Review of King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) by Agustin M — 10 Sep 2010

The third Godzilla movie and it's a wasted opportunity. This movie had a great premise of having two of the most famous monsters in history, King Kong and Godzilla, to fight each other to the death. Unfortunately, The fight scene comes in at the last 10 minutes of a 98 minute movie(Japanese Version). But unlike Godzilla Raids Again, the humans are actually involve with the monsters.

Desperately trying to get more money and attention, an owner of a Japanese company hears that a monster has been located on a nearby island. Seeing an opportunity to bring more publicity, he sends a group of people to go to the island to get the monster, which turns out to be King Kong, and bring it back to Japan. Meanwhile, a U.S. submarine stumbles upon an iceberg with strange activity going on. Upon investigating it, the iceberg contains Godzilla(Which he was trapped there in Godzilla Raids Again). Unfortunately, Godzilla escapes and begins a rampage on Japan. To make matters worse, Kong also escapes from his raft that was carrying him to Japan and starts a rampage too. It's only a matter of time before these two monsters cross paths and fight.

Even though Godzilla is in the movie, the main focus is on Kong: the Japanese are more focused on stooping Kong more than Godzilla. Another thing to point out is that Kong was beefed up to be Godzilla size since Kong was 25 feet in the original King Kong compare to Godzilla's size of 167 feet, which meant Kong would have never been a threat to Godzilla.

A funny thing to point out is that Kong gets stronger when he's exposed to electricity. Why? Well the plot of this movie was different at first. Universal original wanted Toho to make Frankenstein vs. Godzilla where Dr. Frankenstein was recruited by the Japanese to make giant monsters out of animal parts to combat monster threats, one of which is Godzilla. Toho drop the idea and decided to put Kong instead for more marquee value.

Overall the movie is worth watching just for the final fight between the monsters, a good East vs. West fight.