I'd gotten into the habit of putting on a lot of these 50's/60's/70's monster flicks as silent visual "background noise" back when I was doing freelance stuff, and over the past four months I've fallen in love with this sort of thing. Take the sheer retarded fun of something like Destroy All Monsters or Zone Fighter and weigh it against the joyless military slog of any of the 90's or millennial stuff and only the former are remotely memorable. Hell, Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster is just the perfect balance of Dudes In Suits Beating The Tar Out Of One Another and random 60's experimentation:
I guess I'm just kind of fascinated by how there's nothing really like these flicks. Who the fuck thinks of making a movie about a thirty-story moth battling a three-headed armless space dragon? My friend's first Godzilla movie was Final Wars, and just the absolute batshit insanity of that flick to someone who has never seen any of the standard kaiju rouges gallery left him completely dumbfounded. How did movies like this make their own freaking
genre? Ahhhhhhh
A good chunk of the 90's/early millennial stuff aside, what they're putting out now in Cloverfield and the last few Gamera flicks is actually possible to take semi-seriously. If they're not going to try and make this outright fun they've got to have the budget to make it look really good. Had the same view of Eva in many ways (although I might eat those words after how sucky the new series is so far).
Geharha's up next when I have the money.
Below is a sweet-ass Big G poster I'm thinking of getting printed onto one of those mini-posters:
