Shinkaijû Raiga

A monster, accompanied by deadly fish, shrugs off mankind's puny attempts to destroy it, fights a second monster that appears out of nowhere, and moistly lays claim to the city of Asakusa. The plot is incoherent, the acting is clownishly awful (likely not helped by being watched via subtitles) and the special effects are rudimentary (and very repetitive). Clearly made for laughs, the film lacks the goofy but earnest charm of the more juvenile entries in the Showa-era Godzilla series. Humour doesn't translate well (especially through subtitles) and I suspect that I am not the target audience at several different levels, but I found the 'comedy' excruciatingly unfunny. Most of the kaiju sequences seem to be setting up the 'climactic' shot, in which Raiga bends over and anoints his newly claimed turf (the resulting rainbow is the best part of the film). The film should have ended on that high-note rather than drift into some nonsensical sermon about the monster and climate change, which seems to have been appended either to pad the running time or to somehow give an aura of seriousness to an otherwise loopy, jejune fantasy (if the latter, the effort was a failure). A bit better made and somewhat more true to classic kaiju eiga than the creature's first outing (Reigo, the Deep-Sea Monster vs. The Battleship Yamato (2005)) but less imaginative.