All Monsters Attack
Godzilla vs. Gigan
Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla
Ransom for a Dead Man
I made the drive with my sons to Syracuse to the Palace Theatre for a Godzilla triple feature.
Here are a handful of thoughts.
Watching movies on a big screen in the dark with others is still the Gold Standard.
You can easily find copies of all of these movies online with more vivid colors and clean images, copies that won't track out of frame and need to be adjusted by a trained professional projectionist, copies that don't look scratched and beaten up, like they've been watched and loved for longer than I've been alive (which they have).
What you can't get watching these movies at home alone is that moment during the pre-climax climax of Godzilla vs. Gigan (Godzilla first starts fighting Gigan and King Gidorah) when the sound unexpectedly drops in the theatre and remains out for three to five minutes while the house full of Godzilla fans begins lovingly crying out their own monster noises, growls, roars, screeches, skritches, etc. It was the most lovely film moment of the year for me and it was because of an imperfect technology that I love so much, that means so much to me.
Some day I need to write about Gremlins 2. I doubt that I'd be here writing about movies if it weren't for the "film break" moment in that movie when the gremlins take over the projection booth. That moment in the theater was one of the most important moments in my young cinephile life, forcing me to think of film as something created, constructed, made, something physical that was put together with intent.
All of this makes me think of Wender's Room 666 again, which is maybe the best movie I've seen all year, a series of static shots of persons in a room. Overall, maybe our current post-film post-TV digital reality is better for whatever "cinema" has become, but... we have lost something. The world has changed. So it was a rare pleasure to participate in that old world again for a single day in 2026.
I'm not a Godzilla superfan. I've only seen a handful of Godzilla films. Of the three Godzilla films showing at the Palace, I had only seen Godzilla vs. Gigan before and that was only last year. I think it's the best of the three, but my sons disagreed, arguing over whether All Monsters or Mecha was better.
What I'm most glad about was seeing All Monsters Attack in this festival day context. I was inclined to like it and had no pre-conceived notion that I was supposed to think this was the worst of the Showa Era. I found it overwhelmingly charming. Zeke pointed out that the bank bandit subplot was basically right out of the Abbot & Costello playbook, with the characters smacking each other for being idiots and slapstick fall after slapstick fall.
I haven't even mentioned that this Godzilla triple feature opened with a pre-show hour of cartoons! Pink Panther! Foghorn Leghorn, Daffy, Yosemite Sam, Bugs! Woody Woodpecker! James Hound! James Hound? Yeah. My favorite cartoon of the morning was this forgotten Terrytoons short directed by Ralph Bakshi. It's not good. Everything else shown was better than this one, but... it was so undeniably pleasant, reminding me of the sort of endless amount of animated material of this quality that I watched on television as a kid.
In this James Hound adventure, Diamond Jill has come up with a plan to smuggle expensive watches "across the border" using flying ducks. This plan is thwarted by Hound, who sums up the moral for us: "Classy chicks with shady tricks usually end up in a fix."
Which is exactly the same message as the second Columbo TV film, Ransom for a Dead Man.