to bear. Now that you know about the big Project Armpit, you’re probably saying, well, sure this movie is loaded with high drama, but isn’t there some type of comic relief to take the edge off of all this seriousness? I’ve got two words for you: Godzilla, Jr!

Lil’ Godzilla is the most precious little monster lizard you’ve ever seen! Whenever he’s on screen this little fairy music plays that makes you taste that acidic stuff that runs up from your stomach to your throat right before you blow chunks all over your living room in situations like this. Even better, when he growls, it sounds like someone twisting a cat. The best part though is that this creature is so god-awful in the special effects department that you’re left thinking, “man, that doesn’t look like a guy in a rubber suit at all, how fake!”

Thankfully Space Godzilla gets has his best moment of the movie when he captures that sickening little turd in a bunch of his crystals. Of course, that provokes Dadzilla to get a little rough, but heck, Space Godzilla didn’t travel from the evil reaches of deep space for tea and crumpets.

Godzilla and SpaceGodzilla battled for the last several minutes of the film. It was one of those back and forth affairs where Godzilla tried to use his chronic halitosis on SpaceGodzilla and SpaceGodzilla deflected it because of his super powerful crystal deflectors. They rolled around awhile and somehow the giant crystals on SpaceGodzilla’s back got busted open.

This really didn’t have the gleefulness that the classic Godzilla battles had when he fought monsters like the three-headed Ghidorah and took great delight in ripping off heads and stomping them into the ground. This one was just kind of a lumbering effort with both monsters going through the motions and showing little, if any personality.

You watch these movies for the fights. Those are the “money shots” in these flicks. If they don’t deliver, you’re left watching a movie about some idiot trying to shoot a big dinosaur in the armpit.

There were also some incomprehensible moments when Mothra and the two tiny fairy twins that travel with her appeared. They gave advice to some telepath about this or that, but I never did figure out what that had to do with Godzilla’s movie. Mothra only appeared in regular moth-sized form and never got embroiled in the various battles that transpired every thirty minutes or so.

A Godzilla/Space Godzilla movie could’ve been a decent entry in this series, but this was bogged down by non-monster related nonsense such as Project T and the armpit bullet. At 108 minutes this “modern” Godzilla film runs a good 20 minutes longer than the ones made 35 years before. And perhaps not so coincidentally, it runs a good 20 minutes longer than necessary.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Who says you need a whole freaking month to make a movie about costumed stuntmen bumping into each other? Godzilla vs. Megalon? Three weeks! And most of that time was spent getting the guys in the monster suits! And what about the monster suits? The Godzilla suit was finished in only a week and was built so fast the eyes didn’t even work! And who cares about eyes since Godzilla shoots his radioactive rays out of his mouth!

Even the starring monster Megalon is a bargain! He was supposed to be in the previous film (Godzilla vs. Gigan) but got laid off before filming started because they didn’t have enough money for three evil monsters in that movie! So you know he wasn’t commanding top dollar when he agreed to appear in this movie!

Godzilla vs. Megalon delivers all sorts of bang for your buck right from the get go, too! A kid on a funky paddle boat trying to outrun a big whirlpool? Rescued by his two adult males friends? With a harpoon gun, right before all the water gets drained out of the lake? That’s like ten James Cameron movies right there! And for only the cost of the paddle boat rental!

Back at home, the kid and one of his dads gets kidnapped and hauled off in a big metal container on the back of a truck. Their robot, Jet Jaguar, is stolen and it isn’t long before someone is trying to dump the metal container off below a dam. The other dad shows up to save the day, but the container gets dumped anyway!

Just when all seems lost, Megalon shows up and saves them! But isn’t he a bad guy, you ask? Hey, one man’s evil monster is another man’s Seatopian freedom fighter! But what’s a Seatopian? Seatopia is one of those loser continents that couldn’t hang with the big boys and sunk to the bottom of the sea.

Somehow the people managed to survive and are in contract with various monsters that they can summon whenever they get irked at the outside world. In this case, they’re crybabying about a little atomic testing that the Japanese are doing, so they beep Megalon on his pager and tell him to get his sleeping tail into gear and go tear some stuff up.

Megalon is one of those directionally-challenged monsters that doesn’t know exactly where Tokyo is (shoot, the last time he was awake, it was probably a big stinky swamp) so they have Jet Jaguar show him the way.

The good guys regain control of Jet Jaguar and tell him to ditch Megalon and fly over to Monster Island to get Godzilla. This Godzilla is our greatest Godzilla yet, as he looks pretty friendly and listens to what Jet Jaguar has to say through a cacophony of hand signals that reminded me of a backup quarterback sending in the play to the real quarterback. Godzilla takes in everything that Jet says with his gloved hands, nods, hops into the water and starts wading toward battle with Megalon.

Megalon is a giant cockroach with drill bits for hands and an antenna on his head that shoots out lasers. He also can barf up these little red hairballs that explode. The Seatopians realize that maybe Megalon is going to have trouble handling a veteran like Godzilla and a young up and comer like Jet Jaguar, so they get on their cell phone and dial up their pals in space (underground civilizations almost always have good relations with races of aliens) and ask if they can loan out Gigan!

Naturally, I had forgotten everything about Godzilla vs. Gigan as soon I finished watching it, but I was sure that he gave Big G everything that he could handle in their last match. I also recalled that Gigan had a big buzzsaw in his chest that he used when things got dicey, so I figured Megalon was in good hands with his new partner.

Boy was I wrong! A lot of times, Godzilla gets his rump wasted pretty good (and usually loses the first match) in his movies, but this was one time where he pretty much dominated from the start (Megalon did manage to trap Godzilla and Jet Jaguar in a ring of fire though) and didn’t quit until Jet Jaguar threw Gigan into the air and Big G hit him with some of that chronic halitosis he’s famous for.

It all ends with a couple of flying dropkicks and a handshake between Godzilla and Jet that leaves no doubt that Godzilla is firmly on our side and will always be there when some little kid in short pants gets harassed by aliens or underground bullies.

A short and to the point film about the value of friendship and being bigger and stronger than anyone else, Godzilla vs. Megalon only seems to be a wispy shadow of supposedly more substantial earlier efforts in the series. What it actually is, is an economical distillation of everything these movies were always about anyway (monsters beating the tar out of model military vehicles and each other) without all the babble, subplots, and preliminary bouts the other movies frequently resorted to in an effort to fatten their running time.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Godzilla Helper are the chunks of plot inserted in between the Godzilla battles to give the movie a more “feature film” feel. By that, I mean the movie lasts longer than twenty minutes. The problem with Godzilla Helper is that it is used to stretch the good stuff, you know the stuff you actually paid money to see.

I didn’t pay to see stupid people flying around in their model planes while wearing their blue jump suits and bragging that they belong to some group that sounds like one of those cartoons that existed to sell cruddy action figures no kid wanted anyway. In this case they are called the G Graspers. I suppose the G stands for Godzilla, but from what I could tell the only thing they were grasping at were straws.

This is one of those organizations that the makers of the recent spate of Godzilla movies seemed fond of creating. But all those lame organizations like G Force from Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II failed! How are the G Graspers going to avoid the same fate and succeed? They’re going to suck Godzilla into a miniature black hole!

I don’t know how they thought that up or why they think it’s a good idea, but they seem to think that just because nothing, not even light can escape a black hole that somehow it could likewise beat Godzilla.

Somehow they get a cute little bitty black hole invented in about a week. They test it and the air gets all messed up and wavy and a strange creature flies out of it. It’s a really big dragonfly and it flies around and manages to leave one of those dang monster eggs that seem to infest Japan.

Meanwhile Godzilla has been lured to an island by the G Graspers in an effort to fire the black hole gun at him. The only problem is that now all these little dragonflies from the egg are attacking Godzilla and sucking power from him. This messes up the targeting system on the gun, but once Godzilla starts taking care of business with his famous bad breath, the dragonflies leave and the G Graspers fire the gun at Godzilla. And miss!

The little dragonflies that have sucked up Godzilla’s power locate the carcass of the adult dragonfly that Godzilla previously stomped and inject it with all this magic Godzilla juice.

It acts pretty much like monster creatine because this thing comes back to life and the next thing you know, some dude in a white lab coat is explaining to the G Graspers and us that it is Megaguirus and it’s really mean. How do they always know the names of the monsters in these movies? Is there some kind of government list for naming them like they have with hurricanes?

I don’t even think that Godzilla bothered taking the warm-ups off for this one. It had to be one of the shortest and weakest of his many fights. Really though, could you expect anything else when he was fighting a dragonfly? What’s next? Head lice? Scabies?

Godzilla simply stands there and watches this thing fly around and beat its wings and try to look all tough with its red eyes and pincers. It didn’t look like Big G even broke a sweat and he was relegated to doing one ridiculous looking frog splash on Megaguirus.

The other highlights of this clash involved Megaguirus thumping Godzilla on the head a few times. It also pinched him for good measure. Then Megaguirus came at Godzilla and tried to throw its rear end mounted stinger down his throat. Godzilla just bit it off! I was cringing for that poor dumb dragonfly when that went down.

Godzilla finished him off real fast after that and then the G Graspers tried to use their black hole weapon on him again. This time they hit him and he disappears, but hardcore Godzilla fans will want to watch until after the credits are over to find out how effective the Graspers and their fancy gun were!

There really isn’t anything to recommend about this film. You watch these to see monsters get it on and that means you need monster fights and good monsters. You get neither here. The dragonfly reeked of something that would have been merely a supporting monster in one of the old movies. Somebody that just kind of hung out on Monster Island with Manda and the big spider to fill out the roster. It sure isn’t anything to build a whole movie around. A pointless and forgettable entry in a series full of pointless and forgettable entries.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Every movie needs a laugh out loud moment and this one’s is when it is announced that Godzilla has two brains and one is in his ass! The people of G Force (the humans whose full time job is to get humiliated by Godzilla periodically) 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.”

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?”

Things really get rolling once we travel to an island where 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?)

It’s immediately loaded up in a 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 beat down 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. Luckily for the egg’s emotional well-being, there’s a lady scientist there who has a calming affect on it.

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 and out pops a little Godzilla! The scientists promptly announced that it was a Godzillasaur which was the same as Godzilla except it’s a wimpy vegetarian!

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. 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’m some kind of pansy who wants to see guys in rubber suits bawling their fake eyes out!

But what about MechaGodzilla? The first battle is before G Force knows about Godzilla’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 for being such a puss.

Later, 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. Okay, maybe you didn’t guess that.

There wasn’t a whole lot in this movie that made any sense and 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. 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.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

I always thought I struck it rich when one of those bad boys rolled into town for a Saturday afternoon. The best part was that they showed these same two Godzilla movies over and over under a variety of different titles. I think I went to these movies something like five times a piece over the course of three summers.

It’s against that backdrop of having already seen Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla several times that I confess I still didn’t really understand what was happening (something about a cave, a temple, an ancient prophecy, and a statue of a dog with big floppy ears) in this flick that admittedly goes down much easier than the aforementioned Godzilla vs. Gigan.

Initially we get to see an epic confrontation between Godzilla and his little pal Anguirus. I was a little disturbed to see that there had apparently been some type of falling out between the two since they last battled Gigan and Ghidorah together. I mean, they made a really great team, what with Godzilla single-handedly carrying the load and Anguirus getting his spiny tail kicked all over Monster Island.

This is a pretty brutal bout with Godzilla slamming that poor little loser to the ground again and again with his tail and eventually he breaks Anguirus’ jaw, blood spewing all over, leaving Anguirus to limp away all confused, his ripped up jaw dragging in the dirt.

Now you and I both know that the Big G has a temper, but it just seemed out of character when he punked his little buddy like that for no reason. I was therefore relieved when in the course of their battle, some of Godzilla’s skin got ripped off and gleaming metal was revealed underneath.

While this fake Godzilla (Mechagodzilla) is out and about busting up minor league monsters and oil refineries, there are some odd explosions coming from behind a building nearby. You fans will recognize this as Godzilla’s entrance music.

The two Godzillas face off and in a moment that I’ll remember for far longer than it deserves, the real Godzilla kind of cocks his head to one side as if he’s doing a double take and saying, “what? But if that metal creature is Godzilla, than who am I?” They then proceed to rumble for awhile and eventually Mechagodzilla strips down to his Space Titanium long johns and starts shooting rockets out of his fingers.

They brawl for awhile and Godzilla gets pounded pretty good, but gives about as good as gets, before Mechagodzilla flies away. During the battle, Mechagodzilla gets a flat tire or the alternator goes out and his masters order him back to their secret mountain base.

That’s a nice plot twist since we haven’t seen that particular gimmick (monster controlled by space aliens) since 1972′s Godzilla vs. Gigan when the monsters were under the control of alien cockroaches disguised as humans.

And to be entirely fair, this is different because Mechagodzilla is under the control of alien apes disguised as humans, not alien cockroaches disguised as humans. In this movie, whenever these aliens suffer some type of injury, that part of the body reveals its real form which is a cut-rate ape suit. At least in the last movie they tried to explain why the cockroaches were raising a ruckus on Earth. This time out, they don’t even bother to explain why apes from outer space have built a giant robot in the shape of Godzilla, shipped it here to wreak havoc, and at the same time disguised themselves as human beings.

The highly anticipated final battle between Godzilla and Mechagodzilla also features an appearance by that floppy-eared dog named King Caesar. Somehow the statue has come to life and he and Godzilla work together and manage to defeat Mechagodzilla with an assist from a magic pipe! (Magic pipe? I still don’t understand what’s happening! Calgon take me away!)

The battles in this movie are about the only thing that make it more tolerable than the equally dim-witted Godzilla vs. Gigan. At least in this movie, the music isn’t a monotonous dirge and the battles themselves are filmed at normal speed as opposed to the lumbering slow motion we endured for 45 minutes in the Gigan film.

King Caesar is pathetic though. It looks like Toho just sewed together parts of whatever was left over from all their previous monsters. Conversely, Mechagodzilla looks like a pretty cherry ride and gives off the vibe of a cold, calculating, death machine since he’s made out of shiny metal (I’d hate to be the one that has to wax that thing) and we all know robots are evil. It’s plain to see why Mechagodzilla has enjoyed a pretty successful career and why King Caesar was sent to the pound for the next 30 years after this movie.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

To be honest, I didn’t know any of this before watching the movie and just thought I was watching a regular old crappy Godzilla film built around a monster made out of scraps of left over monster suit parts. If I had known that the director had stuck it up Toho’s poopshoot by hijacking their cash cow to advance his own agenda, I probably would have appreciated more than I did.

As it was, I didn’t appreciate it at all and found the artsy-fartsy touches combined with the lame monster action to give off the malodorous scent that the smog monster, Hedorah, no doubt excreted whenever Godzilla punched him in the stomach.

Didn’t anyone from Toho see a script or footage from this movie before it was completed? Who authorized the crudely animated segments that popped up sporadically throughout the movie to drive home the point that no one on the film had the remotest idea of what they were doing? And who was it that authorized the completely dumb part of the story line that had us hanging out a nightclub where one of the guys decided that they should all go up to Mount Fuji for a big rave since Hedorah was on the verge of destroying the world?

At least they got one thing right and had a little twerp named Ken milling around babbling about how he dreamed of Godzilla and how he was sure Big G was going to bail everyone’s partying carcass out of trouble.

It all goes down back in ancient times (the early 1970s to be exact) when we hadn’t yet licked all that pollution stuff that was threatening to ruin the planet. Luckily, we all pulled together and beat that problem without Godzilla’s help by drinking more diet soda and bottled water instead of that poison that comes out of our tap, but what if we hadn’t?

What if the world turned out like the nightmare scenario presented in this Godzilla film? What if our rivers were polluted and factories continued to belch gunk into the air, while sinister meteors crashed into the oceans and reacted with the pollutants to form a deadly creature capable of growing from a little tadpole into a full-fledged guy in a rubber monster suit with big red eyes and no other discernible attributes? Could even Godzilla, Earth’s greatest protector (when he or she is in the right mood anyway), stand against this dirty, sooty menace?

Um, this is a Godzilla that can fly, so I wouldn’t go selling the SUV and start car pooling with Ed Begley, Jr. in his electric car just yet. (Talk about a nightmare scenario!)

I can’t say that I’m really a student of the Godzilla mythos (his adventures all seem to run together – which one was the movie where that one monster started wrecking Japan and Godzilla had to show up to fight him?), but I don’t remember him ever flying around except when one of his monster buddies got crabby and chucked him through the air.

In this movie though, Godzilla somehow manages to fly backwards through the air by firing his radioactive halitosis in the opposite direction. Nifty to be sure, but probably a bit tough on the neck what with having to twist around constantly to see if you’re about to plow into a mountain or get twisted up in power lines.

I guess along with his newfound super power, Godzilla also has a newfound sense of responsibility since he just shows up without any explanation and decides to fight Hedorah. The hows and whys aren’t ever addressed and we’re just suppose to accept the fact that whenever some monster rampage is going on that Godzilla will use his Spidey sense to realize this and show up to fight.

For its part, Hedorah doesn’t really come off as anything that Godzilla should be breaking a sweat over anyway. Its powers seem to be limited to shooting out sulfuric acid and heaving sludgeballs in Big G’s general direction. Not exactly a monster with a buzz saw built into its chest, is it? Or a three headed dragon? Or a robot clone? Or even Anguirus? It probably ranks somewhere in the neighborhood of that dragonfly Godzilla fought in Godzilla vs. Megaguirus.

Forgettable monster mayhem follows as Godzilla encounters Hedorah in both its amphibian form and its “flying saucer” form. Kenny’s dad comes up with some half-assed scheme to defeat Hedorah that involves luring it between a couple of giant electrodes and he gets an assist from Godzilla who not only has become the world’s policeman, but also has developed a rather advanced knowledge of science as he’s smart enough to power up the electrodes with his breath when he needs to.

A complete botch from the drawing board to the finished product, Godzilla vs. Hedorah (also known as Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster) doesn’t even really manage to sell its message convincingly. So what if the rivers are a little pitted out? If it wasn’t for this rock from outer space, none of this would have happened. It wasn’t because we wrecked our planet that all this happened. It’s just another freak from another galaxy stirring up trouble. How is that supposed to tell me anything other than that we need some kind of missile shield surrounding our planet?

Though we would never hear from the director or Hedorah again, surprisingly this movie turned out to be the big break for the guy inside the Hedorah suit as he went on to play Gigan twice before getting called up to the big leagues and stepping into the Godzilla suit in seven movies! Less impressive is that little Kenny returned in Godzilla vs. Megalon.

© 2009 MonsterHunter