The Asian Film Festival has been running in New York. I apologize for not making the announcement earlier but life as we all know it has been quite difficult with these economic times.

I was very fortunate enough to attend this event to see 2 new Kaiju flicks with a big thanks of Sci-Fi Japan and the staff at NYAFF. The two kaju flicks included a short film by Kiyotaka Taguchi with special effects Shinji Higuchi (Gamera Trilogy, GMK) called Gehara: The Long Black Haired Monster and Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G Submit.

The show started with a brief message from the director introducing his next project Death Kappa and speaking directly towards the US Kaiju fans. All his words are true to all the G & Kaiju Fans out there. With today's CG, Japanese Kaiju films are becoming thought of as outdated. Kaiju fans who want to see there favorite monsters like Godzilla, Gamera, and Gappa but cannot.....

Thanks to people like Taguchi & Higuchi, who loved Kaiju films when they were popular in the 60s and 70s, there is still hope that the Japanese Kaiju genre will continue to live and a new monster is born, Gehara.

For a short film of about 17 minutes long, Gehara was done brilliantly. It captured every element of a classic Kaiju flick and teased us with lots of memories from the showa films. It was very nice to also see a few familiar faces from the Godzilla films like Shiro Sano (G2000) as well. The message of the film derives from G'54 making Gehara being the real victim. The kaiju design gave reminded me a mix of dinosaur-like body with Gamera's head but covered in hair. A very unique design as not many big name Kaiju has hair except King Kong and maybe a few Ultra monsters. The film was set in a serious tone but some clever silliness was put in (SPOILER ALERT)


such as when one of the survivors sneaked up on the reporter / official and pulled his hair screaming HAIR!!!!
and when a random American dude started speaking Japanese and with bad action acting which was done on purpose. I believe that was to mimic Raymond Burr. Aliens that look like X-Seijin and the UFO coming out of the (owari[end] logo and controlling Gehara like in Monster Zero) (END OF SPOILER)


The music is excellent and I swear they must have borrowed some Ifukube music for some parts. It is a little after 1:30am here so I'll finish my review and post my review on the Guilala's second film. So while I sleep and prepare for another awesome day at work, I'll leave you with links to see the entire Gehara film. Unfortunately this version is not subtitled but still cool to see without a doubt. When I find the subtitled version, it will be posted in the forum. Enjoy this awesome film!

Part 1 (11min 59sec)

Part 2 (3min 10sec)
More pictures and info about G, Gehara, & Death Kappa projects will be posted later too.

OH and one last thing,

I also found this cool comic in the making called World War G online. Check out the link below for more pictures. You will need to scroll down a bit. Enjoy!

http://robojapan.blogspot.com/2009/02/james-stokoe-developing-world-war-g.html

Sorry for the lack of updates. Lots are coming but it's still a bit too buggy before we implement it in the LIVE environment. I really thank you for your patience.

Also, do to heavy spam attacks, I am temporarily suspending registration. I really do hope that more members will join the forum to share their thoughts, collections, and artwork to the Godzilla community. Please feel free to write to me at gforever AT msn DOT com and I can open an account for you in the meantime. Thanks.

AT = @ and DOT = .

I just spent several hours trying to fix "my" mistake. There's an issue with one of the update packages. I restored the forum from a backup. Nothing should have been lost, but please let me know if anything comes up.

The update will go through soon, I hope. Sorry again.

Hesei and I would like to get some input from our users to enhance the forum experience.

Should clicking a forum link open in the current window or a new one?

Please sign in and click the title of this post or click here to cast your vote. Thank you. - GForever

I'd really like to get some input on this.

Should clicking the "Forum" link on the site open the forums in the current window or a new one?

Please sign in and click the title of this post or here to vote. Thank you.
As for updates, I hope to get forum updates in over the weekend. Because of the nature of said updates, the forum may be down. Everything will be up and running by Monday if not sooner.