Kaiju Reviews #18 - Terror of Mechagodzilla

Alright, time for the final movie in the Showa series... and more title trivia! In this case, the movie was named Terror of GODZILLA in the US... even though the villain was obviously Mechagodzilla... what the hell was wrong with the people that were titling these things?! But anyway, about 90% of this movie focuses on the human perspective... this is gonna be other shortie, that's for sure. We start off with guys working on a thing that go to a place looking for a doctor because of the recent arrival of a creature known as Titanosaurus, which he supposedly discovered many years ago... but no one believed his theory (despite the fact that you can hardly walk for 2 mins. without seeing a giant monster in these movies), so he decided to become a mad scientist. But, instead of encountering the mad scientist guy, the two reporter people end up meeting his daughter. She's important, BTW... because her mind controls Mechagodzilla. Yeah, you read that right. The alien ape guys teamed up with mad scientist (who's manually controlling Titanosaurus) and put Mechagodzilla's controls in her brain or something. That be wacked up, yo. So yeah, at some point, mad scientist sends Titanosaurus to destroy Tokyo... Godzilla kicks his ass. He runs away. Then like a million years later (or atleast that's what it felt like to me), Titanosaurus and Mechagodzilla team up to destroy the random abandoned country side... because model buildings are expensive to make. Fortunately, Godzilla comes along to save the day... except he didn't bring a partner along. O DAM. Due to being outmatched, Godzilla ends up not doing too well in the fight. Though in a morbid turn of events, mad scientist's daughter ends up killing herself so that Mechagodzilla could no longer function. So yeah, Godzilla ends up destroying him. He also defeats Titanosaurus shortly after, once the army figures out that Titanosaurus is weak against sonics. As a celebration of his victory, Godzilla then goes back to the ocean, taking a much deserved rest... which is fitting, considering that he'll be retired for atleast 10 more years.

Rating:
3-something maybe
I don't know; like Destroy All Monsters, most of this is human stuff... though this is more dramatic and well-written (though that still doesn't keep it from being kind of boring) and the monster scenes, while being pretty compelling, are few and far between. Not bad for what it is, but... yeahhh, he definitely needed that rest big time... and perhaps I deserve a rest from all of this Godzilla stuff, for now. The Heisei series can just wait; it's not going anywhere!

Kaiju Reviews #17 - Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla

To start off on a randomly interesting tidbit, this movie had somewhat of an identity crisis in the US, as it was also titled as "Godzilla vs. The Bionic Monster" and "Godzilla vs. The Cosmic Monster". What's wrong with "Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla"?! Oh well, we start this off as someone gets a [strangely accurate] fortune from something or other that says something like "If one sees a black mountain in the clouds, a monster will try to destroy the world... and two will rise to save the world" or something like that. I don't know if that's it exactly, but that's what happens... not that it matters since I usually only describe monster scenes most of the time, even when I say I'm not going to. So, on that note, our harbinger of death is none other than... GODZILLA?! ... Uh-huh... because surely you'd fall for that despite the title, right? So, shortly after "Godzilla" starts wreaking havoc, Anguirus comes along and battles him, only to leave with a broken jaw... but not before destroying some of Godzilla's "skin", revealing that he's really made of a material known as... Space Titanium... right... I guess the writers were feeling particularly lazy that day. Eventually, this fake Godzilla makes its way over to a populated city... only to encounter the REAL Godzilla! The fake Godzilla then gets rid of its disguise, revealing itself to be none other than Mechagodzilla, made by a race of aliens... yes, there's MORE aliens.
This time they're Gorilla-Men things! ... So yeah, Mechagodzilla was made so they could conquer the world (OFCOURSE!) or destroy it, if the prophecy is anything to go by. But anyway, Godzilla and Mechagodzilla do battle, which eventually ends in a tie (due to both of them being severely injured). But after much exposition (and quasi-ripoffs of James Bond sequences) the 2nd savior of the Earth is awakened: King Caesar, the lion/dog/god thing! So ya, King Caesar fights Mecha-G, gets his booty handed to him, Godzilla comes along and teams up with him (though Godzilla ends up doing most of the work anyway), and Mechagodzilla is defeated... until the sequel.

Rating:
3.5/5.0
I got very lazy on the plot description, but I thought that this was one of the better Showa movies... especially seeing as this one had [basically] no stock footage.