Then again, Japanese giant-monster movies are arguably B-movie schlock.
Like I said, it depends on the movie. Many of them are low-budget schlock, others are really classy and well-made. The original
Gojira was made by the same studio and many of the same filmmakers and actors who worked on Akira Kurosawa's classic films; the effects were crude because the Japanese had never done a special-effects film before, but the rest was done with every bit as much care and quality as
The Seven Samurai in the same year (though with only half the budget, admittedly). Most of the later Godzilla films in the original run were cheaper, but a number of the more recent ones, including the upcoming
Godzilla: Resurgence, have been made with much higher budgets by Japanese standards, and some have had pretty sophisticated storytelling.
Then there's the downright schizoid Gamera franchise, which I recently reviewed in full on my blog. The original films from 1965-71 (except for the halfway-decent second one) were extremely cheap, dumb, juvenile, and schlocky, consistently lamer than even the lamest Godzilla films, and the 1980 revival was so cheap that it was actually a clip show where virtually all the monster footage was recycled from the previous movies (and the opening space battle scene was literally just the camera panning over paintings of a space battle). But the Gamera trilogy from the '90s, albeit made on a much lower budget than contemporary Godzilla films, was incredibly sophisticated, smart, and technically superb, collectively among the best kaiju films in the entire genre, and some of the darkest and scariest as well. And the 2006 reboot, while going back to being more of a children's film, was a beautiful, introspective, and poignant children's film, like a live-action Miyazaki movie.
