Godzember, 2019: The Showa Era (1954 -- 1975), Volume II

Godzember continues with "Godzilla Raids Again" (1955),  "King Kong vs Godzilla" (1963), "Mothra vs Godzilla" (1964), and "Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster" (1964).

Godzilla Raids Again (1955)
Director:  Motoyoshi Oda

Length:  81 minutes

Kailua appearances (other than Godzilla)
Anguirus

The first thing I noticed about "Godzilla Raids Again" released a mere year after the original was hey, this score seems sorta upbeat.  Maybe this one will actually be fun?  Not that the original isn't fun. You know what I mean, or maybe you don't, I don't know.  "Raids" is the Godzilla picture that introduced another kaiju (Japanese for "big monster") for Godzilla to deal with instead of just more of the usual (stomping on miniature cities).  The second thing I noticed about this picture is that they're working to maintain some level of continuity.  As a kid I never watched these things in order.  Hell, we even get an appearance from Dr. Yamane who was the paleontologist from the fist picture.  He showed up to, once again, point out that maybe we should just let it live?  It's a glorified cameo, basically.   The main characters in this one are a couple of pilots and the girl they love.  Second consecutive love triangle in a Godzilla picture.  I guess that's continuity?

The picture opens with these pilots out tracking schools of fish.  One of the pilots goes down.  The other radios in for help.  The downed pilot is ok though since he finds himself on a small island.  Also on this very small island are a couple of giant monsters engaged in a wrestling match.  The pilot (I believe his name was Koboyashi but it could also have been Tsukioka) witnesses the fight until they (the monsters) push each other off a cliff and into the sea.  So, wait....you might ask "wasn't Godzilla killed in the first one by the Oxygen Destroyer?  I mean, not just killed but turned into bones and stuff?"  Well, that did happen but as Dr. Yamane points out during his cameo, it's obviously a 2nd member of the same species.  Let's just call it Godzilla.  So, that's the species.  No individuality here. Anyway, Godzilla in this one looks almost identical to the Godzilla of the first one.

I thought its jowls were a bit flabbier but looking at that picture I'm not so sure.  His teeth look pretty menacing?  Essentially what we got here is a retread of the first film only this time we got another monster to contend with.  That monster being Anguirus.  Apparently, this is what's known as an Ankylosaurus (I looked it up) which is a heavily armored dinosaur with a low center of gravity (for a dinosaur) and spikes everywhere.  Similar to an armadillo, I guess.  Maybe the "Ankly" prefix is because he's always hanging around Godzilla's ankles.  Anyway, I didn't expect this thing to put up as good of a fight as he did.

So, the plot.  As the Newspaper headlines that slaps across the screen wonders "Will Godzilla Come Ashore"?  Duh.  This time the humans have a not-so-awful plan.  They'll institute a city wide blackout and lure Godzilla away with flairs.  Unfortunately, they didn't count on the amazing prison break that would happen as Godzilla is being led away by said flairs that would result in a giant explosion down at the ol' chemical plant.  Not only does the explosion lead Godzilla back to the city but it also draws in Anguirus as well.  They fight for a good 15 minutes or so and when they're done, the city is mostly rubble and Anguirus is more than mostly dead.   So, we got a pretty good picture here.  A nice follow up to a bonafide classic.  It's moves at a fairly rapid clip.  The human characters are not really more than types, but they're played well enough.  The overwhelming sadness that surrounds the first picture is almost entirely non-existent here but it's not the laugh-a-minute romps these things would later become.  The black & white helps Godzilla become scarier than he probably would be otherwise.  I don't know,  I liked how it ended with Godzilla lured to some ice island out in the Pacific where it's blown up around him encasing the poor guy in ice where he'll wait for almost a decade before they break him out for the next picture.


King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)
Director:  Ishiro Honda
Length:  97 minutes



Kaiju appearances (other than Godzilla)
King Kong (American Kaiju?)

Giant Octopus

Remember how Godzilla got encased in ice at the end of "Godzilla Raids Again"?  Well, this one opens with a submarine accidentally shooting a missile at the ice island and freeing the thing.  The sub then crashed into some ice and the cabin flooded, reminded me of the opening of "The Abyss" where an entire crew drowned after crashing into some underwater cave or whatever.  Anyway, I find it somewhat interesting that all three Godzilla pictures so far have involved tragedy at sea.  Also, why did it take eight years to make another Godzilla movie and, when they finally made another, why make it a crossover event with a giant American property? Well, turns out a producer on the original King Kong film stole a treatment for a new King Kong film where Kong fights Frankenstein's monster or some shit and sold it to Toho studios and they just crossed out Frankenstein's monster from the treatment and replaced it with Godzilla.  Brilliant?

So, how does Kong fit into this story where Godzilla is freed from his ice prison and does...I don't know....he's kinda hardly in this one.  Anyway, some science type guys hear about this mysterious island called Faro Island (I guess they didn't steal the rights to Skull Island) where a supposedly pretty giant monster in its own right lives.  On the island there are some natives.  Probably racist depictions, I don't know.  These science guys (I gave up even trying to pretend to distinguish any of the humans in this one) travel to the island just in time to see the village attacked by a giant Octopus.

I guess this counts as a Kaiju.  They used some nifty stop motion.   It's abnormally large.  That's all it takes.  Also, Kong came down and stomped the thing to death pretty quickly, took a drink, passed out, woke up on a giant raft, strapped down, and bound for mainland Japan.  Almost exactly how it happened in the 1933 King Kong.

So, Godzilla was stomping the shit out of Japan when Kong was nearing the shore.  Kong got anxious, freed himself and swam to shore.  He then proceeded to toss rocks at Godzilla, who seemed more annoyed than anything else.  Also, his atomic breath burned Kong's fur so he ran away.  I guess the funniest part of the picture was the human's placing bets.  "Ahh...Kong has no chance".  So, what we really got here is an underdog story, not unlike something like "Rocky IV" where our hero (undersized, scrappy) has to take on the antagonist (oversized, full of steroids -- in this case, radioactive energy, I guess) on the antagonist's home turf.  What these Godzilla movies have started to teach me is that Godzilla has one main weakness.  You can grab him by the tail and apparently throw him around.  Of course it's ridiculous to think that King Kong could ever do that but he does.  The King Kong of the 1933 RKO picture would have zero shot in a fight against Godzilla.  I think Kong is something like 35-40 feet and Godzilla comes in at around 150 feet.  So, clearly this is not that Kong, can't be that Kong.  They scaled him up, fed him some juice.  This Kong ain't really a character like the original Kong.  He's got the same googly eyes at times.  He even briefly grabs a dame in Tokyo and runs around with her before dropping her, I presumed to her death, not really remembering.

Ultimately, this is the film that told TOHO studios that Godzilla was a viable franchise, just not quite in the way it had been envisioned from the beginning.  In a way, this predicted the Hollywood films of today where different properties would engage with each other or fight it out (Aliens, Predators, Batmans, and Supermans, etc).  Or....you know Marvel and all its phases which is really just a knockoff of Godzilla and all its eras.  These pictures as they'd continue would become more colorful and more ridiculous but I'm not sure any of them would ever top the scene where Kong, looking for another round, parachutes down into his final battle with Godzilla.

Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)
Director:  Ishiro Honda
Length:  88 minutes

Here's another picture where TOHO took a successful property (the Mothra picture that came out in 1961, also directed by Honda) and introduced it to the Godzilla-verse.  At least in this case, Mothra was a property they owned.  I imagine one of the criticisms of "King Kong vs. Godzilla" was about how shitty the human characters were so in this one they go out of their way to make them memorable.  It's funny because they're still not really well drawn out characters.  They all represent types, extreme types.  The truth seeking reporters and the money hungry (also, quite evil) business guys.  The movie opens with a megatyphoon destroying something known as the "Kurata Coast Reclamation Project".  I guess this was just coastline ravaged by years of giant monsters coming out of the sea.  The typhoon also drags inland a rather large dollar sign in the form of a giant egg.  A guy named Kumayama immediately claims ownership.  Kumayama is an executive at a corporation known as Happy Enterprises and envisions the egg as a centerpiece of his brand new theme park (yet to be built).  Also, Kumayama answers to another greedy motherfucker, the CEO of Happy Enterprises (truthfully, forgot his name and can't make it out in my notes).  Another newspaper headline slaps itself across the screen:  "Giant Egg Washes Ashore".  Something tells me "Giant" and "Ashore" are the two most common words used by this particular rag.  Also, what's with a society where something extraordinary, like for example a giant fucking egg, can be claimed by a private multimillion dollar business?  Doesn't that shit need to be protected?  As Kumayama said later, "I didn't see a name on the egg, did you?" (actual quote from the film, not kidding).

So, what we got here is another giant monster picture, this time with a central theme of how greed, as opposed to nuclear proliferation, can be destructive.  Oh, some reporters and scientists also found a radioactive scale on the beach.  Later revealed to be a part that broke off from Godzilla, who spent the first half of this picture napping under the sand, apparently.

So, the big guy (I'm going to start showing him some respect and stop calling him "it" -- I think they clearly gender him in later pictures) wakes up and is pretty pissed off, starts doing what Godzilla does.

Ok, also we got the twins in this picture.  You may remember them from the first Mothra picture or, hell, any Mothra picture.  They live on infant island where they serve as Mothra's protector.  They're less than pint size.  They first try to convince the greedy entrepreneurs to return the egg to Infant island or there'll be trouble.  Instead, the entrepreneurs gawk at these two magical sprites and, seeing dollar signs almost as big as Mothra's eggs try to grab them.  The twins escape and make it to our heroes of the story, the two reporters (well, guy's a reporter the female is his photographer) and try to convince them to help get the egg returned (of course, they agree).

I've always kinda hated the twins but, you know what, I'm starting to like them.  They do a lot of kitschy (term used to describe all Japanese weirdness) stuff like sing songs to Mothra and that's pretty much it.  Anyway, the story:  Godzilla is stomping the coastline and makes his way towards the Happy Enterprises theme park, where Mothra's egg is being housed, because it sees a giant egg that needs stomping and also it hates anything Mothra related, apparently.  The twins and our heroes have little time to convince Mothra to join the fight.  To do so, they need to travel to Infant island, drink some awful ceremonial tea and convince the natives to allow Mothra to fight but, in the end, it's up to Mothra, herself.  It always is.  So, Mothra and Kong hash out their differences.  Godzilla gets dragged, as he does in every picture after the first picture, by his tail.

And here's a better picture of Mothra in case you've never seen her.

So, there's a lot of beauty in this thing.  Mothra and Kong fight for a while.  Mothra protects her egg.  She more than holds her own.  Her special skill is creating hurricane force winds with her wings, keeping Godzilla off his feet.  Unfortunately, Mothra is nearing the end of her natural life.  She fights for as long as she can before succumbing to old age.  It's not often where you see the protagonist die of old age mid-fight.  It's a moment to appreciate.    Of course, she stayed alive just long enough for her egg to hatch.

And, turns out the larvae are just as powerful if not more powerful than their mother.  Oh yeah, did I mention she had twins?  Twins is also a big theme of this picture.  So, these larvae are adept at shooting the stuff that builds cocoons and also hiding behind rocks.  After Godzilla is drawn out to, yet, another island the larvae cocoon the shit out of him and he falls into the sea.  The end.  Seriously, I think the notion of a "kill shot" left these pictures after the first one.  Producers afflicted with sequel-itus, I suppose.  Thank god?

So, pretty good picture where Godzilla unknowingly kills the two human villains by toppling their own building on them and also he gets embarrassed by a couple of babies.  TOHO needs to start working on their endings.


Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964)
Director:  Ishiro Honda
Length:  92 minutes

Kaiju appearances:
Ghidorah
Mothra
Rodan

This one opens in an observatory where some science type folk are observing a meteor shower.  The meteor shower brings with it some joy (in the observing) and, ultimately, some terror (in the greatest foe Godzilla has yet to face).  Although, before this observing even takes place, we're treated to the first use of freeze frame credits in the series.  If you're not familiar with Honda's 1956 film, "Rodan", you're probably wondering who the hell that bird monster is in the credits.  Let's get the human story out of the way.  We've got a police detective, Shindo, who is assigned to protect a princess, Selina.  She's visiting under the guise of being from an actual earth bound city but, later, in a so-so reveal, turns out she's actually from Venus.  There are some assassins on her trail.  I honestly can't remember if these guys were also from Venus or Earth, likely Mars.  I guess it doesn't matter.  The princess fled her home world because it was basically destroyed by the creature that just arrived on earth via meteor shower (I'm sure you can figure out who we're talking about...here's a hint; more heads than two and less heads than four -- that thing isn't even revealed until there's like twenty minutes left in the picture so sorry for the spoiler.

I liked the human/alien plot.  It reminded me of a Bond film, not so much because of the alien stuff.  More because of the framing.  Is this Bond like?  I'm not sure, not the biggest fan.

But that's not what we're here for.  Basically, we got a movie where Godzilla fights Rodan and then Mothra arrives to convince them that they need to team up to take on an even deadlier foe.  More on that later.  Mothra in this picture is only a single larvae.  The twins (yep, they're back) explained how the other larvae passed away between pictures.  I like how Mothra is essentially a collective.  Larvae, Moth, all Mothra.  Dead, alive, still Mothra.  So, towards the end of the picture the giant meteorite housing the titular monster finally burst open.  First we get this:

Then we get this:

So, now Rodan, Godzilla, and Mothra must team up to take on this new foe.  Honestly, a little disappointed that Godzilla couldn't take this thing on by himself.  I guess the major theme of this picture is teamwork.  Again, it takes a lot of convincing on the part of Godzilla and Rodan.  The twins translate for the human characters.

Mothra:  You guys need to stop fighting and help take out Ghidorah.

Godzilla:  Why should we?

Mothra:  The humans need you.

Rodan:  Fuck that shit, what have they ever done for us?

Godzilla:  I hate people

That's the gist.  Mothra says "fuck you guys, I'll do it myself".  Basically she guilts them into joining the fight.  And it works.

Here's Rodan with a "what the fuck have I gotten myself into look:

So, they fight.  It takes twenty minutes.  It's fucking awesome.  These fights keep improving with each picture.  Of course, this one wraps up with a wounded Ghidorah flying away.  Godzilla and Rodan then watch Mothra swim away.  And immediately after the credits roll I like to imagine them beating the shit out each other again.

Holy shit, I'm starting to realize I need these things to get more crazy with each entry.  I've got ten pictures left for this month.  I've never watched them in order or this close to each other.  I'm starting to worry shit's going to get repetitive.  We'll see.