Godzilla v. Cthulhu is not the name of a movie, although by
Deus it should be!! Okay, I concede,
Hollywood would probably give it to
Michael Bay who would
fuck it up on an enormous scale, but for now the phrase can refer only to a
hypothetical battle in the
imagination of those who
dare to
pile horror upon horror.
Okay, but seriously, it's pretty hard to examine the relative strengths of the two
mythic beasts and not conclude that Godzilla would triumph. The
H.P. Lovecraft crowd will pillory me for this, but consider this angle: Godzilla is not all that far off from being an
elder god himself.
Cthulhu rises from an
ancient slumber from the
sea when
the stars are right. Godzilla? Yep, rises from an ancient slumber under the sea when the
atomic bombs disturb his nappy-time. Maybe there's an ancient
slumber party going on down there. Both have immense, randomly directed destructive power, but what does Cthulhu do when he wakes up? He eats a few people and then freakin'
goes back to sleep! Godzilla on the other hand stomps the Toe- out of
Tokyo, and then slips back into the sea -- but not before signing a twenty-picture deal.
Really we don't know what kind of mad fightin' skillz Cthulhu possesses except that he can apparently drive men mad with his freaky visage: Foul smell.
Squid face. Giant
bat wings. Actually Godzilla has fought beasties with similar features, and Godzilla
always wins in the end. Plus, I've never heard tell of Cthulhu having
atomic breath. Also,
size matters, and it's likely that Godzilla is much bigger between the two. I grant you, his size is not exactly constant across his film career, but he towers over towers. And Cthulhu? Described in
The Call of Cthulhu as a "mountainous monstrosity," but at least temporarily discombobulated by being rammed with a good-sized
boat (but by no means a
ship).
But in the end, here's how I see the throwdown go down. 'Zilla and Cthu' face off on opposite sides of Hiroshima (although it just now occurs to me that if
Don King were arranging this thing it would definitely be in
Manilla, for all the obvious alliterative reasons). They size each other up, and then both shrug and go about eating as many of the little people as they can. And really, the only thing we can hope and pray for is to escape the brunt of
madness and
carnage by being eaten first.