The character of Riddick first showed up in Pitch Black, a movie that became a surprise success, leading to not just this sequel, but the 2013 sequel Riddick, all directed and written by David Twohy, based on characters created by Ken and Jim Wheat.

Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel) is one of the last surviving Furyans, a race that excels at combat and can see in the dark. After the events of the anime Dark Fury, Riddick has been hiding on the frozen planet U.V.

Bounty hunters under the command of Toombs (Nick Chinlund) are hunting Riddick, who easily kills most of them and demands to know how they found him. There was a communication from New Mecca on planet Helion Prime, where Imam (Keith David), a survivor from the first movie, lives. Imam wanted Riddick to know that the Necromongers are looking for him, led by Aereon’s (Judi Dench) prediction that he is the last of the Furyans and must be killed. Her prophecy is that the leader of their faith, Lord Marshal (Colm Feore), will be murdered by this warrior. Commander Vaako (Keith Urban) is sent on a mission to stop Riddick.

Riddick is caught and sent to a prison planet called Crematoria, where he meets Jack, who is actually Kyra (Alexa Davalos), the girl that he saved in the first movie. She resents him for stranding her all alone. Meanwhile, Dame Vaako (Thandie Newton), Commander Vaako’s wife, has a conspiracy to have her husband replace Lord Marshal.

I kind of love this movie because it feels like Twohy was given the keys to the money vault and backed up a truck, ready to make his science fiction visions — and Diesel’s love of Dungeons and Dragons — an actual motion picture. It’s so dense with backstory that it feels like you’re several movies deep in a franchise instead of a sequel starring a character who was the secret hero of the first film that was a sleeper success.

Here’s how geeky this movie is. When Universal decided that they wanted to make a sequel, Twohy wrote the screenplays for not one, but three sequels, to which he and Diesel put into separate leather binders and presented them along with the key for the first binder.

Vin Diesel wanted Dame Judi Dench to play Aereon as he was a long-time fan. As she was acting in a play, he had her dressing room filled with so many bouquets of flowers that she couldn’t get into it. He told her that they couldn’t cast this movie until she agreed to accept the role. In her autobiography And Furthermore, she says that she never really understood what was going on, but enjoyed the experience of making the movie and loved the sets, which were the third-largest user of electricity in Canada.

The Arrow Video 4K UHD of The Chronicles of Riddick is packed with so much! It starts with brand new 4K restorations by Arrow Films of the theatrical and director’s cuts of the film, approved by David Twohy. Then, you get a reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by Dan Mumford and an illustrated collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by Walter Chaw, original production notes and the Chronicles Compendium, an overview of the characters and planets featured in the film.

Extras on the discs include Ambition on Another Scale: Chronicling a Blockbuster Sequel, a brand-new feature-length documentary on the film, featuring interviews with writer-director David Twohy, actors Keith David and Linus Roache, storyboard artist Brian Murray and many others; interviews with Twohy, Murray and David; trailers; two audio commentaries, one by David Twohy and Vin Diesel and the other by Twohy and co-stars Karl Urban and Alexa Davelos; an introduction by Twohy; archive features on the worlds of the movie and its characters; a production calendar and behind the scenes features; three deleted scenes; animated segments that describe the many worlds in this movie; Toombs’ Chase Log, a short film narrated by Nick Chinlund in character; a guided tour of the set by Vin Diesel, along with 360-degree panoramic views of eight sets from the film; on-set interviews with Twohy, Diesel, Dench, Urban, Colm Feore, Alexa Davelos, Thandiwe Newton and producer Scott Kroopf; promotional interviews with Twohy, Diesel, Newton, Urban, Davelos and Feore; Escape from Butcher Bay, a compilation of cutscenes from the acclaimed tie-in video game and The Lowdown, a television special produced to promote the film’s original release.

You can get this movie on 4K UHD or blu ray from MVD.

Dr. Charles Decker (Michael Gough) has been presumed dead, but he’s really been hiding out in Africa, learning how to grow plants and animals to a huge size. Like the baby chimp Konga, which he turns into a monstrous ape and then, well, he goes bonkers. I mean, he was before too, but even more after. He sends Konga to London to kill all of the scientists who made fun of him like Professor Tagore (George Pastell) and Dean Foster (Austin Trevor).

No one knows that and he keeps on teaching, getting obsessed with one of his students named Sandra (Claire Gordon), which angers his assistant and lover — and wife? — Margaret (Margo Johns). When she turns him down, Decker assaults her, at which point Margaret injects Konga with so much of the serum that he grows gigantic and kills her before going wild on London, starting with grabbing Decker and tossing him. As for Sandra, she’s attacked by a man-eating plant and the movie never gets back to her!

The cops kill Konga — no comments, I’m trying to be non-political — and he turns back into a chimp.

Directed by John Lemont, this was written and produced by Herman Cohen, who also produced Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. His co-writer was Aben Kandel, who was also Cohen’s co-writer for Trog, Craze and I Was a Teenage Werewolf.

Dudley Dean McGaughy wrote the novelization as Dean Owen. It has a ton more sex — the movie has nothing like it — than the film, as does McGaughy’s Reptilicus paperback. Charlton Comics — who published two issues of a Reptilicus comic book — had also done a Gorgo comic book with Joe Gill and Steve Ditko. Of that work, said, “I read the screenplay of Gorgo. From the first reading to this day, I marvel at how well Joe adapted the character to comic books.”

Gill and Ditko brought the big ape back from the dead for a few stories in which he fought mole men and undersea monsters. It’s wild that Ditko was drawing this book at about the same time that he was on the Marvel monster books and starting on Spider-Man.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I’ve put off watching this for years — 28 of them! — because I knew how it would impact me.

This is it. This is the end of Godzilla, as there’s no escape from death for any of us. The only question is whether it will come at the ends of the new and unstoppable kaiju Destroyah, which has come from the Oxygen Destroyer that has stopped Godzilla before, or from the fact that inside the creature’s heart, Godzilla has a nuclear reactor that is melting down.

The twenty-second film in the series and the seventh and final in the Heisei era, this is also the last movie for actress Momoko Kōchi, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka and composer Akira Ifukube.

So much of this is a callback to the first movie, starting with hearing the roar before the title.

Miki Saegusa (Megumi Odaka, who is in six of the Heisei era films) of the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center (UNGCC) has been tracking Godzilla and Little Godzilla since SpaceGodzilla was destroyed. She finds out that a volcanically triggered uranium deposit has caused Godzilla to go into meltdown and when his temperature reaches 1,200 °C, he will explode and melt the Earth with him.

The UNGCC finds a college student named Kenkichi Yamane (Yasufumi Hayashi), the grandson of Dr. Kyohei Yamane, the inventor of the Oxygen Destroyer. They use the Super X III to cool Godzilla for as long as they can. At the same time, crustaceans mutated by the Oxygen Destroyer rise and start to kill people before joining into one kaiju form known as Destroyah.

Miki uses Little Godzilla to fight the monster in the hopes that Godzilla will save him and die a valiant death in battle before blowing up. Instead, the child-like Godzilla is killed by Destroyah’s Micro-Oxygen beam as the kaiju final boss enters its perfect form.

As the scientists try to stop Godzilla, it mutates into a meltdown form, looking as if its covered with lava. It tears Destroyah apart, who is stopped by the UNGCC from flying away. Then, the various weapons fire on Godzilla, who slowly melts away, leaving Tokyo irradiated for the rest of time. Or so we would believe, until it suddenly goes away and the smaller Godzilla is reborn as the new King of the Monsters, signifying a new era.

Ifukube, when composing this, said he wrote the final song “as if he were writing the theme to his own death.”

This would have been it for Godzilla, but Hollywood started making new movies and that’s how we got to where we are. Did this movie make me cry? Oh man, you know it. You can make fun of these dumb movies with their rubber suits, but if you grew up with Godzilla and had such a worship of him in your young years, seeing him as someone who could defend you when things were dark, then even in your old age, the close of this film is beyond emotional. You are watching a best friend die.

Giant Space Monster Dogora, directed by Ishiro Honda with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya, is a kaiju movie that I would have hated as a child. It’s mostly a cops and robbers movies about diamonds, then it’s all about scientists. Dogora only randomly shows up and it’s a floating jellyfish that seems like one of the Lovecraft Elder Gods. As an adult, the strange look of this kaiju is exactly why I enjoyed this movie.

When several TV satellites launched by the Electric Wave Laboratory go missing, it’s discovered that they have collided with unidentified protoplasmic cells. While that’s happening, Inspector Komai (Yosuke Natsuki) is looking for whoever is stealing diamonds all over the world, which leads him to a crystallographer by the name of Dr. Munakata (Nobuo Nakamura).

Meanwhile, Mark Jackson (Robert Dunham) is dealing with diamond smugglers as an undercover agent of the World Diamond Insurance Association. They all soon learn that the diamonds — and other sources of carbon — are being eaten by Dogora, which is the form that the cells have taken. And you’ll never guess what defeats the creature. Artificial wasp venom.

Dogora is only in this movie other than a still at the beginning of Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters, but it has shown up in several video games, including Godzilla: Monster of Monsters, Godzilla: Heart-Pounding Monster Island!!, Godzilla: Trading Battle and Godzilla Generations.

This was syndicated by American-International Pictures as part of two of its TV packages, Amazing 66 and Sci-Fi 65. In their prints, all of the cast and credits removed, as there’s a jump cut from the main title to the first scene.

Take a look at the movies in these packages!

Amazing 66

• Attack of the Mushroom People
• Burn, Witch, Burn
• Castle of the Living Dead
• Swamp of the Lost Monster
• Dagora, the Space Monster
• Dementia 13
• Dr. Orloff’s Monster
• Evil Eye
• The Living Coffin
• Invasion
• Man In Outer Space
• Man with the X-Ray Eyes
• Mindbenders
• Monster from the Surf
• Panic In the Year Zero
• Reptilicus
• Space Monster
• The Terror
• Unearthly Stranger

Sci-Fi 65

• Amazing Transparent Man
• Angry Red Planet
• Atragon
• Attack of the Mushroom People
• Battle Beyond The Sun
• Beyond The Time Barrier
• Black Sabbath
• Black Sunday
• Blancheville Monster
• Brain That Wouldn’t Die
• Burn, Witch, Burn
• Castle of the Living Dead
• Circus of Horror
• Cry of the Bewitched
• Curse of the Swamp Creature
• Dagora The Space Monster
• Day The Earth Froze
• Death Pays In Dollars
• Dementia 13
• Dr. Orloff’s Monster
• Evil Eye
• The Eye Creatures
• Face of Terror
• From Istanbul, Orders to Kill
• Fury of the Apache
• Go Go Mania
• The Hand
• Invasion
• Invasion of the Star Creatures
• Invisible Creature
• Journey to the 7th Planet
• Konga
• Lost Battalion
• Lost World of Sinbad
• Man In Outer Space
• Master of the World
• Mind Benders
• MMM 83
• Monster from the Surf
• Night Tide
• Operation Atlantis
• Operation Counterspy
• Panic In the Year Zero
• Phantom Planet
• Planet of Blood
• Portrait In Terror
• Prisoner of the Jungle
• Pyro
• Reptilicus
• Savage Gringo
• Sea Fighters
• Space Monster
• Special Correspondent
• The Terror
• Terror in the Crypt
• Track of the Vampire
• Twist All Night
• Unearthly Stranger
• Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet
• Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women
• Wild Cats on the Beach
• X The Man With the X Ray Eyes
• Zontar The Thing From Venus

“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.