Well, I definitely won't say I wasn't entertained.
I have no idea what made me decide to watch Ebira! Horror Of The Deep. But, honestly, once I saw that giant claw come up from under the waves and toss a boat around, I was all in.
Little did I know that, in no time at all, this movie would involve a psychic, a dance contest, a safecracker, a secret island with a diabolical secret army, ****ing
Mothra (!), and then, oh sure, why not just throw The Big Guy, Godzilla himself in for good measure?
And the plot is just too much fun. A guy goes missing in the South Pacific, his family consults a psychic who says he's not dead, his brother goes to a dance contest where the prize is a boat (to search for his brother), he leaves with the losers of the contest and they trespass on a boat whose owner let's them stay the night... but turns out to be a wanted safecracker. The brother sets sail while they sleep and they find themselves in the middle of the South Pacific, where Ebirah (Horror of the Deep!) attacks and destroys their boat, marooning them on an island... which happens to be occupied by The Red Bamboo, an evil organization making some weird atomic chemical or something and enslaving the nearby-islanders... who are Mothra worshippers! Of course, while fleeing The Red Bamboo, our heroes stumble across a slumbering Godzilla.
That's like the first 20-25 minutes, tops.
After that, there's like some non-plan about going on the offensive against this entire army, some lock-picking (like surprisingly a
lot of lock-picking for a giant-monster movie), the Mothra cult dancing and chanting, I mean, this one guy's got an eyepatch, there's a whole underground lair that's somewhere between Bond-villain and Star Trek, some MacGuyver **** goes down...
and this is all before either Mothra or Godzilla even wake up!
And then you still get like 30-35 minutes of kaiju action.
Did I mention Ebirah is some kind of giant mutated lobster-thingy?
I found this tremendously entertaining. And I wasn't even high.
I mean, honestly the special effects are no worse than other B-movies or Bond movies for that matter of the same era and some of them are actually pretty good, pretty convincing. I mean, except for the actual kaiju fights, those are absolutely hilarious. There's a whole bit with Godzilla and Ebirah like playing tennis with boulder or something. It's amazing. And I actually didn't know, going in, that Godzilla was in this, much less Mothra.
I don't know if I'm gonna go right ahead and watch
Megalon next but I tell ya, Ebirah is aces in my book.