When faced with the film War of the Gargantuas, you might find yourself facing two questions. The first being “What’s a Gargantua?” and the second being “Is there a movie I need to watch before this?” The answers are “It’s a giant hairy man, which is technically called a ‘Frankenstein’” and “Technically this is a sequel to ‘Frankenstein Versus Barugon’ but nothing from that really matters”.

So, War of the Gargantuas is a kaiju movie from Toho, and like some of their other monsters, this has very little to do with Godzilla. The film has a similar start to Godzilla: a ship has a catastrophic accident at sea caused by a Kaiju (in this case, the crew is eaten, rather than being dosed with lethal amounts of radiation), and scientists investigate. They learn that the ship was attacked by Frankenstein’s Monster, which the scientists find odd, because theirs was a baby and mountainous instead of aquatic (which implies there’s more than one).

Through investigating various attacks, it turns out there are, indeed, two of them, as the two end initially trying to communicate, before the aquatic one commits to being a man-eating monster, forcing the mountain one to have to fight them, until both are ultimately killed by an undersea volcano.

So, this film is an interesting Kaiju film. On the one hand, the monster suits are more human-looking, making the monsters less weird-looking than similar characters in the Godzilla movies. On the other hand, that means the choreography can actually be more involved, because you don’t have the same kind of rubber suit issues. Except the fights are all set at night, and the monsters have the same silhouette, which makes it hard to track a winner.

It’s frustrating because Ishiro Honda is clearly trying to do an interesting “nature vs. nurture” story, but big chunks of it are undercut by stylistic decisions that make the monsters harder to tell apart on a fight. The cast is otherwise generally fine, but when you’ve built your film around the monster fights, anything that undermines those ends up undermining the whole film.

I’m glad I watched this, but I also understand why the series ended here.

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