kaiju

Son of Godzilla (1967)

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Godzilla’s titular offspring in the 1967 kaiju comedy Son of Godzilla doesn’t officially have a name, or at least he didn’t yet. Between the film’s release and the character’s return in the following year’s Destroy All Monsters, Toho held a contest for Godzilla fans to name the reptilian tyke, and the world settled on the name “Minilla,” a portmanteau of “Mini” and “Godzilla”. In his initial appearance, however, he’s only referred to as “Baby Godzilla” by the humans on the ground gazing up at his towering, toddling glory. Minilla has gone on to become a viciously hated name within the larger, ongoing Godzilla fandom. He’s cited in online sources as Godzilla’s “adopted son,” but I’m not sure that his initial appearance backs that detail up either. In Son of Godzilla, Baby Godzilla is prematurely hatched from a mysterious egg when his nest is discovered by gigantic mantises (Kamakuras) looking for an easy meal. Before he can gather the strength to flee, he is immediately rescued by Godzilla, who is summoned by his pathetic cries for help. There is no appearance or mention of a mother figure who might have laid that egg, but the scientists & freelance reporter watching from the ground all immediately refer to Godzilla as the pitiful creature’s father. The King of Monsters takes on that responsibility with enough gusto that the question of their biological relation is beside the point. Godzilla teaches Baby Godzilla how to breathe fire and how to rule over the giant bugs that infest the small island where he hatched, like a dad teaching his son how to play catch or how to change a car’s engine oil. It’s all very cute, assuming that you can stand looking directly at the mini-Godzilla’s craggly face.

Baby Godzilla is cute in the exact way that a pathetically ugly rescue dog is cute. Every bumbling minute spent with him is a gift, since it’s a miracle he wasn’t immediately put down. When the giant mantises poke at his freshly hatched body, all he can do is roll around in the dirt like a waterlogged roast turkey that fell off the kitchen table. Minilla has neither a name nor a neck in his first appearance, the latter of which presumably develops during puberty for his species. He falls down constantly, he squawks like an injured donkey, and his every movement is scored as if he were an overweight clown trying to squeeze himself into an impossibly tiny car. I love him. The great thing about Godzilla movies is that they are, at their very least, 2-for-1 creature features that double the number of rubber-suited monsters you’d expect to see in an equivalent Roger Corman cheapie. Whether Godzilla’s fighting a three-headed hell beast, a giant crawfish, or a sentient pile of trash, you’re getting at least two monsters for the price of one. For its part, Son of Godzilla offers you four giant beasts: Godzilla himself (who graciously appears less than a minute into the opening scene), the aforementioned glowing-eyed Kamakura mantises, a giant spider named Kumonga and, the most unholy abomination of all, Baby Godzilla. That’s a lot of bang for your buck, so it’s a little silly that dedicated fans of the series waste so much energy complaining about this outing just because they have to babysit Godzilla’s uggo offspring to get to the good stuff. Not even Godzilla bodyslamming Kamakuras to death and then lighting their mantis corpses on fire is enough to overcome the film’s reputation as Kiddie Junk, à la Godzilla vs Megalon. Pity.

As always, the human drama in the periphery of these kaiju battles is mostly an afterthought. Director Jun Fukuda continues the fun island hangout vibe he previously established in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, putting in a bare-minimum effort to connect the kaiju shenanigans to an obligatory environmental message. A secret collective of environmental scientists has taken over a small island off the Japanese coast to conduct experiments in controlling the weather, in preparation for future climate change & overpopulation crises. Mysterious machines whir in the background while the scientists float balloons full of experimental chemical compounds into the atmosphere that can adjust the local temperature on demand. A freelance journalist crashes the party but ultimately doesn’t find these experiments nefarious, so he casually joins the crew as a cook (and a potential lover for the island’s sole resident, who lurks in the nearby jungle). The weather machine business does eventually come in handy in two ways, though. It offers Godzilla some miniature structures to knock down, as is his wont, and it sets up a graphically beautiful conclusion in which the scientists trigger a snowstorm that freezes Godzilla & Baby Godzilla into forced hibernation. The final image is of the parent & child huddling for warmth as they’re buried alive in snow, while the scientists escape the island via raft and congratulate themselves on a humane resolution to the monster attacks. Admittedly, they do find a way to escape without killing Godzilla’s baby, but I still found the image to be hauntingly sad. Baby Godzilla has a fucked up little face that only a parent could love, and Son of Godzilla vividly illustrates that cold isolation from an otherwise unkind world in its final minute. It’s almost enough to make you cry.

-Brandon Ledet

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)

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There are many ways in which the Louisiana education system is an embarrassing disaster. We often rank at the stank-ass bottom of US states in our education metrics, with a long history of political corruption, racial segregation, and religious privatization getting in the way of any progress towards improvement. So, I feel it’s totally legitimate to blame that system for the fact that I have been living in Louisiana for four decades and have never once seen the movie where Godzilla fights a giant crawfish. There should be annual screenings of Ebirah, Horror of the Deep in every local middle school. It should be as integral to Southeast Louisiana culture as The Blue Dog, “You Are My Sunshine,” and “They All Ask’d for You.” Godzilla fights a giant crawfish in it, for God’s sake. The school system has failed us yet again.

Part of the reason why Ebirah is missing from local syllabi is that the exact species of its titular crustaceous monster is up for debate. Most kaiju scholarship cites Ebirah as the middle ground between a shrimp and a lobster, citing that the “ebi” section of its name is interchangeable in reference to either shrimp or lobster in Japanese. It’s a compelling aural argument, but I also have eyes and, as a lifelong Louisiana resident, I know a crawfish when I see one. Ebirah enters Horror of the Deep claw first, smashing a fishing boat with its dominant limb to tease the mystery of what kind of giant crustacean it could possibly be: shrimp, crab, lobster, etc. As soon as its body emerges from the water to reveal its full form, however, the question is firmly, definitively answered. That’s a dang crawfish.

The kaiju saviors summoned to de-claw and dispense of this monster crawfish are Godzilla & Mothra, who spend most of the movie enjoying a nap. Returning to her winged moth form after spending a couple battles against King Ghidorah as a silk-spewing grub, Mothra is getting her beauty sleep on Infant Island, while the indigenous people she protects pray for her to wake up and save the day. Meanwhile, Godzilla is thought to be dead while he takes an angry-nap under a pile of rocks in a oceanside cave. He’s awoken Frankenstein-style via electric shock, channeling lightning through a sword and a trail of copper wire rigged to ruin his nap. Pissed, Godzilla immediately springs into action and destroys everything in striking distance, a rampage that includes ripping Ebirah’s claws off and kicking him back into the ocean depths.

Because the kaiju fights are delayed by siesta, Horror of the Deep leaves plenty of room for humans-on-the-ground drama, which it only takes semi-seriously. The story centers on a young man who’s desperate to reunite with a brother lost at sea, since he was told by a psychic that his brother is still alive. His schemes to engineer the family reunion improbably involve a televised dance contest, a stolen yacht, and a fugitive bank robber, only for both brothers to be shipwrecked on a small island overrun with militant fascists, thanks to Ebirah’s boat-smashing claw. You see, a vicious militia known as The Red Bamboo have forced the indigenous people of Infant Island to work as slaves in order to produce a fruit-based chemical that repels & controls the mighty Ebirah, and the only way to stop them is cause a little chaos by waking both Godzilla & Mothra — a scheme even more harebrained than saving the day via dance contest.

Once all of the skyscraper combatants are awake and engaged, Horror of the Deep proves to be one of the more fun, lively entries in the early Godzilla canon — the most playful since King Kong vs Godzilla. Director Jun Fukuda takes over from Godzilla mastermind Ishirō Honda here, and he loosens up the tone with some fun novelty additions to the format. Ebirah’s attacks are often filmed from a 1st-person perspective, shot in Crawvision. Godzilla also fights the crawbeast underwater, a precursor to the zombie vs shark fight of Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2. His reluctant face-turn to heroism is jubilantly scored to surf rock, a soundtrack that seemingly inspires Godzilla to dance. The biggest laugh of the movie, however, is the dialogue exchange where our yacht-stealing hero answers the insult, “Your brother’s crazy!” with the deadpan retort, “Yeah, crazy about helping those in need.” That’s good stuff.

Regardless of your personal Louisiana residency status, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep lands as an especially fun, light-on-its-feet Godzilla outing. I was surprised to learn that its American dub, Godzilla vs The Sea Monster, was given the robo-heckling treatment on an early episode of MST3k, which means the show was ironically mocking a movie that was already clearly intended to be an unserious hoot. That’s not the only American institution that let the film down, though, or even the most egregious. It’s time that Louisianans write their  senators to petition for Ebirah, Horror of the Deep to be screened in all local grade school classrooms (assuming that Louisiana schools can even still afford the AV carts of yesteryear). The kids need to know about the giant crawfish movie.

-Brandon Ledet

Enter King Ghidorah

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There’s just no way around it; King Ghidorah is the most heavy metal monster in movie history. I mean that in the literal sense, since the supreme kaiju being is seemingly armored by a layer of gold scales, making his “heavy metal” designation as matter-of-fact as Mechagodzilla‘s. Of course, I also mean it in the colloquial sense. The three-headed dragon beast is loudly & proudly metal as fuck on a cellular level. When Ghidorah flies into the frame to take down Godzilla and his fellow skyscraper flunkies, the image conjures the crushing sounds of heavy-metal guitar riffs in audiences’ brains, even in the 1960s pictures that were produced well before Black Sabbath had a record deal. Ghidorah is so metal, in fact, that it takes at least three other Toho-brand monsters to muscle him out of the pit, one for each lightning-spewing head. 🤘

The first time I encountered King Ghidorah was in the 1968 kaiju crossover picture Destroy All Monsters, in which the space-alien bio weapon was unleashed to union-bust a gang of kaiju that included Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan (among the less-famous monsters Minilla, Gorosaurus, Anguirus, Kumonga, and Varan). Seen out of order in my winding journey through Criterion’s Godzilla box set, this appeared to be an especially grand ego-boost for the giant beast, like when WWE puts over their biggest, brawniest wrestler by having them eliminate every other competitor on the roster during the Royal Rumble. As it turns out, that was Ghidora’s exact funciton from the very beginning, and his debut entrance into the Toho kaiju ring marked the very first time Godzilla felt compelled to team up with other monsters to fight on humanity’s behalf. That Godzilla face-turn was in 1963’s Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, in which evil space aliens declare interplanetary warfare by launching Ghidorah at Planet Earth, threatening to take over. It’s then up to Mothra, in her squirming grub form, to convince Godzilla & the pterodactyl-like Rodan to stop throwing rocks at each other like schoolyard children and instead join forces to fight off this existential, heavy-metal threat. They’re both petty assholes about it, but they eventually relent and team up to repel the flying hell-beast before going their separate ways.

The reluctant tag team of Godzilla & Rodan reforms when King Ghidorah returns in 1965’s Invasion of the Astro-monster. Rebranded with his new wrestler gimmick as Monster Zero, Ghidorah is once again deployed as an interplanetary weapon of mass destruction, one that can only be disarmed by the collective power of multiple kaiju opponents. His inevitable 2-on-1 battle with Godzilla & Rodan is delayed until the climactic 15 minutes of the runtime, though, as the invading Xiliens from Planet X smartly abduct Godzilla & Rodan with UFO tractor beams and imprison them for as long as possible so Ghidorah can do maximum damage, unchecked. Without the large-scale monster battles to fill up the runtime, Invasion of the Astro-monster spins its wheels with lengthy indulgences in political espionage and The X From Outer Space-style extraterrestrial cocktail parties. It’s maybe not the most thrilling approach to making a monster movie, but it does lead to some gorgeous 60s-kitch imagery. It’s impossible to decide what the most striking image of the film is in retrospect, but I’ve narrowed it down to two options: literalizing the Cold War aspect of the Space Race by putting a gun in the flag-planting astronaut’s free hand or Godzilla being abducted by a UFO. Then, Ghidorah soars into the frame to battle Godzilla & Rodan once again, erasing such questions entirely with heavy-metal bursts of lightning.

If there’s one detail of Ghidorah’s design that makes his metal-as-fuck majesty immediately obvious, it’s that each of his individual dragon heads moves independently, which is especially impressive when combined with his suitmation power of flight. It’s a lot like watching Kermit the Frog ride a bicycle for the first time in The Muppet Movie, adding an entire new dimension to kaiju suitmation spectacle audiences previously did not dream was possible. The suit was reportedly exceedingly difficult to operate as a result, often leading to longer shooting schedules as his operators struggled to keep his long, golden necks from tangling like noodles. Like headbanging to thrash riffs, it was well worth the headache. Everything else that makes Ghidorah so thunderously badass is immediately, visually obvious. He is the essence of metal, skyborne and beautiful. Godzilla mastermind Ishirō Honda’s impulse to bulk up the monster’s reputation by making him undefeatable unless several other kaiju attack in unison was a smart one, but it was also necessary. Look at him. No one would buy into the kayfabe otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

Gamera’s 90s Makeover

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All you really need to earn respectability in the entertainment industry is to stick around long enough for the bad reviews to fade away and your presence is undeniable. It worked for Keanu Reeves, it worked for Adam Sandler, and it also worked for the fire-breathing turtle monster Gamera.  When Gamera first premiered in the 1960s, the giant turtle beast was essentially a goofy knockoff of Godzilla, and he was treated as such.  As a result, he quickly pivoted to become a “hero to children everywhere” in a long string of kiddie sequels (before Godzilla also got into that game), so that the original Daikaijū Gamera film was never treated with the same critical or historical respect as the original Gojira.  We all love Earth’s hard-shelled protector anyway, though, so it’s good to know that Gamera did eventually get his deserved victory lap in the 1990s, when he was given a slick, big-budget makeover to help boost his reputation as one of the kaiju greats.  I haven’t yet seen all of Gamera’s kid-friendly sequels from the 1960s & 70s, but I can’t imagine any could compare with his action-blockbuster spectacles from the 1990s.  Gamera’s Heisei-era trilogy is a glorious run of high-style, high-energy kaiju pictures that for once genuinely compete with the best of the Godzilla series, instead of registering as a court jester pretender to the King of Monsters’ throne.

The debut of that 90s makeover, 1995’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, is both the best and the most faithful of the trilogy.  Gamera is re-introduced to the world as a living relic of Atlantis, not a newly arrived extraterrestrial protector.  He battles the Giant Claw-like bird creatures the Gyaos from his 1960s days, who are theorized to have been activated by Climate Change, and his ability to fight them off is powered by a child’s love.  Just in case audiences weren’t sure that this straightforward Gamera revival was inspired by the success of Jurassic Park, Guardian of the Universe almost immediately includes an archeological dig and a scene where the scientist studying the Gyaos shoves an entire arm into their droppings like Laura Dern going shoulder deep in triceratops poop.  It’s the Jurassic Park style mixed-media approach to the visual effects that really makes this one stand out, since the plot and the monster-of-the-week enemies are such classic Gamera fare.  There’s something gorgeous about the film’s 90s green screen magic, surveillance video inserts, and rudimentary CGI mixing with the rubber monster suit tactility of classic kaiju pictures that inspires awe in this reputation-rehabilitator.  We are all Sam Neill gazing upwards, slack-jawed at our giant reptile friend and, then, begging the Japanese military to stop shooting at him so he can save the day.  Every time Gamera bleeds green ooze in his fight to save us, we too ooze a tear in solidarity.

Things turn more horrific in the 1996 sequel Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, shifting from Jurassic Park to Mimic in Hollywood comparison terms.  Instead of fighting off the Gyaos sky-beasts, Gamera has to face underground bug creatures collectively called Legion.  As a threat, Legion can be genuinely unnerving in their Phase IV-style insectoid organization skills, at one point carpeting Gamera’s entire body in a collective swarm.  In individual design, they’re a touch creepier than the Arachnids from Starship Troopers, adding a gross little cyclops eyeball to the center of each bug’s frame.  All we can do in the face of such horrors is to thank Gamera for sticking around to protect us . . . unless you happen to be one of the poor children orphaned by the large-scale destruction of his skyscraper heroism.  Gamera’s enemy in the third installment, 1999’s Revenge of Iris, is the titular parasitic monster that has been orphaned by the turtle’s heroic violence, birthed from a loan surviving egg seemingly borrowed from the set of an Alien sequel.  Really, though, Gamera has to contend with the disaffected child psychically linked to that monster, who lost her parents when Gamera crushed their apartment during a Legion attack in the previous picture.  It’s a plot that questions whether the widespread collateral damage of Gamera’s heroism is worth having him around to fight off lesser monsters, to the point where he has to fight a personified version of the Trauma he’s caused in past battles. We all still love the big guy, but accountability is important.

Of the two sequels, Revenge of Iris is the only true contender for possibly besting Guardian of the Universe as the best of Gamera’s 90s run.  By that point in the series, Gamera’s reputation as something too goofy to take seriously had been fully overcome, so there was only one goal left to achieve: make Gamera scary.  It’s an incredible accomplishment, achieved by filming the giant turtle beast from inside the homes he’s supposedly protecting with his righteous, vengeful violence.  There’s a somber, funereal tone to Revenge of Iris, as if it were clear to the filmmakers that Gamera’s 90s revival was a special moment in time that had already reached its natural conclusion.  Images of dead Gyaos covered in flies and a sea floor carpeted in dead Gameras from Atlantis’s ancient past convey a sad finality to the series echoed in Gamera’s “What have I done?” moment self-reflection when he realizes he has traumatized the very children he sought to protect.  Personally, I was much more impressed & delighted by the spectacle of Gamera’s official makeover in Guardian of the Universe, but the tonal & thematic accomplishments in Revenge of Iris are just as remarkable, considering the monster’s humble origins three decades earlier.  Attack of Legion is a worthy bridge between those two franchise pillars as well, especially on the strength of its creepy creature designs.  Gamera may not have emerged from his 90s run as a hero to all children everywhere, but he carved out an even bigger place for himself in this overgrown child’s heart.  I love my giant turtle friend, and I’m happy that he eventually found the respect he’s always deserved.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Destroy All Monsters (1968)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the kaiju battle royal Destroy All Monsters (1968), featuring Godzilla and all his best frenemies.

00:00 Welcome

01:09 The Craft (1996)
04:20 The Shining (1980)
07:26 Fight Club (1999)
14:47 Malignant (2021)
18:17 Civil War (2024)
19:36 It’s What’s Inside (2024)
28:52 Megalopolis (2024)
40:41 Look What Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976)
49:00 Christine (1983)
52:07 They (2002)
56:45 The Grudge (2019)
1:00:25 Mr. Crocket (2024)
1:05:17 Sex Demon (1975)
1:12:47 Flesh and Fantasy (1943)

1:19:13 Destroy All Monsters (1968)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Rodan (1956)

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Most children grow up with innate knowledge of the main-cast monsters in the Godzilla series, regardless of whether they’ve ever seen a Godzilla film.  Names like Mothra, Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla, and Jet Jaguar really mean something to children, who extend their fascination with real-world dinosaurs to the fantastic monsters of classic Toho tokusatsu as if they were interchangeable.  It isn’t until you’re older and learn the names of second-tier kaiju that the absurdity of that knowledge becomes apparent.  The names Dogora, Atragon, Matango, Varan, and Gorath sound like AI-generated nonsense to anyone not obsessed enough with the genre to collect those lesser monsters’ action figures, but it’s only their general unfamiliarity that makes them ridiculous.  Or that was at least my thought when I sat down to watch 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster for the first time and had to back away because I didn’t recognize one of the monsters billed on the poster.  Godzilla, Mothra, Ghidorah . . . these names all mean something to me, but Rodan the Pteranodon (speaking of the fuzzy border between fictional kaiju and real-world dinosaurs) was entirely foreign.  So, I took the time to get to know the winged beast before watching his official entry into the Godzilla canon.

Appropriately enough, the introduction of Rodan is as an Unidentified Flying Object that attacks jet fighter pilots who have no idea who he is either.  The flying dinosaur travels at supersonic speeds and leaves sky trails in his path, playing into 1950s sci-fi audiences’ fascination with contemporary reports of UFOs.  The answer to the mystery of his body is fairly straightforward; he’s an unearthed pterosaur who’s mutated to kaiju scale through radiation exposure – Godzilla-style.  His mutant abilities can be surprisingly devastating, though, as he can flap his wings with enough force to create shockwaves & wind gusts that level entire cities in a manner of minutes.  Since the monster design is a little unimaginative, it’s clear he needs help to carry the film along, so he’s joined in his debut by a race of giant bug larva with sword-sharp claws that slice people to death on the ground while Rodan attacks from the sky.  The bugs are identified as mutated dragonfly larvae and assigned their own official kaiju name Meganulon, which is well-earned, given than they carry the first half of the movie on their exoskeletal backs before the mystery of Rodan is fully revealed to the audience.  It turns out that even in his titular debut, Rodan was already presented as a second-tier monster and no threat to Godzilla’s reign as King to them all.

You obviously don’t need to know Rodan or Meganulon’s names to fully enjoy the Godzilla series.  Only hopelessly nerdy completists would feel compelled to Do The Homework for a genre that’s mostly just pro wrestling matches in novelty rubber costumes.  The only name you really need to know is Ishirō Honda, Toho’s go-to director for most of its tokusatsu classics.  From the sincere post-war devastation of the original Godzilla to the groovy psychedelia of Space Amoeba, Honda was central to the invention & evolution of kaiju filmmaking in his three decades as a director.  With Rodan, he hit the milestone of directing Toho’s first in-color kaiju picture, which makes for beautiful vintage pop art in its modern HD presentations, especially as the tactile monster costumes clash against the matte-painting vistas of the background.  More importantly, Rodan is interesting as a tonal middle ground in Honda’s kaiju oeuvre.  If you put aside the giant-bug attacks in the first hour, it’s a surprisingly grounded mining labor drama that’s just as grim as the original Godzilla.  Mining-town workers are drowned, crushed, and sliced while their widows wail in agony, making the movie just as much of a political piece about working conditions as it is a pollution allegory.  That dramatic sincerity can slow down the monster-action payoffs in the first hour, but it does make for a fascinating contrast with the screen presence of Rodan and his insect frenemies, who are too goofy to take 100% seriously. 

I am choosing to accept Rodan‘s self-conflicting tone as a feature and not a, uh, bug.  If it were made a decade later, it would’ve been pushed to a more cartoonish extreme to fully appeal to children, which might have robbed it of its interest as a volatile battleground for the sincere vs. silly sensibilities of early kaiju movies.  Arriving just a couple years after the 1954 Godzilla, it’s an early sign of the goofier direction Honda and the rest of the genre would go while still maintaining the brutality and harsh political messaging of that original text.  The least interesting aspect of Rodan, then, is likely Rodan himself, who only earns top bill by default.  I doubt the film would’ve lost all that much if it were just about miners being attacked on the job by Meganulon, so it’s somewhat a shame that their name was pushed to the back pages kaiju history books alongside the likes of Ebirah, Baragon, Destroyah, etc.  I’m never going to complain about getting a chance to see a flying dinosaur attack a miniature city, though, so count me among the dozens of nerds who are glad that Rodan was given his momentary spotlight.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

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The current run of American Godzilla movies so badly, nakedly want what Marvel Studios had in its Avengers era that they’re often referred to as The MonsterVerse, named of course after the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  We’re now at a point where the MCU’s glory days are quickly fading in the rearview, but the Marvelification of Godzilla has just been completed.  After a few standalone stylistic experiments that mired Godzilla in grim-grey CGI drudgery and drafted his longtime frenemy King Kong into the Vietnam War, the two towering kaiju have been teamed up by their own Avengers Initiative in a couple dumb-fun action blockbusters designed to sell some opening-weekend popcorn and to tease the next popcorn-seller down the line, whenever another one inevitably arrives.  2021’s Godzilla vs Kong at least maintained some of the colorful cartoon spectacle of classic kaiju battles like 1963’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, arriving as a much-needed return to grand-scale filmmaking in those early years of COVID precautions.  In their second shared title, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, that classic Toho spirit has instead been completely replaced by the quippy, zippy action comedy of a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel.  Immensely talented actors Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, and Brian Tyree Henry stand around spewing exposition and inane “Well, that just happened” punchlines while CGI gods fight to start or stop the apocalypse in the sky above.  1980s pop tunes loop continuously on old school tape decks as contrast to the rest of the film’s future tech (including a giant mechanical arm built to enhance King Kong’s already mighty super-strength).  All that’s missing, really, is a talking raccoon, but hey you gotta leave something on the table for the next one.

The New Empire is much more flattering as a King Kong sequel than it is as a Godzilla one, mostly because that series has so many fewer, lower points of comparison.  Godzilla currently has 38 films to his name, while Kong only has 12 – most of which are not tied to the 1933 original.  Within that lineage, The New Empire works best as a stealth remake of 1933’s rushed-to-market Son of Kong.  Most of the best scenes involve Kong taking a young, violent, childlike ape under his tutelage as a mentor.  In an early fight, Kong uses him as a weapon, beating back other, meaner apes with the bitey little bastard’s limp body.  Later, they fully team up as a makeshift father-son duo to take down a Richard III-style mad king and free the enslaved apes who live in the even hollower Earth beneath Kong’s Hollow Earth stomping grounds.  By contrast, Godzilla doesn’t get nearly as much to do.  He mostly just swims to an underwater gender clinic to charge up from blue to pink, emerges to join the fight against the mad king in the final act, and then takes an angry cat nap once everything calms down.  Other surprise kaiju combatants join the battle in the back half, but none are as surprising as the Mechagodzilla reveal in the previous picture.  Mostly, the monsters just follow the same patterns of CGI superheroics we’ve already seen countless times in the past decade, just scaled up to skyscraper size for a false sense of escalation.  Meanwhile, the humans on the ground hang out in CSI-style tech labs, narrating the action like WWE announcers.  Director Adam Wingard does his best to add some style & personality to the proceedings, flinging fluorescent goop at the non-existent camera’s “lens” every time a monster is defeated, but style & personality is mostly just window-dressing when it comes to this kind of four-quadrant blockbuster filmmaking.

If there’s any clear artistic path forward for the American Godzilla picture, it might be in more sincerely tackling the POV of the fictional Indigenous tribes who worship & manage the kaiju of Hollow Earth.  So far in the MonsterVerse, the Indigenous peoples associated with each creature have been exoticized with the same old-school Indiana Jones adventurism that’s persisted in both the King Kong & Godzilla series since their respective 1930s & 50s origins.  There’s an unexplored angle in telling a story from their perspective instead of framing it through outsiders’ eyes, an approach already forged by the recent Predator prequel Prey. Of course, despite including the word “new” in its title, The New Empire isn’t much interested in new ideas or in unexplored angles on old ones.  It’s content to repeat what’s worked previously for another easy payout, whether repeating the cartoonish CGI smash-em-ups of Godzilla vs Kong or repeating the crossover superhero team-ups of the Avengers films.  There isn’t much awe or novelty in that approach to sure-thing, big-budget filmmaking, but there is some joy to be found in its familiarity – however minor.

-Brandon Ledet

King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

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There’s a new Godzilla & King Kong wrestling match in multiplexes right now: a tag team formation of the legendary monsters just three years after their last onscreen battle in the American production Godzilla vs Kong.  Do you know what’s never reached American theaters, though?  The original 1962 crossover film King Kong vs Godzilla – at least not in any wholly intact, wholly legal form.  It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that the 1954 Japanese cut of the original Godzilla officially reached American audiences, with the only widely available version being a warped American edit featuring awkward post-production inserts of actor Raymond Burr.  Twenty years later, that film’s second sequel, King Kong vs Godzilla, has still not yet been made wholly available for American audiences … but we’ve gotten damn close.  In 2019, The Criterion Collection released a gorgeous box set of digitally restored Showa Era Godzilla films, with every title dutifully de-Americanized except for King Kong vs Godzilla.  The original Japanese edit of that film is included in the set, but it’s stashed away among the supplementary Bonus Features on the final disc, not listed in sequence.  It’s also not fully restored to the image quality standards of the rest of the set; only the scenes left untouched by the American edit are in Blu-ray quality, while the reintegrated Japanese-only scenes switch to a jarring standard-definition DVD scan.  The reason for this choppy, half-complete restoration is somewhat mysterious to anyone who’s not an employee of Criterion, Toho, or Warner Bros, but I can at least say I’m grateful that it was included in the set at all, compromised or not.

The only reason King Kong vs Godzilla‘s muddled distribution history is worth noting in the first place is that the film was a significant creative swerve for both of its overlapping franchises.  If nothing else, it marks the first time either Kong or Godzilla were featured in color or in widescreen, three entries into both respective series.  The monsters’ onscreen crossover match being billed like a boxing PPV was a big deal, as it set the template for dozens of sequels to come: Godzilla vs. Hedorah, Godzilla vs. Mothra, Mothra vs. Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Megalon, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla … all the way to the aforementioned Godzilla vs. Kong.  More importantly, it was a major change in course for its titular monsters in terms of its intent & tone.  The original Godzilla film has obvious, deep roots in the cultural & historical contexts of 1950s Japan, but it also pulled a lot of narrative influence from the monster-movie template established by the 1930s American classic King Kong.  Kong’s second outing in 1933’s Son of Kong and Godzilla’s second outing in 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again—both rushed to market mere months after the success of their predecessors—were mostly just pathetic cash-in imitators of former glories.  Of the pair, Godzilla Raids Again feels especially superfluous, since it can only offer the novelty of seeing the pro-wrestling style kaiju battles of later Godzilla sequels filtered through the relatively elegant aesthetics of the original (through Godzilla’s fights with the dinosaur-like Anguirus, again recalling plot details from the original King Kong) with no other notable deviations.  Son of Kong is likewise shameless in its willingness to repeat the exact tones & events of its predecessor, but it at least introduces the adorably useless Little Kong of its title to keep the rote proceedings novel.  Together, they make for convincing evidence that both series would have to get goofy to keep going, which is where King Kong vs. Godzilla comes to the rescue.

1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla is a wonderfully goofy corporate satire that feels like it has less in common with previous Kong or Godzilla pictures than it has in common with more cartoonish titles like Giants & Toys and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?.  A lot of the early stirrings of my beloved Godzilla vs Hedorah seem to have originated here, from the psychedelic pop-art color palette to the tangential indulgences in Looney Tunes goofballery.  Our two skyscraper combatants are unleashed upon the modern world in ways that feel true to their origin stories but are heightened for comedic effect.  When an American nuclear submarine gets wedged on an iceberg in Japanese waters, a slumbering Godzilla explodes out of the ice to attack the crew onboard.  Meanwhile, Kong is once again collected from his island home to participate in low-brow vaudevillian entertainment, but this time it’s to boost the ratings for a television program that promotes the Japanese company Pacific Pharmaceuticals.  Shockingly, the island extraction sequence that sets Kong loose somehow feels even more racist than the 1930s film that inspired it (a sequence the original Godzilla copied with much more tact & grace), but if you can stomach the blackface humor long enough to get past it, the rewards are worthwhile.  Pacific Pharmaceuticals quickly establishes itself as the villain of the piece, exploiting their bungled extraction of Kong and the simultaneous emergence of Godzilla to craft the ultimate ratings booster: the world’s first televised kaiju battle.  Instead of nuclear proliferation or the exploitation of Nature, a novelty television program advertising Big Pharma drives the horror of the plot, damning capitalistic greed and bloodthirsty quests for increased ratings.  That theme can’t help but feel a little silly by comparison, and the movie smartly leans into the humor of its villains being incompetently evil in their selfishness instead of being knowingly evil in some grand mastermind scheme.  The world suffers for their folly regardless.

Of course, all of this plot detail and background context ceases to matter during the final act, when Godzilla & Kong finally start going at it in earnest.  I won’t spoil who wins that fight, but I will say that the result is bullshit.  There’s some great monster action throughout, though, including a sequence where a lightning-powered Kong fights an especially slimy octopus and one where Godzilla survives miniature missile fire from an army of toy tanks.  The most notable dynamic to the monsters’ one-on-one match-up is the difference in the care put into their respective looks.  Godzilla looks just as great as ever here, while Kong looks like his costume was left to melt on some forgetful production assistant’s dashboard on a summer afternoon.  I could not get over the bizarre, lumpy proportions of Kong’s hairy, apish body; it felt like I was standing naked in front of a full-length mirror, my exact body type finally represented onscreen.  The half-SD, half-HD lumpiness of the movie’s presentation had a similar kind of misshapen charm to it as well.  In truth, it was no worse than watching a movie on a streaming platform that frequently buffered down to a lower quality due to internet bandwidth constraints, which isn’t ideal for a Blu-ray purchase but also isn’t a total deal breaker.  However, it did have the unintended benefit of highlighting just how much of the original Japanese version of the film had been removed from its American cut, denoted by alternatingly crisped & blurred visual details.  It’s obviously a wonderful thing that Criterion was able to officially present King Kong vs Godzilla to an American audience for the first time in the half-century since it premiered in Japan, regardless of lumpiness.  It’s been so long since the film first came out that its titular combatants have since become tag team partners in fights against other, lesser monsters, so it’s somewhat embarrassing that their original outing together is still partially stuck in a distribution limbo.  King Kong vs. Godzilla is a deeply silly film, but it’s also a historically important one, and it should be treated as such.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Godzilla (1954)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli celebrate Godzilla’s 70th birthday (and first Oscar win) by looking back to the monster’s 1954 debut.

00:00 SXSW

04:31 How to Build a Truth Engine (2024)
06:42 Last Things (2024)
09:30 Bottoms (2023)
11:11 Dune: Part Two (2024)
14:52 Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
21:30 Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
29:07 Theodore Rex (1994)
32:42 Brief Encounter (1945)
37:44 Throw Momma from the Train (1987)
40:43 Twins (1988)
43:31 Wise Guys (1986)

45:43 Godzilla (1954)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew