Cinefantastique Online

You are browsing the archives of Ishiro Honda.

The late Ishiro Honda has long been considered Japan’s premier fantasy film director, and certainly worthy of a book-length study, which is what author Peter H. Brothers’ Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda provides.

As part of our weekend tribute to the late special effects director Sadamasa Arikawa, here is the U.S. theatrical trailer for DESTROY ALL MONSTERS – the memorable Toho production in which Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and all of Earth’s other monsters team up for a non-stop destruction derby involving invading aliens trying to take over the [...]

DESTROY ALL MONSTERS is probably the last well-regarded entry in the original Godzilla series. By this time, all serious threat of the monsters had disappeared; recognizing this, director Ishiro Honda (who had helmed the original GODIZLLA in 1954 and many of the subsequent sequels) opted for a fast-paced action-adventure roller-coaster thrill ride that was seldom [...]

[NOTE: THE MYSTERIANS (1957) has been available on DVD for several years, but today sees it re-packaged with two other titles (VARAN and MATANGO) as part of the "Toho Triple Feature" box set. With that in mind, we offer this review of the original DVD.]
This attempt by Toho Studios to create an alien-invasion science-fiction adventure [...]

This fifth film in the Godzilla series (following MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA) is highly regarded among fans who first saw it on television as children, but anyone looking for an awesome monster movie had best look elsewhere. By this time, the franchise had given up all pretense of serious science-fiction, opting for comic antics: this is the [...]

This sequel to GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER is one of the best entries in the long-running series of Godzilla films from Japan’s Toho Studios. Although the serious tone of the original GODZILLA (a.k.a. GOJIRA, 1954) were long gone, INVASION OF ASTRO MONSTER (originally released in the U.S. as MONSTER ZERO) stands out as a colorful, [...]

Among fans and critics, this is generally considered the best Godzilla sequel from the original series of films, which ran from GOJIRA in 1954 to TERROR OF MECHA-GODZILLA IN 1975. (The monster was revived for two subsequent series, beginning in 1984 and 2000, respectively, plus the 1998 American film produced at TriStar.) MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA [...]