King Kong vs. Godzilla : how localisation produced “badness”

There almost always seems to be a Godzilla film in badfilm lists. In Harry and Michael Medved's first book on bad movies, it was Godzilla vs. Hedorah (Gojira tai Hedora, AKA Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, Banno Yoshimitsu, 1971); for Rob Hill in The Bad Movie Bible, it was Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (Gojira tai Mekagojira, Fukuda Jun, 1974). Godzilla films undoubtedly sit within the canon of “bad cinema,” even praised for their paracinematic quality. This article considers Tōhō Studio's 1962 film King Kong vs. Godzilla, perhaps the most transformed film in the Godzilla series, in both its Japanese and American versions. For its release in the US, the film underwent a significant transformation, with approximately 20 of its 97-minute running time removed, new scenes added, as well as changes to its soundtrack, with the vast majority of music replaced and a new dialogue dub. As the paper argues, the transformations to the film align with objective techniques of badfilm production, including the use of stock footage, library music, issues of logic, and failures of “good” filmmaking technique. The results help to demonstrate the ways in which we can understand how localised films then became canonised as badfilms. Badfilm scholarship has repeatedly problematised the place of non-American cinema within the canon of bad movies, since aesthetic failure is often defined in relation to Hollywood cinema. However, in order for films like King Kong vs. Godzilla to enter badfilm canons, localisation and the work of American distributors must first transform the work into an objectively “bad” work of art, erasing cultural specificity along the way. Nevertheless, such localisation challenges the failed intentions argument of much badfilm scholarship.