Original title: Gojira-Minira-Gabara: Oru kaijû daishingeki
When Toho decided that the Godzilla films were worth saving after all after Kaijû sôshingeki/Destroy All Monsters (1968), no-one could have imagined that they’d have come up with this terrible old nonsense as proof that there was life in the old lizard yet. Also known as Godzilla’s Revenge, it’s the absolute nadir of the series. Continuity between Godzilla films had always been tenuous to say the least but the only way one can even contemplate this one is if one accepts that it’s a standalone film with no connection to the other films beyond the monster characters. Indeed one might be able to make a case for All Monsters Attack being the only “meta” Godzilla film, one in which the main narrative seems to take place in the “real” world and the monsters only exist in the imagination of the film’s young G-Fan protagonist but honestly, the film really isn’t worth the effort.
It starts as an apparently serious drama, a straight faced look at the loneliness of childhood as we follow Ichiro Miki (Tomonori Yazaki), a young boy living in a run-down and polluted area of Kawasaki. He’s bullied by his classmates, barely sees his busy parents and retreats into a fantasy world where he imagines himself boarding n airliner that flies hi to Monster Island to meet Godzilla and Minilla. On the island, he is menaced by a Kamacuras and rescued and befriended by Minilla who can brace – brace yourself… – talk!
In the real world, he’s being pursued by both the school gang and a pair of bumbling bank robbers (Ichiro has found one of the thief’s driving licenses and can now identify them) while in his dream world, clips from earlier films run riot as he watches Godzilla battle Ebirah and Kumonga and see off some circling jet fighters. He also watches Godzilla teaching Minilla how to stand up to his own bully, Gabara (also the name of the kid picking on Ichiro) and learns a few life lessons, allowing him to make his own stand against the crooks and his bullies.
Eiji Tsuburaya is credited for overseeing the effects on the film though this turns out simply to have been a courtesy – he was ill during production and died not long after the film was released and his unavailability leads to All Monsters Attack containing more stock footage than ever before, most of the big action scenes being cobbled together from existing material. This leads to all manner of problems, particularly with the different Godzilla suits used in different films being particularly jarring, Godzilla seeming to change size and shape from one shot to the next.
Gabara is surely one Toho’s least distinguished monsters, one that understandably rarely gets spoken about even by the most die-hard of kaiju fans. Supposedly based on a toad, it’s a green-skinned monstrosity covered in nodules who is able to electrocute his opponents when he touches them. He later turned up in the TV series Ike! Godman/Go! Godman (1972-1973) where he was said to have been a mutated bullfrog, and an episode of the follow up series Ike! Greenman (1973-1974). We also get glimpses, thanks to the stock footage, of Ebirah and that strange condor-like creature Ookondoru from Gojira, Ebirâ, Mosura: Nankai no daiketto (1966) and a Kamacuras from Kaijuto no Kessen: Gojira no Musuko (1967).
All Monsters Attack earns a few credits for showing us a part of Japanese that we rarely see in the giant monster films, the deprived and smog-choked suburb of Kawasaki but that really is all it has going for it. Kunio Miyauchi’s score is dreadful, particularly Minilla’s theme tune, the two story strands never gel for a second and to add to the general weirdness of the proceedings we get a slow motion chase as Ichiro flees the monster Gabara and his climactic fight with the real world Gabara is presented in a series of stop-start still images. It remains the lowest of the low – there were some terrible films still to come but nothing that Godzilla put its name to would every plumb depths quite as low as All Monsters Attack again.
The EOFFTV Review 