King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) "Review 3"

[abraxas]

King Kong vs. Godzilla (Kingu Kongu Tai Gojira) is a 1962 science fiction film directed by Ishiro Honda with visual effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. It was the third installment in the Japanese series of films featuring the monster Godzilla. It was also the first of two Japanese made films featuring the King Kong character and also the first time both King Kong and Godzilla appeared in color and in the same film.



Well lets start this review off by saying that this film has the worse looking King Kong ever put in a film, not only was it an abysmal Kong suit, its one of the worse gorilla costumes in the history of movies.

The story has Godzilla emerging from his icy prison due to an American nuclear submarine colliding with a huge iceberg. Meanwhile a Japanese television station is looking for a new and unique way to help their sagging ratings and second rate science fiction programs. An employee learns of a giant monster that lives on an remote island, soon they leave to capture this creature to use on their program. The natives of the island are a primitive Asian culture, rather then being portrayed as an African-like group, no doubt done for practical reasons.

King Kong drinks a ton of a red berry wine that the natives have used to appease Kong whom they consider to be their god, basically Kong gets drunk and passes out. A raft is constructed and Kong is taken to Japan, the two monsters meet and fight, but Godzilla quickly sends King Kong packing by using his radioactive breath.

As in the original King Kong, this Kong grabs the love interest of one of the main characters and takes her to the top of a building, this one however is a tiny stub of a building which oddly enough looks like the tippy top of the empire state building.

One of the strangest things about this movie is King Kong's new ability to absorb lightning and electricity and turn it into power with which to fight. He even has the ability to make the electricity come of of his hands, which he uses to shock Godzilla, who apparently can now be harmed by electricity, even though the first Godzilla film shows him invulnerable to its effects. In King Kong vs Godzilla this is justified by saying that they only used 300,000 volts in the first film, whereas in this film they use 1 million volts.

Its most controversial aspect is that only King Kong is shown swimming away at the end of the film, the Japanese version suggests that he is still alive, while the US version leaves little doubt that Godzilla was killed by Kong. The reason for this is simply that, at the time King Kong was more popular in Japan then Godzilla was, King Kong had been re-released in Japan in 1954, the same year of the original Godzilla. This sequence was essentially the end of any kind of continuity in the Godzilla series, its also another heavily edited Godzilla film in its American incarnation.

In contrast to the crappy look of King Kong, is the look of Godzilla which is considered to be one of the best looking suits that have been used in the entire series.

3 out of 5 roars (the look of Godzilla saves this film from getting a 2 rating)

[GL]

Ugh, I had hoped you wouldn't fall into that trap, but you did:

GODZILLA DOES NOT DIE AT THE END OF THE FILM!!!!!!!!!!

In the Japanese version, Kong swims away and roars off at humanity, while Godzilla offers one of his own before the screen fades to black. This signifies that both are alive, neither one having won as you could say both sides are effective (we visibly see Kong, so he's the clear victor; conversely, Kong is retreating from Godzilla's turf to lick his wounds. Who won?) while the American cut simply cuts Godzilla's roar due to the popularity of Kong on this side of the Pacific, it being our monster and all. There's no two versions that show each one having come out on top, it's just another attempt by US distributors to showcase their superiority over the Japanese.

Plus, I firmly believe that one is the film that singlehandedly killed whatever respect that the films had by that point and rendered them to the state at which they lie to this day, a subject of embarrasment and mocking status for their primitive special effects compared to the US, which I think is firmly directed right at Kong. Yes, he looks ridiculous, but seriously, was he any worse off after the DeLaurentis version? I happen to love that version personally, but he wasn't that bad at all (it's mostly the puppet-head used for the close-ups that look bad, the full-size suit is actually really good in my opinion, with Hirose's performance there being the problem, not the suit) and he is certainly much more convincing than the giant apes that were seen in previous years (Boris Karloff's The Ape, Bela Lugosi Meets the Brooklyn Gorilla, the Tarzan films in the early 30s and 40s and numerous Three Stooges shorts) not to mention the British King Kong rip-off done only a year earlier, Konga, which had an even worse monkey suit than this one, yet it still comes down to the patriotism in that, since they were done by us, they're better. What's failed to be mentioned in that same space is the fact that they're giant monster films at the same time, competing against these Japanese films are some real embarrasing special effects work (The Deadly Mantis, The Beginning of the End, The Monster from Green Hell and pretty much all of those photo-enlarged lizards and insects) that were running around model-train sets, or even the 1960 Lost World which had crocodiles and iguanas with fangs and horns glued onto them and called Dinosaurs which are even more of an embarrassment to what they did, yet because they came from the US, they became accepted and lovingly mocked for their crudeness, yet the Japanese, with the best special effects and most care put into their films despite the lack of time or budget (take a good, long look at Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster and the special effects in that one: it was all done in a matter of three weeks since it had to be out in theaters less than six months after Godzilla vs Mothra to show just how good they were at these films) and they were treated far worse than the home-grown films simply because of what happened to Kong in this film. From this point on, the entire genre was simply a man in a rubber suit stomping around cardboard buildings and looked at with derision and contempt.

Well, now that I can step off my soapbox, the rest of the film is awesome indeed. Godzilla is one of the best he's looked, the military attacks are a lot of fun and the final brawl on Mt. Fuji is perhaps one of the series best in terms of sheer spectacle and excitement, so I have a lot of love for this one.

[abraxas]

Not sure what you were trying to get at with that post, but Kong does indeed look really bad, I mean look at his hands, they look so plastic and fake, horrible horrible suit all around IMO.

[GL]

The point is simple yet complicated: the stereotype that these films are nothing more than "a man in a rubber suit stomping around cardboard buildings" started with the public reaction to this film simply because of the way Kong, a monster that was made for the US audiences, was portrayed in here. Rather than look down upon their own films, a sense of patriotism allowed the audiences to overlook the utterly-crappy special effects being produced in the films produced at the time (the photo-enlarged insects or the cosmetically-altered lizards) that were of far-lower standards in terms of quality than the Japanese films' far superior special effects, and the entire genre was then ridiculed to the state of being rendered a joke because of them, yet the films made in the US were enjoyed and have become accepted because of their cheesy effects.

Beyond that, I actually like the full-scale suit for Kong, it's more the puppets that look bad. That inexpressive face of Kong during the first battle when Godzilla blasts that helicopter out of the sky and Kong's face is shown in close-up fluttering his eyes and gasping is a prime example of what I mean, just sheer ludicrous on the part of Tsuburaya and really question whether or not his health was ailing years earlier for allowing those shots to be inserted. Of course, Godzilla vs Mothra sort of puts a damper on that theory, but I really don't have a problem with Kong here. It's mostly the puppets.