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.

King Kong vs Godzilla (1962)

"Don't blame them if their god eats you both..."

I know it's midweek, but we've eaten and washed up early, so there's time for the next Godzilla film- the first in colour- and this one not only picks right up from where we left off but co-stars the most famous cinematic beast of all: King Kong.

It's an oddly comedic film, with the usual comedy heroic duo out-slapsticked by their absurd boss, but this approach works in a film which was always going to subsist as a piece of low camp at its most loveable. The costumes obviously have men inside, the tanks are obviously models, and it's amusing so see the camera pan slowly around an electrical substation later on, confirming via the grammar of such films that the substation will later be destroyed in exciting fashion.

We begin with parallel plotlines as an expendable American nuclear submarine awakens Godzilla and is quickly destroyed, while our comedy heroes investigate that island from King Kong for reasons which are said to relate to the advertising of pharmaceuticals but make no sense whatsoever.

The island is a pretty good copy of the 1933 original except, of course, that the "natives" are all Japanese extras in blackface. Oh dear. There's also a very silly scene in which the island chief is amused by a transistor radio as our comedy heroes give out free cigarettes to all and sundry, including a little kid. Oh dear.

There are plenty of exciting set pieces, including an inconclusive early battle between the two monsters where Kong is sent running. Kong also gets a pretty girl to snatch out of a rail carriage  and take to the top of a building, as he's contractually obliged to do. Plenty of model tanks again appear and poor old Tokyo, which can't have been rebuilt for very long, is trashed once more.

We end with a suitably epic clash ending up with Kong swimming home, as Godzilla's fate remains uncertain. That was... pretty much exactly as you'd expect, and good fun,