Yata Kane, beloved son and brother, is lost at sea sometime before the opening credits roll. And while the newspapers contend he is dead, a psychic medium convinces the family elsewise. Ryota, his younger brother, hears about a dance competition offering a yacht to the danciest dancers, but he arrives three days too late to enroll. Two dropouts, Nita and Ichino, take pity on the naïve farmboy and decide to take him to a shipyard. Innocently enough, the tour inadvertently results in the theft of a stolen boat. You heard me. Ryota raises the sails and points the ship southward to the chagrin of the original thief, master safecracker and bank robber Yoshimura, whom does not list seamanship among his many talents.

They float ever farther out to sea for what seems like minutes, when storm clouds form overhead. The small ship is battered and beaten by the waves, breaking its mast and smearing the poop deck. As if that wasn't bad enough, an ominous James Bond-esque theme song cues, announcing the arrival of Ebirâ, a biologically-improbable, giant lobster. After some awkward splashing, Ebirâ's claws make short work of the toy boat, whose occupants have already been tossed to the mercy of the sea.

But all is well. The gang awake safe and sound on Devil Island, a deeply forested, bountiful land, ungroped by humanity's grimy mitts... except for a massive, top secret nuclear bomb plant run by Red Bamboo; eastern Asia's star terrorist outfit. But our heroes are hungry, and first they eat coconuts, which they open with a plastic sword found discarded in the sand. “What are you, a monkey?” Yoshimura quips, evidently emasculated by the coconuts. They finish the monkeychow between cuts and peek-a-boo at the super top secret nuclear bomb plant, which appears to be furnished by IKEA. A battleship docks and unloads a shipment of slaves from nearby Infant Island, home of Mothra. While all of the soldiers are distracted, Daiyo, the prettiest and most scantily-clad slave, escapes to the safety of the jungle. Her comrades, meanwhile, are herded into a cell and forced to make Ebirâ-repellent mustard from lemons in a giant mortar and pestle.

Daiyo soon runs into the shipwrecked protagonists, but as the soldiers were hot on her trail, they are forced to hide in a cave. And not just any cave. A cave in which Godzilla is quietly sleeping on a bed of rocks. They prudently decide to awaken Godzilla by “[using] lightning [to give] him electro-shock therapy.” Nita props the plastic sword on the mountain's peak and runs copper wire from it down into the cave and around Godzilla's arm. Three days later, and just in the nick of time, a storm comes and Godzilla awakens.

Welcome back, readers! Godzilla emerges from the cave, rubs his eyes, and spots Ebirâ being a big lobster bastard in the shallows. The two monsters warm up with a game of boulder tennis, but Godzilla tires of this and knocks the rock into the command tower of the IKEA-furnished super top secret nuclear bomb plant. He cannonballs into the water and bitch slaps the arthropod into retreat.

Amidst all this monster mayhem, Red Bamboo decide to abandon the island, but before they go, they push a red button to “atomize the whole island in a nuclear explosion” in just two hour's time. With just ten minutes of film remaining, it becomes a race against the clock. Can our heroes (and the heretofore forgotten slaves) escape in time? Will they be atomized by the nuclear explosion? Will they be roasted by Godzilla or clipped by Ebirâ? Will Daiyo take off her clothes?

By 1966, the Showa era of Godzilla films was beginning to scrape the bottom of a chlorinated gene pool. Sadly, a decade of Toho producers marrying their sisters borne monstrous offspring with all the incestuous malformations of ancient Rome's royal lineage. Godzilla's eyes are loopy, his movements are awkward, and his cognitive faculties are on par with Julia Roberts'. All the monsters in Godzilla VS the Sea Monster seem, well, fatigued. In fact, the editor had to play the pygmy twin princess song and dance footage twice before Mothra awoke from her slumber.

The human saga is equally knackered. It's as if Josie and the Pussycats wandered onto the set of the James Bond film Thunderball. Super top secret terrorist nuclear facilities aside, the villain had silver fillings bedaubing his teeth and a jeweled pirate patch over his right eye. Worse yet, the heroes' plight is geographically uninteresting, centered on a sparsely inhabited island. When shit finally does start exploding, it is just nature. Boring old trees, frogs, lizards, nature. It appears that populace Tokyo had decided to sit this one out.

But you know what? Fuck it. This is a Godzilla movie! Sure, the writing may be worse than the darkest annals of the Hanna-Barbera catalog, but it is fun. Fun and stupid and atrocious and painful and fun. And after this feature, Mothra took some time off to be a mother and raise her grubs. It was not until the 1992 release of Godzilla & Mothra: Battle For Earth that she reappeared (in her adult, moth form). So technically, this is history. Kind of.