King Kong vs Godzilla

About damn time I got around to watching another Godzilla movie. I've said that I've been waiting for the series to get to that point of just pure ridiculousness. It isn't quite there yet, but this movie was a giant leap forward in that department. 

As a movie, this is overall pretty bad. The effects are of the usual standard, although definitely a step down from the first Godzilla. You have the giant rubber suits, the miniature sets being destroyed, everything you expect there to be by this point. A surprisingly large amount of time is spent with the humans instead of with the monsters, which is definitely a point against the movie. You can't put these two monsters in the title of the damn thing and then proceed to show us humans for 80% of the movie. It's just not right.

Now having said that the movie isn't actually that good, I can now say that this is some of the most fun I've had watching a movie maybe ever. It could be that I was just in the right mood for this one at the time, but I had an absolute blast watching it.

The stuff with the humans was still a little bland but anything with the two main monsters fighting was absolute gold. The Kong suit looks ridiculous which makes it fantastic. He is so clearly just a guy in a big monkey suit. They really didn't even try. Godzilla looks only slightly better, so you just imagine how great it must be when they finally start duking it out. 

As usual the cheap effects bring a lot of charm to the movie. Not just with the bad looking rubber suits though. There are a couple of other huge highlights. It's always entertaining watching an army consisting of obvious toy tanks coming to get Godzilla. I don't think I'll ever get tired of that. However there were two shots for me that really stand out as the highlights of the movie.

1) There's a scene where King Kong and Godzilla are fighting and we get this perspective of their top halves behind a mountain. At this point it just looks like two puppets goin' at each other. It reminded me of when I was younger and when pretend my action figures were fighting by simply banging them into each other. It's not even a quick shot. It stays for a few seconds and then even cuts back to it afterwards. Incredible.

2) A guy is being lowered down on a rope from a helicopter. When you see the shot of the guy being lowered, it is clearly a toy figure because he isn't moving in the slightest bit. He also has this really awkward pose that's just wonderous. I had to rewind this part a few times to really absorb it.

Scoring King Kong vs Godzilla is a tricky task. The movie itself isn't terrific, but damn was it entertaining. Who knows maybe if I watched it again it would be terrible. In the meantime though, I gotta give this beast a good score if only for the entertainment value it brought to me during its running time.

7.5/10