“Aaaaaaaaaaaaand in this corner, we have, hailing from a small town in Mexico, just south of the border ….. the Naked Rose!”
Finding Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989) was sort of like finding a Raiders movie from thirty years ago, as I was fairly sure I’d seen all the Godzillas out there.
Except, you know, there’s some definite ambivalence about spending a couple of hours of your life on the damn thing.
Is it good? Not particularly. Godzilla’s opponent is a ghastly hybrid of a plant, Godzilla himself, and the ghost, for want of a more descriptive word, of one of his victims. She was the daughter of a scientist who works on genetic engineering, but is now dispirited and droopy.
Sort of like an underwatered tomato plant. Yeah? Yeah? Well, aren’t you under-appreciative.
Godzilla eventually wades ashore, so to speak, through an active volcano and making one hell of an entrance, responding to the calls of the cells used to generate the houseplant, having laid waste to the Japanese Navy, and finds Biollante. In the subsequent fight, Biollante is no match for the notorious bad breath of Godzilla, and eventually the latter trots off, deed done. Maybe he’s looking for a thank you treat. The humans try out their latest technology on him, which makes for a few seconds of tension.
But, of course, Biollante is not vanquished, and the process of rising from the dead, besides shocking a couple of ESP-sensitive sorts – this is 1989, after all – who may have had an earlier appearance, or perhaps a series cross-appearance in a Gamera flick, ANYWAYS I need to stop musing on bad stories, where were we? Yeah, that’s a sentence fragment. Stop that, or I’ll make you into footnotes!
Anyways, rising from the dead gives Biollante an impressive set of chompers, I must say.
So, does this match up with the best of Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One (2023)? Good Gatsby, no! It’s just another painful mixture of rubber suits, cardboard characters, fantasies of the day, and a theme in painful evidence.
Genetic engineering is bad! Nevermind that GMOs have never been shown to hurt anyone, and are often helpful.
It’s colorful and action-filled, rather like an obscure American candy: empty calories. See it if you’re a Big G completist.
