Wednesday, 10/16

Okay. So maybe they're not QUITE as good as I remember.

When I was a kid I loved Godzilla movies (explains a lot, doesn't it?). I would sometimes stay up late to see them, I bought a monster movie book once just because it had pictures of the creature, and I would always look forward to hearing the “rawr” and watching the cardboard buildings get the heck stomped out of them.

Don't look at me like that. You already knew I was a weird kid.

Anyway, Turner Classic Movies is featuring Godzilla movies Friday nights this month. They're showing each and every movie Toho made featuring the creature from 1955 to 1976, the films I watched as a kid, so I figured I'd DVR them and see if they live up to how I remember them as a kid.

Spoiler alert—with the exception of one, they don't.

That one would be the original Japanese version of the tale, “Gojira”. That's the film they cut Raymond Burr into for the first US release of “Godzilla, King of the Monsters”. I've seen the movie many times; I even have a Blu-ray with both versions of the film. And the original is a harrowing, atmospherically black & white allegory of the dangers of nuclear war, perhaps not surprising considering Japan was just a decade past having had two atomic bombs dropped on them. Even the Americanized version of the film still holds on to some of the power of the original.

So that one still holds up.

The rest, though? Not so much. As the years advanced and Godzilla was made more and more human-like, the series devolved into a formula piece, where you knew that Godzilla would make X appearances stomping a building and would be joined by one or two other monsters, ending in a fight that made pro wrestling seem unscripted by comparison.

That was especially true in a movie they showed last weekend, “Invasion of the Astro Monster”. I remember loving the Americanized version of it, “Godzilla vs Monster Zero”, almost as much as the original. But upon viewing it the past few nights my fond memories turned into thoughts that I must've been drunk when I watched it, even though I don't drink and even though I was probably eight the first time I saw it. The plot made no sense, the characters made no sense, and even Godzilla was in an alien-induced coma for most of the film. Loraine walked into the living room while I was watching it, caught a few seconds, and said (quoting here) “This isn't a very good movie, is it”.

And I found it very hard to disagree.

So while I'll always have fond memories of watching Godzilla movies as a kid, the adult version of me now realizes that there wasn't really that much to recommend those fond memories. But I'll always still love “Gojira”, and no matter what, seeing a guy in a rubber suit stomp over a cardboard version of a skyscraper—no matter how badly produced or how formulaic--will still always bring a nostalgic smile to my face.

(jim@wmqt.com)