Mothra VS Godzilla

Raiders Of The Lost Bukkake

Mothra VS Godzilla
aka Godzilla VS The Thing
aka Mosura tai Gojira
Japan 1964 Directed by Ishirô Honda
Toho/Criterion Collection
Godzilla - The Showa Era Box Set  Blu Ray Zone B

Mothra VS Godzilla is a sequel to both Mothra (which I reviewed here) and King Kong VS Godzilla (which I reviewed here). Directed by original Gojira and Mothra director Ishirô Honda, this is pretty much the last time in the Showa Wave of Godzilla films that he is portrayed totally as a menacing figure. Barring, of course, him being controlled by evil aliens but, yeah, I’ll get to that in a future review.

Another thing it shares with both the original Gojira and Mothra movies, courtesy of this particular director, is the slow and ponderous nature of the plot which once again concentrates on various human characters such as those portrayed by Akira Takarada, Yuriko Hoshi and Hiroshi Koizumi. This way of gradually building to the inclusion of the main monster characters can often work well but, as far as I’m concerned, this really doesn’t help the pacing at all on this one and the characters themselves, even the token human villains out to exploit Mothra’s egg, are all pretty dull and forgetful. The only bright spot is, of course, the pop duo The Peanuts, reprising their miniature roles from the first Mothra movie. Alas, their single costume in this is pretty hideous and it’s hard to take them seriously when they are wearing such silly, furry hats.

So the basic plot set up is this. After a mudslide caused by a typhoon carries Mothra’s egg onto the ocean and out to a beach in Japan, it is ‘bought’ by a philanthropist and his naive but still evil co-investor to design a theme park around it. The Peanuts try to retrieve the egg but are left empty handed. Then Godzilla rises from a beach in much the same way that a future George A. Romero zombie would and starts causing havoc. In fact, for a while there he just seems to be stumbling around and tripping over things, accidentally destroying them, until his aimless path of destruction becomes more focused and intentional.

The humans from Japan manage to enlist the aid of the original Mothra, who is near the end of her life cycle, to try to repel Godzilla. Alas, halfway through the first battle, Mothra finally expires but then the egg hatches and it seems she has given birth to twins. Two twin larvae finally take Godzilla down and then return with The Peanuts to Infant Island where they originated.

This one was very popular in Japan but, I have to say, the pacing really drags it down and the special effects don’t really hold up as well as even some of the earlier movies in the series. Shots of the giant Mothra egg on the beach while people stand around it and watch look terrible and it’s obvious from the inclusion of these shots that the close up scenes of the egg on the beach show the only small portion of the shell that the effects department built to full scale. The cracks on the egg as it hatches look a bit better than last time this happened though, it has to be said.

Some of the battles look okay and although her spawn only ever remain in their larvae state, the original Mothra looks pretty good. There’s also some interesting shot choices in the movie too. For instance, one of the shots of a cityscape has the camera panning along, stopping and then going back to a building it just passed before zooming in on one of the windows to give us the establishing shot of the next interior scene. This is quite bizarre and is almost a foreshadowing of the way modern TV shows use the camera in a kind of reactive mode to ‘find their shot’ as a play for authenticity.

Other things of interest in the movie include a scene where one villain punches the other and his face gets really bloody, before he shoots the other guy. And they don’t skimp on the blood there either... which is strange for a film which many might perceive to be a ‘family, kid-friendly movie’ but this ‘adult’ tone is not the last time this will occur in a Godzilla movie, if memory serves.

That being said, nobody even thinks to ask who or what it was that’s got Mothra in her pregnant state in the first place. Seriously, who has a penis big enough to fertilise Mothra? I didn’t notice Chuck Norris anywhere in the movie so this is a real plot hole.

And talking of penises... that’s exactly what the two Mothra larvae look like in the last ten minutes, when they take on Godzilla. Basically bobbing up and down and spraying Tokyo’s nemesis with white webby stuff which looks pretty much like they are... um.. cumming all over Godzilla’s head and shoulders repeatedly. Yep, I wouldn’t mind betting this is where the Japanese porn staple of bukkake really started, foreshadowing it by around 20 years. Never mind The Big G... this is pretty much The Big GGG (and if you understand that joke then you have no right to come complaining to me about the observation and, if you don’t understand it, don’t Google it around kids or at work and don’t say I didn’t warn you).

Ultimately, this film hasn’t aged well but it does have a nice score by Akira Ifukube, although the main march is absent. It also references certain orchestrations and melodies from Yûji Koseki’s score from Mothra, including The Peanuts doing a new rendition of the famous song. So there’s that. Certainly, Godzilla watchers will need to see this one in order to get all the links between previous and future films but it’s nowhere near the best in the series, for sure. That being said, the rushed production and release of the next one in the series, Ghidorah - The Three Headed Monster, brought out the same year as this one, is a fair bit better, if my memory of it is anything to go by. I guess I’ll be finding out for sure soon enough.

Shin Godzilla (aka Shin Gojira)

Let The Sun Shin In

Shin Godzilla (aka Shin Gojira)
Japan 2016 Directed by Hideaki Anno
and Shinji Higuchi
Manga Entertainment Blu Ray Zone 2

Warning: Very minor spoilers here.

Okay, I’m really grateful to be able to finally see the recent Japanese Gojira movie since the UK theatrical release towards the end of last year was practically non existent. That being said, Shin Godzilla reminded me a little of the latest Star Wars movie in terms of my general experience of it. By that I mean there are vast stretches of this movie which are deadly dull but that every now and again (every time that we see some Godzilla action, I would say) we have some really cool stuff which does a lot to outweigh the rest of the picture.

The film is actually a reboot of the character and, I believe, it’s the first time this has been properly done in Japan. Although there have been three previous ‘waves’ of native Gojira movies, each series has usually referenced at least the original 1954 version of the film. This one doesn’t and when I say it’s a reboot it’s pretty much, in some ways, a remake of that 1954 classic.

The film mainly takes place in boardrooms and focuses on the political PR and committee response to the new threat of a giant monster doing a ‘Tokyo stomp’. There are lots of actors in here who I recognised from various movies over the years and, if I could match faces to names from the terribly sparsely populated photo section on the IMDB, I could point them out more clearly. However, I can say that various people from movies such as the Takashi Kitano version of Zatoichi, Tarantino’s Kill Bill and Takashi Miike’s Ichi The Killer, among others, are here and are easily recognisable.

The film mostly takes place in various rooms with either bureaucrats trying to figure out what they should be telling the public or with a pool of ‘professional nerds’ who are coming together to find a solution to the problem at hand and, as the film progresses, sometime before the US of A, on behalf of the United Nations, drops a nuclear bomb on Tokyo in a desperate attempt to kill Godzilla. While some of these sequences are quite interesting, they do kinda get a little dull when you realise the majority of the movie is pretty much just the same kinds of discussions going on. There are not very many true hero characters who go off on their own and get into the thick of the action here... although there are plenty of candidates in this who have the kind of personality that could have carried the film in such scenes. In fact, the director seems so intent on making this look almost like a documentary film that, in one scene where officials are holding a meeting, the screen briefly blacks out and the words “Following abbreviated” are flashed up.

The film picks up a fair bit in the Godzilla carnage sequences but the introduction to the character is a bit of a slow burn.

For instance, I was completely taken aback when the sea creature who starts messing with Tokyo, who we can only see from the back fins and a huge, somewhat out of place tail, turned out not to be Godzilla at all. In fact, it looked a little like one of The Big G’s oldest foes, Anguirus. When his head finally surfaces, I couldn’t help laughing because it looked totally unrealistic with these terrible stuck on eyes. I realised that the Japanese had gone back to the whole ‘man in a suit’ way of doing things which kinda made me happy except... I just found out that the monsters in this new movie is 100% motion capture CGI. So what that means is... they’ve done their best to make them look like a badly made costume but, in fact, they aren’t (go figure). I mean, if you’d have stuck googly eyes on this thing, it could not have been more inappropriate to the tone of what I was watching.

Then came a bigger surprise because, after a while... it turns out this is Godzilla, after all. He’d just not ‘metamorphosed’ into his more familiar form yet... which he promptly does about 10 minutes later. Okay, so the strangely ridiculous eyes have gone but it still looks like a man in a suit (which I frankly love, although they might have been better going with practical costumes instead of using computers). I can also confirm that, alas, this is a much less comical Godzilla, more reminiscent of his first cinematic appearance. So anyone expecting to see him/her jumping for joy and kicking his/her heels together or teaching the offspring to blow smoke rings, as in certain previous movies, is going to be disappointed. This is a serious ‘kick Tokyo’s ass’ version of the character. How serious? Well, there were one or two surprises when he started battling those pesky human aircraft in this one.

For instance, before he starts utilising his fire breath, a little eye shield like an extra eyelid covers the eyes to stop them getting scorched. But not only does he have a fire breath... he also seems to have a laser breath, for some unknown reason, which he uses to slice up hostile aircraft and buildings as he goes about his daily carnage. The best additional surprise though, when you can accept that this creature would somehow be able to shoot laser beams out of its throat, is that the creature’s back spines can throw out an equally deadly laser grid to take out anything attacking from above. This looks duly spectacular and it’s one of the reasons I elevated it into my top 26 movies of the year (which you can read here).

That and the music.

The score combines material from composer Shiro Sagisu with new recordings of classic Godzilla themes by ‘the John Williams of Japan’, Akira Ifikube. So a lot of the familiar marches and menace music that people associate with the series are here for you to tap your toes along to. And, thankfully, Sagisu’s new compositions are, frankly, excellent and just the kind of thing you want to be listening to here. They already sound like classic Ifikube pieces and cement in with the older material perfectly. This is easily one of my favourite scores of the year, it has to be said and probably one of the better scores of the entire range of movies.

So yeah, the film uses lots of dryer, boardroom scenes to contrast with the monster shenanigans and, while I could have done with a little less meeting scenes and much more fire breathing, laser slicing, explosive action... I can kinda see why the studio went with this approach.

Shin Godzilla isn’t, in any way, a hard slog of a movie... it’s just a tad dull in certain places but it really, as I said before, makes up for it with some standout Monster VS Military action. Perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea but certainly something that I suspect will please longstanding fans of the titular monster, for sure. Check this one out if you can’t get enough of Godzilla but, if you are not that familiar with the character, maybe go back to the monochrome 1954 version instead.