A fond and nostalgic personal memory, "War of the Gargantuas" was a welcome treat in my family's living room (they had more console television sets back then; am I getting old or what?), and is one of my favorite Japanese monster movies. When they aired it, which was often, I'd get a chance to watch it five times during that week, at 8:00pm on a KTLA (Los Angeles area Channel 5) Movie of the (whole) Week (I was just a kid then, and before anybody was able to rent videos at Blockbuster).
Barebones Summary (without spoiling it for the inexperienced viewer):
A beautiful young female scientist, Akemi (pronounced uh-kay-mee '), does research on a docile, missing-link-like monster child -eventually called `The Brown One.' (There is a cute scene in which Akemi feeds it a chocolate bar, soon after it has played with children's toys). One day the small and hairy young creature escapes the laboratory and grows up alone in the forest. Some years later Akemi meets an American scientist, Paul Stewart, and you just know these two lovebirds are going to fall in love.
Meanwhile at Tokyo International, a huge green monster pops out of the ocean and proves everybody wrong when they say Airport food is lousy. The ugly sea titan sticks its hand in an office window, pulls out an even uglier cleaning lady and shoves it in his mouth. As it munches away and spits out the wrapping (clothes), the clouds overhead start to clear (Ouch, it hates the light!), so it peels-off down the runway and dive-bombs into the ocean.
Elsewhere that evening, aboard a luxury yacht, an American singer belts out a corny love ballad to her formal audience-`The words get stuck in my throat
' (And you just know someone--or something--will soon put a stop to her awful singing).
Before you know it, the behemoth brothers meet several times to resume their sibling rivalries by knocking the wind out of each other, smashing military vehicles of all shapes and sizes, and knocking over downtown buildings.
I believe WOTG offers considerably more than your usual Toho Studios/Japanese Monster Movie, and could do with a modern spin (provided the original plot is not much altered as to seem another film entirely). It certainly has its comedic moments, as already mentioned. There are infinite possibilities in remaking it. The Japanese are great at creating model tanks and realistic building models
all that stuff. And the title creatures are scary looking
Green' looks like a gargoyle without horns, and Brown' looks like a somewhat frightening, foreign version of Frankenstein's montster
