The first seven times were strictly professional! Now, the eighth time is personal! And for his family! And his island home! And it doesn’t matter if he has to battle through a blizzard or just a brat who won’t let a fella get some well-deserved shuteye! There’s no way on God’s green Earth Godzilla is going to let a couple of bugs run him out of his house and eat his only child!
Bugs? Ewww! It isn’t bad enough that Godzilla is always stomping cities and roasting people with his bad breath, but he can’t even be depended on to keep his island free of creepy crawlies?
Admittedly, there’s only about four or five bugs, but they are freaking huge and one of the first things they do is break Godzilla’s boy out of his egg and try to snack on him! It’s precisely this sort of gross child neglect on Godzilla’s part that is surely responsible for Minilla being the slow kid that he is!
While Minilla doesn’t demonstrate the consistently low IQ antics he did in Godzilla’s Revenge, the premature hatching of his egg is evident every so often in Son of Godzilla. He’s klutzy, talks like a sissy, and has problems getting his radioactive breath fired up until dad stomps his tail. That could all be chalked up to not hitting monster puberty yet, but his survival instincts are virtually nil, as he finds himself attacked by praying mantises, a giant spider, and eagerly accepts food from humans.
How did he know that he wasn’t being fed poison fruit? Because it was a sexy girl feeding it to him? Any guy will tell you that’s precisely who you need to be worried about the most!
None of this would matter to us humans of course if there wasn’t a bunch of scientists, a nosy reporter, and most importantly, that sexy girl stranded on the island where all this bug vs. lizard action is going on.
The scientists have set up an installation on the island to work on a project to combat overpopulation by finding ways of increasing food production. As you no doubt have already guessed, this means that they have to freeze the lush, tropical island they’re on.
If you haven’t done the research on crop yields, birth rates, and prevailing weather patterns like I have, you might be prone to dismiss such a plan as a bit nonsensical. After all, how does turning all our beautiful islands into arctic wastelands feed hungry people in the desert? Well of course it doesn’t! But what it does do is allow Godzilla and Minilla to fight the big, bad evil spider Kumonga in a raging snowstorm! And I’d trade a billion starving souls for that any day of the week! Don’t lie and tell me you wouldn’t do the same! We’re only human, you know!
The nice part of this plan is that plunging the island into a new ice age is the scientists’ second effort at completing their experiment. The first time they did it, Minilla’s egg interfered with it causing it screw up and plunging the island into a searing heat wave!
While the scientists survived in their air conditioned buildings, the intense heat had the expected results on the man-sized praying mantis population of the island – it made them into Godzilla-sized praying mantises!
This is actually good news though since it allows Godzilla to pound on a couple of mantises, called Kamacuras, as well as flame broil them. It was such an awesome fight that footage of it would be reused in Godzilla’s Revenge.
In fact, this movie is filled with awesome fights because some of Godzilla’s battle with Kumonga is reused in Godzilla’s Revenge as well! I didn’t mind one bit though because watching Godzilla just standing around staring at Kumonga until Kumonga injures his eye never gets old!
Just how much did I love watching Kamacuras and Kumonga rumble with the Big G in this movie? So much that I didn’t even care that I could see the strings on these mammoth puppets in virtually every scene they were in! The fact that the guy playing Godzilla never got tangled up in all those wires was a most impressive display of stuntman skill!
Strings or not, Kumonga was so hairy and shot out tons of yucky webbing to creep me out enough that I kept touching the back of my neck thinking something was crawling on it!
A fun, colorful, action-packed affair that ably mixes the violence you love in these sorts of films with the comedy of Godzilla being a single parent and trying to teach his son the ropes of being a big bad ass. Moments of suspense such as when Kumonga webs up Minilla and moments of sadness such as when little Minilla can’t go on anymore in the climatic snowstorm may leave the viewer feeling that this was way more emotion than he signed up for with a Godzilla movie! But don’t worry Godzilla lovers, as one of the humans pointed out at the end of the film, Godzilla and son will be fine even though they’re frozen since frozen is just another word for hibernation!
© 2014 MonsterHunter
