Thanks for the memories!

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991)** 1/2 (out of 4) A UFO lands in Tokyo and it turns out that time travelers are on board. They've traveled back in time to warn Japan that their country is going to be reduced to rubble. One is due to pollution but the big issue is that Godzilla is going to be coming back and he isn't their friend.GODZILLA VS. KING GHIDORAH is obviously going to appeal to those die hard fans of the big G. But how does your average fan going to take it? I think for the most part it's an entertaining movie but there's no question that there are some flaws in it including keeping the big guy off camera for so long. It takes thirty-minutes for a dinosaur to briefly appear, fifty-minutes for King Ghidorah to appear and Godzilla doesn't show up until the hour mark.Obviously there's a lot of stuff going on here and some of it is campy enough to where it could hold its head right up there with some of the sillier entries from the 70s. I mean, there's one man who is a robot and the scenes of him running fast through the streets are really bad. The effects are extremely cheap and laughable and they bring the film down a notch. I'd also argue that the WWII footage was also poorly done and looked incredibly cheap. With that said, the Godzilla costume looks pretty darn good and I thought it was realistic enough for the film. The King Ghidorah was also good looking, although not quite as good as Godzilla.I actually thought the story itself was fairly good and the use of the time travelers actually paid off very well. The biggest problem with the film is the fact that it clocks in at 100-minutes and there are way too many moments where there aren't any monsters on the screen and the dialogue and story aren't good enough to make up for that. Once the final battle starts to happen we're treated to the action and destruction that fans have come to love but it's a long way getting there.

This film is probably the most wonderful mess I've ever seen. It's loaded with plot holes, full of terrible dubbing and dialogue, and some hysterical 'special' effects (I'm looking at you, sprinting future android...)To summarise the plot (probably an exercise in futility):Some future dudes come back in time and offer to save Japan from Godzilla, who in their time has totally destroyed the country. They go back in time some more, to WWII, and teleport the dinosaur that would become Godzilla under the polar ice cap so he's safely out of the way (because just killing him would be too hard, I guess). However, before leaving, the future dudes leave some future furbies behind.Upon returning to the present (where everyone still knows about Godzilla, even though he never existed) it turns out the furbies were turned into King Ghidorah by the nuclear testing that would have created Godzilla, and the future people are using him (somehow) to smash the hell out of Japan. Turns out those naughty future people lied - in their time Japan is an economic megapower that basically rules the world, and they hijacked the time machine to come back and destroy them in the past... or something. Not sure why they bothered to enlist the the help of present-day Japanese to achieve this, rather than just doing it themselves.But anyway, the future dudes are undone when their Japanese team-member (who was apparently fine with this scheme until now) betrays them, and hatches a plan with the Japanese government to re-create Godzilla using a nuclear submarine in the hopes he will destroy King Ghidorah. But it turns out Godzilla has in fact already been created because a Russian nuclear sub just happened to crash in the exact same spot where the future people had dumped the dinosaur in the past (again begging the question why they didn't just kill it). Godzilla heads to a Ghidorah- ravaged Japan and monster smackdowns ensue. Godzilla wins, Ghidorah is destroyed and the evil future people are killed. The end, right?Nope. Godzilla now turns on Japan and begins smashing things up big time. So the future Japanese lady goes back to the future (where apparently the plan to destroy Japan has been abandoned), finds King Ghidorah's corpse, turns him into cyborg Mecha-King Ghidorah and pilots him back in time to fight Godzilla in the ruins of Tokyo. More questions, such as why didn't you travel back to a point *before* Godzilla trashed half of Japan, arise. Mecha-King Ghidorah eventually emerges from the brawl victorious, crashing into the ocean and taking Godzilla with him.Future heroine returns to her own time, but not before telling one of our heroes she is in fact a descendant of his in an apparently emotional scene that adds precisely nothing to the film. Beneath the ocean, Godzilla awakens as the credits roll.And all that happens in *one* movie.Seriously, you owe it to yourself to watch this mess. Despite only being an hour and forty-five long, with all the stuff going on it feels like a three-hour epic. There's so much crazy - the future android in particular is absolutely hysterical pretty much any time it's on screen - and the needlessly convoluted plot has more holes than Swiss cheese. Add to that those classic Godzilla model effects that manage to be both very impressive and utterly lame all at the same time and you're onto a winner.I don't even know what score to give this. But it's best taken with a healthy dose of alcohol.

Godzilla and time travel fumble around with each other in an enjoyable but confusing entry. It mostly confuses because the time travel plot doesn't make much sense. Why do the aliens just move Godzilla? Who knows. It's great to see a bit more origin, even if it doesn't all add up. There are some excellent comedic scenes, aided by some hammy acting. The scene with a Mr. Spielberg is a great laugh out loud moment. The war scenes are a little something new, and the anti Americanism has been blown out of proportion. One of the characters even says that the dinosaur was just protecting its island. Ghidorah soon makes an appearance, and there's even more fun to be had with Mecha-Ghidorah. This was a jump back into the cheesiness of earlier films, but after the undeserved failure of the previous installment, that was to be expected.

Heisei had a dark theme with more topical and realistic (as you can get for Godzilla) plots. Following the uninspiring box office performance of 1989's Godzilla vs Biollante, Toho took this as audiences only wanting to see Godzilla fight classic monsters. One of Godzilla's best known, if not THE best known, opponents was King Ghidorah, aka The King of Terror. Toho also switched gears with the plot and chose to take a much more wild, Showa-esque direction with the plot and theme of the film.As a general rule, time travel plots can be pretty messy. Although you can actually make this one fit, it's still questionable for the general audience that won't give it as much thought. The characters in question seem a little stale, as if they never really got into their characters. Special effects were generally okay, although they fell short of Godzilla vs Biollante. Pacing was a problem for some of the Heisei Godzilla movies, but it wasn't much of a problem here. They managed to keep Godzilla's appearance from the audience for over an hour, which is something of a feat in itself.The monsters make good appearances here. Godzilla looks about as good as he did the last time, although his 1944 "Godzillasaurus" looks hopeless. Maybe it's just hindsight bias, but after seeing what was done with Jurassic Park only two years later, I question Toho's effort here. Moving on, I'm loving the redesign of King Ghidorah (NOT a fan of the origin "monsters" for his creation, however). KG is beautiful, both menacing and majestic at the same time. When he's given a new lease on life as Mecha-King Ghidorah, he still looks great, although his inward-pointing knees remind one of a child needing a run to the restroom; this isn't to say it detracts from the monster as not many people notice/care anyways.The odd thing about Mecha-King Ghidorah is his apparent lack of a power increase over the original King Ghidorah. He doesn't really fare any better than King Ghidorah did against Godzilla despite technology from the 23rd century. Side note: the time travel plot still ruins this for me. If they could engineer the Dorats, why couldn't they just engineer a giant monster like King Ghidorah? Or if not, why wouldn't they create a giant robot like 20th century Japan could with 1993's Mechagodzilla? How is it that this 23rd century technology doesn't come close to the performance of 20th century Japan's Mechagodzilla? So many questions that time travel forces a person to bring up.If you get the impression that I think this is a mediocre movie with great looking monsters, you'd be right. The battle scenes are fairly average, but the film can be fun if you ignore the standards set by prior Heisei films. It's certainly different, androids, time travel, 23rd century humans, and all. Had it improved on character development or battle scenes compared to Godzilla vs Biollante, it might've scored just as as well. As it is, Godzilla vs King Ghidorah is a love it or hate it movie. Depends on how you view silly. If you're a Showa fan, you'll appreciate it more. I rate it a 6/10.