Showing posts with label Angillas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Angillas. Show all posts

Thursday, June 16, 2016

"Destroy All Monsters" (1968) d/ Ishiro Honda

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Growing up in the seventies, seeing tonight's review listed in the TV Guide for the coming week usually led to prolonged bouts of unbridled kid giddiness, if not lengthy negotiations with the M & P to stay up late and watch, if it was on after that grey, fuzzy area known in my house as "bedtime". After all, this wasn't just Godzilla and Mothra, or a couple of Gargantuas, this was ALL MONSTER territory. Besides the usual culprits: Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and the three-headed King, you were getting Gorosaurus, Kumonga (Spiga here), Manda, Angillas, Minya, Baragon, and even Varan the Unbelievable shows up for a brief pair of shots. That's unbelievable. Read on...

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Remember when astronauts wore this lemony get up, way back in 1999?
In the distant future of 1999, the United Nations Science Committee has somehow managed to rustle up all of the earth's giant monsters and supplant them on an impossibly tiny island they've christened "Monster Land". They're all there despite long shots that make the place look cramped for even two guys-in-suits. Everything is controlled from a subterranean base on the island, until it isn't. On the human front, you've got Dr. Yoshido (Jun Tazaki) dispatching his sixties-tastic Moonlight SY-3 rocket spacecraft and crew to investigate the sudden loss of communications with ahem, Monster Land. Wouldn't you know it, the researchers stationed there have been slipped a gaseous mickey and rendered subservient to a race of pushy alien women in silver lame capes n' hoods known as the Kilaaks. All the monsters are sent out on a worldwide rampage by the interstellar bitches, with Godzilla stomping the Big Apple, Gorosaurus burrowing up into Paris (Why does Gorosaurus burrow anyway? Strikes me as a poor man's T-Rex.), Rodan flaps through Moscow, Mothra headbutting oncoming trains in Beijing, and Manda flopping around limply in London, respectively. We foolish earthlings are indeed in for it now.

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"I removed the transmitter from behind your ear. I may also have elbow-titted you in the melee. Sorry."
While the world deals with its sudden monster infestation, the Kilaaks are building a stronghold under Mt. Fuji. The UNSC manages to uncover the extraterrestrial (While we're at it, why do the alien races all look like Japanese in these movies. Just a thought, I'm not complaining about hot Japanese cooze in go-go outfits, trust me...) plot, and most of the trainsmitters they've supplanted in rocks...coconuts. Basketballs. Yeah. Anyway, with control of the daikaiju transferred back to the good guys, the Kilaaks send for their three-headed trump card in the form of King Ghidorah, who squares off against the whole damned lot of them. Ghidorah manages to bully Angillas some, before ultimately getting punked the fuck out by an Angillas neckbite, Gorosaurus jumpkick (Why didn't he break out this stuff against King Kong two years earlier?), and Godzilla roughhousing, topped off with a silk casket woven by Kumonga and Mothra in unison. Godzilla stomps one head into the dirt, and as a final slap in the face, Minya smoke rings the last conscious head into defeat. The Kilaak's final hope lies in a mysterious Fire Dragon, which turns out to be little more than a flame-engulfed flying saucer, and that, too, is pulverized. Hooray for Earth. Wave goodbye to the monsters, cramped once again on their archipelago.

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"Spare us your lightning, you're about to get clowned, bitch."
I don't wanna sound too much like the kid who grew up into Mr.Elitist Prick, but overall, if you're not into Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra larva, Rodan, Manda, Angillas, or Gorosaurus, there's not nearly as much daikaiju as advertised, hardly enough to merit "All" in the title. And though Godzilla, Gorosaurus, and King Ghidorah are all cool as fuck, nobody's settling in,  in front of the big screen, jonesing to cheer on a flimsy-looking Manda puppet or the perpetually piss-weak Angillas. Not even a gaggle of ironic kaiju hipsters in fedoras. I'm doubting Mothra larva's fan base as this juncture, too. Still, gonna lay two Wops upon it, in any case. Worth a look, for hardcore daikaiju freaks.

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As a Vikings fan, Godzilla did a lot less of this, especially in playoff games last season. Oof-ah!
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Sunday, May 18, 2014

"Chikyû Kogeki Meirei: Gojira tai Gaigan" (1972) d/ Jun Fukuda

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From Japanese corn-eating hippies to giant monsters that converse casually back and forth in English to interstellar cockroaches with notions of world domination, director Jun Fukuda shows he'd come a long way in handling daikaiju action since his first go back in 1966 when Godzilla made a crispy coconut shrimp dinner out of Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. Here, he packs eighty-nine minutes with as much silliness as anybody over four years old not wearing teeny-tiny shorts and a crooked baseball cap could possibly stand.

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"Is that another banana in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"
Unemployed Manga artist Gengo scores a job at Children's Land, where from the top of Godzilla Tower, some alien cockroaches from Space Hunter Nebula-M have assumed the identity of some dead humans to launch a scheme attacking the planet with two monsters, King Ghidorah, and Gigan, a bird-like cyborg with metal hooks for hands and a table saw inside his belly button. The space beasts are controlled through a series of "Action Signal Tapes" as played through a common reel-to-reel. When one of the tapes is played out of sequence (by Gengo and his nosey pals), it alerts Godzilla, who's been hanging out with his buddy, Angillas, on Monster Island. Godzilla raps in Monster-ese to Angy (think: dubbed kung fu voices over noisy scratching, a la Cooky Puss by the Beastie Boys), who swims to the mainland to check out the funny goings-on, but gets his worthless kaiju ass handed to him him by the army. Congratulations on being the only monster in Japanese history that couldn't handle those guys.

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"All of your go-go girls and most smokable hallucinogenic plants is now belongs to us guys, plix..."
Godzilla then tags along with Angillas, and both of Earth's defenders take a hearty beating at the...feet(?) of the interstellar invaders (Gigan has no hands, Ghidorah's got no arms, period), and a nifty laser cannon located inside the mouth of the Godzilla Tower turns the tide in favor of the unwanted guests from space, until Gengo, his black belt bitch of a girlfriend, Tomoko (Yuriko Hishimi), and his corn-munching pal, Shosaku (Minoru Takashima) manage to destroy the control panel, after which Godzilla dismantles his namesake tower, with the power-starved aliens fatally trapped inside. Gigan and Ghidorah get ganged up on, and fly their defeated asses back into space from whence they came. Godzilla and Angillas begin their long victory swim home (Godzilla on Monster Island is a deceiving alt title, since there's only roughly a minute of footage on the island altogether) when Big G turns for the cameras and gives his signature roar.

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"He brought Angillas ?!!? He actually brought fucking Angillas !"
Despite being a lazy, insulting diaperful of childish excrement (Not nearly the worst of the lot, though. Fukuda's earlier Godzilla's Revenge stands all alone atop that particular poo mountain), second only to G vs Megalon for blatant overuse of stock footage, and extensively showcasing well-pulverized monster suits (If you think the Showa era King Ghidorah suit has seen better days, wait 'til you get a load of Hedo-Goji falling apart before your very eyes), G v G is not without its empty-headed charm, that keeps worldwide daikaiju fans revisiting it, over and over, myself included. Along with Megalon, the next in the series, and Shaw Brothers own Super Infra-Man, Gigan remains a glorious drive-in memory of mine, though it's one Wop score on the rating scale feels generous at times, more often than it does penurious.

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As Big G approaches, his ferocious breath poaches the cooked cockroaches.
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