This film has a really post modern feel to it. It begins with a song in Japanese called Save the Earth that (like The Lost Continent song) you won't stop singing (Kaishan! Kaishan! Kaishan!). The opening credits mix in shots of a girl singing the song with shots of a sludge clogged Tokyo harbor. Things get stranger from here. It opens with an annoying kid and his dad going swimming. The kid's father's face is disfigured and the kid gets his hand burned off by a smog monster named Hedorah who spits acid balls and inhales the fumes off smokestalks. Things get even stranger from there. Theres a Save the Earth concert or something with this girl in spandex with stuff painting on singing, this lava lamp like thing on the wall (definitely hippies) and this teenager who gets drunk and starts halucinating and sees everyone with fish masks on (when I saw this the first time when I was six, couldn't get why everyone started wearing fish masks and why the teen seemed so disturbed about it) until Hedorah suddenly attacks after sucking up fumes. Well Godzilla comes and saves everybody and they start fighting really bizarrely (similar to the Saturday night wrestling scenes from King Kong vs. Godzilla. They wrestle and wrestle some more. Though released in 1971, this is very sixties. Director Yoshimitsu Banno blends mind twisting images, real scenes of Tokyo bay covered with sludge, the scenes with the hippies, disturbing scenes with dying babies on mutiple screens, gory scenes of Hedorah's victems being reduced to skeletons, scenes with the kid and his scientist father trying to figure out how to stop the monster, and scenes with a newscaster. This is very poetic, bizarre, beautiful, and sometimes extremely disturbing and has about the strongest anti pollution messages I've ever seen (Japan was polluted the most back then). This is one colorful film. P.S. I don't know how this film got a G rating with all the disturbing images in it.
Review of Godzilla vs. Hedorah
