I’m a huge Godzilla fan. I also like a good spoof as much as anybody. The G-Man and the entire kaiju genre is certainly ripe for parody, given their low budgets, cheesy special effects, and shoddy dubbing. Because of that, I was kind of looking forward to Notzilla. Unfortunately, the film is just flat-out unfunny. It’s a shame when the straight-up Godzilla movies offer more laughs.
A Japanese scientist (Frederic Eng-Li) accidentally loses a dinosaur egg down an airplane toilet. It lands in the Ohio River where it is found by a blowhard scientist named… uh… Dr. Blowheart (Tim Bensch). One night, he gets drunk in his lab and decides to pour beer on the egg. Much to his surprise, the egg hatches, and a baby dinosaur emerges. The cute critter soon develops a taste for alcohol, and drinks more beer, which causes him to grow to enormous proportions. Before long, the monster begins to wreak havoc on Cincinnati, and it’s up to the bumbling scientists to stop him.
The set-up is promising as the badly dubbed (on purpose) Japan-set scenes are kind of funny. Too bad things fall apart once the action switches over to America. The gags are frequently unfunny and the ones that cause an occasional smirk are repeated way too often and/or are immediately run into the ground.
Like most kaiju movies, the stuff with the monster is more entertaining that the human scenes, albeit only slightly in this case. The creature is cute and all, but the filmmakers try way too hard to make him funny. It would’ve made for a better movie had the creature been menacing in some way, and not an out-and-out goofball.
The use of obvious toys and models during the monster mashing scenes is a nice touch. The best gag comes when the jets are called in to stop Notzilla and he takes them out by simply cutting the strings that are holding the model planes up. The movie really needed more of these fun touches if it was going to work though.
Overall, Notzilla might’ve been a good three-or-four-minute fake trailer, but at seventy-eight minutes it’s something of a chore to get through. You would think that seventy-eight minutes would be just the right length for this sort of thing. However, the gags are just too spread out to cut it as a feature.
Bambi Meets Godzilla was more entertaining.
I thought it was funny.
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