• Directed by Jun Fukuda
• Written by Shinichi Sekizawa and Kazue Shiba
• Starring
  • Tadao Takashima
  • Akira Kubo
  • Bibari Maeda
  • Akihito Hiraka
  • Kenji Sahara

Between the “Godzilla as an honest-to-God monster” phase and the “Godzilla as just a gosh-darned nice guy” phases of the original run of the franchise, lies Son of Godzilla. The franchise was in a state of flux, and this movie shows that; the Big G isn’t quite the awesome force of nature he was in the original, but he’s still not the tame Defender of Children Everywhere that he became very soon thereafter (in other words, there’s no Kenny in this movie). And the bonus here is that, because the franchise was in transition, there’s actually a glimmer of creativity here, a story structure not tied to an ironbound formula. Not that it’s close to being the best of the series, but at least it wins high marks by trying to be a different kind of Godzilla movie.

On a remote South Seas island, a small all-Japanese scientific team, under the guidance of the pipe-smoking Dr. Kusumi (Tadao Takashima) is setting up a mysterious, hush-hush experiment under the aegis of the UN Commission on Agriculture. What, exactly, is the nature of the experiment? Well, you can’t expect the men to discuss that amongst themselves for our benefit, can you? I mean, they’ve already been on the island for weeks getting it ready — long enough that twitchy guy Furukawa (Yoshio Tsuchiya, who also played the Japanese officer saved by the Godzillasaurus in Godzilla vs. King Ghidora) is getting stir crazy.

“Goro, you’re breaking the dress code!”

No, dumping exposition into our lap would be silly. But dumping a reporter onto the island so they’ll have someone to explain it all to — hey, that’d work! So only a few days before the experimental test, an unexpected lone man parachutes onto the island: Reporter Goro (Akira Kubo — also a good way to dump him into the movie), a young and impulsive journalist with an instinct that, gosh darn it, there’s a story to be had on this island.

Since the UN Commission on Agriculture isn’t the most militant branch of the New World Order, the scientists have no security to threaten him, and no boat or plane with which to drag his butt back to civilization. They do have a radio with which they can call in transportation, but it never occurs to them, so instead they grudgingly let him stay as their housekeeper/gopher, trying not to let on what the entire experiment is about. He also asks what the strange “WSSSHT” noises are coming from the jungle, but they can’t answer that one, because they don’t know themselves until a giant (say, VW bus-sized) mantis with glowing eyes wanders into the camp. (Don’t worry, they shoo away really easily when fired upon by scientists with handguns. Security? We don’t need no steenkin’ security!)

Goro also goes far afield looking for some edible herbs (nice to see the UN being economical and forcing their secret scientific teams to forage and live off the land), and discovers exactly what the Godzilla movies have traditionally been missing: A jungle girl (Bibari Maeda), swimming in a tidal pool! She disappears quickly on being spotted, naturally, and none of the scientists believe Goro’s story (I believe that’s called “questioning his journalistic integrity”). They pompously declare that they searched the entire island before setting up their experiment. On the other hand, these are the same guys who missed an entire species of giant-ass mantises residing on said island, so maybe we shouldn’t let UN scientists do their own recon from here on out.

“Mmm! Scrambled, boiled, or poached?”

It turns out, they eventually reveal, that the experiment involves weather control, designed to help feed the starving nations by making the wastelands of the earth farmable. Interestingly, Dr. Kusumi includes the “South American jungles” on his list of wastelands, right beside Arctic tundras and the Sahara. Ooo-key dokey… Anyway, the specific experiment is to see if they can knock the temperature down on this sweltering island.

Goro immediately tries to find his mystery girl, to no avail; meanwhile, the countdown commences, plagued by mysterious bursts of radiation that interrupt radio communications between various parts of the experiment. Apparently, the process works like this: Send up a weather balloon (whole new sense to the term, isn’t it?) with a something-or-other that explodes at umpteen hundred feet. Then spinning blowers on towers spread over the island dispense clouds of silver iodide into the air. And then finally, a second balloon explodes a small nuclear device at a certain altitude. What could be simpler, really, than dumping tons of a foreign chemical into the biosphere, followed by a nuke?

But naturally, something goes wrong; one of those radioactive radio bursts interrupts communications with the second balloon, and nobody thought to build any kind of automatic altimeter-based detonator into it, so it floats far too high before exploding on its own, and throws the whole system out of whack: the island becomes the center of a “radioactive storm,” with torrential thunderstorms dropping 200-degree rain over the island. Gee, there’s a contingency no one prepared for.

Wall-eyed critter, ain’t he?

Being a steadfast scientific sort, Dr. Kusumi decides to stay on the island and reload for a second test; after all, it’s not like any further mistakes can really bugger up the local ecosystem any worse (though the fauna seems surprisingly un-parboiled), and anyway, the radio got broke in the storm, so they can’t call for a cab anyway. (And yes, twitchy Furukawa reacts by twitching even more violently.)

Things do get worse, though. The mantises have been mutated to roughly the size of a Concorde jet by the radioactive rain. And what’s more, when Goro and Dr. Kusumi try to discover the source of the radioactive bursts that have been screwing things up, they track them to a giant egg which the mantises have just dug out of a hillside. Thanks to the well-known animosity of mantises toward anything ovoid, the egg is broken open to reveal — well, Goro immediately identifies it as “a baby Godzilla,” although you and I know that the so-called son of Godzilla looks more like a cross between a frog and an Ewok. The radioactive bursts were the unhatched youth calling to the parent, which means — yup, look out — here comes the Big G, arriving just in time to knock away the mantises which were tormenting G the Younger. Oh, and on arriving, Godzilla accidentally stomped on half of the camp, just in case the storm didn’t do enough damage.

The jungle girl’s also still around, as they discover when she steals Goro’s Hawaiian shirt off the clothesline; Goro follows and finds out that she hid out the storm in a cave, where she’s got some relics that explain how she got there: Her name’s Riko, and she’s been alone on the island for seven years, ever since her father, Dr. Matsumiya, a scientist who stayed in the Pacific after the end of WW2, died. Riko doesn’t really seem any worse the wear for her lonely sojourn, and after an initial bout of mistrust, thinks it’s grand to stay with a half-dozen sweaty men who’ve been alone on this island for months without a female in sight.

What she doesn’t know is, Goro LIKES ‘em feisty.

Most of the rest of the movie is split between various human adventures — some of the men get a tropical fever, and to get the magic “red water” that will cure them, Riko and Goro have to brave the valley of the hideous Spiga, a giant spider that counterintuitively shoots webbing from its front end — and Godzilla’s new parenting role. It’s a parenting style I identify with very well: loving but gruff, with plenty of naps. And I can easily understand Godzilla’s brusqueness with his offspring; while now played by a midget in a suit (instead of the superbly unconvincing marionette model that crawled from the egg), Little G is as annoying as a pin in the eye: He brays like a donkey, gets into trouble with mantises all the time, and can only breathe fire in wimpy smoke rings unless Dad stomps on his tail. And he keeps interrupting Godzilla’s naps.

Naturally, we avoid the most interesting question about Godzilla’s procreation, which is, “How the hell?” Even now, it’s unquestioned among the cast that Godzilla is a male (and the offspring, too); is there a Mrs. Godzilla who doesn’t venture out much? (Given how ugly her kid is, I can venture an opinion why.) Or does Godzilla reproduce by some sort of parthenogenetic ovulation? I dunno.

Eventually, the human types have to escape from the island using the weather control equipment to drop the temperature to “friggin’ cold,” sending everything into hibernation so they won’t accidentally stomp our heroes as they inflate their emergency boat. I guess since it worked this time, we can call the UN’s entire expenditure a success.

“And the next time I catch you smoking my cigars…”

There are some pretty good ideas in here for a Godzilla movie. You’ve got that whole procreation thing (always a crowd-pleaser), and jungle girls are always a favorite. The giant spider is effective; a huge mechanical leg allows the monster to interact with the human cast, a rarity in these movies. And the final image of Godzilla and son, holding each other and falling into hibernation as the snow covers them, is quite striking. But nothing is really explored deeply, or at all, really. I’ve already expressed my dissatisfaction with any explanation for Godzilla: The Next Generation. And once Riko has gotten over her thirty-second adjustment of being in the company of other humans, she seems no more an unsocialized outsider than Goro the Para-Journalist.

Nevertheless, I’m always glad to give credit where it’s due, and having a Godzilla film which didn’t involve Godzilla showing up just in time to battle some other kaiju of similar statue (being controlled by aliens, more likely than not) is certainly a refreshing change. And as annoying as Godzilla Jr. is (known in the Japanese version as “Minira” and in later movies as “Minya,” neither name is mentioned here), he only made two more appearances in the series: A small role in the kaiju-fest Destroy All Monsters, and the incredibly sucky Godzilla’s Revenge, which apparently convinced producers that the now-shabby costume wasn’t worth replacing when it wore out.

I’d suggest that story elements here are worth recycling in a remake, but that’s already been tried before, with a new-and-improved Godzilla Jr. appearing in Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla 2, Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla, and Godzilla vs. Destroyer. By the second of those three, Junior had become so pudgy and bright-eyed that he looked like he was the focus of a new Pokemon expansion deck. I guess the temptation to turn a juvenile Godzilla into something ostensibly cute ‘n’ cuddly is too great for anyone to resist, and these movies really don’t need any Care Bear characters. (That’s what the Mothra movies are for.)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 3 giant mantises and 1 Spiga
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 4
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actor who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0