Godzilla vs. Megalon
Release Date: 17th March, 1973
New Monster: Megalon
Description: Big Bad Beetleborg with drill hands and a magic horn
Origin: Summoned magically by vengeful interdimensional Moai aliens… I think.
Destruction: Beaten up by Godzilla and Jet Jaguar
Actor(s): Shinji Takagi (Godzilla), Tsugutoshi Komada (Jet Jaguar), Hideto Odashi (Megalon), Kenpachira Setsuma (Gigan)
Ancillary Monsters: Jet Jaguar, Gigan
So I have to point out that I saw this film on a really low-quality DVD, which was dubbed into English, and had some of the worst sound of any films I’ve ever seen, including films I’ve seen on “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” The sound is so garbled and the dialogue so mushy that I couldn’t understand half of what was being said. Perhaps this is why I couldn’t follow the plot at all, although some heinous re-editing and outright incompetent filmmaking probably had a lot to do with it as well.
So the new monster in this film is Megalon, a giant upright beetle monster with drills for arms and a horn that can shoot lightning. I can accept that it’s a weird-ass monster, but I am totally baffled as to how it came into being. There is talk early in the film of Easter Island and the famous stone Moai heads thereupon, and how the ancient Easter Islanders could summon monsters… I think. Then there is footage of a race of Caucasians, living in another dimension, on another planet, or perhaps just on a remote island; it’s never really made clear. As revenge for environmental disasters (which may be a callback to Hedorah, but probably not), the white Easter Islanders summon Megalon to destroy the world. Later in the film, one of the Islanders (Robert Dunham) is seen in a computer lab of some kind, where he can also summon Gigan from his crystal space prison. I like it when these films feel like a nine-year-old wrote them, but I would prefer that the nine-year-old in question is not zonked out on cold medicine when he writes them.
There’s a little kid in this film (Hiriyuki Kawase) who has been helping his uncle (?) build a thinking FightRobot named Jet Jaguar. Jet Jaguar is almost stolen by bad guys, but then isn’t. And then Jet Jaguar develops a consciousness of his own, and goes after Megalon. The Gigan is summoned, and Megalon and Gigan and Jet Jaguar all fight one another. Oh yes, and Jet Jaguar has the unexplained ability to grown and shrink at will. But only to monster size and no larger.
And you know what’s missing from the film until about 10 minutes from the end (and the film is only about 76 minutes long)? Godzilla. Yeah, Godzilla is largely absent from this flick, and he only shows up at the end to help Jet Jaguar do the fighting. Robot Man and Godzilla eventually beat up beetle and duckbot. Why is Godzilla fighting? What the heck is Jet Jaguars’ deal? What are the aliens up to? Why is Megalon attacking? None of these questions are answered. My first guess was that Godzilla vs. Megalon was intended to be a backdoor TV pilot for a Jet Jaguar TV series. Here is what I eventually learned from some online research: Jet Jaguar was the result of a write-in create-your-own-robot-hero contest held by Toho. The winner would see their creation face off against a Godzilla villain, Megalon, that was previously scrapped. Giant robots were very popular in the early 1970s, so this contest made sense. The studio worked furiously to make the Jet Jaguar movie, but it halted production several times. Eventually it picked up again, but Toho was still afraid that Jet Jaguar (originally called Red Alone) wouldn’t be bankable enough, so they wrote Godzilla and Gigan into the film at the last minute. This film was the result of studio tinkering, write-in contests, production problems, and discarded Godzilla villains. It kind of feels like it.
Godzilla vs. Megalon is the perfect movie for a weekday afternoon when you’re home sick, and you can’t sleep because you’re too full of drugs. You’ll be dazzled by the bad photography and low-fi special effects, and you’ll blame your illness on your inability to follow it in the least. But when you go back later, you’ll find that it wasn’t the drugs or the illness at all. The film was actually like that. Bizarre, hallucinatory, bad, confusing, and only a few steps removed from properly inducing insanity.
Luckily, the series picked right back up again with one of the coolest monsters in the series.
