When Kobayashi crashes his sea plane on a small island, he discovers a second Godzilla (the first died in Gojira) fighting an enormous, mutated Anklyosaur. The beasts fall into the sea and soon turn up in Osaka, and destroy it. Godzilla disappears into the ocean, and Kobayashi, and his more-able friend, Tsukioka, search for the monster in hopes that the military will find a way to stop it.
Note: This review is of the Japanese version with English subtitles.
Godzilla Raids Again is an oddity for me. All of the other “Showa” cycle Godzilla films (1954 – 1975) I’d seen as a child or teen, but this one had escaped me. So I sat down to watch with perhaps a bit more sympathy and a lot more nostalgia than it deserves. And in that mindset, it was reasonably satisfying.
A sequel to the dark, brooding, nuclear paranoia drama, Gojira (re-edit as Godzilla, King of the Monsters for the U.S.) Godzilla Raids Again is much lighter fare. It is a transitional film between its tragic predecessor and the campy action pics that would follow. It is still a drama, but without the grim tone of the first film, and with an occasional joke tossed in. These jokes either aren’t funny, or simply aren’t translated well (I don’t understand Japanese), but the characters think they’re hilarious. Unlike Gojira, it doesn’t feel particularly Japanese. If the characters had been all blond, white guys, and spoke English, it would have been a typical American ’50s/’60s giant monster movie.
For a time, Godzilla Raids Again sways into metaphor territory, with the survivors of the creatures’ attack on Osaka standing in for those who tried to get things back to normal after Hiroshima. The hunt for the beast is played out like the search for the Bismarck (the powerful German battleship that could overpower any single ship that caught it, but which had to be found before it destroyed the shipping lanes). In the end, this is just a monster movie.
Unfortunately, the effects are distractingly weak. The B&W photography helps, as do the many dark scenes, but there is far too much light for the quality of the Godzilla suit. An avalanche segment, in which ice cubes are plopped upon the flailing rubber lizard, is particularly painful to watch. The decision to give Godzilla substantial dental problems was also a poor one. The monster’s teeth stick straight out of his mouth, which has got to make chewing tricky. I suppose Toho productions might have been considering a cross-promotional campaign with orthodontists.
Unlike later entries in the series, the movie never gets too silly. But it also drags in the middle. A party is excruciatingly slow, and could have been cut in its entirety. It all adds up to a decent, but unmemorable picture.
The movie was released in the U.S., in a much altered version, as Gigantis, The Fire Monster (1959).