Godzilla & Other Movie Monsters (DVD)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C- Program: C+
Made
around the time Sony Pictures was destroying Godzilla is one of the most
unnecessary remakes of all time, Godzilla
& Other Movie Monsters (1998) is a mixed bag of a documentary that sounds
like it would be about giant movie monsters, but goes off into several
directions that make it feel like it was thrown together to cash in on the
big-budget mega-bomb that got it greenlighted to begin with.
Sometimes,
we get some good poster art, film clips, trailers, and rare footage. However, this runs 100 minutes and manages to
often drag on, though the narrator is not bad.
This is usually accurate, but the editing and pace is not the best of
these kinds of programs. Many giant
monsters and franchises are oddly missing (Ultraman,
Inframan, though giant people films
get featured prominently), and the Godzilla
vs. The Bionic Monster fiasco is skipped over. An unusual use of footage form the 1967 James
Bond film You Only Live Twice, which
Godzilla’s home studio Toho helped to produce, surfaces here and there
unidentified.
It also
misses the awful Godzilla 2000
disaster thrown together after the big budget bomb, which is for the best, but
shows the programs age. The animated Godzilla from the late 1970s, which
pumped up interest again when the TohoScope feature films were ended, is also
surprisingly ignored. We see some
scattered memorabilia at one point, but the program, like the horrid remake
that inspired it, misses the reasons the character lives. That is too bad.
The image
quality is a bit soft throughout, showing its professional analog videotape
origins, extending to the poster art’s fine detail. The mix is of color and black and white
footage, and various aspect ratios from various trailer materials. As usual, the letterboxed footage does not
always reflect the actual ratios of the film, and some scope footage is here
pan & scan. The Dolby Digital 2.0 is
usually monophonic, with little remotely stereo, if at all. Extras include a very badly abbreviated Lost World reel, the always amusing Bambi vs. Godzilla short, and the
extremely terrible Godzilla Rap that
manages the extraordinary feat of being worse than that 1998 remake. The box credits the 10 minutes of Lost World here to be from 1948 and
narrated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself.
Well, Doyle was dead by then! It
is an actor narrating silent footage from the 1925 classic as if it were a
flashback and is a curio at best. It is
the kind of mistake that plagues the DVD throughout, but this is a cheap title,
so fans will still want to see it and there are just enough interesting parts
here to make it worth a look, with reservations.
For more,
try these links:
Icons Of
Sci-Fi Toho w/Mothra
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/8934/Icons+Of+Sci-Fi+Toho+Collection
Mothra Vs.
Godzilla + Godzilla Raids Again
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/4613/Godzilla+Raids+Again+++Godzilla+Vs
- Nicholas Sheffo
