G-Watch: Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)

Watched:  11/12/2026

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Ishiro Honda

A wildly entertaining movie, Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) is the second Ghidorah movie, but the far better of the two.  

It does open the door for what would become a recurring motif: jack-ass aliens who want to manhandle the Earth, and employ kaiju to get it done.  

Now, the movie has some key elements that make it work:

1. SPACE TRAVEL
2. Alien worlds
3. Surprise Ghidorah
4. RODAN
5. dick-swinging American Nick Adams as the over-sexed Glenn, an astronaut
6. the coolest space restaurant that isn't at EPCOT
7. the famous Godzilla dance
8. it stars Toho's Godzilla staple Kumi Mizuno 

just some fashion advice from beyond Jupiter

Aliens go to an extraordinary amount of trouble to dupe humanity into letting them kidnap Godzilla and Rodan to get them to fight Ghidorah.  Why?  I'm not sure.  Because the end of the movie is the aliens bringing all three back under their control thanks to magnets.  

Look, don't go into this movie hoping it makes sense.  It will not.  In fact, if you like that picture of Kumi Mizuno above, know that she's, like, one of innumerable women on her planet that all look exactly the same.  Why?  No one will say.

This movie, oddly, has the same ending as Mars Attacks, which I had totally forgotten as the last time I watched this, I drank more than was reasonable and my memories get fritzy around the time the aliens visit Earth officially the first time.

But the aliens, the Xilians, inform way more about the cheap space toys I'd get as a kid than I can process.

somehow, this is not Kraftwerk

 

Anyway, watch this movie.  

It has Godzilla dancing.  So.