Godzilla

Forgive my cruelty! I was ten years young and we were like that in Adelaide. I have fond memories though of those shells cracking. Cold wet gooey bodies splatting were delightfully satisfying.

Godzilla, revenge lizardified, has been quite rightly doing the same sort of thing to humans with his own very, very big feet since 1954, thankfully only in the movies, but in over twenty of them.

Usually he squelches the Japanese in Tokyo. Godzilla was a Japanese invention, one of their responses to the bomb annihalition of two major Japanese cities by the Americans, but this latest Hollywood version has the big radioactive lizard munching on the Big Apple.

I suppose New Yorkers must be used to it by now but I wonder if they savour some deep, grim satisfaction in having their home town as the ferred site for so many disasters.

In Cairns right now for example you can see Godzilla wreck Manhattan, or you can spend your money wisely and go to see the much, much more intelligent and entertaining Deep Impact where New York becomes the target of a rogue asteroid.

But Godzilla is Godawful, an uninspired revel in special effects which entertains as much subtlety as One Nation's economic policy.

In Godzilla it seems that the French have irradiated some poor lizard during their nuclear testing program in Australia's backyard in the Pacific.

(I wonder how long it will be before it's the Indian or Pakistani bombs that will be the H Bomb, Godzilla villains. We'll have to wait for the Hollywood foreign affairs department to decide who are the current irradiation bad guys on the sub continent.)

Anyway, before you can say sunken big ships, the big G. has rocked into Manhattan and is tearing about at 500 ks an hour looking for dinner with half of the U.S. army after him.

Then they kill him. Then he comes back. And of course there remains a baby G. ready for the sequel. Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno and Hank Azaria (the camp house boy in The Birdcage) are the brighter spots hidden deep within great piles of dinosaur dung.