DVD -27 Cine Vu   To most American audiences, Japanese monster movies involve ...

Cine Vu

To most American audiences, Japanese monster movies involve little more than guys in rubber suits stomping on toy buildings and wrestling with each other. While these films do include those things as a rule, they also have social and political subtexts, and plots more complex and imaginative than you'll find in most American film sequels.

Take 1964's Ghidra: The Three-Headed Monster. Sure, there's Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and Ghidra (in his first screen appearance) throwing boulders and breathing fire at each other. But first we're introduced to a Himalayan princess who's been marked for assassination by her own father. After a bomb plot fails, she's possessed by the spirit of an alien, who transforms her into a prophetess of doom.

Meanwhile, a meteor has crashed into the mountains of Japan. Unbeknownst to the scientific team sent to investigate it, the meteor contains the three-headed flying dragon, Ghidra, who's just destroyed the alien's planet.

Then the Mothra twins appear on a television variety show!

Eventually, some monsters show up. Yet even then, things take an odd turn. For the first time (and nearly the last), the monsters actually speak to each other. Mothra attempts to break up the slugfest between Godzilla and Rodan (who resembles a Muppet chicken when not airborne) by warning them about Ghidra's approach, encouraging them to work together to save the planet. (For viewers, the Mothra twins are on-hand to provide a translation.)

What follows from that point is fairly predictable. But I still find it a hell of a lot more entertaining than, say, Scream 2.

Godzilla purists are upset that this Cine Vu edition is a bootleg (which it clearly is). But the way I look at it, Toho has been so stingy when it comes to releasing films from the series to home video, you have to take what you can get. A number of their monster movies have never been released to home video in any form in the States, and some are only available in long out-of-print (and very expensive) VHS copies. Only a handful, licensed by Columbia TriStar, have actually been given a halfway decent DVD treatment. That being the case, when a cheap bootleg like this comes along, I grab it.

As a bootleg, however, the quality is pretty shabby. The originally vibrant Toho colors have been washed away; it's so grainy that at times it's hard to figure out where Godzilla's eyes are. It looks like it was lifted from a fourth-generation VHS. The sound, too, is muddy. But it sure was cheap, and there's no telling when Toho's going to get around to releasing it.

Jim Knipfel