Destroy All Monsters

Kaijû sôshingeki (1968)

Directed by: Ishirô Honda
Written by: Ishirô Honda & Takeshi Kimura
Starring: Akira Kubo, Yukiko Kobayashi, Jun Tazaki, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Kyôko Ai, Andrew Hughes, Chotaro Togin, Yoshifumi Tajima, Kenji Sahara, Koji Uno

Pretty much the ultimate mutant monster movie, featuring Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, Spiga, Barugon, Angilas, that freaky baby Godzilla thing, something called Manda and many many more...

The film is set in the future (I think it's like 1998 or something) and all the world's monsters are living in peace on Monster Island until these aliens from the planet Kilaak invade or something. I dunno. I was just waiting for the monsters to duke it out.

I actually had to wait kind of a long time for that. There's all this other stuff going on up on the moon or some crazy thing like that.

I wasn't entirely sure what the hell was going on while I was watching it and now, having forgotten many of the finer plot points, I'm not entirely sure what the movie was supposed to be about (to be fair, I wasn't really paying that much attention. I watched this one after Valley of Gwangi, Bloodfeast and Monsieur Verdoux so I wasn't really paying attention).

Anyway, the monsters seem to spend most of the movie either not doing anything at all (they sort of disappear for a long time) or roaming about the sea country side looking for planes, boats or trains to destroy.

They do make an occasional detour to trash Tokyo or another major city (Moscow and New York and possibly some other places get wasted in this movie), and we get amusing dialogue along the lines of "Godzilla's destroying Tokyo again!"

I sometimes have a kind of hard time watching these kinds of movie - I mean, the monsters go around smashing stuff, it's all a good time, and then there's some shot of Tokyo all blasted to shit and it's kind of depressing.

Well, never mind that. Eventually, the aliens summon Ghidrah and the earth monsters are all like, 'bring it on you three headed freak' and then Ghidrah gets schooled. Oh yeah.

Yes, that's my kind of movie. Lots of monsters, incomprehensible plot, pointless destruction. Probably a good introduction to those Toho monster movies, as it introduces many of the more famous monsters at the beginning of the movie.

And I'm just nerdy enough to find that really interesting. Yay!

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