Son of Godzilla (1967)

“The smell of a story attracts me...”

Another Godzilla film, I thought, thinking I knew what to expect. Imagine my surprise. No Godzilla destroying Tokyo; indeed no Tokyo at all, as the entire film takes place on a fictional island on the South Pacific. None of the co-star monsters like Mothra or King Gidorah. Just some big preying martises, a massive spider, Godzilla, and... a cute baby Godzilla who looks bizarrely as though he's been animated by Jim Henson.

And yet... silly though it is, with most of the baby Godzilla sequences being accompanied by music to inform us that this is supposed to be comedy... it somehow works. It certainly starts well, with an intrepid reporter, and our POV character as so often before, stubbornly parachuting on to the island to get a story, and discovering sci-fi weather control experiments to solve world hunger by making "waste areas" fertile. I'm sure that won't harm the ecosystem in any way whatsoever.

We get the usual quotient of human drama, a mysterious girl, an unnerving disease with a high fever (interesting whenever one comes across such themes when quarantining) and an egg, almost pecked to death bu praying manises. But none of that is the real point of the film. No, that's to see Godzilla as we've never seen him before, looking after his Muppet Baby of a son, teaching him to roar, to emit ray beams and to fight giant spiders. And we end with Godzillas Senior and Junior embracing in the face of an unnatural cold, both surviving.

This is not your usual Godzilla film. It's utterly mad. But it's actually refreshing to see something a little bit different, and the whole thing is just absurd enough to work. I'm not sure I should have enjoyed this, but I did.