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Bottleneck Gallery will release Destroy All Monsters posters featuring Godzilla and his kaiju friends and foes by Tom Whalen tomorrow, May 15, at 12pm Et.

The standard 36×24 screen print is limited to 150 for $60, while the yellow variant is limited to 75 for $70. A 24×16 archival pigment print on three layers of acrylic panel, limited to 50, will also be available for $125.

“With 1968’s Destroy All Monsters, Ishiro Honda and the rest of the talented Toho team created a simple, all-out slobberknocker of a movie featuring Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, Rodan, and many others,” Bottleneck writes.

We’re stoked to release Tom’s officially licensed print for the kaiju clash, featuring all of our favorite killer creatures, and Tom’s exquisitely clean lines and perfect coloring. We’ve also got an extremely limited edition of acrylic prints that really allow Tom’s monster artistic talent to shine!”

In the film, aliens have released all the...

One scrapped plan for a Godzilla movie saw the King of the Monsters go up against a giant Frankenstein’s Monster. Spanning more than half a century, Godzilla’s cinematic history has seen the kaiju go up against a wide range of opponents. Over the years, he’s fought a spider, a gorilla, a robotic Godzilla, a three-headed dragon, and even a lobster, but Frankenstein’s Monster would have stood out above all of them as his most unusual enemy ever.

Had it moved forward, Godzilla’s canceled battle with Frankenstein’s Monster, a creature who later appeared in two Toho movies, would have been his second showdown with another pop culture icon. His first, of course, was with none other than King Kong. Given that King Kong was less than 25 feet tall in his original movie, the monster naturally needed a significant size upgrade in order for this crossover to work.

It’s another CineSavant review of a movie largely unavailable, especially the original Japanese version. This third Ishirô Honda / Eiji Tsuburaya outer space action epic is probably the best Toho science fiction feature ever, an Astral Collision tale in which the drama and characters are as compelling as the special effects. Nothing can stop a colossal planetoid heading toward Earth, but science comes to the rescue with the biggest construction job ever undertaken by mankind. The fine screenplay generates thrills, suspense and human warmth. It also takes place in the far, far future: 1980.

Gorath

CineSavant Revival Screening Review

Not On Region A Home Video

1962 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 88 83 min. / Yôsei Gorasu

Starring: Ryô Ikebe, Yumi Shirakawa, Akira Kubo, Kumi Mizuno, Akihiko Hirata, Kenji Sahara, Jun Tazaki, Ken Uehara, Takashi Shimura, Seizaburô Kawazu, Takamaru Sasaki, Kô Nishimura, Eitarô Ozawa, Hideyo Amamoto, George Furness, Ross Benette, Nadao Kirino, Fumio Sakashita, Ikio Sawamura, Haruo Nakajima.

Mill Creek again dips into exotic Japanese sci-fi fantasy, and this time scores with the desired language choices and subtitle configurations for these spectaculars from the beginning of Toho’s strongest period. The H-Man is a stylish gangster-horror melange about a radioactive slime that cheerfully transforms Guys ‘n’ Dolls into living goo. Then, a Battle in Outer Space is the result when a two-rocket expedition to the moon uncovers an imminent alien invasion, and flying saucer vs. rocketplane dogfights break out in low Earth orbit and in the skies over Tokyo. Was matinee moviegoing ever better than that? CineSavant writes, uh, at length about all the fan concerns over this disc.

Toho Double Feature

The H-Man & Battle in Outer Space

Blu-ray

Mill Creek

Color / 2:35 widescreen / Street Date June 9, 2020 /

Cinematography: Hajime Koizumi

Director of Special Effects: Eiji Tsuburaya

Produced by Tomoyuko Tanaka

Directed by Ishiro Honda

Here’s how a...

Mill Creek again dips into exotic Japanese sci-fi fantasy, and this time scores with the desired language choices and subtitle configurations for these spectaculars from the beginning of Toho’s strongest period. The H-Man is a stylish gangster-horror melange about a radioactive slime that cheerfully transforms Guys ‘n’ Dolls alike into living goo. Then, a Battle in Outer Space is the result when two-rocket expedition to the moon uncovers an imminent alien invasion, and flying saucer vs. rocketplane dogfights break out in low Earth orbit and in the skies over Tokyo. Was matinee moviegoing ever better than that? CineSavant writes, uh, at length about all the fan concerns over this disc.

Toho Double Feature

The H-Man & Battle in Outer Space

Blu-ray

Mill Creek

Color / 2:35 widescreen / Street Date June 9, 2020 /

Cinematography: Hajime Koizumi

Director of Special Effects: Eiji Tsuburaya

Produced by Tomoyuko Tanaka

Directed by Ishiro Honda

Here’s how a...

Just several years prior, Toho Studios and director Ishiro Honda scored critical and audience success with the monumental Gojira/Godzilla, unleashing a cavalcade of projects that inspired countless kids and filmmakers for generations to come. One of the more overlooked and underrated efforts to come from their cooperation was a rather simple concoction of film-noir, sci-fi and horror originally written off as a Blob rip-off but has become more beloved over time as more have given a look at his classic Bijo to Ekitai-Ningen, also known as “The H-Man”.

After a strange accident, Inspector Tominaga is called to investigate the case which shows a gangster mysteriously vanishing on city streets with just his clothes, gun and a bag of narcotics left behind. Finding the man’s girlfriend Chikako a night-club singer at a club that operates as a front for the gang, involved with the strange disappearances,...

**Massive spoilers for every Godzilla movie, with the exception of the 2014 reboot, and Mothra follow**

August 6th and 9th, 1945 forever changed the course of history. When the first nuclear bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, World War II ended, but a new fear was born that dominated the thoughts of all men, women, and children for decades to come. The Cold War, atomic bomb testing, a cartoon turtle telling children to “duck and cover”, and this new technology that had the actual potential to literally end the world changed the perception of what was scary. Art reflects life, so cinema began to capitalize on these fears. Gone were the days of creepy castles, cobwebs, bats, vampires, werewolves, and the other iconic images that ruled genre cinema in film’s earliest decades. Science fiction was larger than ever and giant ants, giant octopi, terror from beyond the stars, and...

We know the greats; movies like Metropolis (1927), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977).

And there are those films which maybe didn’t achieve cinematic greatness, but through their inexhaustible watchability became genre touchstones, lesser classics but classics nonetheless, like The War of the Worlds (1953), Godzilla (1954), Them! (1954), The Time Machine (1960).

In the realm of science fiction cinema, those are the cream (and below that, maybe the half and half). But sci fi is one of those genres which has often too readily leant itself to – not to torture an analogy — producing nonfat dairy substitute.

During the first, great wave of sci fi movies in the 1950s, the target audience was kids and teens. There wasn’t a lot in the way of “serious” sci fi. Most of it was churned out quick and cheap; drive-in fodder, grist for the Saturday matinee mill.

By the early 1960s,...