Alternate Titles: Godzilla, Minilla, and Gabara: All Monsters Attack
Year: 1969
Director: Ishiro Honda
Special Effects Director: Ishiro Honda & Teruyoshi Nakano
In The Suit: Haruo Nakajima (Godzilla), Little Man Marchan (Minilla), Yashuhiko Kakuko (Gabara)

Oh no! Do we have to this one, Fnord? Can't we just skip it? Just this once?

You always want to skip it.

It's terrible. It's not even a real story. And the boy's shorts are so short!

We have to do it. It's for the good of the project.

Fine. But i am interpreting the rules of the drinking game as liberally as possible.

Ok, here we go. We've been saying for a while now that the Godzilla films have been taking a turn towards more campy and kid oriented fare, but it reaches its nadir with this joke of a movie. Hilariously, though, according to Wikipedia, this movie was released in the US on a double bill with a movie called Island of the Burning Damned. Which i've never seen but just from the title i can imagine the audience got whiplash.

Not only is this movie completely goofy kiddie stuff, but all of the monster scenes are essentially a dream (and so the character appearances listed below technically shouldn't count) and worse, more than half of the monster footage is obvious stock footage from previous movies.

The movie starts with some campy jazz that breaks into a kid-sung (or fake kid-sung) movie that i can't even begin to describe. Luckily it's on Youtube, at least for now.

Then we get into the plot, which is about this poor abandoned boy. He apparently lives in some kind of post-industrial wasteland. His father works and i think perhaps lives on a train...

...and his mom works as a "maid" at what i think is a brothel. She's not allowed to go home at night because the other "maid" gets sick. So the poor kid, Ichiro, is bullied by a guy he calls Gabara (even though his real name is Sanko) and has retreated into a dream world about kaiju. He hears the squeal of a car's tires and says, "Oh, that sounds like Minilla. Kee Kee Kee!" (the car's squeal sounds nothing like Minilla or "kee kee kee!"). He finds a vacuum tube in the dirt and thinks it'll make a good present for the little girl he walks home with, but it's taken from him by Gabara's gang. So he goes home and pulls out his makeshift (and presumably nonfunctional) radio and pretends to call Monster Island.

Even in his dreams he's not in phase with the people around him.

I'm leaving some space here to allow Min to talk about how much room people have on planes in older movies. It's a thing she does.

Look at that plane! That's not first class. Those are just regular passengers. You could land a plane inside that plane, there's so much space. Why is it that when we go on a plane today, we are crammed in like chumps?

His Monster Island dreams are full of stock footage he saw in other movies. So we have Godzilla fighting Kamacuras from Son of Godzilla.

We have Manda from Atragon (at least the blue filter is removed so we can see what he looks like above water, but isn't the guy going to dehydrate?).

We have Anguirus, in a shot taken from Destroy All Monsters.

And who's this?! Giant Condor?!? He's from Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster and i don't know how he's still alive after the first time he tried to fight Godzilla, but he tries it all over again here, with, of course, the exact same results.

And the breakout star of Destroy All Monsters, Gorosaurus (although this footage is from King Kong Escapes).

Ichiro writes himself into the dream, lands on Monster Island, falls into a magic hole, and then and strikes up a friendship with Minilla.

Ugh. Minilla. They've just made this movie that much worse.

Minilla who is the same size as Ichiro.

By the way, short shorts on boys are one of the key characteristics of kaiju movies that we generally don't like to mention.

Put some pants on!

Minilla also has his own Gabara to be afraid of. At least this means we'll be getting some new footage. But he's kind of terrible.

When Minilla talks, it sounds like it was literally the guy inside the suit talking, through the suit. This muffled voice, straining to be heard. Gabara, meanwhile, has a cool psychedelic echo-y roar. Although Min says he sounds like a donkey.

Ichiro is woken up by a neighbor in the abandoned factory that they seem to be squatting in. Ichiro is very unhappy to be awoken from his dream, where he has friends. He's very upset and just wants to go back to sleep, to his dream. That's one step away from catatonia, people.

The neighbor, Shinpei (played by Eisei Amamoto) tells him that his mom ain't coming home tonight, and offers to feed him, and Ichiro reluctantly agrees. Shinpei is a toy maker...

...and he's currently working on a computer that teaches kids about space. But the kid knows that the real purpose of computers is to record the various kaiju roars, and he tells Shinpei so. Shinpei actually thinks it's a good idea.

There's a second thread in this movie about two bumbling thieves that have stolen 50 million yen and apparently the entire Japanese police force is on the look out for them, racing around from city to city with their sirens blazing, which is a great way to sneak up on thieves. They show up at Ichiro's mom's place of work, and i'm only including this picture so Min can tell you that they were in other movies, as she does.

The guy on the right was the villain who bought the egg from the villagers in Godzilla vs. Mothra.

The thieves, meanwhile, have hidden in a local abandoned building near Ichiro's home.

Ichiro later goes out and starts wandering around the abandoned factory, picking up some junk to add to his radio set, and he also finds one on the thieves' wallet. Then he goes home to go back to sleep so he can go back to Monster Island and get chased around by Gabara some more and have Minilla sympathize with him about negligent parents.

Then we have to re-watch Godzilla's fight with Ebirah from vs. the Sea Monster.

Minilla and Ichiro cheer from the sideline.

The good news, if you remember that the giant boulder volley between Godzilla and Ebirah ended with Godzilla hitting the rock astray, is that the boys aren't crushed to death.

Define "good news".

From that we go right into a fight with Kumonga, because why not?

What's funny is that Godzilla keeps drastically changing what he looks like because very different suits were used in the different movies that all this stock footage is pulled from. And some of those suits didn't look so good. So sometimes it's like, uh, Godzilla? Are you ok, buddy?

What's also funny is that mind-boggling scene where Godzilla gets stabbed in the eye by Kumonga thanks to the power of close-up camera work happens again. That was like the worst moment in Godzilla history, at least until this movie upped the ante by including so much fail in addition to that scene, so it's sort of recursively worse.

Another weird thing is that Minilla jumps into the fight with Kumonga, since he was included in the original sequence from Son of. But he's in the scene with Ichiro, and they're the same size. Then he says, "Ok, my turn", and runs out to blast his little radioactive smoke ring. And at that point he's proportionate to Godzilla's size. Which is way bigger than Ichiro. Then he runs back to Ichiro and he's human sized again.

You might say, eh, it's a dream! But later, Gabara comes by and Minilla goes to fight him. And this time, Minilla somehow grows in size right before our eyes.

Arghh! Not the crotch! Why is the camera focused on his crotch?!

Minilla pretty much gets stomped by Gabara. It seemed like he'd learned to use his breath weapon fully by the end of Son of, but he's forgotten it again.

Stomp on his tail!

And while Gabara doesn't have a breath weapon, he does have an energy attack where his horn glows and whatever he touches get zapped with electricity.

Meanwhile, the bad guys are a'schemin. They need to get that wallet back.

Back on Monster Island, another major re-use of stock footage as Godzilla fights the Red Bamboo airplane fleet ("Humans are coming to invade the island again", says Minilla). Yes, let's re-live those scenes of planes flying right into Godzilla's hands, and shooting at the surrounding cliff walls, hitting everything but Godzilla, and then crashing into him because there's no way to avoid him based on their trajectory. Godzilla's strategy of just being there wins the day again. And every time a human dies a fiery death, Ichiro cheers.

After the fight, Godzilla calls Minilla over, and Minilla stops talking in the muffled voice he uses to communicate with Ichiro and reverts to his weird baby doll ma-ma voice that he uses to convince his father that he's a simpering milksop. And it's about at this point in the movie that you're getting complacent and relaxed and maybe a little buzzed from all the drinks and/or head slaps that you've administered, so you're reclining there all chilled out when suddenly the leaves behind Ichiro shift and they TURN INTO A LEAF MAN AND GRAB HIM AND OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?!

Oh ok, it's just the thieves grabbing Ichiro when he's sleeping, incorporated by Ichiro's subconsciousness into the dream. Brrrr that's a crazy scene. It happens too fast to get a good screen grab of. It's almost subliminal. Why they do that to me?!

Can i watch that movie instead?

Faced with trauma in real life, the poor delusional kid goes back into the dream world, where Minilla is fighting Gabara again at Godizlla's insistence.

Ichiro helps Minilla during the fight, first by dropping rocks on his tail to make him shoot his fire breath fully, and then by having Minilla come up onto a cliff with him and then jump onto a tree branch, catapulting Gabara who is sitting on the other side. It's a looooong drop to the branch.

Godzilla approves and shows up onto the battlefield to congratulate his son and kick Gabara around a little. And this is the problem with picking on Minilla. Best case scenario, you're going to beat Minilla and then you have to fight his dad. Worse case scenario, you lose to a cutesy man-dinosaur about a third of your size and then get beaten up by Godzilla anyway.

Gabara tries to fight back a little, but c'mon.

Eventually Ichiro comes out of dreamland but he's still getting inspiring messages from his imaginary friend.

Inspiring in the sense of "Your parents are never going to be there for you, kid, so you'd better start learning how to do things for yourself." And Ichiro does manage to escape the bumbling thieves and outwit them until the police arrive.

The next day, the reporters are all over Ichiro, who solemnly tells them that he wasn't alone, because he had Minilla.

He walks off without an explanation, so the reporters turn to Shinpei the toy maker. The reporters all nod in understanding when Shinpei explains that Minilla is a kaiju. Then Shinpei says the craziest thing ever: "There is a God in the adult world, but children have their own God, Minilla the God."

Wow. What? Wow. But we're alone in apparently thinking this is crazy. The reporters all nod again and say, "I see. You're right.".

I don't think we've been the only ones drinking during this movie.

Ichiro then goes off and beats up his own Gabara.

Pants! Someone get them some pants!

The fight is weird, with constant freeze frames. Very odd "because we can" style of filming. But if we had ended the movie right there, you could understand the intended moral message. You need to stand up for yourself and don't let bullies push you around. Clear enough. Getting there with delusional fantasies about talking to monsters on a faraway island is a little odd, but ok. However, Ichiro doesn't stop with standing up for himself. He moves right into jerk territory and honks the motorcycle horn of a nearby painter, causing the poor guy to fall and get paint all over his face. Because Ichiro didn't get lessons in attitude from just anyone; he got them from Godzilla, and Godzilla can be a real dick sometimes.

As for the English version, all we can say is that the voice for the boy is pretty bad, and the voice for Minilla sounds like Disney's Goofy, if Goofy was also an old man. Also, Kumonga in this movie isn't called Spiga like he is in the other dubbed versions, but he isn't called Kumonga either. Me and Min disagree on exactly what's being said, but it's something like Kumumgza.

I don't understand this movie. I don't understand why it exists. But you made us watch it! When i learned that Destroy All Monsters was meant to be the final Godzilla film, i thought this thing was maybe just patched together for television, but it seems to have been released in theaters. Imagine paying to see a Godzilla movie that is 50% stock footage and 50% After School Special and 399% madness. Ironically, though, this movie and Smog Monster are the two that i used to catch snippets of on Saturday afternoon television and that's what made me a Godzilla fan for life.

Godzilla Drinking Game
	Because i said so.	If i have to watch this movie, i'm having a drink and no one can stop me.
	Someone thinks it's a good idea to drag a giant monster across the ocean on a raft (giant eggs count).
	Attacking planes fly directly at a monster, with no possibility of avoiding a crash even if the monster didn't swat them down.	It's stock footage but it's part of the movie.
	People refuse to believe in the existence of a giant monster even though they've already acknowledged that Godzilla exists.
	A submarine explodes.
	Teens have a dance party on a boat. Two drinks/head smacks if they get attacked by a monster during the party.
	The government is completely ineffective when faced with a corporation doing something illegal.	Cops work for the government. We'll call the two thieves a "corporation". The cops were pretty useless at catching those thieves. Ergo, a drink!
	A humongous lumbering monster manages to sneak up on someone. Two drinks/head smacks if it's the army and they're supposedly using radar.
	A scientist suddenly figures everything out with little-to-no information and explains it all to everyone.	I'm gonna go ahead and count the toy maker's explanation about Minilla. You're goddamn right we're counting it.
	A monster suddenly grows in size just because.	Minilla's ability to grow is never explained. Sometimes he does it willfully and sometimes it just happens.
	People expose themselves to major amounts of radiation with no concern.
	Everyone suddenly knows a monster's name. Two drinks/head smacks if everyone else nods appreciatively and repeats it.
	Army missiles can't seem to hit a 150+ foot monster and instead explode harmlessly around it.	c.f. Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster
	A woman falls down for no reason.
	Bad dinosaur science. You have to give a little leeway for the time period, but pretending a children's picture book is a scientific journal is always worth two drinks/smacks.

Monsters Appearing: Anguirus, Ebirah, Gabara, Giant Condor, Godzilla, Gorosaurus, Kamacuras, Kumonga, Manda, Minilla