Another Side of Godzilla

1967 saw the release of the eighth film in the Godzilla series, Son of Godzilla, and by that time the giant atomic lizard had not only become a part of Japan’s cultural landscape but was making inroads into North America. Still, budgets for the movies were shrinking. Son of Godzilla, like the previous year’s Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, is set on a tropical island to avoid needing expensive city models for Godzilla to stomp underfoot.

Jun Fukuda returns as director, series veteran Shinichi Sekizawa returns to write the script (with Kazue Shiba), and Sadamasa Arikawa again handles special effects. The result can’t help but feel small, not only because of the budget, but also the movie’s too consciously playing to a very young audience. It has moments, but it’s one of the slower and least interesting of the early Godzilla movies.

The story begins with good-guy scientists working on a weather-control project on an isolated jungle island, hoping to increase food production. Things don’t go as planned. Oversized mantises lurk in the dense forest. A nosy reporter, Maki Goro (Akira Kobo), finds his way to the island. He sees a mysterious woman (Bibari Maeda). Then a test of the equipment backfires, and mutates the mantises to vast size. The mantises crack open a mysterious egg, and hatch a baby Godzilla, Minilla (played by Masao Fukazawa, under the name ‘Little Man’ Machan).

Minilla summons the full-sized Godzilla, who has a nice fight with the mantises, now called Kamacuras. The mysterious woman, Saeko Matsumiya, joins the scientists, who squabble and fall sick; to get a cure she and Goro must journey through the lair of a giant spider. It builds to a climax with the spider, the mantises, a hyperactive weather-control device, Minilla, and Godzilla himself (played in this movie by three different actors).

Unfortunately, the film’s slowed by scenes of Godzilla bonding with Minilla and teaching him to use his atomic breath. The relation of the two monsters isn’t really explained; Minilla is officially Godzilla’s adopted son, but one has to wonder. The humans can’t carry the slack created by the unengaging Godzilla-Minilla scenes. There’s a lot of broad comic acting, especially from Kobo, which doesn’t help.

Not even Godzilla’s habit of stumbling into another genre of film works: Matsumiya turns out to be the daughter of an archaeologist originally stationed on the island during the Second World War, who died seven years ago leaving her on her own. She’s a gender-flipped Tarzan. But the movie doesn’t allow her the fun vine-swinging adventurousness of the original.

This is a baseline decent monster movie with enough different monsters that it’s carried by weirdness and subplots. As with previous Godzilla movies, the special effects aim high, occasionally produce some surprisingly nice images, and do always tell a story. But the suits have to carry more emotion than usual, and they’re not up to it; the eyes in particular don’t have enough life in them.

The three men in the Godzilla suit—Haruo Nakajima, who’d played Godzilla in the earlier movies; Seji Onaka, who replaced Nakajima when the suit for this movie turned out to be too big for him; and Hiroshi Sekita, who took over after an accident left Onaka with broken fingers—do the best they can to humanize the giant reptile. The movie continues Godzilla’s transition from a symbol of the devastation of nuclear war into a figure something like (the comparison has been made many times) Marvel Comics’ Incredible Hulk: big green bad-tempered engines of mass destruction who mainly want to be left alone but will usefully stomp bad guys when pointed in the right direction. They’re monsters who fight other monsters.

It may be disturbing that a metaphor for nuclear destruction becomes a slightly-scary but sheltering protector. Or it may say something about how humans grew comfortable with the idea of the Bomb as the 20th century went along. But perhaps it’s simply the inherent logic of Godzilla movies, or all monster movies: the more stories you tell about the same monster, the more comfortable you get with it.

It’s also true that the Godzilla films were fundamentally pop cinema, and primarily about turning a profit. By 1967 that was getting tricky, thus the lower budget. The Godzilla movies were under increasing pressure from the culture around them, in part victims of their own success.

They’d spawned a rival franchise, as starting in 1965 Daiei Film had begun making movies about the giant turtle Gamera. And movies about kaiju (“strange beast,” as a film genre referring to giant monsters) were struggling with a rival subgenre of tokosatsu (“special photography,” or special effects movies) in the form of super-heroes. Notably, in 1966 Godzilla’s own special-effects master Eiji Tsuburaya created a kaiju TV series called Ultra Q, which was immediately followed by a sequel show, Ultraman, in which a giant hero fought aliens and monsters.

What has been called a “monster boom” was underway. But Godzilla, the progenitor, didn’t benefit much. The Japanese cultural industries were producing a range of heroes and monsters who were cutting in on his game. Son of Godzilla was an attempt to find a new angle, an ecological niche in which Godzilla could continue to thrive. It worked in that the movie made money, and more films would be made. But the budgets continued to dwindle, and this did not lead to better movies—only, sometimes, to stranger ones.