Godzilla 1985

Godzilla 1985 is a very bad movie, horribly bad because it has been made to be deliberately bad.  We all know about the bad dubbing in those old Godzilla pictures from Japan, but Godzilla 1985 opens with a scene in which this is done on purpose.  That kind of pulls the rug out from under the film’s intent.  Bad movies made with the intention of being good are funny.  Bad movies made with the intention of being a bad movie feel like a self-inflicted wound.

I’ve seen most of the old Toho pictures of yesteryear and they all had a certain style, a certain bit of fun.  They were cheap, the sound was off, the characters were stiff but colorful.  When I see Raymond Burr in this movie cutting into flat, stiff dialogue I sense that he’s doing it on purpose.  The movie seems to purposely edit his scenes into this movie just as they did in the original from 1955 after producers decided that they needed an American star to get American kids into theaters.  His scenes in this movie seem constructed out of stiff, wooden dialogue and a performance that feels manufactured to be silly.

I like the idea of Godzilla.  I like the idea that a creature has been created as our punishment for fooling around with atomic weapons.  I also like the idea that those original movies were done on the cheap.  They’re fun that way, as a relic of a bygone era before yesterday’s B-Picture became today’s multi-millon-dollar A pictures.  There was an innocence, a lightness, a cheapness that made them fun.  Here it goes wrong, very wrong because the filmmakers are in on the joke.