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 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.

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.