(1962)
Overall: MEH
It was inevitable that America's most famous giant monster would eventually square off against Japan's and the resulting King Kong vs. Godzilla, (Kingu Kongu tai Gojira), has all of the goofy suitmation nonsense that one would both expect and crave. Stop-motion animator Willis O'Brien, (who had worked on RKO's initial King Kong), originally shopped around an idea to have the humongous ape square off against a humongous Frankenstein monster, but after years of getting nowhere, producer John Beck sold the project to Toho and it was re-worked to feature their hallmark, reptilian real estate stomper Godzilla. As the third entry in both monster's franchises, this was the first to be in color and ended up having enough financial success to propel the kaiju genre ever further with boatloads more battle-style spectacles. The actual movie is dopey stuff, with absolutely moronic human characters that may as well be nameless who for laughable reasons decide to capture King Kong by making him drink sleepy juice during a tribal ritual, then strap him onto a bunch of logs with some flimsy wire, and then make him sleepy again later so that they can carry him over on giant balloons to square-off against Godzilla who got stuck in his pursuit of Tokyo because a bunch of electrical towers were in front of him. Whether or not sitting through all of these silly excuses is worth it to get to the couple of minutes where the two actors in rubber suites wrestle and throw rocks at each other is up to the individual viewer of course.
(1963)
Overall: MEH
A rare, grim entry in the catalog of prolific kaiju filmmaker Ishirō Honda with no giant monsters to be found, Mantango, (Attack of the Mushroom People), was based off of the short story "The Voice in the Night" by English author William H. Hodgson. After being only mildly received in its native Japan due to it being a deliberately more serious departure from Honda that explores addiction and the collapse of social norms, the film was eventually released on American television two years later under the more snazzy title Attack of the Mushroom People; a common practice for various other Toho properties. While the film has some interesting ideas and its somber tone is only mildly interrupted by unintentionally amusing dialog like "Go eat mushrooms! You too!", it is almost entirely a character study with very little emphasis on packing any heart-racing wallops. That is until many, many minutes into the movie when the story's more trippy and distressing aspects finally become prominent. By that point though, the crawl has been a bit too laborious to invest in. Still, it is a respectable experiment by the Godzilla franchise's most prolific director, if only a partially successful one in the end.
Overall: MEH
A rare, grim entry in the catalog of prolific kaiju filmmaker Ishirō Honda with no giant monsters to be found, Mantango, (Attack of the Mushroom People), was based off of the short story "The Voice in the Night" by English author William H. Hodgson. After being only mildly received in its native Japan due to it being a deliberately more serious departure from Honda that explores addiction and the collapse of social norms, the film was eventually released on American television two years later under the more snazzy title Attack of the Mushroom People; a common practice for various other Toho properties. While the film has some interesting ideas and its somber tone is only mildly interrupted by unintentionally amusing dialog like "Go eat mushrooms! You too!", it is almost entirely a character study with very little emphasis on packing any heart-racing wallops. That is until many, many minutes into the movie when the story's more trippy and distressing aspects finally become prominent. By that point though, the crawl has been a bit too laborious to invest in. Still, it is a respectable experiment by the Godzilla franchise's most prolific director, if only a partially successful one in the end.
(1963)
Overall: MEH
Putting its substantial budget to good use, Toho's Atragon, (Kaitei Gunkan, The Undersea Warship, Atoragon, Ataragon), is a balls-out tokusatsu spectacle for the studio and one that still managed to shoe-horn in another over-sized monster in the form of the Mu Empire's dragon/snake hybrid deity Manda, which would also appear five years later in Destroy All Monsters. A loose adaptation of both Shunrō Oshikawa's The Undersea Warship: A Fantastic Tale of Island Adventure and Shigeru Komatsuzaki's The Undersea Kingdom, screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa contributed the new yet pivotal character of Makoto Jinguji; a stubborn, Fascist World War II General who has built the ultimate submarine that ends up serving as both Japan and the world's only hope against the underwater Mu kingdom's plans for dominance. The plot moves at an agreeable pace up until the second act which unfortunately detours into characters getting captured and/or arguing with each other for too long, but the elaborate, (be it dated), miniature work, costume, and impressive set design remains the primary focus. This includes an enormous back-lot set that features six-hundred colorfully-clad dancers performing a tribal ritual and of course the finale where lasers and explosions decimate all of the impressive models that were built.
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