All Monsters Attack

By the tenth movie in Godzilla’s cinematic output some bright spark at Toho realised that the greatest resource in keeping the King Of The Monsters flush financially was, obviously, children. After all, the giant irradiated lizard was, at this point, one step shy of being a superhero at this point, turning up to right wrongs at the drop of a hat so the concept was technically sound…. the execution, however…

Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson , Godzilla found himself in a movie specifically tailored for little ‘uns and worse still, had to share the limelight with Minilla, his ugly-ass son in a plot that’s bizarre as it is a let down for long term fans.
Little Ichiro is a lonely boy, his father works long hours on the railways and he is forced to spend long hours with no one but his vivid imagination. He imagines that Minilla is his best friend (hearing the pug dog faced, dead eyed Minilla talk with a child’s voice is weapons grade nightmare fuel) and that they both hang out on Monsterland and watch Godzilla beat up on other monsters while avoiding the red headed, bully monster Gabbara although why exactly a child would imagine a bully for himself is never explained. Maybe he’s just fucking stupid…

Anyway, things don’t sound so bad, right? I mean, once you get past the annoying concept of Godzilla and co. being the figments of a latchkey kid’s overactive brain, the anti bullying plot makes actual sense. 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 other movies so essentially what we have here is a Godzilla clip show aimed a 6 year olds… and they don’t even use good clips, resorting to replaying the tennis-with-boulders goofiness of Ebirah: Horror Of The Deep and Son Of Godzilla. It’s also worth pointing out Godzilla’s appearance changes drastically from shot to shot and any new monster footage is decidedly sub par (Gabara is the WORST monster EVER).

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 pubes.
Commendable concept, horrible execution.

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