‘Godzilla vs Kong’ has been a great success during its first opening weekend. A show in which the confrontations between the two great colossi most famous in the history of cinema has come true. However, it is not the first time that the two monsters from the different franchises have fought, since we got to see the Japanese version of the combat in the 60s.
Cinema of great apes, dinosaurs and other monsters fought to the death has always existed and this new crossover perpetrated by director Adam Wingard proves that seeing two great creatures in the ring is still a successful subgenre for fantasy cinema. Reviewing a good handful of appearances by Kong, Godzilla and other great beings without their own names, we will see up to 11 stop motion productions, men in rubber suits or digital sculpture until we reach the cyclopean new confrontation.
The Lost World (The Lost Word, 1925)
Starting from the moving dolls of the short ‘Ghost of Slumber Mountain‘(1918), Willis O’Brien honed his technique to levels of sheer animated wonder for his glorious, groundbreaking stop motion fights of this groundbreaking Arthur Conan Doyle adaptation, the subject of dozens of later versions. The fight between the Tyrannosaurus and the brontosaurus It is already a classic of the genre.
Available on Fubo tv
King Kong (1933)
King Kong arises from Hollywood’s interest in palaeozoology or cryptozoology and still today it may be the best monster adventure movie in movie history, where the fights with dinosaurs and above all, the great moment with the pterodactyl stand out. It should be noted its endearing sequel, ‘The Son of Kong’, another adventure on Skull Island that is much lighter and more silly, but which still maintains impressive effects, in which the albino son of the great gorilla even faces a bear.
Criticism in Espinof
Available in Flixolé
A million years ago (One Million Years BC, 1966)
Ray Harryhausen He was the magician who perfected Willis O’Brien’s art of frame-by-frame animation with dozens of mythology, horror and adventure films. In ‘Evolution‘(1940) and’The Animal World‘(1956), Darwin’s documentaries on zoology and scientific theories, had several fights between dinosaurs that were a sketch for the monstrous battles of’The Gwangi Valley‘(1966) and’A million years ago‘, in which it presented a fight between a Triceratops and a Ceratosaurus, the most carnivorous species of the Jurassic.
Available on Amazon Prime video
Simbad y la princesa (The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, 1958)
Harryhausen was very comfortable with fantastic creatures, and among the wonders of ‘Sinbad and the princess‘are the Cyclops, and Taro, a mythical chimera similar to a classic dragon, the guard dog of the evil sorcerer Sokura with whom he stars in one of the great fights of fantasy adventure movies, which he can win thanks to his big teeth.
Available in Filmin
La batalla de los simios gigantes (Furankenshutain no kaijû: Sanda tai Gaira, 1966)
Sequel to the bizarre ‘Frankenstein Conquers the World‘(1965), in which Frankenstein’s creature was a kind of giant zombie like those in’ Attack on Titan ‘(2015), directed by Ishiro Honda, who faced two great apes in battles against a squid or between them, in the middle of Tokyo, where buildings are destroyed with his falls, which are still a spectacle for one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite fantastic films.
Available in Filmin
Alien Invasion (1968)
The brutal success of ‘Godzilla’ (1954) in Japan created an inexhaustible franchise that continues to grow to this day. In the Showa stage of the saga it resulted in great combats between all the most famous monsters, the most epic being ‘Alien Invasion’ in which all the creatures of the saga appeared together in a mega salad of people in rubber suits and papier-mâché that summarizes everything that characterizes the good Kaiju Eiga.
Available in Filmin
A * P * E (1976)
The success of King Kong turned the giant gorillas into a subgenre that had countless imitations like this APE, which was released at the same time as the official remake of the original and, in addition to generating the great gif of the gorilla making a comb, has a delusional fight with a real shark that has a reserved place in the pantheon of the funniest of trash cinema.
Gamera 2: The Legion Attack (Gamera 2: Region Shurai, 1996)
The dark reboot of Daiei Films’ 90s Gamera series spawned a spectacular trilogy that ranks among the best of the kaiju genre. In its second and spectacular installment, the turtle-shaped monster, after ending a race of flying monsters in the previous one, faces a mass of insectoid creatures from a meteor known as Legion. Probably better than any new American monsterverse movie.
Jurassic Park III (Jurassic Park III, 2001)
The advance in special effects that turned the fascination for large creatures into a true fever for dinosaurs took place in ‘Jurassic Park’ (1993), which had a much remembered fight at the end of the film, but perhaps the great confrontation of the saga is in the third part, in which the great Tyrannosaurus Rex faced the Spinosaurus, making better a sequel not as lazy as remembered, but definitely lacking in Spielberg’s touch.
Criticism in Espinof
Available on Netflix
King Kong (2005)
Peter Jackson’s digital remake made the myth bigger and stronger, with a fairly successful CGI and a vocation for a three-hour epic great adventure that recovered the sense of wonder of seeing Kong fight against other shows, turning the famous showdown with the tyrannosaurus in an impossible eight minute sequence that pays homage to the original by recreating some of its key moments but doubling in number and tension each moment. It still works better than the new deliveries.
Criticism in Espinof
Available on Netflix
Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009)
Before the monsterverse crossovers, the first to dare with delusional confrontations of creatures were channels like Syfy or the production company Asylum, which turned this battle between two giant sea creatures into an icon of seedy cinema, with bad effects and worse performances but a great dose of absurdity, materializing the unthinkable, leaving a whole saga in which Mega Shark fights with a Crocosaur or there are mutations like Sharktopus, piranhaconda or Pteracuda. They have a very bad reputation, but in reality, Wingard’s film doesn’t manage to go much further either.
Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Although it has some script problems and some uninteresting characters, time and two subsequent atrocious installments have placed this as the best movie of the monsterverse, thanks to its impressive fights, especially against an octopus or the large skull-faced lizards. The almost slasher spirit, with soldiers falling every so often for all kinds of monsters, his bad slobber and the staging of Jordan Vogt-Roberts, with a tremendous photograph, make it win in reviews and it is like a remarkable trip to the heart of the fun-filled darkness without repellent children turning the gorilla into the ‘ET’ he has never been.
Criticism in Espinof
Rakuten tv digital purchase available
Proyecto Rampage (Rampage, 2018)
Few movies have achieved a gorilla and reptile crossover without going by the name Kong or Godzilla. This highly underrated modern B-series adapted a video game in which a cousin of Snowflake faced a bloodthirsty wild wolf and a mutant crocodile in a host salad, destruction and moments of black humor well fitted enough more violent and fun than ‘Godzilla King of the Monsters’ and ‘Godzilla vs Kong’.
Criticism in Espinof
Digital purchase available on Itunes
Godzilla vs Kong (2021)
Although the trailers make us think that the meeting is new, ‘King Kong against Godzilla’ (1962) already faced the two mythical monsters, and did so with much more witty than Adam Wingard’s clumsy film, which drags the problems of the previous one even with the worst integrated CGI of the saga (those seawater sparkles), but it improves somewhat thanks to the adventurous tone of Kevin Connor and his generosity in fights, to compensate for a jumbled and impersonal script, full of filler characters.
Despite the fact that it has more combat, there are shortcomings that because it is a film of giant monsters, they should not stop taking care of themselves, as a minimum of pampering in their story and characters, in the search for sustained tension and suspense so as not to reach the climax exhausted and without nothing at stake. In fact, many things can be asked of you that your proposal promises and does not give: qmake it more Pacific Rim and less Asylum, less run over scraps of visually attractive ideas with the same emotion as watching someone play a game of video game and above all, if you are going to put humans to turn monsters into pets, or show off the names of the actors with regrettable script phrases better not fill with them the 90 minutes of footage in which the monsters do not fight.
Criticism in Espinof