Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
As the Godzilla movies took off, their popularity with children did not go unnoticed by the folks at the Toho studios, who decided to take the movies, which had been on a downswing in terms of serious content since the second movie, into a truly juvenile approach with 1969's Gojira-Minira-Gabara: Oru kaijū daishingeki, released to Western audiences as either Godzilla's Revenge(which is how I will refer to it for the purpose of this review) or All Monsters Attack. Both of these titles are hilariously misleading, given that Godzilla, who is hardly even in the movie, isn't really taking revenge on anyone, and not all the monsters appear, and all of them certainly don't attack, hell, the amount of monster screen-time is horriblely short, something made even worse by the fact that this is a relatively short movie, clocking in at about 70 minutes on my DVD.
Godzilla's Revenge follows the exploits of a young Japanese schoolboy named Ichiro(Tomonori Yazaki - TV's Masked Rider), who lives with his parents in Tokyo, although he rarely sees them due to work commitments, so his main parent figure is Shinpei(Eisei Amamoto - Atragon) ,the kindly toymaker next door.
Ichiro also isn't exactly popular, and is victim to the school bully Gabara. His only escape is to dream of going to Monster Island, where he befriends Minya(Little Man Machan - Destroy All Monsters), the son of Godzilla, who is also encountering problems with a bully named Gabara, except his is a giant monster who emits electricity from his fingertips. Godzilla constantly encourages Minya to fight him, and tells him that he cannot run all of his life, and that he will need to stand up to him. And along with Ichiro's help, Minya manages to do so.
In the real world, Ichiro's situation takes a turn for the worse when he is kidnapped by two bank robbers, but inspired by Minya's courage, he outwits them and they end up in the hands of the police, leaving only Gabara to face up to the next day at school...
Yeah, Godzilla's Revenge probably sounds pretty silly on paper, but I have to say that when watching it, things become oh so silly that it becomes more like some sort of crazy acid trip than a Godzilla picture. Even attempting to take this seriously would be an act of folly, but the fact is that even for a kids movie, it's really pretty stupid, I first saw it when I was pretty young, I thought it was dumb then, and I'm still a big kid at heart, and I think it's dumb now. Possibly the most shocking aspect of it is the fact that it was directed by the first and best of all the Godzilla directors, Ishiro Honda, who usually manned the more serious and, well, good Godzilla movies. He seems to have seen the films made by other directors, like Jun Fukuda's Son of Godzilla and decided to attempt to out-mad them. Of course the next movie, Yoshimitsu Banno's Godzilla Vs. Hedorah, outdid them all in terms of weirdness. Minya has now gained the ability to alter size at will(which is displayed, quite hilariously, with his crotch getting bigger in the camera lense), not to mention talk, where he sounds like a drunken version of Barney while depressed. It's goal is amiable, about never giving in to bullies, but it's just executed in such a cack-handed manner that you have to wonder how it even got made.
The most blatantly bad thing about it can be summed up when I say that special effects god Eiji Tsuburaya was ill and bed-ridden at the time of it's production, so asides from the footage involving Gabara, Minya talking to Ichiro and Godzilla fighting a big stupid bird thing, all the monster footage is actually stock footage, with around 90% of it coming from either Son of Godzilla and Ebirah: Horror of the Deep, and edited badly to try and change what is happening. It sounds pretty bad doesn't it? the actual thing is around 10 times worse. Even at their worst, Godzilla movies could almost always redeem themselves with silly creature action, but this only has about 10 minutes original footage, and the rest is lifted from, already quite bad, older movies, which by the way use two visibly different Godzilla suits.
Before I even mention acting I'll point out that the dubbing is terrible. I already mentioned how bad Minya's voice is, but the human characters don't fare much better. Amamoto's voice is quite well fitting, but Ichiro has been outfitted with one of those stock really high-pitched voices given to all children in dubbed Japanese movies. And the less said about the 'bumbling idiot' and '80 fags a day' voices handed out to the bankrobbers the better.
With that said, acting doesn't actually seem that bad. Despite being one of the most against-the-grain castings ever, Amamoto, usually the very nastiest of villains, does very well as the nice-guy neighbour, and apart from Yazaki's performance, which isn't particularly annoying which is about as big a compliment as you can hand a child actor in a movie this old, there isn't really anyone on-screen long enough to have their acting seriously evaluated on strength of this movie. I can't really fault the film on this field, but when you don't really have much to gauge, it can't really be all that good either.
Music consists mainly of a really quite odd theme tune, and another piece of music reserved for Ichiro. The theme tune is a brassy, almost jazzy style oddity that just really stands out for being quite silly in regards to giant monsters. I mean its a hoot to listen to, and I looked forward to it playing, but that wasn't because it fit the film particularly well, and more because humour was about the only thing that could save this. Ichiro's theme is just bad. It starts out as a sort of lonely little number, and all is going well, you feel sadness for the poor kid, then the song inexplicably turns all upbeat and positive, completely ruining the mood.
As I mentioned, almost all of the effects in the movie are stock footage, and all of it from movies that didn't have very good effects to begin with, so that should tell you something. Minya's suit looks absolutely terrible, as does Godzilla's, which I think is the same 'thing' used for Son of Godzilla, with the frog-face. Gabara is pretty well designed, apart from his scruffy ginger hair(!?), he looks kind of like a cross between Godzilla and the then un-invented Titanosaurus, painted turquoise, sans tail and with ginger hair. Sadly his suit looks like an amateur effects man took that exact recipe and didn't think to fine tune it's look, because the suit looks really scruffy and poor. For some reason I'm sure it's actually not an original suit, and comes from a TV show like Ultraman or something along those lines.
In general, I really can't think of much more to say about Godzilla's Revenge, or much good to say about it at all. It fails as a kids movie, it fails as a Godzilla movie, and it's basically an abomination that shouldn't have been made. One can only speculate what Ishiro Honda was taking when he made this, but it was clearly pretty strong, as this is quite possibley not only the worst Godzilla movie(yes, even worse than Godzilla Vs. Ferris Bueller), but even a contender for the worst Kaiju Eiga(that's Japanese Monster movie for you non-geeks) ever, this even makes some of the original Gamera films look good.
While I would have loved Godzilla to make a truly kid-friendly film(although I loved Destroy All Monsters,Godzilla Vs. Gigan and Godzilla Vs. Megalon as a child), I really do think Toho should have left this stuff to Gamera and Daei studios. Godzilla's Revenge is in no way a good movie, and it's lucky I've even talked about it this long. Due to the sheer lack of quality, as well as the fact about half of the movie is stock footage, the score this movie gets is a firmly rooted 1-Star, and I'm certainly not going to recommend this. If you want to get kids into Kaiju eiga, show them some Gamera movies, because this film will no doubt just put them off the genre for life. It's bad, simple as that.
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