In 2014, the world will rejoice and celebrate as one of the most iconic figures in all cinema turns 60 – it is birthday time for Godzilla, greatest of all building-sized movie monsters. To commemorate this event, the first Godzilla movie in a decade will be coming out in May, titled simply, and cleanly, Godzilla (though I’m sure they’ll find some way to fuck it up; they want to start a franchise, after all. Godzilla: The Rise of the Monster or something equally crass).
And to commemorate both that movie and the Big G’s birthday, I decided to do what I do and fling myself into a big ol’ retrospective, and you know what absolutely astonishing thing I found out? There are so many of the damn things that if I want to watch just one every weekend, and still be ready by 16 May, I need to start now. So even though it feels like we haven’t fully shaken the dust off from last summer, it’s already time to start looking ahead, as I prepare to-
The rules: Every Saturday, a Godzilla film, and since this isn’t some cheap attempt to make fun of the character, I’m going to look only at the almost uniformly superior Japanese versions. There are a couple of exceptions; owing to its historical importance, I’ll be watching the American recut of the original Godzilla, 1956’s beloved Raymond Burr vehicle Godzilla, King of the Monsters in concert with its source material; there are also one or two other films whose Japanese and American versions are so profoundly different at a level deeper than some niceties of emphasis or culturally-specific lines of dialogue that I’ll potentially and I do only mean potentially (which is why I’m not naming them) compare both versions of those, as well.
There’s more! If I’m going to-
-I want to review all of them, even the ones that aren’t in the strict Godzilla continuity. So,in an attempt to comprehensively cover the entirety of the Toho Studios daikaiju bestiary, and to destroy my fucking brain, I will, in between Saturdays, take a look at whatever kaiju films come along at that point chronologically. Though, in a feeble bow to sanity, I’m not going to approach the handful of science fiction films that incidentally but not significantly include the presence of a giant monster that Toho released in the ’50s and ’60s. Nor will I even ponder reviewing daikaiju eiga from other studios, because shit, I want to talk about anything else at some point between now and May.
The city-levelling madness begins tomorrow!