It’s one of the most striking moments in the entire Godzilla series: the King of the Monsters framed in extreme long shot, a tiny, almost frail silhouette set against the horizon as a sea of toxic sludge creeps towards him. Staring down a wave of humanity’s waste, the wailing beast sets the ocean ablaze and telepathically projects himself into the dreams of a young boy – a monster returned to warn the planet of a fate worse than atomic breath.
Yoshimitsu Banno’s Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971), the infamous 11th entry in the storied Toho franchise, may have offered a bleak vision of humanity’s future, but it’s also a fabulously, fantastically strange piece of cinema – full of dizzy psychedelic visuals and fuzzed-out guitar riffs, gooey practical effects and loopy animated interludes, and an unforgettable showdown in which Godzilla curls up into a cannonball and propels himself, with some Looney Tunes physical poetry, in reverse through the air. Whether or not the latter scene tipped series creator Tomoyuki Tanaka over the edge – the producer was once rumoured to have been incensed by the finished film for supposedly ‘ruining’ Godzilla – it’s a singular moment that, like the rest of the film, would never be repeated.
Faced with declining audience attendance as the increasingly kid-friendly series, coming off the recycled-footage fest All Monsters Attack (1969), entered its third decade, Tanaka had hoped to reinvigorate the franchise by offering Banno – who’d studied under Mikio Naruse and worked as an assistant director to Akira Kurosawa on Throne of Blood and The Hidden Fortress – the chance to direct. Despite having half the regular series budget and only 35 days in which to shoot, the 39-year-old first-time director arrived with ambitious ideas. Responding to the pollution crisis that was gripping Japan at the time, and drawing inspiration from Rachel Carson’s influential environmentalist work Silent Spring (1962), he wanted to evoke the foreboding tone of 1954’s original Godzilla, and give his leading lizard a genuinely frightening foe. “Not something like a giant lobster,” Banno later explained, “but the most notorious thing in modern society.”
Enter Hedorah – named for hedoro, the Japanese word for sludge – who arrives all the way from the Dark Gaseous Nebula in the Orion constellation, lured by Earth’s sweet, sweet chemical waste. We first get a glimpse of its enormous red eyes – fashioned, Banno said, to resemble female genitalia – breaching the surface of Suruga Bay, as the aquatic alien plays battleship with the local oil tankers. Hedorah may first appear as a giant tadpole, but this intergalactic freak has more outfit changes than a runway model. The shapeshifting diva is soon sashaying ashore, first in its stink-lined, slime-spewing terrestrial form – imagine a kelp-covered mammoth, or Mr. Snuffleupagus’s less benevolent sibling – and then as a UFO-like mollusc spritzing the city with toxic mist, before its final glow-up, a glittering, diamond-encrusted bi-ped that towers over even Godzilla.
“Since Hedorah was supposed to be a monster created by pollution instead of an animal, I tried to avoid portraying him as an animal,” said the creature’s suitmation actor – and future Heisei Godzilla performer – Kenpachiro Satsuma. “I tried to make him seem spooky and grotesque.” Really, though, with its glowing red sclera and seaweed complexion, Hedorah is just a misunderstood stoner who enjoys chilling in urban spaces and – in what might be the movie’s single weirdest image – taking long, luxurious tokes from industrial smokestacks.
One of the great pleasures of Godzilla vs. Hedorah is its unsparing satire of humankind’s many failures, from the widespread inefficiency of bureaucrats and the military to the failed idealism of peaceniks who respond to the apocalypse by gathering on Mt. Fuji for a love-in. While the world babbles and pollutes, Hedorah grows in power. Thousands perish in grisly circumstances. The chaos is executed by Banno and his special effects team via a kaleidoscope of indelible images, set to Riichirō Manabe’s disquieting soundtrack of acid rock, free jazz and twangy mouth-harp. There’s an acid-laced nightclub freakout that would traumatise Austin Powers; monster fight POVs filmed in fish-eye lenses that anticipate Beastie Boys music videos; and ironic animated interludes designed to mimic children’s cartoons – included, Banno remarked, to reflect the growing popularity of manga. One cheerful aside depicts “Happy Hedorah” sucking the juice from an oil tanker, a bloodied whale carcass dangling from its other claw.
“We reap what we sow,” says a bohemian leader at one point. “Hedorah is a monster of our own making.” As Godzilla and Hedorah square off for their final sludge match, a helpless humanity is reduced to spectators as two monsters indifferent to the Earth’s fate clobber each other in smoke-machined gloom – a showdown that seems to unfold out of time, in some half-remembered nightmare. (To be clear, Hedorah does also sling a glob of slime, custard-pie-style, into Godzilla’s eye; it’s not all horror-movie darkness.) What does it say about humanity that its saviour is another creature born of its own destructive hubris? A victory for radiation over pollution? Is it a warning about the failure to mobilise collective action – an analogy that might apply to our climate-change present?
Maybe it was all too much for audiences and critics at the time, the film’s the brash blend of tones – garish and grim, camp and cautionary – sitting uneasily alongside its sombre existential threat (there was no blaming American atomic bombs for this particular kaiju). Though a modest box-office success in Japan, Godzilla vs. Hedorah drew largely negative reviews (New York Times critic Vincent Canby was bizarrely fixated on a supposed homoerotic bond between Godzilla and the young boy), and for decades the popular consensus was less than flattering; retitled Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster in the US, it was included in Harry Medved’s book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, that feeble – if sadly influential – relic beloved of so-bad-it’s-good types.
Whatever beef went down between Tanaka and Banno, it appears to have been overblown. Though Toho reverted to the more familiar and lacklustre Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972) and Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973) in the wake of Hedorah’s perceived failure, there were tentative plans for a Banno-directed sequel centred on another pollution monster – even if it never eventuated. “I think [Tanaka] probably didn't like the psychedelic atmosphere he saw on set with the fish heads,” Banno later admitted, referring to Hedorah’s hallucinatory nightclub sequence. “He probably worried what sort of weird movie I'd make next!”
Save for a brief and swiftly dispatched cameo in Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), Hedorah would never appear in another Godzilla feature. Still, 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah featured an adversary that drew heavily upon Hedorah’s recombinant powers, while the unnerving creature transformations – not to mention the bickering government ineptitude – of 2016’s mighty Shin Godzilla bear more than a trace of Banno’s influence. And while he never again directed, Banno remained active at Toho for decades, developing various ideas that would lead to his executive producer credit on 2014’s American Godzilla, the film that inaugurated Toho and Legendary Picture’s current smash-hit MonsterVerse. There may only be one Godzilla vs. Hedorah, but the spirit of this doomy, gonzo masterpiece endures.
– Luke Goodsell