First, a bit of history: This happens to be the first movie I can remember watching. I was four years old and staying at my grandparents' house for the weekend. It was a Saturday afternoon down in the den, playing with my uncle's old and abandoned MatchBox cars. My grandfather was with me, sacked out in front of the TV, maybe sleeping? That might explain why he'd let a four-year-old watch this movie.

I tried to make as if I wasn't watching, but my eyes kept drifting back to the screen. I'd never seen anything like it: frightening and thrilling and fantastic. It had never occurred to my four-year-old mind that the world could hang in the balance like that, or that we could have such a terrible, awesome savior. Sure, laying in a strange bed that night, I had nightmares of an insidious foe flying overhead and gassing all of us to death... but I was undeniably hooked.

Some 30 years before Al Gore came out with An Inconvenient Truth , there was another slow-moving, unnatural behemoth stomping across the countryside to save the environment: Godzilla. It seems that an alien lifeform called Hedorah dropped by to feed on our pollution. Fortunately, neither Hedorah or the pollution sits too well with our softer, kid-friendly version of Godzilla, so the King of All Monsters comes wadin' in like John Wayne to take care of business. All of the action is witnessed from the point of view of a Japanese scientist and his short shorts-wearin' young son.

Bitchin'.
Let's start off with the Smog Monster himself, Hedorah. Godzilla has appeared in nearly 30 feature films, and for my money, Hedorah is by far one of his toughest opponents. Sure, Hedorah can shoot heat lazers out of his eyes and spit toxic loogies -- he can even shift shapes (an ability later seen in such foes as Orga and Destoroyah). That's all well and good, but Hedorah is also an entity of living sludge. This not only renders Godzilla's bread-and-butter -- his atomic breath -- fairly useless, it allows Hedorah to regenerate himself simply by consuming more pollution. As you'll see in a bit, Godzilla needs to dig deep into his bag of tricks to get the best of Hedorah.

But really, this film belongs to the hippies. The film itself was released just a couple years after Woodstock, and it really shows. What is mankind's solution to taking on the scourge of pollution? Hold a rock concert at the top of Mt. Fuji, of course! This is, to date, the only Godzilla film to feature an acid rock music video (complete with trippy fish-headed dancers).

But the hippie agenda doesn't stop there. No sir! As if the movie's message wasn't heavy-handed enough, we have a villain that practically fellates industrial smoke stacks. We then see the unrestricted corporate monstrosity fly around the country, gassing and poisoning thousands of people (of all the Godzilla films, this one may have the highest body count). The filmmakers try to take the edge off the wholesale slaughter by showing it in animated segments, but all that does is add a creepy animated element to the film. Hell, Godzilla performs abortions on the little Hedorah egg-spore-thingies. Someone should notify the Catholic League. Considering that this movie was made during the "kid-friendly" Godzilla era, it's pretty dark stuff. Well, not all dark. There is one other thing this movie is well-known for... FLYING GODZILLA. I told you Godzilla had to dig deep into his bag of tricks.