Monday Night OT: "A spirit of the plant in Norse mythology. Only this plant has a human spirit."*

So declares Dr. Genichiro Shiragami of the gigantic genetically spliced monstrosity Biollante. Such a great authoritative figure is he that no one dares to question him. He's also batshit insane. He used to be a totally normal scientific genius working on Godzilla cells, but an attack on his lab in lawless "Saradia" killed his daughter. Like a totally normal, grieving scientific genius working on Godzilla cells, he splices Erika Shiragami's cells with those of a) roses and b) Godzilla's (because of their regenerative powers), thus implanting her soul inside the new hybrid. 

I can't think of anything which isn't just horrible and filthy. I'll just caption it as "Dr Shirigami, pollinated"

After the Saradian catastrophe, a puzzling scene follows with a young woman staring at roses in a greenhouse. That's Miki Saegusa, a teen psychic attempting communication with the spirit of Erika. Miki reports to Dr Shirigami that Erika is recalcitrant this morning. But don't worry; a few scenes later, American corporate spies/saboteurs attempt to steal the G Cells and encounter a mutated rose bush gone full Audrey. She snatches and kills one of them with her thorny vines, injures the other, and escapes the lab. It looks like a PG-rated version of The Thing at this point.

But I wasn't prepared for her next stage of development. She grows kaijunormous in the middle of a lake, waiting patiently like one of Lovecraft's Old Ones, doing nothing until Godzilla is reawakened. 

It's an eerie and beautiful scene and all too brief:

 

just look at her

I would have been happy if she just stood there doing nought for the majority of the movie, but that would have been a different kind of monster movie – an existential horror. 

With a vaguely human shape and the head of a rose, her petals equipped with gnashing teeth within like a psychosexual creature out of Freud/Cronenberg, and grasping vines from one of the nastier hentai, this could have been yet another kind of monster movie. But it's Godzilla, so they eventually meet and fight. By which point, she's grown a more crocodilian head and spits out radioactive pollen from both her mouth and tentacles/vines.

But as disgusting as her appearance is, she holds the soul of Erika Shirigami within her. And Erika was a very good girl. The Best. In her last mutation, she becomes a kind of World Conscience; a protector of Earth. Seriously, at the end she transcends in an animated spectacle on the level of Hausu, with all the emotional weight of a Sailor Moon episode. It ends with the ascended Erika sending us the equivalent of a heart emoji from orbit.

Godzilla Vs Biollante (Kazuki Ōmori, 1989) is one of the more daft in the catalogue. The crazier the plot, the better it is, usually. I love it, and wished it had been made when I was a kid, but it wasn't released in the US until '92 on HBO and VHS. Some unnecessary, decadent 80s guitar shredding accompanied by a disco beat and a string arrangement, hitting the Godzilla March Theme hard at around the 1 minute mark. Glorious.

I think it was a canny move to change the focus of Godzilla movies from fears of nuclear annihilation to the more current fears of genetic mischief and corporate greed. A good updated hybrid of Godzilla and Frankenstein.

SO, WHAT IS UP TONIGHT? and if it were a possibility, in what kind of living being would you choose your human spirit to reside in after your death? No points for picking Moo Deng. That's just lazy.

* I was unable to find any creature fitting this description in Norse myth.