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

Zone Fighter goes all Judge Dredd all of a sudden!

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

The Garoga send a bunch of Terror-Beasts to Earth! They smartly use the footage of the terror-beasts being launched from the opening credits that I don’t think was ever used in an actual episode. Mogranda! Spideros! Garaborg! And two dudes who didn’t get title cards: Kabutogirah and Jikiro! Jikiro doesn’t get a title card the entire episode, despite being a much bigger part of it than Mogranda’s glorified cameo.

The Garoga are all happy and celebrating that they figured out the brilliant strategy of launching more than one or two monsters at at time! It only took 25 episodes and a lot of me telling them to do that for this day to happen. Now all we need to wait for is to see how they screw it up!

Hikaru drives a racing car while Hotaru and new person Mina watch from the sidelines, Mina having her eyes on Hikaru. Earthquake! All these monsters stomping around and dancing causes a bunch of miniquakes. The Gargoa start shrinking the monsters down using gas and putting them in monster capsules.

Hikaru has to call in Zone Junior driving Smokey to find where the two girls are, they somehow wandered off during the quakes. I was unaware it is possible to get lost in the woods during an earthquake, but it is. Somehow logs have fallen on both girls, but only on their arms, but just enough to trap them. Okay. Mina spies Garaborg over the treeline and faints from the shock.

It freaked Mina out so much she’s having screaming fits and nightmares after being rescued, so of course they take her to the Zone Family home instead of a hospital. Why she’s freaking out having seen that monster exist while living in a world where monsters are attacking part of Japan almost weekly, I don’t know.

The Gargoa have like dozens of terror-beast capsules right now, more than enough to easily finish off Zone Fighter, so of course we won’t get them all fired at the same time, only a few. Garoga agents disguised as garbagemen (and also not wearing gloves!) toss terror-beast capsules all around the town. They are so bad at hiding the capsules that the Zone Family immediately has three of them on the table, and Hikaru is looking through his Zone Fighter Monster Fights Memories picture album to try to identify the terror-beasts. Might I direct Hikaru to the the Zone Fighter Splash Page? Because maybe he should read it.

Hotaru and Mina find another capsule in a backyard, Hikaru rushes over, and puts on special gloves and tosses it into a nearby yard, where it explodes and hatches. Yes, that did absolutely, unless you owned the yard that the monster capsule originally was in, because you just saved your garden! This is new monster Kabutogirah, who has big shades and big dreads and sword arms. Kabutogirah breathes explosive gas that can also be acid gas.

Zone takes his sweet time growing big, but then does wrist guns while flying, and rams into Kabutogirah’s head and knocks it back a lot. This pretty much kills Kabutogirah, who explodes and burns, one of the most pathetic monsters Zone has fought.

Zone Fighter then goes near where the monsters were first sighted and the not so secret cave base of the Garoga is. He fights some Garoga as explosions hint that more big monsters are now loose. If you want a secret base, don’t have a lot of Garoga running around.

Now Garaborg, Spideros, and Jikiro are loose. They harass Zone Fighter, who keeps getting injured right when he’s going to grow big. Maybe run away a few seconds? Hide behind a tree? Duck? Grow big when the giant monsters first appear instead of standing around long enough for them to mess with you? Zone gets buried beneath some rocks because he can’t think of any of those simple solutions I just gave him. Am I going to have to jump into the tv and yell at Zone Fighter? Because I will…

Zone Angel and Zone Junior fly in and use Smokey to attract the monsters’ attention, but Zone Fighter is still buried under some rocks and can’t grow big. Hey, a cool way to get big rocks off you is to grow even bigger. Try it, Zone! Smokey both blows the top off of Jikiro, and then disintegrates him! Remember when there was a whole episode about how awesome and powerful Jikiro was? And then a whole second episode about how awesome and powerful he was? Now he’s a punk. A punk!

Garaborg and Spideros close in on the trapped Zone Fighter, when suddenly…

Godzilla appears! He realized his name was on the episode title and he should put in an appearance! I guess they ponied up the appearance fee at the last minute. Though he is having trouble fighting the two idiot monsters for some reason. That’s why he didn’t show up for so long, he knew they’d make him look like a punk as well, so demanded so much money that they could barely afford him in the episode. Godzilla has a shrewd agent.

Mina is also wandering around the woods and helps Hikaru get free, I guess he transformed back to Hikaru mode to spare her the shock of finding out the guy she’s crushing on fights the monsters that give her nightmares every day. She gets him free using a zobot that somehow has an explosive charge. Which causes her to faint! Hikaru doesn’t even check on her and jumps to big Zone Fighter mode…

Zone Fighter runs right up to Garaborg and fires his meteor missiles wrist gun at point blank range, the bullets tearing through Garaborg and causing bloody trails to exit the back side. Garaborg stands, then falls straight backwards, dead thanks to the huge bloody hole Zone Fighter put in his stomach. This was pretty damn awesome, If I do say so myself. And I do. Who knew Sam Peckinpah was a guest director?

Godzilla beats up Spideros, then Zone Fighter blasts him with the proton beam, and Godzilla finishes off Spideros with an atomic breath blast. Spideros burns and explodes, dead again. Godzilla beats his chest in celebration, sort of odd because he didn’t really do any fighting worth bragging about.

The Garoga leave, vowing revenge. Maybe they should use some of those many many other monsters? Maybe they are all duds. It’s probably hard to produce so many monsters without some duds. Are the dud monsters dead, or are they just nice? Is there a warehouse full of nice monsters on the Garoga space station?

The Zone family frolics and Hikaru and Mina share looks of maybe they are dating but probably not because there’s only one episode left and she’d probably faint or realize he’s a terrible boyfriend who doesn’t even check on her when she’s hurt.

Godzilla likes to kill, too!

Rated 6/10 (Opening deal, another toy, hand power, Smokey go fly, grow grow grow, electric set design in every scifi show)

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