King Kong vs. Godzilla

Toho's third Godzilla picture is the one where the series became a colour blockbuster, and eleven million Japanese admissions later it is still the best-attended film the franchise ever had. The setup is pure satire: a pharmaceutical firm chasing publicity for its TV shows ships a giant ape back from a South Seas island right as Godzilla thaws out of an iceberg, and the ratings-hungry executives are basically delighted when the two start levelling cities. Ishiro Honda plays the monster brawl for spectacle and the humans for laughs, which makes it lighter and sillier than the funereal 1954 original, on purpose. The suit-mation wrestling match at Mount Fuji is the reason it exists and it delivers. Skip the Americanised recut, which loses the joke along with the score.