I agree that this sounds somewhat disturbing. After all, it’s clear this movie will have some sort of message about the nature of what it is to be human and to have our deepest dreams and desires be fulfilled and the unexpected prices we have to pay for that. I don’t know about you, but I just signed on to see a bunch of cyborgs bump sprockets!

The movie drops us into this post-apocalyptic world without any explanation, but really, what explanation is going to serve to explain why computer generated sexbots are the only things left on Earth?

Sure, there are some other machines as well such as Joe Admin, the thing in charge, as well as another machine that acts as some sort of guard, though I was never too sure what it would be guarding anything from or why it would be bothering to guard these robot hoochies.

One of the dolls is named Malice and she is among a handful of these dolls that have continued to function after the end of the world. Her days are spent walking the streets trying to hump fire hydrants and mailboxes or whatever else is still out there.

Malice is in need of some repairs so she heads up to the part of the building or city or whatever she was inhabiting to get to the Repairer. Everything goes according to plan with the small exception that she ends up in a strange room and gets assaulted by a strange creature with lots of slimy appendages. Next thing we know, Malice Doll has transformed into Malice, the human woman!

Malice is as surprised as anyone to find that she has actual flesh and bone and this immediately marks her as an outcast among her former friends, but Malice hasn’t just been given human form by this sexual assault. She also got a really cool super power in the bargain – her kiss can now turn other machines into humans as well!

Some of her pals are a tad reticent about this, but eventually most everyone gets in on the act, though a lot of them don’t turn out as well as Malice did.

You see, whereas Malice ended up looking like a regular broad (well, regular in the sense that she looks like what a sexually repressed Japanese guy thinks a regular broad ought to look like), some of her friends look really monstrous, having extra body parts and strange faces and all sorts of icky deformities!

Malice begins to think all this human transformation stuff isn’t maybe all that it’s cracked up to be. Malice ends up ditching her human form for a spirit form.

Say what you want about Malice, but she’s no dummy. She’s astute enough to realize at once that being a human being quite simply sucks and she somehow has the ability to transform again, this time to a little glowing white pixie who flies around and gives Joe Admin a final dramatic kiss.

See, this movie is just like Pinocchio if that little blockhead would have ended up turning into Tinkerbell!

The best thing you can say about this movie (actually three episodes of a video feature cobbled together) is that the computer generated animation is interesting to look at.

Even though the movie itself clocks in at a barely-feature-length 73 minutes or so, that’s still way too long to just be staring at a bunch of pretty pictures.

The story only made the vaguest sense in that I guess I could at least make out the themes they were attempting to push across (you know, all that wishing to be human and what is reality crap), but none of the details made any sense whatsoever.

What was this stupid world we were dumped into? What was that stupid creature that raped Malice. Why was she transformed? And why was she transformed again? Into a fairy? Aside from all that though, why should I even care about a robot without any feelings anyway?

I don’t even think she longed to be human at the beginning like a lot of these types of characters do. How is the audience supposed to be drawn into any of the events that transpired? Not coherent enough for regular audiences and not dirty enough for cartoon pervs. A total turnoff.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

If you’ve seen any of Kazuo Komizu’s movies, you know what to expect: random scenes of over-the-top violence complimented by bottom of the barrel gore effects.

You might also expect his icky obsession with grody sex scenes, but thankfully those expectations were dashed and instead replaced with zombies getting shot and grossly inept fight scenes.

Komizu does hold fast to the one thing viewers love about all his rotten movies – the 70 minute running time! It’s the cinematic equivalent of ripping off a Band-Aid from an open, pussy, stinky wound really fast!

The very beginning of the movie is probably the only time Komizu demonstrates anything close to competency when he posits that a meteor has landed in Tokyo Bay and somehow has caused the dead to come back to life to lay a beat down on the living. Derivative? Yes, but at least I can understand it. (And no, this competency I speak of does not extend to the cheesy special effects involving the meteor, the un-acting that occurs, or the lack of skills behind the camera).

The Japanese military quickly sets up death zones around Tokyo to prevent the spread of the virus that currently affects the undead and also so that the world won’t know how lame Tokyo is now that it’s being run by zombies.

There is also some mention that the virus is affecting humans as well, though I don’t really know much about that because in zombie movies, I’m not paying much attention to whatever sniffles the humans have. I’m here to see guys with gooey heads using arms for toothpicks!

In the midst of this mess is our heroine Keiko. Her father is some type of military bigwig who apparently took time out from fighting the zombie invasion to record all sorts of messages for his daughter.

She follows the instructions contained in the messages which eventually bring her into possession of a black battle suit that her dad also managed to leave her during this mess. I’m assuming the battle suit allows her to fight really well since she’s able to put some super sweet moves on evil humans and zombies alike, but like everything else in the movie, no explanation is offered.

Apparently concerned that his poorly funded, poorly shot zombie vs. babe in battle suit idea was not sufficiently terrible enough, Komizu adds another twist to the zombie movie genre. The military is taking advantage of the situation to create a zombie-human hybrid! These freaks are characterized by wearing face paint and wardrobes cribbed from early 1980s Italian post-apocalyptic movies which means one thing: spiked shoulder pads!

These creatures don’t like humans or zombies and just want to kill everything which I suppose should ratchet up the tension, but I think there were only four of them and the fact that the evil general had to huddle up football-style with them to give them instructions didn’t inspire much confidence.

They do provide the single highlight of the movie however. During a fight with Keiko, one of them starts putting pro-wrestling moves on her! Sadly, it was only a backbreaker and piledriver (couldn’t we get a Stone Cold Stunner or a Sharpshooter, too?), but it was a welcome addition to the zombie mythos just the same.

Demonstrating the stupidity this movie is suffused with, the evil general in charge of the mutants explains that he is going to use them to take over the world!

No one will laugh at Japan being taken over by zombies because they’ll be too busy getting their ass kicked by his mutants! Um, except that the mutants exist to kill everything. How is that taking over anything? His crazy plan ends in the only way it could – with a grenade shoved into his mouth.

Keiko isn’t done with her mission yet though. She also meets up with her father and he gives her a job being in charge of a rescue mission or something. It was a very touching reunion, but we see what a different world we now live in because she goes to shake his hand and he salutes instead!

If we’re living in a world where a gal has to wear a sexy battle suit her dad made for her, gets a job in his anti-zombie army and has to salute him, haven’t the zombies already won?

And in the case of this movie, the zombies would have won with a minimum of effort. There wasn’t a whole lot of zombie action going on. They tear up maybe a handful of people and those aren’t even that messy!

And as far as the zombie killing goes, I suppose if you like to watch mannequins with exploding heads, then you might pop a woody over this one, but the only gasps of horror from us normal folks will be at how unprofessional it all is.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

If you’re a junkie for these types of movies where some kids try to break into organized crime as they attempt to find some meaning in a world where they aren’t wanted, then this one will no doubt satisfy you, but if you think that you’re going to find anything new just because it’s Takashi Miike’s third and final film in his The Black Society Trilogy, then you’ll be sorely disappointed. In fact, a quick examination of those films reveals that Miike already managed to mine many crime movie cliches, with varying degrees of success.

The first movie, the entertaining Shinjuku Triad Society, featured a cop who was virtually indistinguishable from the violent dirtbags he was after. Rainy Dog had us following a hitman around as he slowly (very slowly) came to terms with the idea that he had a child which somehow served to humanize his existence. With the third movie, we watch as these kids get sucked into the lifestyle in contrast to the first two where everyone had been consumed by it already.

The three young guys featured in the film conform to the different variety of punks you would expect in a movie of this sort. Their unofficial leader is bound and determined to escape wherever he currently is. First he wants to get to Tokyo, then once there he decides that he has to leave Japan altogether.

His brother is the sensitive one of the trio and thus has the best hair and quietest attitude of them. He sort of goes along to get along.

The third guy is the not-too bright lunkhead who is the loose cannon. He practically wears a shirt the entire movie with “I’m getting my guts shot out first!” emblazoned across the front. We aren’t terribly surprised then, when toward the end of the movie, he’s holding his bloody chest and moaning that he wants some ice cream.

Oh, and they meet their hooker girlfriend after she pickpockets two of them. She has -wait for it- an abusive pimp she wants to run away from!

Miike manages to continue his single most interesting theme of the trilogy in this movie, that of the outcast in a world of outcasts. With Ley Lines, the movie opens up with the two brothers being taunted as kids by some Japanese twerps because they are Chinese. It’s probably no secret then why the one brother is desperate to leave.

His problem though is that he can’t get a passport because he’s on probation. The only solution then is to unofficially leave the country and that means lots of money and contact with organized crime. After most of his buddies fink out on him at the train station, he, his brother, and the crazy kid head to Tokyo where they hope to find something to do with their lives.

Things look bleak for our three amigos and it seems as if the big city is going to have its way with them right from the get go. But that’s when a chance encounter with a guy in a restroom leads them into the exciting world of toluene dealing!

Those of you with fulfilling lives have no doubt never had the need to get into the whole toluene scene, so a little education may be in order. Toluene is a chemical that you inhale to induce symptoms of giddiness. I don’t think there’s a big market for guys on the street selling toluene in the United States because you can just go down to the hardware store and purchase spray paint or model airplane glue and get the same effect. It’s called freedom, baby!

The sensitive brother finds the hooker wandering zombie-like through the street after being abused by a guy as well as beaten by her pimp. He and her hook up and become fast friends and once the crazy guy comes home with the other brother who was beaten himself, they all become real friendly.

She ends up humping all three at some time or other, including one while he was unconscious, but she announces that she’s no longer a hooker and that she refuses to sell her body anymore! Luckily for our crew, she’s still more than happy to just give it away. Do you ever get the idea that these movies just wander around aimlessly during the middle, marking time until the big heist and gun fight at the end?

This isn’t a bad movie and doesn’t suffer from the excruciating pace of Rainy Dog, but there just doesn’t seem to be much going on to elevate it from similarly-themed films. You never really feel any connection to any of the characters since they say and do very little beyond selling their toluene, hanging out with hookers or whining about leaving Japan.

The most intriguing aspect of the movie, the effect that the prejudice against outsiders had on these three Chinese people isn’t dealt with beyond the whole “I want out of Japan” angle.

The genuinely interesting scenes relating to this such as the crime boss who has made himself a success in Japan, but still yearns to hear fairy tales of his native Shanghai, are unfortunately few and far between as Miike gets hung up on delivering a standard crime drama. Marginally better than the dull Rainy Dog, but not as inventive, engaging or important as some would have you believe.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

He’s having problems in his job where he ends up booted out of his gang, but is still called in to do some freelance-type work. He runs around Taiwan shooting people in his long, white trench coat and sunglasses. He comes home and watches video clips from Gamera movies on his computer. He doesn’t talk much and he has really good hair. He even has one of those quirky superstitions where he refuses to go out in the rain because his grandmother always told him that it was bad luck.

All in all, you’d have to admit that Yuji is one of those carefully constructed movie characters designed to appeal to the young males in the audience who somehow think they can identify with a guy who is nothing like them. And way cooler, too!

So what happened with this movie that Yuji had me wishing that he would just walk out in the rain and melt already? Um, basically nothing. Normally, you could write off long stretches of boring movies by claiming that it was all character development, but with Yuji, you know everything about him at the beginning and he doesn’t change at all until almost the very end when he smiles and shouts once while riding a scooter with his kid and hooker girlfriend.

I suppose it’s baby steps, but if it took an entire film for a guy to contort his face into what passes for something beyond a disaffected grimace, I probably don’t have the decades left to live that we’ll need for Yuji to move from smiling to doing stuff like going to his kid’s ballgames and taking him on Cub Scout trips. Admittedly, he does hug the kid towards the end of things, but I couldn’t help but think it was a bit of a put on, since little Ah Chen had just saved his daddy’s life.

How is it that the lovable urchin Ah Chen comes into Yuji’s life and turns his world upside down? And by “upside down” I mean that Yuji occasionally notices that Ah Chen is following him around when he goes out on his “jobs.”

One day, while Yuji is just sitting there at the computer watching Gamera spin around and mixing it up with the that one monster with the triangular head and that other monster whose head resembles a butter knife, some hag rolls into his pad and tells him that she’s tired of being her kid’s mom and that it is now Yuji’s turn to raise him.

She tells him the kid doesn’t talk and then she leaves. Yuji remembers screwing her, but doesn’t know if the kid is his or not so he does what any of us what do in that situation and ignores the kid, leaving him outside to sleep in the rain. I’m sure that a paternity test was probably his second choice.

Eventually Yuji remembers a story about a prisoner who lived in isolation for so long that he began to care for a fly and then when the fly disappeared, the prisoner began to lose his mind. Yuji looks out the window at this shivering kid and announces that Ah Chen is his fly. Err, okay. I’m not sure if that really passes for some sort of maturing, but at least it won’t make Ah Chen’s pneumonia any worse.

But just because Yuji lets Ah Chen stay in his house, don’t think he’s gone all soft yet. When Ah Chen smiles at his daddy since he’s no longing outside drowning in a downpour all night, Yuji tells him to quit looking at him like a dog would. It sounds harsh to those of us not in the hitman business, but Yuji didn’t get where he is today by grinning like a jack ass. He’s just trying to impart his values on his child and who are we to judge his culture?

Following his speech (and for Yuji, a sentence definitely qualifies as a speech) to Ah Chen about his smiling, Yuji doesn’t speak to the kid for the next hour of the movie. Instead, he just goes about his business, walking around and killing people while Ah Chen struggles to keep up with him.

Yuji’s last job sees him being set up and doublecrossed and ends up with him on the run with a bunch of stolen gang money, his hooker and kid in tow. Naturally, this is about the time when Yuji starts to sort of care about his kid and whore girlfriend.

By the time the final scenes play out and Yuji realizes how much he cares for his son, the circumstances are such that you’re forced to wonder whether those feelings are born out of genuine paternal love or just self-preservation.

This is the second movie in Miike’s trilogy of crime films called The Black Society Trilogy and it’s quite a disappointing follow up to Shinjuku Triad Society. If Miike was illustrating the sheer inhumanity and indifference to life in that first film and by contrast is trying to demonstrate in Rainy Dog the possibility that even those who are most cut off from humanity have the capacity to be changed by love, then he’s failed miserably.

I was never convinced that Yuji was humanized by anything that went on here and since the movie spent most its time just showing this kid out in the rain while Yuji was busy doing other stuff, I didn’t understand what it was that happened with Yuji to make him finally care.

Director Takashi Miike leaves us to wonder if he was making a commentary that in this crazy, mixed-up, crime gang-infested world, we have to find love wherever we can and that even those whose professions require emotional detachment still crave some meaningful human companionship. Or was he saying that there’s nothing more boring than a cool guy saddled with some little snot-nosed punk and whiny prostitute?

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Anyone who is initially put off by the subtitles or the fact that it’s set in a foreign country should be comforted by this development and recognize that this isn’t one of those sissy, artsy foreign crime dramas where doves fly around in slow motion or where the hero sheds a big gooey tear when his partner dies or who is haunted by some failure in his past. This is a movie where the hero sodomizes one of the bad guy’s girlfriends in an effort to get information from her!

But don’t get too down on Detective Tatsuhito for his gross abuse of human rights. Everyone is a sick, demented scuzz involved in any variety of activities that will make you wince.

Wincing is good of course. If I’m busy wincing when one of Tatsuhito’s cop buddies is interrogating a suspect for him by engaging in a technique that I’ll politely describe as “doggie style encouragement” then even though I’m turning a bit green, I’m definitely not bored!

And speaking of all-male doggie style activities, one thing I never realized about the Yakuza and the triads were just how gay they all are. I don’t say that as any sort of pejorative, but only as an observation gleaned from what went on in this movie. This movie had to have the most all-male oral sex scenes of any movie not involving performers named Bruce, Max, or Cougar.

Maybe that was to be expected when the whacko crime lord at the center of this grimy, violent storm was named Wang. Wang is a Chinese guy who fled Taiwan at the age of fourteen after killing his father. He settled down in Japan and got himself a job running a mob dedicated to matching up organ donors with prospective recipients.

Is Wang really such a bad guy to want to help out needy families of two different stripes? There’s rich families that need a healthy kidney for their kid and there’s poor families who need some fast cash and just happen to have an extra kidney lying around in their kid’s gut. Sounds to me like Wang is just making several families’ dreams come true. He’s in the happiness business just as much as in the illegal trade of underage organ business.

Tatsuhito becomes obsessed with bringing down Wang though I think it had more to with saving his gay brother, who through his job at a law firm becomes mixed up with Wang’s organization, than it did with the organ stuff. Tatsuhito has some elderly parents that are worried about his brother and he feels obligated to try and extricate little bro from his burgeoning life of crime.

Tatsuhito’s investigation into Wang and his brother’s whereabouts somehow finds him taking on about twenty Yakuza guys at their club. He gives a pretty good account of himself against the first five or six guys, but it’s the next fifteen dudes that cause him problems.

Beaten within an inch of his life and drugged up, he’s dumped into a trunk and sold to Wang who is hoping that Tatsuhito has taken good care of his kidneys and corneas.

Just when all hope seems lost for Tatsuhito, he gets rescued! But, by whom? Why the girl he sodomized earlier! Obviously, the gritty existence in the Japanese underworld is a bit different than what we would probably recognize as normal.

Apparently, the whole sodomy episode was merely a second date for these two. (The first date would be when she was arrested following the murder of a cop and she told Tatsuhito she would give him information if he would “do it” with her. Tatsuhito isn’t a dirty cop though, so he smashed her face in with a chair.)

But what could have made this gal so enamored with Tatsuhito and his unorthodox courting techniques? It turns out that during that episode of forcible sodomy, it was the first time she had an orgasm without being high! I think it’s safe to say that director Miike, much like his cop protagonist, plays by his own rules.

Tatsuhito, with his new girlfriend’s help, recovers enough (despite her continuing demands to “do it”) to embark on a final bit of R&R (Revenge and Rampage) and hunts down those responsible for his plight.

Miike adopts a pretty straight forward approach to shooting this movie and there’s not a lot of scenes that merely exist to show off someone’s camera technique. His focus is on the unrelenting brutality of this world and he rarely lets up on it.

This isn’t a movie where you’ve got big name actors strutting around posing and dropping one liners on you that are designed merely for the trailer. Its style derives from the events as they play out and while you could say those events are sometimes extreme to the point of being unbelievable, it’s all about context.

For instance in the context of Wang’s world, it wouldn’t necessarily be out of the question for him to run around flashing rival crime lords as a show of disrespect. A bit tacky, yes. But unbelievable? No.

Shinjuku Triad Society‘s a vicious crime epic that refuses to compromise or glamorize what it portrays. There’s no redemption or validation to be found in its conclusion. It’s merely about whose capacity to absorb and mete out violence is greater than everyone else’s. This, the first in a loose trilogy of crime flicks known as The Black Society Trilogy (Rainy Dog and Ley Lines follow), is the kind of Miike stuff that put him on our radar, and deservedly so.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

The end result is a splatter film that many fancy critics have heaped praise on for its examination of Japanese society and its reliance on a rigid hierarchical structure and what happens when it disintegrates when the leader of a group is removed from the equation.

But all this search for nuance and deep meaning made me think of yet another quote. To paraphrase the great Sigmund Freud, “sometimes a guy sticking a shot gun up a gal’s crotch and blasting her is only a guy sticking a shot gun up a gal’s crotch and blasting her.”

Apparently back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Japan experienced a situation on its college campuses that the United States also was afflicted with. I’m of course talking about rich college punks running their respective nations down and demanding that communism be installed as the reigning ideology.

Regardless of where it takes place, I’ve always found this so-called “student activism” to be the height of hypocrisy. How many of these nimrods are living off mom and dad’s money while they’re out protesting “the Establishment?”

Why don’t you quit sitting around your dorm drinking, smoking, and screwing and get out there and run for office, make sure all the students vote, and propose some workable solutions to whatever issues you have beefs with? Or isn’t that as much fun as wearing a bandana over your face and waving around signs with insulting and simplistic messages?

As luck would have it though, the left-wing student radicals in this movie don’t have much time to march through the streets or conduct sit-ins since they’re too busy killing each other!

The movie begins with the leader of the student group in jail. We are supposed to believe that he’s very charismatic and is the glue that holds the group together. That’s the assumption since things go down the toilet pretty fast after he’s out of the picture for good, but since he’s always in the cooler we never see exactly why anyone gives a crap about him.

Be that as it may, he puts his girlfriend in charge while he’s gone. On the one hand, that’s admirable since it shows his belief that women are the equal of men, but on the other hand she’s completely insane and humps just about every guy in the group depending on who she likes on a particular afternoon. This contributes to the group’s descent into madness as jilted lovers wonder why she’s in charge and openly question her authority.

After one particularly dissatisfied guy reports some of the group to the police and tries to get the other part of the group to join a different group, the woman leader (Masami) turns violent and her supporters follow her lead.

What follows is a veritable catalog of atrocities that would be right at home in any sleazy Italian horror movie. Heads explode, guys are castrated, people are stabbed, shot, beaten, and even impaled. If you like your movies to be rough going, the last half of this one will be right up your alley.

The movie eventually gets to the point where you’re just ticking down the people that still have yet to be slaughtered and you’re hunkered down in anticipation of some new gross out scene to come. Following the initial violence against those that betrayed the group which you can comprehend on some level, the movie just sort of shifts into a gory free-for-all which while keeping those with strong stomachs watching, only keeps you watching the way a freak show would, not because there’s a story still being told.

Artsmagic gives this an impressive deluxe two-disc treatment and the extras are mostly entertaining, especially the behind-the-scenes feature showing the filming of Kichiku.

While the movie is a grim march into oblivion, everyone involved in making it is shown having a good time, laughing and joking around. People are posing with the exploded head, reshoots are needed because a guy farts in a scene, and even while everyone is concerned that some special effect hurt the actress playing Masami, they are also wowed by the fact that the blood in the scene ended up sprayed on the ceiling!

It was the perfect antidote to the unending horror of the movie itself and was a fascinating look at a low budget production in action. There’s also several interviews with the principals as well as an introduction by “acclaimed writer on Japanese cinema” Tom Mes where he waxes on and on about the deeper meaning of the film.

Make no mistake, this a stomach-churning effort with surprisingly convincing performances by all the film students involved and the movie itself looks better than what anyone’s idea of a “student film” probably is, but the question remains as to whether all of the brutality served the story or vice versa. I tend to think whatever message the movie had was drowned out in a shower of blood, guts, and chunks of head.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

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