Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)

Original title: San Daikaiju: Chikyu Saidai no Kessen

Director: Ishiro Honda

Writer: Shin'ichi Sekizawa

Composer: Akira Ifukube

Starring: Yosuke Natsuki, Yuiko Hoshi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Akiko Wakabayashi, Emi Ito, Yumi Ito, Takashi Shimura, Akihiko Hirata, Hisaya Ito, Minoru Takada

More info: IMDb

Tagline: The Three-Headed Monster battles Godzilla, Mothra and Rodan for the world!

Plot: After a meteorite unleashes a three-headed beast upon Tokyo, Mothra tries to unite with Godzilla and Rodan to battle the extraterrestrial threat.

My rating: 6.5/10

Will I watch it again? Probably not.  I've got a better idea...

The new Godzilla movie is days away (I'm posting this a few weeks out from when I watched it) and I had the gang over for some Man In Suit double feature 60s madness.  I have a love/hate relationship with these kind of pictures.  I LOVE the monster action but hate the human drama.  These flicks invariably waste too much of our time on shit nobody cares about until the monsters show up and oh how quickly we turn into giddy fanboys when that happens.   There's next to nothing, monster-wise, until Godzilla shows up 36 minutes in and even then it's only a fucking tease.  He pops his head out of the ocean and does that classic scream and it's back to boring ole human junk.  It's like when you order at a restaurant.  Ten minutes go by and the server shows up, making you think you're super close to getting your food, but they only bring you the ketchup or something to tease you and they keep bringing things out little by little.  I hate that shit.  Bring on the fucking monsters!!!

Halfway through the picture Godzilla returns to do some clobbering but that's yet another tease.  It's at the 50 minute mark when he meets Rodan and the shit starts to fly.  We only get short segments of monster action but it's fucking fantastic.  And then there's the huge ass fight between Ghidorah against Godzilla, Mothra and Rodan.  FUCKING AWESOME!!!  It's epic and all kinds of fun. 

And really, you could probably cut the first half hour of human drama and it would hardly affect the actual story.  I figured out that the best way to enjoy these is to remove the monster action and edit it together into a Man In Suit greatest hits collection.  Just one more thing to add to my massive to-do list.  And, yes, it's worth sitting through the meal just to get the desert.