Hot Picks

- There's No Such Thing as Zombies 2020

- Ready for My Close Up 2019

- Maxxie LaWow: Drag Super-shero 2024

- Watch the Skies 2022

- Dream Hacker 2025

- Love and Comminication 2022

- If I Could Ride Again 2025

- Freak Off 2025

- Lavender Men 2025

- Lost Cos 2023

- Sound of the Surf 2022

- The Stillness 2025

- Frankie Freako 2024

- The Texas Witch 2025

- Cannibal Mukbang 2023

- Bleeding 2024

- No Choice 2025

- Nahual 2025

- Bitter Souls 2025

- A Very Long Carriage Ride 2025

- The Matriarch 2024

- Oxy Morons 2025

- Ed Kemper 2025

- Piglet 2025

- Walter, Grace & the Submarine 2024

- Midnight in Phoenix 2025

- Dorothea 2025

- Mauler 2025

- Consecration 2023

- The Death of Snow White 2025

- Franklin 2025

- ApoKalypse 2025

- Live and Die in East LA 2023

- A Season for Love 2025

- The Arkansas Pigman Massacre 2025

- Visceral: Between the Ropes of Madness 2012

- The Darkside of Society 2023

- Jackknife 2024

- Family Property 2: More Blood 2025

- Feral Female 2025

- Amongst the Wolves 2024

- Autumn 2023

- Bob Trevino Likes It 2024

- A Hard Place 2025

- Finding Nicole 2025

- Juliet & Romeo 2025

- Off the Line 2024

- First Moon 2025

- Healing Towers 2025

- Final Recovery 2025

- Greater Than 2014

- Self Driver 2024

- Primal Games 2025

- Grumpy 2023

- Swing Bout 2024

- Dalia and the Red Book 2024

- Project MKGEXE 2025

- Two to One 2024

- Talk of the Dead 2016

- A Killer Conversation 2014

- First Impressions Can Kill 2017

- Star Crash 1979

- Strangler of the Swamp 1946

Gojira no Gyakushu

Gigantis the Fire Monster
Godzilla Raids Again / Godzilla kehrt zurück / Godzilla's Counter Attack

Japan 1955
produced by
Tomoyuki Tanaka for Toho
directed by Motoyoshi Oda
starring Hiroshi Koizumi, Minoru Chiaki, Setsuko Wakayama, Takashi Shimura, Yukio Kasama, Mayuri Mokusho, Masao Shimizu, Seijiro Onda, Sonosuke Sawamura, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Minosuke Yamada
screenplay by Takeo Murata, Shigeaki Hidaka, special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya, music by Masaru Sato

Godzilla, Anguirus

review by
Mike Haberfelner

Quick Links

Abbott & Costello

The Addams Family

Alice in Wonderland

Arsène Lupin

Batman

Bigfoot

Black Emanuelle

Bomba the Jungle Boy

Bowery Boys

Bulldog Drummond

Captain America

Charlie Chan

Cinderella

Deerslayer

Dick Tracy

Dick Turpin

Dr. Mabuse

Dr. Orloff

Doctor Who

Dracula

Edgar Wallace made in Germany

Elizabeth Bathory

Emmanuelle

Fantomas

Flash Gordon

Frankenstein

Frankie & Annette Beach Party movies

Freddy Krueger

Fu Manchu

Fuzzy

Gamera

Godzilla

Hercules

El Hombre Lobo

Incredible Hulk

Jack the Ripper

James Bond

Jekyll and Hyde

Jerry Cotton

Jungle Jim

Justine

Kamen Rider

Kekko Kamen

King Kong

Laurel and Hardy

Lemmy Caution

Lobo

Lone Wolf and Cub

Lupin III

Maciste

Marx Brothers

Miss Marple

Mr. Moto

Mister Wong

Mothra

The Munsters

Nick Carter

OSS 117

Phantom of the Opera

Philip Marlowe

Philo Vance

Quatermass

Robin Hood

The Saint

Santa Claus

El Santo

Schoolgirl Report

The Shadow

Sherlock Holmes

Spider-Man

Star Trek

Sukeban Deka

Superman

Tarzan

Three Mesquiteers

Three Musketeers

Three Stooges

Three Supermen

Winnetou

Wizard of Oz

Wolf Man

Wonder Woman

Yojimbo

Zatoichi

Zorro

Available on DVD!

To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned)

Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
Kobayashi (Minoru Chiaki), an airplane pilot working for Yamaji's (Yukio Kasama) fishery who guides the fishing boats to large tuna swarms, experiences a technical fault in his airplane & has to water his plane next to an uninhabited island. There he & Tsukioka (Hiroshi Koizumi), who has come to rescue him, to their great shock see the giant dinosaur-monster Godzilla - who was thought dead - fight a giant hedgehog-like monster Anguirus.

Fleeing in terror they reach safe land safely, however, when they report their findings to the authorities, they can do little to relieve our heroes of their fears ... since leading scientist Doctor Yamane (Takashi Shimura) is convinced there is no weapon that can harm let alone kill Godzilla, & the only chance humanity has against the monster is - since Godzilla is attracted by light - to completely darken the cities everytime the monster's approaching, & shoot lightballs off into a different direction to lure Godzilla away ...

Soon Godzilla approaches Osaka - where Kobayashi & Tsukioka live -, & the tactic to lure the monster away with lighballs seems to work fine ... until our heroes get involved in a carchase, with them pursuing 3 escaped convicts, at the end of which the convicts truck crashes into an oil refinery, which sets the whole refinery aflame.

Godzilla, spotting the fire, thinks this to be too nice an invitation to miss out on & soon lays waste to Osaka's harbour area ... when Anguisus arrives too, & the 2 fight it out once & for all, with the whole city as battleground & in the end Anguirus losing both the fight & his life ... Godzilla retreats - for the time being.

With the Osaka branche of the fisbhing company they work for literally laid to waste, Kobayashi, Tsukiko & Tsukiko's fiancée move to Hokkaido to resume working, where the men also meet their old friends for mthe air force.

Of course, soon Godzilla is sighted near Hokkaido, & all the air force pilots fly off on a search for the monster, but it is of course Tsukiko who finds Godzilla swimming through the sea, & when his plane runs out of gas, Kobayashi takes over & witnesses Godzilla leaving the water, taking a hike on a snowy island full of mountains. & while he, with some fancy flying maneuvres tries to keep the monster on the island, waiting for the army to arrive, Hidemi - Tsukiko's fiancée - finds out Kobayashi is in love with her too ... but it's too late for Kobayashi, who, when playing Godzilla's lure is killed, crashing into a mountain ... but the avalanche his crashing lane is causing gives the army the uidea to bury the monster under avalanches & avalanches of snow - so Kobayashi's death was not in vain.

 

Despite being far less childish than Godzilla-movies got in the 1960's, this first sequel to Godzilla from 1954 is of course no equal to the original on a pure quality level, it has pretty much all the qualities that hastily produced sequels to a surprise successes usually have: a very derivative, formulaic story, pedestrian storytelling, & special effctw that are on one hand only more of the same, on the other hand inferior to the original (partly due to the fact that the [relative] originality is gone).

The film taken by itself suffers too much from a dull human-interest-story abiout the love triangle between the three main characters, but this subplot, it seems, is not really thought through from the beginning, & further more it's only very loosely (& very late in the film) tied in with the main-(monster-)plot, which makes the movie, despite some massive monster wrestling, a rather boring affair.

 

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

Feeling lucky?
Want to
search
any of my partnershops yourself
for more, better results?
(commissions earned)

The links below
will take you
just there!!!

Find Gigantis the Fire Monster
at the amazons ...

USA  amazon.com

Great Britain (a.k.a. the United Kingdom)  amazon.co.uk

Germany (East AND West)  amazon.de

Looking for imports?
Find Gigantis the Fire Monster here ...

Thailand  eThaiCD.com
Your shop for all things Thai


Thanks for watching !!!

 

 

In times of uncertainty of a possible zombie outbreak, a woman has to decide between two men - only one of them's one of the undead.

 

There's No Such Thing as Zombies
starring
Luana Ribeira, Rudy Barrow and Rami Hilmi
special appearances by
Debra Lamb and Lynn Lowry

 

directed by
Eddie Bammeke

written by
Michael Haberfelner

produced by
Michael Haberfelner, Luana Ribeira and Eddie Bammeke

 

now streaming at

Amazon

Amazon UK

Vimeo

 

 

 

Robots and rats,
demons and potholes,
cuddly toys and
shopping mall Santas,
love and death and everything in between,
Tales to Chill
Your Bones to

is all of that.

 

Tales to Chill
Your Bones to
-
a collection of short stories and mini-plays
ranging from the horrific to the darkly humourous,
from the post-apocalyptic
to the weirdly romantic,
tales that will give you a chill and maybe a chuckle, all thought up by
the twisted mind of
screenwriter and film reviewer
Michael Haberfelner.

 

Tales to Chill
Your Bones to

the new anthology by
Michael Haberfelner

 

Out now from
Amazon!!!