Godzilla

Leeds International Film Festival

This week sees the return of the UK’s biggest film festival outside of London! Hurrah! I’ve enjoyed lots of pretty great films at LIFF over the last couple of years (and have regularly promised far more reviews than I’ve actually written), so I’m looking forward to some more.

This year I’m lucky enough to be doing some work there - which sadly means I won’t get to see half as many films as in previous years (booo!). So I’m going to preview a few I’m looking forward to (and might actually get to see) here. Over the next couple of weeks I also plan on watching a handful of the festival films I can get my hands on and putting them up here. Obviously these will mostly be the older one - I’m not likely to find a DVD copy of Russian zombie flick Meteletsa, which is getting it’s world premiere here in Leeds - but there should be a few interesting things to watch. My very own festival outside the festival.

In terms of things to look forward to, though, I’m spoilt for choice. The most alluring horror treat, to my mind, is the sinister looking Mexican flick, Here Comes The Devil (Ahi va el diablo), which swept the horror awards at the last Fantastic Fest. I might actually get to see this one and am already pretty excited. There’s a decent spread of homegrown horror too: Heretic and Before Dawn both look particularly exciting. The latter is a straight-faced zombie movie - something all too-rare since Shaun of the Dead. Whether either of them can possibly match last-year’s glorious bloodbath of nastiness, Inbred, remains to be seen…

In terms of classics, there’s Django, The Shining, King Kong vs. Godzilla AND Return of the Living Dead. All on a big screen! Coo! Sadly, I think I’ll miss all of them. I might get to see Matango: Fungus of Terror though, which should probably make up for it somewhat.

Actual film reviews coming soon. Expect Belgian wheelchair-bound comedies and Canadian SciFi oddities amongst other things.

Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (Gojira VS Supesugojira )

Chopping Mall Video: Watch SpaceGodzilla arrive on Earth and bully poor little baby Godzilla. See below or CLICK HERE! [Video deleted by request from Toho (Godzilla copyright owners). You’d have thought a single teaser scene, linking to a positive review would be free marketing for them, right? No, as we move into 2010, it seems big money studios are still too technology-illiterate to imagine the internet might actually help them]

IMDb

Since I’ve been writing this blog, I tend to watch films with half a mind towards writing them up here. When I’m watching films on my laptop – most of the time – I’m also on the look-out for screenshots, just a handful of images that I can represent the film with. Most of the time this means that, every now and then, I’ll press the screen capture button during a particularly impressive scene, leaving me with a few shots at the end that I can pick and choose between.

When I’m watching a really good film however, I often forget to do this. It’s easy to get so caught up in a good story that suddenly it’s the end of the film and there’re no screenshots. This is a pain of course, as I have to go back and scan through for important scenes or interesting shots.

At the opposite extreme, there are some films where I end up with thousands of screenshots. There are clearly two reasons for this. Either the film has some really impressive visuals (where impressive can mean beautiful, unusual or just downright bizarre) or the film has a ‘plot’ so paper-thin and dull that looking at the pretty pictures and tapping F9 is far more engaging. Sometimes both reasons can be true.

Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla is both interesting in terms of visuals and entirely dull in terms of plot.

Yep, that’s more or less the only conclusion possible.

Tokyo-stomping time

Ok, basic plot, such as it is: the army wants to kill Godzilla. They build Moguera, a giant robot (somewhere between MechaGodzilla and Transformers) to do so. Before they do, SpaceGodzilla arrives on Earth. SpaceGodzilla is an alien mutation of Godzilla’s DNA and has arrived on Earth intent on destruction. They all fight a bit.

There are good bits: baby Godzilla is funny as anything and the bonkers lady who hallucinates Mothra comes out with some wonderful lines. She also manages to lift the bed she’s strapped to a couple of feet into the air using her mind, and then explains “it’s telekinesis – I’ve never tried it before”. Must be beginner’s luck, I guess.

Mothra-hallucinating lady tries to see into Godzilla’s head…

Moguera, in all his shiny metal transformers-esque beauty.

The film has been savaged in on-line reviews by Godzilla-philes, who pick out series inconsistencies (BabyGodzilla looks different than in previous films, Godzilla’s atomic breath is the wrong colour, etc.). As should be patently obvious by now, I know nothing much about the Godzilla series: my criticism is that the film is dull.

It’s roughly split into thirds. The first third is all about the characters. It’s dull, but forgivably so; we’re being introduced to people who’ll be important to the plot, right? The next third is easily the best. SpaceGodzilla and Moguera fight in space, SpaceGodzilla arrives on Earth and bullies baby Godzilla (see the video!), SpaceGodzilla turns on Tokyo. The final third though, is rubbish. The three-way battle is long, slow and very boring; the destruction is fun, but for a climactic scene it drags on endlessly. I’d stopped caring long before the end.

I suspect, as with so many films of dubious quality, this one would be a whole lot better if watched whilst tackling a quantity of beer (or drink of choice…).

To close, I’ll quote the important moral of the film, one as relevant today as it was in 1994 (if not more so): “If the universe is polluted, another space monster will arrive pretty soon. [SpaceGodzilla] was a warning to mankind”

Ebira, Horror of the Deep / Godzilla Vs The Sea Monster

Now with added VIDEO. See below! ChoppingMall brings you handpicked scenes from reviewed films!

Now, I can’t pretend to know a lot about Godzilla. Nor, for that matter, Japanese cinema in general. Or even Asian cinema. In fact, as far-east film culture goes, I am mostly ignorant. This has always seemed a shame - I know I should really make more of an effort - but for once I was thankful of the fact; my ignorance of the Gojira/Godzilla series meant that I was entirely unprepared for what this 1966 film threw at me.

Oh sure, I knew what Godzilla was. Big monster, yeah? Scaly equivalent to King Kong, yeah? Breathing fire, making noise and bashing things, yeah? Whilst those might all be true, I wasn’t expecting quite the level of bonkers fun that Godzilla offered.

From some of the most sublimely ridiculous dialogue ever encountered to a long battle between Godzilla and crab-lobster-monster Ebira that mostly involved chucking a rock backwards and forwards between each other, the film is 90 minutes of well-paced, self-consciously silly, mega-monster fun.

I don’t really need to describe this in any further detail: just go and watch it. It has Godzilla reawakened by lightning a la Frankenstein, a nuclear bomb and a massive lobster. And some wonderful puppetry. What’s not to like?

UPDATE:

ChoppingMall brings you more! Here is a specially selected scene from this film, available to watch on the Chopping Mall YouTube channel. Expect lots more from other films to come!