WarBeast
02-20-2008, 11:56 AM
I just watched this old Kaiju flick last night.. Varan is one of the early big monster movies that Toho put out after the success of Godzilla '54.
I love old Toho movies , but I'm pretty sure they shortened the title down from Varan The Unbelievably Boring... I've watched many a Toho movie where it started slow but picked up steam as the movie moved a long, and by the end was kicking ass.
Not this movie... The monster shows up early on, and the monster looks pretty cool for the time, but the monster action is so damn tedious... 90% of the movie is ships and planes bombing and shooting Varan in the ocean for long long long sequences, punctuated by scenes of people sitting around talking about what a threat to Tokyo Varan will be and how their weapons just aren't working on him.
Also the story is kinda stupid as well, some scientists go up to a remote village to find a rare butterfly, the natives tell them to stay away from the lake, they go to the lake, disturb Varan and he kills them.
More scientists show up and disturb Varan some more and he destroys the village.
Now they decide, rather than just leave Varan the hell alone in his remote isolated lake, where he seems perfectly content, they must destroy him immediately. All they end up doing is poisoning the lake and pissing him off. Thus Varan leaves his tranquil little place and heads out to the ocean, where we spend a majority of the movie watching him get shot at, to no avail.
The final climactic battle of the movie sucked because he never made it to Tokyo, and just barely made it to land and kinda ripped up an airport.
The movie was a complete waste, in fact, I don't know if I could've made it through the movie without the fastforward button on the remote.
Watch this movie, ONLY if you are a die-hard Kaiju completist. If you just sorta like Godzilla flicks, leave this one be....
I love old Toho movies , but I'm pretty sure they shortened the title down from Varan The Unbelievably Boring... I've watched many a Toho movie where it started slow but picked up steam as the movie moved a long, and by the end was kicking ass.
Not this movie... The monster shows up early on, and the monster looks pretty cool for the time, but the monster action is so damn tedious... 90% of the movie is ships and planes bombing and shooting Varan in the ocean for long long long sequences, punctuated by scenes of people sitting around talking about what a threat to Tokyo Varan will be and how their weapons just aren't working on him.
Also the story is kinda stupid as well, some scientists go up to a remote village to find a rare butterfly, the natives tell them to stay away from the lake, they go to the lake, disturb Varan and he kills them.
More scientists show up and disturb Varan some more and he destroys the village.
Now they decide, rather than just leave Varan the hell alone in his remote isolated lake, where he seems perfectly content, they must destroy him immediately. All they end up doing is poisoning the lake and pissing him off. Thus Varan leaves his tranquil little place and heads out to the ocean, where we spend a majority of the movie watching him get shot at, to no avail.
The final climactic battle of the movie sucked because he never made it to Tokyo, and just barely made it to land and kinda ripped up an airport.
The movie was a complete waste, in fact, I don't know if I could've made it through the movie without the fastforward button on the remote.
Watch this movie, ONLY if you are a die-hard Kaiju completist. If you just sorta like Godzilla flicks, leave this one be....