King Kong is captured by a Japanese pharmaceutical company,
​escapes from captivity, and battles Godzilla for monster dominance.

ACTION/SCI-FI

King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963)

Directed by Ishirô Honda and Thomas Montgomery

Written by Shin'ichi Sekizawa, Paul Mason, Bruce Howard

Starring Michael Keith, Harry Holcombe, Tadao Takashima,
Kenji Sahara, James Yagi, Mie Hama, ​Ichirô Arishima

Spin-Off of 1933's King Kong and 1954's Godzilla

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Connor Eyzaguirre

February 23, 2021

3/10

Wow. Adam Wingard, the bar has been set extremely low for you to succeed. I know that age has made this film depreciate in value by a considerable amount. But story structure, characters, and empty promises have nothing to do with age. While I have plenty to complain about with this horrific train wreck of a crossover, the one thing that is wholly unforgivable is the fact that Godzilla and Kong don't actually start fighting until the last TEN MINUTES of the movie. Even if everything else was solid gold, that is a colossal kick in the balls to anyone who believed in the film's pretty straightforward title.

Turns out there are two different versions of this movie, because America couldn't bear to lose to Japan and Japan couldn't bear to lose to America (again). So an American filmmaker added new American scenes to the Japanese version, resulting in a film the doesn't make sense or flow well at all. We get fleeting glimpses of Godzilla and Kong throughout, including an island full of blackfaced Asian actors pretending to be nondescript natives. There's some bullshit about pharmaceuticals, red power berries, and a big earthquake, but I had checked out long before that. I won't shit on the special effects or the monster costumes, because I understand it was 1963 and things weren't awesome in that department yet. But everything else is hard to defend.

There are so many Godzilla movies now that it's hard to keep track of all of them. I've barely dipped my toe in the waters, but this is easily the worst one (and I'm including Roland Emmerich's '98 disaster in that list). It's an embarrassing film that never utilizes either character, tries its hardest to keep them apart the entire movie, never gives us anyone to root for, and has no conclusion after all of that. Simply put, it's a terrible movie.