kaiju

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

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

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As I’m piecing together my personal Best Films of 2023 list in these last few weeks of the year, I’m becoming increasingly self-conscious of how many of my favorite new releases are shamelessly nostalgic for the toys & kitsch collectibles of my youth.  Even without a new Godzilla film juicing the numbers, it’s been a great year for films about Furbies, Barbie dolls, Ninja Turtles, and tokusatsu superheroes like Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and The Power Rangers.  My Best of the Year list is starting to look like a 1998 Toys”R”Us TV commercial, which is somewhat embarrassing for a man of my age.  I am approaching 40 years old, and I still don’t wanna grow up.  Thankfully, Godzilla Minus One‘s inclusion in this year’s throwback-toy-commercial canon is at least helping to class up the list a little, as it’s a much more sincere, severe drama than most movies that have excited me lately.  It’s just as openly nostalgic for vintage tokusatsu media as Shin Ultraman, Shin Kamen Rider, and Smoking Causes Coughing, announcing itself as an official 70th anniversary celebration of the original 1954 Godzilla film that started it all.  However, it’s the only film in this year’s crop to hit the same notes of deep communal hurt as the ’54 Godzilla, which is a much more ambitious aim than reviving the goofball slapstick antics of the child-friendly kaiju & superhero media that followed in its wake.  Godzilla Minus One‘s sincerity is incredibly rewarding in that contrast, to the point where it’s the only Godzilla movie I can remember making me cry.

To commemorate that 70th anniversary, Godzilla Minus One dials the clock back to the widescale destruction of post-WWII Japan, covering the first few years of national rebuilding after nuclear devastation.  The giant primordial lizard of the title is once again shaken awake by the human folly of the atomic bomb, a great sin against Nature echoed in the creature’s flamethrower-style “atomic breath.”  The film’s limited budget means that Godzilla gets limited screentime, but the monster is deployed wisely as an unstoppable, unfathomable horror whose atomic power is so great that it burns away the flesh of its own towering body.  Godzilla is scary again, more of a harrowing extension of war survivors’ PTSD than a rollicking hero to children everywhere.  The cleverest move the movie makes, then, is by limiting the scope of its drama to match the limited scope of its monster attacks.  We feel the fear Godzilla stirs in just a few cowering citizens’ lives, even though both the monster and its victims represent large-scale national grief in metaphor.  It’s a small-cast wartime melodrama that’s occasionally interrupted by kaiju-scale mayhem, the same way a soldier who survives war is supposed to go through the motions of normal life in peacetime despite frequent, violent reminders & memories of the atrocities they’ve witnessed or participated in.  The “Minus One” of the title refers to people struggling to rebuild their lives from Ground Zero, only to be reset even further back by the grand-scale cruelties of life & Nature, through the monster.  It’s tough to watch.

The drama gets even more intimate & insular from there.  Most Godzilla movies dwell on the city-wide chaos of the monster attacks, depicting thousands of victims scattering away from Godzilla’s path like helpless insects.  In contrast, Godzilla Minus One zooms in to assess the value of just one, individual life in that mayhem.  Its mournful protagonist (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a kamikaze pilot who dodged his suicidal mission during the war and now suffers intense survivor’s guilt, convinced that he morally failed in his duty to serve his nation.  The sudden appearance of Godzilla offers the self-hating young man a second attempt at wartime valor, to the point where he’s disturbingly excited by the prospect of facing off against the monster instead of experiencing healthier responses like fear & grief.  In a more proudly nationalistic action thriller, this sentiment would go unchallenged, and his self-assigned self-sacrifice would be celebrated as traditional macho heroism.  Instead, Godzilla Minus One is about the community of people around the pilot—each having survived their own war atrocities & personal shortcomings—convincing him that his life is worth living, that he has value beyond the damage he can cause as a lone soldier in a war that’s officially over.  The honor of serving his country through death is no nobler than risking his life de-activating leftover explosive mines to put food on his family’s table; it’s sad & disgraceful, and it should be treated as a worst-case scenario.

The dramatic beats of Godzilla Minus One are just as predictable as the rhythm of its monster attacks, and just as devastatingly effective.  I cried with surprising frequency during the final twenty-minute stretch, even though I saw each dramatic reveal coming from a nautical mile away.  Maybe it’s because I vaguely related to the communal struggle to rebuild after multiple unfathomable catastrophes, having remained in New Orleans through a series of floods & hurricanes.  Maybe it’s because I more personally related to the pilot’s struggle to learn a foundational sense of self-worth, the toughest aspect of adult life.  Maybe it’s because composer Naoki Satō’s gargantuan score drummed those sentimental feelings out of me through intense physical vibration.  Who’s to say?  All I can confidently report is that the drama is just thunderously affecting as Godzilla’s roars, which is a rarity in the series.

-Brandon Ledet

Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy (2009)

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It’s easy to be flippant about superhero fatigue right now, since the MCU & DCEU filmmaking behemoths are both dozens of titles into their decade-long stranglehold on Hollywood, with all possible surprise & novelty long squeezed out of the genre’s lungs.  Still, my exhaustion with superhero blockbusters has less to do with the genre at large than it has to do with those two franchises in particular.  There’s still plenty of surprise & novelty to be found elsewhere in superhero media, especially if you’re willing to stray outside the US.  I was recently tickled by the anti-fascist Italo circus superhero flick Freaks vs. The Reich, for instance, which happened to include similar touches of laboratory torture & Radiohead song placements as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, just in a much more interesting context (time-traveling ether-addict Nazis vs. Totally 90s™ mixtape aesthetics).  I’ve also been enamored with Neon Genesis Evangelion mastermind Hideaki Anno’s years-long project of building an MCU style interconnected universe out of pre-existing Japanese tokusatsu properties – first in Shin Godzilla, then in Shin Ultraman, and most recently in Shin Kamen Rider.  The project shamelessly leans into the commercial end of filmmaking instead of the artistic, collecting all of Anno’s superpowered freaks in action figure toy commercials instead of a crossover feature film.  It’s also, just three titles in, the most exciting big-scale superhero media on the market.  Anno’s Godzilla film was more of a governmental bureaucracy satire than a superhero picture, subbing in the titular kaiju god for any number of natural disasters that the timid, rules-obsessed humans on the ground were ill-equipped to respond to with any speed or efficiency.  By contrast, his Ultraman movie (which he wrote, produced, edited, and mo-capped but did not direct) is pure retro superhero fluff, throwing back to its titular space alien’s vintage TV roots.  It’s such an infectiously wholesome, psychedelic superhero story that I didn’t even care that I was missing a half-century of contextual Ultraman lore that would help explain its scene-to-scene idiosyncrasies.  It did convince me to dip my toe deeper into the back catalog of Ultraman cinema, though, finding a movie specifically made for people who grew up steeped in Ultraman Awareness the same way that most current teens aren’t old enough to remember a world before the MCU.  It was a baffling experience but also a delightful one.

I should have known from the longform title Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legends The Movie that the 2009 sequel to the TV show Ultraman Mebius was not going to be as welcoming of an entry point as the series-reset Shin Ultraman (in which “Shin” is commonly translated as meaning “New”).  According to my half-assed Wikipedia research after stumbling into Mega Monster Battle blind on Tubi, Ultraman Mebius is “the 20th TV series and 40th anniversary production in the Ultra Series.”  Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy is the second sequel to that show, “preceded by Ultraman Mebius Side Story: Ghost Reverse, a direct-to-video special from Ultraman Mebius.”  As someone who recently rolled his eyes at the news that the latest Guardians of the Galaxy movie included plot details set up by a straight-to-Disney+ holiday special outside the 30+ movies of prerequisite homework, you’d think I’d also find this overwhelming mountain of contextual backstory to be an automatic deal breaker.  Instead, I found it freeing.  The infinite supply of Ultraman lore means that there isn’t enough time in my scatterbrained life to possibly watch it all, so the pressure is off.  Walking into Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy having only seen Shin Ultraman before it is kinda like watching Avengers: Endgame after having only seen Captain America: The First Avenger, an out-of-the-loop disorientation that the TV-series recap in its first few minutes does little to soften.  The narrative continuity of the Ultra Series only matters so much, though.  It’s relatively easy to shut your brain off and accept statements like “The Planet of Ultra will perish unless we retrieve the Energy Core” at face value without worrying about what the Energy Core is, or who’s threatening the Planet Ultra with mass destruction to begin with.  If anything, Ultra Galaxy overloads the screen with so many Ultramen, Ultrawomen, and Ultrathems that it’s clear there’s no need or even possibility of getting fully caught up with Ultraman lore as a newcomer.  To put it in American superhero media terms, it’s the Ultraman equivalent of the Spider-Verse, wherein almost every character—good or evil—is some kind of Ultraman variant.  One Ultraman has horns; one red-eyed Ultraman is evil; one pigtailed Ultraman is a girl.  It doesn’t actually matter what their names or histories are, just that it’s wonderfully surreal to see them all share the screen as they collectively beat down an equally infinite supply of resurrected rubber-suit monsters from the Ultra Series’ past.  I may not fully understand all of the characters relationships & insular worlds of Ultra Galaxy, but I do fully understand the joys it finds in excess – flooding the screen with all the Ultramen and all the kaiju all at once.

If anything, this is exactly how I remember watching superhero media in a pre-MCU world.  As a child, I didn’t tune into episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, or Batman: The Animated Series with decades of comic book history or even weekly episodic continuity informing the battles of the day.  I just knew that Shredder, Rita Repulsa, and The Joker were “Bad Guy” villains that had to be constantly, violently be beaten back from victory for the sake of peace on Earth.  It used to be possible to drop into the continued adventures of an intergalactic superhero at any point of their cyclical journey the same way you can tune into a single match of a months-long pro wrestling program and instantly get the gist.  In this particular instance, the evil Ultraman Belial plans to dominate Planet Ultra (where all Ultramen originate, apparently) by resurrecting the ghosts of famous dead kaiju on the meteor that serves as their graveyard.  A collective of elite Ultramen led by Ultraman Mebius, Ultraseven, and the original Ultraman form a Power Rangers-style superhero team to beat back Ultraman Belial and his own evil team of undead kaiju before it’s too late.  There’s also some human Earthling involvement and the aforementioned Energy Core McGuffin jumbled up in that plot, but they’re insignificant to what makes the movie entertaining: the nonstop superheroic martial arts.  Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy is a surreal mix of tactile fight choreography and green screen sci-fi effects.  It is pure excess in its relentless Ultraman-on-kaiju mayhem, leaving very little room in the runtime for the audience to ponder the lore before the next rubber-suited monster attacks the superpowered citizens of Planet Ultra.  Lacking any other context, I can only compare Ultra Galaxy to Shin Ultraman in terms of filmmaking craft, and Anno’s film appears to be a cut above other modern Ultraman media in that side-by-side.  Shin Ultraman still comes across as a lumbering, slow-to-act superhero origin story in that comparison, though, as Ultra Galaxy assumes you’ve already done the homework and immediately launches into constant Ultraman battles until you’re well past satisfied.  Maybe if I had already seen 30 other movies in the Ultra Series that bombardment would have left me as numb as the MCU has left me post-Endgame, but there’s still plenty of surprise & novelty left in this particular superhero franchise for me.  In fact, I understood so little about the background lore of Planet Ultra and its infinite Ultramen that the next time I watch one of these out-of-sequence Ultra Sequels I’ll likely be just as baffled (and delighted) as I was this round. I’m looking forward to it.

-Brandon Ledet

Smoking Causes Coughing (2023)

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French absurdist Quentin Dupieux has been on a real hot streak lately.  Threatened to only be remembered as an early-internet memester for his Mr. Oizo music videos and the killer-tire horror comedy Rubber, Dupieux recently hit a creative breakthrough in the killer-jacket horror comedy Deerskin.  On paper, it might not appear that there had been much progression between his early novelty horror about a murderous rubber tire with telekinetic powers and his more recent novelty horror about a murderous deerskin jacket with telepathetic powers, but Deerskin really did mark a new level of maturity & self-awareness in Dupieux’s art that’s been consistently paying off in the few years since.  Every one of his films, including Rubber, are proudly Absurdist comedies about the meaninglessness of Everything, but Deerskin extended that worldview a step further to indict his own catalog of work as meaningless art about meaninglessness – an endless parade of empty frivolities.  That might sound like it would de-value Dupieux’s creative output, but it’s instead freed him to follow his most inane, meaningless impulses for the sake of their own pleasure, and he’s been making his funniest comedies to date as a result.

At first glance, Smoking Causes Coughing registers as just another one of Dupieux’s hilarious but meaningless novelties, no more important in his larger oeuvre than his recent Dumb & Dumber buddy comedy about a monstrously gigantic housefly.  Since all of his movies assert a consistent absurdist worldview, there isn’t much to distinguish the individual titles from each other outside the immediate humor of their high-concept bar napkin premises.  If Dupieux had fully committed to a feature-length Power Rangers parody entirely focused on the Super Sentai superhero knockoffs rebuilding group “cohesion” & “sincerity” on a mundane work retreat, that’s exactly what Smoking Causes Coughing would be: another fun, dumb, proudly meaningless comedy from an increasingly prolific director who makes two or three novelties just like it every year.  Instead, it manages to feel like yet another Deerskin-style shakeup to his creative routine, freeing him to be even dumber & more meaningless than ever before.  That’s because it’s an anthology horror comedy disguised as a feature-length Power Rangers parody, a surprise change in format that has not been hinted at in the film’s cheeky advertising.

Apparently antsy about having to spend 80 minutes on just one absurdist bar napkin premise, Dupieux is now chopping them up into bite-sized 8-minute morsels, which is great, because every impulse he has is hilariously idiotic.  With Smoking Causes Coughing, he’s entered his goofball Roy Andersson era, merging philosophical art & sight-gag sketch comedy into an efficient joke-telling machine that’s free to follow its momentary whims from vignette to vignette without fear of losing the audience’s confidence.  In the Power Rangers-spoofing wraparound story, a team of helmeted rubber-monster fighters called The Tobacco Squad (because they use the destructive powers of cigarette smoke to defeat their intergalactic kaiju enemies) find their teamwork in daily battles increasingly disjointed, so they go on a corporate-style work retreat to rebuild group cohesion.  As soon as that gag is milked for all it’s worth, the individual members of Tobacco Squad (Nicotine, Mercury, Methanol, etc.) entertain each other with campfire horror stories to pass the time, which allows Dupieux to fire off as many short-form, for-their-own-sake inanities as he pleases.  They’re all very funny (especially the slasher parody segment involving a noise-cancelling isolation helmet) and intensely idiotic in the exact ways Dupieux’s ideas have been from the start, but none of them threaten to outstay their welcome the way a single-joke premise like Rubber might have in the past. 

All that Dupieux’s missing at this point, really, is an American audience.  It’s likely no coincidence that my favorite two movies from him to date are the ones I happened to catch in the theater, so it’s a shame their only New Orleans screenings were at festivals, not in regular theatrical runs.  I very much appreciated getting to laugh along with like-minded crowds during Deerskin at New Orleans French Film Fest in early 2020 and, more recently, during Smoking Causes Coughing at Overlook Film Fest last week (the same day it was domestically released VOD). Still, it’s odd to see his work sidelined as specialty events for niche audiences.  Both films killed in the room, and it would be incredibly cool to see Dupieux’s recent output get the crowd-pleaser rollout they deserve.  If an easily marketable Power Rangers aesthetic and a glowing blurb from John Waters calling his latest “a superhero movie for idiots” & “one of the best films of the year” isn’t enough to earn Dupieux wide theatrical distro before being siphoned to streaming, it’s doubtful anything ever will.  We shouldn’t be allowing the funniest comedies on the market to be downplayed as high-brow festival fodder because they happen to be in French, but I guess I should just be grateful that he’s continuing to make them and that local fests like Overlook are continuing to program them; it’s always a blast, especially with a crowd.

-Brandon Ledet

Shin Ultraman (2023)

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Just as the original Godzilla series quickly backslid from heartbreaking political allegory to novelty children’s fluff, Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla franchise starter has already made way for quirky kitsch in its immediate follow-up – Shin Ultraman.  I could not be happier about it.  While Shin Godzilla is the smarter, more thematically purposeful film, Shin Ultraman is the more fun, breezy, rewatchable one.  It continues Shin Godzilla’s satirical illustration of the ineffectiveness of bureaucracy in the face of a kaiju-scale threat, but that governmental buffoonery is more of a background hum here than it is the main show.  Anno’s Ultraman film—which the Neon Genesis Evangelion mastermind wrote, produced, edited and, most surprisingly, mo-capped—is more of an upbeat celebration of both sides of the human/monster divide.  It crams in tons more of the skyscraper CG monsters than Godzilla’s solo outing could manage (although the individual designs of Godzilla’s Pokémon evolutions were a major highlight in the earlier film), and it also celebrates the humans below as adorable dorks who are just trying their best in a world stacked high against them.

If Shin Ultraman echoes any of Shin Godzilla’s high-minded artistic merit (beyond a main-cast performance from Drive My Car’s Hidetoshi Nishijima), it’s in its look & pacing.  Director Shinji Higuchi shoots governmental office scenes like he’s competing with Soderbergh in full showoff mode, finding the most improbable camera angles possible to accentuate the absurdism of modern office work’s fluorescent-lit mundanity.  Anno matches that overachiever energy in the editing room, cutting between Higuchi’s off-kilter shot compositions with a distinct anime sensibility – always going 10,000% hard no matter the occasion, even when depicting paperwork.  That dynamic attention to detail makes this a formidable contender for one of the most visually impressive comedies in decades; it’s just also one of the goofiest.  Instead of trying to conjure realistic-looking CG monsters (which was never a concern in the genre’s early rubber-suit days anyway), Shin Ultraman’s kaiju creatures lean into the uncanny end of the medium. That means it will be taken less seriously than aggressively dour competitors like Gareth Edwards’s American Godzilla film from 2014, but also means it’s a lot more fun to watch.  If it resembles any big-name kaiju movie from the past couple decades, it’s the goofball free-for-all Big Man Japan, which is at least a comparison that does it a lot of favors.

Story-wise, Shin Ultraman returns its titular space alien superhero to his children’s TV roots, pitting him against a series of skyscraper monsters in a consistent episodic rhythm.  Ultraman walks among us in a barely concealed Clark Kent disguise, powering up to kaiju scale whenever another post-Godzilla CG monster emerges to tear up Japanese cities & countryside.  His Earth-saving superheroics are even scored by a tin-canny mix of 60s throwback stock music presumably lifted from the original Ultraman series.  It’s a familiar formula for anyone old enough to remember a pre-MCU media landscape, but in the 2020s its vintage earnestness feels remarkably refreshing.  Ultraman is genuinely fascinated with the go-getter exuberance of the human spirit—especially when threatened by impossible odds—and, by extension, so is the film.  The hook of seeing Shin Ultraman big & loud at the theater is in the promise of weird-looking CG monsters doing battle over miniature cities while shooting laser beams out of their eyes, hands, and mouths.  Once your butt is in the seat, though, the real show is in its celebration of humanity’s adorable perseverance & naivete.  It can’t help but feel a little frivolous in comparison to the political cynicism of Shin Godzilla, then, but that unashamed frivolity is incredibly endearing.

Maybe I’m making Shin Ultraman sound like disposable kids’ fluff here, and in some ways maybe it is.  Its plot machinations surrounding intergalactic superweapons that can transform human beings into kaiju-scale war drones and Ultraman’s superheroic sacrifice in merging his alien DNA with a human’s are all old-hat comic book nonsense.  I’d much rather watch earnest nonsense like this than its ironic callbacks in post-modern works like Big Man Japan & Psycho Goreman, though, which borrow from the pop art beauty of its vintage kitsch but are too embarrassed to be mistaken for the genuine thing.  There’s plenty “adult” material lurking under this film’s Saturday Morning Cartoon surface too – from the governmental bureaucracy satire to the CG psychedelia to the momentary indulgences in sexual fetishism (including some especially shameless pandering to the giantess community).  They’re just not the main draw.  Shin Ultraman is a delight precisely because of its childlike exuberance, which is just as fitting to its titular alien hero’s television origins as Shin Godzilla’s political cynicism is to the original Gojira.

-Brandon Ledet

Cross-Promotion: The X from Outer Space (1967) on the We Love to Watch Podcast

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I recently returned as a guest on the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the adorably jazzy kaiju space adventure The X from Outer Space, as part of the show’s ongoing “Size Does Matter” theme month.

Aaron & Peter were kind to invite me back after previous discussions of Brigsby Bear (2017), Dagon (2001), The Fly (1958), and Xanadu (1980). It’s always a blast to guest on their podcast, since I also listen as a fan. Their show is wonderfully in sync with the enthusiasm & sincerity we try to maintain on this site (especially when covering so-called “bad movies”), so I highly recommend digging through old episodes & clips on the We Love to Watch blog if you haven’t already. And, of course, please start by giving a listen to their episode on The X from Outer Space below.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974)

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I was initially careful not to divulge too many third-act details when reviewing Godzilla vs Kong, but it’s been an entire year since it first premiered so I don’t mind spoiling it now.  The only reason Adam Wingard’s kaiju smash-em-up is the best American Godzilla film to date is that the monster fights promised in its title felt exceptionally tactile & novel for a modern CG blockbuster.  And what really launched those fights over the top was the WrestleMania-style surprise entrance of Godzilla’s mechanized doppelgänger Mechagodzilla in the third act, injecting an excessive rush of adrenaline into a movie was already plenty entertaining before the bionic monster’s arrival.  The delight of that last-minute surprise really leaves audiences on a fist-pumping high, forgiving all the mundane humans-on-the-ground storytelling it takes to get there.

Looking back at the delightful surprise of Mechagodzilla’s most recent onscreen appearance, I can’t help but wonder if the robo-monster should always be presented as a last-minute swerve.  At the very least, I can say for certain that its first franchise appearance in 1974’s Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla would’ve been greatly improved if its existence weren’t teased in the title & poster.  There’s a brief, glorious moment in the film when Godzilla is being framed for mayhem he didn’t commit by the mechanized imposter, frustrated that other kaiju and the citizens below believe he has turned heel.  The film could have been an all-time classic if that conflict was allowed to drive the plot, delaying the reveal of the “space titanium” under the faux-Godzilla’s “skin” as late in the runtime as possible instead of immediately degloving it.  Basically, I wish Mechagodzilla was the Gene Parmesan of the series.

There is plenty of novelty to be found elsewhere in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla without that surprise reveal.  While Mechagodzilla is almost always a manmade weapon in subsequent films (including in Godzilla vs Kong), it arrives on Earth as space alien tech in its first appearance.  The sub-James Bond espionage antics that thwart that alien plot can be a little dull (an unfortunate holdover from the previous entry in the franchise, Godzilla vs Megalon).  The aliens themselves are amusing knockoffs of the Planet of the Apes creature designs, though, which adds a post-modern mash-up quality to the premise.  The film also doesn’t entirely rely on the novelty of Mechagodzilla to freshen up its monster roster.  It also features appearances from Anguirus (a spiky armadillo) and King Caesar (a personified Shisa statue) in its Royal Rumble rollout of surprise combatants.  It’s a fun picture as is, even if it had much greater potential as a kaiju whodunnit.

To be fair, I’m not sure Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla needed to be especially novel to be worthwhile, considering that it was already arriving fourteen films deep into the Godzilla canon.  Fifty years and twenty-two Godzilla movies later, there have been plenty of boring, uninspired kaiju duds with way less to offer than this standard-issue monster flick.  At the very least, it attempts to establish its own playful sense of style between the kaiju battles in its cave-painting illustrations, Brady Bunch news-report grids, and double-exposure shots of religious prophecies.  It’s no Godzilla vs Hedorah in that respect, but few movies are.  Most importantly, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla gets by on the exact same merits that made Godzilla vs Kong such a delight: the inherent entertainment value of its pro-wrestling style kaiju fights (which are often shockingly bloody in this case, imagery that was often softened in its American edits).  I just can’t help but wish that it also held back Mechagodzilla for as long as possible in the same way Godzilla vs Kong did, though. It could have been an all-timer instead of just another good’n.

-Brandon Ledet