A bell is a cup until it is struck

Full scale Gunhed 507 prop used in the film "Gunhed", being used as a promotional item for the movie, outside JR Shinjuku East Exit Station Square, Tokyo, in front of My City department store (now Lumine Est), July 1989.

So much of the look of Godzilla vs Biollante clearly and famously owes to Gunhed, which reflects a sense of the Cronenbergian in its grisly biology just as it is a showcase of gorgeously grisly mecha.

Putting the obvious factor of Biollante herself aside for a moment, the whole of Godzilla vs Biollante feels so tethered to the roughly contemporaneous Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue and Zeiram. Its truly a flatout biopunk horror flick. It’s to a point where it actually looks a little wrong to me without VHS fuzz.

Feels like a relative of Hiruko The Goblin as well, if I’m being honest.

I dunno! The movie’s just blatantly a horror picture show in a way not a lot (not enough) of Godzilla movies are? 

I think Biogoji becoming the basis for the later Heisei suits, the design morphing over the 90s to the 1994 and 1995 suits becoming the “defacto” Godzilla for so long, has overshadowed the aspects of the design that are truly… gross? The texture of his skin, constantly soaking and in the movie’s color palette, his dark brown predatory eyes that look completely black (like a shark’s), his double rows of shark teeth. His dorsal fins, while a reworking of the classic 60s look, are actually distressingly “gory” in a way I think that gets taken for granted. Bone tearing out of his flesh.

There’s so many classic elements of his body (mostly the Shodaigoji and Kinggoji) at play, and he is supposed to carry a regal “classic” aesthetic to contrast with and act as an uncanny dissonance against Biollante’s more blatant nightmare, but I dunno! He’s a quietly nasty boy, a simmer of energy Shin Godzilla cranked up to a boil?

(And he’s goT THE BEST WITTLE ANGWY SCWUNCHED UP FACE!)