Misadventures in Blissville

This is episode 5 of Geno Cuddy’s brilliant New Cult Movie Podcast, in which we discuss the 1969 film, All Monsters Attack, directed by Ishirō Honda.  This is such a bizarre and wonderful movie.

I refer to my notes here, from the article I wrote commemorating the 60 and 61st anniversary of Godzilla, “61 Years of Screaming.”

Of course, none of this can prepare you for the madness that is “All Monsters Attack” (1969), a Godzilla movie that isn’t really a Godzilla movie. It’s more a 69 minute acid trip suffered by a boy who hallucinates being given instruction by Godzilla and his son in how to deal with some local bullies while he hides from burglars. This is my daughter’s favorite of the Gojira movies as it directly addresses children.

“Kaiju Machi”
Performed by Risato Saski
(Japanese Version Only)
Translated as “Strange Beast Road”

This is such a funky, awesome opening theme, the original Japanese title sequence.

The opening titles are a mash-up of previous Gojira movies, there’s this weird cat-like monster, a spider monsters that projectile vomits silk, like Mothra (or Mosura in the original Japanese). This movies comes without subtitles, because I think it just plays better when you don’t quite know what’s going on. You’ll notice too the widescreen format. When we first watched these movies on television, they were presented 4:3 and looked awful – also the dubbing was pretty bad. It seemed like it was three or four actors doing the voices: one woman, two men, usually they would get the female to dub the voices of all the children.

Here we have post-war Japan and the director Ichiro Honda keeps reminding us of the industrialization that took over Japan and really made it into a financial super-power in the late 70s, early 80s. We focus on this little, and he has a little girlfriend, and he’s beset by bullies. He and his friend have to wade through this traffic in Tokyo.

As you can see, the color correction for this blu ray set is fantastic, looks so much better than previous releases. The symbol on the kid’s baseball cap looks like one of those 45 adapters for records.

The kid starts tripping. Where is he going? He’s on an airplane with a bunch of white people! Everybody vanishes! Monster Island! Now we commence fighting! Godzilla looks like he’s gained a little weight in the ensuing years.

He’s falling down a rabbit hole. This is Alice in Wonderland, or Akira in Wonderland.