December 10th: All Monsters Attack (1969)

It’s happened guys, we’ve finally hit a genuinely terrible Godzilla film. We have quite a lot to go still but honestly, I would be very surprised if any turned out to be as bad as All Monsters Attack (1969). The film tells the story of Ichiro (Tomonori Yazaki), a young boy who loves kaiju and is being bullied. So in order to learn to stand up to his bullies he daydreams about being on monster island, befriending Minilla, and learning to be confident enough to stand up for himself. He also gets kidnapped at some point for some reason, but frankly I don’t care.

This will probably be a fairly short review because I have very little nice to say about this film. If we want to start off with the positives, the opening sections where we meet Ichiro and we see him being bullied is fine narratively and could have set the film up to be somewhat decent, even if clearly a kid’s film. After all, just because a film is mad predominantly for kids doesn’t mean adults can’t enjoy it. But the film doesn’t do that and that is where the positives end. Firstly, all the kaiju stuff in this film happens in dream sequences which is just so lazy and contrived. But that’s not even the worst of the laziness. No, the worst of it is the fact that most of the kaiju action is just repurposed scenes from previous films. I’m not joking, that is all it is. Not only is this the height of laziness, but it also means that Godzilla looks different scene to scene because of how many times he is redesigned in this franchise. It does have some newly shot stuff, but even that is naff. Firstly, the new villain Gabara, who is a stand in for Ichiro’s bully, is shit. His design is horrible, and for some reason he has ginger hair? You know about as well as I do why. And secondly, the fight scenes are really poorly shot and are just boring. But the worst thing about the film. The absolute top of the pile of what makes this film bad; Godzilla’s son, Minilla, speaks. Yes, it’s a dream so whatever, who cares really, but not only do we have to look at the little turd we now have to hear this really horrible, tinny voice coming out of his ugly mouth. Avoid this film.