Rodan!

I love Rodan, the movie that is. It was my first Japanese monster movie I think. For some reason it played on my local TV stations while I could hardly get the other films, save for some of the later and weaker Godzilla flicks. Along with the other dandy Godzilla Vs. The Thing which showed up on Halloween flim fests, I cut my teeth on Kaiju with Rodan.

And as it turns out I was lucky to do so. Rodan is a rich movie for any pulp-genre fanboy. It's part noirish murder mystery, part bug-monster movie in the traditon of THEM, part UFO flick, and part giant Japanses monster movie, with a little romance flicked in at the end for good measure. This movie has got it all.

Recently I finally got to see Rodan in the original Japanese form, and it's a somber monster movie, with a real mystery to be solved. Rodan doesn't show up for a very very long time, while the screen is occupied by some above-average acting. The scenes where the hero finds himself stranded among the insect-monsters in the egg chamber of Rodan gave me shivers as a kid and still is an effectively creepy scene. That it's presented as a memory gives it an added dimension, a dreamy delusional quality.

The UFO portions of the movie are decent, but when Rodan finally shows up and starts blowing over buildings the movie really gets humming. More even than Godzilla (a living a-bomb), Rodan is a natural disaster producing in his/their wake a small flood, an earthquake, and an ersatz hurricane. Maybe it's the recent news, but seeing an entire city getting blown off its foundations was pretty unnerving, even in a funky old monster movie.

The ending continues to affect me. The Rodans cleave together in a world they cannot cope with, and die in yet another natural disaster, a volcano. It's an odd twist and ties them to the young lovers we've watched throughout the movie, who have also been rocked by the disasters both personal and ecological in the movie.

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