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, they’re no less bogged down in syllables that look more and more fake the longer […]

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 still images of the Godzilla suit. Comparatively, I’d seen more than half of the 24 […]

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 their reinterpreted version of the character. When the 1998 Godzilla came out and fizzled, it […]

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 part of the Godzilla franchise at all, since that seems to generally be something that […]

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 a point of intense, permanent change, and perhaps not for the better. (As for why […]

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 Dragon in 1994. I have on multiple occasions accused Okawara’s directorial vision of being unusually […]

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 to tell in Japanese, either; the difference there is that the character 対 is replaced […]

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 Mothra: The Battle for Earth. But we’re going strictly by Toho’s official titles here. I […]

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 a problem the single thing most often cited as a damned flaw in writer-director Ohmori […]

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 hey, he was in his 40s at this point, cut him some slack). Though the […]

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, has one of at least three different titles, depending on what country you’re in and […]

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 the accountants. More importantly for the movie itself, it was the first Godzilla film directed […]