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Godzilla, So-So Solo-Act: The Return of Godzilla (Godzilla 1985)

Godzilla, So-So Solo-Act: The Return of Godzilla (Godzilla 1985)

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return-of-godzilla-international-dvd-coverThe most recent Japanese Godzilla film, 2016’s Shin Godzilla (aka Godzilla: Resurgence), is about to stomp into North America on Blu-ray. Shin Godzilla received an extremely limited one-week run in U.S. theaters in October 2016 — the theater where I watched it ran it once each on Saturday and Sunday morning — so this home video release is the first opportunity most people in Region A will have to see it. (I’ve reached a point where I no longer consider the world in terms of nations but of Blu-ray region coding. “What part of the world are you from?” “Region A.”)

As prep for examining Shin Godzilla, I’m warping back to 1984 and the film in the series with which it has the most in common, i.e. the last time Godzilla went solo, with no other monster in sight: The Return of Godzilla. The home video timing works out well, since The Return of Godzilla only recently had its own digital video debut in North America on a Blu-ray from Kraken Releasing. In fact, the film hasn’t been available here on home video in any format since the late 1990s.

It’s also the first time the original version of the film has been legally available in the United States. When The Return of Godzilla first reached American theaters, it was as a grotesque Dr. Pepper-fueled mutant hybrid called Godzilla 1985. This Americanized version has been heavily slagged for decades for good reasons, but the original isn’t a hidden gem like the Japanese version of King Kong vs. Godzilla. Don’t expect a kaiju epiphany on your first viewing of The Return of Godzilla.

The Reboot of Godzilla

Known in Japan simply as Gojira, The Return of Godzilla was a reboot of the series long before that term for franchise reimagination became popular. It ignited the “Heisei” series of Godzilla films that lasted until 1996 and brought the legendary monster to a second height of fame and quality. Which is strange, since The Return of Godzilla doesn’t look as if it could ignite anything bigger than a tealight candle.

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Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster: The Godzilla Movie to Rise Again in 2019

Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster: The Godzilla Movie to Rise Again in 2019

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It’s been a month since Kong: Skull Island came out and grossed over half a billion dollars globally, so I feel safe in 1) discussing the post-credits stinger without a spoiler freak-out, and 2) predicting we’ll indeed see Legendary Picture’s planned Godzilla vs. King Kong film in a few years. Warner Bros. isn’t leaving franchise money on the table, especially with their DC pictures in a shaky place.

But the movie arriving before the Radioactive Terror and the Eighth Wonder smash heads is promised in Skull Island’s post-credits stinger. Godzilla: King of the Monsters, to be directed by Michael Dougherty and slated for release in March 2019, is the third installment in the Legendary Pictures Kaijuverse. Kong: Skull Island contains numerous references that it occurs in the same universe as the 2014 Godzilla, such as the presence of the monster-researching Monarch Organization and mention of the Pacific atomic test originally targeted at killing Godzilla.

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The Godzilla Blu-ray Flood: Godzilla vs. Hedorah (Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster)

The Godzilla Blu-ray Flood: Godzilla vs. Hedorah (Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster)

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Godzilla vs. Hedorah blu-ray cover

This Godzilla film benefits from historical context, so here it be:

In the early 1970s, Japan faced a crisis from increasing pollution due to a massive, unregulated boom in industry across the nation during the previous decade. Poisoning from sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide created a spike in cases of asthma and bronchitis, and respiratory problems in general took a steep rise. The sulfur dioxide poisoning in the city of Yoakkaichi, from refineries built during the 1960s, was so pronounced that it coined a new disease name, Yokkaichi asthma. This caused a ten- to twenty-fold increase in mortality rates among asthma sufferers and led to a 1970 class action lawsuit. Children went to school wearing cotton facemasks, and in the larger cities oxygen tanks were available on the streets for emergency use. In the seas, poor waste management led to a drop in the fishing industry, one of the backbones of the Japanese economy—and fishing rates have continued to drop ever since. A country that once had nuclear power at the forefront of its fears was overwhelmed with a new horror of toxic waste contaminating the air and sea.

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The Godzilla Blu-ray Flood: Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster)

The Godzilla Blu-ray Flood: Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster)

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After a few years fighting battles among the cities of Japan and facing the hapless measures of the Japanese Self-Defense force, Godzilla got to go on a tropical island vacation and enjoy broiled seafood. The results were an entertaining variation on the classic Godzilla formula known as Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. Or maybe Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster. It depends on how strict you are about Toho Studio’s official English titles.

The arrival of the new US Godzilla triggered a flood of Japanese Godzilla films to Blu-ray, with eleven hitting hi-def on the same day, spread across seven releases. The oldest film on the slate is 1966’s Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, arriving courtesy of small label Kraken Releasing, a successor to ADV Films. You may know Ebirah better under its original U.S. television broadcast title, Godzilla versus the Sea Monster, with “vs.” spelled out for reasons best left mysterious. This Blu-ray is the first stateside release to have the official English title on the cover, although the movie’s title card reads Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster, no longer spelling out “vs.” Reasons more mysterious.

A brief backdrop to this odd G-film: In 1965, Toho Studios made a deal with U.S. animation company Rankin/Bass to co-finance a live-action movie featuring the return of Toho’s version of King Kong. The show would tie into a Rankin/Bass Saturday morning animated series, The King Kong Show. Toho’s writers created a script titled Operation Robinson Crusoe, but Rankin/Bass passed on the idea. The King Kong film eventually emerged in 1967 as King Kong Escapes. But Toho chose to recycle the Operation Robinson Crusoe script as a Godzilla project.

Toho also decided to make it a lower budgeted Godzilla film than the previous entries and placed a different creative team on it. Crime movie director Jun Fukuda replaced Toho’s A-list monster and science-fiction specialist Ishiro Honda. Although Toho Special Effects Department head Eiji Tsubaraya received credit for the VFX direction, his assistant Teisho Arikawa handled most of the hands-on work. Regular Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube was also absent, although his replacement, Masuro Sato, certainly was no B-lister; he was director Akira Kurosawa’s favorite composer and previously scored the second Godzilla film, Godzilla Raids Again (1955). Nonetheless, going with Sato — along with Fukuda and Arikawa — definitely gives the sense that Toho viewed Ebirah as a scaled-down production compared to the Honda-Tsubaraya-Ifukube epics of the previous years.

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Mothra vs. King Ghidorah: Which Toho Monster Will Appear in the Next U.S. Godzilla Movie?

Mothra vs. King Ghidorah: Which Toho Monster Will Appear in the Next U.S. Godzilla Movie?

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godzilla_vs_kingghidorah_91mothra vs GodzillaCaution: This article discusses some details about Godzilla ‘14 that viewers who have yet to see the film may consider spoilers. (Non-spoiler review here.) Viewers who haven’t seen the film should also go take care of that now.

Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. felt confident enough about the almost $200 million that the new Godzilla took in at the global box office during its opening weekend — the biggest International opening of 2014 at that point — to announce a few days later what everyone knew the moment the movie started pulling in heaps of cash: “Yep, we’re gonna make another one.”

We know little more at the moment. In the build up to Godzilla ‘14, all parties involved avoided sequel speculation. Director Gareth Edwards — whose association in a follow-up is uncertain at this time, especially since he signed on to direct the first Star Wars spin-off movie — made brief mention of doing something with the “Monster Island” concept introduced in Destroy All Monsters (1968), but nothing specific. Which means we can all speculate freely and wildly about what might happen in Godzilla Raids Again or whatever title “Godzilla II” has.

The big question about any Godzilla sequel: What other monster(s) will appear? Although it’s possible for Legendary Pictures to go with an original creature — and they did well with the MUTOs — it’s almost a guarantee they’ll negotiate with Toho Studios for the rights to one of the classic kaiju. Toho is reportedly through the roof with excitement over the new movie, so the negotiations won’t be aggressive.

There are many monster possibilities, but most online speculation has landed on two superstars: Mothra and King Ghidorah. Any Godzilla fan would place these kaiju at the top of a list of “must haves.”

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Godzilla (2014) Is a True Godzilla Film and a Unique Blockbuster

Godzilla (2014) Is a True Godzilla Film and a Unique Blockbuster

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IMAX-poster-for-Godzilla-smallNew to Godzilla? Read my 5-part history series.

To all of those who saw the new Godzilla this last weekend who have never before fully understood the obsession fans have for this monster … now you will get it. Welcome to our weird world!

Godzilla isn’t just a massive monster that stomps stuff, confronts the military, and grapples with other monsters. Any giant beast can do that without much thought put into it. Godzilla is a character and a legacy. Even when playing the straight-up villain in films like 1964’s Mothra vs. Godzilla, the Big G is beyond larger than life and something you cannot help but gape at in awe and then salute. What a piece of work is a giant radioactive reptile! In apprehension how like a god(zilla)!

Director Gareth Edwards’s 2014 take on Godzilla, only the second film from a U.S. studio featuring the monster (or, if you ask most fans, the first), is a genuine Godzilla movie. Edwards’s creature isn’t the greatest incarnation to grace the silver screen, something I’m sure he would admit, as nothing could re-capture the cultural magic and hands-on effects work of director Ishiro Honda and special effects creator Eiji Tsubaraya from the classic series. But the Edwards Godzilla is a legitimate and superb version that achieves the gravity of the 1954 orignal Godzilla and the thrilling monster-vs.-monster mayhem of the films that followed it through three eras and six decades. For Godzilla fans, this movie contains the sheer ecstasy of a dream realized that brings spontaneous cheers, gasps of admiration, and watery-eyed moments of recognition. I could not imagine a better way to craft a U.S.-made Godzilla film, and it is to the immense credit of Edwards and everyone involved that, until now, I could not have foreseen how such a feat was even possible.

Even for those with scant knowledge of the great monster except what comes from the pop culture mill, Godzilla ‘14 is as an unusual Hollywood blockbuster. Gareth Edwards and Co. crafted a movie that stands apart from the stateside summer thrill machines as much as the Japanese films of 1960s did from their U.S. counterparts. Godzilla plays at the slow build, purposely restraining the sprawling spectacle until unleashing the finale. During the first two thirds, the suspense centers around scenes where the monsters remain glimpsed, their masses emphasized to drive the action without making them the centerpieces. Godzilla doesn’t receive a full reveal until an hour in, and the movie immediately leaps away after the unveiling. Instead of signaling the opening of the mayhem, the moment switches into the next step of the gradual climb to the plateau. Where many blockbusters pummel audiences with as much noise and pixels as they can afford until viewers feel only numbness for the finale, Godzilla wants to make them breathless in anticipation for the climax so that when it arrives, it means something.

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A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996–2004)

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996–2004)

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GodzillaMillenniumHey, kids: guess what comes out in theaters this Friday? Oh, wait … I have something I need to finish up here. (Sorry about the delay. It’s a boring story.)

Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)
Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)
Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)
Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1996)
Addendum: The 2014 Godzilla

Godzilla ‘98: An American Tragedy

Oh, I wish Theodore Dreiser wrote this.

All right, let’s get this mother*&!%ing thing over with as much speed as possible: Godzilla ’98 stinks like rotten Limburger. We can all agree on this. It isn’t the worst film in the Godzilla series, but that’s because it doesn’t belong in the series and has no business associated with anything with the name “Godzilla” on it. It has zero connection to any version of Godzilla, nor does it make any attempt to interpret the monster whose name it crassly exploits — which is probably the most insulting thing about this massive heap of industrial Hollywood sewage.

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A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1996)

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1996)

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Godzilla 89Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)
Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)
Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)
Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996–2004)
Addendum: The 2014 Godzilla

The Underwhelming Comeback: The Return of Godzilla (1984) and Godzilla 1985

After an absence of nine years, Godzilla smashed back onto screens in 1984 in a film simply titled Godzilla (Gojira) in Japan, but marketed as The Return of Godzilla to English-speaking markets. In modern movie lingo, The Return of Godzilla is a reboot. It wipes from continuity all the previous G-films except Godzilla ’54 and fashions a new continuity: The Heisei Series.

The new movies developed a recognizable style, but The Return of Godzilla looks different from the installments that followed. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka aimed to capture the somber tone of the 1954 original and transplant the Godzilla nuclear metaphor into the 1980s Cold War. The monster, having somehow survived Dr. Yamane’s Oxygen Destroyer thirty years past, heads back toward Japan, squeezing the island country between the nuclear superpowers of the U.S. and Soviet Union. Scientists and the Japanese Self-Defense Force race to find a way to stop Godzilla before a greater nuclear confrontation arises.

It’s an ambitious, admirable premise. The actual movie fails to live up to it, either as a serious tale or as a monster show. While the Cold War background is intriguing, the human action is bland and no character stands out. The exception is the Japanese Prime Minister, whose scenes dealing with the U.S. and Soviet envoys evoke a true sense of Japan’s awareness of it legacy in the atomic age. Otherwise, the time spent away from Godzilla is a stodgy bore of people sitting around talking about all the things they aren’t doing, handled with workman-like direction from series newcomer Koji Hashimoto.

The effects scenes are hit-or-miss. The Return of Godzilla was Toho’s most expensive SF film at the time, and it gave VFX supervisor Teruyoshi Nakano his only hefty budget for a kaiju movie. This translated into a few spectacular sequences, such as Godzilla’s first engagement with the JSDF in Tokyo Bay, and the monster’s showdown with the movie’s special-tech weapon, the flying tank Super-X. Godzilla concludes the fight by toppling an entire skyscraper onto the Super-X. Now that’s how you do it!

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Godzilla Interruption: All Monsters Attack… Because Nobody Talks about It Much

Godzilla Interruption: All Monsters Attack… Because Nobody Talks about It Much

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All Monsters Attack Poster with captionI now interrupt my continuing “History of Godzilla on Film” to bring you an Up Close and Personal look at one particular movie: 1969’s All Monsters Attack, also known as Godzilla’s Revenge.

It seems like an out-of-left field pick, since this movie has a poor reputation among the kaiju fans. As film historian Richard Pusateri says on the audio commentary for the current DVD: “Fans cannot decide if this is the worst movie of the series, or the second worst.”

However, I picked this movie for spotlight attention because it rarely receives any attention. Most Godzilla fans have seen it all the way through only once — probably in the English-dubbed version — and then left it on the shelf. With its chunks of stock footage lifted from earlier Godzilla films, fantasy elements that relegate the monsters to existence only in the imagination, and a target audience of third- and fourth-grade children, ­All Monsters Attack is easy for adult viewers to dismiss.

However, the movie contains elements unique among the classic Godzilla series that make it worthy of discussion. And for good or bad, it does have SF legend Ishiro Honda in the director’s chair in his penultimate Godzilla movie.

So let us go pay a visit to late-1960s industrialized Japan and meet a bullied latchkey kid with dreams of monsters.

The Background of All Monsters Attack

Toho Studios planned to conclude the Godzilla series with 1968’s epic Destroy All Monsters. But their resolution did not hold for long. Although the studio system would not collapse for another year, Toho’s movies were doing less business because of television’s popularity. When the studio heads decided to make another Godzilla movie, it was because they devised a way to make it as inexpensively as possible.

Rival studio Daiei’s 1968 movie Gamera vs. Viras inspired Toho’s choice. The Gamera film (released in the U.S. as Destroy All Planets) used battle footage from two previous Gamera movies to expand the running time and reduce the budget, and it used child heroes for direct appeal to the kiddie crowd. Toho gave instructions to producer Tomoyuki Tanaka to create a Godzilla film for children that made extensive use of existing special effects footage.

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A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)

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Godzilla01Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)
Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)
Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1997)
Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996–2004)
Addendum: The 2014 Godzilla

Sayanora, Tsubaraya — and Sayanora, Golden Age of Japanese Cinema

The end of the Golden Age of Japanese Giant Monster movies coincided with the end of the most productive era for the Japanese film industry. Starting in the early 1950s, the country’s film industry experienced a meteoric rise. The major studios released a combined average of 450 movies to theaters each year. But the growth of television in the 1960s started to erode film attendance. In the late-‘60s, audience levels dropped precipitously, numerous theaters closed, and the studios faced cutbacks. Contract directors and stars were released, departments were scaled down or eliminated, and the studio responsible for the “Gamera” and “Daimajin” films, Daiei, was forced out of business entirely.

Science-fiction and monster movies had it particularly rough because of the growth of television. Popular superhero TV shows offered a cheaper alternative for young audiences to get their giant monster fix. The children who increasingly made up the viewership for Godzilla movies could now see kaiju action daily from their living rooms.

Ironically, the person most responsible for the growth of SF television was Eiji Tsubaraya, Toho Studio’s master of visual effects and one of the four “Godzilla Fathers.” Tsubaraya formed his own independent company, Tsubaraya Productions, in 1963 to create special-effects television programs. The 1966 hit show Ultra Q led to the monumental success of Ultraman the next year. Each week, Ultraman pitted its giant-sized title hero against a new monster. Clone shows sprouted everywhere, and the monsters of cinema screens started to bring in less money.

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