Movie Review: Godzilla v King Kong

The best natives and the best island sets by far of the entire series

All of the natives are laid out in primary colors, the whole village too; on this island even the birds have feathers in bold primary colors.

The epic Mia Hama, alone in orange with a huge, coconut-shell brassiere that sways languorously. This is a solid, strong looking beautiful woman, a real brick-house.

Explorers totally Abbott and Costello in their costumes and personas. Bribing the natives with lots of cigarettes and a bright red radio playing Japanese pop songs.

Akiko Wakabayashi shines. The most beautiful sentence in any language. I know that there have been beautiful women throughout history, women that I will never see, but if any of them were better looking than Akiko I’ll eat my hat. Miss Earth of all time. She was even a Bond Girl in one of the later Sean Connery Bond movies. Unfortunately she gets very little screen time.

American nuclear sub, the crew decked out in white gloves like those worn in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Crew killed by Godzilla, they die with dignity.

Everywhere the primary colors, including the internal and external color scheme of a U.S. Navy helicopter.

Godzilla emerges from an iceberg and approaches land surrounded by a field of icebergs. He is immediately fired upon from a very big land base that is strangely devoid of ice or snow and covered with brush and trees that ‘Zill can set on fire.

A wildly successful native dance around the drugged out Kong, lots of good looking women on this island, displayed to wonderful advantage. We would have loved this dance at our parties in the early Sixties, the girls walking slowly and jerking their breasts to one side with the beat.

Funny how the monsters always appear in twos in Japanese Kaiju movies. In this one Godzilla is breaking out of an iceberg simultaneously with the finding of King Kong by some guys who went to an island looking for something else. After that they gravitate to one another, the better to stage a climactic battle.

The old Tokyo skyline, nothing over six stories . . . the little tanks are Shermans, World War II vintage and kind of rinky-dink.

The Godzilla suit used in this movie is a good one for the period. It might be the famous “frog” suit that I have read about. The Kong suit is really awful, but the suit-actor makes the best of it.

My copy is a DVD in the original Japanese, letterboxed and very good quality images, two Dollars worth of Baht. No thrills and chills in this movie, but lots of good looking women and plenty of fun.