All Monsters Attack

All Monsters Attack (1969)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects in close collaboration with Honda)
Also known as: Godzilla’s Revenge (the American title, although it sounds more like a British euphemism relating to spicy food).

Prepare for a shock: This film opens with a song being growled out by a child. It’s no “Gamera March”, although it goes by the title of “Kaiju March”. This should give some indication of the influence Daiei’s Gamera series now has on the Godzilla movies. Listeners can probably work out that the song has something to do with Godzilla, Minilla and smashing things. After the opening titles, it plays again over scenes of a dystopian industrial cityscape. That’s contemporary Tokyo.

We follow a boy called Ichirō as he makes his way home from school. As he walks alongside a railway line, his father, a train driver, calls out to tell him he’ll be working late tonight. (Dad is played by Sahara Kenji, formerly the hero Shigeru in Rodan (1956) and a regular in the Godzilla movies.) Later, on a break, Ichirō’s father confides in a colleague that he worries he’s neglecting his son; the colleague is more interested in a newspaper report about a recent bank robbery. Ichirō scavenges for eye-catching junk along the roadside and, against his friend Sachiko’s advice, goes to nose around a derelict factory building. He’s driven off by a gang of children led by a bully that Ichirō and Sachiko privately call “Gabara”. (It’s not clear where this name comes from, other than the generic “-ra” at the end, but it’s explicitly not the bully’s real name.)

When he gets home, Ichirō heads straight for the apartment of his neighbour Shinpei, who has his spare key. (Clearly Ichirō’s mother is out at work too. Amamoto Hideyo plays Shinpei – this is his first major role in a Godzilla movie. He can be seen in minor roles as a butler in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) and a Red Bamboo officer in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966). He was the villainous Dr Who in King Kong Escapes (1967).) Shinpei is a toymaker and shows Ichirō his current project, a tabletop computer that can recite facts about the Moon. (It displays a still shot of the moonbase from Destroy All Monsters (1968) as it does this.) Ichirō says the Moon’s all very well, but he’d rather go to Monster Island, the home of Godzilla, Minilla, Rodan, Kumonga and all the other daikaiju. (That’s “Kaijū-tō”, not “Kaijū-Rando” as in Destroy All Monsters, but given we’ll discover it’s a dream location apparently composited out of clips from earlier Godzilla movies, “Kaijū-Rando” is possibly where Ichirō got the idea from.) Monster Island is also home to Gabara, a monster that loves to fight, although Godzilla keeps him in check. Shinpei understands that this is a coded reference to the bully Ichirō calls Gabara and urges Ichirō to fight back against his tormentor. Ichirō heads over to his own apartment where he finds a note from his mother, eats his tea and watches some television, including a news report about the bank robbery. Soon bored, he fantasises about taking a flight from Haneda airport to Monster Island.

In this first dream sequence, Ichirō finds himself seated on board a passenger jet and then transported directly from it to Monster Island, where he watches a replay of Godzilla’s fight against the Kamacuras from Son of Godzilla (1967). Climbing up a tree, he spots various kaiju last seen in Destroy All Monsters, then sees the ginger buzzard Giant Condor from Ebirah, Horror of the Deep as it swoops towards Godzilla. Another replayed kaiju fight follows. Next, Ichirō is pursued by a Kamacuras and falls into a deep pothole. He’s unable to climb back out by himself, but is hauled out on the end of a rope by none other than Minilla. (And in all-new footage, too!) In a radical departure from his previous two film appearances, Minilla doesn’t make peculiar “wagwa!” noises but actually speaks to Ichirō in Japanese, his jaw flapping as he does so. He also appears at the same scale as Ichirō. (Both of these things only apply while Minilla is sharing the scene with Ichirō – in later scenes, lifted wholesale from earlier movies, he’ll be his old self again.) Minilla reassures Ichirō that he’s friendly and is sorry to hear about his absentee parents. However, both are obliged to hide when Gabara walks past.

This Gabara, the Monster Island dream counterpart to Ichirō’s nemesis, is a tall, tailless, reptilian kaiju with warty green skin, a ridge of horns from the crown of his head down to the back of his neck and a thin thatch of blond hair. He has large eyes, a mouth full of pointy teeth, an unpleasant smirk and a roar that sounds like cackling laughter. Just when he’s passed by, Ichirō is woken up by a shrill ringing sound.

This may be the sound of the telephone in Shinpei’s apartment or a coincidence, depending on how thin the walls are. Ichirō’s mother is calling to ask Shinpei to keep an eye on her son while she works late at the office to cover for a sick colleague. After she hangs up, her other co-workers mention the bank robbery again, just in case you’d forgotten about it.

Unable to get back to sleep after Shinpei passes on his mother’s message, Ichirō heads out and finds his way back to the derelict factory. It looks like it’s been abandoned for decades, but Ichirō finds a brand new driver’s licence in the dust. This belongs to one of the two bank robbers, who are hiding in the building. The robber follows Ichirō home and notes which apartment he lives in.

After dinner, Ichirō dreams himself back to Monster Island, only to be confronted immediately by Gabara. He runs away and finds Minilla again, and the pair go to watch the big lizard-vs-lobster fight from Ebirah. This is followed by a reprise of Godzilla’s battle with Kumonga from Son of Godzilla, recut so that Minilla doesn’t have to step in and can continue to watch from the sidelines. No sooner is Kumonga dealt with than – new footage! – Gabara turns up. Minilla has told Ichirō that Godzilla wants him to toughen up and fight his own fights, so he grows to his more familiar kaiju size in a string of jump cuts and steps out to face Gabara. The result is an ignominious trouncing. Minilla, restored to human size, retreats with Ichiro to watch the scene of Godzilla destroying a squadron of Red Bamboo fighter jets from Ebirah. With the planes dealt with, Godzilla summons Minilla to him and the pair re-enact the “learning to breathe fire” scene from Son of Godzilla. As he watches from the greenery, Ichirō is seized by a predatory plant and wakes up.

He has in fact been seized by the bank robbers, who’ve broken into his apartment and abduct him at knifepoint. One of the men stays at the old factory building with Ichirō while the other goes to steal a car. Ichirō wills himself back to Monster Island, where he sees Gabara bullying Minilla. Encouraged by Ichirō and a very pushy Godzilla, Minilla bests Gabara, but only temporarily. Gabara soon tries his luck with Godzilla instead. At last the father and son duo send Gabara packing. Ichirō cheers them on, but panics as Godzilla seems about to turn on him and wakes up back in the derelict building.

The other robber returns and the pair decide to take Ichirō with them for insurance as they make their escape, but their stolen car won’t start. Inspired by his dreams of a newly confident Minilla, Ichirō gets away from the robbers and leads them back into the building, where he takes them down with a series of Home Alone-esque pranks. Meanwhile, Shinpei has gone looking for Ichirō and finds the car with a bag full of stolen money in it, and calls the police in to arrest the robbers.

The next morning, Ichirō seems to have made his peace with the idea that his parents will be out at work all the time to support him. He’s ambushed outside his apartment by journalists and tells them that Minilla helped him beat the bank robbers; Shinpei explains to them that the fictional kaiju is a kind of spiritual role model for Ichirō. On his way to school with his friend Sachiko, Ichirō is set upon by Gabara’s gang but gives the bully a beating. He then terrorises a worker painting a billboard and leaves his dad to sort out the mess behind him. He continues on his way with Gabara’s gang now tagging along with him.

In December 1969, Toho made their bid to win Godzilla’s audiences back from television to cinema, or at least to present a viable alternative form of entertainment for children who could now get their fix of hyperactive kaiju action every week for free at home. Tokusatsu movies released to theatres in the usual way just couldn’t hold their own at the box office any more. The last one Toho sent out to fend for itself, in July, was the execrable Latitude Zero (1969), based on an American pulp radio serial and notable for being filmed entirely in English and guest starring Cesar “The Joker” Romero as the villain. I would suggest that this item was never going to turn Toho’s fortunes around, but in any event it clearly didn’t do much to restore the studio’s confidence in kaiju eiga.

Their solution was the Toho Champion Festival: a half-day event, usually on a Saturday, run as many as three times a year at its peak. (Spoiler alert: its peak lasted about four years. From 1975 to 1978 it ran only once a year, in March, and then, to borrow a phrase from Edgar Allan Poe, television held illimitable dominion over all.) For the price of admission, parents could leave their kids at one of Toho’s theatre outlets and get some time to themselves, and the kids could take in multiple features with a total runtime of a bit less than four hours. The attractions were a mix of old tokusatsu edited down to an hour and a quarter (less talk, more action!), cinematic cuts of TV episodes, animated features and shorts and the debut releases of the last six Shōwa series Godzilla films.

Toho copied this format from Toei Company’s successful Manga Festival (dedicated, despite the name, to live action as well as anime), which had been running since 1964. At least Toho had the luxury of being able to do this, unlike the Daiei Motion Picture Company which would have been too far in the red by the end of 1969 to try anything similar on Gamera’s behalf. The Champion Festival’s most lasting and infamous legacy is that those cutdown reissues of Toho’s earlier films were achieved by butchering the original film negatives, causing them severe damage.

All Monsters Attack, the first Godzilla movie to debut in this setting, leans heavily into the situation. It isn’t a film about Godzilla, but a film about an ordinary, contemporary child who reflects the intended audience, who’s watched the recent Godzilla movies and uses them as a moral compass in his parents’ absence. Perhaps some of those festival attendees were themselves “latchkey kids”, passing some time at the cinema while their parents were out working extra hours. The film has a proportional content of recycled footage that would make even Gamera vs Viras (1968) blush, but this is put into good service as the clay out of which Ichirō’s dreams are formed. Like many of the young viewers, I’m sure, Ichirō has seen those earlier movies and, in the days before home media, has relived the action scenes in his head, perhaps misremembering them or mixing them up, even projecting himself into them. The replayed scenes even anticipate the Champion Festival’s strategy of filling time between new material with reissues of older films. (Edited versions of Ebirah and Son of Godzilla, the two features most heavily referenced in All Monsters Attack, would eventually headline the July 1972 and July 1973 festivals respectively.)

This isn’t a trick Toho could play more than once, but once you’ve stepped into the Land of (Meta)Fiction, it’s not that easy to step back out again. Although subsequent movies will return to the familiar model of telling stories about Godzilla, I think the question of who’s telling those stories will remain. I mentioned while discussing Destroy All Monsters that the concept of “Kaiju Land” felt like a toybox, and this movie’s Monster Island dreamscape only reinforces that. Bear that in mind when Monster Island reappears “for real” in Godzilla vs Gigan (1972) and Godzilla vs Megalon (1973).

The actual message of the film is a bit of a mixed bag. Ichirō is urged to stand up for himself and fight his own battles, and sure, that’s all well and good, although it fundamentally involves him punching the crap out of Gabara and biting his arm, then adopting his gang. It also involves Ichirō causing a painter’s slapstick “accident” and leaving his father to carry the can for him. He’s become more independent, but he’s also become something of a menace. It’s not uncommon for children to be portrayed as little tearaways in kaiju eiga – see especially the Gamera movies – but I’m not sure whether this is meant as a release of pressure or incitement for the child viewers in a society as famously polite and deferential as Japan’s.

On a broader scale, is it meant to needle the kids’ parents? Is this message of defending oneself through free self-expression, and potentially through aggressive direct action, intended to map onto Japanese society or even onto Japan as a player on the global stage? America had been urging Japan to stand up and fight its own battles for some time now, encouraging it to write its own constitution following their nominal withdrawal and rearm itself. Japan was understandably reluctant to do this, given America’s prior actions against them. All Monsters Attack does seem to hint that Japanese society ought to embrace change, however troubling and occasionally violent the consequences might be.

To start with, it looks like it might offer a critique of absentee parenting, an inevitable consequence of the economic impact of Japan’s post-war rebuild. Ichirō’s father says early on that he worries he’s not spending enough time with his son, and when Ichirō’s mother says in her final scene that she’ll give up working late shifts at the office, it feels like a predictable follow-on from what’s gone before. Yet Ichirō rejects that and repeats the argument his neighbour Shinpei used earlier in the film, that those extra shifts are necessary to support the family financially. He demonstrates his maturity and independence by accepting the new status quo – which the rest of the film has presented as an undesirable set of conditions that leaves Ichirō neglected, bored and in danger – in place of the older social standard we might have expected from this film, that of a stay-at-home mother raising her child. From a 21st-century perspective, we might consider this bit of scriptwriting progressive. What Ichirō doesn’t have – but Minilla does, as seen in Son of Godzilla – is a pushy parent driving him to study and take his own place on the treadmill. He does now have his own gang, though. The kids are all right, the film seems to say, but I’m not sure how sincerely it says it.