ALL MONSTERS ATTACK

Gotta confess, watching a good Godzilla movie on a late summer Saturday afternoon is one of my guilty pleasures. Too bad ALL MONSTERS ATTACK (1969), isn't a good Godzilla movie.

I've had this one on my shelf for awhile. I decided to give it a shot last week and while I was sorry I'd wasted time on this nonsense, I did score a good unscheduled nap out of it. Released in the U.S. as GODZILLA'S REVENGE, AMM sets up a premise, based on the title and the one sheet, that the screenplay doesn't deliver. Instead of Godzilla and various kaiju attacking Tokyo or some other Japanese city, the big guy and his friends and foes all live on the mythical "Monster Island", a location reached only in the dreams of the kid protagonist Ichiro (Tomonori Yazaki). The youngster is a latch key kid who is bullied by some of his fellow school mates. When he visits Monster Island in his fantasies, he learns how to stand up to bullies, skills which he puts to good use back in reality when he confronts two bumbling bank robbers.

The absurdity factor in the Godzilla and other kaiju films produced by Toho Studios in the 1960s was already fairly high but I've always been willing to engage in a willful suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy the films. But ALL MONSTERS ATTACK represents the point at which the entire genre jumped the shark. It's unabashedly a kids;' film, with a child protagonist and a child like monster, Minilla, as his companion. Al of the monster fights look like just what they are: wrestling matches between men in not-at-all convincing rubber monster suits.

 I suppose a 61 year old man really has no business even watching something like ALL MONSTERS ATTACK, much less criticizing it but it's amazing to see how much the Godzilla film franchise had changed since the release of the original masterpiece GOJIRO in 1954. In fifteen years, Godzilla went from a terrifying metaphor for nuclear war to a big, friendly, green giant. It would be several years before the monster regained his original city stomping, atomic fire breathing cred.