After bringing the bulk of Toho’s A-list monsters back to prominence over the course of Godzilla vs. Mothra in 1992 and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II in 1993, the crew led on the latter of those films by director Okawara Takao sat out 1994’s entry in the Godzilla franchise, leaving Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla to the ministrations […]
So, 1993’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II isn’t a sequel to 1974’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (that was, of course, 1975’s Terror of Mechagodzilla). Toho decreed that to be the official English title solely as a way of making it minutely easy on us poor anglophones to distinguish between a pair of movies that aren’t so easy […]
Pay close attention: there we have Mothra vs. Godzilla, a 1964 film that for most of its life was better-known in English-speaking territories as Godzilla vs. the Thing or Godzilla vs. Mothra. Here we have Godzilla vs. Mothra, a 1992 film that for most of its life was better-known in English-speaking territories as Godzilla and […]
Even by the standards of a movie franchise whose immediate prior entry featured an 80-meter dinosaur spitting beams of nuclear energy at a giant carnivorous rose that was cloned from the dinosaur’s own DNA, the 1991 film Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is really peculiar. Not, entirely, peculiar and bad. And I do not regard as […]
The important part first: BioGoji, the Godzilla suit featured in Godzilla vs. Biollante, is my all-time favorite design of the iconic creature. It’s not flawless – like all of the VS Series Godzillas, it has chunky thighs that suggest that too much devouring nuclear sites and not enough time jogging is taking its toll (but […]
I hope you don’t mind if I immediately bog things down in a semantics discussion, because I’m going to do it regardless: The film with which Toho’s classic monster Godzilla made his first appearance of the 1980s, nine years after Terror of Mechagodzilla made so little impression and sent the franchise into mothballs in 1975, […]
From just about any angle you want to approach it, 1975’s Terror of Mechagodzilla is heavy with Significance for the Godzilla franchise. For one thing, with 28 total Japanese movies and one semi-official American production released in the monster’s first 59 years, this fifteenth film finds us at the numerical halfway point. But that’s for […]
Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, from 1974, was among the first Godzilla pictures I ever saw, so I was never till now in a position to appreciate what a massive shift in the series it represented. In particular, what a jaw-dropping change it meant for director Fukuda Jun, whose four preceding Godzilla projects had all been largely […]
It’s impossible to say that 1973’s Godzilla vs. Megalon represents the flaming-out of the Godzilla franchise, or dropping off a cliff, or any other colorful metaphor you like for a movie series just plain giving up. After all, it came out just a year after Godzilla vs. Gigan, a movie which doesn’t leave very much […]
After having been quite horrified by the outlandish weirdness (even by the standards of Japanese pop culture!) of 1971’s Godzilla vs. Hedorah, series producer Tanaka Tomoyuki had one demand, and that was for the next year’s movie to be a sane and normal Godzilla movie like all the other Godzilla movies. And by God, but […]
We can pussyfoot around, or we can be frank: Godzilla vs. Hedorah, from 1971, is the god-damn weirdest of all Godzilla films, and it puts in a superlative argument for being the god-damn weirdest giant monster movie that Toho ever put its name to. This is a truth largely unrelated to judgments of good and […]
Through no fault of its own, Space Amoeba – initially released in English as Yog, Monster from Space, and given the brisk Japanese title Gezora · Ganime · Kameba: Decisive Battle! Giant Monsters of the South Seas – has the feeling of a great, epoch-marking film. It was the first Toho daikaiju eiga released in […]
