This is the one where Godzilla fights a giant rose. It’s one of those things that is so bizarre that you just have to lead with it. What makes this particularly strange is that this story somehow beat out a script which pitted the Big G against a gigantic super computer, a story which was […]
Read more "Gojira vs. Biorante [Godzilla vs. Biollante] (1989)"I suppose you could say it is a tradition. Although it isn’t too hard to spot the moment when it actually began. When Toho’s first major monster epic, Godzilla, first came to the United State, the U.S. producer added a lot of new footage with Raymond Burr as a reporter (with the funniest moment coming in […]
Read more "Daikaijû Gamera (Gamera: The Giant Monster) (1965)"(aka, XIX) I should know by now that you just can’t rely on the advertising. Consider the movie 19: if you read the plot summaries of the film that are out there (and yes, the plot descriptions you find on a movie site are almost always written by the studio, particularly when every review uses […]
Read more "Nainteîn [19] (1987)"(aka, Gappa; Monster from a Prehistoric Planet) It’s amazing. I know I watched this movie. It couldn’t have been that long ago. And yet I can barely recognize any of it. I’ve been trying to go back and revisit many of the classic Kaiju Eiga films in their original, uncut Japanese form, so I knew […]
Read more "Daikyojû Gappa [Gappa the Triphibian Monster] (1967)"I know, I know, we’ve all said it: Why can’t we have nice things anymore? But I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad if we weren’t reminded what we are missing every once in a while. Take Godzilla, for example. It has been six years since Toho released Shin Godzilla, and we haven’t seen a live […]
Read more "Gojira buiesu Gaigan Rekusu [Godzilla vs. Gigan Rex] (2022)"There have been a lot of Kaiju parodies coming out of Japan lately. I suppose it is inevitable as it has been six years since Godzilla stomped through Tokyo in Shin Godzilla and Godzilla: Final Wars premiered over a decade before that, while the last Gamera entry fizzled badly at the box office in 2005. Clearly, […]
Read more "Daikaijû no atoshimatsu [What to Do with the Dead Kaiju?] (2022)"Honorable Mention (Hey, it’s a giant monster movie. We cover giant monster movies) There is a useful rule of thumb about giant monster movies: Most of the time you are better off ignoring the bits between the giant monster battles. Now I’ll admit this is somewhat unfair: after all, Kong is a great adventure film, […]
Read more "Uktena, the Horned Monstrosity (2021)"(aka, Outlaw Power, Armicron in Outlaw Power) I think the main effect of watching this Power Rangers-style direct to video movie is that I now really, really, really want to see the original 1995 Korean film they stole the effects from. I mean, wow, they look remarkably good. Better, for the most part, than the […]
Read more "Armicron (2000)"This is one of the strangest Tokusatsu films Toho made. Admittedly, that’s an awfully big claim, and there are a lot of contenders for the crown, but let’s just point out a few salient points: Despite what you might think, this is not a sequel to Toho’s classic faceoff between Kong and their own in-house […]
Read more "Kingu Kongu no gyakushû [King Kong Escapes] (1967)"This is one of the rarest of Toho’s Tokusatsu films. But what the heck, I managed to see it anyway. Mind you, while I didn’t exactly see it in the worst way possible — after all, the quality of the film itself was quite good — I came fairly close. I couldn’t find any subtitles […]
Read more "Shuto shôshitsu [Tokyo Blackout] (1987)"
rivets on the poster 