Here’s where I blow what middling B-movie/genre film fan credibility I have by admitting that I don’t enjoy Japanese monster movies. Or, as their often called, kaiju movies (“kaiju” being Japanese for “talk-fest”, I suppose). Maybe I’m uncultured. Maybe I just haven’t seen the right ones. I’m an asshole, but I’m not the kind of asshole who considers himself an authority on anything. I’m wrong all of the time. Just ask my local police department.
So, to start on a positive note, here’s what I like about kaiju flicks: Rubber suit monsters? Cool with me. Total mass destruction? I’m down. Those cool primitive effects where the monsters shoot fire or energy beams out of their faces? I can dig it. Some of the campy characters (such as this film’s “spacemen from the third planet” in full-on Ed Wood-level silver jumpsuits)? Neat-o mosquito, I say.
As for the bad stuff, it’s mostly the lumpy pacing. Giant beasts are about to stomp all over Tokyo again and nobody can stop talking and talking then talking some more about it.
I even don’t care much for the first Godzilla movie from 1954 that people say is a classic, so I’m not exactly over the moon about the fifteenth film in the series.
Anyway, you get not only Godzilla here, but you also get Mechagodzilla (aka robot Godzilla) and the Titanasaurus (a giant underwater dinosaur who’s been eating passing submarines for breakfast) and a mad scientist villain who looks like Colonel Sanders.
The excitement is killing me.