Kaiju / Live-Action Films

He's still working on the Friend to All Children part.

Examples of Kaiju in live-action films.

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• The Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth just scrapes in as it constantly grows as it remains on earth.
• The Giant Amoeba and "Rat-Bat-Spider" from Angry Red Planet fit the bill.
• The Avengers (2012) features the now iconic Chitauri Leviathans who effectively trash New York in the climax. It took the likes of Hulk and Thor to bring them down and Iron Man (who had a hard time believing what he was seeing) pulled off a Kill It Through Its Stomach after being swallowed by one. The Leviathans make return appearances in later films (albeit relegated to cameos and subject to The Worf Effect) and games.
• The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is an early prototype of this genre. Since the film The Giant Behemoth/Behemoth: The Sea Monster is basically the same film, it counts as one as well—with the only addition of it being able to project radioactive waves from its whole body.
  • Based on the same short story, the Japanese short film Howl From Beyond The Fog featuring the blind, sauropod-like Nebula, who forms a bonds with an also blind, human girl named Takiri.
• The protagonist from Big Man Japan might be considered one but his giant monster foes certainly are. Unlike most Kaiju, though, they tend to be somewhat humanoid, and sometimes don't even fight and merely humiliating the protagonist.
• The Blob (1958) can be seen as a Blob Monster taken to this level as it grows larger. The 1980s remake's climax is a full on Kaiju rampage.
• The Kraken in Clash of the Titans. It destroys cities, is impervious to normal weapons, and is huge. Even moreso in the 2010 remake; one of the thing's tentacles is about half as long as the city of Argos.
• Cloverfield is a Genre Deconstruction of kaiju attack movies, emphasizing the connection between them and the Disaster Movie genre and how terrifying, deadly, and incomprehensible such an attack would be to an average citizen as it did in the first Godzilla film. Specifically, it uses the monster as a metaphor for the chaos and fear that the 9/11 attacks caused, with the destruction that it causes in New York staged in a manner reminiscent of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and the main characters (and, by extension, the viewers) being largely in the dark as to what's really going on. The Cloverfield monster itself is an interesting variant of Kaiju; instead of being a mutant or a supernatural entity, Word of God considers it to be a pretty normal animal reacting to things the way any animal in its position would. It's also apparently a lost and confused baby that wants to find its mother... which begs the question of how big and terrifying its mother must be...
  • ...which is a question addressed by the sequel, The Cloverfield Paradox, where we finally get to see an adult Clover. It's tall enough to peek above the cloud layer, making it approximately a couple of miles tall!
• In Colossal, Anne Hathaway's character controls a gigantic monster that materializes in Seoul if she stands in a certain place at at certain time. The monster is on the skinny side for a kaiju, but it can effortlessly (though accidentally) smash through buildings and shrug off missiles. Jason Sudeikis's character can similarly summon and control a giant robot. Ironically, he purposely uses it for destruction while in a typical kaiju movie the robot would be the good guy.
• The very oldest Kaiju in film is a Frost Giant in Georges Méliès' Conquest of the Pole from 1912. It was limited to an unknown area, but is still a giant worth noting. But if the mythical Frost Giants count as Kaiju, then Satan and several Titans from Dante's Inferno from 1911 at least deserve an honorable mention.
• The extremely obscure kiddie movie Daigoro vs. Goliath, produced by Tsuburaya Productions of Ultraman fame. Interestingly, it was originally meant to be a Godzilla movie.
• The Daimajin series' eponymous monster is an ancient demon-god. It too battles medieval forces, but with a stone body and mystical powers. It also exists to punish the wicked—but has unreasonably high standards. So, each time after it frees the oppressed villagers from the evil warlord/king, it goes on to attack them.
• Day of the Kaiju is something of a Deconstruction, mostly surrounding what is apparently a dead kaiju washed up on the beach. However, scientists aren't 100% sure it's dead… Not that the government will listen.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Aquaman (2018) features the Karathen an ancient seabeast that resembles a colossal combination of a squid, a shrimp and a dragon that guards the Trident of Atlan, and gets tamed by Arthur in the Final Battle. It’s also voiced by Mary Poppins.
  • The Suicide Squad: Starro the Conqueror, a literal Starfish Alien grown to gigantic proportions while being the subject of US government-sanctioned experimentation in Corto Maltese. It eventually escapes and goes on a rampage in the climax of the film. John Economos even refers to Starro as a kaiju.
• The Deadly Mantis: A giant prehistoric mantis.
• The last shot of The Deadly Spawn features one of the monsters grown larger than a house.
• Referenced in Deep Rising, at the end of which something unseen but HUGE moves toward the beach and the survivors, knocking down trees as it approaches. Not to mention its own multi-armed, lamprey-headed octopus with mouths at the end of each arm. Its head fills a ballroom and its tentacles can reach throughout an ocean liner.
• Dogora features a giant space jellyfish as the titular kaiju.
• A commercial for the fast food chain Hella Burger in the Slasher Movie Drive Thru depicts Horny the Clown as one of these.
• The dragons from D-War fit the bill.
• The giant amoeba-like life form from the finale of Evolution certainly counts.
• The Friend to All Children, Gamera, a heroic giant space turtle, along with the creatures he fights.
  • "Gamera is really neat! Gamera is filled with meat! We've been eating Gamera!"
• Gappa: The Triphibian Monster fits the bill.
• Ghostbusters: Kaiju + Bathos = The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
• The climax of Ghostbusters (2016) has a Bedsheet Ghost Kaiju smashing the city.
• THE GIANT CLAW! The flying battleship Giant Antimatter Space Buzzard from 17,000,000 B.C.!
• Godzilla pretty much revolutionized this trope. Every movie in the franchise contains at least one monster!
• Goosebumps (2015) upgrades the preying mantis from Shocker on Shock Street from just another example of Big Creepy-Crawlies to something that eats cars and crashes through buildings.
• Gorgo counts too, but he gets captured and held by those damn humans...then his much larger, angrier mother appears.
• The Hobbit features Smaug. Word of God places him at 130 meters long (about 425 feet, although he sometimes looks smaller), far larger than he was in the book. He does his share of city-smashing as well, although he's usually content to sleep in his massive pile of gold. Unusually for this trope, he can communicate perfectly well with people; he's just a malicious, greedy Jerkass.
• Though not as huge as most Kaiju (only the size of a truck), the monster of the Korean film Gwoemul, or The Host (2006), is in many ways a tribute to the genre.
• Hot Fuzz seems to pay homage to this genre in part of its climax, with normal-sized humans Nicholas Angel and one of the villains having a brutal fistfight in a model village. Quentin Tarantino revealed his jealousy of this sequence in the DVD Commentary; he wanted to do a kaiju-style fight in Kill Bill between The Bride and Elle Driver, in tribute to War of the Gargantuas, but he just couldn't figure out a way to make it work.
• It Came from Beneath the Sea features an Octopus of Kaiju Proportions. Several other films (usually titled things like Octopus and Octopus 2: River of Fear) feature similarly large giant cepholopods, but aren't as good as Ray Harryhausen's.
• Jack Frost at the end of Jack Frost 2: The Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman.
• Talos from Jason and the Argonauts is made of bronze, but definitely fits the bill.
• Killer Klowns from Outer Space: Jojo the Klownzilla is a giant alien Monster Clown.
• King Kong is effectively the one memorable Western example, who assaults the Big Applesauce. An even bigger Kong also has a couple of movies in the Toho lineup, one where he faces Godzilla, and King Kong Escapes, which not only features Kong, but also Gorosaurus (a kaiju-sized dinosaur that latter joins Godzilla's crew), Mechani-Kong, and a giant snake.
  • Aside from King Kong, there are other giant ape Kaiju. These include The Giant Peking Man, Konga, A.P.E., and King of the Lost World.
• Kraa: The Sea Monster is actually from Outer Space, but is 200ft tall.
• The oliphants from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, while smaller and less invulnerable than other examples, should get special mention for being an entire herd of Kaiju. And dressed up for battle, no less.
• The earliest example of the familiar Kaiju formula is present in 1925's The Lost World, in which a brontosaur wreaks havoc in London, setting the template for the genre before the sound era.
• The T. rex rampaging San Diego in The Lost World: Jurassic Park was a homage to these type of movies. One of the Japanese tourists even yells "I left Tokyo to get away from this!"
• The Meg has a group of scientists having to take down a giant prehistoric shark known as the Megalodon.
  • Meg 2: The Trench will see the scientists facing an even bigger Megalodon and its pack.
• Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. The octopus attacks Tokyo Bay, but for some reason we never see any scenes of this, whereas the giant shark takes a bite out of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
• The gigantic octopoid aliens in Monsters that cause plenty of collateral damage, fight the military (despite not actually being antagonistic) and smash things tick enough boxes to qualify.
• Legendary Pictures' MonsterVerse is all about this trope, of course. A whole ecosystem of skyscraper-sized monsters populated the earth hundreds of millions of years ago; most died out, but the survivors went dormant, awaiting conditions favorable to reawakening.
  • Godzilla's eponymous creature was the biggest until Toho's Shin Godzilla. He faces off against two kaiju who feed on nuclear energy, the M.U.T.Os (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism).
  • Kong: Skull Island's King Kong is the largest version since the Japanese one at 100 feet tall, and because he's just a teenager, he's still growing. Of course, he's not the only giant monster living on Skull Island in the film.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters is the first American film to feature kaiju from the original Japanese Toho films besides Godzilla himself — Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah.
  • As for Godzilla vs. Kong, well, the title says it all.
• Night of the Lepus, which demonstrated that we've run out of things to make into giant monsters on a rampage.
• Pacific Rim has an entire army of these, even named as such by the humans - the film opens with a definition of the term "Kaiju". These Kaiju are colossal biological weapons built by extradimensional aliens rising out of a portal in the Pacific to launch an extinction campaign on the human race. Humongous Mecha prove to be the only effective countermeasure. This is also one of the few non-Japanese films to use the actual word "Kaiju" to describe the creatures, to the point where less well-informed fans think that the movie invented the term. It's also one of the few films since the Franchise/Godzilla franchise to make the Kaiju a metaphor for a crisis, in this case climate change: the Kaiju are "ranked" in size with Categories like hurricanes (from 1 to 5), the most immediate threat they pose is to coastal nations, their blood has a toxic factor and other than the Humungous Mecha Jaegers, another (futile) defense against them is a massive coastal wall in the vein of a stormwater barricade. The film itself states the Kaiju's masters had attempted to invade Earth before, but decided not to as the conditions weren't ideal; by the time of the film, anthropomorphic climate change has made Earth more suitable for them.
• The Kraken from Pirates of the Caribbean.
• Iron Golem/Minotaur in Pulgasari isn't too big, but given its attacking medieval villages, it fits the bill. Notable for being from North Korea, and eventually banned there. Toho's special effects team were even tricked into helped out, with the eponymous monster, which resembles a cross between Godzilla and an ox, being portrayed by Godzilla suit actor Ken Satsuma.
  • An American Direct to Video film called The Adventure of Galgameth reset it in Medieval Europe, but has the same plot as Pulgasari, right down to the eponymous monster's weakness to salt water and growing by eating iron and its derivatives. However, unlike, Pulgasari, Galgameth remains fully benevolent throughout.
• Rampage (2018), an adaptation of the Midway games, features George (an albino gorilla), Ralph (a wolf), and Lizzie (a crocodile) who are mutated into giant monsters and go on a cross-country rampage.
• REPTILICUS! The giant goop-spitting snake-dragon that destroyed Copenhagen!
• Sharktopus stars a shark-octopus genetic experiment that escapes military control and goes on a rampage.
• Space Amoeba features an extraterrestrial parasite that possesses the bodies of various sea creatures (a cuttlefish, a stone crab, and a rock turtle), turning them into kaiju.
• In Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace the Sando aqua monster, a.k.a the proverbial Bigger Fish, spends most of its screen time devouring smaller sea monsters.
• Street Fighter has a tribute to these, with Zangief and E. Honda duking it out in a model city.
• The title monster from Supercroc is a Kaiju-sized Crocodilian, with appropriately thick armor.
• Numerous films by SyFy and The Asylum.
• Thunder of the Gigantic Serpent, a Japanese kaiju flick and one of Godfrey Ho's flicks that don't involve ninjas, has one of the largest snakes in cinema. It's head being bigger than a car when it gets big enough.
• The Troll Hunter has the giant Jotannar Troll, at over 200ft tall.
• War of the Gargantuas, a sequel to Frankenstein Conquers the World features 2 giant, mutated humanoids battling it out in Japan. Both films overlaps with Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever.
• The space monster Guilala from 1967's The X From Outer Space is one of the most bizarre Kaiju to have its own films. He got a sequel 41 years later called Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit, which introduced another kaiju - the multi-armed warrior god and mystical defender of Japan Take-Majin
• Yakuza Apocalypse: In the third act of the movie, when Kageyama rips the bandage off Kaeru-kun's belly button, a light shines out from it that ends up awakening a mountain-sized version of Kaeru-kun that can also breathe fire.
• Yongary: Monster from the Deep and its remake Yonggary are basically Korean Godzilla-knockoffs. The later film has it fight another Kaiju, named Cykor.
• Zarkorr: the Invader, produced by the same company as Kraa.

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