Godzilla vs. Megalon

Godzilla vs. Megalon (Gojira Tai Megaro) (1973)

Runtime: 82 minutes

Directed by: Jun Fukuda

Starring: Katsuhiko Sasaki, Yutaka Hayashi, Hiroyuki Kawase, Robert Dunham

From: Toho

I explain why in the Letterboxd review why now I will be watching the Godzilla movies out of order. There's a good explanation. While this movie isn't that good at least I finally got to see it in full instead of the shorter American print that the majority of people in the United States have seen. I'll be back tomorrow night, with something pretty different.

I know I am now watching the movies in this franchise out of order but it has to happen; I might as well do it now as the last day in May some of the later films that are on Hulu are going to go away so it's best for me that I see them then. Why not watch another movie from the franchise that Hulu provides? And why not see the entry that general consensus says is among the worst entries in said franchise?

This is likely best known in America for either... the skewering MST3K gave it many years ago, the “flying horizontal for 2000 feet before delivering a dropkick... twice” moment or its poster from Cinema Shares, the people who released it in the United States 3 years after it came out in Japan... by this time the King Kong remake had come out so Cinema Shares decided to spoof that poster by creating their own poster which was Godzilla and Megalon fighting each other on top of the World Trade Center; they must have thought, “Who cares if this doesn't actually happen in the film?!” and it is an awesome poster; heaven knows I wish that would have actually been the movie instead of what we got.

Instead, this movie is about Ultraman... er, I mean “Jet Jaguar”, a robot created by two men who have a son (that's the subtext I got, that they're a couple and the young boy who unfortunately keeps the kaiju film tradition alive of wearing too short shorts is their kid), and how the robot has to do battle with Megalon, a beetle-like creature who has drills for hands. It's actually a cool-looking kaiju monster... unfortunately it comes off as being pretty dumb-the bad guys need to steal Jet Jaguar and program him to lead Megalon around as otherwise the creature would be too dopey to know where to go-but alas. It's released by the Seatopians, humanoids who used to live on the Earth's surface but they moved down and are ticked by nuclear testing. Former enemy Gigan also appears. Eventually, Godzilla shows up to save the day.

It seems like a random movie that The Big G was randomly inserted in as otherwise a solo Jet Jaguar film would have bombed... which is actually what happened and it's why it is more about a robot that can magically force itself to grow from human height to kaiju height to fight than Godzilla defending the Earth once again.

The movie is funny bad, sure, but overall it's not too good. While there's such absurdities as the “modern version of what the people from Atlantis would wear” outfits the Seatopians wear, what hurts this movie a lot is how cheap it seems; the fact that a lot of stock footage is used from previous films demonstrates this rather well. Even with there being some decent moments, the monsters fighting each other was cool and the pacing was actually not bad, this is clearly a lesser entry in the franchise.