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OVERALL
BEASTS
BREASTS
Original title: Gojira tai Hedorâ
Director: Yoshimitsu Banno
Writers: Yoshimitsu Banno & Takeshi Kimura
Cast---
Akira Yamauchi ...  Dr. Yano
Toshie Kimura ...  Toshie Yano
Hiroyuki Kawase ...  Ken Yano
Keiko Mari ...  Miki Fujiyama
Toshio Shiba ...  Yukio Keuchi
Yukihiko Gondo ...  Mean general
Eisaburo Komatsu ...  Fisherman
Tadashi Okabe ...  Scientist

Runtime: Germany: 96 min | USA: 87 min
GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER
(1971)

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). See it here.

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. Check him out here.


                                                                              - Scot Nolahn @ The Bargain Bin Review
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Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster (1971)
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