Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

A great movie.. a great monster who deserved more outings.

Rodan was one of the first movies I ever remember scaring me. It's really a movie that gets crazier as it goes on. From the 'murders' in the mines, to giant man-eating insects, to 'UFO' sightings all over the world, to the reveal of an even larger monster that eats the insects from before. And then to top it all off there are a pair of Rodans, almost mirroring the human couple of Shigeru and Kiyo. The ending is unexpectedly tragic as the kaiju relationship comes to a horrible end as our human characters watch from a distance.

Shigeru watching the Rodan hatch from its egg and devour Meganulons is one of my favorite scenes in a Japanese monster movie. It's like something from a Lovecraft story as a character goes insane from witnessing an event so shocking and otherworldly. It's a strangely real detail in a very strange movie.

The sequence with the three guys going into the mine and being attacked really creeped me out as a kid.

i really love the first half of this film

For those of you who don't frequent TCM's Movie Morlocks blog (and you should); our old pal David Kalat has written a nice piece on Rodan, which aired this morning. He places it within the context of the evolution of the Toho monster movie.

http://moviemorlocks.com/2015/04/25/how ... ove-rodan/

Rodan was a good movie. It featured a monster bird and his mate. It was a threat to mankind and has to be killed. It didn't remain dead, since it later return to life in other movies.

Wow, so I read the article, and well most of the comments concern Godzilla...I guess no one knows of Rodan's significants there...Well if the people around the area, experinece large amounts of water in the mines, horrible deaths, UFOs, and couples going missing on top of the volcano...then we should start to worry.

The original Japanese version is a classic despite its flaws, because being only the third movie of its kind, back in 1956, in Japan, and the first one in color, you have to assume that a lot of trial-and-error was going on. For the most part, Eiji Tsuburaya's effects work is top-notch, but you can tell that he and Akira Ifukube must have been working on a limited amount of time and money. The original Rodan has very much a 'diamond-in-the-rough" quality to it, but Ishiro Honda managed to make it one of the most important films in the entire genre.

That being said, it is the U.S. cut that I fell in love with, when I first saw it back in the day, around the time I had just started to see the Godzilla movies for the first time (late eighties, early nineties). The additions and subtractions that the American distributors made, I think, served to liven things up a bit, and make the movie more entertaining for an American audience. This is an Americanization that I feel holds up really well to it's original counter-part. And, of course, it serves as the introduction to one of Eiji Tsuburaya's very finest of all kaiju-creations, "The Samurai Warrior of the Sky, Radon!!" I don't know where that tag-line came from, but I like it lol! Behind Godzilla, Rodan is my favorite of all Toho's creations, and the movie, in either version, is one of those "monuments of kaiju/tokusatsu cinema" that I have always held in such high regard my whole life. It belongs in the same class as Godzilla '54, Mothra, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Matango, Godzilla vs. The Thing, Ghidrah The Three-Headed Monster, Monster Zero, Frankenstein Conquers The World, War of the Gargantuas, King Kong Escapes, and all the rest of the top-tier Toho kaiju-eiga.