There are films about which we say, “people have mixed reactions”, because there are things that are generally liked and things that are generally disliked, and it’s hard to feel much more than a profound ambivalence about it when taken as a whole. And then there are films about which we say, “people have mixed […]
If there is one unanswerable criticism of Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S., it’s that the film is entirely shallow. Not, après it’s immediate predecessor Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, that it ends up a trivial pile of nonsense and fluff whose attempt at any kind of humane drama goes massively awry; that it never makes even the pretense of […]
I might scour my vocabulary for hours and still never come up with a better single adjective to describe Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla than “frivolous”. Which is on the one hand not a word that really suggests and kind of special sin or even a legitimate failing of any sort, but on the other is almost […]
Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. Far and away the wordiest, clumsiest English-language title of any Godzilla movie – any Toho daikaiju eiga at all, for that matter. But simply a direct translation of the Japanese, and if you look at some of the original names for the classic movies in the franchise, […]
We now arrive at an exciting moment, for me personally: starting with 2000’s Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, the series wraps up with a run of five movies which I’ve never seen and about which I know basically nothing. In the most extreme cases (Megaguirus is one of these), my knowledge extends literally only to having seen […]
It’s wonderful what desperate humiliation will do. 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah was announced and sold, with great purposefulness and gravity, as the final Toho-made Godzilla film until the character’s 50th anniversary in 2004, while the Japanese company would silently remain on the sidelines as Tri-Star over in Hollywood made its own trilogy of movies with […]
It became eminently clear halfway through 1998, with the release of the American Godzilla, that Toho’s planned retirement of their most prominent kaiju superstar wouldn’t end up being as long-lived as had been the intention, and plans for a proper Godzilla movie to come out the following year were put into place. But their back-up […]
The foremost of all the non-pressing questions I have regarding the 1998 American Godzilla – pro tip: there is no such thing as a pressing question about the 1998 Godzilla – is whether or not it’s the worst film of the Godzilla franchise. And I suppose I should really first ask the question if it’s […]
Rebirth of Mothra II – its Japanese title is Mothra 2: The Undersea Battle – is a bad movie. That’s not special on the face of it. A lot of daikaiju eiga are bad. But ROM 2 has somehow managed the first Toho monster movie which, in my estimation, is just bad bad – not […]
Having killed off Godzilla in 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, sending the corpse off to America to be violated even further, Toho found itself in the unprecedented position of having no giant monster franchise to go along with a marketplace where giant monster movies were still doing pretty decent box office numbers in Japan. The good […]
Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, from 1995, was literally advertised in Japan with the slogan “Godzilla Dies”. But even if you didn’t know that going in, it’s a film that positively oozes fin de siècle gravitas and sincerity and gloom, making it very clear that whatever the story the film intends to tell, it will arrive at […]
I must offer two apologies, one of them to a real person. That being Okawara Takao, the director of Godzilla vs. Mothra and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, the 1992 and 1993 entries in a franchise that was still going strong as you please when he stepped away for a year to make Orochi the Eight-Headed […]
