| Godzilla Raids Again
was the rushed-into-production sequel to the
iconic Godzilla
(1954), released a mere six months afterward.
While Eiji
Tsuburaya and his unit worked well under
this pressure, the film smacks of being quickly
conceived merely for profit. It is largely
the Son of Kong to the original Godzilla’s
King Kong, the quickie sequel made
swiftly after the original to make a few bucks
(or in this case yen) while the property was
still hot. However, while Son of Kong
is a fun, quickie adventure picture, Godzilla
Raids Again falls even shorter of its
predecessor. Beloved director Ishiro Honda
was unavailable and thus his replacement,
Motoyoshi Oda, delivers a film that, largely
aside from Tsuburaya’s impressive FX
sequences, is unfocused in its narrative,
pedestrian in its direction and all around
disinteresting and uneven.
Two fishing scouters: Tsukioka
(Hiroshi Koizumi) and Kobayashi (Minoru Chiaki)
are trailing some tuna at sea when Kobayashi
experiences engine trouble and has to make
a crash landing on a nearby island. Tsukioka
lands his plane to rescue Kobayashi and the
two of them soon witnesses something truly
shocking: a second Godzilla doing battle with
a new monster: Anguirus, a spiked dinosaur.
Tsukioka and Kobayashi return to their home
city of Osaka and the city government is at
a loss as to what to do if the monsters should
come to Osaka. Dr. Yamane (Takashi
Shimura), who witnessed the attack of
the first Godzilla in Tokyo, recommends that
the residents of the city dim their lights
since Godzilla seems to be enraged by bright
light. Soon Godzilla indeed heads to Osaka
Bay. The city dims its lights and it appears
to be effective, but a group of convicts en
route to prison break out of the prison van
and crash a hijacked car into an oil refinery,
starting a blaze that catches Godzilla’s
attention and causes it, along with Anguirus,
to come ashore. The two monsters then spar
once more, thrashing downtown Osaka in the
process.
Godzilla Raids Again
is a highly mixed bag of a movie that lets
one down as much as it delivers. Admittedly,
the film does have some fine attributes. The
monochrome cinematography by Seichi Endo is
gorgeous and the film’s look is every
bit as effective as that of the first Godzilla.
Its images are once again moody and atmospheric
and perhaps invoke the morose, stark newsreels
of the Second World War even more so than
its predecessor. Godzilla and Anguirus’
nighttime attack on Osaka, this time with
the city completely pitch black, is particularly
effective. This sequence has a particularly
war footage-like aesthetic, perhaps intentionally
so since Japanese civilians during the later
years of World War II would often dim their
lights to avoid being targeted by Allied bombers.
Tsuburaya’s effects work is at the top
of its form here, equal to if not topping
his work on the original. The scenes are well
staged (with the Osaka scene being, as said
before, downright hauntingly beautiful), the
miniatures look nice, the environments are
effective and the monsters look convincing.
An assistant to Tsuburaya accidentally filmed
the monster combat footage in fast motion
rather than slow motion like standard monster
footage, so the monsters battle each with
lighting ferocity like two enraged animals.
Allegedly Tsuburaya liked the effect and decided
to leave it in, though he may have left it
in more due to necessity under the hectic
shooting schedule. While perhaps disconcerting
when one is used to the more lumbering monster
suit melees that would come later, it is an
interesting and oddly effective FX blunder.
However, as fine as the FX
half of the movie is, the rest of the film
falls far short. Motoyoshi Oda's direction
is very pedestrian with a lack of focus that
makes Jun
Fukuda look like Akira
Kurosawa. The first half of the film following
up to Godzilla and Anguirus’ attack,
with the exception of an absolutely mind numbingly
boring sequence with Dr. Yamane, is more than
decent. However, the atrociously paced script
by Oda and Shigeaki Hidaka makes the bizarre
decision to put Godzilla and Anguirus’
attack in the second act instead of the third
act, making the rest of the film feel like
a boring, needless extension of an already
“spent” plotline. The characters
that the plot overly revolves around are too
uninteresting to be attributed the level of
importance that they are given. There's some
brief interest in a “love triangle”
plot with Tsukioka, Kobayashi and Hidemi (Setsuko
Wakayama), their boss’ daughter, but
it is not handled well enough and feels like
it would be more at home at any number of
Japanese studio melodramas than a kaiju film.
The final sequence, featuring Godzilla’s
submersion in his icy tomb for which he would
spend the next seven years, is effectively
shot but drags on too long.
The actors are competent, many
of them, such as Hiroshi Koizumi, Minoru Chiaki
and Yoshio Tsuchiya, are top-notch Toho actors
who frequently worked with Honda and Kurosawa,
but the cast act like they’re kind of
bored with not enough investment in the flimsy
ciphers of characters they are portraying.
The music by the talented composer Masaru
Sato is a mixed bag, some of the music,
like the main theme, is a little too upbeat
for the movie’s own good but the eerie,
minimalist piece played during Godzilla and
Anguirus’ Osaka shakedown is quite effective.
This would not be Sato’s last foray
into the Godzilla series, he would later score
several of Fukuda’s entrees including
the lively, breezy scores for the equally
lively Ebirah,
Horror of the Deep (1966) and
Son
of Godzilla (1967) with which he would
create music of far more consistent quality.
When the film hit America in
1959 on a double bill with the B-classic Teenagers
from Outer Space, it went through some
odd alterations. The film was originally to
undergo a full-scale Americanization called
The
Volcano Monsters and even involved
Toho shipping the Godzilla and Anguirus suits
to America, but somehow the plans fell through
and a more straightforward approach was taken
ala the earlier release of Rodan
(1956). Like Rodan
(1956), narration was added by a someday famous
Keye Luke and the film had much of Sato's
score replaced with generic library music
and a fair amount of stock footage thrown
in the film for a bunch of weird reasons.
Far weirder, however, is the original US title,
Gigantis, the Fire Monster. For some
odd reason, copyright or not, Warner Brothers,
the distributor, wanted to distance themselves
from Godzilla in the promotion and the film’s
title and dub script refers to Godzilla as
Gigantis even though the monster onscreen
couldn't be anything else but Godzilla. This
is even more confusing since most video versions
have a badly computer generated title card
of Toho’s international title, Godzilla
Raids Again, against the credits yet the
creature is still called Gigantis in dubbing.
The opening of the film, like with the US
Rodan
(1956), is a strange montage of atomic test
footage that has little bearing on the rest
of the film to remind us of “the price
of progress”. The sequence where Yamane
presents the Godzilla footage is juiced up
with some stock footage from various B-grade
and below older films including One Million
B.C. (aka the low budget genre film stock
footage goldmine) and Unknown Island
with a theory of the creation of Godzilla/Gigantis
that is the most outlandish piece of pseudo-scientific
gibberish I’ve ever heard in any 50s
sci-fi film, an almost impressive achievement.
Overall, Godzilla Raids
Again, while containing moments of considerable
interest and worth seeing for most fans of
the series for Tsuburaya’s stunning
FX work, is an extremely uneven effort and
shows it’s rushed, blindly capitalistic
origins badly. Toho would do much better for
their next few genre efforts in which Ishiro
Honda would return: the moody and poetic Half
Human (1955) and the impressive Rodan
(1956).
|
(2.5/5)