Zone Fighter Episode 25 – Seizetsu! Zoon Gojira tai Kyoujuu Rengougun
Zone Fighter Episode 25 – Seizetsu! Zoon Gojira tai Kyoujuu Rengougun
aka 凄絶! ゾーン・ゴジラ対恐獣連合軍 aka Bloodbath! Zone & Godzilla vs the United Terror-Beast Army! aka Carnage! Zone & Godzilla vs the Allied Terror-Beast Forces
1973
Written by Yoshihisa Araki
Directed by Kengo Furusawa
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Zone Fighter goes all Judge Dredd all of a sudden!
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Finally, the Garoga grow a brain and unleash an attack on Zone Fighter that could possibly work, drowning him in monster foes. Unfortunately, they don’t go full force with the idea, and Godzilla shows up to beat up some of the spare monsters.
Though five monsters appear – Mogranda, Spideros, Garaborg, Jikiro, and the new monster Kabutogirah – there are dozens of capsules shown that the Garoga have, and they even toss them all around Tokyo in preparation for a massive attack. Instead, the attack is sort of minor, some monsters appearing solo and others attacking just outside of town. The only way the massive monster strategy could be successful is if they throw out dozens of foes, so this holding back is weird.
The Garoga launch a whole slew of Terror-Beast missiles featuring some old favorite terror-beasts, and also some awful terror-beasts. No explanation for why they aren’t dead, but whatever! These are all the twin brothers of the dead monsters. Yeah, that’s it! The amount of returning monsters who were destroyed earlier is complicated because I don’t know if to classify them as new versions of the monsters, or as just the monsters themselves reappearing because they “got better”. Even more confusing, Jikiro appears again, but the last time we saw him, he was Super Jikiro. I find it hard to believe the Garoga would go to the trouble of downgrading one of their Terror-Beasts, so the reversion is doubly weird.
Another explanation is the terror-beasts are recreated after each use, reincarnated like they are Cylons or something. This means that each of Zone Fighter’s murders of them are meaningless as far as killing them to destroy them goes, because they’ll always come back. It also means that the monsters will remember their defeats by Zone Fighter, which should in theory make them better combatants each time Zone and them fight. That doesn’t bear itself out, so maybe this theory is bunk as well. Or maybe the terror-beasts are just that stupid.
Several of the terror-beasts appear because Garoga combine together to becomes the terror-beast, while others are created from living things, mutated into terror-beasts. Most appear to be of unknown origin, whether they are captive animals mutated into monsters each time they need something to fight Godzilla, or even from breeding stock of creatures about the Garoga Space Station, stored in the terror-beast capsule form, or in pre-mutated animal form. If the reincarnation theory is true, would terror-beasts created from living things (such as Garoga Gorilla and Jellar/Kastom-Jellar) become part of the rotating terror-beast stable, or are they outside the instances of terror-beast reincarnation? This whole concept is more and more deeply troubling the more you think about terror-beasts and their origins. Their possible innocent status makes Zone Fighter look more like an evil bloodthirsty madman than his violent actions do on their own. And that’s pretty violent.
Unfortunately, just like all the other mysteries, we’ll never know the definitive answer due to the series being abruptly cancelled with no known followup.
This episode is also notable for being the last appearance of Godzilla on the show. Godzilla just shows up out of the blue to help with the situation, one thinks he’s attracted to the large amount of kaiju bioenergy in the area due to the influx of terror-beasts. Godzilla fares the poorest of all his Zone Fighter adventures, almost losing against two weak opponents until Zone Fighter saves him (to be fair, he saved Zone Fighter first) Godzilla does finish off one of the monsters.
The original monster for episode 25 is Kabutogirah, who is a creature with dreadlocks and fashionable sunglasses. He’s in the prologue sequences with the other monsters, and emerges to fight Zone Fighter about halfway through the episode. He does a terrible job and is murdered, not even scoring a spot in the final battle. This makes him one of the lamest terror-beasts in show history, even when highly subsidized by other monsters, Kabutogirah isn’t even close to a threat.
If you need a refresher of all these monster monsters, check out the Zone Fighter Splash Page
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Categories: Television Reviews Tags: Garaborg, Godzilla, Japan, Jikiro, Kabutogirah, March of Godzilla 2014, Mogranda, Spideros, tokusatsu, Zone Fighter
Attack of the Galactic Monsters (Review)
Attack of the Galactic Monsters
1983 (Yeah, whatever!)
Directed by Godzilla, probably. Maybe. Just an educated guess!
Attack of the Galactic Monsters is one of two (so far) movies that have popped up recently purporting to be edited for American TV movies (usually attributed to Hawaiian TV if a location is mentioned), the other being Monster King Godzilla. This one popped up on the Archive.org website (!) and is largely a paste job set around the 1977 Toho movie War in Space. UPDATE: It looks like the Archive.org link is now dead. Be sad=( If you though War in Space was too boring and far too long, and had far too much characterization of the cast, this this is the movie for you! It chops out over 2/3rds of War in Space, and inserts footage of Godzilla kicking various monster butts from the TV series Zone Fighter, a tokusatsu series that guest starred Godzilla occasionally.
Both Attack of the Galactic Monsters and Monster King Godzilla have little real information about them. People theorize that they are legit, or they are a hoax, or mention that they may have seen the tapes at bootleg stands at cons. No one has any real proof in any way. If these are a big hoax, someone spent a lot of time on them, including transferring everything to a VHS tape before digitally saving it for the masses on the internet. One thing that is suspicious is there is no obvious gaps for commercials. I had lots of experience taping things off TV as a lad and know what a tape looks like when it’s paused to cut out commercials, and there are none of those artifacts that I can see. It is possible it was taped with commercials intact, but then they were digitally edited out before the upload. It is also possible that this is the master tape so of course there are no commercials. But neither explains the odd running time, 55 minutes is not really a good running time for a tv show with commercials. So who knows? What I know is I got some extra Godzilla flicks to review on here, and that is totally jawesome.
As so much is cut out from the War in Space film to shorten it and add in Godzilla fights, the movie makes little sense. They barely explain any of the characters’ names, and instead rely on you just going with it. So just go with it! I haven’t seen War in Space in like 20 years, so I needed a cheat sheet, but there should be enough info below to let you know what is going on if you have seen the film or not. Basically, in War in Space, aliens invade the Earth and blow the crap out of it. so Captain Takegawa and the flying drill ship the Gotem (design based on Atragon‘s Gotengo ship) goes to the alien planet to blow up some alien jerks. And there is a horned Wookiee with an axe. Go team Let the Wookiee Win!
The other stuff you need to know is about Zone Fighter, Toho’s best known tokusatsu series from the 1970s, where the Zone Family fought the evil Garogas, who attempted to conquer Earth via sending giant monsters. Zone Fighter and sometimes Godzilla would then horribly murder the monsters, until everyone was defeated by being canceled in the middle of the series. This movie uses up most of the Godzilla appearances and barely uses Zone Fighter at all, except for one sequence where he fights Godzilla. Will there be more info on Zone Fighter episodes shortly? Maybe….
People Roll Call!
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Monster Roll Call!
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: fan films, Garaborg, Gigan, Godzilla, Jellar, Jikiro, Kastom Jellar, Ryo Ikebe, Spideros, tokusatsu, Wargilgar, Zandora, Zone Fighter