I watched Godzilla vs Hedorah for the first time recently. This has to be one of the strangest Godzilla films I’ve seen yet. The intro song feels in the vein of a James Bond jazzy song but with a a pretty morbid message about how much we’re destroying the Earth with pollution. I assumed it would be Honda directing it given this strong social message, so I was surprised to find it was someone else (Yoshimitsu Banno).

Hedorah is actually a pretty cool monster. He has a few distinct phases, two of which he can switch between at anytime. I also think he’s somewhat cute with his big glowing eyes. I found the deaths caused by him in this movie to be more disturbing to watch than most other monsters as we see the immediate effects of his gas essentially dissolving a body to a skeleton close-up, rather than say Ghidorah leveling a city from above.

I didn’t care for the inconsistencies of Hedorah’s origin. It would make sense as social commentary to have him simply be created by all the sludge and pollutants dumped into the water, not unlike Godzilla being created by nuclear testing, but then they go and say he likely came from another planet, which takes some of the blame away from humans.

The tone of the movie is all over the place. At certain points there are these little animated transition scenes that felt very Monty Python to me. There are moments when Godzilla and Hedorah face off against one another and it honestly feels like they’re communicating, but there’s no dialogue or text bubbles that accompany them, so as a viewer we’re just watching the two stand around, and not do anything, which is a bit awkward. And then there’s Godzilla’s theme by Riichirō Manabe, which sounds so goofy. I still enjoyed the movie, and some of its tonal inconsistencies are just a byproduct of its time, but I wish we could have seen a meaner and more serious Godzilla film, with an Ifukube score, rather than the more kid-friendly version we have here.