A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Thursday, October 15, 2026

Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster (Ishiro Honda, 1964)


Cast: Yosuke Natsuki, Yuriko Hoshi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Akiko Wakabayashi, Emi Ito, Yumi Ito, Takashi Shimura, Akihiko Hirata, Hisaya Ito, Haruo Nakajima, Masanori Shinohara, Shoichi Hirose. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa. Cinematography: Hajime Koizuma. Production design: Takeo Kita. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii. Music: Akira Ifekube. 

This time the monster terrifying Japan comes from outer space, not spawned by atomic testing here on Earth. Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster centers on a creature that destroyed civilization on Venus before directing its attention toward this planet. Fortunately, it meets its match in some terrestrial monsters, Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra, although Mothra has some difficulty persuading the other two lunkheads to join forces against a common enemy. But the parts of the film that deal with humans are even more screwy than usual, involving a princess (Akiko Wakabayashi) from another country, visiting Japan on a good-will trip.  Somehow, the princess gets possessed by the spirit of a Venusian who witnessed Ghidorah's destruction of her planet, and she's able to aid the earthly scientists and good guys once he starts his rampage. But the princess has her own human enemies, assassins from a rival political faction, who only complicate things once the monster action starts. Also there to help are the Shobijin, a pair of fairy acolytes to Mothra who facilitate communication with the larval creature. They're played by the twins Emi Ito and Yumi Ito, who are also a musical duo known as Peanut. Fortunately, you don't need all the backstory of these creatures to watch Ghidorah. It's the usual non-stop mixture of dated but charming special effects, with some sly humor thrown in.  

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