In short: Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971)

aka Godzilla vs the Smog Monsters

Original title: Gojira tai Hedora

A meteorite drops a mysterious and very dangerous lifeform this movie’s Kenny (Hiroyuki Kawase) will randomly dub “Hedorah” on Earth. At first, the creature appears as a series of large, acidic tadpoles who love to eat toxic material and generally adore industrial sludge, but the more human crap it eats, the larger and more mutated it becomes. Now, one might think having a waste-eating kaiju around would be rather neat for a world drowning in man-made waste, but what Hedorah metabolizes, it spits out as even more toxic and dangerous mist or sludge.

Eventually, Godzilla will come to the rescue, but what’s a giant lizard to do against a toxic, icky waste monster?

Some courageous souls at Toho tried something new with the flailing late era Showa Godzilla by hauling in young director Yoshimitsu Banno and letting him concoct his very own kind of kaiju.

The result of that attempt is a wild mix of the most childish bits of kaiju eiga, random pieces of pop art (including some equally random metaphorical animation), some of the most gruesome and classically horror-style moments you’ll find at this point in the series, some trendy ecological messaging, and half a dozen other elements of no import. Unfortunately, Banno seems to have no control about the movie’s disparate elements whatsoever, leading to a complete mess whose tone and style shifts so wildly and randomly, it doesn’t even manage to make something of its very obvious and clear ecological themes. One would expect the film’s general wildness would at least make it entertaining, but for a a tale that’s as full of everything under the sun as this is, it is nearly absurdly sluggishly paced. A film full of hippies turning into skeletons after being spit at by a sludge monster that features symbolic cartoon interludes really shouldn’t be this dull, but Hedorah manages handily.

Adding insult to injury, the movie also doesn’t know how to be a kaiju. Even if you ignore Riichiro Manabe’s terrible score replacing proper Ifukube monster action music, there’s something a bit embarrassing about a movie that really thinks having Godzilla fight a monster whose only fighting techniques are slithering away and spitting sludge at our hero kaiju could work in any way, shape or form.