On Thursday, January 30, 2003, at 10:45 PM, Scott Andrew Hutchins wrote:

> Matango (Ishiro Honda, 1963)


Obviously, the list is in no particular order, otherwise Matango, the
Fungus of Terror (AKA Attack of the Mushroom People) would be first. :-)

Seriously, Ishiro Honda is a director who is often overlooked,
dismissed as "the director of those awful Godzilla movies" by most. In
fact, he was a great filmmaker who worked as assistant director with
Kurosawa on some of his later films, such as Kagemusha and Ran.

As for the Godzilla films, before you criticize, see the original
Japanese versions, in widescreen for the ones that were filmed that
way. They are very different films than the badly dubbed, re-edited,
panned-and-scanned versions that most Americans have seen on TV in
their childhood. In particular, see the original Japanese version of
Godzilla (1954), which features Takashi Shimura of Seven Samurai fame
as the lead. The American version was butchered of about half of its
footage in order to make room for poorly integrated scenes featuring
Raymond Burr as an American reporter.

Chris Nuzzi

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