When a world ending three headed monster by the name of Ghidorah arrives on earth chaos ensues!Godzilla, Rodan & Mothra are all on the scene but fighting one another. Can Mothra and the martians convince them to work together to fight this seemingly unstoppable force?So once again we have the grade A cheese, men in monster suits, stop motion animation, ridiculous fight scenes and terrible acting. And yet somehow/someway this is actually the best Toho film I've seen.It suffers with all the usual tropes and arguably the plot is even worse than usual but it works and makes for a fun monster epic.The Godzilla films are certainly niche and not for everyone but this is a fun little effort.The Good:By this point it's actually starting to feel like a franchiseBuilds up to a solid climaxThe Bad:Opening is really daftSome of the outfits are embarassingly badPlot is a tad confuddledGodzilla moves like a teletubbyFranchise is getting goofyThings I Learnt From This Movie:The mini martian ladies are growing on meMid battle giant monsters often enjoy games of catch with boulders

This one has some of Earth's best and most patriotic monsters teaming up to defeat a new creation from the Japanese film makers. Ghidorah is a three headed Cerberus like creature who spits fire from each head. He already destroyed the planet Venus or Mars depending on which version you watch. A princess from a small Himalayan country has been possessed by the spirit of the now dead world and is trying to warn of Ghidorah's coming and his powers. There's a subplot in this involving an attempted kidnapping of the princess.In the end it's Mothra and his two fairy companions who persuade Godzilla and Rodan to team up and the three of them face Ghidorah in a handicap match and combine their skills to defeat the really alien dude. You have to admire the way Rodan and Mothra worked together on this with Godzilla providing a finishing move with some foreign objects.These films are so cheesy, but they're lots of fun.

It may interest you to know before seeing Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (and by the way thankfully Toho didn't go with the original title of Godzilla & Rodan & Mothra Jr vs Ghidorah, though they'd later have such ungainly titles in the early 2000's), that most of the monsters don't show until the halfway point. With the exception of a sequence on a variety show where two children ask for what they would like most in the world, they say they'd like to see Mothra and, since it's all been pre-planned(!) the people of the Infant island are behind a curtain along with the two lovely twins from the island and by way of song make it so not just the kids but *everyone watching on TV* get to see the island itself and Mothra on it, it's a story of the humans and a 'Venusian' Princess. I don't think this is necessarily a negative for any monster movie as long as the human characters give me something to keep my attention or, if they're daring enough, do something that's really out there (i.e. satirize bureaucracy in Shin Godzilla).In Ghidorah, we get a story that could have come out of a pulp comic book or paperback (I'll get to the comic book element in a moment), where the start of the movie has a Princess on a plane getting word from, uh, somewhere, telekinetic-like, that she has to get off the plane and run. She does and the plane explodes, which sets off this woman, who claims to be a survivor from the planet Venus and has a warning to Earth that destruction is coming to her, being sought after by some sinister agents. Are they also from Venus? Does it fully matter? All we have to see is that some guy with those frilly things around his neck like it's the Renaissance era tells another guy to go kill the Princess. And yet, are you ready for this, this Princess may not even be from Venus at all(!) What gives? Possession? Well, you'll just have to tune in to find out, kids! Once again there is a room for newspaper reporters with some of the character action, though here the main heroes are a cop/bodyguard and a female reporter who wants to get the Princess' word out to the world (there's an actually tense sequence at a hotel room that involves the threat of violence with a knife that, somehow, feels more harsh its mere suggestion than most of the other cartoonish monster attacks to come, largely by the presence of the sun-glass-wearing assassin). This plot is the stuff of B-movie trash, but it's directed and written and performed so straight that it comes around to being sincere and believable and clever; this part of the movie, with maybe a scene or two exception, doesn't have to be enjoyed as a guilty pleasure thing, it works as a legit pleasure.Of course we're waiting for the monsters to come, and they do, with the Big Bad space invader Ghidorah, a three-headed winged serpent that has destroyed all of Venus except for the spirit of the being inside the Princess, and it's up to Mothra to stop him... no, wait, Godzilla and Rodan have to stop fighting one another, let alone the two attacking the city as they usually do, to band together. It's in this sense the movie goes most into being a comic-book kind of movie, akin to The Avengers though in an ironic way since their de rigur is to destroy the world not to save it. This also comes with, no joke, Godzilla and Rodan *talking to one another* as the twins translate what they are supposed to be saying through, uh, body language and such. But, ultimately, they put aside their differences and face Ghidorah together. It's the first true monster mash in this series of Toho movies (prior to this it was one-on-one fights between Godzilla and someone else), and it's pretty spectacular as far as these movies go.I think I liked how the filmmakers were able to balance human characters we could at least partially invest in, that had the modicum of depth and personality that should be there (and there is, genuinely), so that by the time the monsters come we have people to latch on to, including the Space-being-possessed princess. If things stick out it's mostly due to comparisons: Ghidorah is a marvel of a movie monster, and moves pretty well for 1964, with an imposing presence and nice lightning-bolt special effects. Rodan, by comparison, looks like crap and can barely move. When he/it does, it looks like some puppet from a by-gone era. There are also moments where humor comes in with the monster fight, or what they try to do (at one point Godzilla and Rodan toss rocks at each other like it's a game of tennis), but it's the unintentionally funny moments that stick out.All this said, I'd put Ghidorah as one of the major efforts from Toho during this period, or even overall for the entire franchise, it's that good; there's hypnotic music with the twin ladies, exciting monster fights, and not half-way bad human characters. And there's even a message about, well, sharing humankind! 8.5/10

This is the fifth entry in the Godzilla series. This is also the first film appearance of Godzilla's Arh nemesis, King Ghidorah. The plot goes something like this: Detective Shindo is assigned to protect princess Selina Salno. However her plane is destroyed en route by a bomb and is assumed dead. She turns up again claiming she's a princess from mars, and making prophecies of forthcoming disaster. However her predictions start coming true, and Rodan rises from a crater and Godzilla emerges from the sea. Meanwhile a meteor crashes. The Shobijin( Mothra's fairies) don't go on a boat taking them to birth island because of Selina's prediction, and it ends up being destroyed by Godzilla. Selina then reveals that mars was destroyed by a space dragon, King Ghidorah. And that he's already arrived on earth in a meteor. Anyway thats the main plot. What I wanna talk about is Ghidorah. He has a rather interesting design. Three heads, two tails, big wings and no arms, plus the ability to fire bolts of gravitational from his mouth. This film has its action-orientated parts, like the the gunfights between Shindo and Selina's assassins and the giant monster battles. It also has its comedic parts such as when Ghidorah zaps Godzilla in the nuts, or when Rodan and Godzilla laugh at each other, after getting sprayed by Mothra. The special effects are average for a Japanese film. Rodan's hand puppet looks like crap. The acting is suburb and feels pretty real, except for a few scenes. Overall this is one of the better films in the series.