Original Release: July 5th, 2018
Oh, you thought the previous Godzilla movies were drug trips? You haven’t seen anything yet.
This movie is… odd. It’s a definite step up from All Monsters Attack (aka Godzilla’s Revenge) but it’s certainly not great. It’s an okay movie that features some really weird scenes, including a strange animated sequence partway through.
It’s also oddly horrifying, considering that this was released in the height of the ‘Godzilla is for kids’ era of the franchise. Such as the scene in which Hedorah reduces an entire street of people (except for one kid) into skeletons via toxic acid in the air. It’s surprisingly graphic for a 70s movie.
Then there’s Hedorah himself.
He’s a pretty cool and mildly frightening monster. Since he’s literally mutated garbage given godly powers, he’s a gigantic walking mess. This makes him fun to look at, let alone fun to watch in action. Plus, he was the first monster in the franchise to actually evolve over the course of the film, going from this…
To this…
To this…
Over the course of the film. This evolution system wouldn’t be used often, but it would come back later for Destroyah in the Heisei period and even Shin Godzilla. So yeah… it was only kind of a big deal.
But forget all that. There’s one thing that makes this movie stand out. One thing that elevates this movie from an alright but weird one to a spectacular one.
The flying scene.
If nothing else, watch this movie just to see this scene. I assure you, it’s the most glorious thing you will ever watch in any of these movies.
