Warning From Space

Well Wish Star Fish

Warning From Space
aka Spacemen Appear In Tokyo
aka Uchûjin Tôkyô ni arawaru
Japan 1956 Directed by Kôji Shima
Daiei Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Star fish shaped spoilers in this one.

Okay, if there’s yet another good thing about UK boutique Blu Ray labels just recently, it’s their new found interest in releasing previously unseen Japanese science fiction, horror and fantasy movies which haven’t been seen over here in a proper version before. This one, Warning From Space is a first time watch from me and, although some print damage means some of the sequences are fluctuating a little, I have to say that Arrow have done a wonderful job with getting this out there. And I was actually quite taken with this one.

Briefly, in terms of plot, the film centres around some mysterious UFOs appearing in Japan over a few weeks followed by the brief appearances, of some starfish monsters, designed by popular artist Taro Okamoto. However, once the starfish people, who come from the planet Paira, have realised we frighten them, they transmute one of their best scientists into human form, the guise of a popular tap dancer in Tokyo, so as not to scare us jumpy Earth people. Then they tell us that unless we release all our nuclear weapons at an oncoming planet on a collision course with Earth, we will be destroyed by it in 30 days. Much politicking occurs but, when the various countries finally agree that it’s a good idea to stop the certain death which is approaching, the nuclear bombs do nothing. Luckily, the aliens prepare a missile utilising a theoretical formula from an earth scientist, which they knew about millenia ago but destroyed and forgot about it, so they could never suffer from its destructive force... and use it to destroy the menacing planet.

So, yeah, there’s lots of interesting stuff in this movie, for sure, beyond the fact that the creature designs were produced by a famous artist. Perhaps that’s why the decision was made to shoot this one in colour because, it’s actually the first ever Japanese science fiction film to be shot in colour (just two years after rival company Tokyo launched their black and white Godzilla films). It’s interesting that the aliens, although presented as a possible life threatening menace at the start of the picture, to catch the imagination and keep the audience interested, are actually on Earth for a mission of peace. The film was actually based on a novel by Gentaro Nakajima, from what I can understand but, in film at this point the concept of aliens being our friends was fairly new and I can’t help but think this film was in some small way influenced by the 1951 movie The Day The Earth Stood Still, in this regard... at least in terms of creating a cinematic environment to get the project green lit.

The starfish version of the aliens aren’t in the movie too much but they look pretty good and, for fans of comic book company DC, they may look especially familiar. I have no idea if this is true but surely the alien starfish character Starro, who debuted in the first Justice League Of America comic book in 1960, is a complete rip off of these aliens? Especially since it doesn’t take much imagination for someone to put an S in front of Taro Okamoto’s name and add an extra R. Starro, of course, would finally make it onto cinema screens as the prime villain in the 2021 DC movie The Suicide Squad (reviewed here).

There’s something about the way colour is used too, which gives this film a certain something. The bright red splash of blood (or is it supposed to be red paint) which ushers in the opening titles on a red block background (on the Japanese print... the US dub version, also included on this Blu Ray, apparently dumps these titles for something else) are quite strong and, in the opening shot, pitched in sharp contrast to a big close up of a blue umbrella to bring us into the first shot of the movie. And the main sequence on the mother ship when the starfish aliens are conversing about how to not frighten the Earthlings has them all appear as grey monsters on a grey set... which is a nice use of muted colour. Also, they have that wonderful, revolving double hoop spinning around in their ship, which is a simple effect but which I don’t remember seeing on screen before it made an impact with audiences in the 1978 picture Superman The Movie... so it’s nice to see it used here in a 1956 film. Another nice touch which we see in a lot of modern science fiction movies from the mid-1970s to present, is the loss of radio signals in the area whenever there’s a UFO or monster in the vicinity... the film is not shoddily thought out, for sure.

Of course, the alien transformed into a half drowned human found on a lake and then used to infiltrate one of the many scientist’s family homes gets some stuff wrong, if she doesn’t want to be immediately found out. For instance, in a wonderful instance of some kind of trick photography, which is very well done, she jumps impossibly high to return shots when she’s playing the scientist’s son at tennis. Not to mention, when trying to avoid autograph hunters who think she really is the local tap dancing sensation, walking through doors without realising you need to open them first, just dematerialising through them instead. Yeah, actually it’s surprising with all this going on that people take so long to realise that she’s not actually human, for sure.

The aliens are mostly not present for the last third of the picture, where it turns into a disaster movie with the heat of the approaching planet causing high temperatures and forcing the inhabitants of the planet into underground shelters. They turn up for a quick deux ex machina style rescue as revealed earlier but, yeah, I thought Warning From Space was pretty good, it has to be said. When the earth is saved, loads of different examples of native wildlife, such as rats, bunnys, crabs and tortoises emerge from their natural hiding places and return to Earth’s surface once more. A subplot involving a villain who kidnaps one of the scientists to persuade him to give them the formula of ultimate destruction kind of peters out by the end and the villain goes unpunished, since it’s only happening in order that the scientist’s absence from the main part of the narrative can build suspense as to whether the Earth will survive or not. But, as I said, I didn’t mind this and I will definitely try and watch this one again at some point. I had a good time with it and I suspect fans of Japanese science fiction in general should find this one worth a watch.

Spook Warfare

Kappa-nese Action

Spook Warfare
aka Yōkai daisensô
aka The Great Yōkai War
Japan 1968 Directed by Yoshiyuki Kuroda
Daiei Blu Ray Zone B
From Arrow’s Yōkai Monster Collection Blu Ray set

Spook Warfare, also known as The Great Yōkai War... which is also the name of the partial reboot of this movie made decades later... is the second film of the original Yōkai monsters trilogy, again from 1968 but with a different director. And it’s a very different feel to the first movie in that a) it’s much more focused as one story, rather than two different character factions trying to solve the same problem, as in the first film and b) it feels much more comical in its execution. This second thing is interesting because, like a few of the Godzilla films where child heroes are pitched in with magazines showing ‘page 3 girls’, the Yōkai monsters films seemed to be perceived by a modern Western audience, from what I can make out, as children’s films. Well, I don’t know about that...

Yes, the monsters in this are much more friendly and helpful to the innocent, human victims in the movie but, there’s quite a bit of eye gouging and splashes of blood thrown about in this one which logically tells me that the ‘child-friendly’ angle is a bit of a misconception. Indeed, the UK release of this one by Arrow, as part of their four film Blu Ray Yōkai Monster Collection, carries a 15 rating. So I feel somewhat confused that a modern reviewer on the IMDB (no, I couldn’t bring myself to read the whole review... and I generally don’t read other people’s reviews of a movie before writing my own for fear of being somehow ‘infected’ with their words and viewpoint, anyway) starts off the review saying that he is not the target audience, these are kids films.

Hey ho... anyway, this does have a somewhat lighter tone than the previous film and starts off when two archaeologists accidentally unleash an Ancient Babylonian demon, Daimon, who quickly makes his way to Edo Period Japan and bites a previously benevolent magistrate on the neck like a vampire. What this basically does is inject the magistrate with the demon, who carries on disguised as the magistrate.. but as the totally bad guy version of him (we know he’s bad straight away when he slices the family dog up with his samurai sword). He basically drinks the blood of his bewildered servants to keep himself going and also injects clone demons of himself, with equal powers, into some of them.

However a kappa, water spirit (not looking completely unlike the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of a couple of decades later) who haunts the magistrates grounds, is ejected by the demon so he goes into the forest and rounds up as many of his Yōkai friends as he can to attack the demon. Well they take a couple of goes at it but, after most of them are accidentally trapped inside a bottle by a magical inscription, they call on even more Japanese apparitions to help them, when they are eventually freed. And they help the poor humans to defeat the Babylonian demon and his clones because, as they point out, they don’t want a foreign demon running around and causing evil chaos as it would give Japanese apparitions a bad name.

Many of the Yōkai monsters are back from the first film, including two of my favourites the Rokurokubi (telescopic neck woman) and Karakasa Obake (the playful, hopping on one leg, tongue dangling umbrella demon). Alas, the big, bear cyclops Tsuchikorobi is not in this one but, also absent is Kuchisake-onna, the giant headed incarnation of the slit-faced woman. I can see why she’s absent in this one though since, as I said, the film is much lighter and comedic tonally, so she might have been a little too sinister to include this time around.

There are no real striking shot compositions that I can particularly recall standing out but there is some nice, hand held and moving camera stuff when the buddhist monk who is trying to expel Daimon is shot in a much more dynamic fashion and lit with reds and oranges, presumably to add visual interest to what would be, otherwise, a pretty boring instance of a guy sitting down and chanting.

The film flows along in a much more coherent fashion that the previous entry in the series and you never once feel like the elements of this story could ever have been transposed with a standard chambara of the time, which was a problem with the previous one, which might just as well have been labelled Zatoichi VS The Demon or Sleepy Eyes Of Death Meets The Yōkai.

One of the highlights of this one would be a moment when, after Rokurokubi uses her growing neck to surround Daimon like a boa constrictor, I thought to myself, careful lady, he’ll tie a knot in your neck if you’re not careful. Sure enough, he does just this! Secondly, I finally got to see a real use for the Karakasa Obake, as a Yōkai new to this film (and who looks startlingly similar to some early sketches of the design for Yoda when The Empire Strikes Back was being made, if I’m not much mistaken) uses him as a proper, expanded umbrella to float up to the head of the giant version of Daimon so it can get close enough to stab him in the eye.

I have to say that, although this is not as quirky, in some ways, as the first film 100 Monsters (reviewed by me here) I think that overall I prefer this movie, although the constant engagement of the various Yōkai and, indeed, having them as the main, driving force of the movie tends to make them less special than when they were used more sparingly.

If you’re like me then this kind of cinematic genre is unmissable and I’d certainly recommend Spook Warfare to any scholar of 1960s Japanese cinema. It’s pretty entertaining and you even, thanks to Kappa, begin to feel almost emotionally attached to the various Yōkai and their plight. Once again, thanks to Arrow for putting out such a wonderful boxed edition of these movies.

Gamera Super Monster

Turtle Recall

Gamera Super Monster
aka Uchu kaijû Gamera
Japan 1980
Directed by Noriaki Yuasa
and Shigeo Tanaka  
Daiei/Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers but... you’re probably
not going to care either way with this movie.

Gamera Super Monster is considered both the last of the Showa era Gamera films and, also, the last kaiju movie of the Showa era. Out of the films I’ve watched so far in Arrow’s truly superb Gamera - The Complete Collection Blu Ray box (which is now in its second edition but split down into two, smaller boxes), both this one and the last one have been quite disappointing, following on from a load of truly bizarre and wonderfully surreal monster movies.

Now, 1980 is a bit late for people to be talking of it in terms of the Showa era, as far as I’m concerned but, I can certainly understand why, now that I’ve finally seen this. The most disappointing thing about this truly low budget, attempted revival of everyone’s favourite giant-sized flying turtle, which was not a success and failed to save the new, resurrected and bought out version of Daiei Studios (which filed for bankruptcy shortly after), is the fact that every single monster fight scene in the film is culled from previous Gamera movies! There are very few original kaiju themed special effects shots in this film apart from a couple of new Gamera fly-bys. So you will see him battle almost all of the monsters from the previous films, as spliced in footage highlights making up the total of the kaiju confrontations in this movie and, it’s only the supporting alien and human content which is original to this version.

Oh, wait. Did I say original. Sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking because the remaining, newly shot content is far from original.

So the film starts off with a definition of what a galaxy is and tells us that the ‘Zanon’ spaceship has conquered various planets... showing us a few static illustrations of space battles since the producers really didn’t have the budget to shoot those kinds of scenes at this point. From here on it basically parodies a bunch of American movies which were big in Japan from the last five or so years. Remember, this film is nine years after the previous entry and was released in 1980. So what do we have here?

Well, following on from the two illustrations of space combat, we have a starship which, apart from a couple of oversized fins, looks exactly like the Imperial Star Destroyers from the original Star Wars. So much so that the first moving shot of the film is an almost exact copy of the first shot of the 1977 original, as we watch the impossibly huge (but now quite quick) belly of the ship pass above the camera in space. Seriously, it’s almost the same shot dropped in.

The we meet the three adult stars, Kilara (played by Mach Fumiake), Marsha (played by Yaeko Kojima) and Mitan (played by Yoko Komatsu). All these gals have to do is go through a silly choreography of arm and leg movements and they shed their Earth bound alter egos, transforming into their superhero, space alien selves... with cloaks and costumes to match as they fly around in the sky like Superman. However, because of the big invading starship, they have to be careful about revealing their super powered selves to other people. Then we meet their friend, the child hero of the movie Keichi (played by Koichi Maeda) and also the evil alien woman Giruge (played by Keiko Kudo). Giruge is here to oversee the releasing of the monsters in the evil alien’s plan to invade and destroy the Earth by unleashing stock footage Gamera fights from previous movies at us! Shenanigans ensue including a hazy, bizarre reappearance of Gamera as Earth’s protector in somewhat muddy and questionable circumstances.

After that, the film becomes a rush of scattered ideas as the various players do the bidding of their script writers and rush around to various locations in an attempt to explain why the various kaiju battles are taking place all around the globe, with mismatching Gamera suits and a complete disregard for cars and fashions from the 1960s and early 1970s juxtaposed with new footage of 1980s environments.

Lots of ideas are shoe horned in here including a bizarre scene where the fins of one of the monsters are swimming around the ocean as the cast suddenly seem to be in a Jaws movie for a minute or two... very strange. It’s like the writers were trying to throw everything from a mid to late 1970s American blockbuster into the melting pot to see if some regurgitated idea might capture the attention of the audience. I mean, the alien gals are seen controlling their futuristic technology with musical notes whenever Keichi is around and having a close encounter with them, so to speak.

There are also some real bizarre moments when various famous Japanese anime shots are inserted, sometimes with Gamera superimposed over them. I recognised Space Battleship Yamato when Gamera was bizarrely in front of the cartoon image but another one is from something I don’t know of but which was apparently well known in Japan. About the only interesting reference is when a poster board of a monster, which is obviously supposed to be advertising a Godzilla movie (referred to here as Dojira, although not to be confused with the real Dojira from Ultraman, I guess), is toppled in Gamera’s wake as a kind of poke in the eye to Toho (who would make a big comeback with the first in their second wave of Godzilla films only four years later).

Also, while the music is reminiscent of both John Barry and Barry Grey in a few places, it’s really not very good (and the new Gamera Song is really awful) and I would say inappropriate to the film, not only not functioning to support the scenes it’s underscoring but actually dampening the potency of most of the scenes. It’s amazing how the exciting and humourously grotesque, surrealistic monster fights from previous, much better Gamera films can seem real drudgery when they’re rescored with this new stuff. It’s a bit of a hard watch, if I’m honest. Although, oh joys, that blasted ricochet sound effect is back in one scene... and I didn’t miss it one bit.

At the end, Gamera sacrifices himself to save the Earth but it’s not the moving moment it should be and, it’s then diluted by the three surviving space gals taking the youngster on a fly by of the city at night... just like the Superman and Lois flight scene from Superman The Movie... while the credits roll.

Arrow’s transfer is pretty good I suspect but, as is very apparent from the opening credits, this is a terrible print... if it is taken from a print. It looks, especially at the start, like a really good transfer of an old VHS tape print, which is to say... very fuzzy and almost unwatchable. Things perk up as the movie progresses but, you’ve also got the problems of different footage from different movies derived from different quality prints also fighting each other in the mind and so, the look of this particular one in the box seems inconsistent throughout.

Okay, I’ve nothing much more to say about Gamera Super Monster other than... I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are a die hard fan of the kaiju in question. I’ve only got four more Gamera films to watch left in this boxed edition now but I’m hearing they get very good again, very fast... the first of these being shot some 15 years later and I shall, as always, let you know.  

Gamera VS Deep-Sea Monster Zigra

Zigra Follies

Gamera VS
Deep-Sea Monster Zigra
aka Gamera tai Shinkai kaijû Jigura
aka Gamera VS Zigra
Japan 1971 Directed by Noriaki Yuasa
Daiei/Arrow
Gamera Complete Collection Blu Ray Zone B

Okay... so I’ve watched the six previous films in the Gamera series so far, all twelve of which are part of the fantastic Gamera - The Complete Collection Blu Ray boxed edition from Arrow Films. And up until now I’ve been pretty impressed by them all. Well, it was bound to happen but, I have to say that Gamera VS Deep-Sea Monster Zigra is an absolutely terrible film. But, as I found out after I watched it (and pretty much suspected all the way through, since it’s pretty obvious what the main issue with this movie is), there’s a very good reason as to why this one’s so terrible and, in some ways, we should maybe be grateful that this at least finished up with a comprehensible story.

It starts off with a pre-credits sequence establishing to the audience that by now the Japanese are so advanced with their technology that they have set up a base on the moon. We then see a spaceship from another planet blow up that moonbase and ‘displace’ a moon buggy... which really just looks like it’s been disintegrated but, amazingly, this moment does make some sense in terms of the plotting much later in the picture.

So, after the credits with the main Gamera song being sung again, we meet two dads and their respective son and daughter, who have stowed away on their little fishing boat. They then see the spacecraft that does so much damage at the start of the movie and it displaces their fishing boat to bring it inside the spacecraft. They meet Zigra’s human envoy as she shows them how powerful Zigra’s ‘completely unseen throughout the entire movie apart from one big monster fish’ alien race are. They’re here to conquer the Earth because they live in the sea and have polluted their own planet. So, in a theme shared with the fashion at the time (and again now, as it happens) and reflected in the same year’s other big kaiju eiga, Godzilla Vs Hedorah (aka Godzilla VS The Smog Monster, review coming soon), they come to Earth to stop us polluting our seas and to use them for themselves, while keeping the humans alive so they can eat them to survive.

Somehow the kids manage to lead their ‘fathers in a coma’ out of there and get their boat clear in a completely implausible and ‘against any credibility or logic’ manner, so that they can warn Earth’s military defence force, who are based in the local Marineworld for the rest of the movie because... well, that’s the thing...

We are already ten or twenty minutes into the movie and still no giant monster battles or anything. This is a slow movie and I honestly thought, after a while, that the opening ‘Gerry Anderson style’ exploding miniature moon base set was purely there to put a bit of action into the film before this long lead in. However, as the movie progressed and there were very few monster battles, I realised that the budget must have been miniscule. Indeed, when the human envoy of Zigra is sent to Marineworld to kill the kids, there’s a long and drawn out, somewhat comical (not entirely sure it was supposed to be) chase scene and, it was at this point that I was absolutely sure that this had been put in merely to pad the running time because they couldn’t afford the money to get more monsters fights into the mix (nor the time, as I later found out).

And, yeah, I was right. The director was now a hired gun, no longer on the payroll of Daeie studios... and was expected to put in all the overtime that a film like this required to make deadline for free, along with the crew. The budget was slashed right down on this one and not because the last movie wasn’t a success... it absolutely was... but because the studio was out of money and time. Hundreds of people had been made redundant prior to this and a crew member had even died from the stress of working for Daeie on this film. The studio filed for bankruptcy soon after so, the next Gamera film was also cancelled but, frankly, the lack of budget and adequate resources of people and time really show on this production.

So when we do get the first of two fights, where Gamera is beaten by Zigra and left for dead (which is beginning to become a formula for the dramatic impetus of these films now), it just looks cheap and almost like the battling monsters (Zigra has turned into a Goblin-shark style metal creature after Gamera destroys the spaceship) are just standing around waving their arms about and being unnecessarily vocal. It’s just kind of dull and, frankly, although the design of Zigra looks okay and on a level with previous foes, well... I just don’t see how you can make a giant monster battle feel so uninteresting, to be honest.

The key to freeing the people left comatose in the human envoy’s path is to interfere with their sonic harmony by yelling into a microphone thingy which translates it into the exact same sound waves which had rendered them into their helpless state. The same trick is tried on the space lady and, after a guy yells ‘Ha Ha Ha’ into the mike, she drops down on the floor and reverts to a moon geologist who was apparently in the moon buggy at the start of the picture. Gosh, this begs the question of just what one verse of Little Brown Jug might have done to Zigra’s alien control.

And the special effects, which had been going downhill since the absolutely stunning work on the second movie, Great Monster Duel: Gamera VS Barugon (reviewed here), are really not of a standard I would have expected a studio to let out of the gate to be honest. I mean, these films rely on stuff like back projecting the monsters behind the characters in some shots, to wed the humans and the effects work. Here, however, the back projection screen showing the giant shark fin coming towards the boat in the water, or Gamera’s head as he carries the boat to safety, is actually made up of highly visible, vertical slats which you can clearly see breaking up the image all over the screen. I mean, what were they thinking?

The only thing in this film which is of note, is a cute moment after Gamera has defeated Zigra. The antagonist is lying on the ground with his five big shark fins standing up. Gamera hits one with a rock and notices that if he hits each one in turn they produce different tones. So he then proceeds to play the Gamera theme on Zigras back as if it was a xylophone. But, honestly, this is the only cool bit in the entire movie. And it’s a shame that, after such a successful run of really groovy, giant flying turtle movies, this last one for nine years is such a terrible swan song for the original version of the character.

And that’s me done with Gamera VS Deep-Sea Monster Zigra. Its not a movie I can recommend in any way, shape or form and, it’s not one I’d choose to go back to unless I was watching the entire series of movies again. However, as we will see... this was not the end of Gamera. And I just hope the next one is better than this because, I can’t see how it could be much worse.

Gamera - The Giant Monster

Turtley Awesome!

Gamera - The Giant Monster
(aka Daikaijû Gamera &
Gammera The Invincible)
Japan 1965 Directed by Noriaki Yuasa
Daiei/Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

First there was Nezura! A movie about a deluge of oversized rats attacking Japan.

Or, rather, first there wasn’t Nezura! Because the huge horde of real life rats used on the miniature models not very far into shooting were infested with fleas and maggots and production was apparently shut down by the health and safety people. But there was still money left over from the project and Daiei studios, who were behind the successful series of Zatoichi films at the time, were going to be the first studio to try and take on Toho Studios at their own game... namely, the first studio other than Toho to make a large scale monster movie (kaiju eiga) in the wake of Toho’s 1954 Godzilla and its various sequels or other monster movies. And so, Gamera was born. The first of what would eventually be, over the decades, 12 films featuring this giant, fire breathing, flying turtle to date.

And I’d never seen any one of them but Arrow Films have just come to the rescue here with what is a truly beautiful box set of all the Gamera films restored for Blu Ray in a marketing move made, perhaps, to emulate the successful Criterion edition of the Godzilla - The Showa Era films box set from last year (and packaged in a similar way to their own wonderful Herchell Gordon Lewis boxed edition). This new Gamera - The Complete Collection set is a true behemoth of an oversized box set including a hardback reprint of various Gamera comics too and a fairly interesting, soft bound book about the series of films. If you look carefully at the hardbound book which packages the discs, you’ll also find small artwork cards of each of the films (again, the brightly coloured illustrations are in a similar vein to the ones found in the Criterion Godzilla set) and also a map in a pocket on the inside front cover of ‘Gamera’s Japan’, double sided in English and Japanese versions. It’s a truly lovely package but... what about the films?

Well, I’ve only seen this one so far but I have to say that, as an admirer of the Godzilla films, I was truly impressed with just how brilliant the first movie in this series is. It’s the only one in black and white because, well, the budget wasn’t all that but, the ‘almost novice’ director took on the huge challenge of making the movie when all the other directors at the studio took a pass and went through a chaotic and difficult shoot to make... one of the best kaiju eiga I’ve ever seen, for sure.

The film starts off with researchers in Iceland and three of the main characters, Dr. Hidaka played by Eiji Funakoshi, his assistant and a reporter... spot some mysterious and sleek planes in the sky. In the American recut (which I’ll get to later), they are named as Russian planes but in this, far superior Japanese original version, they are unnamed. This, however, doesn’t stop the Americas from blasting one of them out of the sky and the atomic bomb on board detonates in the ice. Like many an Eastern monster movie, this man-made incident awakens an age old beast from his hibernation and, before you know it, Gamera the giant turtle has cracked out of the ice and goes on a, fairly docile for the most part, rampage when it somehow finds its way to Japan.

These early sequences are amazing and, on some scenes in a ship, the director even swings the camera around to capture the seesaw motion of the vessel (the more creative shots deleted from the American cut, for some reason). Also, apart from one hilariously bad line reading at the end of a scene, the American military as represented in the Japanese cut seem very naturalistic and authentic (the guy introducing the film in the Blu Ray set has a different opinion on that one, for sure). Everything felt quite real to me in those US scenes which were shot by the Japanese.

Once Gamera is out and about of his icy slumber, the opening credits play out on his scaly shell as he walks off towards Japan. We get a foreshadowing of, frankly, much more evil than we think may be coming when the Eskimos tell, in their warning to the Japanese doctor, that Gamera in their legends is ‘the devil’s envoy’.

I have to say the film looks great. Coupled with some very crisp, high contrasting black and white photography which made me think of the early films of Seijun Suzuki, we have some lovely shot designs in some of the movie, where the director might frame people within simultaneous diagonals and verticals made by poles and other foreground objects. Added to this are some really nice special effects works and miniatures. Not all the miniatures are convincing, for sure but, enough of them are well enough done to ensure that Gamera’s rampages look impressive and have consequence.

The film does all the expected Godzilla stuff where Gamera demonstrates his fiery breath and even fails to blink at high charged electricity wires but, he’s also got a little trick he pulls, once he’s been turned over onto his back and the Japanese military think they’ve won their battle. This is where he pulls his arms and head into his shell and fires jets out of the openings to turn it into a kind of flying saucer. A neat trick which, obviously, wasn’t a feature that Godzilla was armoured with. Also, although this is not a deliberate thing, his genetic make up also blocks radio signals in any area in which he is found... so that’s obviously useful to him.

There are also some grim moments here, even though Gamera does seem to be a completely inadvertent and reluctant antagonist. For instance, you do see him breathe his fiery breath onto a whole crowd of people... who we see ‘burn’ via that old ‘turn the image into a negative exposure’ trick that the early Doctor Who stories used to use whenever anyone was shot by a Dalek or some other aggressive enemy. This is something you don’t actually see Godzilla do in any of his early films (although it’s surely implied), to my knowledge, so this one does have a grittier edge to it, for sure.

However, that gritty edge is a little hamstrung by the fact that there’s a turtle obsessed kid called Toshio who thinks his former pet turtle has somehow grown into Gamera and he basically just runs into danger, risking his own life and everyone else’s, throughout the film. I think we’re supposed to be given a shot of hope for the future of humanity with the less than subtle insertion of this character but, honestly, he just seems like a hugely deluded, beyond stupid character presence, if you ask me.

Asides from this ‘meddling kid’, the only other thing which I think is a slight negative is the sound design. Every time something explodes in this film, which is quite often, it’s accompanied by the sound of a bullet ricochet. Seriously, this makes no sense and kind of gives the action sequences a bit of a surreal, possibly humorous quality when they really could do with just some hefty, rumbling bangs instead.

The ending is interesting on this one too. Not making the same mistake as Toho did on their first Godzilla film, Gamera is captured alive at the end and rocketed off to Mars. How this denouement continues in the future of the film series is unknown to me at time of writing this but I’ll let you know soon.

Like Godzilla and many of the other, earlier kaiju eiga, the film was given to the Americans and they cut a load of stuff and added a load of footage to make it into... well, let’s call it a totally different experience. The American version doubles up on the letter M in the title and this version is also made available as a bonus feature on the first of the Arrow Gamera discs, to give it the title of Gammera The Invincible.

The US cut adds lots of unwanted narration, includes a whole bunch of new ‘explanatory’ scenes to include American actors Dick O'Neill  and Brian (Quatermass) Donlevy (in much the same way that Raymond Burr was added into Godzilla - King Of The Monsters), changes just a few musical cues (not the whole lot this time, thankfully) and somehow transforms this slick and brilliant debut of the giant turtle into a slow, dull, lightweight version of the Japanese template. The role of the kid is cut down so he’s a little less prominent but, honestly, that’s the only possible improvement and it generally makes the movie hard to watch. Even the replacement military scenes seem to have less ‘oomph’ to them and it really destroys the icy cold atmosphere of the opening ten minutes of the movie.

Ultimately, though, this has to be one of my best blind buys for a while and this beautiful new boxed edition from Arrow is easily a big competitor with the recent Severin Al Adamson box set as, in my opinion, ‘Blu Ray release of the year’. I can’t wait to watch the other 11 films in the set spanning decades of Gamera films. Gamera The Giant Monster is absolutely an unmissable film if you are a fan of Godzilla and other assorted oversize creatures of Japanese cinematic history... and this turtle-y awesome Blu Ray set is definitely the way to go. I absolutely loved it.