Cool! I thought I was the only person who had one of those.

The flowers, alas, aren’t saying much, but there’s other stuff going on at the psychic institute — it seems that all the children had the same dream last night. And when asked to draw pictures of their dream, what do you think every cute lil’ urchin holds up? If you said “pictures of Godzilla,” well, I’m not giving out prizes, so you’ll just have to bask in the glow of satisfaction.

That’s right, Godzilla may be waking up from the bottom of the volcano on Mt. Mihara, where he fell at the end of Godzilla 1985. The Japanese government starts scrambling for pre-emptive defense strategies, their best one being “Anti Nuclear Energy Bacteria,” which could soak up Godzilla’s energy from the inside. No one’s made any yet, but they should be able to synthesize it from the frozen Godzilla cells they’ve still got from the last attack. All they need is a brilliant scientist to do the job — someone like, say, Dr. Shiragami.

The doc’s not so big anymore on all this genetic engineering, but when an earth tremor from Mt. Mihara destroys his greenhouse and almost kills his precious roses, he reconsiders. But his terms are these: He gets to keep the Godzilla cells in his lab, alone, for a week. Why would he want to do that? Probably because his higher-ups might not condone his fusing a Godzilla cell with a rose cell in order to create an immortal, indestructible breed of roses.

Anybody else see this as a bad idea?

I love the smell of Triffids in the morning.

Sure, it does protect Shiragami’s work when two American thieves break into his lab to steal his research; huge slimy tentacles come from nowhere and do them in. (Huge slimy tentacles? All we need now is a few schoolgirls in sailor suits…) But by the next morning, it’s dragged itself off to the nearby lake and become, well a huge rosebush with toothy mouths on the ends of its tentacles. Says Shiragami: “I think now I may have made a mistake.”

Let’s see. We’ve got the giant tentacled rosebush, we’ve got the Japanese army working on new and inventive weapons… What’s missing?

Oh yeah — the big G himself. He wakes up thanks to that same American rival company, which threatens to set explosives in Mt. Mihara’s crater unless they’re given the anti-nuke bacteria (because it can upset the balance of world power, and thus greedy capitalists are all over it). They don’t get it, the bombs go off, and a certain surly kaiju gets up on the wrong side of the bed.

Nobody, but nobody, makes an entrance like Godzilla.

I think you can guess where most of the movie goes from there. The Japanese use their latest high-tech weapon, the Super X-2, which is basically a huge remote-controlled flying shoebox which can reflect Godzilla’s breath back at him. It doesn’t sound like much until you realize that it’s a damned sight better than, say, constructing a Godzilla-scale bipedal robot to fight him. They’ve also got their normal missiles and mines and lasers and all that stuff that’s guaranteed to get Godzilla good and riled up. Plus there’s the rosebush (dubbed “Biollante” ostensibly after a character in Norse mythology — what the hell, it’s better than “Posie”), who exerts some kind of influence on Godzilla since it is half-cloned from his cells. Plus we’ve got the Americans and Saradians both trying to get their hands on the anti-nuke bacteria, various army schemes, Miki dreaming about a whole lotta stuff, and some major city-stomping going on.

Plus Science. We’ve got Science with a capital “S.” Shiragami and his young assistant Kirishima (Kunihiko Mitamura, who’s also Asuka’s boyfriend) get into it so often on “real Science” that it starts to sound like a quest for orthodoxy. Comments like “What kind of scientist are you?” and “You don’t understand Science very well” and “Scientists have to look to the future!” fly with reckless abandon, the capper being, “Godzilla and Biollante aren’t monsters; it’s the unscrupulous scientists who create them who are monsters!” I’d love to see Liz from And You Call Yourself a Scientist! give her take on this one; she’d probably be as happy as a woodpecker in a bucket of grubs.

There are some great bits in here. The scene of all the kids holding up their pictures of Godzilla, while not even remotely original, is still striking and memorable. The final incarnation of Biollante is pretty brutal-looking. And the army actually has a plan to lure Godzilla away from the city, instead of waiting for him to wander into the business district to unleash their firepower.

“Godzilla vs. Biollante and Super X-2,” by Alex Shumate (age 7).

Problem is that Godzilla’s main opponent, apart from the ineffective military, is, well, a giant rosebush. Sure, it’s a rosebush with Tremors-like mouthed tentacles, and by the end it becomes an ambulatory rosebush with a super-toothy head that spits green slime all over Godzilla, but it’s still a rosebush. You can dress up the rosebush all you want and make it as fearsome as you can, but in the end there’s just not a big cool factor associated with rosebushes. A rose by any other name…

And things are not improved by Koichi Sugiyama’s perfectly hideous score. Yes, it does contain the classic Godzilla theme, always a necessity. But there’s also an orchestral theme which sounds like outtakes from John Williams’ Raiders of the Lost Ark score, plus a recurrent funky pseudo-disco action theme, and a fast-paced bit of chase music filled with oompahs. You can’t take seriously any tense action or chase theme accompanied by oompahs, pal. Can’t be done.

I appreciate that this, the long-awaited follow-up to Godzilla 1985, was trying to be original and give us something we’ve never seen before. But that never-before-seen thing was a giant rosebush. It’s no wonder that, after this, the powers-that-be at Toho said, “Know what? Maybe we’d better stick with recycling from here on out.”

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 23 (plus the expected collateral damage)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 103
• dream sequences: 0 (despite all we hear about them)
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0