K. Waste posted:

Lol, I've tried it four times all the way through and no dice. At the most it keeps me morbidly curious enough to keep coming back, and those first twenty minutes are some of the best I've seen in Italian exploitation. But that was Dawn of the Dead's problem, too, for me. When you sit down and watch both films, you realize that the preamble is actually more interesting than what comes after.

I'm not putting down Fulci, and I've only seen one of his other films (Don't Torture a Duckling, which I really got into). And watching the DVD special features I really appreciated that screenwriters Elisa Briganti and Dardano Sacchetti decided to combine both the contemporary and 'classic' concepts of the zombie. It's certainly an important film, because it's really the first one that explicitly connects the flesh-eating ghouls that Romero invented to the concept of the 'living dead.' But as with Dawn of the Dead, I think it's another case where 'significant' doesn't necessarily translate to great cinema.


It's so joyfully sleazy. Italian exploitation is like the Bart Simpson of international cinema, a "shameless burlesque of irrepressible youth."

But, I could go on and on, so, I'll make an effort post:



That, my friends, is the Japanese poster for Monster King Godzilla, the Japanese dub of the international market re-edit of Gojira. Most of what I'm about to write is apocryphal, so just know that I'm printing the legend.

The movie apparently did quite well, but anybody who has seen Godzilla, King of the Monsters! already knows that it basically replaces the documentary perspective of the original and has everything channeled through Raymond Burr's perspective. There's a good deal of film that is told simply through Burr basically watching Gojira without subtitles and having his guide translate for him. Thus, when the film was translated back into Japanese, often times it comes off as if the translator is blatantly lying to Burr about what people in the movie have actually said.