KING KONG VS. GODZILLA: I Want My Own Monster!

King Kong vs. Godzilla (American version, 1963) – The 3rd Godzilla Movie – Directed by Ishiro Honda and Thomas Montgomery – Starring Michael Keith, Tadao Takashima, Kenji Sahara, Yu Fujiki, Arnold Johnson, Ichiro Arishima, Mie Hama, Shoichi Hirose, and Haruo Nakajima.

This movie is insane.

I love it.

I watched the American version of KING KONG VS. GODZILLA. There wasn’t any real logic to this decision except that’s what started playing when I hit play. I’m glad this is the version I watched, though, because it’s one of the most compelling stews of insanity and genuine emotion around. It strikes the perfect chord for what I want when I throw a Kaiju movie into the Blu-ray player – it’s big, wild, crazy, and infused with genuine human drama. I don’t know if I’d prefer the original version, as it’s the American version that adds the newscaster angle into the plot.

Yeah, there’s a newscaster in KING KONG VS. GODZILLA and he’s not out reporting from the scene or being, in any way, dramatic. No, newscaster Eric Carter (Michael Keith) is as calm and cool reporting on the arrival of King Kong and Godzilla into the world as if he’s reporting on the pie eating contest at the State Fair. It’s genius. And rubbish. And totally bizarre. Eric Carter is the kind of guy who could read, “Asjd sdfsdf suodffjop0 roerpdjj aoweujfoj aofjoaue9iopifjoidjfdf dfia” off the teleprompter without a second’s hesitation.

Carter’s news center is apparently at the United Nations and he spends a lot of time talking through the International Communications Satellite with his Japanese analog. What I absolutely love about this whole set-up is that I can’t tell if Carter thinks he’s broadcasting the news or if he thinks we’ve all popped over to his house to make friendly banter about the latest in Kaiju happenings. I half expected a fondue pot to be sitting on his desk, and his pin-up wife with her beehive hairdo to be visible over his left shoulder, lounging on a rag sofa and reading a magazine while sipping on and orange mescaline cocktail.

This is not Walter Kronkite sitting at a desk and somberly delivering the news of monster devastation. No, this is High Hefner in a smoking jacket talking about how he and some buddies went fishing and accidentally saw his neighbors having sex in a canoe. Carter has this bemused, aloof air the whole time, and you can almost see the actor playing him imagining the vacation in Palm Springs this acting gig is going to bring him.

It gets even better when Carter brings in a scientific expert (Arnold Johnson) to explain why Godzilla and King Kong have shown up and are stomping around the world, heading for Japan on a collision course. The scientist actively looks for the camera to make sure you’re understanding that what he’s saying is important. “You see,” he says sincerely, “the man was putting his penis into her vagina while in the canoe. It was quite the thing.”

There’s a subplot involving red berries from Faro Island that can cure all the bad things in the world or something. A pharmaceutical company wants to harvest the berries, but the natives won’t allow this because their mysterious giant god who lives on their island that no one has ever seen likes them. One of the pharma reps is made that they’re not getting enough press, so he screams like a five year old that, “I want my own monster!”

What’s important is that the invisible giant god who the Faro Islanders worship but have never seen is King Kong. He reveals himself to protect the islanders from a giant octopus. Kong defeats the giant octopus and then drinks two big barrels of the red berry juice and falls asleep, which allows to reps from the pharmaceutical company to tie Kong to a raft and haul him in the direction of Japan, where the pharma company that now “owns” him wants to use him for publicity.

All of that actually happens.

Godzilla enters the movie because he was trapped in an iceberg. Now, I believe the original version meant this to be a direct continuation of GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN, where the Kaiju is defeated by burying him in snow and ice and rock. The American version doesn’t really bother with this because ol’ Eric Carter is too busy thinking about heading to Atlantic City for the weekend.

There’s an intriguing difference in how humans relate to the two monsters. With King Kong, it’s the two pharma reps doing their best bumbling idiot routine. They provide a bit of comic relief to the proceedings, while Godzilla brings the tragedy. The humans embroiled in the Godzilla half of the film are just normal folks trying not to get killed by a giant freaking lizard.

Oh, that reminds me. The expert scientist? He explains to the people at home that Godzilla is likely part Tyrannosaurus Rex and part Stegosaurus by flipping through pictures of a dinosaur book.

Does anyone else suddenly picture Doctor Hammond sitting off-screen, eating melting ice cream, mumbling, “Spared no expense” into his Alka Seltzer and absinthe?

King Kong and Godzilla eventually fight because it’s in the movie’s title and all of the action scenes provide the goods.

Through it all, KING KONG VS. GODZILLA has the right mix of fun and drama. The fact that newscasters can treat the arrival of King Kong and Godzilla with such easy charm should not work, yet it gives the movie the right added bit of nostalgic charm. It’s almost like they approach it all like they know it’s just two guys in rubber suits stepping on toys and cardboard. At the same time, though, we’ve got the folks who are having their lives turned upside down by Godzilla to balance off the absurd with some genuine emotion. It’s a perfect mix, and this is a strangely perfect movie.

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When he’s not talking to other writers, Mark Bousquet is doing some writing himself. He is the author of multiple novels and collections, including the recently released The Haunting of Kraken Moor, Gunfighter Gothic, Stuffed Animals for Hire, Dreamer’s Syndrome, Harpsichord and the Wormhole Witches, and Adventures of the Five. He has also published a review collection entitled Marvel Comics on Film, which covers every cinematic and TV movie based on a superhero from the House of Ideas. A complete listing of all his work can be found at his Amazon author page.

RODAN: We Dug Too Deep

Rodan (1956; American Release, 1957) – Directed by Ishiro Honda – Starring Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirakawa, and Akihiko Hirata.

Some interesting facts about RODAN:

1. It was Toho’s first Kaiju movie in color.

2. It was a big hit in the United States.

3. I watched the American version.

Okay, not the most interesting facts in the world but all three of them are important to understand both the movie and this review. (If I just wanted to impress you with something awesome I would have told you that George Takei does voice-over work for the American release.) I watched the American version of the film because that’s what Netflix has streaming and I didn’t want to wait for the DVD, and there are subtle differences between the two. (At least, that’s what Wikipedia tells me.) I don’t like watching the dubbed version of foreign movies. I’d much rather watch the original language version and read the bottom of the screen, but I was interested in seeing how the American release of a film worked without the added effort to hire Perry Mason to film new scenes.

It’s actually that first point up above, however, that I think plays the biggest role in how one enjoys the movie. In my review of GOJIRA / GODZILLA the other day, I mentioned that I was surprised at how dark and serious the movie was. Having brushed against, rather than fully engaged with Kaiju films over the years, my thoughts on the genre were largely concerned with men in rubber suits stomping over tiny city sets. That exists in GOJIRA, but the whole tone of the film was much more thoughtful than I was expecting. Perhaps that raised my hopes too high for RODAN, which is also directed by Ishiro Honda (or perhaps it’s the subtle differences in the American cut) and also features a dinosaur-esque monster coming up from beneath the surface to terrorize a city. Taken superficially, the most apparent difference between GODZILLA and RODAN is that the latter film (despite being released only two years later), is the addition of color.

You might think that such a positive technological advance as moving from black and white to color would only help a movie, but it actually hurts this early Kaiju movie.

First, nothing amplifies unrealistic effects like color. From watching a billion Doctor Who episodes, I can speak from experience when I say that rubber suited monsters are just more believable (or less unbelievable) in black and white. With a severely limited palette, you can obscure the weaknesses better, but when you amp up the color, suddenly it’s just that much harder to believe that we’ve got a 150-foot monster stomping on an actual car, and not Larry in a rubber suit stepping on a toy.

The black and white color scheme of GOJIRA helps to give the film a darker, moodier, almost noir-ish feel to the city scenes. I think it works well with the film’s sense of collective guilt and insecurity. In RODAN, however, all that color makes it hard to hide the weaknesses and works against a somber mood. We’re in color, baby, let’s see some sh*t blow up!

And blow up it does. RODAN starts off with a keen interest in story, but by the end, this is a loud, balls-out piece of explosion porn, and I think that has something to do with how the introduction of color altered either the story itself, or at least its presentation.

Like GOJIRA, Honda builds this film off the idea that humans are pushing too far and are risking being rebuked by the planet its carelessly destroying. RODAN takes place in a mining town and the miners are starting to dig too deep into the earth. If you’re like me, of course, the second you hear of people digging too deep you’re expecting a Balrog to come up out of the darkness, but the monsters in RODAN are more natural. First, we get giant insects attacking the miners first, and village soon after.

There’s some nice story work here in the opening of the film, as Shigeru (Kenji Sahara) believes one of the first two missing miners is innocent while everyone else believes him guilty of killing the other missing miner when he shows up dead. Shigeru isn’t believed because he’s in love with Goro’s sister, Kiyo (Yumi Shirakawa). Kiyo is super over-emotional but it’s understandable given that everyone thinks her brother is a murderer and then giant insects start appearing at your doorway.

Soon, however, Shigeru and Kiyo are largely lost as the film turns into an explosion fest. Shigeru is injured in an earthquake and comes back with amnesia, but when he remembers what he saw beneath the earth (two large eggs that birth the Rodans), this becomes a military movie. A team goes to check the Rodans out and then it’s just bang bang bang boom boom boom bang bang bang. Guns aren’t effective in stopping the giant dinosaur birds, so the military ends up trying to trap the Rodans underground by blowing up a volcano. They fail to bury them but the Rodans are poisoned and weakened from all the bombs and gas and when one of them dies in the volcano’s lava, the other one sticks around, unwilling to live without its mate.

It’s a rather powerful ending, speaking to the moving connection the two Rodans have for one another, but that angle needed to be developed more fully for the ending to have a truly thunderous impact. As it is, it’s only Shigeru and Kiyo who really seems to understand what the deaths of the Rodans mean on a personal level. Everyone else is like, “Huh, we did it. What’s for lunch?”

While not the all-time classic that GOJIRA is, RODAN is still a fine film with a fantastic ending.

And lots and lots of missiles.

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Mark Bousquet is the author of several novels and collections, including Gunfighter Gothic, Stuffed Animals for Hire, Dreamer’s Syndrome, Harpsichord and the Wormhole Witches, and Adventures of the Five. He has also published a review collection entitled Marvel Comics on Film, which covers every cinematic and TV movie based on a superhero from the House of Ideas. A complete listing of all his work can be found at his Amazon author page.