Review of Destroy All Monsters (1968) by Adam B — 27 Jul 2010

The title of this movie is a lie. Let's break the title down, but we'll do it backwards. 1) Monsters: so far, so good. This is a monster movie, and monster movies usually have monsters in them. 2) All: Well, they left out Adolf Hitler, Caligula, and all of my grandfathers, so not all monsters was present in this movie. 3) Destroy: this is just plain wrong, because if we put in all the other words from the title of this movie, we get "Destroy All Monsters", and that's not what happens at all in this movie.

What happens is all of the monsters get together after being brainwashed or some shit by a team of space broads, and instead of destroying themselves (like the title said) they all team up and decide to murder the one monster that they unanimously hate: King Ghidora. It was such a one-sided fight that you don't even know who you should be rooting for. I mean, they are all monsters, after all, but we learned a long time ago that they have some sense of morals and companionship. Granted, King Ghidora was pretty much the biggest asshole among those monsters, but the way they gang-raped him makes you wonder if he really deserved to die like that. They even let the little doughy baby Godzilla deliver the final blow to the poor bastard.

Oh well, the Godzilla franchise is pretty much a train wreck of never-ending reboots, remakes, and rehashes. You can't expect them to try and make sense out of such a cheesy movie. unfortunately, this "Crowning Achievement of Japanese Monster Movies" doesn't even try to be a movie at all. It was basically just Toho Studios showing off by trying to cram every one of their giant dinosaur suits into one frame, and they barely managed to achieve that. I've seen a lot of these godzilla movies, and I know that there were plenty of moments where they just shoved stock footage into the final cut.

Oh well, I guess if you're tasteless enough to pay to see a Godzilla movie, then you're just there to watch some sweaty Japanese guy in a lizard costume lumber around a squib-infested model of a city, and pretend like the Asian guy in the Barney suit ain't actually five-feet-tall.

And one final comment about this piece of moldy cheese: if Wikipedia is to be believed, then the original title of this movie was Attack of the Marching Monsters . . . which makes even less sense, because these monster don't march so much as they lumber around large cities, causing billions of dollars (or septillions of yen) in property damage, and obliviously kill thousands upon thousands of people.

At least it wasn't as bad as Godzilla's Revenge. That movie made me want to kill myself, my family, and Mrs. Higgin's poodle. Fortunately, sanity prevailed during that incident.