Remakes have a tendency to revive interest in the originals, at least as far as the studios are concerned. They roll out new editions rolling on disc and digital streams in anticipation of interest and the new Godzilla has no shortage of ancestors: 28 Japanese Godzilla features (and one American film that is best not spoken of) from the 1954 original to the final Japanese appearance in the 50th Anniversary feature Godzilla: Final Wars (2004).
Eleven of those films are newly released on Blu-ray this month, spanning forty years of Japanese giant monster madness. Not all of them are masterpieces (or even particularly good, to be honest) but a couple of them are classic and most of them are great fun. And through them all, Godzilla is incarnated by a stuntman in a suit stomping through miniature cities and landscapes while an overcranked camera filmed it at high speed to give a dreamy, slightly-slow motion look and a sense of mass and size to the monster battles. The process is affectionately known as suitmation.
Kraken, an imprint of anime specialist Section23, has three pictures from the first wave of Godzilla film, known to the kaiju cognoscenti as the Showa Period. One of them, the 1971 Godzilla vs. Hedorah (Kraken/Section23, Blu-ray, DVD), originally released in the US as Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, is the trippiest picture of the entire cycle. It’s a Mod-zilla mixing of pop music, hip nightclub scenes and psychedelic imagery with an environmental message and the pollution spawned monster.
That’s right, Hedorah is born of pollution and toxic waste, growing from a bizarre black tadpole to a weird, blobby slime monster (the name, in fact, is a pun on the word hedoro, the Japanese term for sludge or slime) through osmosis and a voracious appetite for pollution. In the film’s most memorable (and unabashadly druggiest) scene, Hedorah grows legs (or something similar that provides landfall locomotion), ambles up to a smokestack belching black smoke and huffs it down like a stoner with a giant, putrid bong. Sounds like a solution for pollution, right? Except that Hedorah oozes poison gas as a by-product, which itself evolves from a knock-out gas to an acid fog that eats its victims down to the bone. Yes, this is the first Godzilla film since the debut that leaves victims littered across the screen. Even Godzilla is affected by it, and when he punches Hedorah, his arms simply sink into the creature, like it was made of sludge.
It’s truly bizarre and quite a trip, and it was too much for Toho Studios. A planned sequel was scrapped, Banno was bounced from the franchise and journeyman director Jun Fukuda brought back. Some fans hate the film. I think the sheer oddity of the creative chemistry makes it one of the most strangely entertaining entries of the entire series.
All three feature the original Japanese language and English dub editions, with the original Japanese trailers.
Thus Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991), a wild mix of time travel, bionic monsters and historical revisionism. A team of do-gooders from the future pay a visit to 1992 Japan, ostensibly to save the island nation from certain doom by ridding them of Godzilla, but in reality putting in motion an insidious plan for… well, you know how these things work. The film explains Godzilla’s origins (he’s a surviving dinosaur mutated by the radiation of H-bomb tests in the South Seas islands), then wipes it away with alien hocus pocus. In his place the Futurians create the dreaded three-headed, gold-scaled flying dragon King Ghidora, whose snaky, bobbing heads scream lightning bolts, and send him on to level Tokyo. Fear not, for no simple time travel paradox can stop the creation of the planet’s greatest lizard king and Godzilla is back, bigger, badder and angrier than ever. Don’t try to make sense of the time travel shenanigans for the plot has more holes than sieve. Just enjoy the no holds barred giant monster battles (including a bout between the Big G and a rebuilt flesh and metal Mecha-King Ghidora) and loopy sci-fi flourishes. He returns in Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth (1992), which is practically a modern remake of the original Godzilla vs. Mothra, with an evil twin Mothra tossed in for good measure
Godzilla: Final Wars is at once tribute, celebration, summing up, and send off, and quite possibly the first Godzilla film directed by an honest to goodness fan of the old-school movies: genre stylist Ryuhei Kitamura (of the cult hit Versus). It’s the first Godzilla film in decades to embrace that early “history,” bringing back all the old monsters for one last fight, and for good measure it tosses in an alien invasion force and a team of Power Ranger-like mutants to enlist Godzilla in their battle to take back the Earth. It’s lusciously, knowingly, lovingly cheesy, an affectionate farewell with a hilarious parting shot at the American remake. Every creature brought in to battle Godzilla is a classic suitmation monster with one exception, a suspiciously familiar CGI lizard who is easily tromped by the real lizard king in record time.
All eight films feature original Japanese language and English dub editions and original Japanese trailers. The final double-feature includes featurettes on each film.