YouTube Free Movies: Godzilla vs. Gigan

I’ll be honest – I had to look at Wikipedia’s long, long list of Godzilla movies before I could remember the title of the one I watched a week or so ago: Godzilla vs. Gigan. I found it, of course, on YouTube, and thought, “You know, I’ve never watched an entire Godzilla movie; this is probably as good a place to start as any.”

So, tell me this is a movie made in the 1970s without telling me this is a movie made in the 1970s:

Apparently, it was called Godzilla on Monster Island in the United States. Not that it matters. All I know is the version I watched was in Japanese with subtitles, not dubbed over in English.

And it was . . . a Godzilla movie. I went into it not really knowing what to expect, and came out feeling about the same way.

It had some interesting moments. Some confusing moments. And some interestingly confusing moments as well.

First of all, this being in Japanese, the character names eluded me. I’m told the main turtleneck sweater-wearing protagonist is a magna artist named Gengo, who is either hanging out with his girlfriend or his mother – I never really figured out which; I have to assume since they appeared to be close to the same age they were boyfriend/girlfriend, though at one time he draws a monster bearing her resemblance and calls it a “momma monster,” adding to the confusion. Despite this, it was fun to watch the mom/girlfriend unleash her martial arts skills on the baddies; I almost wished it was mom at the time, as this would have added to the film’s humor.

There’s also a hippie, an odd theme park called World Children’s Land, and two maniacal people who are either handing out cigarettes or trying to destroy the world. Amid lots of talk of peace – the peace that comes only after destroying everything that’s not peaceful, So yanno, many layers in this film on the “what’s the moral to the story” level.

If you’re not getting the drift already, the movie was silly. A few months ago I watched a preview for the latest King Kong iteration and was kind of bothered by the “human” way the monsters were depicted fighting (lots of punch-throwing and such). Not that I’m an expert on animal fighting, but I get the feeling they should fight differently than humans. Watching this movie I kinda got that feeling as well, though it helped that all the monsters had some kind of weapon they could blast at their enemies by just having the actors stand there with their costume mouths open.

As with many movies of the era, there was an underlying “we’re destroying the ecology, so whatever happens to us we deserve unless we recognize our error and start fixing things” vibe. The bad guys are revealed (spoilers) to be interstellar cockroaches planning on colonizing Earth because their home planet has become too polluted to live on. Not that they did the pollution, rather another species polluted and then died out from said pollution.

I gather from the film that every planet has its own native monsters and that in some way, they’re either there to keep more dominant species in check or to be used as intergalactic weapons if things are going awry elsewhere.

Still better than any Avengers movie out there, so there’s that.

It also contained a scene where everyone was eating a banana:

And they gave the monsters cartoon talk balloons, which were a nice touch I wish we'd see more of in such movies today. But they're not done for children or comedy today, but for Serious Film People who want to see different monsters do the same iteration of destruction and defeat that just kinda leave me cold.