King Kong Vs Godzilla (1962)

Director: Ishiro Honda

Writer: Shin’ichi Sekizawa (Screenplay) Paul Mason, Bruce Howard, John Beck, Willis H O’Brien (Story)

Starring: Tadao Takashima, Kenji Sahara, Yu Fujiki, Ichiro Arishima, Jun Tazaki, Akihiko Hirata

Plot: A pharmaceutical company captures King Kong and brings him to Japan, where he escapes from captivity and battles a recently released Godzilla.

Tagline – The Battle of the Century!!

Runtime: 1 Hour 37 Minutes

There may be spoilers in the rest of the review

Verdict: Monster Battle

Story: King Kong vs. Godzilla starts when the Americans disturb the resting place of Godzilla releasing him upon the world to attack Tokyo. In Japan Mr Tako (Arishima) has discovered a miracle cure berry which he wants to profit from, this sees him sending a team including Osamu Sakurai (Takashima) and Kazuo Fujita (Sahara) to the island of King Kong to retrieve more.

With Godzilla now terrorising mainland Japan, the only hope is to let King Kong loose after he is captured from his home island, which will see the two monsters face off.

Thoughts on King Kong vs. Godzilla

Characters – Godzilla is the monster of legend in Japan, he has once again been awoken and heads to Japan to take control of the land, he destroys everything in his path. King Kong has been taken from his island where he rules, once he gets free, he heads to Japan which will see him go head to head with Godzilla to see who is the king of the monsters. Osamu Sakurai is part of the team that go in search for the berries which will offer the miracle cure, he does need to help control Kong once he is free. Kazuo Fujita is in search of his girlfriend after she ends up in the path of Godzilla.

Story – The story here follows two different scientific teams that accidently bring King Kong and Godzilla to mainland Japan and must use them to defeat each other to stop Tokyo getting destroyed by the monsters. This is mostly mad to let the two giants fight, both sides of the story are showing signs of greed with the motivation for reaching Kong’s island being around being able to cure disease for profit, while the Godzilla discovery is about gaining power from the unknown in the ocean for military reasons. The way the story is told, feels like a large media report with a guy filling in the gaps for us whenever something is happening or between the incidents too, before sending us back to the live action. I understand this is one of those creature features that isn’t going to need a deep story which is why it does everything it needs to without being complicated.

Action/ Sci-Fi – The action in the film is the destruction by the two monsters which is massive in scale, with the sci-fi elements of the film showing how the monsters have come about.

Settings – The film uses the settings to try and show us the Japanese background for the monsters to travel through.

Special Effects – The film was made in the 1960s which wasn’t the biggest time for special effects, what this movie achieves does impress throughout too with the big monsters just being people in costumes.