ZillaFoot (2019)

directed by Anthony Polonia

USA

81 minutes

1.5 stars out of 5

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I looked up reviews of this on Letterboxd prior to watching it and was surprised to see how negative the general consensus was. Kaiju fans tend to be a lot more appreciative of "bad" movies, especially when they're made with a genuine love of the genre, so what could be SO terrible about this one that absolutely no one seemed willing to even give it points for trying?

Well, I understand now.

During and after the cold open, I was actually feeling fairly okay about this. Bad acting is really not something I care too much about anymore, especially in a roughshod production such as this one; these days it matters more to me to be told an interesting story than to have the people involved in the story nail all of their performances. But then the plot ("plot") moved on, and I thought... are... are they dubbing this white woman with somebody doing a vaguely Japanese accent? Did they just call that white guy "Dr. Tazaki"? Oh, I am in for it, aren't I?

So yeah, the deal with this movie is that its cast of entirely non-Japanese actors are (for the most part) given Japanese names and overdubbed by VAs who sound like they're doing that plausibly-not-a-native-English-speaker accent that the voice cast of every Toho movie imported into America in the mid-20th century had. And half of the names they give these characters are actually just Japanese-sounding non-words (with some exceptions). This is... honestly kind of funny, but in a really terrible sort of way. I cringed bodily when two of the leads met up with the fake Ultraman's human host and he bowed to them. This was only one of many cringes the film drew out of me.

Everything I just mentioned is indicative of this movie's wider problem, and the reason why I think it's bad-bad and not "bad but endearing": plot- and idea-wise, the film seems like it has no idea what it's doing or why it's doing the things it's doing. There is a concept - aliens deploy a large creature to terrorize Earth in order to make way for their invasion, some scientists and a couple other people fight it - but that's all there is. ZillaFoot is filled with scenes that felt like they were inserted in at random, and past a certain point I lost all expectation that whatever came after what I was currently watching would have any relevance to it or progress the plot in a linear, understandable way.

The weird side effect of this choppy narrative is that there's one or two scenes that are actually extremely funny. Now, when I say "one or two", I do literally mean there's about two. There's a totally plot-irrelevant scene where a detective named "Dirty McCruption" parlays with a guy in a robe for some kind of ruby skull in exchange for his tiny dog, who the detective kidnapped - this is the only funny scene in the whole thing. Or maybe I just have a bad sense of humor. But when that detective was telling a rambling story about his encounter with something called a Disco Plesiosaur and he ended it by saying "...I died!" and then immediately moved on, oh man, something about that just got me.

But I really wouldn't recommend that you watch this even just to laugh at it. It is pretty clear that ZillaFoot is deliberately terrible - an extended scene in which the dubbing cast makes fun of itself (not for the weird maybe-accents, but for other things) proves this. This movie knows it's bad. I do feel like it was made by people who care about kaiju movies, and the crew even includes some people - like Raf Enshohma - who are in the Western tokusatsu community, but it cares more about being Bad™  than it goes about connecting with its audience at all.

(I do have to give the casting department credit for finding a guy who looks exactly like Osman Yusuf. That, at least, gives this a little more authenticity as a kaiju film.)