That's right, during it's unfortunately limited run through the country's art theaters, I took in a viewing of the greatest monster movie of all time on an actual theater screen. I did so alone so I could fully enjoy the experience as a once-in-a-lifetime treat to myself. No, I didn't wear a trench coat and bring a lot of napkins with me in case your sick little mind is working overtime (which, I of course admit, mine thought the same thing as soon as I typed that), but I did smuggle in a few of my favorite snacks (Charleston Chews and Peanut Butter M&Ms), divined a nice quiet seat tucked away from everyone else, and relived the childlike wonder that I hadn't felt in a theater since my parents took me to see Godzilla 1985 when I was 4... Yeah, I know, this whole review has started off sounding both snide and irritatingly wistful, so to make up for that I offer the following: I'm a complete piece of crap who should die homeless and alone during the winter, frozen in a subway tunnel, after which some hoodlums will push my corpse in front of the R train and laugh as my innards spew all over the front car like some morbid octopus made of human anatomy. Better? Good.

Everybody knows the tale of the Big G's first foray into Tokyo Town as he would stomp his way into the history books as one of, if not THE biggest beast to smash his way across the silver screen. We all remember the cheesiness of the American version, which interspersed scenes of Perry Mason drinking toxic waste so he could grow to 30 stories tall and battle mighty Godzilla with his atomic brain tumor. It was incredible. However, thanks to the underground bootlegging society (who aren't really all that secretive if you ever troll the comic book convention scene), a copy of the movie's original 1954 Japanese release version has been making the rounds through many a nerd's eager hands for several years now. I'd been sitting on my copy for a year or two when the people at Classic Media brought this rarity to the masses in a two-disc special edition release containing both the original and American flavors of the movie. I know this is one of those movies that I'd usually deem as Shortie fodder because 98% of the people visiting this site have already seen it a dozen times, but this is Godzilla. If anybody deserves the feature treatment for each and every one of their cinematic travels, it's God-fucking-zilla... which, if you're keeping track of your Japanese terms at home, means I pretty much just said “gorilla fucking whale”, which is a Hell of a mental picture all on its own.

On August 6th, 1945 the US military dropped a history changing payload on the heads of civilians in the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed by another attack three days later on the city of Nagasaki. The two attacks killed an estimated 105,000 people and injured another estimated 94,000. 60% of the Hiroshima deaths were attributed to fatal burns from the blast, while a staggering 95% of Nagasaki's fatalities resulted from the same, while the rest were mostly crushed by falling debris. The aftermath of the bombings as they relate to radiation poisoning and mental trauma is even more terrifying, with lasting effects dipping their poisoned talons into the gene pool of future generations. Somehow, “they got the guns but we got the numbers” doesn't really work so well when the guns the other guy is sporting have the potential to wipe out a planet and systematically erase human existence from the face of the Earth. Thank you Albert Einstein. But, on the plus side, the dropping of the first Atomic Bombs would lead to a golden age of science fiction movies about atomic heroes and nuclear nightmares the world over! Most notably of these abominations of science? One of the illegitimate grandkids of the greatest mind to ever indirectly contribute to the mass murder of innocent people? As Blue Oyster Cult once said, “History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of men: Godzilla”.

Yeah, I never thought I'd reference Blue Oyster Cult beyond a mention of “I got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell!” either, but Mother Nature works her big green hips in mysterious ways.

A 75,000 ton ocean freighter goes up in a ball of flames in the Sea of Japan. A salvage vessel sent to the site of the ship's last know whereabouts suffers the same enigmatic fate. All but three crewmen are killed, the survivors picked up by a passing fishing boat the next day and taken to Odo Island to recuperate, while more and more boats suffering the unexplained fury of the sea and fishermen discover that their livelihood is also somehow vanishing. Are the crafts being exploded by an underwater volcano? Have the fish finally acquired demolitions capabilities to defend themselves from man and suicide bombed themselves in the process!? According to an old fisherman, these events are the wrath of an ancient ocean deity named... come on, you know this... well, take a guess... that's right, the name of the movie is Poseidon... while you go grab the short bus, I'll tell everybody else about Godzilla.

If the old man hasn't just gone completely senile, the people of his village were sacrificing local girls as late as the early 1900's to what they believed was a pissed-off sea monster in order to appease the beast into leaving their precious catch-of-the-days alone. No longer barbaric enough to throw away perfectly good baby-makers, the villagers instead perform an exorcism ritual to try and banish the water demon from their lives. What they get instead is a massive typhoon... the kind of typhoon who uses Tokyo Tower as a back scratcher, wears tanks for roller skates, and uses Yao Ming to pick the crap out of his teeth. To investigate the crisis further, the Japanese government sends a research team out to Odo Island to try and exhume some answers. What they find is giant footprints, radioactive fallout all over the place, squished prehistoric insects that have been extinct for millions of years, and THIS GUY!

The party scientists (Woooooooooo! Party!) believe this irradiated tourist from Jurassic Park is actually some kind of amphibious missing link between the aquatic dinosaurs and their dry land cousins. 50 meters tall (164 feet, give or take... though probably much less in today's economy), dripping radioactive fallout, displaced from his habitat by H-Bomb testing, 'roid raging on atomic growth hormones, and extremely miffed because his food supply has been killed off by nuclear pollution, the nation of Japan should probably get into the Missionary Position now because they're about to get fucked something fierce.

Depth charges do no good, bullets bounce off of him, a massive electrified fence of barbed wire only tickles his reptile testis, tank shells are shrugged off, and missiles? Well, technically none of the 50 or so rockets fired at Godzilla actually hits him... from a budget saving “don't fuck up the suit1” point of view I get it, but from an inside-the-movie line of reasoning it just begs for me to make a joke about how the Japanese pilots might have actually hit him if they weren't squinting all the time. Sorry. Either way, the Big G makes landfall and Tokyo is left a Hell of fire and rubble after he leaves. Not bad for a monster that's just a guy in a rubber suit half the time and an oversize hand puppet the other half. In the aftermath of the attack is when the heart strings get tugged though, and a parallel between the atomic bombings and Godzilla's raid is drawn as we see Geiger Counters lighting up around children and watch sons and daughters break out in tears while their parents are carted away in meat wagons. Still make ya wanna chant “USA! USA! USA!” next time somebody glorifies World War 2? Then again, I'm sure the Chinese people who were being raped and plundered by Japanese soldiers at the time probably wouldn't have much sympathy...

Japanese scientist (and eye patch wearer) Dr. Serizawa has a new invention that will provide the answer to the Godzilla conundrum: the Oxygen Destroyer. It's a device that, when fired under water, yanks the 'O' from 'H2O' in the surrounding area, thus taking away the most important building block of life, even for a giant fire breathing atomic dinosaur. Anything in its path suffocates, then GETS COMPLETELY LIQUIFIED. Afraid that the plans for the Destroyer could be discovered, Dr. S decides that the only way to keep them safe is with his own death, so he delivers the Oxygen Destroyer to the G Monster personally. It's for the better anyway, cuz his lifelong love Emiko was gonna give him the “let's just be friends” speech so she could be with her handsomer, buffer, more emotionally available boyfriend Ogata anyway. Not big on happy endings (remember, this is supposed to be one huge allegory about America A-Bombing Japan after all), Emiko and Ogata are left to spend the rest of there lives feeling guilty together, and Emiko's Zoologist father threatens that if mankind (ie America) doesn't stop throwing around highly destructive weapons with dangerous long-term effects they don't bother to research first, another Godzilla threat is always possible. Thanks Debbie Downer.

Unlike most American atomic monster flicks, Godzilla has a lot of emotional baggage to it. Between the horror of a populace faced with a terror it's helpless to stop, the singular torment of Serizawa as he's faced with holding a secret weapon that could both stop Godzilla but destroy the world, the overall struggle of this movie is palpable. To a lesser extent we've got the romance stuff that I couldn't really care less about, although the intensity that Momoko Kôchi puts into Emiko, mainly in scenes where she not only screams in fear but physically collapses under the weight of her own emotions, keeps you invested in her as a character. Also, if you've got clinical depression, you might not want to watch the scene in the hospital after Godzilla finishes up his trouncing of Tokyo. Instead of people being thankful they've survived a citywide holocaust, the focus shifts to the survivors dealing with the loss of those who died in the attack and the radiation poisoning that's going to have a long and painful effect on many of themselves, including children. “Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!?” No, I don't want to think of the children. They're too damn depressing.

At a time when all of the big sci-fi monster flicks were done with stop-motion animation, Toho saved a LOT of time on production by innovating the “man in a rubber monster suit” method of special effects. As with any method, it was nowhere near perfect in the early stages. The suit scenes here are noticeable, because the head to the costume doesn't seem to move it's jaw at all. It's not hard to distinguish which portions of the action were shot with a man in costume and which were done with a Godzilla hand puppet. The jaw moves, the eyes don't, and the arms flail like, well, a rubber hand puppet. It made sense to do too, especially since Big G's atomic breath was little more than a spray of smoke and rigging something like that into a rubber suit would've been hard and probably dangerous 54 years ago. The jet plane attacks also require heavy suspension of disbelief while you're at it, because the wires attached to the planes that direct the Roman Candle “missiles” are impossible to miss. It's hard not to complain about how much of the monster stomping action is so dark that it's nigh unwatchable without squinting your eyes till they rupture, but when you think about how cheap and goofy the special effects are, and you also factor in how the main raid takes place in the middle of the night, you can get past the barely lit scenes.

Godzilla gave birth to a storied movie series that would see dizzying high and pain inducing lows throughout the 50 years between this and Final Wars. It started as a “message” movie that put a lot of work into the story and acting, but would progressively swing to the other end of the spectrum, highlighting vastly improved suit work and miniature models while throwing around vague, generic sci-fi plots about invading aliens, killer robots, and other less-depressing subject matter. Even Godzilla's big “green” movie was little more than a 90 minute joke with the “save the planet” message as an afterthought... as sung by a bunch of acid tripping Japanese hippies goofballing on flower power... As much as I loved the later flicks growing up, there's something to be said about being old enough to appreciate the original as the almost artistic atomic monster movie-with-a-message. Godzilla is almost of an entirely different genre and representing the film's theme of real life nightmare and historical suffering through a giant fire-breathing lizard is almost a second thought to what that lizard stands for. It's art. No matter how pretentious that might make me sound, that's really how I feel. And if you don't like it? Go suck a wet fart. How's THAT for artsy pretention?!