Godzilla vs Biollante (1989)

 “Biollante is just a cross between a plant and Godzilla...!"

It’s been more weeks than I realised since the last Godzilla film so here's the next one- and it's one of the most impressive with a cool antagonist and high production values.

There's a lot of fun here, from the concept (we get to see a Godzilla cell merge with a plant cell to create Biollante, because that's how genetics works...) to the appearance of Biollante, with the rubber tentacles and Venus flytrap maws. Its all very '80s, with the industrial espionage (we get to see the contemporary industrian rivalry between the Americans and Japanese in this decade from a Japanese perspective, ESP nonsense, car chases and action, 80s fashions, 80s action film music and all those things which are fun to look back on from a vantage point of thirty years later.

And yet, despite the B movie silliness of the concepts, the plot is bloody good and the whole film is superbly shot. It's also positive to see a new monster antagonist for Godzilla after all these years, and a different type of monster at that. We carry directly on from the previous film, with the same impressively realised Godzila (the set piece where he destroys Osaka is extremely well done) with excellent use of his familiar fanfare. Brilliantly, it's Godzilla who remains the antagonist throughout, with Biollante being the eventual means of his destructtion in a well-plotted series of events.

I'm not ranking these films in order of best to worst, as this isn't that sort of blog, but if I were, this would rank quite highly as a genuinely good monster film that nevertheless offers plenty of low camp fun.