Godzilla: King of the Monsters - 1956 short review

This is the American re-edit of the original Gojira, released in 1956. You could say that this is the same movie as the one I previously reviewed, but there are a few things I have to go over before moving on to the official sequel to Gojira.

When they released Gojira here in America, they chopped up the film and put in new scenes with Raymond Burr, as well as name the monster Godzilla. I guess they heard 'Gojira', and they thought "The monster's name is Godzilla, because clearly that's what the little Japanese man was trying to say." But what do we care at this point? It's a good name that stuck.... well, at least until they started calling him Gigantis, but that's going to wait until next time.

Just watch this trailer, it's basically the tone of the movie.

Better than any ever written by Jules Verne? Sure, let's go with that, shall we?

Although Burr is a great actor, the only purpose he serves is to narrate over the entire movie, just to dumb it down for all us American audiences. With him in this film, it feels like a generic B movie. With that said, it is still a good B movie.

This is actually the first version of the film that I saw, like most western audiences did. Although we don't get what we got with the uncut version, it was still pretty entertaining. The scenes with Godzilla are all the same, as well as any parts with the Japanese characters that weren't cut from the movie. Obviously it's dubbed, and it sounds boring. It sounds like they're just reading their lines right off the page, and not really acting the part. But, again, the bad dubbing is a time honored characteristic of most kaiju films.

The main problem with this movie, after watching the original cut, is the fact that Burr is just the narrator to it all. He barely serves the plot outside of that. Obviously he doesn't interact much with the original characters, because he can't. He's just being edited in with them, and he feels out of place.  His parts clash with the other characters, and if you watched this version first, they feel kind of crammed in. But if you watched the original first, you get the opposite feeling, this time Burr is the one making the story feel cluttered. You might say "Who cares, it's not like we see these movies for the people." That's right, we don't see these movies for the people. But having at least a little bit of effort put into them would be nice.

Other than that, I have nothing more to say about this version. I can't, because outside of Raymond Burr, the film is basically the same. Like I said, with Burr in it, it's just a B movie... but it's a classic one. I have to give it some credit, though. It gave Godzilla the title of King of the Monsters, as you heard about 7 times in the trailer above.