When I was in middle school, I found a series of six little orange-spined books about monster movies in some library or other, each focusing on a classic: Dracula, Wolf Man, Frankenstein, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, one I don’t remember, and of course Godzilla. I read that in the middle of the original series – the ninth of fifteen films – was one I’d never heard of, but it sure sounded like the reason movies were invented. I’ve no idea why I must have always missed Destroy All Monsters when channel 36 or 46 showed a Godzilla film. Even without the main character’s name in the title, I read the TV listings with a fine-toothed comb looking for anything that sounded promising, and I’m pretty sure that at any time between the ages of eight and twelve, had I seen a movie called Destroy All Monsters in the Sunday TV Week, I would have been shouting about it.
So I got an external Blu-ray drive, which means that I can read the 15,000-plus pages of PDF material on the Doctor Who Blu-rays, and I can get screencaps from Blu-rays like the Criterion Godzilla set. It comes with an unbelievably pretty transfer of the movie and, tragically, the English language dub, which my son asked to watch. Oh, it’s painful. It’s the worst dub on the prettiest visuals. The kid didn’t care. He just wanted mass destruction, which this movie delivers.
In the far-flung future of 1999, the monsters of Earth have been baited and relocated to some islands near Japan called Monsterland. They’re hemmed in by defense screens and have ample food, and since they’re all in one place, it makes it easy for some smug space ladies called the Kilaaks to take over the control center, brainwash the staff with devices that are not hearing aids – that’s Susumu Kurobe, who played Hayata in Ultraman a couple of years previously, in a small role as one of their new agents – and put transmitters all around the planet to drive the monsters to attack Earth’s major cities. If I counted right, nine of the Toho movie monsters get a good bit of screen time. A couple of others, Baragon and Varan, were reduced to cameos, apparently because the costumes were too damaged.
I finally saw this film when I was a little too old to love a Godzilla movie, and it sure wasn’t pretty like this print. (Did you watch Bad American Dubbing like I suggested last month? The hearing aid scene was from the same nth-gen copy that Dave from Let’s Anime landed back then.) But I was old enough to start recognizing actors, like Kurobe, and also Kenji Sahara as the commander of the moonbase. I knew then that he’d been in a couple of previous Godzilla movies, but now I know him better as the star of the tremendously entertaining Ultra Q.
But when you’re nine, the stars of the movie all have big teeth. Destroy All Monsters was made to blow the minds of elementary school-aged kids out their ears, and it succeeds mightily. Our son says this was by far his favorite of the ones we’ve watched, and as soon as it was over, he was waiting for me to get my silly pictures from the disc so he could rewatch Godzilla, Rodan, Manda, and Mothra destroy Tokyo, and the big see-it-to-believe it climax, where eight of the monsters all team up to fight Ghidorah. They were doing these wrestling matches more for laughs than anything else at this point, but they work on two levels. When you’re a kid, just seeing all these titans mobbed up to kick Ghidorah’s space monster ass is something you can only dream about, and when you’re an adult, you marvel at the choreography necessary for any of this to work.
That’s the last of these movies I plan to blog about, but our kid’s enjoying the rest of the movies without me yammering about them. He’s watching Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, which I know better as Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, as I’m typing this, and I’m trying real hard not to be distracted by Kumi Mizuno. And the great big shrimp-crab monster, of course.
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 
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