



This movie, thought of by many fans as one of the best of the lot, was a disappointment to me. It was advertised as having all the Toho giant monsters in it and along with all the good reviews I had read about it, I guess my expectations just soared a bit too high.
In the future... 1999 (looks more like the late 60s to me!), all the world's giant monsters have been confined to Monster Island (here I began giggling, because in my dubbed version they translated the word island as land so we have all the world's monsters confined to Monster Land. Sometimes dubbing can be a good thing. ::snicker::) Each monster is given his own special environment on Monster Island, each with it's own special containment field to keep them from wandering off.
The fun begins when alien invaders decide to use the monsters to soften up the Earth for their invasion attempt. Naturally that means all the monsters get to escape and each gets a major world city to attack. Godzilla attacks New York City. Mothra destroys Beijing. Rodan gets Moscow. And our buddy King Ghidrah gets to stomp Tokyo.
I don't want to get anyone's hopes up on this this though. In spite of all that good sounding stuff above, this movie is a disappointment on many levels, proving that too much of good thing truely can be bad. For one thing the screen time given to each monster is limited so the destruction scenes of the world's major cities are just way too short. For example Godzilla didn't get to smash the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center or kick down the Empire State Building! There are entirely too many silly scenes with the cheesy spaceship, don't get me wrong I have nothing against cheesy spaceships, but this goes back to "too much of a good thing...". Then there's that hokey reporter and the annoying cuts to newscasts through out the movie, didn't they realize that narration on the plot of a movie went out in the fifties? Surely that is the only purpose for this facet, the movie would have been much better without it. Finally, the only thing that saves the movie is the ending... the massive monster attack! These fighting tactics can only be compared to Hollywood Hulk Hogan and his nWo!
CREDITS
Kaiju Soshingeki [Parade of Monsters] (1968)
Released in U.S. as Destroy All Monsters (1969)
CAST
Katsuo Yamabe........................Akira Kubo
Dr. Yoshida..........................Jun Tazaki
Commander Sugiyama.............Yoshibumi Tajima
Kyoko Manabe...................Yukiko Kobayashi
Leader of the Kilaaks..................Kyoko Ai
Dr. Otani.......................Yoshio Tsuchiya
Nishikawa..........................Kenji Sahara
CREW
Director...........................Ishiro Honda
Screenplay.........Ishiro Honda & Kaoru Mabuchi
Special Effects..................Teisho Arikawa
Music.............................Akira Ifukube
Running Time: 89 minutes
U.S. VERSION
Released by American International
Running Time: 89 minutes
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