New Movies Round-up.

So, for no particular reason, last weekend was a “new movie special” in my house. A rare occurrence, to say the least. Here then are some notes on the post-2020 releases we covered. 

 

New Order 

(Michel Franco, 2021)

Well, you'd have to go a long way to find a commercially released fictional film more thoroughly depressing than this one.

It kicks off like Mexico’s subtlety-free answer to ‘Parasite’, as a swanky wedding party full of head-in-the-sand rich people is crashed by the feral, green paint-splattered rioters that the media has been warning everybody about for days, prompting their own security staff to also turn against them, with predictably harrowing results.

Meanwhile, the apparently well-intentioned bride-to-be is out swerving roadblocks, trying to obtain urgent medical care for the wife of a former domestic servant. Long story short, she is captured by a cartel of rogue soldiers, who are taking advantage of the new martial law regime to orchestrate their own mass kidnapping operation, based out of a disused prison building.

Rape, torture and general dehumanisation ensues, until the bride’s brother and fiancé- fresh from burying their dead after the wedding massacre - take the ransom demands to the family’s high level military-industrial connections, who proceed to close down the embarrassing rogue element within their ranks the only way they know how: by killing absolutely everyone involved, including the prisoners, and framing the poor, long-suffering working class family whom the bride was initially trying to help for her kidnap and murder. They are executed. The End.

Jesus. I perhaps should have put in a spoiler warning before the above paragraphs, but to be honest, it’s clear within the first five minutes that nothing nice is going to happen to anyone here; the remaining screen time is just an exercise in delineating the precise detail of how their lives are going to be destroyed.

Basically comprising a blandly restaged mega-mix of assorted terrible situations which have occurred in different regions of the world in recent years, liberally spiced with older visual references to the Mexican and French revolutions, Michel Franco’s film offers little thematic nuance, no glimmer of hope, no trace of human warmth - just a relentless parade of middle class nightmare fuel and craven injustice.

Normally, I’m inclined to at least give these kind of short-sharp-shock dystopian atrocity films props for their ability to shake viewers out of their complacency and so forth, but in this case… well, let’s just say, if you want to find out about the distressing consequences of the growing disparity between rich and poor or the dangerous slide toward corrupt authoritarianism across the globe, there are a wealth of documentaries and activist films out there which can give you the skinny on that. Given that you’ll emerge feeling like crap either way, I daresay they would constitute a more useful viewing experience than Franco’s rather slick and emotionally detached outburst of one-note rage.

At least he has the decency to cram it all into less than ninety minutes, but that’s still longer than I really wished to spend being battered with the “LIFE IS SHIT” stick. 

 

Slash/Back 

(Nyla Innuksuk, 2022)

Now this one on the other hand, I really liked!

Basically, what we've got here is ‘Over the Edge’ meets ‘The Thing’, shot in an Inuit fishing village just south of the Artic Circle, where a gang of bored teenage girls are forced to defend their community against body-hopping alien monsters whilst their parents are off getting drunk at a square dance.

Things are very nearly ruined by some absolutely terrible CGI animals, mixed with scarcely-much-better, “guy in a Halloween mask” level practical effects... but, given that the horror aspect of the film is soft-pedalled throughout, none of this really matters too much.

Really, the alien/monster stuff is just an excuse to get the girls into tense and scary situations, allowing their characters and relationships to morph and reshape themselves under pressure, and allowing them to use their combined ‘ancient hunting culture + modern digital teen’ style moxie to fight back against the invaders. All of which is handled just beautifully by first-time director Innuksuk and the teenage cast, and is really where the film excels.

The remote setting is an unusual and compelling one for an action/adventure story, giving us a lot of casual insight into 21st century life as experienced by indigenous peoples in Canada’s far north along the way, and all four of the central characters are just awesome. They speak and behave like real teenagers, but are also hugely likeable and super-cool - a very difficult balance to pull off, but ‘Slash/Back’ nails it 100%. (Again, I'm reminded of Jonathan Kaplan’s classic ‘Over The Edge’ (1979) in this regard.)

I guess this is more-or-less teen-friendly viewing, but its approach to the material is in no way condescending or juvenile, and it’s easy to imagine that viewers in the girls’ own age group would get a real kick out of seeing them band together to kick ass with hunting rifles and giant choppers whilst protecting their younger sublings from harm, making this a solid “family movie night” recommendation for anyone out there with kids.

Fun, heart-warming low key stuff,  this certainly made for a perfect palate-cleanser after the joyless slog of ‘New Order’. I mean, if kids like this are growing up out there in the frozen North (and aspiring filmmakers presumably a mere couple of the generations older are casting them in cool movies), maybe there’s hope for the human race after all, y’know?

 

Enys Men

(Mark Jenkin, 2023)

Ostensibly the latest self-proclaimed “folk horror” / hauntological hang-out movie to receive a big push from the BFI and big hype from the hipper end of the media here in the UK, it’s probably fair to say that filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s second feature as director takes a rather different approach to this kind of genre-adjacent territory to the Stricklands and Wheatleys of this world.

I haven’t seen Jenkin’s previous film ‘Bait’, but I became interested in checking this one out after reading that he still shoots using a 16mm bolex without sync sound, processing the resulting footage in his kitchen sink and single-handedly foleying the entire soundtrack - a statement of DIY intent which I find both appealing and intriguing, given that I’m sure he could have easily wrangled professional level production values off the back of his first film’s success, had he wished to.

And indeed, this notion of filmmaking reinvented as a kind of rural handicraft can be strongly felt throughout ‘Enys Men’, with the director’s focus often seeming to dwell less on the elliptical tale of a woman (Jenkin’s partner Mary Woodvine) residing alone on a fictional Cornish island observing a copse of rare flowers (in 1973, natch), and more on the windswept vistas of the oppressive, rocky coastline, or the richly textured detail Jenkin wrings out of the man-made elements within the frame. (His obsessive concentration on radio apparatus, petrol generators, kettles and the like suggests a sense of bone-deep analogue fetishism which I suspect it will be difficult for any of us pre-digital relics to fully begrudge.)

All of this looks absolutely beautiful, needless to say, rendered uncanny and weirdly subjective by heavy layers of grain, flashes of over-saturation and other assorted artefacts of Jenkins’ determinedly lo-fi technique, whilst the director’s own score - seemingly conjured up from a bunch of found sounds and radio static filtered through some pedals - furthers the homemade vibe.

I also enjoyed the way in which Jenkin maps out the topography of his imaginary island using carefully framed bits of mainland - a process which put me in mind of certain ‘70s Jess Franco films - whilst the film’s ominous use of abandoned mine workings allowed me to loosely place it within the canon of earlier “Cornish horror”, alongside Doctor Blood’s Coffin, ‘Plague of the Zombies’ and Mike Raven's ‘Crucible of Terror’, which pleased me no end.

Not that there’s a great deal of explicit horror stuff here, it must be said… or indeed much in the way of a clearly delineated series of events at all, really. Though the film is densely packed with images and movement (the inability of the bolex to extend shots beyond thirty seconds probably helps in that regard), the narrative information we are given eventually becomes so oblique, contradictory and chronologically disjointed that each viewer will probably emerge with their own interpretation of exactly what the hell is going on here… which is probably just as it should be.

In fact, ‘Enys Men’ fulfils its function as a kind of ‘mystery film’ with a rare intelligence and lack of pretention, allowing images and sounds to function like pieces of a cursed jigsaw puzzle, never quite fitting together into a satisfying, coherent whole, but suggesting a wealth of strange and intriguing patterns along the way.

As such, I suspect many viewers lured in by the hype surrounding the film’s release will find themselves left cold and irritated by the whole experience, and I certainly wouldn't blame them for that. It’s not exactly what you’d call a ‘film for everyone’, that’s for sure.

Personally speaking though, whilst it didn’t have a huge emotional impact on me, I still really enjoyed it on a meditative/aesthetic level, simply because the stuff it’s made out of (grainy 16mm footage of craggy headlands, deconstructed fragments of M.R. James-esque ghost stories, eerie coastal ruins, retro-‘70s lo-fi experimentalism) always really appeals to me. After all, I’m only a few years younger than Jenkin, I grew up in a broadly similar environment, and I suspect that some of the same bone-deep connection he clearly feels to this material must carry over to some extent. Your own ability to tune into the same wavelength may vary, but that’s just fine.

Horror Express: It! The Terror From Beyond Space (Edward L. Cahn, 1958)

If the fact that much of the first half of Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s original script for Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ was borrowed from Mario Bava’s ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965) has been widely acknowledged by this point in time, it seems to have been less frequently observed that a significant amount of the material in the second half of Scott’s film (the ‘monster loose on the ship’ stuff) comes to us direct from this little number – an admirably straight-up SF-horror programmer, made for peanuts in 1958, and likely selling a great many more of them as it proceeded to blow the minds of monster kids around the globe in these good ol’ triple feature matinees and suchlike.

In the far-flung future of 1973(!), a moustached official addressing a press conference in a disconcertingly cramped looking White House briefing room sets the scene for us. Earth has lost contact with the first manned mission to Mars shortly after it landed, and a shiny, lava lamp-shaped rescue ship has been dispatched upon its wobbly, sparkler-powered way to see what gives.

We re-join the crew of this rescue ship shortly before they once again depart from the red planet, having picked up the sole survivor of the earlier expedition, Colonel Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), who claims that the rest of his crew were killed by an unseen monster of some kind. Disregarding this fantastic story, the rescue ship guys naturally figure that he must have murdered his crewmates in order to maximise his own chances of survival after their ship crashed, and are determined to return him to earth to face a military firing squad (so we’re told?!). Before take-off however, there’s some brief faffing about with someone accidentally leaving the loading bay doors open for a while, and… you can see where this is heading, right?

We’re first introduced to the crew of the ship via a series of ‘portrait’ shots which see them taking their positions for take-off and reporting their readiness, during which we note that, alongside about eight men, there are two women taking active roles on-board ship, which seems at least slightly progressive by the standards of the 1950s, don’t you think? [Also, it’s the same gender balance as ‘Alien’, if we’re keeping score.]

Immediately after this launch sequence however, we cut to the mess room, where the men are sitting around the table relaxing, talking about what they’re going to get up to when they’re back on Earth etc [shades of ‘Alien’, once again], whilst the two women hover behind them, refilling their coffee cups and collecting their dirty plates! Welcome to 1973, ladies.

Needless to say, for those who believe that science fiction should be a genre defined by Big Ideas, ‘It! The Terror from Beyond Space’ will prove absolute anathema. Issues of social progress, man’s place in the universe, or the possible implications of contact with extra-terrestrial life, all remain resolutely unexplored here. The film’s monster does not change shape, change size, absorb its victims’ personalities, communicate telepathically, reproduce asexually, become invisible, or do anything else remotely weird or noteworthy.

It may initially hide itself by lurking in the heating vents [ala ‘Alien’], but once it emerges, there’s no funny business with this guy – he’s just a good ol’ fashioned monster, with the teeth and the claws, and the growling and stomping, dragging corpses around and sucking the moisture and/or ‘life essence’ out of them, and such. (“It’s been sittin’ here for about half an hour, just lickin’ its chops”, a trapped crew member reports over the intercom at one point.)

What director Edward L. Cahn (who helmed far too many similarly action-packed b-pictures for me to even begin listing highlights here) and his collaborators give us with this one is in fact a nigh-on definitive exemplar of the Two-Fisted Sci-Fi ideal. Just a bunch of tooled up guys trapped in a tin can with a ravenous, bullet-proof beast - and if that ain’t enough to keep you entertained for 70 minutes, you probably should’ve tried the theatre across the street, mister.

Thankfully, our crew have set out on their journey into the unknown equipped with a crate of hand grenades, a wide variety of small arms, a cupboard full of experimental gas bombs and a bazooka (well, this is an American mission after all, I guess they needed the comfort factor). But, whilst their foresight in packing enough firepower to mount an assault on Colditz Castle may be vindicated by the fact that they’ve immediately encountered a blood-thirsty space monster, imagine their dismay when none of this stuff even slows it down!

Characters frequently say things like “I threw enough gas at it to knock out 67 elephants”, but still it keeps on comin’. They try electrocuting it, setting it on fire, even blasting it with radiation from the ship’s on-board nuclear reactor (of course there’s an on-board nuclear reactor), but to no avail. How will any of them make it back to earth alive? Well, I don’t want to give away the ending, but – just think ‘Alien’, and you’ll be on the right track.

If the movie I’ve described above sounds pretty corny, well, I suppose it is, but it’s certainly no less effective for that. Though clearly very much influenced by Hawks & Nyby’s ‘The Thing From Another World’ seven years earlier, Cahn & co simplified and streamlined that film’s actually rather complex and multi-faceted narrative, boiling it down to its basic essence and prioritising tension and man-vs-monster action over sub-text and thematics.

They were aided in this by, amongst other things, the fact that they had a way better monster suit to work with. Designed by Paul Blaisdell (Roger Corman’s go-to guy for this sort of thing) and inhabited by professional gorilla suit actor Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan (who for my purposes is probably the biggest name on this film’s cast list), this thing is one mean bloody bastard of a critter, looking rather like the Creature from the Black Lagoon’s cigar-chomping, WWII vet uncle who opens beer bottles with his teeth. I daresay it must have really given some kids in the film’s original audience the heebie-jeebies, even as it sent others into paroxysms of delight.

Meanwhile, the film also boasts some pleasingly atmospheric photography and great, imaginative set design, realising the cramped, vertically levelled interior of the conical rocket ship in a physically believable manner which makes for a tense and challenging battleground upon which the men can engage the monster. (Having said that, I also loved seeing anachronisms like analogue clock faces, gas valves, mason jars and hand drawn blueprints making the journey into outer space, lending a defiantly low-tech vibe to proceedings, suggestive of a slightly re-tooled submarine movie.)

Cahn’s direction is snappily professional, and, sealing the deal, the cast – largely consisting of forgotten actors who I can imagine must have spent the ‘50s essaying hard-bitten corporals and/or small town posse participants – deliver a set of performances which are lively, engaging, and most importantly, entirely straight-faced.

A veritable model of filmmaking efficiency, ‘It!’ may not be the smartest atomic age sci-fi movie around (to put it mildly), but it’s certainly one of the most enjoyable and well-realised ventures in this vein that I’ve seen to date, however laughable the buck fifty model shots and pokey White House press rooms may be (got to love the ending, where the spokesman for the space programme returns to tell the world’s press, “eh, maybe we’ll just skip Mars”), and regardless of the hilarity the film’s unthinking misogyny is likely to evoke in modern audiences. As far as simple tales of scary monsters and the square-jawed spacemen who kick their behinds go, this one is tops.

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Kaiju Notes: Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster (Ishirō Honda, 1964)

FEATURING:

Godzilla!

Rodan!

Mothra (larval form only)!

King Ghidorah!

BORING EXPLANATORY NOTE: I’m aware that ‘Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster’ is the fifth film to feature Godzilla, whereas this is only the third entry in this supposedly chronological series of posts looking at the big guy’s movie career. Whilst working my way through the big Criterion set though, I accidentally found myself watching the American version of ‘King Kong vs Godzilla’ (1963), which I don’t wish to review until I’ve had a chance to compare it with the hopefully-slightly-less-godawful Japanese version. [Why did Criterion relegate this to a bonus disc, rather than presenting the two versions side-by-side? Not that it excuses my not bothering to check more thoroughly before hitting play on the U.S. version, but still…] Meanwhile, my wife and I also watched an old DVD of ‘Godzilla vs Mothra’ (1964) relatively recently before obtaining the new blu-ray set, so we took the decision to shuffle it to the end of our viewing schedule and instead get stuck into the next few films, which neither of us had seen before, beginning with the same year’s ‘Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster’! Any questions? No? Good.

1.
After two films which saw Godzilla returning from a near decade long sleep to battle other, pre-existing screen monsters (King Kong, obviously, and Mothra, who had previously enjoyed her own stand-alone movie in 1961), ‘Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster’ (or San Daikaiju: Chikyu Saidai No Kessen [‘Three Giant Monsters: The Greatest Battle on Earth’], as the Japanese had it) marks a significant change in direction for the series, not only introducing the titular monarch of space monsters, but also becoming the first of Toho’s kaiju films to adopt what we might call the “monster rally” formula, as inherited from Universal’s horror films of the 1940s and their tendency to throw all of the fans’ favourite beasties together into the same film on the flimsiest of pre-texts. It’s fitting therefore that, in many respects, this initial all-star throw-down emerges as just as just as much of a goofy, uneven mess as ‘House of Frankenstein’ had two decades earlier.

2.
One of the basic rules governing kaiju movies, I’ve always thought, is that the most successful ones need good human stories to go alongside their monster stories, and if the human-level stuff in ‘Ghidorah, The Three Headed Monster’ is perhaps not ‘good’ in the conventional sense, it is at least extremely weird, which certainly does the trick.

One of our central characters – Naoko, played by Yuriko Hoshi – is a TV reporter who works the paranormal beat for some kind of “unsolved mysteries” type show, and boy, she’s really got her work cut out for her this week!

Not only has there been an unprecedented rash of UFO sightings (Naoko visits the local believers, hanging out with their telescopes on a Tokyo rooftop), but an aeroplane carrying the revered Princess Saino of the fictional nation of Selgina (Akiko Wakabayashi, who later appeared in ‘You Only Live Twice’) has disappeared without trace in Japanese airspace, Mothra’s tiny avatars The Peanuts (Emi & Yumi Ito) are in town to make a surprise appearance on a kid’s TV show(!), strange subterranean rumblings beneath a distant volcano seem to presaging the re-emergence of some monster or other (it turns out to be everybody’s favourite supersonic turkey-bird, Rodan), AND a mysterious lady prophet (who bears an uncanny resemblance to the missing Selginian princess) has popped up in Tokyo, drawing large crowds as she claims to be channelling an alien intelligence emanating from Venus, warning of great disaster which lays ahead for the human race! What’s a girl to do, eh?

Zeroing in briefly on the Selginians, they’re certainly an interesting bunch. With their ostentatious ceremonial costumes and extreme veneration of their monarchy, I wondered whether the country was supposed to be a fictional stand-in for Thailand, but who knows, they could just as easily be ersatz Brits, I suppose. That would certainly seem in keeping with the fact that, inexlicably, the male Selginians wear Elizabethan ruffs at all times, sometimes in combination with codpieces, pantaloons and the like. What is up with this? Had Toho inherited a dressing up box from a touring Shakespeare company or something?

Well, regardless – there are certainly few sights in mid-century cinema more gloriously, cross-culturally surreal than that of some grizzled yakuza actors done up like Sir Walter Raleigh, complete with incongruous sun-glasses, whilst on board a spaceship. For this alone, ‘Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster’ will always have a place in my heart.

In fact, the opening, almost entirely monster-free, half of this film is great deal of fun all round. The strange way in which all of the above-mentioned plot threads play into each other is delightful and highly entertaining, occasionally making me wish that they were being explored in the context of some oddball sci-fi comedy, instead of merely padding out the run-time on giant monster movie.

3.
Since I skipped over ‘Godzilla vs Mothra’, let me take this opportunity to express my undying love for Mothra, and the wonderfully weird mythos which surrounds her. She’s so different from all of the other Kaiju monsters, with her female-coded benevolent, maternal instincts, her extraordinary, kaleidoscopic appearance when in full ‘moth’ mode (sadly not seen in this film), and her ability to directly communicate with humanity via her ever-delightful intermediaries in the form of tiny island singing duo The Peanuts.

Together with the colourful rites of the ‘Infant Island’ natives who seem to spend their time continuously praising their guardian kaiju’s larval form, this all brings so much surreal, psychedelic verisimilitude to the films Mothra appears in – a feeling which is only intensified here, as, in a head-spinningly ridiculous turn of events, she intervenes to act as a peacemaker between Godzilla and Rodan, encouraging them to put their differences aside and team up to rid their planet of the invasive Space Monster…. but, more on that below.

4.
Since I’ve already broached the subject to a certain extent above, let’s get into the potentially controversial issue of kaiju gender. I’m unsure whether the films ever explicitly state that Mothra is female, but I’ve always just assumed this, on the basis of ‘her’ associations with breeding and motherhood (something the other monsters pointedly lack), ‘her’ protective/non-aggressive behaviour patterns, and the fact that ‘she’ communicates via the female voices of The Peanuts.

Likewise, I’ve always simply assumed that most of the other kaiju are male, given that they spend their time stomping about like idiots, beating their chests and walloping each other… but of course, thinking about this for even a matter of seconds reveals that these assumptions are based on nothing beyond the most remedial and reprehensible of gender stereotyping.

I’d imagine the fact that Japanese grammar – in its most basic iterations, at least – does not include obligatory gendered pro-nouns probably plays into this ambiguity to a certain extent, potentially allowing the films’ original scripts to entirely avoid the issue - and indeed, the notes accompanying the Criterion Godzilla set find writer Ed Godziszewski playing it safe in this regard, pointedly referring to the monsters using the non-gendered “it” pro-noun.

Whilst technically correct and politically advisable however, this approach feels cold and disingenuous to me, in view of the strong characters and clearly anthropomorphic personality traits with which Eiji Tsuburaya’s creations are imbued, especially in sillier films such as this one.

If I continue to instinctively refer to kaiju using gendered pro-nouns therefore, I hope that readers will be able to forgive me, on the basis that these films were produced in an era when such stereotyping of gender roles was baked into culture and went largely unquestioned. And because I mean, life is basically just feel a lot more fun when Godzilla is a dude, right…?

5.
Meanwhile, King Ghidorah (who is definitely a ‘he’ – I mean, he’s a KING, right?) definitely gets a fantastic build up here for his inaugural appearance – one of film’s strongest dramatic moments (not that that’s saying much) comes when Princess Saino, channelling the survivors of the lost Venusian civilisation, tells us of how Ghidorah single-handedly laid waste to the entirety of Venus, a planet housing a civilisation far in advance of our own.

I mean, Japan’s government may have had some fun and games with Godzilla and the gang in the past, but this SOB must he on a whole other level, surely – I mean, he’s a goddamned PLANET EATER, for goodness sake.

And, happily, his inaugural appearance in the film does not disappoint. Surely one of Tsuburaya’s most impressive and elaborate creations, King Ghidorah initially looks like the kind of thing which might have stalked Ray Harryhausen’s dreams after a few too many brandies, but he becomes even more remarkable once we realise that, like his fellow monsters, he has actually been rendered at man-in-a-suit scale rather than as stop motion, with the suit’s primary occupant – who is frequently required to hang suspended in mid-air above the film’s miniaturised sets - assisted by a small army of off-screen puppeteers, helping co-ordinate the movements of heads, wings and tails. Pretty incredible stuff!

6.
It’s a great shame therefore that the promise of this terrifying new global threat is squandered in the film’s final act, via a lacklustre and absurdly goofy final confrontation which seems liable to have left many fans hoping for a death-defying, destructo-monster showdown feeling distinctly short-changed.

In fact, in contrast to the film’s rather complex and bizarre human storyline, little effort seems to have been put into the parallel monster narrative. Godzilla and Rodan both just sort of pop up out of nowhere, for no particular reason (although I did like the way latter emerges from an apparently genuine, shot-on-location smoking volcano), and begin half-heartedly knocking lumps out of each other, just because… well, it’s what they do, right? Mothra meanwhile is only on the scene because, as mentioned, her avatars The Peanuts have travelled to Tokyo to appear on a TV show, granting the wish of some adorable young tykes whose main dream in life – as they loudly proclaim when asked - is to meet Mothra.

If Godzilla’s pattern of behaviour in previous films put me in mind of a giant cat, here he and Rodan seem more like bored children, squabbling in the playground in the last few minutes before the bell rings. Hanging about on a (conveniently uninhabited) battleground in the shadow of Mt Fuji, they basically spend their time leering and throwing rocks at each other, until Mothra (in larval form) turns up to try to convince them to put their differences aside and join forces to save humanity from the invading space monster.

Not only does this turn of events introduce us to the frankly ludicrous notion that these very different species of prehistoric monster share similar gifts of reasoning and language, we’re also apparently expected to believe that they all understand the same language – and, furthermore, it’s our language (which is to say, Japanese).

I recall watching (I think) the much later ‘Godzilla vs Gigan’ (1972) a few years back, and being absolutely appalled by the fact that the filmmakers were sufficiently disrespectful as to make Godzilla actually speak. Perhaps I should have withheld my scorn however, because here we are, nearly a decade earlier, in a movie ostensibly directed by the great Ishiro Honda himself, and the Big G and his pals are already chatting away like nobody’s business.

“Myuh, myuh myuh, we don’t want to help the humans, they’re always being mean to us, they’re a bunch of jerks,” seems to be Godzilla and Rodan’s basic position, and Mothra is like, “fine then, see if I care”. So King Ghidorah flies in, and Mothra, stuck in larval form, starts trying to fight him, getting pretty badly beaten in the process. At which point, Godzilla and Rodan are like, “hey, that big kid from another school is beating up our fellow earth-monster, let’s get him!!” And so, they change their tune and proceed to help dispatch the unspeakably mighty, literally planet-destroying Space Monster by means of knocking him about for a few minutes and kicking him up the arse, prompting him to fly away in shame, multiple tails between his legs.

Hurray, the world is saved, and everybody rejoices, as the human powers-that-be seem content to let previously city-crushing behemoths G and R loll about unmolested in a big field, because they’re heroes now, I suppose.

Ye gods – what is this rubbish? Only the fifth entry in the Godzilla canon, immediately following the extremely good ‘Godzilla vs Mothra’, and our kaiju have already been downgraded from dread-dripping stand-ins for the existential threat of nuclear war and natural disaster to the level of bickering, Saturday morning kid’s TV puppets. What comes next, I dread to think.

7.
Having said all that though, I couldn’t help but love the fact that Godzilla’s first spoken word is that all-purpose, impossible-to-really-transliterate Japanese exclamation / curse pronounced somewhat like “kyiiisurre”. Frequently heard in yakuza movies, this is often translated as “fuck” or “goddamnit”, but Criterion’s subtitles here simply went with “BASTARDS!”. For all the nonsense outlined above, someone clearly still understood the big dude’s personality pretty well.