La Guerre des Monstres

A fond and nostalgic personal memory, "War of the Gargantuas" was a welcome treat in my family's living room (they had more console television sets back then; am I getting old or what?), and is one of my favorite Japanese monster movies. When they aired it, which was often, I'd get a chance to watch it five times during that week, at 8:00pm on a KTLA (Los Angeles area Channel 5) Movie of the (whole) Week (I was just a kid then, and before anybody was able to rent videos at Blockbuster).

Barebones Summary (without spoiling it for the inexperienced viewer):

A beautiful young female scientist, Akemi (pronounced ‘ uh-kay-mee '), does research on a docile, missing-link-like monster child -eventually called `The Brown One.' (There is a cute scene in which Akemi feeds it a chocolate bar, soon after it has played with children's toys). One day the small and hairy young creature escapes the laboratory and grows up alone in the forest. Some years later Akemi meets an American scientist, Paul Stewart, and you just know these two lovebirds are going to fall in love.

Meanwhile at Tokyo International, a huge green monster pops out of the ocean and proves everybody wrong when they say Airport food is lousy. The ugly sea titan sticks its hand in an office window, pulls out an even uglier cleaning lady and shoves it in his mouth. As it munches away and spits out the wrapping (clothes), the clouds overhead start to clear (Ouch, it hates the light!), so it peels-off down the runway and dive-bombs into the ocean.

Elsewhere that evening, aboard a luxury yacht, an American singer belts out a corny love ballad to her formal audience-`The words get stuck in my throat…' (And you just know someone--or something--will soon put a stop to her awful singing).

Before you know it, the behemoth brothers meet several times to resume their sibling rivalries by knocking the wind out of each other, smashing military vehicles of all shapes and sizes, and knocking over downtown buildings.

I believe WOTG offers considerably more than your usual Toho Studios/Japanese Monster Movie, and could do with a modern spin (provided the original plot is not much altered as to seem another film entirely). It certainly has its comedic moments, as already mentioned. There are infinite possibilities in remaking it. The Japanese are great at creating model tanks and realistic building models… all that stuff. And the title creatures are scary looking… ‘Green' looks like a gargoyle without horns, and ‘Brown' looks like a somewhat frightening, foreign version of Frankenstein's montster

You have to simply take this type of movies for what they are. It's quite hard to say anything serious about them because they are all looking very outdated, features some bad acting and of course also don't have the most clever or original scripts.

What makes this movie very fun and watchable is the fact that it's almost non-stop movie monster action. Halve of the time during this movie you're watching a bunch of guys in suits walking around at a set with miniatures but it's all simply fun and good to watch. Lots of things get destroyed and the army is basically using everything it got to stop the two Gargantuas from reaching Tokyo. At the same time the two Gargantuas 'brothers' are also battling each other, so we have some action coming from basically every angle here.

It means that the 'human' story of the movie gets sort of pushed to the background but this is not necessarily a bad thing. It only means that the movie decided to go for entertainment rather than depth. Also not a bad movie, considering that the acting in this movie isn't exactly the best. Russ Tamblyn's overacting is quite laughable.

The movie is not necessarily a sequel to "Furankenshutain tai chitei kaijû Baragon", since this one doesn't even feature any of the original characters from that movie. It means that you don't necessarily need to see the first movie before watching and enjoying this one. The movie is from the same director and pretty much features the same crew as well, who did lots of movies like this together. Honda is also the director of the first original "Gojira" movie.

This movie is simply good and entertaining for what it is.

6/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

This is certainly one of the better non-Godzilla kaijus. It has plenty of action and in some ways it has a love story within it. The character Akemi has a deep motherly affection for Sanda (the Brown Gargantua) and is willing to do anything to protect it from the wrath of the army who see him as nothing but a menace. In the meantime, Gaira (the Green Gargantua) is the true evil. He sees man as nothing but food and this brings him into conflict with his brother who is gentle in nature but results to violence as a last resort.

I saw this movie when it was in theaters in Queens, New York around 1968 and the promotional ad stated that the first 100 movie goers will receive a free pet monster. Well, my monster loving friends & myself were all over that. Turned out that the pet monster was a silly little rubbery goofy animal. Everyone loved them nonetheless! We all enjoyed the movie & it was billed as a second feature along with D.A.M. Destroy All Monsters! What a blast! War of the Gargantuas was definitely the better of the two flicks and every time I went to the beach after that kept hearing that eerie music and waited for the green gargantuan to rear his big ugly head out of the ocean. The ultimate battle between good (brown gargantuan) and evil (green gargantuan) as can best be done in Japanese monster fashion. Russ Tamblyn was popular at the time after appearing in West Side Story and Tom Thumb. I would say this was his best movie. I recommend it to any monster movie buff. MikeW

We'll give credit to TOHO productions, it is different from the Godzilla films, which I adore. It seems they just used different monsters while using the same scaled army vehicles and scenery. Having viewed Frankenstein Conquers the World, this "Sequel" doesn't quite add up to it's previous storyline which was a little vague, blame it on poor editing? Had they expanded on why and where these 2 monsters originated from, it would make more sense, while still leaving out human dialogue. I saw this film as a child, it scared me into believing there really were creatures walking around stomping on people! When you hear the lady singing on the cruise ship, and that poorly written song sticks in your head, believe me, you'll wish she had been eaten first. The movie is a classic, worth a look see.