News

Godzilla premiered in November of 1954, eight months to the day after the United States set off its first hydrogen bomb. Indebted to but distinct from pioneering giant monster movies like 1925’s The Lost World, 1933’s King Kong, and 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the seminal Japanese kaiju film is more than just another special effects-driven creature feature. Working from a story by Shigeru Kayama, writer-director Ishirō Honda and co-writer Takeo Murata provide an outlet for post-war Japan’s fears.

In the atomic age parable, an ancient, 164-foot creature dubbed Gojira ravages Tokyo after being awakened from its deep-sea hibernation by nuclear testing. Scientist Daisuke Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), salvage ship captain Hideto Ogata (Akira Takarada), paleontologist Kyohei Yamane, and his daughter Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kōchi) are tasked with fulfilling their social obligations to stop the seemingly indestructible beast.

The decision to use an actor (Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka) in a...

Killer Collectibles highlights five of the most exciting new horror products announced each and every week, from toys and apparel to artwork, records, and much more.

Here are the coolest horror collectibles unveiled this week!

Godzilla 4K Uhd from Criterion

Godzilla will celebrate its 70th anniversary in style, as The Criterion Collection is bringing Toho’s 1954 Japanese kaiju classic to 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray on November 5.

The film has been newly restored in 4K with uncompressed monaural sound. A high-definition restoration of Terry Morse’s 1956 American reworking of the film, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, is also included.

Ishirō Honda directs from a script he co-wrote with Takeo Murata. Eiji Tsuburaya (Ultraman) helmed the special effects. Akira Takarada, Momoko Kōchi, Akihiko Hirata, and Takashi Shimura star with Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka as Godzilla.

Special features include: commentary by film historian David Kalat; interviews with Takarada, Nakajima, special effects technicians Yoshio Irie and Eizo Kaimai,...

The original Japanese version of Ishiro Honda's kaiju classic "Gojira" -- previously bowdlerized by American translators as "Godzilla" -- wasn't released in American theaters until 2004 to coincide with the film's 50th anniversary. Up until then, American audiences had to content themselves with the 1956 film "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!," a heavily re-edited version of "Gojira" that included new scenes of actor Raymond Burr narrating the action. The footage was directed by Terry O. Morse.

When "Gojira" was finally released in 2004, not every critic was pleased. Most audiences accepted that Honda's film more or less birthed the kaiju genre, and established a persistent pop culture icon that persists to this day. Roger Ebert acknowledged that "Gojira" could be significant while also being completely shabby. He gave the film only one and a half stars, saying it was "idiotic." "Godzilla at times looks uncannily like a man in a lizard suit,...

He may be king of the monsters and headliner of the longest-running film franchise, but Godzilla isn’t exactly a beacon of consistency. He made his premiere in Honda Ishirô’s 1954 classic Godzilla as an allegorical figure, warning of the dangers of nuclear technology, before eventually settling into a drive-in movie star and a hero for children, as well as those young at heart. That’s a somewhat unlikely legacy, especially considering that the original film ends with the creature’s unambiguous death.

Inspired by King Kong’s popularity in Japan, Godzilla’s filmmakers didn’t have the time or resources to execute the stop-motion movie magic that brought Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong to life (the 1933 monster adventure was re-released in Japan in 1952), but their resourcefulness and ingenuity resulted in a different kind of magic. Tsuburaya Eiji’s pioneering use of suitmation was not...

Elvis Presley’s handlers found the formula that would keep his stardom solvent through the 1960s in this well-confected, calculatedly vacant star vehicle that Everybody liked and enjoyed in 1961. The coolest celeb in America ended up in some of the squarest, least-hip films of the era. Why do we like it so? Cutting through the fog of nostalgia reveals the appeal. The Hawaiian scenery is a knockout, plus there’s good support from Joan Blackman and especially Angela Lansbury, who humbles herself to play an idiot mother caricature for Mister ‘Rock-a-Hula.’

Blue Hawaii

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Paramount Presents

1961 / Color/ 1:85 widescreen / 101 min. / Street Date November 15, 2022 / Available from / 39.99

Starring: Elvis Presley, Joan Blackman, Angela Lansbury, Nancy Walters, Roland Winters, John Archer, Howard McNear, Steve Brodie, Christian Kay, Iris Adrian, Hilo Hattie, Jenny Maxwell, Pamela Austin (Kirk), Darlene Tompkins, Jose De Vega, Frank Atienza, Ralph Hanalei, Gregory Gaye.

Cinematography: Charles Lang...

“Woman Warriors in Brutal Death Battle!” This adventure thriller has no reputation to speak of, and is mainly notable as a strange chapter in the topsy-turvy life of Curt Siodmak, who as a producer-writer-director, filmed this and another equally absurd jungle romp on location in Brazil. How Siodmak got these pictures going is a mystery — they received national releases, in Technicolor through Universal-International. CineSavant makes its best, wholly un-researched guesses, breaking all the rules of ethical film reportage. But honest, this is the jungle fantasy populated by Amazon warriors — all painted green.

Love Slaves of the Amazons

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1957 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 81 min. / Street Date June 14, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Don Taylor, Gianna Segale, Eduardo Ciannelli, Harvey Chalk, Wilson Viana, Eugenio Carlos, Tom Payne, Gilda Nery, Ana Maria Nabuco, John Herbert, Louis Serrano — and Paul Frees, times six.

Cinematography: Mario Pagés

Art Director: Pierino Massenzi

Film Editors: Oswald Hafenrichter,...

Author: Zehra Phelan

The veteran British actor, Charles Dance, who is best known for his role as Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones has signed up to star in the Michael Dougherty Godzilla: King of the Monsters alongside Sally Hawkins who is set to reprise her role as Dr Vivienne Graham from Gareth Edwards 2014 version of Godzilla.

Related: Kong: Skull Island Premiere Interviews

As with Kong: Skull Island, which starred Tom Hiddleston, reintroducing audiences to the slightly oversized ape, Godzilla: King of the Monsters looks all set to do the same story wise, even though no plot has yet been revealed before the pair meets for an almighty battle come 2020. Both films fall under the Legendary/Warner Bros cinematic universe, with a release date set for May 22nd, 2019, exactly a year before Godzilla vs Kong there is no doubt Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a part of this franchise.

Author: Jon Lyus

Fresh from her moment in the spotlight last night at the SAG Awards, where she shared the Ensemble in a Drama Series award with her Stranger Things brethren, news has come in of Millie Bobby Brown’s next project. She will be following up the second season of the huge Netflix smash with a leading role in Legendary’s next Godzilla film, subtitled King of (the) Monsters*.

Trick R Treat and Krampus director Michael Dougherty was recently confirmed as the man to replace Rogue One’s Gareth Edwards, who directed the 2014 series reboot. This new film has been scheduled for release on March the 22nd, 2019.

So far this is the only piece of casting news received, however we should see a new team line up to face the destruction and disaster we’ve come to expect. Godzilla 2 will build on the chaos of Edwards’ recent effort, and...

**Massive spoilers for every Godzilla movie, with the exception of the 2014 reboot, and Mothra follow**

August 6th and 9th, 1945 forever changed the course of history. When the first nuclear bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, World War II ended, but a new fear was born that dominated the thoughts of all men, women, and children for decades to come. The Cold War, atomic bomb testing, a cartoon turtle telling children to “duck and cover”, and this new technology that had the actual potential to literally end the world changed the perception of what was scary. Art reflects life, so cinema began to capitalize on these fears. Gone were the days of creepy castles, cobwebs, bats, vampires, werewolves, and the other iconic images that ruled genre cinema in film’s earliest decades. Science fiction was larger than ever and giant ants, giant octopi, terror from beyond the stars, and...

Chicago – In his excellent commentary for “Godzilla, King of the Monsters,” the 1956 reworking of Ishiro Honda’s “Godzilla,” both of which are included in one DVD or Blu-ray set recently released from Criterion, film historian David Kalat claims that these films are looked at skeptically when it comes to critics assessing the art of the form. He’s half right. Any critic worth a damn understands the influence and importance of Honda’s film (and Morse’s reworking of it) but generations of movie goers may consider these movies a joke (in no small part due to the films that would follow, including Roland Emmerich’s awful reboot attempt). This stellar edition, arguably the most interesting release of Criterion’s first quarter of 2012, will hopefully correct that.

DVD Rating: 5.0/5.0

Watching Honda’s “Godzilla” again with the perfect high-definition digital restoration from Criterion one is struck by how much the film...

Back in August of 2011 Criterion hinted they would be adding the classic Japanese monster movie Godzilla (Gojira) to their collection. This immediately sparked online enthusiasm and was shortly thereafter confirmed for release. And not only would we be receiving a new high-definition digital restoration of the 1954 original, but an HD restoration of Terry Morse's 1956 Godzilla, King of the Monsters along with a commentary on both films and a disc full of interviews and featurettes. For me, however, the biggest realization at that time was... I had never seen Godzilla, a fact I remedied only days later. In what served as good preparation for this release, last August I watched both Ishiro Honda's 1954 original as well as Morse's remake from a couple of years later for the first time, the latter of which uses footage from Honda's film and recuts it around a new story featuring Raymond Burr as American journalist Steve Martin who,...

By Raymond Benson

Normal 0 false false false En-us X-none X-none MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

The original 1954 Japanese Kaiju (it means “strange beast”) film, Gojira, is not only a classic monster movie, it’s one of those significant game-changers that is important to pop culture and cinema history. Gojira, known as “Godzilla” in the west, was the first of an onslaught of “strange beasts,” spawning a Kaiju franchise that is still popular today. In fact, Hollywood is remaking Gojira as a reboot at the time of this writing.

The ’54 film, directed by Ishiro Honda and produced by Toho Studios (it’s ironic that it was being made at the same time as Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai from the same studio), was little seen in the West until recent DVD releases appeared. Instead, for over fifty years we’ve had Godzilla, King of the Monsters, an abominably bastardized, re-edited import of Gojira. Joseph E. Levine...

[1] Fans of monster movies and/or the Criterion Collection probably recall that a couple of months back, rumors began surfacing of a Criterion Collection release of Godzilla -- an unusual, though not unprecedented, pick by a video distributor that generally favors artsy pictures over genre flicks. So today's news won't come as a surprise, but rather a welcome update. Criterion has officially confirmed a January release for their Godzilla Blu-ray/DVD, and has unveiled a list of the special features we can look forward to. More details after the jump. The Criterion release will include both the 1954 Japanese original as well as the 1956 American reworking starring Raymond Burr. Like all Criterion discs, Godzilla will also include a slew of juicy special features. Here's the list, from the Criterion Collection website [2] (via Shock Till You Drop [3]): New high-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition) Audio commentary...

Now you can not only see a man in a giant rubber lizard suit in a new digital transfer, but you’ll be able to experience all of the unique special features that are usually accompanied with Criterion’s discs. The original 1954 radiation fueled monster that attacked Japan, Godzilla, will terrorize Blu-ray on January 24, 2012. Cirterion is known for releasing discs packed to the gills with interviews, featurettes, and booklets with excerpts from film historians. Yet, for completists, this new package will not only have the original 1954 version but also the heavily edited 1956 version released in America. America’s version of the film utilized original footage from the 1954 film, but forced in an unnecessary American reporter that covered the devastation of the giant monster. Now, fans will have both versions in one complete package. See the official synopsis from the Criterion Collection’s website below, along with the striking cover-art from the upcoming disc.

Beyond the best transfer of Godzilla to disc yet, the Criterion version will include the following extras: *New high-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition) *Audio commentary by David Kalat (A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series) * New high-definition digital restoration of Godzilla, King of the Monsters, Terry Morse’s 1956 reworking of the original, starring Raymond Burr * Audio commentary for Godzilla, King of the Monsters by Kalat * New interviews with actor Akira Takarada (Hideto Ogata), Godzilla performer Haruo Nakajima, and effects technicians Yoshio Irie and Eizo Kaimai * Interview with legendary Godzilla score composer Akira Ifukube * Featurette detailing Godzilla’s photographic effects * New interview with Japanese-film critic Tadao Sato * The Unluckiest Dragon, an illustrated audio essay featuring historian Greg Pflugfelder describing the tragic fate of the fishing vessel Daigo fukuryu maru, a real-life event that inspired Godzilla * Theatrical trailers...

Ever since it was announced that the original 1954 version of Godzilla is being released onto Criterion Blu-ray and DVD, we've been salivating at the possibilities. And now ... we have all of the details for you right here!

Look for the flick to hit home on January 24th, 2012!

Special Features

New high-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition) Audio commentary by David Kalat (A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series) New high-definition digital restoration of Godzilla, King of the Monsters, Terry Morse’s 1956 reworking of the original, starring Raymond Burr Audio commentary for Godzilla, King of the Monsters by Kalat New interviews with actor Akira Takarada (Hideto Ogata), Godzilla performer Haruo Nakajima, and effects technicians Yoshio Irie and Eizo Kaimai Interview with legendary Godzilla score composer Akira Ifukube Featurette detailing Godzilla’s photographic effects New interview with Japanese-film critic Tadao Sato The Unluckiest Dragon,...

It was rumored a couple of months ago that Criterion would be re-releasing Ishiro Honda’s masterpiece Gojira on Blu-ray. Shock Til You Drop is now confirming the film will be coming back to Blu-ray on January 14th, 2012.

Here’s a list of special features we can expect:

New high-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)

- Audio commentary by David Kalat (A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series)

- New high-definition digital restoration of Godzilla, King of the Monsters, Terry Morse’s 1956 reworking of the original, starring Raymond Burr

- Audio commentary for Godzilla, King of the Monsters by Kalat

New interviews with actor Akira Takarada (Hideto Ogata), Godzilla performer Haruo Nakajima, and effects technicians Yoshio Irie and Eizo Kaimai

- Interview with legendary Godzilla score composer Akira Ifukube

- Featurette detailing Godzilla’s photographic effects

- New interview with Japanese-film critic...

Long rumored and now official, Criterion is bringing the 1954 classic Godzilla to Blu-ray on January 24, 2012. The specs go like this: - New high-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition) - Audio commentary by David Kalat (A Critical History and Filmography of Toho.s Godzilla Series) - New high-definition digital restoration of Godzilla, King of the Monsters, Terry Morse.s 1956 reworking of the original, starring Raymond Burr - Audio commentary for Godzilla, King of the Monsters by Kalat New interviews with actor Akira Takarada (Hideto Ogata), Godzilla performer Haruo Nakajima, and effects technicians Yoshio Irie and Eizo Kaimai - Interview with legendary Godzilla score composer Akira Ifukube - Featurette...

It was recently made known that Criterion was working on a new Blu-ray/DVD release of Gojira (1954), but there have been some very exciting developments regarding the Us version titled Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956). A rare unedited print of the Us version has been found and should be included with Gojira on the Criterion release.

From August Ragone, via Twitch: “Yesterday, I posted the fantastic news that the Criterion Collection had slyly announced, with a simple photo, that they will be prepping a DVD/Bd release of the original Japanese version of Godzilla aka Gojira (1954), and while, it seems, that Honda’s seminal film will be getting a much-needed restoration, some have been asking if the corresponding Us version helmed by Terry O. Morse, Godzilla, King Of The Monsters! (1956), starring Raymond Burr, will be included in this release. Previous home video releases of this film — and all versions screened on television,...

You see now, news like this? You cannot imagine how happy it makes us to share it with you. For years the Criterion Collection has been the gold standard in home video releases. The true mark of excellence. Now not only is Godzilla getting the royal Criterion treatment, but a rare print has been discovered that will be the icing on the cake!

From our friends over at Twitch who got the news from Godzilla historian August Ragone, who writes ...

"Yesterday, I posted the fantastic news that the Criterion Collection had slyly announced, with a simple photo, that they will be prepping a DVD/Bd release of the original Japanese version of Godzilla aka Gojira (1954), and while, it seems, that Honda's seminal film will be getting a much-needed restoration, some have been asking if the corresponding Us version helmed by Terry O. Morse, Godzilla, King Of The Monsters! (1956), starring Raymond Burr,...

Didn’t I just write one of these a week ago? Of course I did, because this is your destination for the best coverage of all the new titles Criterion puts up on their Hulu Plus page, and this week is no different. There’s fewer films (unless they decide to throw up another 30 when I least expect it) but in this case, less is more. And the lucky number is 13 this time. With worries of what the future for Hulu is, there are supposed talks that Google is definitely interested, which is interesting. Especially with their roll out of Google+ these past few days. If you like what you see, please sign up via this link. It does wonders for this article. But enough about that, you want to know about the movies. So let’s not make the good people wait.

The one that made my head explode was Godzilla,...

Charlie Chan definitely has a place among the pantheon of famous fictional detectives. He is certainly one of the more controversial ones. Although Chan is undoubtedly a hero, many Asians resent the character as an ethnic stereotype. Chan is polite and soft spoken, never lacking an appropriate old Chinese proverb to suit the occasion.

The character of Charlie Chan was created by Earl Derr Biggers in 1923 as a rebuttal to the “Yellow Peril” stereotypes so common in literature of the day, such as Fu Manchu. Biggers lived in Hawaii and resented the unflattering Asian clichés so he invented a benign Chinese Investigator working for the Honolulu Police Force. He wrote several Chan novels. The honorable Chinese Detective became so popular that he was soon adapted into film. There were many Chan films, starting in the silent film era. Early films actually starred Chinese actors but the Audience didn’t respond to Asian Leading men.

Last Friday marked the arrival of Red Cliff (read our review here) the new war epic by Chinese action-meister John Woo. But this wasn’t the same version that graced Asian theaters prior to its international release: In its home country, Red Cliff was released as two films, the first in mid-2008; the second in early 2009.

Rather than unleash a nearly six-hour magnum opus on audiences worldwide, Woo pared both films down into a single two-and-a-half hour cut. In interviews, he said the deleted scenes mostly placed the film’s events in historical context, which might not have appealed to Westerners unfamiliar with Chinese history. Woo’s movie depicts the famous Battle of Red Cliffs, which was fought around early 200 A.D. between warlords from the northern and southern regions of China.

It’s too early to tell how successful Red Cliff will be with North American viewers (In mainland China,...