Godzilla Day Bonus: Let's Go To France

Long story short: what I have for you today is LE CHOC DES PLANÈTES, the rare-ish (and previously unavailable online) French cut/dub of 1962's Gorath, which you can watch in full on Internet Archive here.

Why? I don't know.

Long story longer: I initially wanted to include this in an article I was working on about the various international export versions of Gorath, but that article didn't pan out. I've decided instead to make it an addition to my Godzilla Day festivities since, due to being busy behind the scenes, I had to settle for writing a shorter, less elaborate Godzilla Day post this year. This counts as Godzilla-related because Gorath appeared in Godzilla Final Wars, and furthermore because I said so.

(Long story even longer: I actually had to mail this off to somebody who had a PAL-compatible tape deck for digitization, and it was not cheap or easy to get the French tape in the first place, so, all told, the entire process of bringing you Le Choc des Planètes set me back $135.)

Like, you can't tell me this doesn't rule.

Gorath hit the French home video market in the 1980s, and from everything I can find, it was the film's first entry into France, apparently never having had a theatrical release. It seems to have also been its last entry into the country, as it doesn't seem to have a DVD or streaming release either - at least not specifically a French-dubbed version; I'm sure French people can stream other versions wherever anybody watches anything. The tape I have was released by Fil à Film, who put it out with several different covers, all of which are actually pretty cool by themselves but have nothing whatsoever to do with the movie.

As you'll see, the French cut is mostly just the Brenco American cut dubbed into French (they didn't even bother to take Brenco's name off of the closing credits), which unfortunately means our beloved Maguma is reduced to strange noises and an indistinguishable corpse shrouded in fog. To get more technical, this is actually the Heritage Enterprises cut, which is a re-cut of the Brenco cut that removes the pre-title sequence present in the Japanese version. (You can learn more about differences between the American and Japanese versions here.)

According to a website I found, at least four separate VHS editions of this film exist, and the space-helmet painting on the cover of mine seems to have been ripped off by Fil à Film from an edition originally distributed by Ciné Video in 1986. Given that the tape includes previews for other films being released to VHS in 1989, I'd guess my tape comes from sometime around then.

I've done quite a bit of scouring and actually cannot turn up much of anything about an earlier French release of this film, which is quite odd. Imagine it's the 1980s and you're a French sci-fi fan who pays attention to what films certain labels are putting out on VHS. You pick up the newest release from Broadway or from Fil à Film, entranced by the inexplicable, hallucinatory cover art, you stick it in your VHS player, and... it's a severely edited Japanese movie from 1962 that has never been released in your country until now?

So, yeah, apologies that my Godzilla Day posts were not (to me) quite up to snuff this year, but there is a lot happening behind the scenes. I suggest that you check out the previous year's two posts, which I thought were pretty alright.