Gojira-Minira-Gabara: Oru kaijū daishingeki (Godzilla's Revenge) (Tomonori Yazaki, Eisei Amamoto) no gummy bears
I reflect back on the awful movies I've seen over the scant twenty-six years of my life. Manos: the Hands of Fate. Spice World. Grease 2. Mitchell. Stargate. Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. This Island Earth. Crossroads. They represent the bottom of the barrel in a classification that defies description.
They're about to make a new friend.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Godzilla's Revenge, a movie so lame, it might be best to shoot it and put it out of its misery. After recently watching the 50's cult favourite King of the Monsters, I had decided to check out a second, random title from the series. This was a mistake of gigantic, reptilian proportions.
In many ways, Godzilla's Revenge represents the perfect and complete anti-film. There is no plot, there are no characters, there is no point. It simply exists. It opens with a little boy named Ichiro, who seems to have been found by the filmmakers and thrown into every scene without being aware he is actually in a motion picture. He is confusingly played by Tomonori Yazaki, and at every turn, we are just as confused as is.
Ichiro gets picked on by bullies who say really weird things to him. To compensate, he tends to fall asleep next to some kind of transistor radio, which teleports him to the land of people in rubber monster costumes and cheesy synthesizer music. There he meets Godzilla's child, Minira. Can any words do justice to how inane Minira is? He talks to Ichiro in a voice reminiscent of Barney the Dinosaur, and tries to take on other, bigger monsters, such as Gabara or Gamera or something.
Today, right now, without any access to a computer whatsoever and on a budget of $100 Canadian, I could make a better movie with better special effects than Godzilla's Revenge. It is hands down, easily, the phoniest looking movie I've ever seen, which, in hindsight may have been its point, but because it unfolds like some kind of children's movie, would probably bore even a 5-year old. To top it all off, apparently even the monster scenes were compiled using stock footage from previous films in the series. When a film achieves this level of badness...
Shoot! I forgot to mention that back in the other realm of reality, there are two bank robbers who kidnap Ichiro and... oh, never mind.
In this review, I haven't accurately described how utterly stunned I was as I watched each subsequent scene unfold in Godzilla's Revenge. I do, however, remember that the black-and-white Godzilla: King of the Monsters! depicted crowds of people fleeing in horror at the ghastly vision of appalling atrocities. I think I know the feeling.
