Is It Worth the Watch?

I’ve always loved kaiju (giant monster) films, and when I was a teenager King Kong vs. Godzilla was one of my absolute favorite movies in any genre. I can’t tell you how often I saw it in the theater or at the drive-in, my poor father taking me and sitting through it again and again. (I’m pretty sure one time, when it was the second film of a double feature, he suggested we skip it and head home after the first movie. Needless to say, I had none of that.)

It’s about a pharmaceutical company unearthing King Kong on a desert island and knocking him out with a red berry juice they’ve discovered he’s addicted to, then bringing him to Japan as a promotional gimmick. Coincidentally, at exactly the same moment, Godzilla escapes from the iceberg he had been trapped in since 1955 and heads to exactly the same spot in Japan. Things don’t go well, mostly because Kong and Godzilla don’t really get along (maybe because of Kong’s drinking problem.)

I remember teenage me thinking the special effects were breathtaking, the storyline was compelling, and the battle scenes thrilling.

What the fuck was I thinking?

Today it looks cheap, thrown together, and ludicrous. I’m going to assume the American release (which I recently saw) is heavily edited and altered, since there are jumps in logic and scenes that make absolutely zero sense. Maybe the original Japanese version looks better, is more coherent or even contains a thrill or two.

But I doubt it.

In fairness, it made a lot of money on when it was first shown, enough to deserve a recent big-budget remake.

All that being said, it’s always wonderful to see two major movie stars working together in the same picture.

Is It Worth The Watch? There’s something appealing about a guy in a rubber suit fighting another guy in a rubber suit, crushing a scale model city. In all honesty, Godzilla movies are always a lot of fun, often because they’re so cheesy. 

1962

97 minutes

Language – Japanese, English

Starring – Tadao Takashima, Kenji Sahara

Director – Ishiro Honda

Screenplay – Shinichi Sekizawa

Special Effects – Eiji Tsuburaya