The Host, a South Korean movie about a water-dwelling, people-eating monstrosity that terrorizes Seoul, has become the best-selling movie of all time in its native country—and won plaudits from critics around the world. Now, with the creature feature swimming to U.S. theaters on March 9, South Korea officially comes out from the shadows of Japan’s Godzilla and America’s King Kong to get an internationally feared cinematic beastie of its own. But how would the fish-like colossus fare in a three-way fight against the biggest baddies ever? Calling all monsters for the Ultimate Showdown!

SKIN TYPE:
King Kong: Hairy
Godzilla: Scaly
The Host Monster: Slimy
The Winner: The Host
Hairy, of course, is a perennial first-date nightmare, and scaly has gone hand-in-hand with evil ever since Eve became BFF with a certain serpent, but there’s no question that we’d all rather shake hands with Ron Jeremy or carry an alligator handbag than get plastered with a gob of goo.

SEQUELS AND REMAKES:
King Kong: 7
Godzilla: 28 movies (29 if you count the one with Raymond Burr), 4 television shows
The Host: 0
The Winner: Godzilla
Maybe in 20 years we’ll sit down in front of the boob tube some Sunday afternoon and watch eights hours of “The Host Movie Marathon” on Channel 11, but somehow we don’t think so.

HOME BASE:
King Kong: Skull Island
Godzilla: Pacific Ocean
The Host: Han River
The Winner: King Kong
Not only did Kong have his own island, he was treated like a god by the natives. You know you’ve made it as a monster when humans serve you other humans for supper.

SECRET ORIGINS:
King Kong: Big-boned
Godzilla: Nuclear-weapons testing
The Host: Pollution
The Winner: King Kong
The best pollution message ever came on that episode of Diff’rent Strokes where Kimberly’s hair turned green (also, Godzilla tackled that whole environmental thing way back in 1971 in Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster). And when Gojira first appeared in Japan in 1954, it was already late out of the gate for sci-fi flicks warning of the perils of atomic weapons. So King Kong wins by default, but also because it’s kind of refreshing to see a movie where there’s a giant beast running around terrorizing people for no particular reason.

BROUGHT TO LIFE BY:
King Kong: Stop-motion
Godzilla: A guy in a rubber suit
The Host: CGI
The Winner: King Kong
We’re CGI-ed to oversaturation, so it was a close call between the guy in the rubber suit and the nearly lost art of stop-motion picturemaking, but for sentimentality’s sake, we’re going with the metier of Ray Harryhausen. Bring on the swashbuckling skeletons!

SIZE:
King Kong: About 25 feet tall (in a crouch) and from 20 to 60 tons
Godzilla: About 50 meters tall (just over 164 feet) and 20,000 metric tons (about 22,046 U.S. tons)
The Host: About the size of a van or small truck—say, 15 feet long and about 3 to 6 tons
The Winner: Godzilla
The U.S. version of King Kong vs. Godzilla aside, it seems unlikely that even the Big Ape could take on the King of All Monsters, which towers over him like an adult human over a newborn puppy. And the monster from The Host may be frightening to small fry like us, but there’s a good argument to be made that it’s really nothing more than semi-sentient Godzilla poop.

INTERESTING APPENDAGE:
King Kong: Long arms
Godzilla: Tail
The Host: Tentacles
The Winner: The Host
For us humans, who also have two arms, King Kong’s admittedly big guns don’t seem all that impressive, especially since he can only use one of them while he’s holding onto Fay Wray. Godzilla’s tail comes in handy once in a while to sweep the legs out from under a sneaky Ghidorah, but more often than not, it’s apparent the guy inside the rubber suit’s just trying not to trip over the goddamn thing. The Host’s tentacles, on the other hand, are fast, have fine motor control, can be used as whips, can pick up objects, change the oil in the car, flip over the bulgogi…

SPECIAL POWERS:
King Kong: Can climb skyscrapers
Godzilla: Breathes fire (“atomic breath”)
The Host: More slime
The Winner: Godzilla
As we mentioned earlier, slime is creepy, but you’re hardly going to impress the gang at Monster Island with Super Snot. And why bother climbing to the very top of the Empire State Building when you can just incinerate everything below the observatory level and bring the antenna to you? It may be retro and conservative and all, but when the big Monster God’s handing out superpowers, you can never go wrong with fire breath.

IMPLICIT BAD GUY:
King Kong: American capitalists
Godzilla: American military
The Host: American military doctors
The Winner: The Host
It pays to be specific. The Host not only lays the blame for all the havoc on the overseas U.S. military presence, it even pinpoints the specific branch of the military down to that creepy American doctor and his dimwitted but reluctant Korean lab assistant. So when a white guy in a lab coat tells you to dump your toxic chemicals down the drain that opens up into a river in a highly populated city, instead of using the conveniently located hazardous-waste disposal unit that every decent lab in the world has—don’t do it!

DONE IN BY:
King Kong: Love
Godzilla: The “oxygen destroyer”
The Host: Fire + pointy stick + pissed-off papa
The Winner: King Kong
Godzilla loses major points for taking the Star Trek: The Next Generation deus ex machina route and positing that the best way to solve a problem that technology started is by using more technology. (It would have been cool if, by using a secret weapon against the monster that the previous secret weapon woke up, the heroes brought yet another monster into the picture.) The Host doesn’t fare any better with its interminable, slow-mo, death-by-a-thousand-cuts ending—and for resorting to impalement. (What, did Mel Gibson guest direct?) King Kong’s hokey but touching Achilles heel—he’s really just like us!—is still so iconic that no big-time monster movie’s dared to copy it yet.

MASCOT/SIDEKICK:
King Kong: Fay Wray
Godzilla: The shojobin
The Host: Little Orphan Boy
The Winner: Godzilla
Fay Wray was really just a damsel in distress, and you get the idea that introducing the Little Orphan Boy in The Host is director/screenwriter Bong Joon Ho’s way of disguising his sadistic glee at killing off the main character’s family members. But who can forget the shojobin, those inch-high fairy-like girls who sing creepy songs and pop up every now and then to nag the Japanese people about the importance of respecting the eggs of giant rampaging moths?

BIZARRE ADORING FAN:
King Kong: Adolf Hitler
Godzilla: Blue Oyster Cult
The Host: North Korea
The Winner: Godzilla
The North Korean government gave the South Korean flick unheard-of raves for its supposed anti-American message, and Kim Jong Il’s a verified nutter. Hitler repeatedly told people that his favorite movie was that product of American decadence King Kong, and we remember reading somewhere, maybe in People magazine, that he was kind of a not-so-good guy. But Blue Oyster Cult? Come on. Now that is weird.

The Winner of the Great Three-Way Movie-Monster Ultimate Showdown: Godzilla!
The staff of TripmasterMonkey welcomes the reign of the scaly, fire-breathing overlord, and desires only to spread the word of his screechy awfulness.

•