A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

There goes Tokyo...again

Chuck reminds me that one of the greatest horror movies of all time is getting a re-release in its orginal format. Put on your Tokyo CDF helmet, scream, and point wildly into the air...Godzilla is back:

Tokyo is in ruins. Geiger counters, ticking so fast the sounds blur, measure the radiation emitted by the children and families who crowd bomb shelters and burn wards.

Victims of the bomb? Well, sort of.

These are scenes from the "Godzilla" you never saw. Unexpurgated, uncut and subtitled, it's a far cry from the heavily re-edited, dubbed, Americanized monster movie you grew up with, which featured inserted scenes starring Raymond Burr (as ace reporter Steve Martin).

My dad used to wake me up every time Godzilla came on the Friday Night Creature Feature when I was a kid (the TV station's library was pretty limited, so this was an every six weeks type of occurrence). I was transfixed by the grim shots of the big G laying waste to Tokyo, and I always wondered why the hell "ace reporter Steve Martin" stayed in his skyscraper even as a 167 foot lizard was bearing down on it.

He'd have done Peter Arnett proud.

We tend to think of "Godzilla" as a cheesy monster movie, thanks largely to heavy re-editing in the Burr version that dispensed with nearly 40 minutes of director Ishiro Honda's original vision, two dozen or so sequels that got goofier and goofier, and rivals like "Mothra" and "Rodan." But seeing the original version -- produced by a culture with still-fresh memories of atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a feeling of being caught in the middle of Cold War paranoia between the United States and the Soviet Union -- it's clear that it's time for a major reappraisal. "Godzilla" is one of the great anti-nuclear films, made by a onetime prisoner of war and documentary filmmaker, with an original vision as well-imagined and chilling as "Dr. Strangelove."

Seriously.

I don't doubt it. I always had a severe disconnect between the stark imagery of the original and the goofy-ass shenanigans of the sequels. The more recent G-films have recaptured some of the big bastard's inherent evil, but think about the twenty years before: flying drop-kicks? Twin fairies? King King wins? Bah.

Honda's original cut is rife with nuclear references. Godzilla is clearly awakened by American offshore testing of hydrogen bombs, and he spews atomic breath. Government officials debate -- members of the Japanese government believe Godzilla's atomic origins should be kept from the public to avoid panic; but a female senator (a new phenomenon at the time) says the truth must be told.
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Critic Danny Peary, in his book "Cult Movies 2" (Dell, 1983), accuses the company that created the American version of defacing the original by making "deletions that arouse suspicions regarding the covering up of references to damage done by the A-bomb."

Nah, that doesn't sound like anything an American company would do.

Now the bad news, according to Rialto Pictures official site, it doesn't look like the re-release is coming to Houston any time soon. I may actually have to haul my ass up to Dallas or...Plano(?) to check it out.

Plano. There's a town crying out for a visit from a giant, radioactive reptile.