Monster X Trailer, Rodan DVD News!
It was just a few days ago that I finished a story commenting that I wished they’d hurry up and get a new trailer out there for Minoru The Calamari Wrestler Kawasaki’s remake/sequel/parody/whatever of The X From Outer Space. And they’d need to hurry too since The Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit opens in Japanese theaters on July 27th.
The movie gods clearly heard my cry because the trailer has arrived in all its cheesy Japanese glory. Though I must register a little disappointment in my inability to understand Japanese since its apparent the dialogue has a tongue-in-cheek slant to it that doesn’t register the full intent to us English-speaking Westerners. It’s still fairly easy to figure out what’s going on if you know the plot: giant space monster ends up back on Earth just in time for all the international leaders to assemble for the G8 Summit and the only thing that can save us all is an ancient monster-fighting deity played by Beat Takeshi.
Kawasaki wasn’t kidding when he said this was going to be an old school daikaiju movie with old fashioned Japanese monster movie special effects. Some of the monster footage looks like scenes straight out of a late 1960’s kaiju flick shot with modern day digital cameras. Check it out;
Meanwhile, for those that love their Japanese monster movies old school and Toho-produced, DVD Drive-In reports that September 9th will be the day Classic Media will finally release a much-anticipated two-disc set of the Toho monster classics Rodan and War of the Gargantuas.
The movie that introduced the world to Godzilla’s future, supersonic, pterodactyl rival, Rodan will be available in both the English-dubbed American cut and an English-subtitled Japanese cut that also boasts an extra 10 minutes worth of footage.
War of the Gargantuas, a weird and wild sequel to Toho’s Frankenstein Conquers the World, in which a pair of good and evil, giant, hairy hominids named Sanda and Gaira appear in Tokyo to wreak havoc, will also be available in both dubbed and subbed format. Though in this case, it seems the American version is actually three minutes longer.
In terms of DVD extras, all that has thus far been announced is a documentary that, oddly enough, has nothing to do with either film. Godzilla fans probably won’t complain too much about that since “Bringing Godzilla To Size” is an in-depth 68-minute doc narrated by Alex Cox that delves into what it was like making these movies half a century ago with particular emphasis placed on the nuts and bolts of Godzilla movie special effects work. Those familiar with hardcore Godzilla fandom will recognize names like Norman England, Ed Godziszewski, and Steve Ryfle, who together directed, produced, and wrote this original documentary. That alone should make this DVD set a must-have for any fan of daikaiju flicks.
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