Awfully Good Movies: Godzilla's Revenge (Video)

Awfully Good Movies: Godzilla’s Revenge (Video)

June 3rd 2019, 6:00am

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Godzilla's Revenge / All Monsters Attack (1969 / 1971)

DIRECTOR: Ishiro Honda CAST: Tomonori Yazaki, Kenji Sahara, Machiko Naka

With Godzilla reclaiming his throne as KING OF THE MONSTERS in his latest American reboot, Awfully Good Movies is revisiting some old-school Godzilla–rubber suits and all–by taking a look at perhaps the worst movie of the original Toho Godzilla series: GODZILLA'S REVENGE, aka ALL MONSTERS ATTACK! Fifty years ago, Toho Studios was prepared to close up shop for good on the Godzilla franchise as the films were bringing in increasingly lower box office receipts, with Godzilla getting his ass beat at the Japanese box office by his fellow kaiju Gamera. So Toho decided to follow Gamera's lead and reinvigorate their series by making the tenth Godzilla adventure far more child-friendly than its previous installments, as Godzilla was now paired up with a mischievous young boy named Ichiro who uses his Godzilla-related fantasies as a means of escape from his absentee parents and aggressive school bullies. And since the Gamera movies were able to work with lower budgets by reusing footage from previous movies, most of the fights in GODZILLA'S REVENGE between Godzilla and his fellow inhabitants of Monster Island are just taken from previous Godzilla movies with little to no reediting. Hey, we ARE aiming this movie towards kids, after all, and we all know that kids are stupid! Oh, and you remember Manilla/Minya, the adorable son of Godzilla who's been palling around with his green mean dad in the past two movies? Well, now he can talk in this movie–even if he really hasn't got anything substantial to say, and he talks in a dumb voice that sounds disconcertingly like Barney the Dinosaur, but hey, as we previously stated: kids are stupid. But Toho would find out from the lackluster reception towards their tenth Godzilla installment that maybe children were a little smarter than they gave them credit for, because even if you were to walk into this flick as a Godzilla newcomer, you could still tell how little of a shit was given in this slapdash excuse for a monster movie…although I'll admit the monster fights are still a lot of fun to watch. Also, I'll give this much credit to GODZILLA'S REVENGE: its soundtrack does not feature a single song from Puff Daddy featuring Jimmy Page, nor does it kill off Bryan Cranston 15 minutes into the movie. Hats off to you there, Toho Studios…hats off to you.