The basic set-up sure seems delicious; a whole group of Toho's most popular monsters all in one movie. Godzilla, Rodan, Anguillas, Mothra and pretty much all the others (including a few very obscure ones) packed into one movie should by all rights be simply irresistible.

And....mwelll, it is quite good, only not as tremendous as I had expected. Yes, the whole kaiju bunch get together to battle the nasty aliens in the end (who send in Ghidora against them, who's always nice to see in action as the kaiju über-baddie), and this big fight scene is pretty great. Only, it's short, and there's little else in there that really stands out. In fact, for a flick with so many monsters in it, you see shockingly little footage of the kaiju actually tearing up cities good and proper. Plus, some very obscure monsters join the fray, which eventually only clutters things, as we'd rather just see the proper big-name kaiju instead of a shady filler-material monster.

There's some kind of a plot in there, but it's not really something to write home about. Someone's had the clever idea to store all the earth's (or Toho studios') giant monsters on the aptly-named isle of Monster Island. This just begs for disaster, of course. Before long, a mysterious cataclysm causes all the monsters to escape and wreak havoc. And as usual, there's a bunch of unpleasant, and very oddly dressed aliens behind all this. Que lots of scenes with brave human heroes and their funky spaceship trying to put a halt to the aliens' evil plans. In fact, far too many of such scenes. And while there are delightfully silly cheapo sci-fi costumes and tacky spaceships in there, somehow more of the proper kaiju action that this film's concept promised would've been much better.

It's still quite an addition to a kaiju lover's collection, and is good enough to kill time in a nicely silly way, with all those groovy big monsters in there. Worth a go, but could've been much more. (still, hooray for a flick where poor old Anguillas is -not- merely used as a kaiju-sized live punching bag for a change).