Tag Archives: Ishiro Honda

Zone Fighter Episode 12 – Kyoujuu Kichi Chikyuu-e Shinnyuu!

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Zone Fighter Episode 12 – Kyoujuu Kichi Chikyuu-e Shinnyuu!

aka Terrorbeast HQ: Invade the Earth! aka The Terror-Beast Base: Invade the Earth!

1973
March of Godzilla 2012
Written by Norio Komata
Directed by Ishiro Honda

March of Godzilla 2012 is not dead, it was just resting as a TarsTarkas.NET got crushed beneath the weight of a trio of first run flicks and a lost film about a guy in a skeleton suit. But the train has been righted back on the track, and we can continue with our journey of Zone Fighter! Perhaps now you wish the train was flipped back onto its side. Well, too bad, so sad, Zone Fighter is here and he’s fighting a giant chicken while the producers might be committing horrible animal abuse. You just can’t be sure.

Rock ’em, Sock ’em Morons!

If you are Zone Fighter unaware, feel free to drop on by the Zone Fighter splash page, you’ll be glad you did! Now let’s get on with this show, before the chicken monster Barakidon crosses the road and I have to make even lamer jokes!

Troma’s Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead sequel was ambitious

The opening shows Zone Fighter killing many of the previous monsters, his horrible murder spree seared into the eyes and memories of the Garogas. So the Garogas have the ultimate plan to stop Zone Fighter’s brutal murder of monsters – a new monster!

Soon two tiny girls will be by demanding this egg…

Great plan, idiots! I hope Zone Fighter murders all of you.

Ha ha ha! Your hat is ridiculous!

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Zone Fighter Episode 04 – Raishuu! Garoga Dai Gundan – Gojira Toujou –

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Zone Fighter Episode 04 – Raishuu! Garoga Dai Gundan – Gojira Toujou –

aka Onslaught! The Garoga Army: Enter Godzilla! aka Invasion! Garoga’s Grand Army – Godzilla Appears –

1973

Directed by Ishiro Honda
Written by Shozo Uehara

Finally Godzilla’s supposed to show up, right? his name is in the freaking episode! This is old school silly Godzilla, around the time of Gigans, Megalons, and defending the earth from whatever stupid alien is attacking it.

Huzzah! He’s in the preview before the episode! Wooooo! First the theme song:

Zone…Zone…Zone…baka baka baka…eats toliet paper…Zone Fighto!

The Zone Family sees another meteor so goes to investigate, and there Takeru gets beat up by a remote control airplane. Yes, I write the truth. Then Takeru beats up the guy flying the remote control airplane. There is a lot of remote control violence in this episode!

But Hotaru knows this dude from back on Peaceland! He’s another Peaceland survivor named Sachio, and although everyone is suspicious because he’s a violent model airplane assaulter, he gets invited home for dinner by Hotaru.

Later Wargilgar appears! Zone Fighter quickly grows up to fight him. New Zone Fighter special moves include some sort of rainbow doorway that stops Wargilgar’s fire breath briefly. Wargilgar has fire breath that looks very dangerous and also has a double-barreled shotgun come out of its mouth and shoots at Zone Fighter. They fight for a while until Sachio materializes a ray gun that blasts Wargilgar into nothing!

All too easy!


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Zone Fighter Episode 03 – Tatake! Garoga-no Chitei-kichi

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Zone Fighter Episode 03 – Tatake! Garoga-no Chitei-kichi

aka Defeat Garoga’s Subterranean Base! aka Strike! Garoga’s Underground Base

1973

Directed by Ishiro Honda
Written by Masaru Takesue

Zone Fighter Episode 3 is here, and like the rest it is weird and unsubtitled. So we don’t need no stinking subtitles, but you might need to read the Zone Fighter Splash Page to get caught up with the series if you are unfamiliar.

Blah blah Peaceland got Alderaned the frak up, the Garogas followed the Zone family to Earth, and now this planet is in danger because the Zone Family only thinks about saving their own skin.

A third guest star kid in as many episodes is Akira’s new best friend. What is with this kid, he can’t keep a friend longer than one episode? And yes, this new kid named Momo has tiny shorts.

Garogas kill a dude via gas in a can that his car runs over and vaporizes the car! Why not do this to the Zone Family? (Because as we see later the guy isn’t killed, only teleported to the Secret Underground Base of the title!)

The Garoga have a Secret Underground Base with mushroom-shaped buildings on Mt. Fuji that isn’t really underground all that much. Maybe it has deep basements, and that’s the secret. I haven’t been this disappointed since I found out Monster Island was a peninsula!

Some Japanese Arab Shieks are in town, and the Zone Family impersonates them as a lure for the Garoga. Are Japanese Arab Shieks that common? I’m leaning towards no.
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Cozzilla (Review)

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Cozzilla

aka Godzilla, il re dei mostri

1977

Directed by Ishiro Honda and Terry O. Morse (USA)
Italian rearrangement and direction by Luigi Cozzi

cozzilla
Godzilla, il re dei mostri (hence after known as Cozzilla) began life long ago as 1954’s Gojira. After becoming a box office hit in Japan, the film was recut for America with scenes added starring Raymond Burr (at that time relatively unknown.) Godzilla, King of the Monsters proved to be a hit in America as well. Sequels were spawned, a franchise was born, and new Godzilla films were being produced 50 years later. The US cut of Gojira is not the only overseas modified version. Another one has gained some fame for the many odd alterations done to it. Writer/director Luigi Cozzi is a big fan of Godzilla, wrote a book about Big G, and is even nicknamed Cozzilla by his friends. Cozzi is best known here for being the director/Writer of Star Crash, Contamination, and the Lou Ferrigno Hercules movies, as well as the writer of Devil Fish (featured on MST3K.) None of those films are known for their stellar plots or special effects, but instead their cheese and terribleness. Here, one finds that even with a great movie base to work off of, you can ruin a final product.

Cozzi set out to share with Italy the great monster film, but he knew he would have to alter it for Italian audiences. In 1977, no one went to black and white films, thus Cozzi set up an elaborate colorization process known as Spectrorama 70. Colored gels were set behind frames of the film, oversaw by Armando Valcauda. New music cues were put together by Alberto Moro to go with the altered length of the film. Scenes were chopped out, and much new footage was added, but mostly World War II stock shots of bombed cities, weapons firing, and dead bodies. Yes, actual dead bodies. Also, a shark fights an octopus from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms towards the end.

The only known copy of this film is a VHS tape that had direct footage from a 16mm print (complete with reel announces.) As the tape was old, parts of it are choppy, and it appears to cut off abruptly at the end. wtfFILM got a hold of a copy of the tape and helped allow the world to see it, first by providing DVDRs and then uploading the film to Google Video. You can see the film here with their review. Some of the background information mentioned here was revealed there, and they even subtitled the movie themselves! As of this writing the store is closed, but hopefully it will be open soon, he has some other neat stuff around (including a trailer I saw for a restored version of Cozilla, which looks like it might be re-color-altered from Godzilla KOTM DVDs! Maybe that will get compelted soon and we can have a real treat!)

cozzilla
Godzilla has always been an allegory about the dangers of the atomic bomb, even when he was dashing out of a cave to save TV hero Zone Fighter (okay, maybe not then) but this version of the film takes that to an extreme level. It is so extreme, I was expecting the film to be chugging Mt. Dew and snowboarding out of airplanes into a volcano. It is a depressing kind of extreme, as Godzilla turns into an indictment of war and the human race in general. Thanks to the ample WW2 stock footage, we see far too many real dead bodies for anyone’s taste. Sure, the original film was about the horrors of the atomic bomb, but they didn’t make you want to go curl up in a hole and cry. Talk about brushing your teeth with a shotgun! Thankfully, the VHS quality and the Spectorama 70 color bleed takes the wind out of the sails on some of the images’ graphic details.

The overall use of the color does some nice work setting the atmosphere of the film at times. Godzilla’s attack and the Tokyo destruction are shown as bright red, and makes it violent, chaotic, and tragic at the same time. I enjoyed that choice of color, but at other times the random blues, greens, and yellows seemed to be chosen haphazardly. Some of the screenshots will just look odd because of that. I tried to make many of the shots identical to the ones in the Godzilla, King of the Monsters review, so you can flip between them and see how the color made them different (ignoring the obvious difference in video quality.) In addition, I threw in new shots of the older altered movie and the new inserted footage. As we go along the plot, I’ll point out what differs, and copy over some of the similarities, as the basic story is the same.

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Godzilla vs. Mothra (Review)

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Godzilla vs. Mothra

aka Godzilla vs. the Thing aka Mosura tai Gojira

1964

Starring
Akira Takarada as News Reporter Ichiro Sakai
Yuriko Hoshi as News Photographer Junko ‘Yoka’ Nakanishi
Hiroshi Koizumi as Professor Miura
Yu Fujiki as Reporter Jiro Nakamura (with egg and frying pan)
Emi Ito as Shobijin (Twin Fairy)
Yumi Ito as Shobijin (Twin Fairy)
Yoshifumi Tajima as Kumayama
Kenji Sahara as Banzo Torahata

Super Scary Saturday is in the HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUSE! Not House, MD, your house! Our house! It’s a very very very fine house, with two cats in the yard… Seriously, it’s time once again for a Godzilla movie, as March of Godzilla heads to the penultimate recap, and it’s a Super Scary Saturday version once again, as Grandpa Munster is there to guide us through! This time Godzilla is fighting Mothra in a battle that is battle-ish. Or something. This is pre-good guy Godzilla. Godzilla is still bad, still stomping the people for a pastime. In this version, they ramp up his lizardness, redesigning his head to make him more lizard-looking and more sinister-looking. Mothra makes her first appearance since her own movie, and the Twin Shobijin fairies played by the Peanuts are along for the ride. This is the American dub, complete with a scene filmed only for the US version.



Super! Scary! Saturday! It’s Super Scary Saturday, in case you missed the dozen other times I mentioned it and the big pictures. Grandpa Munster opens singing Zippity do dah! before beginning the standard “It’s me, Grandpa!” Grandpa walks in, with a baseball glove in hand, suddenly stops in his tracks! He says “What is this?” All of his friends are lounging around sleeping and being lazy. Slim the Skeleton is lying down flat on his back. Grandpa tells him to “shake a leg” and he does.

Next up, Grandpa asks mannequin Deadra if she’s going to spend all day filing her nails, which are ten penny nails which she is filing down with a metal file. Explaining this pun takes all the life out of it. Grandpa skips over Fang, who’s also sleeping but just woke up, to see Igor the bat asleep on his bed. Grandpa says Igor was more fun during the Black Plague! “Actually, the Black Plague was a lot of laughs…” Finally, Grandpa says the group needs to “shape up or ship out!” Grandpa will introduce….Grandpa-cise! What’s Grandpa-cise? We’ll find out in the next host segment. Until then, it’s time for the main show…Godzilla vs. Mothra!!!


We open in a storm, like so many Godzilla films. Well, at least Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster. Instead of wrecking a boat, we gets lots of shots of model sets being blown over. It’s like Hurricane Katrina, Japanese Model Version! Look out, Newu Oreansu! Actually, it’s Hurricane Abe, as the dialogue will tell us later. Areas of Japan are ruined, and Reporter Ichiro Sakai and his rookie photographer Junko Nakanishi arrive to survey the scene. Ichiro Sakai is played by Godzilla favorite Akira Takarada, who starred both in the first Gojira all the way to the last one (but not all of them in between.) Photographer Junko Nakanishi is played by actress Yuriko Hoshi, who will be playing almost the same role in the next film Ghidrah, except as a stronger woman character. She doesn’t return to the world of Big G until 2000’s Godzilla X Megaguirus. Her character has the nickname Yoka, so that’s what we’ll be calling her in the synopsis. Reporter Sakai has made some enemies, most notably the loudmouth mayor of the coastal city that was trashed by the hurricane. He boasts that their development project will be on schedule despite what Sakai wrote, thanks to their industrial-strength water pumps. Mr. Loudmouth Mayor fails to reveal how much these things cost, or why he’s wasting money on that instead of providing aid relief. I’d like to think that in the US he’d get run out on a rail, but we still have 99% of the Katrina idiots in charge, so we’d probably give him a medal as people starve.



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Godzilla vs. Monster Zero (Review)

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Godzilla vs. Monster Zero

aka Monster Zero aka Kaiju daisenso

1965

Starring
Nick Adams as Astronaut Glenn
Akira Takarada as Astronaut K. Fuji
Jun Tazaki as Dr. Sakurai
Akira Kubo as Tetsuo Teri
Kumi Mizuno as Miss Namikawa
Keiko Sawai as Haruno Fuji
Yoshio Tsuchiya as Controller of Planet X
Directed by Ishiro Honda


Celebrate! Celebrate! Super Station TBS! Duh duh DUH! It’s…..SUPER SCARY SATURDAY!!! Yes, once again, we got a blast from the past, a dust off of the Old School, to educate the New School of what was cool. Grandpa Munster is here to host us another Super Scary Saturday Edition of a TarsTarkas.NET review of a Godzilla movie for our March of Godzilla spectacular that’s in it’s second month. Previously, we had Ghidrah the Three Headed Monster as Grandpa hosted it for us. Now, the sequel is here, and Grandpa Munster is still there to guide us through. This hosting has a plot, several longer host segments, and doesn’t mention the movie by name. This could mean it was used on multiple movies, or for last minute changed movies, as the other Super Scary Saturday movies I have (or at least the other two I remember) both have skits involving the specific movie.

The main feature is Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, aka Monster Zero, aka Kaiju daisenso. The television version is full screen, and calls it GvMZ, while a DVD version I have is widescreen, and under the title of just Monster Zero. Try to guess which screenshots are from the TV and which the DVD, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Monster Zero was the first direct nod to the international appeal of Godzilla, where they just stuck an American in the middle of the film from the beginning, instead of waiting for the international distributors to do it for them. Said American is Nick Adams, or NICK ADAMS as he has a gigantic credit before the opening title. Nick Adams (born Nicholas Aloysius Adamschock — seriously!) went on to…drink himself to death! I mean he died of a drug overdose. Well, he was a big name, getting an Oscar nomination for Twilight of Honor, and spent a ton of money trying to advertise that he should win it, and was robbed. Then, he went to Japan to make some Toho films, and began an illicit affair with costar Kumi Mizuno, who later dropped him. And then he died, showing that Kumi Mizuno is that good of a woman. Oh, he was married at the time, and still married when he died. We’ll talk about the rest of the stars when they pop up in the film, as well as more Nick Adams information. What Nick Adams represents was paving the way for more Western actors in Godzilla films. It’s also interesting to see how he’s portrayed, giving you a glimpse of 1965 Japan’s impression of Americans.

So let’s sit right back and we’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip. It started on this wacky island, aboard this tiny ship. The mate was a mighty American, the Skipper, brave but Japanese. Two Monsters were passengers later for a two hour movie, a two hour movie. The space-weather started getting rough, and the tiny ship was tossed. If not for the courage of Godzilla, King Ghidrah would return, King Ghidrah would return.

Okay, sorry about that. Let’s get it on, Super Scary Saturday-style!

The monsters roar, the wolves howl, the aliens zap, and the lady screams…it’s the Super Scary Saturday logo commercial! It’s our introduction, and we start right away, with…Grandpa Munster! “It’s me, Grandpa!” I love Grandpa Munster. Grandpa is spraying his castle for bugs “I’m nothing if not thorough!” Grandpa asks Igor for the mail (Igor is the rubber bat on a string seen in several episodes) and Igor drops a whole pile of mail on Grandpa like tribbles raining down on Captain Kirk. “You’d think that just once he’d place it in my hand” Grandpa mutters. The first piece Grandpa opens is…a paper fan! Yes…it’s Fan Mail!!! HAHahahahahahaha!! The second piece Grandpa stumbles across is a letter from one of his “dearly departed wives,” it’s an invitation to a party. A party Tonight! “Igor! This is postmarked 100 years ago!” It seems Igor was using it as a coaster, “That Igor is going to drive me batty!”

Grandpa RSVPs via a cobweb covered phone. His departed wife is named Emma Baumy and she tells him it’s a costume party. Grandpa says he’d “love to drop in for a bite!” Grandpa knows what he’ll go as…the perfect man! But he needs help from his magic spellbook, so while he looks at that, we “look at this.” (No movie title given.) So we jump right in to..


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