Son of Godzilla

A group of scientists has set up a secret weather-control experiment on a tropical island in the South Seas. Their work has already raised temperatures there, and one side effect is that the local praying mantises have grown to enormous size. A reporter, Goro Maki, arrives on the island and joins the research team, whose experiment soon runs into interference. The giant insects find a huge egg and try to break it open, but the creature inside is rescued by Godzilla, who takes charge of raising the infant as his own. The scientists, along with a young woman living alone on the island, are caught between the monsters.

Jun Fukuda directed the film, which followed his earlier Godzilla entry Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and came before several further series instalments he made in the 1970s. Shinichi Sekizawa and Kazue Kiba wrote the screenplay, Tomoyuki Tanaka produced, and the cast includes Tadao Takashima, Bibari Maeda, Akira Kubo, Akihiko Hirata, Kenji Sahara and Yoshio Tsuchiya. Toho released it in Japan in December 1967, and it runs 86 minutes.

Reception has been modest. A small pool of critics rated it 4.6 out of 10, while audiences are somewhat warmer: it holds 5.2 from around 6,800 votes on IMDb and 6.4 from roughly 256 votes on TMDB. Its worldwide box office of about 2 million dollars reflects the lighter, family-oriented tone the series took in this period.