All Monsters Attack (1969) – Review

By the tenth movie in Godzilla’s cinematic odyssey, some bright spark at Toho realised that the greatest resource in keeping the King Of The Monsters flush financially was, obviously, to get more children to come and watch his movies. After all, the giant irradiated lizard was, at this point, barely one step shy of being an out and out superhero at this point, turning up to right montrous wrongs at the drop of a hat, so the concept was technically sound…. the execution, however…
The result was All Monsters Attack, a movie primarily aimed at children that saw the King Of The Monsters reduced to that of a figment of a child’s imagination and ending up not unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, in movies like Jingle All The Way, The Pacifier and The Tooth Fairy. Worse still, Godzilla not only had to share the limelight with Minilla – surely the Jaden Smith of the Kaiju world – the majority of the monster action is merely repurposed clips from previous films. But perhaps the biggest blow to long-term fans is that this truly bizarre concept was brought to us by Ishiro Honda himself, the man who had primarily built Toho’s monster universe into what it was at the time.

Little Ichiro is a lonely boy who lives in the highly polluted urban jungle of Kawasaki and thanks his father working long hours on the railways and his mother absorbing vast amounts of overtime at work,.he is forced to spend long hours with no one but his vivid imagination. Often, to break up the monotonous hours spend on his own in an empty apartment, he spends time chatting to a local toy maker, or ducking a group of bullies who tease him, but a lot of the time he daydreams that he travels to the fantasy land of Monster Island and makes friends with Minilla, the son of Godzilla. Despite the fact that hearing the pug dog-faced, dead-eyed Minilla talk with a child’s voice is weapons grade nightmare fuel, they both hang out and watch Godzilla beat the crap out of other monsters while avoiding the red headed, monster bully monster, Gabara – although why exactly a child would choose to imagine a bully for himself in his own, personal fantasy land is never really explained – maybe he’s just fucking stupid…
Anyway, while Ichiro fantasy life is full of adventure, monsters and Godzilla punching out giant his neighbours like a boozy dad at a little league game, his actual life is about to get a shot of excitement of it’s own when the child stumbles upon the hideout of a couple of bank robbers who take steps to try and silence him.
Can Ichiro take the lessons he’s learnt by watching Minilla stand up to Gabara and use it to not only defeat the robbers, but find a way to be more confident and bold in life too?

I have to confess, on paper, a lot of All Monsters Atrack makes a lot of sense. Honda is obviously invested in the points that the movie makes about parents, enslaved to making ends meet, leaving their kids to fend for themselves, bullying and the increasing amount of pollution that Japan was pumping into it’s own atmosphere. Taken in this respect, you couldn’t really imagine a hero of popular culture relating to his child fans more unless Tony Stark jetted round to a random kid’s house in person in order to help him with maths homework – which sort of happens in Iron Man 3 now that I think about it. Anyway, things don’t sound so bad, right? I mean, it’s a legitimately endearing concept and an exceptionally savvy way to put a younger audience directly in the movie while simultaneously dealing with some important, social issues.
However, the reality of the situation proves to be something quite different and after the spectacular, multi-monster blowout of Destroy All Monsters, its genuinely tough to get past the annoying concept of Godzilla and co. being the figments of a latchkey kid’s overactive imagination. Maybe I could have forgiven the concept if Toho had put some actual production values behind it, but as the film limps it’s way through it’s obnoxious runtime it becomes abundantly clear that this is an exercise of corner cutting. The vast majority of Godzilla scraps are scenes edited in from previous movies while we cut back to Ichiro reacting, so essentially what we actually have here is a Godzilla clip show aimed at 6 year olds… and they don’t even use good clips either, resorting to replaying the tennis-with-boulders goofiness of Ebirah: Horror Of The Deep and the mantis slamming antics Son Of Godzilla. It’s also worth pointing out that as a result, Godzilla’s appearance changes drastically from shot to shot and all the new monster footage shot is noticably sub par with Gabara quite possibly being the worst monster in Toho’s monster pantheon by something of a long margin. Rigid, cheap looking and boasting the twin powers of zapping victims with blasts of static electricity and being a massive ginger dickhead, I realise he’s supposed to be the representation of Ichiro’s angst, but you’ll most likely find yourself longing for the more sophisticated designs of a King Ghidorah or an Anguirus.

Also not helping matters one not is a truly atrocious theme song and score which is the audio equivalent of being kicked squarely and repeatedly in the balls by someone wearing clogs, in fact the whole film seems crafted to play like nails down a blackboard to anyone old enough to have grown pubes and the film neglects to find a counter for that issue that plagued many a Gamera movie during the same time period – Japanese kids in 60s monster movies are usually agonisingly annoying.
However, if you were to strip out the monster stuff and simply presented the story as a half-hour, after school special to help kids realise that they don’t have to be lonely or afraid, its admittedly pretty effective and I honestly believe that it was a great gateway flick for kids back in the day. Of course, the central message that you can instantly cure bullying by fight back once is suspiciously dated and even though Ichiro defeats the robbers and punches respect into his bully, his parents are still going to work horrendous hours, so you are left wondering what exactly the moral was supposed to be once the movie finally grinds to a merciful halt.

Honda was said to have had warm feelings about this particular entry into the franchise, but, like many others, I find this weird, unnecessarily meta, rug pull the most dreaded watch whenever a Godzilla marathon comes around.
Commendable concept but horrible execution, when you make Minilla the lead, this is what you’re bound to get – proof that raging, inexcusable nepotism even happens on Monster Island.

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