Godzilla on DVD

NYPress.com

CLOSER, MY GODZILLA, TO THEE
The monster remastered

To believe that seeing one Godzilla movie is to have seen them all is to ignore the fact that the mighty dragon has evolved over the course of 28 features since he first trampled onto the screen in 1954. Over the past year, the folks at Classic Media and Genius Products have produced bonus-packed DVD releases of a handful of these flicks. Their two latest efforts, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster and Invasion of Astro-Monster, are specimens from 1964 and 1965, respectively, and seem very much products of their time. This is to say that when Godzilla started heaving boulders, the villagers probably weren’t the only ones who were stoned.

Ghidorah is the more surreal of the pair, a Three Stooges episode gone radioactive with Godzilla, Mothra and Rodan making funny faces, getting blown off their feet and ultimately uniting to fight the rather beautifully constructed title character, a large-winged three-headed beast from outer space. Meanwhile, a real-life twin sister duet known in Japan as the Peanuts show up as 6-inch high fairies and some Asian assassins attempt to gun down a hot prophetess from Venus. The film has been cited as the first time that Godzilla actually goes to bat for humanity instead of trying to crush it, and also as the first to intentionally add a layer of silliness to the monsters’ antics.

Astro-Monster ups the guffaw factor and features Godzilla doing an inane Irish jig after battling what turns out again to be Ghidorah who now has taken up residence on the mysterious Planet X. American actor Nick Adams co-stars and performs in English while Rodan, the Big Bird of Japanese monsterdom, suffers from a bad case of mind-control.
Both DVDs include the original Japanese versions, with subtitles, as well as the dubbed and edited American versions for fans of classic out of sync dialog. The audio commentaries, by film historians, David Kalat and Stuart Galbraith IV, are 90-minute dissertations on every conceivable aspect of Godzilla lore, from wear and tear of the costume to the insertion of destruction scenes from other films as a way of keeping down the budget.

- Stan Friedman   July 11, 2007