The Sunday night, post-fencing tournament, “I cannot but drool now” movie is Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995), another in this long-lived franchise. Once again, we have Godzilla, this time literally steaming himself to death because his nuclear reactor heart is slowly going critical; add to that a positively spectacular case of shingles, and it’s fairly understandable why he’s extra crabby in this episode. His home of Bass Island is gone, his son, Junior, has transformed into the final stage of the Godzilla species (possibly a species of Megalosaur) and is running around on his own, and micro-oxygen has created Destoroyah, a monster capable of turning into a little army of small monsters or assembling into the big monster. He also gets to have some lightning effects.
Yeah.
The special effects run the gamut. On the low end, Destoroyah, especially in component form, is positively awful. In assembled form, it’s not much of an improvement. In some of the Tokyo scenes we observed a marked lack of panic in a city that was supposedly under evacuation order, leading to the supposition that Tokyo residents have become remarkably blasé concerning kaiju running loose in the city. In our own metropolitan area, we imagined such traffic reports as “kaiju backup on I-94 west bound at Snelling,” but we’re not certain that Midwestern stolidness would sustain the moment in an adequate manner.
On the other end, Godzilla with shingles was remarkably effective; Junior caught in the clutches of Destoroyah lingered on the line between awesome and silly. In one shot I appreciated the allusion to Goya’s The Colossus, and it was rather well done.
Story? “Where’s Godzilla? Where’s Godzilla now? There’s trouble in the industrial section! Where’s Junior? Oh, what’s that? Where’s Junior? Where’s Godzilla? Godzilla’s been frozen with lasers! Oh, poor Tokyo! Junior’s dead! Godzilla’s melting! Oh, no! NUCLEAR POWER IS BAD!”
The last one was explicitly stated, no doubt for the defective members of the audience.
Yeah. It was good for a drooly night. If you’re functional, though, don’t waste your time on this drip of a movie.
