Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla

#5 in my ranking of the Showa Era Godzilla films. Jun Fukuda returns to the Godzilla franchise for the final time, and he puts forward his best effort and one of the best of the franchise. He doesn't elevate the material, but he does bring together the basic elements into an entertaining and complete package…

Godzilla vs. Megalon

#15 in my ranking of the Showa Era Godzilla films. The success of any of these Showa-Era Godzilla films (really the whole kaiju genre) seems to hinge on three major things: the dedication to the human story, some kind of connection between the human story and the monster action, and then the quality of the…

Godzilla vs. Gigan

#11 in my ranking of the Showa Era Godzilla films. Tomoyuki Tanaka brought back Jun Fukuda to the Godzilla franchise after the...interesting results from Yoshimitsu Banno on Godzilla vs. Hedorah, choosing to go a more traditional monster-mash route from the man who had made Ebirah and Son of Godzilla. There's also a move away from…

Son of Godzilla

#14 in my ranking of the Showa Era Godzilla films. The return of Jun Fukuda to the Godzilla franchise pushes the whole affair more fully towards silliness and outright appeal to childish entertainment. Ishiro Honda did not approve, but he was not involved. There was almost always a certain seriousness to the monster action, making…

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep

#4 in my ranking of the Showa Era Godzilla films. So much of what I get out of these monster movies from Japan in the 60s is how they take on the aspects of different genres to try and keep things interesting. This, the first Godzilla film not directed by Ishiro Honda since he was…