Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972) Recap/Review

He's only on Monster Island for one scene.

Before the Legendary Pictures movies started coming out the name "Godzilla" to Americans conjured up images of cheaply made sci fi crap full of silly moments pandering to the little kiddies. That doesn't accurately describe 90 % of movies in this series...though that absolutely 100 % accurately describes today's film. Godzilla vs. Gigan (originally released in the states with the bullshit title "Godzilla on Monster Island") is a movie that's mostly remembered for introducing the villain Gigan, who went on to become 1 of the most popular kaiju amongst fans...and for not being very good.

(Yes I realize this is my first recap since February. No I don't know when the next 1 will be. Yes I know nobody cares since no one knows this blog exists.)



Recap:

We open with our protagonist Gengo (Hiroshi Ishikawa) showing off his ideas for a new comic to the head of a comic book company. Since said ideas involve children's hatred of homework getting telepathically beamed into outer space and creating an evil monster of homework, the meeting goes about as well as you'd expect.

  Gamera movies wouldn't even use this as a monster. Purely for budget reasons though.


He bitches and moans to his girlfriend for a bit about not getting the job  before she tells him to apply for a job at "World Children's Land", an in construction amusement park that's working on building a tower of Godzilla. Because what better mascot for your amusement park than one of the multiple
giant monsters that routinely turns Tokyo into burning rubble? Also of note about this scene: Our protagonist calls his girlfriend "A real hard bitch" which I only bring up because there's no way in hell you'd see that in a kids movie nowadays.


Anyway he goes to World Children's Land and we learn that they're simultaneously working on a monster museum and completely dedicated to bringing peace to the whole world (because amusement parks are obviously known for their humanitarian work), a concept so ridiculous that even Gengo with his moronic ideas about homework monsters questions it. But he immediately changes his tune when the head of WCL likes said moronic ideas (Which is frankly the most unrealistic thing in this flick about giant monsters fighting other giant monsters from outer space over the fate of the planet) and gives him a job.

Then completely out of nowhere Gengo says "What about Monster Island? All the monsters in the world live there!" before the WCL guy tells him that they'll destroy Monster Island after they build the museum. OK 1: What did Monster Island have to do anything they were talking about? B: Why does a supposed amusement park have the power and authority to blow up an island? 4: Blowing an island to bits and killing all its inhabitants doesn't exactly sound very peaceful.

 Nothing screams "world peace" quite like a 50 meter tall radioactive lizard who shoots atomic energy from his mouth.



The next day Gengo bumps into a woman on his way to the WCL office. The woman runs away before she can explain anything but not before dropping a tape on the ground. Later that night Gengo is confronted by that same woman, who is demanding the tape from him. He refuses to say anything (because WCL told him they were enemies of peace) but faints when a hippie holds an ear of corn to his back like a gun thus causing him to faint.

...That's a sentence I just typed out, isn't it?

 Yep, this is the 70's alright.


The woman and the corn guy are Machiko (Tomoko Umeda) and Shosaku (Minoru Takashima) respectively. They explain to the now awake Gengo that Machiko's brother got a job at WCL, disappeared and the higher ups aren't talking. Conveniently though, her brother wrote down this message in his journal: "Their plans are diabolical! The tape will reveal everything!". Gee, woulda been nice if you wrote those plans in your journal instead of this cryptic message.


Even though Gengo has no reason to trust these weirdoes, he believes everything they say and gives them the tape. They turn the tape on and it plays a noise that Godzilla and Angurius hear on Monster Island.

...Before I go on I feel like I should warn anyone who's currently drinking something while reading this to stop, let you spit it out in disbelief.

Godzilla and Angurius...talk to each other. And I don't mean they make monster noises to each other, I mean they speak English. In case you don't believe me here's the clip:

 Minilla talking in Godzilla's Revenge was bad enough. Now Godzilla has to sound like a drunken mental patient?

.Angurius and Godzilla talk to each other throughout the film but only 2 scenes have them speaking English like this. I have to ask...why? It's not like either of those scenes were so complex that the minds of the audience members couldn't possibly comprehend them without dialogue. The really bizarre thing is this was in the Japanese version too only with word bubbles instead of spoken words. Just shit.

Speaking of shit let's talk about the Godzilla costume used for this movie. While Angurius and all the other monsters look fine Godzilla looks like he's literally been through the wringer. At the time Toho had been using the same suit for years and the wear and tear was incredibly obvious at this point.



 This is a gif I found of a scene from later on in the film. You can literally see the King of the Monsters falling at the seems!

Godzilla tells Angurius to check out the noise so Angurius leaves Monster Island (which the monsters can just do whenever they want, I guess) and swims to shore. Even though at this point in the series Godzilla and his allies were firmly the good guys, the military shows up and drives him off.


Back with our heroes protagonists, they learn that the bad guys are holding Machiko's brother prisoner in Godzilla Tower, so they head off to rescue him. They get there and Gengo and his girlfriend stop him from getting executed but get caught by the villains.
We learn that the people behind World Children's Land aren't people at all, they're actually cockroach aliens from the Space Hunter Nebula M galaxy who want to take over the Earth and have sent King Ghidorah and Gigan out to destroy Tokyo. Why they pretended to be running a children's amusement park or why they hired Gengo in the first place are predictably never explained.

 "Gigan, did you remember to turn the sink off before we left?"


Usually the scenes of monsters destroying the city are highlights of kaiju cinema but 90 % of the destruction scenes here are just clips from the previous films. Not only that but all of those previous destruction scenes took place in broad daylight while all the monster scenes in this movie take place at night which gives me flashbacks to the rapid day to night shifting in Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Actually like 50 % of Ghidorah's scenes are just clips from the previous movies. Toho straight up had to rebuild the costume since it was in even worse shape than Godzilla's and they had to cut corners with the new suit since they didn't have the FX budget or the crew necessary to make it as movable as it was before. Because of this Ghidorah barley does anything in the original footage and didn't show up in another movie for 19 years. It really makes you wonder why they even went through all the trouble.

Angurius and Godzilla show up to fight the duo. While this is going on Shosaku and Machiko help our trio escape and they drive off, leading the space cockroaches to use Godzilla Tower to fire a laser at their car and kill them. Except they weren't killed because they had actually pushed the car out and hid in the forest even though none of them knew the tower could do that so I guess they all have really good foresight.


Back to the monsters, Godzilla's getting his ass kicked by both Gigan and Godzilla Tower's laser beams (the stock footage of Ghidorah is helping too) and Gigan actually causes a massive geyser of blood to erupt from Godzilla's shoulder. Angurius doesn't fare much better as Gigan's stomach blades causes Angurius to spurt enough blood to hit the camera! I wish more family films had this much blood in them.

 Rated G!


Back to the boring humans, they manage to blow up Godzilla tower by hiding explosives in a life size black and white portrait of them (where the hell did they get that from?) with the help of the military (the military doing something right in a kaiju movie? What madness is this?). This only works because the space bugs are dumb enough to mistake it for the real thing and shoot at it.

With the tower destroyed Godzilla and Angurius beat the ever lovin' shit out of Gigan and Ghidorah and cause them to retreat. The Earth is saved, everyone's happy, the end.

Review:

Godzilla Vs. Gigan has all the hallmarks of early 70's Godzilla: Bad English dubbing, gratuitous use of stock footage, random weird moments, shoddy FX and a plot about aliens trying to take over and/or destroy the world (this was the 3rd movie to use this plot and literally every other Godzilla movie in the 70's followed suit). The fight scenes that were actually made for this movie are pretty fun to watch though and I'd be lying if I said I didn't find this flick's shittyness relentlessly entertaining.


But let's talk about Gigan. You know, that guy whose name is in the title? It's funny to me how a hilarious dumpster fire of a movie gave us 1 of the most interesting looking monsters in the franchise. Gigan stands out amongst Toho's kaiju for the fact that he doesn't obviously look like something. Let me explain: Ghidorah looks like a dragon, Anguirus looks like an armadillo, Biollante looks like a plant, Megalon looks like beetle, but Gigan doesn't resemble anything from Earth. OK he sort of looks like a chicken but that's only in a really superficial way considering chickens aren't exactly known for having horns, mandibles, scales, sharp things for hands and belly chainsaws.

Gigan's unique design is the reason why he's in almost all the video games and has tons of merchandise despite only appearing in 2 movies after this one. Hell the next movie he was in was so bad it made this 1 look like the first movie.



Rating: 3/5. It's hilarious!