My Favorite Movies

  Ok, so Willis can't really act (his characters are really all just Bruce Willis, just as most of Jack Nicholson's roles are him playing himself), but dammit, these movies are great! I do sometimes mumble to myself, "Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?" and most people don't go to hear Willis spouting Shakespeare. They want ACTION and Willis is more than willing to oblige.

  Die Hard concerns the adventures of NYPD cop John McClane, whose estranged wife, Holly, has taken a job for the Nakatomi Corp. in L.A. In an attempt to reconcile with his wife, John travels to L.A. to meet Holly at her office, a visit which coincides with a Christmas party Holly's company is throwing.
    As McClane goes up to his wife's office, Alan Rickman, playing European terrorist/thief Hans Gruber, who has his eye on the millions of dollars in negotiable bearer bonds the Nakatomi Corp. has in its safe, takes over the Nakatomi building and all the partiers are held as hostages, including Holly McClane, but not John, who proceeds to kick some German terrorist ass, killing the terrorists one at a time and dispatching Hans Gruber by launching him out a high window.

  Die Hard 2 - Die Harder is set in Washington D.C., where U.S. military extremists, working under the command of a jailed Colombian drug czar and military leader, have taken over control of Dulles Airports' runway lights control tower and are threatening to crash-land airplanes until the General Drug lord is released into their custody.
    John McClane is waiting at the airport for Holly, who is on one of the planes endlessly circling Dulles Airport. Since ole John is a 'can-do' kinda guy, he foils the plot to crash his wife and hundreds of others by again kicking terrorist ass. One of the notable parts in the film (a non speaking role) went to the guy who played the liquid metal Terminator in Terminator 2. But he dies fairly soon into the festivities. McClane stays one step ahead of the terrorists, airport personnel and the U.S. Army and saves the day, his wife and the hundreds of other airplane passengers.

  Die Hard 3 With a Vengeance is clearly the best in the series. Set in New York, it concerns John being forced by a 'mad' bomber to perform certain tasks, including getting undressed and hanging a sandwich board on himself that says, "I Hate (the N- word)". Then he has to go to Harlem and stand around.
    Samuel L. Jackson plays Zeus Carver, the angry owner of an electronics store in Harlem, who sees McClane and helps him get away before he can be torn apart by Harlem street kids, involving himself in the Bomber's (Simon's) plans for McClane. But bombs aren't all Simon has on his mind.
    It turns out Simon had a brother. Hans Gruber. And he also has his eye on the billions in gold bullion kept on deposit in New York's Federal Depository, located on Wall Street, site of a subway bombing just moments before.... with Zeus Carver keeping company with him the whole way and Simon doing his best to avoid McClane's "investigative" skills, Simon has an ingenious plan to rob the depository and eliminate McClane at the same time....

  The Die Hard trilogy is some of the best action ever filmed. Although Willis can't really act, he plays McClane flawlessly, if a little too resiliently. He survives explosions, drownings, locusts, bullets, hooks, metal cables, he is catapulted out of a military transport plane (which is on the ground) and parachutes back to the ground safely (NEVER happen), hand grenades, burning jet fuel, the best fighters the military can produce, machine guns on snowmobile, helicopters exploding over his head, among many other amazing and unsurvivable threats and weapons. He saves his wife's life twice, and still can't get her to stick around for long after each time. Holly doesn't even appear in the third movie, but the viewer is led to believe she has again left John.
    All three of the Die Hard movies were directed by a damn good director, John McTiernan, who also directed Sean Connery in Medicine Man and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator, two other favorite movies of mine.

    Action movies, for me, are a great escape when there's just nothing to do. And who represents action more than Arnold Schwarzenegger? This is from True Lies, a great Arnie movie.
    Co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Tia Carrere and Tom Arnold, True Lies was directed by ole "King of the World" himself, Titanic director James Cameron. True Lies is the story of Harry Tasker, computer software salesman by day, Secret Agent by night. Curtis plays his unsuspecting, bored wife Helen, who decides to spice up her life by by being involved in a spy plot herself. She meets a used car salesman who is pretending to be a spy, in order to score with unsuspecting women, Helen being his latest challenge.
    While all this is going on, Harry, working for an Ultra-Secret Intelligence Division known as The Omega Sector, is investigating Palestinian terrorists who have smuggled four small nuclear bombs into the Florida Keys, where they plan to detonate one each week until the U.S. withdraws from the Persian gulf.
(Picture Courtesy of Tia Time-The Tia Carrere Page)
    Instrumental in the terrorist plot to nuke the U.S.  is Tia Carrere, playing the femme fatale Juno Skinner, an antiquities importer and mercenary, who assists the terrorist Aziz in his efforts to bring the stolen nukes to the Keys, while at the same time trying to seduce (or kill, or both) Harry.

    Offering the best action I've seen in years, True Lies is, in my opinion, a much better movie that Titanic, but then again, I'm not a chick. Full of action and humor, the only place the plot drags is when Helen, at a rendezvous with Simon the car salesman, is abducted by Harry and his confederates (in masks) and interrogated at Harry's headquarters. This part of the movie, while important, isn't handled as well as I think it could have been. However, the stunts are incredible, and at a time when CGI (computer generated graphics) was just coming into use, Cameron employed them without overemploying them, especially in the Harrier Jet scenes. Cameron has a good sense of what special effects are for. George Lucas, you might want to pay attention to his use of effects in his movies.

    Most of Arnie's movies are good for action, not for logic. If Arnold ever does a movie with Steven Spielberg, the guys who spend all their time spotting inconsistencies, mistakes and incongruities will declare a holiday.
    Don't get me wrong. Spielberg is an incredible director, as good as (if not better than) James Cameron. In fact, there are similarities  between the two directors. Both dumped absolutely beautiful women (Spielberg dumped the beautiful Amy Irving, for Kate Capshaw. Nothing against Irving, but I would have made that trade myself; Cameron dumped the gorgeous Linda Hamilton, for whom, I'm not sure), and both had humble starts in their directing careers: Spielberg toiled at TV movies (making the superlative TV film Duel, with Dennis Weaver, not to mention a classic Night Gallery episode with Joan Crawford), while Cameron directed a very low budget (and terrible) movie known as Pirhana II - The Spawning.
    Arnold Schwarzenegger also  made terrible movies, most notably (or un-notably, if you prefer) Hercules in New York. He had just come over to the U.S. from Austria, his accent was thicker than his neck and the producers ended up dubbing over his voice with one that could at least be understood.
    Arnold knew his destiny was to be a movie star. He took an incredible chance on what turned out to be his breakout film, Conan the Barbarian.
Conan the Barbarian was produced by Dino DeLaurentiis, directed by John Milius and the screenplay was written by none other than Mr. Conspiracy himself, Oliver Stone....! It was perfect for Arnold; he, like Kurt Russell in Soldier, doesn't even speak for the first 20 minutes or so. James Earl Jones plays Thulsa Doom, a half-man, half-snake, half DeCaf Latte Demi-God leader of a cult of snake worshippers.
Sandahl Bergman (Zha-WING!!) plays a Valkyrie thief and Conan's partner in crime (and sex- Woo HOOOOO). Although she ends up getting killed, she does make another appearance, just when Conan needs it most. Even The Exorcist himself, Max Von Sydow, makes an appearance as King Osric.
    This is a great movie. Everything about it is great. The script is very true to itself, I've never read Robert E. Howard's Conan books, so I don't know how faithfully they were adapted to the movie. But I do know that within the interior logic of the movie, it works. And works well. The soundtrack is awesome too. The instrumental soundtrack was the very first CD I bought when I got a CD player.
    This movie has it all. Blood 'n' guts, sex, a very buff Arnie, orgies, pretty good FX (for 1981, the giant snake is damn convincing), sex, ghosts, cannibalism, sex, shape shifting, sex....

OH YEAH.... Did you like the scene in Return of the Jedi, where Princess Leia is in the gold bikini and chained to Jabba the Hut? Would you like to see where Lucas got his inspiration for that scene? Check out Conan the Barbarian. King Osric (Max Von Sydow)'s daughter has fallen under the diabolical Thulsa Doom's spell and has gone to marry (and and probably be sacrificed by) him. Osric hires Conan and his small band of thieves to kidnap her away from Doom. Conan agrees, because the reward is huge and because Thulsa Doom killed his parents (actually his entire people) when Conan was a small boy. When Conan and his band encounter Doom, it's during an orgy of the Inner Circle of the Cult, with Doom sitting on his throne, Osric's daughter reclining at his feet. While the actress playing the Princess is no Carrie Fisher, she is quite fetching in that scene.

  Anyway, while Conan the Barbarian is a great movie and brought a lot of attention to Arnold, he still evidently needed help with his subsequent movie choices. I have this mental image of Arnold pacing back and forth, wondering which actor in Hollywood he could possibly talk to, who would give him good advice about which movie roles to pursue. Finally, he has an idea, runs to the phone and calls.... Bill Cosby. Arnold's next few movies were all great action flicks, but the plots were, even more so than usual, only devices to get to more action. We have:
      Raw Deal: Arnie as a disgraced ex-FBI agent (huh? Don't agents have to be U.S. citizens?) who is brought back by his old boss to go undercover and destroy the Mafia family that killed Arnie's ex-boss' son. Katheryn Harrold plays a busty moll who gets a crush on the big lug and ends up in Witness Protection. Darren McGavin plays Arnie's ex-boss.
      Commando: Arnie as a retired Army Colonel (huh? I thought soldiers have to be U.S. citizens, too?) whose daughter (a pre Charmed and pre naked Alyssa Milano) is kidnapped by Dan Hedaya, Carla Tortelli's ex-husband from Cheers, and threatened that if he doesn't blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda, Hedaya will kill Milano. Rae Dawn Chong co-stars as a flight attendant who adopts Arnie and helps in his efforts to save his beloved yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. Shitty movie, great action. There's just something about Arnie shooting weapons, muscles all jiggling, that just sums up the word ACTION to me. Especially gory when Arnie slices the top of a soldier's head off by throwing a circular saw blade at him. And the things he can do with a machete!! Especially famous for being one the first movies to employ the "endless ammo clip" to Arnie. He shoots for hours, no jams, no reloading. It's great.
       The Terminator: Is there anyone on the planet who hasn't seen this movie, or its immensely popular sequel? This is the movie that made Arnold Schwarze.... Schwarzen..... Schwarzenegger a household word.
Doesn't he look young in this photo? Now compare that one to this pic from Terminator 2: Judgment Day.... 
Doesn't he age well?

    Then came Predator. Directed by Die Hard's John McTiernan. Another big budget movie with top drawer special and creature effects by Stan Winston, who also built the Alien creatures for John Cameron's Aliens. Also starring Jesse "The Body" Ventura, it is a tour de force for Arnie. He does an incredible job in this film. Kevin Peter Hall, an extremely tall man who played Chewbacca in the Star Wars movies, plays the Predator in this movie. Incredible flick, and rousing, terrific soundtrack by Alan Silvestri, who wrote the soundtracks for the three Back to the Future movies and Forrest Gunp, amongst many others.

   Paul Verhoven's Total Recall, based on the short story, "We'll Remember It for You Wholesale". Costarring Michael Ironside (one of my favorite actors) and Sharon Stone, one of my favorite femme fatales. If you don't know the story, here it is. Arnie plays Douglas Quaid, a man in the future, a future where Mars is colonized and is being mined. Quaid is a man with a past. Just not his own past. He works as a lowly construction worker, married for 8 years to Stone. He dreams of a different life, but not in a Walter Mitty type way. He dreams of Mars, alien cultures and rebel fighters. In other words, adventure.
    In the future, memory manipulation has progressed to the point where you can take an entire vacation without leaving your house. Recall is a company that specializes in false memory vacations, complete with authentic souvenirs. Arnie goes to Recall, to see if a fake trip to Mars isn't what he needs to make his dreams of Mars stop. A real trip to Mars would be dangerous, as there are rebels fighting the establishment on Mars at this time. They hope to overthrow the rulers of Mars and make breathable air free to all.
    When they attempt to implant the memories in Quaid, they stumble onto a block. For some reason, Quaid has had a huge chunk of his memory blocked off, but the treatment frees these memories. Quaid is actually Douglas Houser, a special agent for the ruling class on Mars, the ones who determine who gets to breathe within the artificial warrens of Mars and who doesn't. He has been blocked to be sent into deep undercover to expose the rebel base and help the Rulers, led by Ronny Cox as Cohagen, to put down the resistance once and for all. During his adventure, Quaid discovers a machine left by aliens millions of years before, a machine which uses the mineral Terbinium to make atmosphere for the planet. Cohagen won't turn it on, because he mines the Terbnium and because if he controls the air, he controls the Mars colony.

After Terminator 2: Judgment Day came The Last Action Hero. Primarily a kiddie flick, it nonetheless does a fair job of lampooning the whole action movie genre. Again directed by John McTiernan, who just misses the mark (personally, I think his choice for the kid was what undid the movie; that kid is pretty irritating.... he should stick to Prehysteria movies), but is mildly entertaining anyway. One of the best scenes is when they are in the movie's version of the LAPD police station, and there's a desk sergeant giving out assignments, partnering up different police officers for that day. He drones out names and to whom they're assigned. In each case, the pair sounds like a bad Hollywood pitch for a buddy movie: A Rabbi with a German cop, a dumpy little fat guy with a blonde hardbody cop who knows kung-fu, an animated cat (voiced by Danny DeVito), and at one point, a black and white digital image of Humphrey Bogart is teamed with another flesh and blood cop.
    Cameos abound in this movie and there are some mildly funny sequences, but the movie did poorly at the box office and for good reason. none of the characters are sympathetic enough to get us to care about them, except Mercedes Ruell as the irritating kid's mother.
    Cameos abound in this picture
    Of course, there are other Arnie movies, which aren't action flicks. Twins, again with Danny DeVito, Kindergarten Cop, Jingle All The Way, and of course, Dr. Victor Frieze in Batman and Robin, which was sort of action, mostly incomprehensible.

    On to the third person in this Action Movie Hall of Fame: Sly Stallone, on whom we won't waste a lot of time . Rocky, Rocky 2, First Blood, The Lords of Flatbush, these are about the only movies I can recommend that have Stallone in them. Except for Lockup, which is one of the best movies I have ever seen. Sly, ya did good on that one, buddy. And actually, although it isn't action, I liked the John Landis movie Oscar, where he plays a member of organized crime, trying to go legit. Judge Dredd I liked, but just barely.

And then there's Mel. Gibson. Mr. Mad Max. He started in action (and other) films in Australia, the Mad Max trilogy being the most famous. Then he came to the U.S. and was in many movies, both action type and other genres. However, we're here to talk about the Lethal Weapon series of pictures.

   Lethal Weapon concerns the plight of Martin Riggs, a young, single detective working undercover narcotics in L.A. Riggs, a Vietnam Veteran and martial arts expert, is also a recent widower and spends his days struggling against crime and his nights struggling against suicidal loneliness and depression. His almost conscious death wish makes him a reckless and dangerous partner to have.
    At the same time, Det. Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover), a family man, is coming up fast on retirement and wants nothing more than to do the time he has left in as quiet a way as possible. He gets a call from an old Army buddy who wants Murtaugh to look into his daughter's involvement in drugs and pornography. Murtaugh finds her. On a stretcher, dead.
    When he gets back to the station, he's assigned a new partner. Riggs. Most of the force feels that Riggs is acting depressed to draw a psychological distress pension, and hope that Murtaugh can rein Riggs in a bit.
    Fat chance.
    As they investigate the daughter's suicide, Riggs and Murtaugh gradually come to the conclusion that she was murdered, by a group of fanatical Ex-Special Forces mercenaries who maintain a heroin pipeline into L.A., with the help of Murtaugh's Army friend. His daughter's murder was a warning to him, not to go to the police. After Murtaugh confronts his friend, the friend confesses all, before he is murdered by the same group of mercenaries, who then kidnap one of Murtaugh's daughters to ensure Riggs' and Murtaugh's cooperation with their smuggling.
    Again, fat chance.
    Throwing police procedure to the four winds, Riggs and Murtaugh rescue Murtaugh's daughter, kill all the bad guys and basically drive the street price of heroin through the roof.

Then there's Lethal Weapon 2, a movie with a more social conscience than its predecessor.
   Lethal Weapon 2 again teams Gibson and Glover as Riggs and Murtaugh, who get involved with Afrikaan nationals at the height of the South African practice of Apartheid. The South African consulate is involved in a money laundering scheme which is netting them millions in U.S. currency. A grasping, whiney accountant, Leo Getz (played by Joe Pesci) who has been laundering the money for the Consulate, decides to turn state's evidence and implicate the South Africans in the conspiracy, which marks him for death and gets Riggs and Murtaugh assigned to him for protection.
    After Leo explains how he laundered the money, and after a foiled attempt on Getz's life by the South Africans, Riggs, Murtaugh and Getz decide to make the Consulate's life a living hell. Riggs meets Anika, an assistant to the Consulate, and they fall in love. That is until, Riggs and Anika are kidnapped by the consulate workers and Anika is drowned. Before Riggs is also thrown into the ocean, the lead bad guy for the Consulate confesses to Riggs that he was responsible for Riggs' wife's death in a car accident. If it weren't for a shoulder Riggs can dislocate anytime he wants, he would have been drowned too. Riggs, in an effort to bring down the South Africans, attaches a chain to one of the structural supports for the consulate's house on stilts and brings the whole thing crashing down, then destroys the money scheduled to be sent to South Africa and ultimately, Murtaugh kills the African Consulate.

   Lethal Weapon 3 involves Riggs and Murtaugh in a stolen weapons ring, headed by an ex-police detective who's involved in gang related crime. This is at a time when Murtaugh's son is at risk of getting involved with a neighborhood gang and at one point, Murtaugh shoots and kills a gang banger who is a friend and classmate of his son's. Murtaugh experiences a crisis of faith for having killed a boy his son Nick's age (and actually, the way the scene was shot, I thought that Nick had gotten involved in the gang and Murtaugh killed him. I guess that would have been too damaging to Murtaugh.
    Riggs meets Lt. Lorna Cole (Rene Russo), a member of LAPD's Internal Affairs Division, and after much adolescent flirting and scar comparing, they fall in love, mainly because Lorna can kick box almost as well (if not better) than Riggs. Leo Getz is also on hand again, to provide more comic relief, this time as a real estate agent trying to sell Murtaugh's house when he retires.
    Riggs, Murtaugh and Cole team up and foil the ex-cop, his gang of ex-cons and coincidentally destroy a housing development in the desert, before Murtaugh decides he is once again not ready to retire and cancels the contract to sell his house.

   Lethal Weapon 4  the last movie in the series, is also one of the best. Starring Gibson, Glover, Russo and Pesci again, and also bringing in Chris Rock as Detective Butters, this being more of a "passing the torch" kind of movie.
    Murtaugh is still not retired, his oldest daughter is pregnant (and unmarried) and he's really feeling his years. Riggs and Lorna Cole are living together and Lorna is pregnant too.
    Riggs, Murtaugh and Getz go out on Murtaugh's boat, so that Murtaugh can talk to Riggs about marrying Lorna. While out on the boat, a Chinese boat, smuggling Chinese nationals into the U.S., almost steams over them during a gunfight on the Chinese boat. Riggs and Murtaugh get involved, stop the gunfight, but let the bad guys go.
    A family on the boat, the Hongs, also get away and go into hiding at Murtaugh's house. Mr. Hong's brother has been sent to the U.S. earlier, to work at counterfeiting Chinese money in an effort to purchase the release of "The Four Fathers", the leaders of a Chinese Triad. One of the Four Fathers' brothers is a ruthless killer who Riggs and Murtaugh run into for the course of the movie. The Hongs are taken from Murtaugh's house and the house is burned down. The house fire would have gotten Riggs, Lorna, Murtaugh and his family if the youngest Hong hadn't hidden away and then emerged to cut them all loose. After the counterfeiter finishes the money plates, he and all the rest of the Hongs are also killed. The money is taken to purchase the release of The Four Fathers.
    During the money exchange, Riggs and Murtaugh arrive to expose the plot to the extortionists, showing them that the money is fake. This starts a huge gunfight in which The Four Fathers are all killed, including the Triad killer's brother. The Triad assassin then proceeds to kick both Riggs' and Murtaugh's butts, before being run through with a piece of reinforcing rod and dropped into the sea from an old, rotted dock. Riggs almost dies underwater as well, before shooting the assassin and before Murtaugh can save him.
    During the course of investigating the Chinese connection, Murtaugh learns that Butters (Rock) is the father of his daughter's baby, and that they were secretly married months ago. At the conclusion of the caper, Riggs marries Lorna as she is in labor, but both Lorna and Murtaugh's daughter have their babies and everyone lives happily ever after.

    Well, there is only one other Action movie star that I must discuss, one that has starred or costarred in over 20 movies over the years.Godzilla, King of the Monsters. G is the MAN. End of story, turn out the lights, go home. Godzilla is the type of action star that directors drool over. Do we need him to look tough or goofy? Is he destroying Earth in this movie, or protecting it? Or this gonna be a tag team wrestling movie? Godzilla has supposedly died in nearly every one of his movies, but sometimes he (she?) can hibernate in icebergs, sometimes he hibernates in volcanos, he doesn't need to breath air, and although he can be hurt by missiles, lava seems to have no effect on him. However, in the excellent and more recent Godzilla Vs. Destroyorah, his time seems to have indeed come to an end. Godzilla, whose internal fusion reactor for a metabolism is starting to redline, suffers a most fatal and literal 'meltdown'. But who knows? Godzilla Junior was on hand for this movie as well, but he may have been killed by Destroyorah. Until the Sony movie by Roland Emmerich (who also directed ID4 and Universal Soldier, a movie a friend of mine is in), Godzilla had never really been portrayed as a flesh and blood (so to speak) organic being.
    Godzilla has gone through many physical changes as well. There are way better sites than mine that can show you all the many physical changes Godzilla has undergone (and in many cases, suffered), but my particular favorite Godzilla (appearance only, the movie itself sucked huge wind) is King Kong Vs. Godzilla. The King Kong suit is terrible, for some reason his arms can magically change length, the fingers useless, the hands flopping at the ends of obvious arm extensions. Also, in several memorable battle scenes, Godzilla is throwing rocks on Kong, who's unconscious on his back. A couple of rocks hit him in the upper lip area, depressing it and showing it to be the rubber you knew it always was, and somehow Kong, although he can be burned by Godzilla's radioactive breath, is strengthened by lightning, which coincidentally strikes him repeatedly while he's battling Godzilla (and, fortuitously, the lightening only strikes Kong when he's getting his butt whipped). Godzilla, even though he is a big nuclear reactor himself, can't stand D/C current, apparently. So, he dies. And, as a matter of fact, Kong dies too. Kong died in the original Japanese version, released overseas. American audiences didn't cotton to the idea that Godzilla wins, so a quickie shot of Kong swimming away into the ocean after the battle leaves the audience to believe that Kong kills Godzilla and goes home.

Kong actually had a son at some point, and Willis O'Brien, the creator of the original Kong, trotted Lil Kong out the following year, in a movie inexplicably titled, "Son of Kong". Other than that, the two De Laurentis movies ("King Kong" and "King Kong Lives", which stars Linda "Terminator" Hamilton) and the new Peter Jackson remake starring Jack ("School of Rock") Black, there have been few giant ape movies. Yeah yeah I've seen "Mighty Joe Young" (both versions) and they don't count anymore than "Congo" counts. Godzilla though, now there's a STAR. He's starred in over two dozen movies during his long career, and has undergone some radical head and body changes, not ot mention his attitude. Some movies he's after mankind, sometimes he's protecting man form their own folly, sometimes, he's just there to kick another guy in a monster suit's butt. I'm not counting the Sony Pictures "Godzilla" with Matthew Broderick, that was a remake of the original "Godzilla, King of the Monsters". I mean just the Toho Godzilla has changed and changed again. With the release of 2004's "Godzilla: Tokyo SOS", Toho Pictures reported the sad news that the monster has finally retired. However, it seems as though Toho is finally releasing every Godzilla movie made on DVD. I'm slowly converting my collection over. The one Godzilla flick I was never able to find a commercial copy of was "Godzilla vs. Hedorah" aka "G vs the Smog Monster". This is one of the most disturbing movies of the whole series. An alien organism has arrived on Earth and has begun to animate the pollution in the ocean off the Japanese coast. The sludge and slime all comes together to form Hedorah, a rapidly mutating monster which is so poisonous, it's farts are sulfuric acid, which it emits when it flies. Godzilla shows up to deal with the pollution problem, encounters Hedorah and massive destruction and death follow. This is ONE Godzilla movie which is not "G" rated, the deaths are fairly graphic, including one pretty gross scene of a guy slowly disintegrating after being subjected to Hedorah's sulphuric mist. This is also the only Godzilla movie I've ever seen which uses CARTOONS to run through some of the more expensive plot ideas, such as Hedorah consuming the smoke from a manufacturing plant, then swallowing the plant itself whole, etc. Well, it was finally released on DVD and of course, I now have a copy, which I've watched like 11 times.

    Whew! I'm bushed from all this writing. I'm going to take a little break and in the next chapter, I'll discuss the comedies I like and why. I hope to see ya there.