Zone Fighter Episode 04 – Raishuu! Garoga Dai Gundan – Gojira Toujou –
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!
Categories: Television Reviews Tags: Godzilla, Ishiro Honda, Japan, Masaru Takesue, Spyler, tokusatsu, Wargilgar, 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….
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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