by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I went through
our back files of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and got out their version of Godzilla vs.
Megalon — I’d pretty much avoided
watching their parodies of Japanese monster movies because the films are
oppressive enough au naturel, but they turned out to be genuinely inspired by this one. The plot is
a bit less pretextual than usual but is still hardly the most important aspect
of this film: it begins with a huge nuclear test that triggers earthquakes all
over Japan (with the memory of the Fukushima disaster still fresh I recalled
the tsunami and sang, to the tune of
“High Hopes,” “Whoops! There goes another nuclear plant!”) and gives us a lot
of spectacular footage even though some of it looks like the bomb was wrapped
in fireworks to give it a really cool-looking third-stage effect. Then we get a
quick glimpse of Monster Island, which seems to be the bullpen where the Toho
monsters rest up between movies, and after that we finally meet our first human characters: eccentric inventor Goro Ibuki
(Katsuhiko Sasaki), his brother (who lives with him, for some reason) Rokuro
(Hiroyuke Kawase) and an obnoxious little kid (I think he’s supposed to be the
inventor’s son, though I wasn’t sure which of these nice-looking but boring young actors was supposed to have
sired him), whom we see in the water, paddling a weird craft that looks like a
giant duck with two miniature dolphins tied to each side to serve as
propellers.
The earthquake caused by the nuclear test (ya remember the nuclear
test?) causes a whirlpool that
sucks the aquatic toy down to the bottom before that entire part of the Sea of
Japan dries up and becomes land, though (unfortunately, if your tolerance for
movie-kid glucose is as low as mine) the child escapes. The inventor is
building a robot called “Jet Jaguar” (I’m not making this up, you know!) that
about two-thirds of the way through the movie develops the ability to change
size from that of a normal human being to that of Godzilla — a capability that
seems to surprise everyone in the movie, including the character who supposedly invented it. The
robot turns out to be needed when the Emperor Antonio (Robert Dunham), ruler of
the underwater kingdom of “Seatopia,” which supposedly was once on the surface
but sank like Atlantis or Lemuria (both of which inspired much better movies
than this!), decides to seek revenge on the earthlings whose nuclear tests have
already (unknowingly) destroyed one-third of Seatopia by letting loose their guardian
monster, Megalon — and the robot (not any of the people!) gets the bright idea
of going to Monster Island and summoning Godzilla, who as in a lot of his later
films actually appears here on the side of good, to join him in battling
Megalon.
Godzilla vs. Megalon is tacky as only a Japanese monster movie can be — there are a lot of
ways a movie can be bad, but the people at Toho Studios seem to have worked out
an utterly unique one filmmakers in other countries have never been able to
duplicate (and remember this was when Akira Kurosawa was under contract to
Toho, so the studio was making some of the worst movies of all time and using
the profits from them to subsidize some of the best movies of all time) — and it’s got some cool
vehicles, including the dune buggy the inventor and his oddball family ride in
(swapped midway through the film for a Volkswagen 1600 fastback — one oddity
Charles noted is that nobody in this Japanese movie seems to be driving a
Japanese car, though I joked that was because they were exporting all of them),
as well as a pretty irrelevant subplot involving a pair of thugs who want to
steal the robot and to that end kidnap the inventor and the boy and lock them
in a freight container for a couple of reels or so until they escape (the MST3K crew joked that one of the thugs looked like Oscar
Wilde — it must have been the hair) — the movie is also about half over before
we see the monsters fighting, which is what we came for, and the action is
pretty ineptly staged, but there’s a kind of comfortable old-school feeling to
these movies, with their refreshingly non-gory battles (they were appealing to an audience of children, after all)
and their overall air of cheery ineptitude, as if the people making these
movies knew exactly where they fit
into the overall scheme of things in the movie industry and were, in a way,
savoring just how bad these movies could be without crossing the line over into
utter unwatchability.
The MST3K crew were especially inspired by this one, particularly in the dance
sequence in the Seatopian court (where they decided, based on the peaked hats
the female dancers were wearing, that this was a ballet version of the Ku Klux
Klan) and in the final segment, in which they took the action song at the end
of the film, “Gojira to Jetto Jagâ de Panchi Panchi Panchi” (“With Godzilla and Jet Jaguar, Punch
Punch Punch”) — which for some reason the U.S. distributor, a company called
Cinema Shares (shares what? Your pain? Your disappointment that this isn’t a better movie?) left
in Japanese even though the rest of the film is (typically badly) dubbed in
English — and added subtitles that purported to translate it and actually
mocked it.
