Godzilla

Here’s another one of my life’s important junctures, for not only was ‘King Kong Vs Godzilla’ my first encounter with this mutated gargantuan, it was also my first giant monster movie, my first ever ‘kaiju’! ‘King Kong Vs Godzilla’ was also the first Toho production I’d ever seen and I was in awe, yes! Awe!! The scale and sound of this fantastic production just blew me away. The films of this big fellow and his kin folk, have given me more enjoyment than anything else in my entire movie viewing career. I don’t really know what it is about them that fascinates and excites me so much. I’m used to people looking at me as if I’m still a small child, even my fellow staff at Derann couldn’t understand and used to go into hysterics when the saw ‘the man in the rubber suit’. But perhaps it’s main attraction is the thrashing they give Tokyo or some other major city, the crowds of terrified people as they run for their lives, or perhaps, and this is particularly true in the Japanese movies, seeing those miniature streets lined with street lights, telephone lines and abandoned cars, waiting for the monster to swipe an arm or swing it’s  tail, and then it happens, the models, built with such care and detail, every tile on a roof, whole walls falling into rubble..Magnificent!, all that hard work for just a few moments of movie footage, of movie magic.  It’s just not as satisfying when it’s CGI! Until recently I’d only ever seen 6 Japanese Godzilla films at a cinema, although I have seen several other Toho productions ‘King Kong Escapes’, ‘Battle in Outer Space’ and ‘Frankenstein Conquers the World’ an a handful of others, at various cinemas. That first movie opened up a  world of giant monster movies where entire cities or landmarks were levelled. Movies like ‘Gorgo’, ‘King Kong’, ‘Reptilicus’, ‘Konga’, ‘Gappa’, ‘Gamera’, ‘Mothra’, ‘Rodan’, ‘Tarantula’, ‘The Deadly Mantis’ and a multitude of other pesky critters. It was me who persuaded Michael Myers, Managing Director of UK based distributor Miracle Films to put Godzilla’s name on their posters for ‘War of the Monsters’. They’d done very good business with ‘Monsters From An Unknown Planet’, without a mention of Godzilla, so I said Godzilla should be on there and so it came to be, did it help, I’ll never know! But giant monster’s don’t have to create havoc in a built up area, I’m just as happy to sit and watch any film that contains dinosaurs or other over sized beasts, movies like ‘The Land Unknown’, ‘The Lost World’, ‘One Million Years BC’, ‘Lost Continent’, ‘The Beast From Hollow Mountain’, ‘The Cyclops’, ‘Them’, ‘Unknown Island’…are you getting the picture. More recently, I was generally quite happy with 2014’s ‘Godzilla’, though I thought he could do with losing a few pounds. The sequels ‘Godzilla: King of the Monsters’ and ‘Godzilla Vs Kong’ were both action filled with some great spectacle. Whatever, Godzilla is a good deal better than the 1998 critter that ran around New York City impersonating ‘Big G’. I have all of his films on DVD and are collecting them as they appear on Blu-ray, I also own the Criterion ‘Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954–1975’ Blu-ray set. I have a very nice collection of other giant varmints, a collection that is continually  growing, and in the last few years have I discovered the world of 12 inch vinyl figures from X-Plus, which I proudly display in my bedroom! In 2023 I had the thrill of seeing ‘Godzilla Minus One’ at my local Showcase cinema. Big audience and a fabulous experience, possibly the best Godzilla film ever made.