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 VS Jiger

Gamtastic Voyage

Gamera VS Giant
Demon Beast Jiger
aka Gamera tai Daimaju Jaiga
Japan 1970
Directed by
Noriaki Yuasa & Shigeo Tanaka
Daiei/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

The next film in the wonderful Gamera - The Complete Collection Blu Ray boxed edition from Arrow films was inspired by two big things happening in Japan at the time. Due to a TV documentary, there was renewed interest in the mysterious statues of Easter Island in the country. Coupled with this, Osaka (where this film is set) was hosting a huge show called Expo 1970 (think of something like the famous New York World’s Fair or even the Millennium Dome celebrations of a couple of decades ago). Footage of the actual Expo 1970 buildings from when they were being constructed were used for this film (just like the Millennium Dome was used before it opened, by EON productions for the opening sequence of The World Is Not Enough, reviewed here) and there’s a couple of minutes of footage at the front end of this movie where it looks like one huge advert for the various countries and companies taking part, as various buildings are highlighted. As it happens, Expo 1970 opened just one week before this movie, Gamera Vs Giant Demon Beast Jiger, was unleashed in Japanese cinemas.

And so those two elements kickstarted a story idea which had a bunch of archaeologists, working for the Expo 1970 exhibitors, pulling up a mysterious statue discovered at the fictional ‘Wester Island’ (look, I don’t write these scripts, don’t blame me), ignoring an island representative’s warning that the famous curse will endanger them all if this task is accomplished.

Well, it is accomplished and Gamera, everybody’s favourite giant flying turtle and friend to children everywhere, tries to stop the pesky humans from uprooting the long statue and moving it. Regardless, the statue is pulled up and this acts as a kind of uncorking, as the statue and the shrill Devil’s Whistle sound it makes both a) reacts with the poisonous debris and so makes all the people who handle the statue sick and b) unleashes the dodgy looking monster Jiger to terrorise the Earth once more.

And it’s not a bad film, in all honesty... giving us some new spins on what you can do with a giant turtle drama and also having the requisite amount of fights occurring between the pseudo science and the comic relief. The first fight between Gamera and Jiger ends up with Jiger beating the turtle and leaving it for dead. This is because, asides form a big, sonic disintegrating ray which decays whole areas and leaves fleeing humans as standing skeletons (apparently, this weapon is called the Super Ultra Ray), she can also shoot solidified saliva harpoons out of her nose tusks. She uses said harpoons to pin Gamera’s arms and legs so he can’t retract them into his shell and he’s left helpless on his back while Jiger travels to Osaka in pursuit of the statue, so it can throw it in the sea before the annoying humans catch on it can be used against it.

In a surprisingly extended scene akin to a secret agent in a spy movie slowly escaping his bonds to head towards the next scene, we see Gamera use a nearby rock to help bash some of the harpoons out of him and then just tear the others out with his hands mid flight (which, honestly, if he could do that now then why didn’t he do that in the first place?) to pursue Jiger to Osaka. He then gets beaten again as Jiger uses her tail harpoon to impregnate him with her larvae and it’s an almost touching scene when the gummed up and dying Gamera makes it to the water front before the cancerous thing inside him turns his head and leg white and keeps him unconscious. We see him dragging himself to water where he manages to submerge some of his head and body before freezing up completely. So, yes, this is pretty much Gamera meets an inter-species version of The Joy Of Sex right here, with a kind of gender switch as Jiger’s tail is the object of penetration to perpetuate her family line.

Meanwhile, the human stars of the show, who are a bunch of kids (in keeping with most of the previous installments), use one of their dad’s new mini subs to enter Gamera’s body in an extended sequence obviously inspired by the movie version of Fantastic Voyage. Sadly, there’s no Raquel Welch in a skin tight suit to help them but they do manage to kill the small Jiger inside Gamera accidentally, with low frequency sound waves and this gives them a clue as to how to hold off adult Jiger until the sub can return with electric cables to restart Gamera’s life vitality, so he can finally take care of the opposing monster by blocking her harpoon nose tusks with a big barrel and retrieving the statue with its Devil’s Whistle from the sea.

And it’s a fun and lively film which holds the attention and, although it looks pedestrian for a lot of the time with, for example, a bad matte glass shot of the statue in front of the camera at the foreground of a scene (not because it’s particularly badly executed but because the painting actually does look more like an illustration rather than the actual thing itself), there are still some nice shots in the last twenty minutes of the film where the director uses the verticals of the windows in the headquarters of the Anti Jiger Taskforce to section off parts of the frame. Alas, though, even those shots can’t disguise that the windows behind the actors are just a slightly faded back projection. There’s also some scale issues with the mini sub which appears to be only half the size of Gamera’s head when it goes in but, presumably, is somehow a lot smaller once it’s inside and roaming about the giant turtle’s innards.

Mostly, though, Gamera VS Giant Demon Beast Jiger is pretty much entertaining, fast moving kaiju fun and, as you would expect from Arrow’s wonderful work on the set, it looks fantastic. Incidentally, although it never happened on screen ever, the two companies Toho and Daiei teamed up for a nightly show taking place at the real Expo 70, where the two star monsters of their respective studio, Godzilla and Gamera, finally fought each other. What a shame those two companies never worked together to have this happen in the movies. Still, the films are all we’ve got and this one is as entertaining as the previous entries, as far as I’m concerned. Looking forward to exploring the next one in the set.

Gamera Vs Giant Evil Beast Guiron

 

The Slice Is Right

Gamera Vs Giant Evil Beast Guiron
aka Gamera tai daiakuju Giron
aka Attack Of The Monsters
Japan 1969
Directed by Noriaki Yuasa
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Wow. Just wow. Is this the greatest movie ever made? Probably not. Is this the Citizen Kane of giant flying turtle movies? Also, probably not but, honestly, this movie was so much fun that I spent my time texting about it and then replaying the bits I missed while texting because it brought so much violent silliness to the table. I mean, by now the Gamera series was completely retooled for the kiddie market and, following on from the surprise success of the previous entry, Gamera Vs Viras (reviewed here), it’s pretty much highlighting the child protagonists almost exclusively but, even so, the surrealistic violence on this one is both astounding and drawn out in a pretty sadistic manner, so I was confused in terms of the juxtaposition of intended audiences. Indeed, some of the more gruesome monster carnage was cut from the film when it was re-titled as Attack Of The Monsters, for the AIP release in the US.

After some complete tosh about a star in trouble on the other side of the galaxy (the writers apparently trying to ride the back of the enthusiasm for the upcoming moon landing), followed by a credit sequence shown over boiling lava which, in all honesty, has nothing to do with the content of the movie.... a Japanese kid, his sister and his American friend witness a spaceship landing through his telescope. The next morning they bike over to where it landed and the two boys enter the thing... and get whisked away to another planet. A planet which has a population of sinister aliens with their own monster called Guiron, who sees off a space monster who is a tarted up version of Gyaos from a previous movie, in spectacularly violent fashion (yeah, I’ll get to that soon). Meanwhile, the younger sister can’t convince the boy’s mothers they have gone off to have adventures in space. Incidentally, there’s a strange take in the film where one of the boys looks straight into the camera and at first I thought he was breaking the fourth wall to connect with the audience. Then I realised he must have thought one of the other actors had flubbed a line and was looking towards the director to call cut and make them do it again. Why this shot was kept in the film I’ll never know, I guess.

Anyway, the aliens are bizarre and comical and transform themselves into sexy ladies. There are two of them and, although they often talk about the population of the entire planet and they have clearly have a vast ‘space complex’ on their world, you only ever see two of them and absolutely nobody comes to help them when they get into trouble at the end. And, since one of the aliens, by now transformed into ‘space babe’ form, kills the other because she’s been damaged, you have to wonder if she’s actually halving the population of the planet. Similarly, when one of the non-aimed missiles the kids manage to shoot at the surviving alien manages to kill her too, you have to wonder if these young tykes are not somehow guilty of genocide? Where the heck are the other aliens? This film makes no sense.

As it happens, the grand scheme of these two aliens, Barbella (played by Hiroko Kai) and Florbella (played by Reiko Kasahara) is to return on the ship to Earth and to eat the brains of the kids en route, before going on to eat all of the humans on our planet. However, Gamera comes to the rescue, sees off Guiron and takes the kids back home in a hastily prepared spaceship (you really don’t want to know... just watch it, it’s funny and highly implausible).

And... in terms of plot and effects, it’s not that great a movie. Some of the slide shots are terrible. It looks cheap and when the kids tell the aliens about Gamera, the defender of children, footage is replayed from the previous films... including some stuff from the very first film (with absolutely no explanation as to why some off the flashback footage is in black and white when the rest of it is in colour). However, the film more than makes up for all this with the epic battles between, first Guiron and Gyaos and then, two battles between Guiron and Gamera.

Guiron is, basically, a big walking Bowie knife with shark-like features and is about as surreal as you can get. When Gyaos tries to shoot him with a laser beam that shoots out from his mouth, it bounces off the surface of Guiron’s unwieldy knife head and is reflected back to Gyaos, cutting his own leg off. The one legged behemoth takes to the sky to fly at Guiron, who plays possum as he arrives before jumping up and slicing his arm/wing off. Then, with Gyaos on the ground, writhing around in agony, Guiron slides up to him and takes his other arm off before then using the ground as a big chopping block to slice his head off with his own big, cutty head. Said head goes flying through the air (for some bizarre reason, physics does not play its proper part here) and then, Guiron starts slicing up the body and giving an evil chuckle.

This is amazing and definitely sets the Guiron character to truly be the “Giant Evil Beast” he’s credited as in the title of the film. Gamera also loses to him on his first fight, largely due to the fact that, in another bizarrely surreal twist, Guiron has boomerang ninja stars which fly out of his knife head, hit the target and stick in (releasing gouts of blue Gamera blood) before returning back to their housing in Guiron’s head. But that’s okay, because Gamera soon learns how to break off the long, spindly top of a nearby mountain and use it as a baseball bat to deflect the shuriken in mid flight.

Other oddities involve the fact that one of the kids seems to be dressed up like Captain Scarlet and that Gamera uses a horizontal bar connecting two buildings on the alien planet to do twirly gymnastics on. One of the kids gives him a ‘Perfect’ score. Roll over Olga Korbut, is what I say. Added to this, when you have two space babe aliens delivering lines like... “While they’re sleeping, we’ll eat their brains raw.” and, not to mention, the cutesy and energetic Gamera song which is heard at least twice, then you have a film which, frankly, I could watch many times over the course of my life, if I had the time. This is perfect material for ‘spirits and beer’ nights with your friends and, once again, these Gamera films, housed in the beautiful Gamera - The Complete Collection limited edition box from Arrow (which I believe they have now reissued as two smaller, separate boxes), are really impressing me. I can’t wait to see the next one. Daiei created a very credible box office rival to Toho’s Godzilla series and it’s such a shame that the two titans never met (on screen). Definitely check out this Arrow box set if kaiju eiga are your kind of thing. Just fantastic.

Gamera VS Space Monster Viras

Anti-Viras

Gamera VS Space Monster Viras
(aka Gamera VS Viras aka Gamera
tai uchu kaijû Bairasu aka De
aka Destroy All Planets)
Japan 1965
Directed by Noriaki Yuasa
and Shigeo Tanaka  
Daiei/Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Well this is an interesting one. Gamera Vs Space Monster Viras is the fourth film in the massive and quite brilliant Gamera - The Complete Collection Blu Ray boxed set put out by Arrow films last year. Now, I have to say that, as someone who’d never seen a Gamera movie before this release, I have been extremely impressed with the films in here so far. That being said, this one is not nearly as impressive as its three predecessors and, once you factor in that, like Toho’s Godzilla movie Destroy All Monsters from the same year (review coming soon), this was supposed to be the last in the sequence, due to declining box office returns, it’s not that surprising... the budget of this one was slashed to just a third of the previous film in the sequence, Giant Monster Dogfight: Gamera Vs Gyaos (reviewed by me here). Of course, the irony of this is that, in both the case of this film and of Toho’s Godzilla series, both their purported last hurrahs far exceeded box office expectations and they ended up revitalising and continuing the series in the case of each monster.

Now this one, according to the one page blurb in one of the booklets accompanying the set, is supposed to be the start of both a decline in the quality of the films (no surprises their given the budget) and also a shifting to the kids in the Gamera movies being the main human focus, as opposed to the adult characters who are more on the periphery of the action.

This one starts off with a spaceship about to come and enslave the Earth. However, the occupants see Gamera flying around in space with them (goodness knows how they know the giant turtle’s name... had to suspend my disbelief and sublimate my outrage at such a leap in known information by shouting at the screen here) and attack him. However, Gamera destroys them and this leads into the credits with the cutesy Gamera March song being sung. We then cut to a group consisting of the Boy Scouts Of America and two meddling kids in particular, played by Tôru Takatsuka and Carl Craig (due to a new distribution deal with American International Pictures, one of the kids in each picture would have to be caucasian). Shenanigans ensue as the two kids try out a prototype submarine and accidentally come across, not just their giant ‘friend of all children’ Gamera, but also a second spaceship which temporarily imprisons Gamera in it’s ‘super catch ray’.

And this is where things get a bit silly...

Already, the budget dictated that a lot of the film takes place in identical looking rooms on the spaceship to allow them to just slightly re-dress the sets (just like the Cube movies) but at this point in the narrative, the aliens scan Gamera with some kind of memory ray. And this is the main difference between the various cuts of the movies... how much of this memory ray you have to endure. This sequence goes on for a shortish time in the Japanese theatrical release, a very long time in the extended AIP TV version for the US markets and, maybe around 15 minutes (somewhere in between) in the Japanese Director’s cut, which is the version I chose to watch (the new Arrow edition gives you the choice by including all three versions). And, what the memory ray is looking for, is to find Gamera’s weaknesses from previous battles. So, yeah, just like a TV show bottle neck episode (which this kind of is, in movie form), this just means loads of footage from the previous films including, startlingly, the black and white footage from the first movie, which none of the aliens seem to blink at. Very strange.

And that’s not the strangest cost cutting exercise either because, when the two kids are captured and ‘beamed up’ to the spaceship, being used as ransom so Gamera doesn’t attack the alien spacecraft, a brainwashing machine is fired onto Gamera’s head and so he is under command of the aliens. And this is where it gets even sillier because they order him to attack various places (often culled footage from previous films) and, when he goes to attack Tokyo, blow me down if it isn’t in black and white again! Yep, they even use flashbacks from the first Gamera film and try and, somehow, pass it off as new footage. What the heck is going on here? What were they thinking? I mean, necessity is the mother of invention but I think invention’s mother kinda had a massive breakdown here and started rolling around on the floor in a humongous fit of mismatching film stock.

So the rest of the film is mostly the shenanigans on the spaceship as the kids try to escape and reverse the various alien devices with their meddling ways, including the polarity of the brain device stuck to Gamera’s head, which means he ends up attacking the aliens instead of the rest of the world.

However, as disappointing as a fair amount of the movie is, the franchise certainly doesn’t disappoint in terms of being absolutely weird and cool in some of its content. For example, the humans who have been taken over and are being used as extensions of the aliens sometimes lurk in the shadows of the ship so you can see all their eyes light up. It looks curiously unsettling and is quite effective. Think Village Of The Damned but much more overtly executed. And then, when the kids try to lasso one of the guys (a scene set up in the very early parts of the film, when one of the little tykes loses his hat), the alien/human hybrid just fires off his arm and the bloody stump forces the kids up against a wall before flying back to the host organism like a fleshy version of a Transformer. Similarly, when the big squid alien (one of many but who also takes the name of his race, Viras) is finally going to have to go after Gamera itself, a gesture from its tentacles ushers in the mass decapitation of it’s human slaves, new squid monsters pushing out from the neck stumps. Then, when all the monsters are roaming around, the main creature absorbs them all  one after the other to grow to giant monster heights in an effort to defeat Gamera.

So yeah, lots of cool and strange stuff like this means, frankly, Gamera Vs Space Monster Viras isn’t a dead loss and is still quite an entertaining, if not all that impressive, entry into the series. Nonetheless, in spite of the many flashbacks and cheapness of the production, it’s an entertaining enough film and I am looking forward to seeing where the series goes from here. This new box set is quite startlingly good and definitely one of the best things Arrow has put out so far, I reckon.

Giant Monster Dogfight: Gamera Vs Gyaos

Gyaos Reigns

Giant Monster Dogfight:
Gamera Vs Gyaos
aka Daikaijû kûchûsen:
Gamera tai Gyaosu
Japan 1967 Directed by Noriaki Yuasa
Daiei Arrow Gamera Complete Collection
Blu Ray Zone B

So this is only my third Gamera film watched to date but, I have to say, this new Arrow boxed Blu Ray edition was money well spent because I’ve watched three strong kaiju eiga in a row now. I’m not expecting that batting average to hold up for all 12 films in the set but, well, so far three out of three is pretty good.

This one starts off with a series of volcanoes which, this time, unleash a new monster from captivity in the depths of the Earth. This one was originally supposed to be some kind of giant Dracula to combat the box office draw of Toho’s giant Frankenstein monster films but, in the end, the beast in this one kind of evolved into Gyaos... who is pretty rigid and angular of facial expression and, to me, looks a little like Sam The American Eagle in The Muppet Show, I have to say. However, the blood craving of the Dracula template was kept as this monster likes to feed on people and on the bloody pulps of their corpses it leaves in its wake. Yep... this guy isn’t content to step on those pesky humans... he likes to pat them and then scrunch them up in his fist to presumably lick the blood afterwards (off screen).

Gyaos also fires sonic but clearly visible beams out of a combination of what he can blow through his two throats (his double throat genetics meaning he can’t actually turn his head to see what’s behind him). These look pretty much like laser beams and can cut pretty much anything they come into contact with... and we see him slicing up a fair few things in this movie, including Gamera who, it turns out, bleeds a kind of greenish blood. There’s an impressive shot early on in the movie where his laser-like beams slice a big helicopter in half and a real sized cabin was obviously built for a great side view of the halves parting and various passengers falling to their death.  

Talking about the gore, this was something which was pretty much absent at the time from most of Toho’s various Godzilla films. When the previous Gamera film didn’t hit so well at the box office, the original director who had made the first one was reinstated for the series (as well as retained to do the effects shots he made so successful in Gamera VS Barugon which I reviewed here) and one of the things he wanted to do was to push the kaiju gore to find a way to compete with the product Toho were putting out. The presence of Noriaki Yuasa here may also explain why those terrible ricochet sound effects are back on the soundtrack when something explodes. It just sounds so fake.

Another thing Gyaos can do is fire a kind of fire extinguisher out of his belly, which really seems to knock Gamera for six. By now, in keeping with what was going on in Toho’s Godzilla series, Gamera was already thought of much more as a protector creature than a threat... but he’s bested many times here in fights with Gyaos.

The cast are all great here, with Kôjirô Hongô returning as a different character from the one he played in the previous Gamera film and a lot of emphasis on a child who befriends the giant turtle. Now, I’d heard that the emphasis on the Gamera films were mostly focussed on kids but the way it’s done in this one, at least, is not too over the top and it doesn’t in any way ruin the watchability of the movie. Although, I have to ask myself why it’s always the kid who picks up on the ways to try and kill Gyaos and not the adult characters. It’s he who works out, for example, the Gyaos is a nocturnal character and helps lead the adults to the fact that Gyaos’ main weakness is sunlight (originally scripted as giant Dracula, remember).

Unlike a lot of the kaiju eiga, there’s no real exploration or researched explanation as to Gyaos’ motive and penchant for destruction throughout the film. He’s just released from his hibernation and that’s it, he just wants to slice up buildings, eat people and lick up their blood. However, already a pattern is emerging in the films as I see them. And that is that the humans cook up a plan to defeat each film’s villanous monster, only for that attempt to fail and then, thankfully, the help of Gamera saves the day.

Mind you, with the plan they hatch in this one, you can see why it would fail. After manufacturing a kind of fake, pink and bubbly blood which smells and tastes the same as regular human blood, they use a big fountain of it to lure Gyaos to the top of a big, revolving restaurant/hotel. Then, when Gyaos takes the bait, they spin the restaurant around at speed to try and dizzy the monster up so it will fall over and be defeated by the dawning sunlight. Not only does this plan look pleasingly ridiculous on film... in just the way every kaiju lover wants to see... it fails miserably but, of course, by this point, Gamera is on hand for his third and final showdown with the creature.

Like the previous two films in the series, the shot design in this is pretty cool and there’s some lovely bright lighting throughout. The turquoise pulsating cave in the first ten minutes of the movie is especially nice. There’s also a lot more action and less explanation in this one, in a deliberate move to stop the child section of the audience getting too bored, too quickly with the movie. That being said, the film retains the satirical edge by focusing on a roadblock protest of the building of a new highway through farmer’s land, which was very much on the mind of the Japanese at the time due to some pressure put against the building of a new airport with similar, aggressive protests.

There’s no real human villain in this one either, although the main kid's grandpa, played by Akira Kurosawa regular Kichijirô Ueda, does fulfil a kind of mini version of this role for a little part of the film, before the character is softened considerably as the plot progresses.

All in all, I had a lot of fun with Giant Monster Dogfight: Gamera Vs Gyaos and it’s been an absolute pleasure to watch through these so far. I really wasn’t expecting the Gamera series to be this good so... well... I can’t wait to see what the next one will bring.

Great Monster Duel: Gamera VS Barugon

Gamera Shy

Great Monster Duel:
Gamera VS Barugon
aka Daikaijû kettô:
Gamera tai Barugon
aka War Of The Monsters
Japan 1966 Directed by Shigeo Tanaka
Daiei/Arrow
Gamera Complete Collection
Blu Ray Zone B

Six months after the release of the initial, very successful movie Gamera- The Giant Monster, the studio released the direct sequel, Great Monster Duel: Gamera VS Barugon (or marketed just as Gamera VS Barugon in various places, for some reason... ignoring the fact that the longer title is what is on the actual print of the film). This is part of the recent and very special Arrow Films boxed set, Gamera The Complete Collection* and, I had seen none of these before this release. Like the first film in the series, it’s an absolute humdinger of a movie.

Despite young director Noriaki Yuasa’s ‘left of field’ success with the first one, Daiei decided they wanted a more experienced director here, since they were going to give this one an 'A picture' budget and it would also be the first in the series shot in colour... so established and respected director Shigeo Tanaka was given the job. However, Yuasa was retained to oversee all the special effects sequences which... well, more on those a little later.

This was a more adult film than the original and, also, not what the series would become... though it really helps, in my opinion, not to have a bunch of kids running around in this thing. Starting with a narrative recap and footage from the previous film, with the monochromatic excerpts tinted slightly blue, the narrative comes back in several key places during the film to explain what is going on and is used as a kind of short cut to keep the action moving. It works well.

Now I’ve called this review Gamera Shy because... well, he’s barely in the film. Instead we have another monster, Barugon (not to be confused with Baragon from the Toho kaiju movies), who takes up the lion’s share of the kaiju footage in this movie. The film, however, starts off by picking up from the ending of the last movie. While the space capsule imprisoning Gamera is on its way to Mars, a meteorite hits said capsule and Gamera flies back to Earth to attack a damn. We have five minutes of great kaiju chaos here and then... nothing much monster related for a good long while. This sequence is presumably a strong kaiju carnage sequence to keep the audience expectations at bay while the strong story and characterisation from an amazing group of actors takes place.

Instead, we have the story of a guy going in search of a cave in a forbidden jungle area, where his older brother hid a giant opal during the war. One of his brother’s fellow army men from that time betrays both him and his other helper and he is left for dead as the human villain of the piece returns to Kobe with the opal. However, as he has been treating his athlete’s foot with infrared rays, he carelessly leaves the red  light on and the opal is in it’s path while he is off playing Mah Jong. Trouble ensues as the opal is transformed into Barugon, who attacks the city of Kobe with his ‘freeze tongue’ and the ‘rainbow ray’ he fires from his Gojira-like back plates. Gamera comes to fight Barugon but, if you remember the freeze bombs the humans used on Gamera in a sequence in the previous movie, he’s susceptible to cold and so, even though he punches a big hole in Barugon’s face which gushes oodles of blue blood, Gamera is easily defeated by Barugon’s freeze tongue and left for dead for all but the last ten minutes of the story, when he thaws out and comes to the rescue.

I really liked this movie. Normally I might find it dull that the monster action sequences are few and far between but the direction and shot design here is amazing. The director utilises elements like highly saturated colours so you’d have, say, a large area of bright red in the background on the left, a mid shot of full colour, and a smaller but hefty amount of oversaturated green on the right to balance everything out. He also uses lots of things to split up the shots and I especially liked some of the stuff in the cave scenes where he literally has the three characters walking about in two thirds of the screen in a jagged aperture made by the frame of the cave while the rest of the screen is just black. There’s loads of stunning stuff here in the non-kaiju content of the film to really excite the eye. There’s even a moment where, on the appearance of a ‘civilised’ character in a village of natives, the camera suddenly zooms in on his face from extreme long shot very quickly in the space of a second to highlight his introduction. There’s nice stuff like this happening all through the movie. Also, never mind the kaiju stuff... there’s a really well choreographed fist fight between two or three human characters much later in the film.

Now let’s talk about those effects sequences. Superb. Some of the best kaiju scenes I’ve ever seen. Noriaki Yuasa is a quick study and he does some stuff here which more than gives the Toho Godzilla films a run for their money. Even the sound design is better on this one. Gamera’s roar is pretty much like an extended tyre screech and, although Yuasa uses that stupid ricochet sound effect again (see my review of Gamera - The Giant Monster here), he only uses it once so it’s not nearly as irritating as it was before.

And then there’s the thing which absolutely stopped me in my tracks and made my mouth drop open. In one sequence, where Barugon is facing off against military tanks, the tanks are basically firing something which look just like the laser blasts from George Lucas’ original Star Wars movie. The blasts are being fired all over the place and it’s looking just as good as ILMs original effects for the Lucas films. Only it’s 11 years before Star Wars even happened. I’ve not seen the likes of these kinds of effects anywhere before 1977 and I didn’t realise they existed before then. If readers could post in the comments section below if they’ve ever seen effects like these, pre-Star Wars, in any other movies... I’d really like to know about it. I was absolutely bowled over by how sophisticated the effects work is here for a 1966 movie. Unbelievable.

So there you have it... that’s the second film in this mighty boxed set from Arrow that’s impressed me. Great Monster Duel - Gamera VS Barugon is a remarkable piece of work and I was so pleased to see this. The Arrow set also has the trimmed US cut of the movie, War Of The Monsters, included as an extra but, from what I understand, I don’t really need to watch that one as it has no alternate footage, apparently. I’m really looking forward to seeing what direction the series goes in from here and now, thanks to Arrow, I can.

*I believe this has since been reissued by Arrow, split into two separate sets.

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.