Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964)

“King Ghidorah will turn this planet into a tomb.”

A turning point in the Showa Era, Shinichi Sekizawa’s 7th kaiju film written for Toho delivers Godzilla’s most enduring foe and most importantly, introduces the concept of Godzilla (and Rodan) being a friend to the puny hoo-mans and not an angel of destruction. The legendary Ishiro Honda (whom I love to think of as Kurosawa’s BFF) once again takes the reins and has to juggle multiple storylines including one in which a princess targeted for assassination believes herself to be a Venusian. 

It’s way too talky. I know those monster battles are expensive and time-consuming, but they’re what we came for and the big battle takes forever to get to. In fact, the film has the annoying habit of fading out on almost every monster sighting just as things are heating up. It’s tradition that a Godzilla film is people talking, a monster battle, people talking, a monster battle, etc., but the pre-final battle sightings are a bit underwhelming. Godzilla does get a lot of dick trauma. First Rodan drops him dick-first on an electrical tower and then Ghidorah (I say Ghidrah myself) zaps him in his Minyas. Ouch.