Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)

Original title: Kaijû daisensô

The alien invaders that had made their first appearance in a Godzilla film in San daikaijû Chikyû saidai no kessen/Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster (1964) came to the fore in Kaijû daisensô/Invasion of the Astro-Monster (1965), also known in English as Monster Zero, the sixth of the Godzilla films. The monsters largely play second fiddle to an alien race who introduce the much over-used trope of the would-be invaders somehow being able to control the monsters and use them for their own ends.

In the year “196X”, astronauts, Fuji (Akira Takarada) and Glenn (Nick Adams) are investigating the mysterious Planet X (which seems, inexplicably, to be in orbit around Saturn) when they are abducted by the human-like aliens known as Xiliens. The aliens make humanity an offer that seems too good to be true – in exchange for the cure for cancer (it becomes a formula for eradicating all diseases in the English dub) they want use of Godzilla and Radon/Rodan to help them fight off the destructive Monster Zero, which turns out to be none other than King Ghidorah. Clearly no-one on Earth in the fictional world of Godzilla has ever read or watched any pulp science fiction so are caught completely off guard when the Xiliens double cross them and use the monsters to attack the Earth ahead of their full-scale invasion. The race is on to find a way to break the aliens’ control over the monsters before they destroy the whole world.

Anyone expecting a Godzilla film to be scientifically accurate is definitely barking up the wrong tree but when the science is as blatantly wayward as it is here it’s hard to ignore it. Screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa and director Ishiro Honda clearly have no understanding of basics like what a constellation is, how planets actually work or indeed anything at all about space science. And one suspects that they didn’t actually care one jot – their job wasn’t to teach us about science but to give us an outlandish plot with just enough monster action to keep Godzilla’s ever-growing legion of fans happy. And on that score they mostly succeed. There’s too much attention paid to the frankly ludicrous Xiliens and their ridiculous Controller (Yoshio Tsuchiya) who babbles away in a strange “Planet X language” from time to time while looking laughable in the sort of costumes that would have disgraced even the most lurid of pulp science fiction magazine.

The effects are par for the 60s Japanese course and as ever it takes a while to get to the good stuff and when they arrive they’re accompanied by something that would become even more prominent in subsequent films – an attack of stock footage culled from the earlier films. The monster scenes are undeniably as captivating as ever, if a little silly at time – most infamously there’s that jaw dropping moment when Godzilla performs a little victory dance after it initially bests King Ghidorah. Supposedly based on a pose struck by the main character in the popular manga Osomatsu-kun by Fujio Akatsuka, a particular favourite of actor Yoshio Tsuchiya, it’s the moment that the Godzilla series finally broke its ties to the original film, the nuclear avenger of 1954 now transformed into the goofy, dancing saviour of Mankind. Any lingering pretence that Godzilla was still a metaphor for the horrors of the nuclear bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasai was finally laid to rest in this one shot

Invasion of Astro-Monster was the first of the Godzilla films to benefit from co-production funding from the States. Producer Henry G. Saperstein had been asked by UPA to source monster films for them to release in the USA and he approached Toho with a view to investing in what would turn out to be three kaiju movies, the others being Furankenshutain tai chitei kaijû Baragon/Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965) and its sequel Furankenshutain no kaijû: Sanda tai Gaira/The War of the Gargantuas (1966). He brought actor Nick Adams with him to give American audiences a more familiar face to engage with. Despite Saperstein claiming to have put up as much as 50% of the funding, the budget for Invasion of the Astro-Monster was notably lower than even than its already cash-strapped predecessors, leaving effects director Eiju Tsuburaya struggling to make the effects live up to earlier glories. Setting part of the action on a desolate Moon-like planetscape reduced the need for elaborate city miniatures and the recycling of stock footage helped stretched the budget a but further but overall it looks and feels cheap.

Invasion of Astro-Monster is a lot of fun even if one can’t quite shake the disappointment that it had come to this for Godzilla. His dance wasn’t quite the depths of his embarrassment (there was worse yet to come) but it’s still a new low for a series that was rapidly moving away from its roots. Both Godzilla itself and the films it appeared in were becoming very different beasts to the ones that had made landfall on the Japanese coast back in 1954. If you can get past the ridiculous looking aliens, the daft plot that pits Godzilla and Radon against a monster they’d only just convincingly defeated the year before and of course that dance there’s still much to enjoy here. But we must hold it responsible for introducing the “aliens-controlling-monsters” plot that would would turn up far too many times for its own good in the 1970s.