Godzilla was having some wee GI issues during this scene. The director was understandably irate. Until Godzilla ate him. After that, King Ghidorah quit whining about his co-star, given the lack of self-control during the rending of the director.
Oh, wait, is that Mothra? No? A suppository tool? Oh, ugh.
Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), with a previous review here, bears little resemblance to the previous review, leading me to think this is a different cut of the movie. After all, the previous review references Martians, while in this movie the extra-terrestrial is a Venusian.
Let’s go with that, because this did not seem at all familiar to either of us.
In some fictional country, the Princess Salno is leaving for a visit to Japan on her obviously model plane. Nefarious forces are at work at home, though, and the Princess is considered to be surplus by the Powers That Wannabe. As her plane flies through the night, a meteor storm entrances her to the extent that she opens the plane’s door and plunges out into the night sky, and the plane, ummmm, explodes, sure, let’s use that verb, moments later.
Meanwhile, that meteor storm brought more than illusions for a Princess. There’s a huge and growing meteor in the side of Mt. Kurodake, a madwoman running around predicting Rodan is about to pop out of his hidey hole, also in Mt. Kurodake, and maybe Mothra’s fairy twins, in town for a visit, shouldn’t take that ship back to Infant Isle, home of their master. Mistress. Deity. Cute pet? So hard to tell the difference these days.
And the Powers That Wannabe are becoming suspicious about that madwoman, enough so to send an assassination squad.
All this time there’s a brother (cop) and sister (journalist) who are pursuing the madwoman to see just what’s going on with her, and they collide with the assassination squad in a hotel. Fun!
Yeah, that rough character on the right is one of the worst Rodan’s I’ve ever seen.
As the madwoman undergoes analysis at a top researcher’s clinic, incidentally revealing she’s the last surviving Venusian and thereby winning a prize for the researcher, Godzilla, having randomly torched a ship – remember? – now wades ashore, while Rodan, a really bad Rodan in any way you want to take that, pops out of the mountain, much to the chagrin of a guy fetching a mistake made during a selfie. Yeah, selfies are not a new phenom.
Rodan and Godzilla get together and … act like spoiled children.
No kidding. And in the meantime, that meteor has burst and the forthcoming King Ghidorah, he/she/it/them of the three legs and three tails, the lightning coming forth and all that rot. Yeah, I’m not cleaning up that sentence, it reflects all the incoherence of KG.
But the Mothra groupies fairies are still around, and, informed that two rather large infants are having a go of it, rather than working KG over, sings a request to Mothra to come and make the kids shape up. Mothra arrives and finds KG to be a real handful, and in fact her, I’m sticking with that gender for what’s really just a giant larva, role appears to consist of being tossed around like a salad. Can she get Godzilla and Rodan to grow up and behave? Or will she die once again?
Uh.
And that’s the real disappointment in this story. In the first installment of this series, Gojira (1955), Godzilla comes across as baleful, almost otherworldly metaphysically speaking, creature with an inscrutable agenda, or at least a lust for destruction. This Godzilla and Rodan are just oversized brats.
And it really spoils an otherwise OK movie, which won positive commentary on its cinematography and something that actually resembles a plot from my Arts Editor, although the special effects are not impressive at all. It’s too bad, but don’t waste your time with this version, either, if you’ve seen Gojira, because it’s just demoralizing.
