“This is one lobster you don’t want to order!” Synopsis: A young man steals a boat to find his brother, but he and his shipmates become shipwrecked on a mysterious island inhabited by a giant sea monster and a slumbering Godzilla. Original Japanese title: Gojira, Ebirâ, Mosura: Nankai no daiketto

Calamity Brains:

Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster is fairly half-hearted, even for a Godzilla flick. Back in the kaiju heyday when studios were turning out these monster movies left and right, it took something special for one of the movies to stand out… and this one doesn’t.

Part of the problem is that this flick was originally written to star King Kong, not Ebirah. The adjustments make several parts of the movie uncharacteristic for our scaly hero, and the movie is further complicated by several mostly unrelated subplots. Mothra is there, for instance, but despite being built up far more than Godzilla within the story, she doesn’t actually awaken until the very end.

The real reason to watch kaiju is for the spectacular (and often spectacularly bad) monster battles. Here as well, Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster delivers poorly. The only giant monster who does much of anything throughout the movie is the titular shrimp Ebirah; Godzilla’s role is fairly limited. Of course, once we finally get into the monster-on-monster violence, the movie is quite fun… it just takes too long to get there, and it’s too brief when it finally does happen.

A word of caution: if you’re looking to round out your kaiju viewing, skip the MST3K version of this flick. The audio on their dubbed movie is bad enough, but the peanut gallery talking over the characters constantly means its even harder to follow what little plot there is.

Calamity Brains’ Rating: C