Customer Reviews

Godzilla: Ghidrah - The Three Headed Monster [VHS]

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

If you are looking for a high quality classic godzilla movie on DVD - DON'T BUY THIS DVD!!! It is absolutely awful. I should have known something was wrong when there was no picture available for the cover. Even the cover is a cheap imitation. It appears that someone set up a digital camera, a "cheap" camera, in front of a television set and hit record. The movie shutters constantly, the picture is blurry and the quality is utterly apalling.

Nowhere on the DVD cover is Toho Co. Ltd. (the creators of this movie) given credit.

I rated this 1 star - but in reality it is less than a zero - THE QUALITY IS THAT BAD! Don't waste your money on this DVD!!!

This DVD is a horrid piece of trash. It is not even a legitamate release, IT IS A BOOTLEG DVD-R, and Toho will be cracking down on CineVu soon enough. But, please, do yourself a favor and don't rush to buy it before that happens because IT IS UTTER GARBAGE.

Hopefully this wiil teach me to read the reviews for every purchase before another "gem" like this waste of money slips through. I too am amazed Amazon is still selling this shoddy unwatchable copy.

The DVD is terrible. First, though the cover promises a widescreen transfer, the DVD is horribly cropped, so 50% of the scope image is missing.

If that weren't bad enough, the picture quality is very, very poor and during motion scenes (most of the film) the picture blurs!

The old Goodtimes LP speed VHS tape from the 80s looks better than this.

Avoid at all costs!

This disc is a DVD-R,the purple gives it away, and it looks like a copy of the old VHS. Since Toho still owns the rights, I am surprised that Amazon is selling this, considering there *may* be copyright issues involved. I am both disapointed and disturbed that amazon is selling this.
Don't buy this disc.

Ghidrah the Three Headed Monster is one of my favorite Godzilla movies. I eagerly awaited this DVD to replace my ever so worn VHS copy. So, what did I get? Somebody with a copy of this movie on VHS that was even worse than mine transfered it to a DVD-R, printed out a really bad cover and label, and sold it.

That's right, it's a bootleg. A really bad bootleg. I have other bootlegs. They look better than this, and they cost less. I feel cheated.

Don't buy this.

This film, here titled "Ghidrah-The 3-Headed Monster," although alternately known by many other names, but never by its true name, "Three Giant Monsters: Earth's Greatest Battle," is a series of firsts and lasts for the Godzilla series.

Among the important firsts is the arrival of King Ghidora, the golden 3-headed space dragon that would serve as a Toho arch-villain for the reminder of the 50-year history of Godzilla flicks. Along with MechaGodzilla, King Ghidora would be Godzilla's most consistent and dangerous challenger, and return time and time again. In this version, King Ghidora is fresh from the destruction of Venus and its entire population. Flying through space disguised as a meteor, he arrives on Earth looking for new prey.

Another first, the first battle between Godzilla and Rodan, tears across the Japanese country side. In a sad last, the final appearance of Emi and Yuki Ito as the Shobijin, the tiny twins summon the larval Mothra to halt the battle, and to convince the two raging beasts that they are good, not bad, and should band together to protect Earth from King Ghidora. This encounter sets the stage for most Godzilla flicks to follow, with the big guy being a defender of humanity rather than its destroyer.

A really fun entry in the Godzilla series, and King Ghidora makes for an excellent villain. It would be nice to see this film get a decent DVD treatment, with its actual title restored and the original Japanese language track, instead of the terrible dubbing that harms so many Godzilla films.

It took a month for me to actually receive this film. I have been waiting for years to see this, the last Godzilla film I needed for my collection. I should have waited longer. Even if you don't mind that this is a cheap DVD-R bootleg of a shoddy print, or that the title is spelled wrong, or that the cover and label are ugly as sin... you should not buy it. Why? Because the last chapter of the disc doesn't play! You can't even watch the whole film all the way through. I have returned and replaced this disc twice already and they were all the same. I'm going to avoid all DVDs from "Cine Vu" from now on.

VIDEO QUALITY:
While they decided to slap a huge "WIDESCREEN" logo on the bottom of the case, the film is actually presented in full screen. The print itself is disgusting, probably more so than anything Power Multimedia have ever released. The colours are under-saturated to the point of looking black and white, the image occasionally warps, the image is abundant with scratches, hairs, tears and other such blemishes. The high amount of artifacting didn't help it much either. While trying to be as fair as I can with this review, I honestly can't find any redeeming qualities with this release.

AUDIO QUALITY:
The disc only contains one audio option, the English dub. Although encoded as 5.1, all it is doing is putting the exact same stream through every channel. Basically it's mono, which just happens to be coming out of all your speakers. The whole film is plagued with constant hissing and some frequent popping. It's not flat out terrible, but it's far from "good".

EXTRA FEATURES:
Seriously, what did you expect?

OVERALL:
The first thing I noticed upon opening the Amazon box was the cover, which is printed on standard printer paper. They must have been running low on ink when printing my copy, since it's covered with vertical lines. The cover itself wasn't cut to fit properly, with odd white borders around the image and stuffed in the case at the wrong angle. The cover art looks very crude, and the name "Ghidrah" was also misspelled as "Ghidra". The disc itself has a cheap home made label, and I noticed the ink had smudged around the edges. Upon playing the disc there is a very cheesy splash screen which aids the ego of the mysterious "John Matarazzo", who also had his name listed as the films director for a short time on Amazon, and credits himself for "DVD Design and Creation" and "Realization" on the cover. When I tried booting the disc in my DVD player, no luck - rejected. When I tried in the player in my room it loaded, however the film was constantly jumping and jittering. In the end I tested it in my DVD-ROM, which seemed to play fine. Why is this? Probably because it's a badly encoded DVD-R. That correct, DVD-R, even more obvious since the bottom of the disc is purple, whereas legitimate discs are silver or gold (single and double layered respectively). Finally, CineVu don't own the copyright to "Ghidrah The Three Headed Monster", or "Ghidra The Three Headed Monster" should I say. Not only is this disc a bootleg, but it's a bad bootleg. You would have thought since they are breaching copyright anyway that they would have used Toho's Region-2 DVD as a source and subtitled it, but alas it was much easier for them to mass produce this garbage. What's the worst of it all? The disc costs $20. If you've got any wits about you, you'll stay away from this release.

This is not a legal, legitimate DVD, it is a DVD-R! The hideous cover art is not only unattractive, but rife with mispellings and not even cut properly, it looks like sisors were used when it was removed from the dot-matrix printer this was run-off on. Contrary to the bold statement that the film is in widescreen, it is in fact full-frame, and sporting one of the shabbiest, dirtiest representations I've ever seen! In this case, the VHS editions offered in the past by Video Treasures are 100 times better. AVOID at all costs. $5 would have been too much for this hideous release of a fun film, $20 is just about criminal. Speaking of criminal, notice that Toho is given no credit anywhere on this thing! Hmmm, think somebody needs to talk to their legal department!