With Gareth Edwards‘ Godzilla (Warner Bros., 5.16) just around the corner, Edwards‘ Monsters (’10) is worth recalling. I loved the look of the trailer but for some reason I never got around to the feature, which Magnolia distributed. It earned a lousy $237,301 domestic and $4,005,677 international. So nobody saw it including me. As part of my Godzilla prep I intend to see it this week on Netflix.

“The one film you must see if you haven’t is Monsters,” Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy wrote this morning. “I saw Edwards introduce the restored original Godzilla at the TCM festival a couple of weeks ago and he’s very impressive — a smart, quite self-deprecating young Brit who, on Monsters, directed, shot, wrote, did the production design and all the effects himself. It was shot on location in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica and the U.S. The camerawork is fantastic, the sense of being on the road and living by your wits in Central America, the music and the uncliched and novel approach to making a monster movie — all exceptional.

“If I were a money guy seeing this, I would have given Edwards however much he wanted basically to make anything, which is basically what happened, I guess. Decidedly talented. I don’t know how I missed even hearing about it at the time, but it went right by me.”

The only thing that scares me is Edwards saying in this interview video that he ate so much “Spielberg garlic” as a kid that the stink of Spielberg, in a manner of speaking, is in his system. Be afraid — be very afraid of that.

Empire‘s verdict: “An amazing achievement for a ‘first-time’ filmmaker, which measures up to the finest indies for performance and character-work, and the biggest blockbusters for jaw-dropping effects. And it has the year’s best sex scene too.” Okay, that settles it.