11 Best Classic Japanese Godzilla Movies, Ranked

No need for Kong or any other expensive special guest stars here. The 33rd Toho Godzilla movie is a classic solo outing updated with some truly dazzling CGI. In fact, Godzilla Minus One managed to beat out Hollywood heavyweights like Napoleon, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 for the Best Visual Effects Oscar this year. Not bad on a budget of $10 million. Set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the film returns to the themes of the 1954 original: the looming specter of nuclear catastrophe and a scarred nation trying to heal itself. Godzilla Minus One is easily the most emotional and resonant story in the saga yet, which, I realize, isn’t saying all that much. But you may find yourself wiping away a tear or two between rounds of stunning smash-and-mash mayhem. Still, the main attraction is obviously the film’s eye-candy effects, as it should be. With a tenth of the budget that an American studio would throw at it, director Takashi Yamazaki really delivers the awe-inspiring goods—and with more soul and panache than Warner's five recent MonsterVerse flicks combined. This is a real movie, folks—not just another silly, break-the-bank Tinseltown blockbuster.

Yes, this particular clash of the titans has been waged before. And depending on your tolerance, not too terribly either. I suppose the fact that we’re now being treated to a $200 million rematch is just further proof (as if any were needed) that there’s no new ideas under the Tinseltown sun. Interestingly, the first time around, it was Kong who managed to finagle top billing on the marquee. And while “The Eighth Wonder of the World” looks absolutely nothing like the star of the 1933 RKO classic (actually, he looks more like the bastard child of a couple of the Banana Splits), he gives Godzilla all that he can handle in this entertaining, enjoyable, so-bad-it’s-batshit-awesome mess. After being awoken from an icy slumber, Godzilla sizes up the simian behemoth and they face off rather epically on Mt. Fuji. King Kong vs. Godzilla is the movie that kicked off the whole “Godzilla vs. Fill in the Blank” grudge-match formula. And, as it would soon become clear, it proved to be a hell of a formula.

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Okay, okay, this one is a real love-it-or-hate-it proposition. But I stumbled onto it at an impressionable age (about 10) on our local Saturday-afternoon monster-movie TV showcase, “Creature Double Feature.” Conceived to broaden the franchise’s reach to the kiddie crowd, Son of Godzilla introduces us to Minilla—the cute/creepy pint-size spawn of our hero (not to be confused with Godzooky, Godzilla’s nephew from the animated late-‘70s television show). Like a Cat Stevens song in kaiju form, father and son duke it out with a bunch of giant pincer-clawed insects that look like rejects from Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters and bond over heart-melting lizard-tail piggyback rides. The trailer promises that you will “See how a baby monster becomes a monstrous monster!” But that’s a bait and switch. There’s nothing too monstrous here, just a kid and his dad having a ball on a playdate. What can I say, 10-year-old me was a sucker for it.

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Here’s where shit starts to get real. Sure, the plot of Invasion of the Astro-Monster gets a little talky at times, and we could do without the East-meets-West romantic subplot, but the sixth film in the franchise has some of the best orgy-of-destruction sequences in the classic canon. A flying saucer full of aliens from Planet X touch down on Earth offering a cure for cancer if they can borrow Godzilla and the winged Pteranodon, Rodan, to kick the snot out of a third monster back on their home planet: the three-headed dragon-badass Ghidorah (a.k.a. Monster Zero). The deal with the aliens turns out to be a con job (those shifty bastards and their body-hugging silver space suits!), but the battle royal on Planet X is very much the real deal as Godzilla and Rodan turn out to be a formidable tag-team dishing out some serious kaiju wrath.

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By the early ‘70s, the prolific output of Godzilla sequels was in danger of running the franchise into the ground. And much as James Bond tried to goose its own pop-culture relevance by cashing in on Star Wars mania with Moonraker, the Toho braintrust looked elsewhere for a fresh shot in the arm—namely, in the popularity of the kitschy Japanese Ultraman TV series about a flying robot superhero. Enter Jet Jaguar, an Ultraman-esque hero (or is he…?) who teams up with Godzilla to battle Megalon, a giant googly-eyed cockroach with drill-bit arms from the lost underwater continent of Seatopia. Godzilla vs. Megalon is pretty out there (even for a ‘70s Godzilla film), but it’s also hugely satisfying—especially in states where recreational cannabis is legal.

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Returning to the ecological-parable roots of Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original, Godzilla vs. Hedorah is a Trojan horse of a monster movie. You see, humanity is destroying the environment—and that destruction comes with a price tag: Hedorah! Better known to Western audiences as ‘The Smog Monster’, this melting wax-candle of a beast that feeds on toxic sludge, sewage, and pollution. And given the state of the state of the planet, how can you not root for him a little, right? Wrong. Because, as the stentorian voice-over announcer on the trailer intones: The Smog Monster is “a mastodon of destruction” (which, come to think of it, would have been a hell of a name for a Guns N’ Roses tour in 1987. This is a pretty sweet little early ‘70s Godzilla flick.

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This is the Godzilla movie that ruled my dreams when I was 12. And I’d still argue that it’s one of the best installments in the series. Why? Because Godzilla has finally seen the enemy…and it is himself (or at least someone who looks like himself but covered head-to-hoof in metallic armor). When they first square off, you can see the priceless WTF?! expression on Godzilla’s confused face. So who is this bionic, titanium-plated foe who can shoot laser beams from his eyes? It turns out that he’s a robot controlled by alien invaders who look just like humans and even smoke cigars. This guilty pleasure is also notable for the introduction of Godzilla ally, King Caesar—an unsettling hybrid of a lion and a mangy junkyard dog. The three-way finale is a honey.

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Here we have the Wrestlemania of Godzilla films, a wild and deliriously bloated bill of Toho’s greatest monsters (there’s at least a dozen) uniting to save Earth from nefarious aliens. With O.G. auteur Ichiro Honda back behind the camera, this all-star free-for-all is also notable for giving us a glimpse of our favorite kaiju in the wild, living their carefree lives on the desolate and aptly-named Monster Island. That is, until sinister aliens start commanding them one by one to unleash hell on major cities around the world (“Rodan Ravages Moscow!”, “Mothra Massacres Peking!”). Is it the most artful Godzilla movie? No. But is the most insane and it delivers the most value. In short, Destroy All Monsters gives proof to the maxim that too much is never enough.

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This is the closest thing the old-school Godzilla franchise has to a classic-rock greatest hits album. Think of it as Godzilla Live at Budokan! It has telepathic Venusians, an amnesiac princess, and even a nice dose of global intrigue. So there’s a plot, yes. But there’s so much more thanks to the cinematic debut of one of the most indelible and iconic badasses in the kaiju pantheon: Ghidorah. Just how badass is this hydra-headed beastie? Well, so badass that Godzilla needs a little help from his friends, Rodan and Mothra. If some of the earlier entries are cheese, this qualifies as high-end fromage.

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Arguably the most famous Godzilla film after the original, Mothra vs Godzilla (a.k.a Godzilla vs. The Thing) more than earns its gold-plated rep thanks to the oversized moth of the title (although the series would dither back and forth about whether Mothra was friend or foe) and the bonkers pair of tiny twin pixie-women who have a special connection to it. First unveiled in Honda’s 1961 film Mothra, the flying Keith to Godzilla’s Mick has a field day fluttering her wings to produce tsunamis that wreak maximum havoc and giving birth to larvae that promise an infinity war of sequels. Simply put, this is hands down the best Godzilla chapter of the ‘60s.

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The first time is always the best, isn’t it? Well, at least, it is here. Ichiro Honda’s monster-movie masterpiece is, of course, an allegory about the horrific devastation unleashed by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII. But like all of the best B-movies of the Cold War era, even its cut-rate rubber-suit trappings can’t disguise its profound message—the terror of a nation that faces annihilation without warning. But if that was all that Godzilla (originally titled Gojira in Japan and re-cut in the U.S. to add star Raymond Burr) had to offer, it wouldn’t have anything close to the lasting impact it continues to have six decades-and-change later. Godzilla is also a masterclass as a straight-up horror flick with a populace fleeing for their lives with no clue what the hell is happening to them. Its terror goes beyond logic and deep into the world of nightmares. With Godzilla, Honda’s immortal, poetic creation arrives fully formed as a supersized specter of the apocalypse. Afterwards, there was no hiding and no turning back.

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