aka Gojira vs. Kingu Gidoraa

• Written and directed by Kasuki Omori
• Starring
  • Megumi Odaka
  • Iaso Toyohara
  • Anna Nakagama
  • Chuck Wilson
  • Kenpachiro Satsuma

In case you’re wondering, yes, it’s that time of year again — time for the B-Masters Cabal, those most elitist of elite b-movie websites, to do another themed roundtable. This time, in honor of the upcoming release of Godzilla 2000, we’re plumbing the depths of kaiju movies, so that the Big G doesn’t feel alone on these American shores.

By Friday Aug. 11th, the following sites should have the following reviews for your perusal:

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! reviews The Giant Claw
B-Notes reviews Dogora
The Bad Movie Report reviews The Mighty Peking Man
Badmovies.org reviews The X From Outer Space
Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension reviews Reptilicus
Oh the Humanity! reviews Godzilla vs. Mothra
Stomp Tokyo reviews War of the Gargantuas
Teleport City reviews Godzilla’s Revenge

And, since Stomp Tokyo went to all the trouble to get a pre-release video of Godzilla 2000 all the way from Japan, here’s a link to the guest of honor himself.

And now, for my contribution to the festivities:

In 1991, I was a Mormon missionary in Japan. That summer I lived in a small house with my companion (since missionaries always travel in twos) and another two missionaries. One day, the other two took off early in the morning without a word, and were gone until at least nine that night. They wouldn’t say where they were; they just acted mysterious about it until a couple of weeks later, when we threatened them with physical violence, missionaries or no.

“We were extras in a movie,” they said with a shame-faced snicker.

“No way,” I said.

“A Godzilla movie,” they said.

My jaw hit the floor.

Thus began my long love affair with Godzilla vs. King Ghidora. It’s an indefensibly goofy movie, but dammit, it’s a GOOD indefensibly goofy movie.

We open in 2204 AD, as a submersible drifts along the deep sea, examining the sunken form of a monster quickly identified for us (for those who didn’t know) as King Ghidora, minus one head. The dialogue of the submersible’s unseen occupants informs us that Ghidora got his whupping back in the 20th century, at the hands of — Godzilla!

Cue credits.

1992 AD. A flying saucer buzzes Tokyo repeatedly, prompting great crowds to stand and point, and inciting sensational headlines in the otherwise staid Japanese press. All of this is brought to the attention of Terasawa, a young but successful science fiction writer who’s trying to get away from paranormal subjects and into nonfiction; but his former editor at Super Mystery Magazine Mu (she’s a cutie, too) wants him to investigate and write a story on the UFO for them. Terasawa’s more interested in a smaller article in the paper: A crazy old man at Dinosaur World museum who claims to have seen dinosaurs.

He’s a crazy old fella, all right; he walks around Dinosaur World with a megaphone, proclaiming that a dinosaur saved his garrison in the Pacific during WW2, and that it’s sorta their guardian angel. After the coot is thrown out of the museum, Terasawa questions him at the little food stand he runs (just looking at it got me hungry for some authentic ramen and some yakitori… mmmmm…). The geezer explains that their unit was trapped on Lagos Island with the Americans surrounding them and blowing their butts off, when suddenly the dinosaur emerged and chased the Americans away, saving the Japanese soldiers.

Meanwhile, we’re introduced to all the government muck-a-mucks whose job it is to say terribly obvious and not very helpful things about the UFO. Seems the saucer has landed in a remote part of Japan, and is just waiting for someone to come a-knockin’. This scene also reintroduces us to some of the long-time players in the new Godzilla series: Defense Minister Segawa (the old guy), Takehito Fujio (the younger guy), and Miki Saegusa of the ESP Research Institute (the cute but jug-eared girl — I’m not being mean, I just call’em as I see’em).

Terasawa goes to visit Professor Mizaki, who believes that saurian extinction may not be as complete as everyone thinks. But alas, it’s impossible to go back to Lagos to check on the current status of the dinosaur, as the island was used for H-bomb testing in 1954. That leads to Terasawa’s hypothesis (more like an unsupported flight of fancy, but since it proves correct, he’s allowed to smirk): That the radiation from the nuke testing turned the dinosaur into — Godzilla!

Then the cutie editor comes up with another interesting fact. Guess who else was on Lagos island? Businessman Yasuaki Shindo, formerly Major Shindo, who was one of the main figures in the post-war reconstruction, and who also owns Dinosaur World.

That same morning, two helicopters on routine patrol explode as they reach the vicinity of the UFO. The army naturally surrounds the area.

When Terasawa visits Shindo and puts the question to him, Shindo flatly denies that there were dinosaurs on Lagos Island, but changes his story when Terasawa mentions his idea that the dinosaur became Godzilla. (Apparently, being reminded that a two-hundred foot fire-breathing monster exists soothed his fears that he’d be ridiculed.) He even provides some old photographs that he’d had the presence of mind to snap at the time, which Terasawa goes over with the professor and the cutie editor. (Is it wrong of me to continually refer to the editor as a cutie? I know it seems terribly sexist, but she doesn’t really contribute much to the story except her pretty face.)

Meanwhile, at UFO central, three figures emerge from the underbelly of the craft. Segawa and Fujio go out to meet with them. They are Wilson (an American), Grenchinko (apparently a Russian, though nobody bothered to tell the guy doing the English voiceover), and Emi, a Japanese girl. (I’d like to point out here that, unlike Nick Adams in some earlier kaiju movies, both Wilson and Grenchinko speak fluent Japanese in the Japanese-language version. My own Japanese has never been good enough to figure out if Grenchinko was speaking Russian-accented Japanese, though.) They explain to the befuddled locals that they’re from the 23rd century, and that the UFO is actually a time machine. Also, that the three of them are still in the ship, and what Segawa and Fujio are conversing with are all holograms demonstrated by a “trick” handshake). No apologies are made for the two exploded helicopters.

An aside: In English, the dialogue in this movie, and many other Japanese films, sounds expecially ludicrous because every character apparently feels the need to repeat already-established facts several minutes after we’ve passed that point in the conversation. “So it’s a time machine!” “So you’re from the future!” “A hologram, huh?” etc. While I will agree that it’s silly, I will defend writer/director Kazuki Omori by stating that it’s also completely common in Japanese conversation. Repetition and meaningless confirmations are an integral part of speaking Japanese, and it often drives Westerners crazy. No, that doesn’t make the English version sound any less ludicrous.

Anyway, Wilson asks them to arrange a meeting with the Prime Minister and the other heads of government for the next day. When the appointed time arrives, the future folk use a teleporter to arrive at the meeting and finally explain their presence.

Here’s their story: In the future, Japan no longer exists. Sometime hence, Godzilla awakens once again (after naps like that, you’d think he’d be a little less cranky) and destroys some nuclear plants (the Russian, or at least his voice-over performer, insists on pronouncing it “NOOK-yuh-ler”), and the resulting radiation destroys the country. Their solution? Well, they have a book, written some years hence by a certain writer named Terasawa, about the origin of Godzilla…

So Segawa and friends bring Terasawa and Professor Mizaki (who wrote/will write the intro) in for a meeting. The time travelers’ plan is to go back in time, before Godzilla was created, and move the dinosaur from the island to prevent it from getting that transforming radiation exposure. Thus, no Godzilla. (Mizaki’s comment: “Our history will no longer include Godzilla.” No, but we’ll all be able to console ourselves with Gamera, won’t we?)

The futurians ask for Terasawa, the professor, and jug-eared Miki to accompany them on their expedition to the past, guided by Emi and M-11, the futurians’ pet android (much better table manners than the Terminator). Why? Uh…. We’ll talk about that later.

From the mother ship, the expedition members enter the smaller shuttle ship, where Emi has a trio of Doraks — biotech-created pets from the future, which resemble little golden cat puppets with bat wings. M-11 sets the controls, and ZZZZOOOM they’re off through a time warp that resembles the wormhole from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Welcome to 1944! The shuttle streaks over the U.S. boat off the coast of Lagos at night, inspiring some cutesy dialogue between the Captain and Major Spielberg, who’s gonna tell his son about this. (Get it? Get it? This actually gets funny a little later, as you’ll see.) The captain, by the way, is played by Kent Gilbert, a celebrity in Japan who also runs his own chain of English schools. From his performance here, I’ll wager that a string of Drama schools did not rapidly follow. (He’s a Mormon too, by the way.)

M-11 goes and looks in on the Japanese troops, huddled in a cave, waiting for the assault tomorrow. His six-million-dollar eye manages to pick out both the crazy old guy and Shindo, or at least their ostensibly younger versions. (One of the bigger sticking points for suspension of disbelief in this movie — and that’s saying something — is the ages of these characters, since they’re played by the same actors in both 1944 and 1992. There’s only so much that hair color will do to reverse the signs of ageing, you know.) (Meanwhile, meaningless comment aboard the shuttle: “We really did travel through time!”)

Next morning, the US troops attack, and it goes poorly for the Japanese, until THUMP… THUMP… THUMP… A ponderous carnosaur-type dinosaur trudges through the jungle. (If you look really close, you can see the itty-bitty ears on the sides of its head. Yup, this really is the origin of Godzilla.) While the Japanese wisely retreat, the Americans insist on shooting it; naturally that only riles it, and a score of servicemen lose their lives under its big feet or beneath the trees it knocks over. (It was in this scene that my fellow missionaries performed, dressed as G.I.s and shooting firearms. I’ve yet to be able to pick them out reliably on either my American-release EP or my homemade dub of the Japanese release; someday I’ll have to surrender and get a DVD player.)

When it follows them onto the beach, though, the ship has a clear shot at it, and bombards it pretty thoroughly (comment from the ship: “Take that, you dinosaur!”), but not until every single American on the beach is dead. Finally, the wounded dinosaur stumbles off into the jungle, and the captain decides that they should just plain leave the area. (Footage of his subsequent disciplinary hearing is not included.) This, by the way, is where the Spielberg joke actually becomes amusing, since this movie was released a year before Steven Spielberg did his own dinosaur flick.

We fast-forward a couple of days (hey, we can do that, we’ve got a time machine), when the Japanese troops are ready to leave the island. Major Shindo and his troops pay their respects to their saurian savior, whom they don’t expect to survive his injuries. Once they’re gone, M-11 sets the big teleporting lamp on top of the shuttle to transport the dinosaur off to the deep sea of the Bering Strait.

Then, right before they leave, Emi mysteriously leaves the Doraks outside. And then ZZZZIP, back to the future (or rather, the present), and let the paradoxes begin.

See, the people in the present confirm that Godzilla is gone. Wait! How would they know? There’s never BEEN a Godzilla, right? So howcum everyone knows about him?

But no one has time to worry about that, because almost immediately, a new monster shows up on the scene — King Ghidora, the radiation-induced amalgam of the three Doraks! And he’s controlled from the UFO! Ghidora lands at Fukuoka and performs the standard kaiju urban renovation project.

(You really gotta love the evacuation scenes in these movies. Watch the running people closely, half of them are smiling. They’re just jazzed to be in a Godzilla movie.)

Emi gets mad at Wilson and Grenchiko because, hey, they’re stomping her homeland! (Um, what exactly did she think their plan was?) But the men ignore her and, having decimated Fukuoka, then set King Ghidora on Hokkaido.

Now, let’s take a gander at the map:

Fukuoka is down in the lower left-hand corner, right by the East China Sea. Hokkaido, on the other hand, is the northernmost island — are far from Fukuoka as you can get and still be in Japan. This is an attack plan?

Well, Emi sneaks out with a jetpack and visits Terasawa, and this is where the exposition comes in. The time travelers are not representatives of the future world government, as they originally claimed; instead, they’re from the more radical Equal Environment Earth Union, and stole the time machine. It seems that, far from being destroyed, the Japan of the future is far too powerful, having used its economic might to buy up whole continents (South America and Africa are explicitly mentioned) and generally lording over the whole earth. So these three had come back to use the Doraks to create a monster they could control, and use it to knock some of the stuffing out of Japan so it wouldn’t have the wherewithal to become such a world power. Only now Wilson and Grenchiko have decided that it’s more fun to knock Japan clear back to the Stone Age.

Normally, the perfect weapon against one building-stomping kaiju is a second building-stomping kaiju — but Godzilla ain’t around any more! Or has never been around at all! So why is everyone talking about him? My head hurts. Anyway, is there any way we can recreate Godzilla? Say, by exposing the dinosaur to radiation? Gee, the drowned corpse of the dinosaur has been languishing in the waters of the Bering Strait for almost fifty years now; shoot, why not? But who’s got the nuke they can use?

Shindo does, it turns out; he has a single sub with nukes, designed to protect Japan in an extreme emergency. It’s currently in the vicinity of South America, but he’s certainly willing to turn it around.

Apparently we don’t need to wait that long, though; Miki starts harping about how she can “feel Godzilla.” (This, apparently, is the extent to which her psychic powers will benefit this movie.) How could that be? Could some other source of radiation have caused the dinosaur to become Godzilla? (This conversation, by the way, is taking place in a room whose door proudly proclaims it the “Super Scientific Play-Room. Scientists need downtime too, right?) Apparently, yes, as the cutie editor is able to find out from their back issue files; a nuclear sub went down in the Bering Strait in the mid-’70s and was never recovered. So, if the dinosaur’s been slowly absorbing radiation for almost twenty years, it’s only natural that it’s about to emerge as Godzilla! (I’d really love to read a biology textbook from this parallel universe.)

Well, gosh! We’d better tell Shindo to call off his sub — don’t want overkill! But Shindo’s not answering his phone, so Terasawa and Emi set off to find him. But someone else has found them — M-11, on a mission to bring Emi back. A car chase ensues, in which M-11’s rolls and explodes. But he merely steps from the flames, his false skin burnt and exposing metallic parts in his face and shoulder. (What — like you didn’t see that coming. Come on, exposing the machinery in an android is as inevitable as breaking rope bridges.) M-11 six-million-dollar-mans his way in front of them and stops Terasawa’s jeep with his bare hands, then lifts the front end off the ground. End of the line. (Note: In the Japanese release, the jack which is really holding up the jeep is clearly visible entering the frame at the end of the shot; in the American release, that’s been snipped out. Party-poopers. Note that all the ludicrous science has been left intact.)

Dragged back to the UFO, Emi unloads her foul mouth on Wilson and Grenchiko: “You disgusting men are filled with deceit!” Oddly enough, the disgusting men are unfazed; their reply falls more along the lines of “No one can defeat us, bwah-ha-ha” etc.

Deceit they may be filled with, but apparently not intelligence, as they give Emi the run of the ship again. Her first project, then, is to reprogram the reupholstered M-11 to obey only her commands. And as they say, “One person and an indestructible android is a majority.”

Meanwhile, undersea: Shindo’s sub is dutifully making it’s way to the Bering Strait, when — what’s that ahead? That, huge, bipedal, corduroyed thing? (Wait a sec while they turn on the rock star lighting behind him.) It’s Godzilla! And he’s in the mood for a good sub sandwich!

Terasawa, having gone home after Emi’s capture, then gets picked up by the new friendly version of M-11 and snuck into the UFO. Emi has changed out of her future granola clothes into her action outfit — a short black skirt, thigh-high black boots, and her hair in a tail off the top of her head. They come up with a plan…

An army chopper with most of the other characters (Miki, the professor, etc.) hovers over the spot where the sub disappeared. And with a flourish of bubbles, and a ridiculous harp run (I wish I were kidding), Godzilla surfaces! And off he goes, heading unerringly toward Japan.

Meanwhile, King Ghidora is finally arriving on Hokkaido; he easily dispatches the stock footage fighters that try to annoy him. But then Godzilla reaches Hokkaido from the Bering Straight (in less that fifteen minutes?! He may look clumsy on land, but Godzilla must swim like a sumbitch!). He ignores the field of cows and instead starts wrecking power stations and the like.

Wilson, insensed that Godzilla has reappeared, sets King Ghidora after him. The expected kaiju whupass ensues, as each bedecks the other with its own energy-laden breath. But though Godzilla is bigger than before (and meaner, as signified by his red eyes), the battle does not go well for him…

…Until Emi’s plan comes to fruition. She, Terasawa, and M-11 set explosive charges around the UFO’s main computer. Terasawa declares, “Make my day!” (yes, he says this in English in both the Japanese and English versions) and Boom! Suddenly Wilson can no longer control King Ghidora, and Godzilla gains the upper hand.

Naturally, they have no circuit breakers in the 23rd century, so the entire UFO begins showering sparks from instrument panels. But Wilson and Grenchiko are unworried because 1) the new Godzilla is antisocial enough that, even if he beats Ghidora, he’ll go on to destroy Japan himself, and 2) the UFO has a time homing device; if there’s a major power interruption, it will automatically return to its own time in 20 minutes. Bwah-ha-ha!

The good guys knock out the bad guys and escape in the shuttle. They then turn on the teleporter and aim it at the UFO…

Back up in Hokkaido, Godzilla’s kicking King Ghidora’s heinie. When Ghidora loses his middle head, he finally decides to turn tail(s) and run, but Godzilla doesn’t give up so easily; he blows a hole in Ghidora’s wing as he flies over the ocean, and Ghidora plummets into the deep. That’s about when the UFO teleports into his field of vision, and the last thing Wilson and Grenchiko see is a big fiery belch coming their way.

But now… Godzilla’s on a rampage. And those are notoriously hard to curtail. So onward to Sapporo, the major city of Hokkaido. (Cue evacuating crowds.) The anti-Godzilla laser cannons roll onto the scene, and do about as well as the anti-Godzilla weapons do in every other Godzilla movie. Godzilla leaves Sapporo a smoking hole, and proceeds south. (A nifty detail here — while striding down the street, Godzilla breaks into the subway beneath. Hey, it’s just a nifty detail; no biggie.)

All those with hair are pulling it out. Now that Ghidora’s gone, what other force can stand against Godzilla? Then the brainstorm: Emi and M-11 can go back to the future in the shuttle and find some way to repair Ghidora and bring him back to 1992. It’s a long shot, but hey — you got a better idea? Off they go. Emi makes some flirty noises at Terasawa before she goes; more on this later.

So now we’re back at that scene that began the movie in 2204, with Emi, M-11, and some other guy in the submersible. M-11 detects life signs in Ghidora (hey, if the dinosaur can do it, why not Ghidora?), and Emi convinces the guy to help her reconstruct Ghidora and send him back.

Meanwhile in 1992 (can you say “meanwhile” about something happening two hundred years earlier?), Godzilla enters Tokyo Bay. Fortunately, all of Tokyo has been evacuated — except Shindo, who watches the destruction from his penthouse office window. Ah, what poetic justice, he muses; it was the dinosaur who saved him and allowed him to reconstruct Japan after the war, and now it was that same dinosur who was stomping it all to kindling. Shindo gives Godzilla a final salute before Godzilla fries his entire building.

Many more buildings fall before Godzilla’s unfocused rage (including a few that I’ve been in before — how cool is that?), before the sky crackles — and there it is! The new, improved, Mecha-Ghidora! Gleaming chrome covers its torso (from which Emi controls it), reinforces its wings, strengthens its shins, and comprises the whole of the new mechanical head in the middle.

Kaiju whupass round two.

After flattening most of the city (and having been knocked down a couple of times), Emi releases Mecha-Ghidora’s secret weapon: a set of four grabbing clamps which grip Godzilla’s limbs, and a mega-clamp which grabs Godzilla’s midriff. Then Ghidora takes off, flying Godzilla out over the ocean before Godzilla manages to fry Ghidora again and send them both into the drink; at the last minute, the shuttle, which was part of that whole torso panel, pops back out of the ocean safely.

Emi makes her farewells, including revealing to Terasawa that he’s actually her distant ancestor, and pops back into her own time. (What?! You were making flirty noises with your great-great-grandpa? Dirty pool!)

The end.

It’s a whiz-bang show while it’s running, but it only takes ten minutes of half-conscious thought afterward to see that the plot makes absolutely not one lick of sense. In fact, it raises more questions than Socrates himself:

Why does the UFO buzz Tokyo a full day before making contact? Why do they bother to reveal themselves and get help from the present-day folk? After all, they already have the book, which tells them more than the present-day Terasawa knows. And what’s the point of having Miki along? Why do they linger in the past and watch the whole drama instead of efficiently zipping in after the fact and removing the dinosaur? Why didn’t they check first to see where there were downed nuclear subs? WHAT’S WITH THAT MASSIVE FRIGGING PARADOX? Why do they blithely let Emi sneak out and help the others? Why do they let her reprogram M-11? How can Godzilla get to Hokkaido so quickly?

Thinking about all this will kill brain cells. On the other hand, there are many things which raise this movie above the rest of the Godzilla corpus. I mean, it’s got UFOs! Time travelers! WW2 battles! Surviving dinosaurs! Gaigins who speak Japanese! A Terminator-style android! Nuclear subs! Cows!

And just as notably, it doesn’t follow the pattern of “Another monster appears on the scene just as Godzilla is waking up, so they fight” that they resorted to again in Godzilla and Mothra.

And plus, there’s just the fact that I have a personal connection to this one. I was there when it was being made; I got to see firsthand the marketing blitz, and the love that the Japanese public have for their own worst cinematic enemy. I got to be in buildings that Godzilla later smashed.

In fact, aside from being pissed still that I didn’t get to be an extra, this is a great big warm fuzzy for me.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 71 (plus various pilots, crew, and stragglers in the evacuated cities)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 157 (give or take)
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0