THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS (1966)
Tagline: Can a Country Survive When Two Gargantuas Battle to Death?
(Sci-Fi, Action, Horror) [G]
When you watch this movie you might wonder why Frankenstein comes up so freakin much. Isn’t this a movie about Gargantuas? Well it is, but it’s a loose follow-up to FRANKENSTEIN VS BARAGON (or) FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD. The English translated name would have been “Frankenstein's Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira”, but the movie was put out as THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS in the US instead. FRANKENSTEIN as featured in the previous film is not in this. We get two different looking creatures.
In this one a Gargantua which is basically a lab experiment escapes and starts getting blamed for brutal killings by a giant unknown monster. However, the lab Gargantua is known to be peaceful and the movie mentions this like a thousand times. Eventually, we find out there are two, like the poster shows and after at first getting along, it’s time to fight. Can the good gargantuan defeat the evil one before Japan is laid to waste.
First off, let me say for a TOHO flick, these two monsters are freakin gnarly looking. This movie got a G rating, but there is a ton of death, people getting eaten, and fighting, and crazy stuff like that. Overall the fight scenes are solid and worth waiting for and the writing is actually pretty good. The evil Gargantua is given a weakness but overcomes it making both monsters near indestructible and you want that when you are watching these things. There is also a bit of a King Kong type love story between Akemi and Sanda (the good Gargantua), since she cares for him and doesn’t want to see the army kill him. One of the primary weapons used in the film is a MASER canon. It was a fictional weapon used in a lot of TOHO films.
Out of all of the TOHO movies, this one is one of the most memorable. For me, the memory of seeing this as a kid is actually better than the movie. It’s still good, but the ending for me like in a lot of TOHO flicks is pretty damn rough. I do like that none of the dubs in the American version were annoying. I guess Russ Tamblyn was kind of a jerk working on this thing, but honestly, his lines put up against the rest of the film were not all that note-worthy and had no effect on my overall rating.
Some technical issues in TOHO flicks are common, like seeing wires, etc, this one is no exception, but for this movie still manages to land as one of the crazier, more fun TOHO flicks. I have to give it a solid 5 out of 7. If the ending had been better, I could bump this thing up. The ride itself is worth the 5 though. It’s also sad that TOHO never brought the Gargantuas back to the screen.
GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF TOHO COMPANY AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.
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