Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob Lamb. We have a new episode of Weird House Cinema coming out this week that is going to feature Godzilla, So we are going to explore one of our past episodes today. This is an episode that originally published seven sixteen, twenty twenty one. It is on the a really great Godzilla picture, Godzilla Versus Hetera from nineteen seventy one.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Godzilla time on the podcast. But maybe at Godzilla you're a little bit less familiar with one that was new to me as of this week. Today we are doing the Godzilla picture that was too hot for Toho, the Godzilla film that is too rat it's too dangerous, it must be stopped. It's Godzilla versus Hetera.
Yes, Godzilla versus Hetera, one I had never seen before. And I think you know, I've seen a fair number of Godzilla films over time, and I think I tend to have watched the ones that were either on TBS, back in the day they would show me in like the Afternoon when I was a kid, or ones that were featured on Mystery Science Theater three thousand later on. But there, of course have been tons of Godzilla films over the years, and this is one that simply fell
through the cracks for me. I did not I did not know it existed until this week when you said, hey, why don't we do a Kaiju movie? Why don't we do either this one or that one? And I looked and I saw, well, it looks like Godzilla versus Hetera is available on HBO Max as part of the Turner Classic Films selection.
There.
Well, let's do that one. It's the easiest one for me to see. And I'm so glad I did.
The other option we were looking at. It's funny because the two movies have a kind of similar premise. The other one we were looking at was The Space of Me, which does not have Godzilla in it. It's a Kaiju movie about an alien microbe that lands on an island in the South Pacific and there it transforms some examples
of local wildlife into giant monsters. I think it makes a big squid and a big crab and one other thing I don't recall, but in this movie we also have an alien microbe I think, coming from a gaseous nebula or a speculated by one character later on, from a planet covered in sludge, a sledgelike planet, dark sledgie planet, dark sluedgy planet that has come to Earth. And whereas many aliens would say, take me to your leader, this one says, take me to your smokestacks. I need to get high.
Take me to your pollution. Yes. And the one character even says, wasn't this good? It can eat up our pollution? Like no, it's just too destructive, that's right.
Yeah, So this is a pollution monster that huffs airborne particulates straight out of smoke stacks. He is a broomstone beast from space that exudes sulfurous gas and acid and poison and is bad news all around.
Yeah. So one thing about this film is this, First of all, this film is very much a Kaiju versus film, So it is going to largely hit the same plot points you're familiar with. Some new creature presents a threat to humanity. An established veteran, in this case, Godzilla, shows up to battle it. Human characters watch on as battle proceeds. You know, your good guy Monster is going to be on the ropes for a little bit, but it's going to have a big comeback and eventually win the day.
So Godzilla versus Heter is going to give you all of those points. But there's so much additional weirdness here. There's so much visual flare in this film. I feel like it really stands apart from pretty much all the other Kaiju films that I've seen. I'm actually I seriously entertained putting it above Shin Godzilla is my favorite Godzilla movie.
I was thinking about the same thing. This is a new favorite for me, definitely my top three now, and much like you, I also have Shin Godzilla near the top of the heap. But mainly it's the reason I was so enthralled by this movie was its novelty. Having seen many Kaiju movies, it has a lot of the familiar elements, and in fact, I would say the familiar elements are actually the weakest part of this movie as
far as the big monster meet slam goes. I mean, there is a you know, extended thirty minute beat down at the end of the movie that is Okay, it's not one of the best, but it's also not one of the worst. But it is the other elements of this movie that really make it an absolute standout, without a doubt, the most bizarre Godzilla movie I've ever seen in that this movie believes it is art. Yes, absolutely, no, yeah,
no question about this. It thinks it's art and it's making a statement and maybe it's going to change the world.
Yeah. It's probably the best example of an avant garde Godzilla film, and that's one of the reasons why it's so watchable. It's also one of the reasons that that its director was criticized back in the day and indeed never directed another Godzilla film. You'll see his directorial credit IMDb for some other Godzilla films, but that's because they utilized footage from previous films in those pictures.
That's right. So the director was Yoshimitsubeno, and you will frequently see references to this as the movie that ended his Godzilla career. You know, he could have gone on to do all kinds of Godzilla stuff, but like I said at the beginning, this was just too hot for Toho. It was too weird. It was too radical. It was rocking the boat. You can't make movies like this.
Man, Yeah, exactly. There are a lot of stories about how producer Tomoyuki Tanaka responded to this. There's at least one story in which he said, you've ruined Godzilla and there was a lot of anger and I was read. There's a lot of There's a great blog post about this from Patrick Galvin at Toho Kingdom dot com. You
can look it up. He has a She Meets Subano in memoriam posts that goes through a lot of this and talks about his achievements, his you know what he gave the Godzilla franchise, but then also how it was received at the time. So, yeah, this is a movie that was maybe ahead of its time, and I think stands the test of time because it is doing things differently.
So what is it doing differently? I could list a number of things. One thing I will say is the esthetic differences. It's much more free form than any other Godzilla movie I've ever seen in that it inserts things that are outside the normal stream of plot development. So it has musical numbers, it has animated segments. They're short, but there's several of them throughout the movie, and they were some of my favorite parts because they're beautiful animation.
It's almost like a Godzilla movie with elements of like the Yellow Submarine movie and another sort of late sixties psychedelic films that involved a lot of exciting visuals with abstract colors and dancing in a club.
Yeah. And also yeah, there's also a huge cultural element to this as well. There's a there's a sense of the youth movement and the youth culture and and the and and their rise and their importance and and their part in the fight. Generally, in a kaiju movie, who do you see fighting the kaiju? Who's raising arms against the kaiju? It is the military, right.
The authorities?
Yeah, Yeah, and in this we see the authorities playing a part but also failing in ways, and it's it's the youth who are who are leading the charge at one point.
Yes, in this movie. Ultimately, I think the authorities are portrayed as almost entirely incompetent, that like, they are not the ones preserving order. Ultimately, it's Godzilla who's the one who is preserving order? And Godzilla I was trying to think about what Godzilla represents in this movie, because I think you can make a case that a lot of the Godzilla films have a I mean, you know, it's it's hard to say they have a very clear message. But to the extent that there is a message in them,
it's a kind of vague environmental one. It's you know, that we have done things to the earth, and in doing things to the earth, through maybe weapons testing or industry, we have upset the natural order and we have unleashed forces that are beyond our control. But like I said, I think that that critique is in most Godzilla movies very buried under the surface, very vague. In this movie, it's the opposite. It's not only overt, it's extremely overt.
They are screaming in your face with an environmental message. Yeah.
Yeah, they definitely lean into the idea that Godzilla is is not only it's not just a big monster for kids, so they acknowledge that, but he is also something of unembodiment of the nations of or a culture's will, you know, Like like Godzilla represents in a sense humanity struggle against pollution, against destructive elements of the world, and the question of can Godzilla defeat this enemy is ultimately a question of whether we can, whether we have the public will to confront it.
That's another transition I would say. Originally, Godzilla is sort of the manifestation of us having unleashed forces beyond our control by our upsetting of the natural order. In this movie, he is the thing that fights back against the monster created by industrial pollution. Yeah, now I have a question. I don't know if you know the answer to this.
One of the fun things we see with the Godzilla arc is that in the very first Toho Godzilla movie, Godzilla is the antagonist of the film, like, you know, this is a dangerous, scary, dark monster that brings great destruction. But by the later films, Godzilla is often sort of the hero of the film, is portrayed as a force who is inherently dangerous, but which ultimately fights against a force that is even more threatening or even more malevolent.
And that's the case in this movie. So I wonder, like how exactly that arc develop and is that the case for other movies, Like I've watched some of the Gamera movies, where you know, Gamera is doing the same thing Godzilla is doing in the In the later movies, Gamera is good and he's fighting against the bad monsters. Was that always the case with Gamera or did Gamera start as bad like Godzilla did?
If memory serves, Gamera followed the exact same track. Guy Gamera in the first film is a threat that has to be overcome and launched into space, I think ultimately, and this would be This would be for a more in depth discussion later, perhaps drawing on the work of people who've maybe thought longer and harder about this than
we have. But I imagine there is there are a lot of comparisons to be made with the way deities change over time, and you know, we can I don't know if it would be the exact same trajectory or would be kind of an inverse trajectory in some cases, But I wonder how you know, in a loose sense anyway, Godzilla is a deity. He exists not in the the the myth realm of you know of say, like the
ancient world or even modern religion. But he's in the film myth world and is therefore not quite the same as our traditional ideas of deity, but perhaps subject to some of the same changes in the way we perceive him.
Well, maybe Before we go on any further, we should hit some trailer audio.
All right, let's have it. This, I believe is from the English trailer for Godzilla Versta.
Out of the Polis of Waters. It came to become the most fearful menace that ever threatens manki growing ever more deadly on smug Only one course there stand up towards over powering evil. Nothing man can do can stop the smug Monster and Godzilla save the earth from this mastodon of destruction.
All right, sounds good to me, and we should, of course note that in the US, this I think was originally released as Godzilla versus the Smog Monster.
Yeah, that's right, though, from what I understand in the movie, the monster is not made of smog. The monster is made mostly of waterborne pollutants and then comes out onto land to huff the smog.
Yeah, he's made out of like sludge and minerals and all. A quick quick bit of trivia. In Germany, this film was released as Frankenstein's Battle against the Devil's Monster.
That doesn't make any sense.
This was new to me, but apparently in the German release of Godzilla films, it was often explained that doctor Victor Frankenstein created the monsters that Godzilla fights, and it just had to do with with how they were releasing them at the time, so you had multiple toh films. Toho did some Frankenstein films about drink Giant Frankenstein's and I checked. It's okay if I called them Frankenstein's. I
checked with the Frankenstein's monster on this. But this sort of set the precedent for how you would release a big monster movie in Germany.
I remember reading a few weeks ago about a movie I'd never heard of before, that is it is directly a Frankenstein kaishuvy, not just called Frankenstein. It's like about now that I'm about to say this, this really sounds wrong, but I think what it is is a Nazi scientist takes Frankenstein's brain to Japan for study and there it gets it somehow gets turned into a giant monster.
Yep, I believe that's right.
Okay, strange, yeah, right, Maybe.
We'll come back to it. We were talking about doing some Frankenstein films eventually.
All right, I guess we should come back to talk about the director of Godzilla versus Hetera, who was again and Yoshimtsubano.
Yes, director, also co writer. He lived nineteen thirty one through twenty seventeen. This was his first and only Godzilla movie. Again, you'll see him credited on the Gigan and the Megalon movies,
but that's just because they utilize older footage. He previously served as assistant director and second assistant director on some really notable Akira Kurosawa pictures, including Throne of Blood in nineteen fifty seven that's that wonderful Samurai Macbeth movie, and also The Hidden Fortress in nineteen fifty eight, which I think is often cited as one of George Lucas's influences in the creation of the original Star Wars picture.
Both great films.
Yes, I've also read that Bano was was very much a part of the Toho film system. So he came up in Toho and he stood under several notable Toho directors.
I believe his grip on this film is strong, because unlike some other Kaiju films, this is one in which I detect not just a Toho house style, but I feel a really strong, bold, individual director's vision guiding the whole thing.
Yes, absolutely, and I think It's why at the time there seems to have been tension with producer Tanaka over this. It seems like he he fell out of good graces with Toho and ultimately went on to be more of a producer. He was, but was EP on the twenty fourteen American Godzilla movie, and I believe he's credited even
though he's occurred after his death. I think he's credited on Godzilla King of the Monsters from twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one's Godzilla versus calng But yeah, I think this is the reason why he was controversial at the time but is memorable today. You know, there have been so many Godzilla films, how many of them are really worth looking up and seeing if you're not a completist, I would say this is one that's worth going back and seeing.
Yeah, totally. And it's different than a lot of the other best ones, because I would say a lot of the other best Godzilla movies, apart from the first one, the first one is very dark and gloomy. A lot of the other best ones are very bright and lively and sort of fast moving and fun. This one is also overall dark and gloomy, but it's excellently dark and gloomy.
Yeah, yeah, all right. So there was another writer on this, Takeishi Kimura, who lived nineteen twelve through nineteen eighty eight. A studio writer for Toho, he was involved in more than thirty films, including some really notable ones including Rodin the Mysterians. Oh, he was the writer of Matango.
Allegedly he believed this was his finest work.
It is a fine work. We may have to come back to Matango. This is about an island where where a fungal infection turns humans into my connid mutations. It's pretty fabulous, So yes, Mattango's worth checking out. Kimura also worked on Frankenstein Versus Beragon. This was a giant Frankenstein movie from Toho, The War of the Gargantuans, King Kong Escapes Destroy All Monsters, and and of course this wonderful Godzilla film.
Takeshi Kimura is interesting because I was finding a lot of very tantalizing biographical details about him online, but not in very solid looking sources, and I couldn't find them backed up anywhere that looked more solid, So frustratingly, I can't report a lot about him with confidence, but if, for example, some of the like user submitted biographies I've found of him on various sites have any truth to them.
He was a strange and interesting figure. He was allegedly known for writing Toho monster movies with a more gloomy outlook and serious political themes, as opposed to the happy, go lucky beatdowns of other you know, repeat Kaiju screenwriters.
Well, as we turned to the cast here, let's go right to the beat down. We're going to talk about the human characters played by human actors, but let's start with the monsters.
Oh yeah, So here's something about this movie. Despite the fact that it has a much darker tone, the Godzilla in this movie is kind of sassy. I really detect a sense of humor in Godzilla's gestures and expressions in this film. There's even a really funny moment later on where the military is trying to do something to defeat the opposing monster and fails, and Godzilla does almost kind of a shrug, like, oh boy, do I have to do everything myself?
Yeah? Yeah, there is a little bit of sas. He's a bit of a show boat at times. I mean, he's on the ropes a lot in this, but he shows he's a little bit of a showboat in a few scenes, and he also takes some really inventive bumps, like he'll get shot with a laser and do a complete front flip. So there are times like that where I was really admiring the performance. And indeed the performer here is Haruo Nakajima, who lived nineteen twenty nine through twenty seventeen. He is kind of an all star of
the Godzilla franchise. He played Godzilla in twelve consecutive films. He was also in Mathra in the War of the Gargantua's as well as Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Most people forget that in original cut of that the Seven Samurai battled a giant monster. No, not really, but he played a non monster in that. But generally he's considered a legend of the rubber monster suit, the rubber suit actor par excellence.
I haven't seen Mosra in a long time, but I remember that one is known for being one of the best of the meat slams. It's like a really great monster throwdown.
Now, the enemy in this is played by Kimpachiro Satsuma, who was born in nineteen forty seven, and as of this recording is still alive. And while he plays Godzilla's enemy in this picture, Satsuma would go on to play the King of Monsters himself after Nakajima retired, So Satsuma served as Godzilla from nineteen eighty four through nineteen ninety five.
Seeing those dates though, did make me a little bit sag with sadness as I imagine the transition from Godzilla and his monster enemies being a person in a suit to being a CGI creation.
Yeah, I mean, you got to love love the suit, and you know there there. I think there have been a whole documentaries about about what was required of these gentlemen because these were very physical performances. They involve suits that were often not very well ventilated and you're, you know, you're you're sweating profusely inside them. And as we mentioned, like with Godzilla, there's a certain it's not just a stammer around and smash a building. There's a certain physicality
to the performance that really shines through. You have to portray more than just brute lizard strength or anything like that. There is a character there that the actor is portraying. All right, Well, let's get into the human characters. Now, most most of these characters are going to be members of the Yano family, Theyano family being the key family of humans. And let's start with the child. The boy.
Uh.
This is here Yuki Kawasi playing Kenyano and he was This actor was born in nineteen sixty four. Child actor was also I think he showed up in nineteen seventy three's Godzilla versus Megalon as well, and he wasn't in much, but he was in a TV series called Sorrow Sorrow Nu Gundan, which I believe is Army of the Apes if you translated. This was eventually cut and released as a film in the US by Sandy Frank as Time
of the Apes Science Theater three thousand. Viewers will be familiar with this film, which is a lot of fun. But I have never had the chance to watch the original TV series, but there's a lot of it and it has huge fans in Japan. People still follow it, and it seems like there's a lot more like what you see in Time of the Apes is very much a compressed plot line. There's apparently a lot more going on.
There's a robot in it, I would love to know more, and I'd love to hear from anyone who's watched it in full. I don't think it's been really widely available on DVD or Blu Ray or even like you know, streaming services outside of Japan.
Now, Rob, I have a Kaiju question. Maybe you can shed some light on this for me. Okay, In Godzilla versus heter this young boy Ken has a kind of psychic connection with the monsters. He has apocalyptic visions of the smog creature Hetera, and he has and he sort of has omens about when Godzilla will appear to save the day. So and this is not the only film where there is some kind of psychic or at least an emotional bond between the Kaiju monster and a young child.
That's often true in like the Gamera movies. And do you know is there a reason for this recurring theme.
I don't know. It's one of those things that is often with gammers, like Gamma is a friend of children, you know, there is this innate connection. I don't think I have personally seen a Kaiju film other than this one where it's described as an over psychic link, a telepathic link between monster and child. Like there is some sort of sacred bond there. I feel like it's something, and I could be wrong on this because I'm not a Kaiju movie expert or a Godzilla expert or anything,
but I feel like this. In this case, our screenwriters said, well, obviously this link is here, let's actually explain what it is a bit to a certain extent while still retaining its mystery.
Okay, okay, I mean, maybe it could just be that you need to have some kind of demonstration of an emotional connection between the monster and the human characters, and maybe it's just natural to assume that only a child has the moral purity to have that connection with the big beast.
Now, if we do go back to that idea of Godzilla as an actual deity, it is interesting the use
of in this film. I don't know if you notice some of these details, but first of all, the boy Ken he has toy Godzilla's and he has something like a Godzilla shrine set up, and this is kind of lightly juxtaposed with the casual use of tiny amulets, and you know, visions of I think like the like the Buddha that are arranged around the television sets and other scenes yes, yes, So I don't know how much what they're how much they're really trying to say with that,
but I feel like if one wants to really chew on the matter, you can definitely start making those connections.
I love the fact that Ken is playing with Godzilla dolls in this movie because it's like that scene in Halloween three where Tom Atkins is sitting at the bar and he's watching the first Halloween movie on a TV.
That's pretty good. All right, Let's move on to some of these other human characters. So the matriarch of the Yano family is is Toshi Yano, played by Toshi Kimura. She acted in such pictures as sort of The Beast Revenge and The Three Outlass Samurai. And then Akira Yamauchi plays doctor Toru Yano, the patriarch of the family. He lived nineteen twenty one through nineteen ninety three. This seems to be his biggest role, but was He also had had a part in Lone Wolf and Cub Baby cart
in the Land of Demons from nineteen seventy one. This is of course a classic of the genre and was also a major inspiration on the Mandalorian TV series.
So he plays the scientist character. Usually in these movies you need at least one scientist character who's there to figure out the nature of the new threat. And so he's some kind of biologist who has an early encounter with the hetero beast in the water and ends up like with a big sulfuric acid burn on his face.
And there's a very funny scene later on where he's, you know, he's trying to solve the problem and he's lying awake and his wife comes in and says something like she's like, stop thinking about hetero and go to bed.
Yeah, he spends a lot of the picture of kind of bed ridden and recovering from his injuries.
Yeah, all right there.
Well, I also have a couple of characters who are not members of the Yano family but are very close with them. The first of all is the care director Yukio Kuchi, played by Toshio Shiba, and this is the Karen, the youth with the really captivating eyes.
I think Yukio is supposed to be Toshi's brother, the kin's mother's brother, so ken Ken's uncle.
Okay, all right, that was kind of lost on me, I guess.
But yeah, But otherwise He's just like a young guy who hangs out with the family and then later goes to a psychedelic nightclub.
Yeah. So Shiba had a long TV and film career, including the nineteen seventy one Kaiju movie Mirror Man, and I think he's still active. He was born in nineteen forty seven.
He has amazingly distinctive eyes. He's one of those people who you've probably had this experience before where I saw him and I was like, oh, he looks so familiar. What have I seen him in before? And I looked and I couldn't find anything. So I think maybe I've never seen him in anything before. He just has such a distinctive look that he seemed familiar.
Yeah, same, all right. And then we also have a character by the name of Miki Fuji Nomiya. This played by the singer Kiki O Maari. This is I think her only film role, but she does seem to have had a much richer career as a singer, and it looks like she's still active, at least on Japanese language social media. She seems to have a following as being I mean, it's kind of like, I guess cinematically it's kind of like having been a Bond girl if you
were a Godzilla girl. I think there's actually a documentary about like Godzilla Girls, and she's featured in it.
She has a fabulous musical number in this There are multiple musical numbers in this movie.
Actually, yeah, But she has a lot of style. She brings a style and hypnis to the film that certainly stands the test of time. And finally, I'm gonna mention the composer is Richiro Manabi who lived nineteen twenty four through twenty fifteen. He has one hundred and fourteen score credits on IMDb. I'm not sure if he's responsible though for the opening music. I guess he is. We'll get to that in a minute. But has really really nice opening music, a really nice theme song they keep really
turning to. It's really nice. It's just great. I did read that Guy Hemric did the lyrics for the English version. I have not heard that because the version we watched is the one on HBO Max that's up there with the TCM collection and it is in the original Japanese with subtitles. But I guess there was an English language version of it, like they dubbed it for release in the States, and Himrick is the guy who did a lot of lyrics for beach movies back in the day,
stuff like Beach Blanket Bingo and muscle beach parties. So I'm just gonna guess here, but I'm I'm guessing that his lyrics did not retain the strong and dire environmental message that we find in the actual Japanese lyrics.
Maybe not the beach movies, the bikini movie the peak of human artistic achievement.
All right, Well, let's get in the plot a bit here.
All right, Well, one thing this movie really does is it sticks to its themes. It hits you right with them at the outset, and then it does not give up. So you start with, of course, as always, the classic glorious Toho logo. And then very first thing you see smokestacks, Yeah, billowing clouds of soot, rushing water slicked with oil and green foam. The message is clear, the earth is disgusting,
The earth is just ruined. And then and then you see water and what's this what's coming out of the water? Is it a slimy, cancerous garbage bag with red crocodile eyes? Boiling up to the surface. That's right, you see Hetera poking up out of the water right at the top. Just no waiting at all.
Now you don't see all of them though it's sneaking at you.
No, no, much like a crocodile like looking up over the top of the water. You just see a kind of the pebbled surface of the top of his head and the eyes looking out there. And he has these vertically oriented red eyes that are very very prominently featured throughout this movie in fact, and eyes somehow seem to be a theme of the film because remember, like his eyes or his power, Godzilla partially defeats him by pulling
his eyes out and electrocuting them. Yeah, but as soon as you see Hetera title card Godzilla versus Hetera, and then bam straight to a James Bond style musical introduction. Amazing. And when I say James Bond style, I really mean it, as in, there's like a glamorous singer doing a theme song for the movie over over colorful abstract backgrounds, just like in a in a James Bond title sequence.
Yeah, this track, by the way, is called give Back the Sun exclamation point, and you can find this on whatever your streaming music side of choice happens to be. I'll also try to include this embedded on the blog post for this episode at Summuta music dot com.
I had one of those moments where I was watching this by myself, but I just wanted to be looking around to find somebody else in the room, like are you seeing this? Are you seeing the same thing I'm seeing? The song is tremendous.
I loved it, Yeah, but I mean because the lyrics are so solid and gloomy, and it's an interesting juxtaposition between the tone of the lyrics and the style of the song. But then yeah, we have this you know, this fabulous you know splash of color behind her as she's singing. You know, this is this bond sense of of of wonder and it's kind of I guess the stuff behind her too, with the kind of like oil lights. It's like the the Joshua Light Show, that stuff you
see in a lot of like psychedelic performances. Uh So it's we have a strong opening with with psychedelia and in music and fashion, but then also scenes of sludge and pollution and and I have to say, we in the movie fraug When we talked about frogs in a previous episode of Weird House, we talked about the problem of eating fake looking garbage, fake looking pollution. And I
feel like this movie nails its pollution. The pollution looks real and yet has a surreal quality to it that feels like it is it is art.
It's disgusting. Yeah, yeah, And oh the lyrics of the song, it's all like the birds and the fish they are all dead. It's the you know, the Goldfinger song, but it's about pollution. And there's a great part where in the verse she's just listing off names of chemicals. She's singing mercury, cobalt, cadmium, All life is gone. The fields in the mountains are silent, and there's like green bubbles in the background, and then and then when she gets
to the line, there's no one left on earth. This also ties back to our discussion from frogs, because what is the single piece of garbage or litter that conveys squalor better than anything else. It is a discarded doll. And what do you see here floating in the oil in the trash? It is a filthy, discarded doll. Or maybe it's a mannequin, but it's a dull manquin humanoid shape.
Yeah, it's pir the plastic likeness of the human form discarded in the plastic strewn, polluted mess, this patina that encompasses our culture.
Oh and there's a Grandfather clock floating in the imak.
That's pretty great too.
It's so good.
So this movie really comes out strong. A lot of Kaiju movies are just about like it doesn't even like you just want to skip to the big battle at the end, like the big battle in the destruction and the monster beat down, that's all that matters. Usually in this film, everything else is done to such a high level. I feel like you'd be hard pressed to find a Godzilla movie or any Kaiju movie that is more interesting in its scenes that are not about monsters battling.
I totally agree. In fact, it was inverted for me. The only time in this movie that I did start to get a little bored was during the big monster fight toward the.
End, which which does go on a bit long. But I'm not even sure that's an appropriate criticism for me to make of a giant monster movie.
But I do just want to reiterate one more time, you are correct, this movie passes the fake garbage test. It's not like in Frogs, like where you're seeing discarded beer cans that look like somebody just drank them.
Yeah.
But from here we go straight into the action, and it is what we mentioned before, a young boy playing with Godzilla dolls. There's actually pretty interesting framing in this scene. As we've said many times, this is a visually interesting movie. It's got a well, you know, it's got a good sense of mees on sen to be pretentious about it.
Interesting photography, interesting framing. So this boy is playing with Godzilla dolls on an idyllic grassy hillside that overlooks a vast urban landscape that's just covered with smokestacks, like a valley of thorns. Yeah, but he's got this Godzilla shrine and this surrounded flowers and it's beautiful. Uh. And and here we get to meet the main human characters, the
members of the boys family. The boy, of course is Ken, and we meet his father, doctor torru Yano, who's a marine biologist, his mother Toshi, his uncle or friend Yuki oh I think his uncle and h and Ken and Yukio are talking at the beginning of Yukio is like, hey, is Godzilla your favorite? And Ken says, yes, he's a superman. Is he a man?
I don't know.
I mean, I guess you could certainly say he is super compared to man. Yeah. But anyway, they're hanging around when their unusual fish guy shows up. There's this guy named mister Gohey, and as soon as he arrives, they're they're like, oh, hello, have you brought us another unusual fish? So I think it's because the father is a marine biologist that they've got a go to guy for unusual fish.
Yeah. And uh. And indeed the father what he has various jars of strange specimens that he's collected lining the wall great set.
Yeah, And so mister Gohey brings in the specimen, which looks like a gigantic tadpole. It's like a fist sized tadpole. But they conclude that it cannot be a tadpole because mister Gohey caught it at the prime spot for shrimp fishing in Saruga Bay. And do tadpoles live in the ocean. The father says no, they do not, and mister Gohy notes, you know, Seruga Bay is getting really really bad, Like he didn't catch a single shrimp there this time, and it's almost as if the world is sort of is failing,
is giving out on them. And then meanwhile, once again this movie does not make you wait on developing things. The family starts watching reports on TV about a giant creature that's breaking up ships in Seruga Bay, Like oil tankers are coming into the bay and they're crashing into each other and then getting snapped in half, almost as if something is wanting to like drink the oil out of the boats.
Yeah, the pacing in the film is excellent leading up to full monster reveal.
Yeah, and so of course it's investigation time. The scientist and the scientist father and Ken have to go into the bay and see what's going on. So Ken hangs out on the rocks by the shore while doctor Yano goes into the water to see what's up, and we get to see some underwater sequences. One of the things I loved. I didn't know what to make of this. There's a piece of trash sunk to the bottom of Suruga Bay that looks like an artificial swan. Okay, it
is just there. Meanwhile, Ken up on the Rocks is like prying up muscles and he discovers that they're empty and the crabs are bleached and dead. So it's just this place has been ruined by pollution. Everything's dead. It almost reminded me of the recent episodes we did about marine mucilage. Yeah, but here I think we get our
first vision of Hetera. In fact, well it's a combination scene because Hetera actually does appear in one form, but also Ken is having visions of Hetera that seem to go beyond what he is actually doing in this scene. Did you understand it the same way?
Well, there was a lot coming at me at this point. I think I was just like generally geeking out at how terrific this was visually. But yeah, like the father, the doctor is having his own encounter under underwater, and then Ken is encountering all this stuff above the water. Yeah, it's it's and is this when we start getting the cartoons?
No, that's not yet, not yet. This scene finishes with like Ken being confronted by Hetera and Hetero like flies over him and he reaches up with a knife and like, yes, part of it.
Yes, this is the free Willy moment. It's like the moment in Free Willy, except imagine that instead of it being an orca, it was a sledge monster, and instead of touching the creature, you were driving a knife up into its sledge belly. That's literally what happens, and it's terrific.
Ken does a really great sledge belly slicing, and meanwhile, doctor Yeno down in the water is severely burned, and so we go back to the house and he's got bandages all over his face. He has been attacked, and we learned a number of things. We learned that Hetera, he's already got a name. Now, he's named after a type of sludge called hetero. I don't know what hetero means, but yeah, soon after this, we get our first cartoon sequence,
which these cartoons are absolutely wonderful. This one was labeled Happy Hetera and it very much reminds me of the animation style of The Blue Meanies and the Yellow Submarine movie.
Yeah, there's a real sense of weirdness and whimsy to them, and it's just just fat. I wish there were actually more animated sequences in this film, because they just do a great job of breaking up the pay thing and just you know, upping the visual pizazz of the whole feature.
Now, like the last episode, I don't think from here I'm going to do a complete, like scene by scene breakdown of the whole movie, but just maybe wanted to focus on some things that caught our attention as we as we went through. Because you know, this is a kaiju movie. You can probably guess basically the structure it takes.
The hetero monster becomes increasingly menacing, attacks the city until eventually Godzilla appears to fight it off, and then it comes back even stronger, and now it looks like Godzilla and the people are in trouble. But then Godzilla and the people come up with ways of fighting back, and you know, it's pretty standard.
Yeah, there's going to be some buildings screwed up, there's going to be some sort of large scale technological approach to fighting the monster with mixed results. All that stuff is in play. You will not be surprised by anything that actually happens from a plot standpoint for the most part, but some of the specific choices they make are still amazing.
One of the main ones I would say is in the first big hetera attack scene where he comes out of the water and he attacks the lane. He comes out of the water to huff smoke stacks. But the way they set that scene up is that we see I think yukioh is there at the nightclub scene, isn't he?
Yes, he is, He's he's seems to be having I don't know, he is. The scene where he's drinking, like he's just down some sort of cocktail or some sort of alcohol in the rocks and then he kind of looks at the glass like he's he's having mixed thoughts about what he just drank. He has a love hate relationship with this cocktail, and he's he's dressed in this really cool outfit. He's got this wonderful colorful shirt on and this weird tie that absolutely love. And meanwhile, the
nightclub itself is just amazing. You've got more Joshua light show stuff going on behind them, You've got this, You've got Kikio Omari doing some sort of a performance and she's wearing this weird Naiad costume with like nautical details on it. It's it's very psychedelic. It's just a really cool nightclub sequence. You watch it and you want to be there.
Yeah, love love Love the sequence. It's it's so strange and it's so good and and I think they're in a way reprising the song from the opening, or at least playing on variations of it, because both of them have that phrase they keep saying, give it back. I think means like give give the natural resources back to the earth. But it's so strange because from there we go from the song and the nightclub to first of all, a heatera prank call to the police station. Did you understand this?
I don't think I quite got to say. This was a section with film where I started watching it with my son too, so I might have been slightly distracted as we talked about what was going on on screen.
And then so you see a police officer answer the phone and say like, hello, who is it? And then he's like, that's ridiculous. Hetero is a sea monster. So somebody's calling and saying they're hetero maybe oh, or.
Maybe they're just reporting. They're like, hey, heterroa is attacking the city and they're like, no, no, no, I can't be. That could be in the sea. Because one of the themes here is that heater is going through a transformation he's going from an aquatic form to a quadrupedal form. Ultimately he goes through a flying phase and then into a bipedal form for the final fight that he also backtracks to a flying form a little bit at will.
I think you're right, that must be how to understand it, because my version didn't make any sense. I was like, what's with this prank call? But yeah, no, I think he's saying, somebody reports Hetera being on land and he's like, no, no, that can't be because Hetero is in the water. But what does Hetera do once Hetera comes on land? Just slips its mouth right over the top of a smoke stack and starts huffing the gas.
Yeah. And of course in all of this, Hetera is also emitting like sulphuric acid clouds, And either at this point or very shortly afterwards, we start seeing scenes of it just like obliterating crowds, like turning people to skeletons in the street.
Yes, yes, like people literally just turn into piles of bone ones. Yeah, but we also watch Hetera like Hetera has these tumor looking things, these bumps all over its body. Should we describe can we describe? Hetero. I don't even know how to say what Hetero looks like. Hetero looks like a big ball of garbage with like trailing slime tentacles that has these vertically oriented red eyes.
Yeah, and he's kind of glistening, kind of sparkling. It's really quite an ambitious and effective monster costume, because if you see enough Kaiju film, do you realize there are only so many things you can really do with a human in a suit for or and or the use
of puppetry, and there are limitations in both areas. And I feel like they did a great job with this costume and that it's clearly built around a bipedal human performer, and yet it does have that feel of some sort of a morphous sledge monster.
Yeah. So this horrible thing is attacking the city. What's going to happen? Is Godzilla going to come and save the day. Well, we had a hint earlier that he would, because I think that Ken was writing an essay for school when he said, like, I think this is what
it is. Ken is writing an essay for the second grade for a second grade class, and it says something like, you know, the water is polluted with cadmium and mercury and all this, and then it ends with saying, I bet Godzilla would be mad if he saw.
This, Yes, and then eventually he has like a visual hallucination, like a vision a prophecy, and he's like, Godzilla is coming, Godzilla is coming to clear this up.
That's right, And then what's that? It is? Godzilla? Godzilla coming over the horizon and Godzilla and Hetero throwdown. They have a great fight, a great fight with very weird energy, unlike any other fight I can think of from a Godzilla movie that I recall because it's a fight with basically no music and very little sound effects. The fight later in the movie has a lot more the Godzilla
squealing sound this one. There are long stretches where it's very quiet, this kind of low anticipatory rumble as the two monsters just kind of regard one another and stand there swaying in the darkness. It's it's very unusual, very effective.
Yeah. I also like how some of these fight maybe all of the fight scenes, but some of the key fight scenes take place in like a great field, like it feels like a like a battlefield instead of it being I don't know, a lot a lot of Kaiju movies they end up taking place on a model city or around a model city, and I don't know, this one just just had a different feel to it.
Yeah, two monsters, they're like like engines idling almost. Yeah, and I should say, all this is going on, the fight is sizing up between them while they're while Yukioh is still in the nightclub, and he's starting to have hallucinations of all the dancers in the club wearing fish masks, which was just so it's one of multiple parts of this movie that reminded me of The Wicker Man. Uh
so they're they're fish masks here. But then later on in the movie, all the young people they decide, they're like, well, Hetera's here, and you know, the earth is so polluted, we're basically near the end of human civilization anyway, so let's just go have a big Wickerman party on Mount Fuji, which is exactly what they do. They go up and they do a summarile kind of thing.
Yeah, well it's a it's a it's kind of a somber affair. They're kind of I guess mourning, but also ultimately bringing the fight to Hetera. That the military has has mostly failed, and it's up to the youth to to raise their voices in song and then ultimately like throwing torches at Hetera as he advances. It's it's pretty stirring because it you know, it's it's it's about the
youth culture. And then there's this other uh and their role in perhaps fighting these important battles of the future, you know, certainly and environmentally, but it but also you have these sequences in this whole sequence you see these kind of ghostly looking old people watching on from shadows with kind of somber looks on their faces. Oh.
Yeah, that was one of the strangest things to me. I didn't know what to make of that. I thought maybe I had missed a scene explaining what was going on there or something. But while there is this Mount Fuji young people Wickerman party and they're out playing guitars and dancing in the field, there are these like ghastly people of the wheat who are just standing behind these tall grassy stalks with these gray and passive faces and just watching.
Yeah, it reminded me a lot. This movie reminded me a lot in general of some of the works of Miyazaki because he has a lot of environmental themes in his work, but also there are he does deal with these kind of generational conflicts as well. And I feel like, and I could be wrong on this, but I feel like that's the territory that this director was getting into with god Zilvers's Hetera, at least just a flash of it.
There's this idea of generational conflict concerning the confrontation of in this case, environmental issues.
So maybe it's like the gray people of the weed are kind of like the adults and spirited away who can't see the magic and are just sitting at the food stall stuffing their faces until they turn into pigs.
Yeah, yeah, perhaps, But of course eventually it's it's all about Godzilla and Hetera battling each other, and boy do they battle. They battle. They battle a lot. They've battle
hard there, Godzilla's on the ropes. They are comebacks, and then and there's a sequence where where there's also flying, like Hetera goes into a flying form, drops Godzilla onto the side of a mountain, and then Godzilla falls into a hole and then this then then Hetera is going to like sludge flood the hole Oh, it gets it gets really intense there.
Yeah, horrible. So it's a part where you think Godzilla is maybe gonna die, like Hetera throws him into an open grave of toxic sewage. Yeah.
Oh, and then but the fly ying Heroro is not the only one to fly. Godzilla flies in this and I don't think i'd seen this before.
I started shouting when I saw it. Godzilla like balls up basically like Tuck. I was gonna say, he tucks his tail. That makes it sound like he's ashamed. He like balls up into an almost kind of fetal position, and then kind of hurt like blows out the radiation breath like a jetpack exhaust trail and flies.
Yeah. I thought I'd seen all Godzilla's tricks before, but this is my first time seeing this. I'm curious if this ever came up again in another Godzilla film, or if they decided not to. I mean, I thought it would look it fit perfectly in this film. I'm not sure if other Godzilla directors would have liked it.
Yeah, I mean, if Godzilla can fly, that kind of changes the whole equation. I'm sure there have been other movies where he flies. I have a vague tingling recollection that happens in something else, but it's certainly not all of them. Okay, Now, ultimately there it's one of those sequences where it involves the human characters trying to set
some kind of technological trap for the Montster. They're trying to electrocute Hetera because the scientist character figures out that electricity dries out the sludge and this is the only way it can be defeated. And if they're not able to defeat it with these big electrodes, then it will get too big for even Godzilla to handle, and then it will just take over the world. Right.
Also oxygen, so they bomb it with oxygen from helicopters a little bit.
Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that. But like we were saying, ultimately, the military is not very good at upholding their part of the deal, and Godzilla kind of has to do everything for them, and Godzilla like sighs and shrugs his shoulders, like really, guys. But eventually Godzilla pairs his radiation breath with the giant electrodes, and of course, you know who wins in the end. You know, yes, it's not hard to guess, but there's a lot of great stuff along
the way. One of my favorite parts was when Godzilla. It almost seems like the good guys think they have defeated the monster, like twice already, but it keeps coming back. So Godzilla, having defeated it another time, starts sort of reaching into the sludge corpse body and just like ripping out guts and throwing them all over the place, like you know, you get some guts, and you get some guts, and all the bits of guts all dry out in the electric field. And I thought that part was great.
Yeah, yeah, just breath blasts the whole field afterwards, and then it's done.
So I don't know if you noticed the same thing I did. It's possible I'm mistaken about this, But did the movie show a very brief flash of that famous woodblock the Great Wave off Kanagawa for a second at the end.
It did, and then I think it had it added the text like will it happen again?
Yeah, So I wondered, did you know what to make of that? Like why the Great Wave? In particular?
I believe that this is this is a piece of art we've discussed in the show before, when we talked about it on a stuff to blow your mind episode about rogue waves.
Yeah, because but I believe to depict a rogue wave right right.
And I was looking up for like a nice concise description of what this picture is and what it perhaps means, and I found one at the Yale University Art Gallery, and this is what they have written there.
Quote.
At first glance, snow capped Mount Fuji looks calm in the background of this print, far from the boats and towering waves. But the mountain is slightly obscured by a boat whose sharp, sickle like tip threatens to lop off Mount Fuji's peak. And recent scholars suggests that this print has political implications. Mount Fuji, a symbol of Japan, is menaced by boats and overpowering waves, both of which may
imply a fear of foreign powers encroaching on Japanese shores. Indeed, in eighteen fifty three, roughly twenty years after this print was made, the American commodore Matthew Perry led a United States Navy fleet into the Tokyo Harbor and forcibly open Japan to trade. So I think we might interpret this as meaning like pollution is the next great wave, or it is the current great wave and it is threatening Japan, and you know, can we stop it? Can we rise
up against? Like what is our what is our resolve against this threat?
And Godzilla himself embodies that resolve?
Yeah, I believe so. By the way, there are multiple versions. You know, this is a very popular piece of art, so there's been various reinterpretations and parodies of it over time. If you just do a quick Google image search for the Great Wave off Kanda Gawa Godzilla, you will find depictions of Godzilla battling the wave, literally depictions of Godzilla as the wave. It's pretty fun.
That's good, all right. Well should we wrap it up there?
Yeah, let's go ahead and close the book on this one.
Now.
If you're wondering though, where can I watch Godzilla versus cetera. If you if you subscribe to HBO Max, you can find it in the TCM collection there, which is where we watched it in really just glorious quality. But you can also pick it up in various other formats, including Blu Ray and if you want to go for something special, pick it up as part of their Criterion Collection box set. Godzilla The Shoa Era Films nineteen fifty four through nineteen
seventy five. So yes, I think this marks the first Weird House Cinema film that is also in the Criterion Collection.
Oh I'm not so sure about that. Isn't there a criterion of Split Second? What about Robot Jocks?
Not yet?
I used to believe.
I think I could be right. I think this is their first Criterion collect because I don't think Mad Love is in the Criterion Collection. Oh really?
And transfers to Return of Jack Dead.
No no, not yet? Not yet?
All right. Well, I got to say, honestly, this is one of the most enjoyable Godzilla movies I've ever seen. It's kind of notorious. Actually, if you look at, you know, lists of people ranking the best Godzilla films, it does not usually make the top tier. But I disagree. I would put it right up there with the best. Yeah.
Yeah, it's pleasant to watch. So if you if you're looking for a Godzilla film, give this one your consideration. All right, So we're wrapping it up here. As always, you can catch Weird House Cinema every Friday in the Stuff to Blow your Mind Podcasts feed. You can find
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Huge things As always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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