Shin Godzilla (Review)

March of Godzilla Godman

Shin Godzilla

aka シン・ゴジラ aka Godzilla Resurgence
Shin Godzilla
2016
Written by Hideaki Anno
Directed by Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi

New facial cleanses have gotten out of control!

Godzilla was on one of his occasional breaks after his Final War while the US developed their own Godzilla franchise. But after that monster hit, Godzilla reawoke in Japan to return with a spiritual successor to the original Gojira that is also one of the most successful films in Japan. Godzilla is back as a force of nature, the appearance and response directly referencing the Japanese Fukushima earthquake/nuclear disaster. Much of the film is spent in a West Wing style series of high level government meetings, in which entrenched minsters and officials do little of consequence in order to avoid looking bad if their actions don’t have the desired effect. While that sounds like it could be terrible, it’s actually really good, the scenes are cut quickly and innovatively to keep things moving briskly along while still giving you the feeling that the characters were in long unproductive meetings.

Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi were given free reign to tell their story, the pair having collaborated on Evangelion, with Anno subsequently directing cult live action films such as Cutie Honey and Higuchi doing effects work on the Gamera trilogy and directing the Attack on Titan features. Their strong pedigree promised that we would get something unique and entertaining, and the pair delivered with a strong entry.

The effects are a bit mixed, the final form of Godzilla is well done, but the earlier forms look goofy and some effects with them seem more rushed. While most of the music is new, there is some nice Akira Ifukube put in at the right time, with tanks driving around and blasting away that helped made the scene come together, you won’t care that everything is now CG instead of models and a guy in a suit. It really is modern mixed with the past, besides the retro tank fight, we have unmanned drones attacking Big G at one point, and the final sequence has a bunch of industrial and civilian vehicles that make up the heart of Japan’s economic might being used to save Japan.
Shin Godzilla
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Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (Review)

Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl

aka Kyuketsu Shojo tai Shojo Furanken

2009
Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu

Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (hereafter VGxFG due to our crippling laziness in both typing and copy/pasting the movie title) is from the same Japanese goremasters that brought us The Machine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police, and Hypertrophy Genitals Girl. That’s the movie where the girl has the giant genitals. It won six Oscars. Yoshihiro Nishimura is a special effects expert who has directed several of the gore flicks, while Naoyuki Tomomatsu is a director and writer who also produces a lot of gore flicks such as Stacy and Zombie Self-Defense Force . VGxFG is based on a manga I haven’t read because I only read scifi novels published around the time my mom was born I get from used book stores. I also read books about McBroom’s Farm, but there were never and Vampire Girls fighting Frankenstein Girls. Maybe some of his kids were vampires or Frankensteins, he had like a million of them and also ran a zoo at one point besides the farm where I bet the Silver-Tailed Teakettler fought the Sidehill Gouger.

If you like gore and splatter effects and CGI blood, then this movie has that stuff and you probably already at least know about it. But maybe you haven’t bothered to rent it from NetFlix yet and are deciding on if you should see it or requesting Goonies one more time. And that is where TarsTarkas.NET can help. First of all, go get Goonies from a used DVD store, you can probably get it for like $5 thanks the the economic apocalypse. Second, give us $5 as well. This doesn’t help you, but it helps us. Everyone wins! (Everyone at TarsTarkas.NET!)

VGxFG is much like the Twilight saga, in that there are two specially powered teenagers fighting over the heart of a normal teenagers. Sure, the sexes are reversed, and the werewolf is a Frankenstein monster now, but it is similar. And no one sits in a window for four months while some generic alt rock blares in the background about possibilities. Come to think of it, VGxFG is nothing like Twilight. Forget I said anything!

Let’s get the Roll Call out of the way before I devote another paragraph to how VGxFG is exactly like Lethal Weapon 3

Monami Arukado/Vampire Girl (Yukie Kawamura) – A lonely vampire girl searching for love by tricking boys into eating her blood. Just like all other women… Yukie Kawamura is a gravure idol so check out her gallery we put together.
Keiko Furano/Frankenstein Girl (Eri Otoguro) – dresses in the gothic-lolita style tough girl with a squad of three gang members who bully Jyugon into being her boyfriend…until Monami comes along. Is eventually killed and rebuilt by her father as Frankenstein Girl ready for revenge.
Jyugon Mizushima (Takumi Saito) – The innocent cute boy trapped in a world where two super-powered girls battle over his heart without consulting him in the slightest. Isn’t love grand?
Kenji Furano (Kanji Tsuda) – Vice-Principal/science teacher and Keiko’s father. Also secretly a mad scientist who experiments on the students.
Midori (Sayaka Kametani) – The over-sexed school nurse Mizushima goes to see because he’s still freaking out. It turns out she is also the mad assistant to Kenji Furano for his crazed experiments in chopping up students.


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