SATURDAY SHOWCASE : Cool Kaiju Artwork

Bandai Godzilla 2014 Toys Revealed

These come from the ToyWiz website.

Ad For Kraken Releasings Godzilla Films Releases

Here is the link for all the info on these releases.

Destroy All Monsters And Godzilla Vs. Megalon To Be Re-Released

Toho’s DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (怪獣総進撃, Kaiju Soshingeki, 1968) and GODZILLA VS MEGALON (ゴジラ対メガロ, Gojira Tai Megaro, 1973) are returning to home video in North America from Media Blasters’ Tokyo Shock label. Both Godzilla classics will be released individually on DVD and Blu-ray and as a DVD box set to follow the wide theatrical release of the new GODZILLA.

Both films were previously released, there was issues between Toho and Media Blasters on the first releases which have now been worked out. The movies are scheduled for DVD, and in a first for GODZILLA VS MEGALON, Blu-ray starting in late July 2014. Both editions will boast HD transfers and be presented fully uncut with Japanese 2.0 and 5.1 audio and Toho’s English 2.0 audio/subtitle options. DVDs of the two films will also be packaged together in a “Godzilla Stomp Box” exclusive for Walmart stores. The Stomp Box goes on sale in mid July.

Update: the DVDs and Blu-rays will both be $19.99 and be released on 7/22, the Stomp Box will go for $14.96 and be released on 7/8.

Giant Size Godzilla 2014 Package Gives Hints At Origin, More Pics

Possible spoilers!

Possibly the last of an ancient species of giant amphibious creatures that evolved at a time when the surface of the earth was over 10 times more radioactive than it is today. GODZILLA can convert his radiation stores into a violent, focused exhalation of atomic ray. Rarely seen, but spoken of in antient Pacific Islan myths. 'Gojira' was last spotted in 1954 when the U.S Navy encountered and attempted to kill him with an atomic blast in the Pacific Ocean. Since then, the giant creature has been living in the deep ocean - until a threat to his survival from an ancient foe forces him to reappear.

Giant Size Godzilla 2014 In Toys R Us Already?

It seems Toy R Us is on a roll of sorts they have already shipped Godzilla 2014 toys, now they are apparently showing up in stores here is the 24" Jakks Pacific version (over 40" long) which was found on Facebook and was retailing for $40+. 

Update: This is the 24" figure and is over 40" long there have been posts on the web that it is a 43" figure which is incorrect, even we posted it as such and a few more pics as well.

Godzilla: The Monster Movie With A Director Of Modest Origin

From The Guardian

How do you go from a microbudget monster movie with special effects created using off-the-shelf software to a $160m (£96m) Hollywood megalith starring the hottest cult actor in the world in three years? The answer, if you are 38-year-old British film-maker Gareth Edwards, appears to be with plenty of laid-back panache, no small amount of style and masses of geeky charm.

It is very unlikely that any other director in Hollywood – certainly not the likes of Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich – would have admitted their first experience of Godzilla was the late-70s Hanna Barbera cartoon version. Nor that when they first watched the Japanese Toho movies on Channel 4 they could not work out why the (heavily dubbed) dialogue seemed so out of sync with the picture.

Edwards was quite happy to play the self-effacing ingenue during a Q&A with bloggers and journalists in London last week, in the course of which we got to see around 20 searing minutes from the film itself. The director, who debuted with Monsters in 2010 and was almost immediately picked up by Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures to revive Godzilla, could probably afford to play down his credentials: if the scenes we saw are anything to go by, his film stands a strong chance of being one of the greatest monster movies of all time.

The irony for a fan of the cartoon is that the preview footage steered well clear of Godzilla's sillier manifestations. Hanna-Barbera's version famously featured a cowardly cousin of the great lizard named Godzooky, with rubbish tiny wings and the not-so useful power of breathing smoke. Some of the poorer Toho films, although not the classic 1954 original that kicked off the whole saga, maintain an unarguable air of man-in-a-monster-suit camp.

Edwards' film, by contrast, has the look of a dark and atmospheric, blood-curdling journey into a world of uncertainty where man is no longer the apex predator and preposterously gargantuan creatures roam through cityscapes with brutal and unearthly insouciance. "As the human race we abuse our position," said Edwards when asked to describe the new Godzilla's dramatic undercurrent. "Our movie is very much themed around man v nature. It's about our abuse of nature and how that can come back to haunt us."

This time Godzilla is far from the only behemoth crashing through skyscrapers with unstoppable destructive force, and some of these other monsters are staggeringly sublime visions from a nightmare plane of existence. I won't ruin the fun for serious acolytes, but there are multiple nods to the Toho films.

The feel and style of the movie closely recalls Monsters, in which Edwards first invited the audience to get under the skin of his human cannon fodder, then plunged them into a fight for survival against hellish extraterrestrial titans in a remorseless display of shock and awe. The director insisted he approached Godzilla in exactly the same manner as his earlier film.

"If you wrote a list of all the pros and cons of making a low-budget movie, when you make a high-budget movie, just swap them over," he said. "Everything that is easy to do when there's just three of you is really hard when there's 400 of you. And everything that's hard when you've only got a tenner becomes really easy when you have millions. So that sort of balances it all back out again.

"The real difficulty, the hardest thing in any film-making process, is telling a good story that you really care about the outcome of. It doesn't matter if you've got 10p, or $200m, it's just as hard for everybody, and that's what we focused all our time on trying to get right."

Aping the intelligent camerawork and cinematography of Monsters, the new film sees Godzilla and his fellow kaiju shot from angles and in light that never gives too much away: we are always straining our eyes to make sense of the vast and savage horrors before us. Edwards also revealed that his version of the monster is the biggest ever at 350ft tall.

"The idea was to make him as big as we possibly could," he said. "We wanted him tall enough for you to be able to see him wherever you are in a city but small enough for him to be obscured at times – because otherwise it's no fun. We did a whole version of options from crazy tall to small to dinosaur-sized and it was quite clear that 350ft was the optimum height. Especially as that would make him technically the biggest Godzilla ever, so we thought 'let's do that'."

Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston, playing a nuclear physicist whose life was changed 15 years previously by an earth-shattering event he refuses to believe was a natural disaster, is the perfect actor to express humanity's incandescent fear and rage at the prospect of imminent Armageddon.

Edwards said he picked Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who plays Cranston's military commander son, for his ability to hold audiences through multiple scenes with little or no dialogue. That's a big ask in a movie where the threat of barbarous beasts appears ubiquitous, and the jury must remain out on whether the British actor is up to the task. We'll also have to wait and see whether Godzilla can succeed where so many of its predecessors have failed and avoid descending into final act mega-destruction overkill.

Emmerich's 1998 Godzilla still lingers in the memories of fans as a sad example of Hollywood's inability to find the beating heart of its source material. On this evidence Edwards' take looks odds-on to wipe its predecessor from the map.

Kaiju Battle Review: Pacific Rim Trespasser Figure

Trespasser one of the many kaiju of Pacific Rim and one of the first to appear in the film, attacking San Francisco as well as other cities. Now it is an awesome figure Trespasser is bigger then the two previous kaiju released by NECA like Leatherback released in wave 2 Trespasser has quite a few points of articulation and plenty of detail. Trespasser is very similar to Knifehead in style with two large arms and two smaller arms but both are articulated unlike wave 1 Knifehead in which the smaller ones were not (wave 3 Knifehead is different which we review in the near future), they also share a similar color scheme. The figure looks great but there is one thing that I was not crazy about which was the tail that is curved, due to the packaging, and is hard to move to a different position. The figure has a solid feel and is easy to pose overall joints are all firm but not to hard to adjust into different poses. The paint job on it is very good with one exception there are a few mistakes on one side of the figure's abdomen it is not horrible but it is slightly noticeable. Overall it is an great figure slightly better then Leatherback in my opinion, which is a great figure as well. This figure is part of wave 3 which includes Battle Damaged Knifehead, Cherno Alpha, and Coyote Tango, although the kaiju are definitely my favorites.

Trespasser And Leatherback