All Monsters Attack (1969)

The short shorts on a prepubescent boys was apparently a huge problem in Japan.

When I embarked on my mission to watch every Godzilla film, I knew there would be moments that it became difficult. They can't all be winners right? All Monsters Attack might be the biggest looser in the entire series. The movie is clearly aimed at children, but not in a tactful or appealing way, which makes it an absolute chore to watch for an adult.

All Monsters Attack has nothing to do with Godzilla. Seriously nothing. A young japanese boy who is being bullied, imagines that he can visit monster island and make friends with Godzilla and his son Manilla. Manilla sounds exactly like Barney and through the monsters the boy learns to be brave and to stand up to his bullies. This is one of the least successful films in the series financially and a absolute bomb for Godzilla originator Ishiro Honda.

Other than the fact Godzilla isn't real and never steps of monster island, the biggest problem with this movie is the fact that it uses literally 20 minutes of stock footage from previous films. I really never wanted to see Godzilla fight the giant crab again, but here it is just in case one time wasn't bad enough. While I get that the movie is a kids movie, there is just no excuse for the poor writing here. Everything is dumbed down to a level that makes my head throb and if I never have to watch All Monsters Attack again, I will be thankful.

2/10

Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster (1966)

Godzilla fights a giant lobster, seriously.

I don't know if it was the dubbing, the poor VHS tape recording or the movie itself, but Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster is just plain bad. Somewhere between the 45 minutes of monster-less story and the fact that Godzilla fights a giant lobster lies the reason why this movie sucks so hard, but I don't think I want to dig that deep to find it. Suffice to say, this is, without a doubt, the worst film in the series so far.

Let's see if I can remember what happens in Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster. Some dude gets lost at sea, his brother tries to find him, but he's attacked by a sea monster and ends up on a weird island where some shady people are making some shady stuff. About an hour later Godzilla fights a giant lobster and Mothra shows up to rescue everyone before the island explodes. Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster is directed by newcomer, Jun Fukuda and he certainly doesn't prove his qualifications here. I'm worried that he went on to direct four more films in the series, one of which I know is almost as bad as this one. The film has some familiar faces, it uses a lot of the same actors that were featured in previous films, and it brings back Mothra, for the last time until 1992. None of this matters though because the movie is truly awful.

Like all of the Godzilla movies, this one has a few great campy moments. Godzilla's game of tennis with the Sea Monster and the part where he rips off the monsters claw and claps it at him were moments that made me chuckle out loud, but those moments make up such a small portion of the film that you forget them amidst the sea of crap. Like many of the movies, Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster focuses way too hard on the human characters in the movie. This is always an issue, but unlike the last few movies, the characters here are just plain boring. Nothing about their lives or relationships is remotely interesting and you're left with an hour of plot development that doesn't make a whole lot of sense and is entirely boring. The other issue is that the movie just doesn't feel like a Godzilla movie. Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster was originally supposed to be a King Kong movie, but the filmmakers couldn't secure the rights. Rather than do some rewriting, they just replaced all instances of Kong in the script with Godzilla. What you end up with is a bunch of King Kong motifs and ideas, like Godzilla having a crush on a human girl, and a disjointed movie. The combination of these elements makes for a film that isn't even laughably bad.

This is a time to be very blunt about a movie. Don't ever watch Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster. Unless you have some silly ambition, like me, to watch every Godzilla movie out there, this is an easy one to avoid. While I would never watch Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster again, it is one of the few Godzilla films to get a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode and I would suggest watching that instead.

2/10

Naked Lunch (1991)

Only the second best man in a chick suit of reveal of the early 1990's.

Now that my time has been thoroughly wasted, I have nothing but contempt for David Cronenberg's adaptation of the novel Naked Lunch. It's been a long time since a film has inspired so much apathy out of me, but the film managed to simultaneously irritate, confuse and bore me. Some people said Naked Lunch was a novel that could not be made into a film. I find it hard to care if Cronenberg's attempt was proof of this fact or just a failure of a film. Naked Lunch wasted my time and I probably won't forgive it for that.

I'm not really sure what Naked Lunch was about. Somewhere between the shooting up bug poison, talking ass-holes and the gay sex with bugs I got lost. From what I gathered, some dude got high on bug toxin, shot his wife and ran away to the middle eastern version of Studio 54. Somewhere between his rampant homosexual hunger and his less than savory relationship with a giant cockroach he becomes a secret agent of sorts. After that, I stopped paying attention but I tuned in long enough to see people drinking jizz out of alien heads and  Roy Scheider bust out of a woman suit. Robocop, the Sheriff from Jaws and Bilbo Baggins star in this crap fest for reasons unknown. The film is a far cry from David Cronenberg's later directorial work, such as A History of Violence, and it's easy to see why Cronenberg's early films retain only moderate cult status while his recent work has received critical acclaim. Naked Lunch toils in movie obscurity for a fistful of obvious reasons.

I'll be the first to admit that I like weird movies. I like a movie that doesn't spoon feed you the answers or one that makes you think. The problem with Naked Lunch is that it provides no incentive to think. I didn't feel like there was anything terribly profound hiding inside the movie so all it's weirdness was was wasted. The movie is certainly ambitious and expressive, but ambition doesn't make up for the fact that it was a total failure. I understand the metaphors and I get what the movie was trying to do, but it wasn't at all effective. The movie never hooks you, unless you really love pretentious writer talk, and Weller's dead pan attitude isn't really all that exciting to watch, even if it's appropriate. His voice matches the snail-like pace of the movie, which seems way to long even though it's under two hours in length.

I don't have much to say about Naked Lunch because it's still on my shit list. It was too weird to laugh at and a wholly unsatisfying film on both intellectual and entertainment levels. How something like this ends up on a list of movies to see can only be attributed to the author having a huge boner for David Cronenberg.

2/10