“Very rare Godzilla film made for Hawaiian TV in 1980 by Filmways TV USA, 99% stock footage and a bizarre wrap around plot involving physic powers make this a very strange film.”

Yet another strange mash of footage that some believe came from Hawaiian TV and others think is a hoax, Monster King Godzilla puts together various Showa-era Godzilla moments with another Toho movie, 1974’s Jun Fukuda-directed ESPY.

That movie is all about the International Psychic Power Group, a team of psychic superheroes who are the X-Men if they were funded by the U.N. After four politicians from Eastern Europe are killed, the psychic team is called into action, but must deal with Ulrov and his mental powered killer Goro.

Now imagine that movie but someone would rather watch footage of Godzilla fighting Megalon, Hedorah, Mecha Godzilla, Titanosaurus, King Caesar, King Ghidorah and Gigan instead of letting you know most of the plot of ESPY.

The copy of this that I have has sound that cuts out from time to time, making this an even more disconcerting experience. It’s like this was dubbed into English, back into Japanese, dubbed into French, then Spanish, back to Japanese, a side trip to Switzerland and then back to English before, again, someone wanted every Godzilla fight in the 1970s dubbed in, just because.

Big love to the psychic girl in this with a white miniskirt, gigantic glasses and a white fur coat. Well done on the metallic orange lipstick, your outfit has choices and you made all of them.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

I have no idea how and why this exists, but I’m ready to find out.

Supposedly made for Hawaiian TV, this 55 minute movie is made out of parts of War In Space and Godzilla scenes from the TV show Zone Fighter. And it’s a mess, a glorious mess, nearly an hour of footage of space ships, aliens yelling and kaiju beating one another up.

Or maybe it’s an elaborate hoax, a bootleg put together to sell at cons and post to the internet.

Does it matter? This does what I have always wanted: Chop out the boring exposition and human drama and just give the audience what they want: explosions, kaiju combat and destruction.

I could tell you that this is about Hell, the Supreme Commander of the Empire of Galaxy kidnapping the daughter of Captain Takigawa and holding the Earth hostage.

Meanwhile, Zone Fighter was a Toho tokusatsu show that took place — in continuity! — between Godzilla vs. Megalon and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. It’s all about the zone Family, whose planet Peaceland was destroyed by the evil alien race known as the Garogans. The children of the family are Zone Fighter, Zone Angel and Zone Junior, powered by toy-like weapons.

King Ghidorah and Girus show up, as does Godzilla, who has a special cave built for him by the Zone Family so he has a place to relax. It lasted for 26 episodes before poor ratings ended the show, even with the appearances of Toho’s most famous monsters. Also: Every bad guy monster dies horribly on this show.

For an example of that, Godzilla sets Wargilgar on fire in this, as we watch that poor kaiju dance around ablaze. Burn, Tokyo, burn! There’s also a magnetic kaiju named Jikiro that gets torn apart. In America, we only saw fights between monsters. Kids in Japan demanded blood.

This also ends as so many Japanese movies do with one of the heroes bravely sacrificing his life to save everyone else. I didn’t understand the idea of nobility as a child and it just made me sad. It still does. But then again, did I really want. these antenna aliens telling me how to live my life? Today, I’d do the same thing, but it’s not as cool to drive a minivan into a spaceship as it is to drive a big flying battleship.

Anyway: This movie goes good with drugs.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

The Asylum put this out one day after Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Your grandmother would have bought you this for Christmas and said, “I know you love that Godzooky so much.”

Directed by Mark Atkins (Planet of the Sharks) and James Thomas with a script by Atkins, this has an industrialist named Billy Ford (Adrian Bouchet) is drilling on the ocean floor — the Kermadec Trench off the coast of New Zealand , if you want to be precise — when there’s an accident. He sends two of his people, Cherise (Donna Cormack Thomson) and Riley (Chris Fisher) to learn the truth, along with a government agent and myth expert Sarah Murray (Natalie Robbie). They find a kaiju that looks like a giant winged starfish, which means that they need to awaken The Living Mountain to fight it.

General Horne (Eric Roberts) is also involved, as he leads the Navy. Wouldn’t he be an admiral? And what’s he going to do against a giant monster with magma for blood? That said, the starfish looks good, but this is a movie that gets all the parts of giant monster movies wrong. Forget humans and their problems, give us a quick reason why two monstrous beings must battle and let them go at one another.

I am a simple man and I understand these rules.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This begins with a bomb threat on an airplane, which is soon hijacked, with pilot Ei Sugisaka (Teruo Yoshida) and stewardess Kuzumi Asakura (Tomomi Sato) held at gunpoint. As the plane changes course to Okinawa, a UFO smacks into their flight path and causes them to crash, killing everyone except Mrs. Neal (Kathy Horan), Senator Mano (Eizo Kitamura), weapons dealer Hirofumi Tokiyasu (Hideo Ko) and his wife Noriko (Yuko Kusunoki), space biologist Professor Saga (Masaya Takahashi), psychiatrist Dr. Momotake (Nobuo Kaneko), the boy who called in the bomb threat and the hijacker, who takes Kuzumi and makes his way toward the UFO, which splits his head open and sends a blob into his body.

Dr. Momotake is attacked by the teenager and knocked off a cliff, where he finds the hijacker, who drains the blood from his body. It soon kills Tokiyasu and possesses Noriko, speaking with the voice of an alien race through her body. The Gokemidoro have invaded Earth and no human will survive. She falls off a cliff and instantly turns into a corpse.

The survivors lock themselves in what’s left of the plane, but the teenager explodes his bomb, allowing the hijacker to kill Mrs. Neal. Mano locks all of them out of the plane as they set the hijacker on fire, but even that won’t stop the alien, which kills everyone but Sugisaka and Kuzumi, who find every car empty on a highway and every human dead.

Nearly every character — other than the survivors — is a horrible person and does just as much to kill people as the aliens. As it is, even when the two characters survive, they only will live long enough to see the invasion begin, unless a miracle occurs after the credits.

If you ever wondered why the sky is so red when the Bride lands in Japan during Kill Bill Volume 1, this movie is the reason. Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of it.

Directed by Hajime Satô, who also used the Westernized name Terence Ford and also  directed The Golden Bat, this was based on the tokusatsu series Gokemidoro. This feels like The Blob meets The Thing and then space vampires in a world where everything is neon and even birds realize that things are hopeless and commit suicide. 1960s Japanese science fiction horror made by people that know that mankind is hopeless because while other filmmakers made movies about the horrors of nuclear war, they had already survived it and knew everything was darkness.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Director, writer, producer and ape costume wearer David L. Hewitt made some wild movies like The Wizard of Mars, Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, Girls from Thunder Strip, Journey to the Center of Time and Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors before doing effects for films like Syngenor, It’s Alive III, Shocker, Superman IV, Willow and many more.

Shot in Bronson Canyon and Simi Valley in California, this is a movie filled with stock footage and stolen monsters, like the cave monster coming from Goliath and the Dragon. There’s also a plastic dinosaur at one point obviously being held by someone’s hand, which had to have been the same effect from One Million AC/DC. 

Circus owner Mark Remington (Anthony Eisley, who in addition to campaigning for school prayer ended up being in some bafflingly goofy movies that I love, such as The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals and Dracula vs. Frankenstein) is losing money and sure he’s about to go out of business.  He goes to Africa to find Gorgo, a giant ape, who is known by April Adams (Megan Timothy), one of those white women brought to the jungle by her older scientist father.

I was not expecting her father to be named Tonga Jack (Kent Taylor), but this movie is just ridiculous — and I’m not being so bad it’s good here, this movie is just ready to eat your brain — like having Bruce Kimball play a clown and a witch doctor who is — you knew it — in brownface. Supposedly, the costumes are from a real headhunting tribe. This may also be William Castle ballyhoo.

You can watch this on Tubi.