REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - HE IS FILLED WITH TURTLE MEAT

Seven years after Kaneko Shusuke put to bed his grand re-casting of goofy-ass '60s monster Gamera as something like a force of nature over a trilogy of some of the best daikaiju eiga ever made, Kadokawa Pictures - the company that had ultimately gathered up the tattered remains of Daiei Film in the interim - brought the character back for what is, as of this writing, his final screen appearance. Once again, Gamera merely followed in the wake of Godzilla: much as the '90s trilogy didn't start until the same year that Godzilla's second phase of movies wrapped up, 2006's Gamera the Brave came out two years after the third phase of Godzilla had ended with the promise that we'd see no more of the big lizard for a full ten years. It would seem, then, that Kadokawa was simply taking advantage of a vacuum in the marketplace, except that the opposite was more true: while the '90s Godzilla films had been largely successful for what they were, the '00s films had trailed off in popularity badly. There was, at any rate, no clamoring for any new daikaiju eiga at the time Gamera the Brave bowed.

And thus we segue into the question of who, exactly, was supposed to be the audience for this film. The darker, more self-serious Gamera trilogy of the '90s makes perfect intuitive sense: I have no idea if it was marketed this way in Japan, but it was perfectly positioned to remind adult viewers of those ludicrous, cheap monster adventures that they watched back when they were kids. Which had now been deepened and enriched with more sobriety and thoughtfulness, growing up much as its audience had. Gamera the Brave, meanwhile, is a straightforward children's movie; probably the single most unabashed children's movie in the franchise. And for what children? The ones who had been born more than a quarter of a century after the campier incarnation of the giant turtle had last been seen in 1971's Gamera vs. Zigra (I'm not counting Gamera: Super Monster, and neither should you)? Because I have a tough time imagining that they'd care. The film's plot actually suggests an answer, in that it features a father who was a kid when Gamera last came around now has a son of his own to share the new incarnation of the monster with, though the relationship between the two is mostly ignored for the bulk of the running time. It could just be that the studio had a brand name and proceeded to make terrible choices with it in a tone-deaf attempt to make some easy money, but I don't like to impugn movie studios like that.

Given that there's virtually no clear reason for Gamera the Brave to exist, it's actually pretty decent. It's unmistakably a children's movie, right down to the goofy music cues, but it's a mostly decent one, with enough well-staged daikaiju action that it doesn't feel as bitterly toothless as the likes of Son of Godzilla, which will always be my gold standard for a children's daikaiju eiga going as wrong as it possibly can. And there are scenes which reinforce something that gets reinforced a lot, if you watch enough children's entertainment made outside of the United States, which that a lot of countries have a much more ambitious and dangerous sense of what qualifies as "kid-friendly entertainment" than we do. There is, in this film, a scene in which the villain kaiju Zedus is scene thoughtfully chomping - complete with cartoon chomping noises - a human being. We don't see the human being, but it's still so casually violent and I will confess to dearly loving it for that.

Things start up in 1973, with Gamera dying; I take this to be an attempt to situate the film in continuity with the first seven movies, and explain why none were made in between 1971 and the reboot in 1995. None were made. Gamera's death comes after he protects the world from a trio of Gyaoses, sacrificing himself to end their reign of evil. Gamera, incidentally, looks willfully unappealing in this scene, worse than in any of the previous films in the franchise, but he goes away fast enough that it's not a huge issue. Many years later, Aizawa Toru (Tomioka Ryo), the young son of Aizawa Kousuke (Tsuda Kanji), who witnessed Gamera's death, is playing around on a rock pile with some friends who are kind of bullyish, and when he separates himself from them, he finds a magic glowing egg. As one does. Hardly has he picked it up when out hatches a perfectly ordinary looking CGI turtle, whom Toru names Toto.

Now, we know what movie we're watching, so we're much less surprised than Toru when his little Toto starts to evidence some very odd skills, uncharacteristic of other turtles, like his ability to fly and breath fire. And I will confess at this point that whatever risk Gamera the Brave was running of totally losing my goodwill (the opening act establishing Toru is way too long for such a tepid little character), when Toto starts to run around exhibiting superpowers, the film won me right back. Not for any good reason, but because Toto's smug look of satisfaction, done without ever making him look less like a real turtle, is the most fucking adorable goddamn thing. And there's a weird but charming shout-out to Gamera vs. Guiron, when a kitchen knife falls blade-first in front of Toto, and the little turtle gets a very angry and intense look on its face before he spits a fireball at it.

Among the turtle's other powers, it grows quickly to a very large size, and we get to see what a juvenile Gamera looks like, with its big earnest wet cow eyes and everything. And from here, Gamera the Brave clicks over into standard-issue Gamera plotting: a monster, the big (and impressively scary) dragon-thing Zedus is making trouble, and instinctively, Toto-Gamera knows that he must fight on behalf of humanity. In round 1, the better-choreographed by far, he ends up incapacitated, and Zedus goes on wreaking havoc while the humans work on a plan to juice up Toto-Gamera until he reaches the full size of his illustrious father, big enough to knock Zedus out completely. Importantly, other than being the requisite boychild who roots for the giant turtle and tells adults about how Toto is a friend to all children, Toru is mostly just a chatty waste of time, contributing a grand total of one action to the entire back half of the plot. Which makes it especially irritating that we had to spend 40 minutes getting to know all about him. But kids' movies need kid protagonists, or whatever.

The film is certainly more soft and gentle than anything preceding it in the series, without real danger even despite the presence of a giant man-eating dragon. Though, the action is actually fairly decent, with a good sense of weight and destruction between the two brawling monsters (it helps that the film balances practical effects with CGI only when necessary, and it ends up looking surprisingly great, even better than the 1990s films). And the film doesn't dumb itself down at all: Toru may not be a very sophisticated observer of the world around him, but that world proceeds along with its adult business much the same as in any daikaiju eiga. So still pretty dumb, but it's not like the stakes have been lowered. The fates of cities still hang in the balance.

Director Tazaki Ryuta, a veteran of action TV and movies for children, handles all of this with a light tone that never feels insubstantial or insincere; it's not great cinematic art, but the 96-minute film breezes past without tripping up on its plot slowdowns, or the moments that might easily have seeped into dimwitted sentimentality, as the relationship between Toru and his giant turtle friend are foregrounded. And it's because Tazaki and screenwriter Tatsui Yukari weren't aiming to make a character story, or a moral play for wee folk, but a quick-stepping action-adventure. This they accomplished. It's not remotely the best farewell to the character, mucking up the grandeur of 1999's Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris, and going into it knowing that it's the final Gamera story leaves it feeling a lot more hollow than it deserves. But of course, there's unlikely to be a "final" Gamera story as long as there are movies, and until the series gets restarted yet again, Gamera the Brave is a totally satisfying if slight place to pause for a while.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - GAMERA IS A GOOD TURTLE

I don't know at what point director Kaneko Shusuke and writer Ito Kazunori decided that their makeover of Daiei's loopy turtle monster Gamera was going to be a trilogy, nor do I know if they had it in mind from the very beginning how they were going to end. But oh, how much 1999's Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris (released three years after Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, for added build-up) feels like a conscious grand finale, every step of the way. It possess a grandeur and sense of monolithic scope far beyond that the daikaiju eiga genre would seem to be able to accomodate, let alone require. There are individual shots whose sense of immensity, dwarfing the humans included for scale, is enough to make you forget to breathe for a little bit: a specific perspective towards the film's end, from below Gamera and his foe Iris, is one of the best single images of giant monsters I think I've ever seen in a daikaija eiga or any other genre film, suggesting the colossal height and deadly weight of these creatures and making them seem much, much too real for big rubber suits. And that's not too long after a shot of the human characters looking down an immense pit of collapsed building, one of the best images at summing up the huge scale of destruction that these same creatures would be capable of producing that I'm familiar with in the annals of Japanese monster movies.

I'm going to have to walk that back a little bit, because I'm starting to describe the best daikaiju eiga ever made, and I honestly don't thing that Revenge of Iris is even the best of the 1990s Gamera trilogy. The story in Gamera: Guardian of the Universe is maybe a little bit tighter, and it has a more intoxicating build-up, while this final sequel has a graver and higher-impact series of climaxes. But I am honor-bound to admit that mostly, I'm just not all that fond of the Gamera redesign in this movie: he suddenly got all, like, spiny. In fact, it was only right in the act of typing that sentence that I figured out exactly my problem: he's suddenly turned into a live-action version of Bowser from the Super Mario franchise. Which, I get it, fire-breathing bipedal turtle with teeth, Bowser already was Gamera, basically. But this film pushes it to the point where apparently, after my subconscious happily smothered it for ten straight movies, I can't stop noticing it now.

Anyway, that's a shamefully nitpicky reason to slag on a movie. Revenge of Iris is really damn good, whatever minor shortcomings here or there, and things it does well are unmatched by just about any other daikaiju eiga out there. In fact - Big Steaming Hyperbole alert - in terms of creating a compelling and driving human story, in which character psychology is a key element in the film's function and its impact, Revenge of Iris does things that out of its entire genre, I've only otherwise seen in the 1954 Godzilla, where the damned things got started in the first place. And that brings us to Iris's revenge, which I had always assumed was some sort of "ancient enemy of Gamera resurrected and looking for vengeance" deal, which isn't it at all (though the ancient enemy motif does crop up; to whet our appetites, the film first half includes Gamera versus a resurgent population of Gyaoses).

In fact, the revenge is being wreaked by a teenage girl, Hirasaka Ayana (Maeda Ai), who witnessed the death of her parents four years earlier when they were collateral damage in Gamera's attack against the Gyaos threatening Japan at that point. She has, since then, harbored a much more intense feeling of hatred for the giant turtle than the government, which still hasn't decided if Gamera is a friend or foe (there is, happily, a little boy in a baseball cap who shows up long enough to clarify the point). And when Gamera returns to deal with the Gyaoses, killing a tremendous number of innocents in the process, it's more than Ayana can take. And it just so happens that her rage has a convenient outlet: she's been dazzled lately by a kind of stone egg in her local temple, and it hatches right about this time, revealing a sort of odd, vaguely squid-like critter with a kindly, cute expression, that forms a psychic bond with Ayana. Her bad luck: the thing, Iris, is a malevolent monster, growing at a fearsome rate, and it uses Ayana as its life source. This puts her in the center of a struggle between an anti-Gamera government agent, Asakura Mito (Yamazaki Senri), and our heroes from Gameras past, Gyaos-fighting ornithologist Nagamine Mayumi (Nakayame Shinobu), and Kusunagi Asagi (Fujitani Ayako), whose psychic link to Gamera is gone, but who still knows more about the giant turtle than anybody.

That the giant monsters are, in effect, proxies for human emotions is certainly one of the most unique and succesful things about Revenge of Iris; it's good-faith attempt to do something almost totally new in a daikaiju eiga while returning it the genre's roots, in which the monsters are versions of other, more real-world concerns. And for all the good work that Kaneko and cinematographer Tozawa Junichi and effects director Higuchi Shinji do in crafting a sense of awesome grandeur for the film, shamelessly trotting out one iconic image after another, and staging some of the most visually dramatic action shots in any daikaiju eiga - an early shot of a flaming Gyaos plummeting to earth is both subtle and deeply awe-inspiring, while the final shots of Gamera are so self-conscious about staging him as a godlike being that it's almost a little embarrassing - for all the Revenge of Iris has, in its images, an operatic flair for grandstanding and awe, the reason that it's one of the best in its breed is its firm and relatively complex emotional grounding, with the best performances, across the board, of any Gamera movie. Not that it's a tremendously competitive title...

There's real greatness in the film; not bad for anything involving a giant fire-breath monster, and particularly when it's part of the same geneology as Gamera: Super Monster. What I don't think it quite manages is being consistently great: some of the individual elements feel distinctly reheated (it's kind of hard to feel enthusiastic about a third consecutive film where the Japanese government would rather fight Gamera than his obviously more deadly opponent), some are forced (an explanation is given for why Japan uniquely attracts giant monsters, a question that I don't believe anybody had ever asked in the 45 years preceding this film's release), and generally speaking, the further we are from Ayana, the more generic the plotting becomes. Iris is a really solid monster that isn't especially memorable in any one way (certainly not after Legion), and while the filming of the action is beyond reproach, the specific choreography of the action is fine but not particularly special, until it starts to take a turn for the brutal near the end.

But I don't know that any of that matters. The bar for daikaija eiga is not very high, but Revenge of Iris vaults over it without breaking a sweat or inconveniencing itself in the least. This really is one of the finest Japanese monster movies I have ever seen: nuanced in its story and character, bold in its visual dynamism, boasting some really great visual effects for the time and the industry; and unafraid to end on a more ambivalent note than literally any other daikaiju eiga I can name. It is a definitive statement, and if it's not perfect, it's still awfully damn impressive in every way.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THE SWARM

A little friendly argument flared up in the comments of my review of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe about the relative quality of the movies that make up director Kaneko Shusuke and writer Ito Kazunori's Gamera trilogy of the 1990s. And through this, I was amused to discover that, while there are only six possible ways to rank three movies, it appears that absolutely nobody can agree on a single ranking for these films.

So let me start off by acknowledging that I would set 1996's Gamera 2: Attack of Legion (whose onscreen English title refers to it as Advent of Legion, which is frankly a lot better) a solid step down in quality from Guardian of the Universe, largely on the grounds that while the first movie feels somewhat unlike any daikaiju eiga I have known, Attack of Legion is a lot more typical. Outside of a few individual moments, it closely resembles the 1980s/'90s Godzilla films, and while it is better than most of them (though one of the ones it's not better than is Godzilla vs. Biollante, the one it most particularly resembles), I feel like I enjoyed Kaneko and Ito more when they were pushing into newer, fresher storylines, and not just telling me the same sci-fi tinged tale of the military having a plan in place to stop any potential daikaiju, but it falls apart the first time it gets tried out, and only the large and destructive monster that has been largely mistrusted can save the day, though nobody's entirely sure if he's any better. And there's a psychic girl tossed in there for flimsy, continuity-related reasons.

That's a snippy way of reducing Attack of Legion to its most generic elements, but the happy fact is that however we want to rank the Kaneko Gameras, the difference in quality is fairly minor, and it's quite a privilege to have two consecutive films in one daikaiju eiga franchise both operating at such a high level of style, narrative coherence, and well-conceived action. A few months after Attack of Legion opened in Japan, Toho would bow its Rebirth of Mothra trilogy, in some ways a weird response to Daiei's new wave of Gamera vehicles (the RoM films are where Toho's daikaiju eiga first incorporated CGI, something that Guardian of the Universe had already employe, and Attack of Legion would rely on even more), and in other ways (mostly in that they're unambiguous children's movies, and not terribly bright ones, either), feeling like a conscious and deliberate attempt to totally ignore anything going on elsewhere in the world. Viewed against that backdrop, even the worst of Attack of Legion still makes it absolutely and incontrovertibly a top-shelf daikaiju eiga, regardless of whether it's slightly better or worse than its predecessor sitting on the same shelf.

I've basically already told you the plot, but just to flesh it out: about a year after the devastating battle between Gamera the giant tusked flying fire-breathing turtle and Gyaos the giant bat bird, Japan is still getting back on its feet, relying on international cooperation to rebuild and also police the oceans for the return of Gamera, still assumed to be a danger in the absence of counter-evidence. The potential of a giant turtle is about to be of no importance at all, though, for an aberrant meteor shower strikes Japan, and within the next couple of days, a cluster of enormous insect-like creatures have been spotted, and the city of Sapporo starts to be overrun by a kind of unknown plant material. Plucky scientist Honami Midori (Mizuno Miki) is the first to assemble all of these events into one: the meteor brought a species of space-insects to Earth, and now they're going to raid the planet for silicon, building a hive as they do so that will permit them to launch a new colony into space once they're down ravaging this planet into a dessicated husk. It takes every scrap of military power that the government, in the form of Colonel Watarase (Nagashima Toshiyuki), can throw at the insects (which have by this point been nicknamed "Legion" in reference to the swarm of malevolent spirits from the Christian Bible), just to keep them from advancing.

Japan and the world are just about fucked when out of the sea, in an absolutely terrific image that's only kind of spoiled by having the worst CGI in the whole movie, who should come but Gamera, protector of the whole world, to stop the aliens. He's been a bit slow, though, for the alien nest in Sapporo is about to produce an enormous creature almost twice Gamera's own size, all chitinous plates and enormous, crawly legs, and huge, utterly unknowable demon-bug face. And as is typically the case in Gamera films, the turtle gets much the worst of it in their first fight, being blasted into oblivion; all hope seems lost until Honami has the thought to contact Kusanagi Asani (Fujitani Ayako), the teenage girl who'd formed a special psychic bond with Gamera during his last appearance, and may be the only one who can do anything to bring him back now.

Good or bad, brilliant cinema or just tacky genre picture, there's one thing that even the crankiest hater couldn't deny: the enormous Legion Queen that comes to destroy Japan in the second half of the film is a magnificent movie monster. As much as the '90s Gamera design and the previous film's primordial beastie Gyaos are terrific, well-built, wonderfully detailed and articulated pieces of rubber sculpting at its best, the queen in this film has to count among the best monsters in any daikaiju eiga ever filmed. It is, for one thing, an alien being that honestly feels like it could not possibly have evolved on Earth, while looking familiar enough that we can immediately contextualise its sharp, stabbing edges and horrifying features: it is a marvelous creation out of the most fevered sort of nightmare, and just watching it twitch and snarl is fantastic. When it actually starts to fight with Gamera, the film takes off into the stratosphere: the final battle scene isn't merely better than anything in the first movie, it's as good as anything I've seen in any post-'60s daikaiju eiga, and it's enough to make me want to call effects director Higuchi Shinji, between this film and the last, the best man in his field since the death of Tsuburaya Eiji. The creativity of the attack strategies used (at one point, the queen zaps Gamera with whiplike tendrils made of energy, or something like that), the overwhelming drama of the smoky nighttime lighting, the rumbling momentum of Ohtani Ko's score, the excellence of the models, and the feeling of enormity are all basically perfect; colossi colliding into one another with the force of gods.

Nothing in the film is anywhere near as good as that climax; nothing in a lot of films is as good as that climax. Certainly, the only thing "wrong" with Attack of Legion is that it feels so unabashedly normal: after Guardian of the Universe told a tight thriller story that functioned entirely on its own, an interesting mystery even when it had nothing to do with daikaiju, the sequel falls into the trap of throwing a lot of stuff at the story, hopping from one narrative thread to another without doing anything to make them feel like they belong together. Not that the humans in Guardians of the Universe are rich, complex portraits of humanity, but at least they felt consistent through the feature, an anchor for the plot. The people in Attack of Legion are more like cogs.

What the film does boast that sets it above all the movies with similar plots is Kaneko's strong guiding hand and clear awareness of what he wants the movie to be. It is a serious film, with only enough humor to temper the controlled panic of its characters and the sense of real fear undergirding all of it: what is this unknowable creature from out of the blackest nightmares, why can't we stop it, what is it going to do to us? Encourage real stakes and a sense of danger are uncommon in daikaiju eiga; it is what made Kaneko's first movie such a surprise, but it's maybe even stronger here.

It's still, ultimately, a really well-made program filler, with some shaky acting (the Americans in the first scene are absolutely the pits), some amusingly overt product placement (the Legion likes Kirin Beer), an out-of-nowhere ecological lesson in the very last scene, and CGI that's, on the whole, not quite as good as in the last film, I assume because there's so much more of it. But those are not especially damning sins, and Attack of Legion is every bit as good a proof that its genre can have interesting, grown-up thoughts in its head as its remarkable predecessor was.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - NICE GAMS

I wonder if 1995's Gamera: Guardian of the Universe is without precedent in how massive a shift it makes in tone from anything that precedes it? The closest thing I can come up with is Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, which brought a considerable degree of sharp-edged grimness to a property that most people still associated with bright colors and camp, but that ignores the huge volume of comic book material predating the Burton film that posited an even dark, more brooding Batman, stretching all the way back to the '30s. And it also forgets that the 1960s Batman TV show was craft, self-aware camp, and not just stupid kiddie schlock. Neither of those caveats apply to the eight Gamera films made between 1965 and 1980, all of which were stupid kiddie schlock whose campiness was unintential, and only the second, 1966's Gamera vs. Barugon, made any legitimate claim to being serious in any way whatsoever.

You would think that any attempt to do a dark and gritty reboot of the Gamera franchise could only happen in the spirit of parody, and yet when Tokuma Shoten Publishing, then the owner of Daiei Film relaunched the franchise in the mid-'90s, when Toho's second wave of Godzilla films was starting to wind down, that's exactly what they did. What's really surprising, though, isn't that a character whose entire filmography had, to that point, been the most lavishly camp-soaked nonsense you could imagine was randomly selected to be treated with gravity and rough realism, but that it would actually turn out incredibly well. Under the guiding hand of horror director Kaneko Shusuke and screenwriter Ito Kazunori - who, the same year, wrote the screenplay for the beloved sci-fi anime feature Ghost in the Shell - Gamera: Guardian of the Universe rather shockingly turned out to be one of the most sensible, creative daikaiju eiga of its generation, certainly equaling the best of the 1990s Godzilla films while breaking further from genre convention. It's a film that spends not one second wondering how to trade on the audience's built-in nostalgia for the franchise (how could it, when it represents such a massive and merciless overhaul of the franchise's basic goals?), instead working from the ground up to create the rarest sort of giant monster movie: one that functions as a movie, even when it's not wowing you with giant monsters.

Now, to be fair, the solution that Kaneko and Ito came up with to make the first-ever genuinely and objectively good Gamera movie basically involved cheating off of Jurassic Park's answer sheet whenever they couldn't come up with something on their own. Sometimes this is vague and probably coincidental, like the similar rhythm in the build-up to a Pacific storm; sometimes it's clear but transmuted enough that it feels like it's own thing, as in a scene where a giant prehistoric predator rears its head out of the jungle foliage in a very T-Rexish way, but for completely different narrative reasons. Sometimes, it's so exact that the only thing to do is ask if Jurassic Park hadn't been released in Japan yet, and the filmmakers assumed they could resort to blatant thievery without getting caught, like a scene in which a lady scientist digs in a huge pile of animal shit hunting for clues, in shots that are framed identically to JP's own shit-digging scene. Though it must be conceded that there is surely a finite number of ways you can stage that scene.

But as Jurassic Park copycats go, Guardian of the Universe has the decency to be one of the very best that I've ever seen, marrying the American thriller mechanics of that film to a distinctively Japanese idiom without the join ever threatening to split apart. There are moments scattered throughout that, hell, I'll even suggest maybe improve on anything to be found in Steven Spielberg's dinosaur movie: the first glimpse we get of Gamera, an enormous but indistinct tusked face underwater, is as close to a perfect creature reveal as you're ever going to get, awesome and just a little terrifying in the finest popcorn movie tradition.

The film's story is a bit more of a mystery than normal for a daikaiju eiga, which is possibly what you get to do when your title monster has only appeared in one bomb in the preceding 24 years: some kind of inexplicably moving atoll collides with a ship carrying plutonium, at around the same time reports of an enormous bird attacking villagers have been coming in from an island in the southwest of Japan. The atoll, for its part, cracks apart after scientist Kusunagi Naoya (Onodera Akira) discovers an ancient slab covered in European runes, and only one member of the investigating team, Yonemori Yoshinari (Ihara Tsuyoshi) catches a glimpse of the giant animal that has emerged from the atoll as it swims away. The giant bird is a much more immediate concern: ornithologist Nagamine Mayumi (Nakayama Shinobu) fairly quickly discovers not just one, but a whole population of enormous leathery creatures somewhere between a bird, a bat, and a pterosaur. In finest creature movie tradition, the government decides that these enormous terrorbeasts should be captured and studied (and, it's not quite spelled out, weaponised), and Mayumi ends up working to help lure the creatures even closer to Japan, hoping to trap them in the then-new Fukuoka Dome, a baseball stadium on the island of Kyushu. So that's one set of murderous daikaiju maneuvered right into killing distance of plenty of large cities; the other one is on its way. For as Dr. Kusunagi discovers with his teenage daughter Asagi (Fujitani Ayako, the closest this film gets to the series stock type of the child with a magical connection to Gamera) and Yoshinari, the atoll and the giant turtle inside of it is a chunk of the lost continent of Atlantis, and that turtle, called Gamera, is the protector designed to fight the same giant bird-beasts who were built by the Atlanteans in a fit of ill-advised genetic experimentation, called Gyaos. The pollution and nuclear toxicity of the 20th Century brought these creatures back to life, and now Japan is the battleground for an ancient monster fight to work itself out again. But the government, more concerned about Gamera's destruction than the Gyaoses', and perhaps looking to save their investment, would rather focus on stopping him than the flock of carnivorous hellbeasts, despite all Asagi's protestations that Gamera is a good turtle, who is kind and gentle. Or words to that effect.

There's a lot that's fascinating in all that: the government's initial decision to focus on stopping Gamera rather than the escaped Gyaos especially adds a wrinkle and level of complexity that's not at all common in the genre, and the anti-pollution, anti-nuke sentiments, though they are borrowed wholesale from the Godzilla franchise, are incorporated into the movie with a delicacy and subtlety that keeps the film from becoming any kind of haranguing message movie. But what's most impressive and admirable about Guardian of the Universe are the bigger strokes: the way that the filmmakers actually try to ground Gamera in some kind of plausible now, treating the build-up to the daikaiju in a very logical, story-first approach that makes this feel as rational and grounded as any daikaiju eiga since the very first Godzilla, 41 years prior. The characters are etched out just enough to give them personalities and plausible motivation, but thankfully, the movie isn't trying to throw together some ginned-up human subplot that weirdly intersects with the monster action; it provides a strong narrative reason for all of the people who are involved to be there, and proceeds to function as an anti-monster procedural as much as it is an action movie about giant creatures duking it out in and over and through Tokyo.

Though when it is that action movie, it's a good one. The effects, supervised by Higuchi Shinji, are absolutely terrific, suggesting a sense of scale that's not to be found in any but the best Godzilla films, and is totally absent in any of the preceding Gamera vehicles. The lighting, the slightly slowed-down action, and the camera angles all give Gamera weight and mass, and sell the primordial threat of Gyaos; I am stunned that a monster whose shovel-headed design I'd have considered so impossible to redeem could end up being such an effective, otherworldly but still plausible creature of nightmares given life. The film also boasts what are, if I am not mistaken, the first CGI effects in any daikaiju eiga: they're not flawless (the first shot of Gamera spinning around to lift off is a real disappointment, one of the film's few clear missteps), but they open up the possibilities for much greater scale and ambition in the fight scenes than any of the earlier Gamera pictures would have known what to do with.

Without necessarily addressing itself to weighty questions of life and death (though it has a sense of true danger), Guardian of the Universe never quite turns into anything but a top-notch genre film - but it is a top-notch genre film. The story structure is tight as a drum and has just enough mystery, even when we should already know damn well where things are headed, that it's always really exciting and interesting to follow, and that already is a huge achievement for a daikaiju eiga; tthere's just enough winking humor that it always remains fun, even at its most sober - "Someday, I'll show you around a monster-free Tokyo", Yoshinari wryly suggests at one point. It's not the perfect daikaiju eiga, or anything like that, but given the market of the 1990s, and the enormous baggage the film had to dispose of before it could even get started, I have a hard time imagining a more completely successful reset to the Gamera franchise than this one.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN

Once upon a time, like, four days ago, I brightly and innocently declared that I knew what I was getting into with Gamera: Super Monster. I was incorrect. Based on the only things I knew about it, it seemed easy enough to figure out why people hated it: the 1980 one-off resuscitation of the franchise attempted to keep the struggling Daiei Film afloat after a decade spent on the brink of receivership tried to keep costs low by culling a huge percentage of its footage (Wikipedia noncommittally describes it as "about one-third" of the 90-minute film) from the earlier Gamera films. Meanwhile, the new monster footage consists of a grand total of two minutes or less of a stiff Gamera prop whose only point of articulation is it mouth flying through space. That certainly sounds like enough to go on, but it's not really specific enough to know. I mean, they could have done just about anything with all of that recycled footage. This could have been the goddamn Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy of Gamera movies.

But the hell of it is, the third of the movie that was taken from other, better movies - and doesn't it already say a lot that Super Monster is bad enough to make me retroactively describe Gamera vs. Guiron and Gamera vs. Jiger as "better" - is certainly the best part of the movie, which is never more visually appealing and dramatically tight than when it lops the ends off of yellowing footage to fit it into the new movie's narrower aspect ratio, while the same exact narrative scenario plays out six times with no more variation in the screenwriting that leads to these fights than the bored narrator mentioning at one point that Gamera had to travel to "the planet where monsters are kept" in order to fight Guiron. Though I might have liked it even more if the film had just flatly declared that the rocky alien world of Gamera vs. Guiron was just some other part of Japan, and had the same reaction shots that we see elsewhere.

As for the bad part of Super Monster, it's hard to decide if I'm more aggrieved by the terrible low-impact story, or the unfailingly cheap execution of that story. Certainly, the bottomless depths of suckitude that the film will reach have been indicated before the slightest impression of the plot has been given: the cheerily dumb earworm of a march that had served as Gamera's theme song for several films running has been replaced here by something that resembles a Japanese approximation of a German oompah band, with vocals by a happy-sounding adult lady and not the sugared-up children's choir that had previously insisted with such energy that "Gamera is strong! Aliens from Venus or Mars are no match for his spinning jets!" It's the kind of heartbreak that instantly got the film on my bad side, and things only got worse as the narrator informs us of the great space battles that we'll be seeing in the form of paintings, in lieu of, y'know, space battles. These paintings serve to tell the none-too-exciting terror excited across the galaxy by the pirate space ship Zanon, which I take to be the Japanese word for "Imperial Star Destroyer", given that the Zanon is a dead ringer for that design and is even introduced in the exact same "ship moving over the camera, away from us" shot that opened Star Wars when we finally see it as a model and not just a cost-saving drawing. Everything about the opening minutes of Super Monster conspires to promise the cheapest, most unimaginative possible attempt to force Gamera back into the spotlight, and the hell of it is, the film only gets worse from here.

The audience identification figure is Keiichi (Maeda Koichi), one of many happy little boys in Japan in those days, reading his comics and punking wacky cops and daydreaming about his favorite of all hero-monsters, Gamera the turtle (it's not even slightly clear what history Gamera has in this world: the brand-new backstories for all of the other monsters would seem to indicate that it discards all of the earlier films besides the very first Gamera, but Gamera himself was still a villain at that point, which clearly isn't the case now). But the actual protagonists are a trio of aliens hiding in the form of Earth women, Kilara (Fumiaki Mach), Marsha (Kojimo Maeko), and Mitan (Komatsu Yoko), frequently engaging in a weird little background-dancer choreography when they need to adopt their true form: Earth-looking women in bright pink and white superhero capes and suits. Zanon, which is apparently sentient on top of everything, knows that these space women are the only thing that can stop it from conquering the planet, so it sends its own space woman assassin, Giruge (Kudo Keiko), to also hide herself as an Earth woman and try to kill the women by throwing giant monsters at them. But the turtle-obsessed Keiichi has apparently called up Gamera, friend to all children, or maybe Gamera just shows up, or whatever, but Giruge's increasingly frantic attempts all involve stock-footage fight scenes spooling up, with her and Keiichi and the good space women staring at it in new shots that almost manage to convince you that they might possibly belong in the same movie.

He also plays the new Gamera march, twice: once for his pet turtle, once for the space women, though at that point I think he still doesn't know that they're space women. Surprisingly, the plot kind of bleeds into itself a little.

The pervasive sense of littleness that affects every moment of the story makes it abysmally hard to watch to begin with: Zanon has no presence as a villain, so all we get is Giruge, and she spends half the movie freaking out that Zanon is going to execute her if she keeps messing up. There is never a trace of the idea that our protagonists, who aren't nearly active enough for the word "heroes", are ever in any kind of danger of being found by Giruge, let alone defeated by her in battle.

That said, I think the deathly pointlessness of the story is less galling than the terrible cost-saving filmmaking technique: when the inside of the space-women's secret hideout space inside a giant mustard-colored van is depicted as a room made of bed sheets with a fan blowing on them, any hope is dashed that the film will at any point invest in more than the absolute minimum effort necessary to put the feeble excuse for a script over. Assuming such hope remained after the whole "painted stills standing in for a first act" gesture. Anyway, it's pure, non-stop agony: crappy chroma-key effects of a sort that rival low-budget television in their sharpness and persuasive ability doing absolutely nothing to spice up the bland locations, which give the film the sickly pall of having been shot entirely in one suburb, possibly all in different rooms of a single suburban home.

To their credit, director Yuasa Noriaki and screenwriter Takahashi Nisan understood what a dismal heap of shit they had on their hand, and so ended the film with Gamera killing himself to take Zanon out once and for all, in what I can't even bring myself to call an "effects sequences", though it involves shaking the camera a lot. And so the career of the little daikaiju that couldn't finally coughed itself to death, and when a much-revamped and restructured Daiei decided to bring the unlamented beastie back to life after fifteen years, it would be in such a wildly different form as to count almost as a different franchise altogether. For which I can only give thanks: Super Monster might have represented the absolute worst possible daikaiju eiga made by an even remotely important film studio, but it also might not, and the thought of someone making another one on an even lower budget is the stuff of nightmares, pure and simple.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THIS STORY IS A WARNING TO MANKIND

Gamera vs. Zigra didn't single-handedly drive Daiei Film to bankruptcy; but as one of the last handful of movies that company released before it did temporarily wink out of existence in December, 1971, it's a rather clear example of what was going on at the studio that forced such a drastic step. It's a dreadful movie, almost totally unwatchable in every way; if I were going to hunt around desperately, looking for something to say in its praise, I might fumble my way around to "it's not nearly as technically inept or painful to slog through as 1969's Gamera vs. Guiron, the film-before-last in the series", and if I really had to scrape the bottom of the praise-barrel, I'd add that it's remarkably better in its original Japanese cut than the Sandy Frank-produced VHS release from the '80s which remains the version best-known in America, owing largely to how much information the anamorphic widescreen film lost in the conversion to pan-and-scan, but also because some of Frank's dubbed lines needlessly obscured things which made at least some kind of sense in the original script. But that's not even really a defense, only an admission that based on my heretofore exclusive experience with the English dub, I was expecting a shit sandwich, and while a shit sandwich is exactly what I got, at least the bread was toasted.

For this seventh and final entry in the initial wave of Gamera pictures, we get the plot of the second through sixth again, slightly reworked and with a villainous daikaiju antagonist who I must concede to be one of the most unusual of the whole subgenre. But we'll get there only after a long, directionless, life-stealing amble through a plot that just never, ever starts to make sense. We start on a Japanese moonbase, and while the American dub quietly skips us ahead to 1985 ("ahead", whatever), the original film reflexively sets us down in 1971, as we'll find out in dialogue eventually. So a 1971 film, set in 1971, with moonbases. And Japanese moonbases, at that. This particular moonbase is attacked by what looks, initially, like a jester's hat made out of gumballs, and then we naturally cut to Kamogawa Sea World, where a peppy young boy named Kenichi (Sakagami Yasushi) tells us how his dad works there. And then we get to meet dad (Saeki Isamu), and dad's nominally American co-worker Tom Wallace (Fujiyama Koji, who isn't even wearing the pretense of whiteface). Kenichi and Dr. Wallace's daughter Helen (Gloria Zoellner) are best friends, and when their dads head off to do some investigating of Christ knows what in the open ocean, the children tag along. But don't get too excited about how quickly the movie is clipping along, because this only happens after, like, a half of a reel of Sea World footage, and chatter about the recent Magnitude 12 earthquakes that hit on precisely opposite sides of the Earth, which somehow has remained intact despite being subjected, twice, to quakes that requirs more energy than exists on the planet.

Anyway, the four travelers are at exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, and end up in the path of a teleportation beam from that same bizarre-ass gumball spaceship. Here they meet a gorgeous but obviously evil woman (Yanami Eiko), who doesn't even bother pretending to have anything but the most wicked plans in mind: she claims to be the representative of Zigra, which functions as the name of a planet, a population, the spaceship, and the enormous toothy creature perched over the ship's bridge watching the human prisoners. The Zigrans managed to poison their own oceans to the point that their civilisation was on the brink of death, and so they went out into the wide universe looking for the one planet that would perfectly serve as a new colony. Guess which one they've picked. Of course, you can't have an alien invasion movie without the aliens having a proper reason to invade Earth, but that's the second time the Gamera franchise has hauled out that exact scenario, almost down to the wording, in... how many films? Since Gamera vs. Viras, I think. This franchise has a tendency to blur together in a way that even the most generic of Godzilla pictures never figured out how to do (incidentally, 1971's entry in that franchise Godzilla vs. Hedorah, also adopted a completely blunt "take care of your fuckin' oceans, already" message, though it contrived to do so without recourse to minute upon endless minute of Sea World B-roll).

The evil woman is able to put the two adults into a standing coma, but the kids outwit her, and after a deadening low-speed chase around the bridge, they've turned her magic coma powers back against her and spirited their dads off the ship, to tell the whole world their story of terror, in darling, malapropism-heavy kiddie style. This escape pisses the living hell out of Zigra, who tasks the woman to head to Japan to stop them using any means including - especially! - murder. But leave the rest of the people she meets alone, because Zigra is looking forward to having all of humanity for its food supply, and losing the entire population of Japan in one sweep of a death ray would start things off at a deficit. Unsurprisingly, the harder she chases, the more of an inept bungler she turns out to be.

Somewhere in all this, an enormous flying, fire-breathing turtle shows up, but it's plain from the way this happens that screenwriter Takahashi Nisan hadn't really worked out why.

Beyond question, the most distinctive and interesting thing about Gamera vs. Zigra is Zigra itself, and not just because you need a flowchart to determine which of several distinct entities that name refers to at any given point. I am referring to Zigra the daikaiju, who transforms out of the ship into a being shaped something like a metallic goblin shark, and then finds that thanks to the lower pressure of Earth's oceans, it suddenly grows to enormous size, even larger than Gamera himself. Zigra stands out from the crowd for at least two reasons: one is that it spends virtually all of its time "underwater", though this particular film's ability to create a plausible aquatic environment through the means of some diffused shadows is rather unimpressive, particularly when Gamera starts breathing fire while standing at the bottom of the deep blue sea; the other is that Zigra talks. Which, for all the plot's aggravating boilerplate (oh, another pair of Japanese and American kids are the only ones who know what's going on when aliens try to destroy Earth with a giant monster, and are alone able to call up Gamera, friend to all children, to save the day? Well, did you evah!), is actually pretty cool, and serves to make the film feel unique, or anyway close enough to unique that I don't feel like I'm doing anything too vicious to the word by using it in this context. Zigra is more of a concrete, well-defined threat than any Gamera villain since at least Gyaos, almost solely because of the added personality that comes from hearing it speak in the menacing, merciless tones of Noda Keiichi.

That is, perhaps, the only way that Zigra is more threatening or in any way superior to the average Gamera villain, though I am obliged to admit that the monster design is rather more effective than perhaps any other monster in the series: the action the suit and models are put through tend to to a good job of hiding the limited articulation, one of the most reliable shortcomings of the Gamera monsters. This is the only remotely nice thing I can say about the fight choreography, which is absolutely dismal throughout, rather clumsily stitched-together shots of the monsters not even obviously "fighting" put over without any illusion of impact, mass, or momentum. And even the limpest moment in either of the big monster fights is preferable to Gamera's finishing move, when he plays Zigra's dorsal spines like a fucking xylophone, plunking out his theme song in lieu of actually taking care of business.

In the lengthy passages when it's not focused on the monsters, Gamera vs. Zigra grinds through scene after scene of tedious non-plot, culminating in an infamous protracted sequence where a Sea World employee and a hotelier argue over who gets to purchase the last fish being sold at market during the Zigra crisis, a conflict that Takahashi and director Yuasa Noriaki find so important that they divide it between two scenes. And the momentum is further compromised by the most absolutely ridiculous score, composed by Kikuchi Shunsuke in a capery tone resembling Henry Mancini at his least imaginative. While none of it is emphatically bad in the horrible way that Gamera vs. Guiron was bad, it's almost certainly more boring and directionless, the actors uniformly uninteresting in their execution of stock characters, and the human activity onscreen as arbitrarily divorced from the kaiju sequences as I can think of in any such film I have seen. It's more visually attractive than the baseline for the Gamera franchise, I guess, and there are a few scenes where the filmmaker stage the Zigra ship as a dominant threat in ways that are even kind of exciting (I am chiefly thinking of a sequence where it briefly stalks the characters like a shark). So it is surely not the worst of the series. But it is also not, by any means, a strong argument that, as of 1971, that franchise's temporary shuttering was any kind of loss to cinema generally, or to daikaiju eiga fans specifically.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - JIGER, JIGER, BURNING BRIGHT

To begin with, it would take very little effort to best Gamera vs. Guiron, and certainly, Gamera vs. Jiger goes at least that far. No farther: it does not bring us back to the halcyon days of "so bad it's good" Gamera films. It's just so bad. But not bad in such a claustrophobically pointless way as its immediate predecessor among the six films made in the franchise as of 1970, where we now find ourselves.

The arrival of Gamera's second decade! And like all auspicious dates, it came with a celebration alongside of it: Expo '70 in Osaka, the first World's Fair held in Japan. This was a real-life spectacle that Daiei Film cannily piggybacked on; for what kind of producer of junky genre films could possibly pass up the chance to exploit real-world interest in a major event that everyone in the target audience would already be talking about? And so, when the time comes for it, of course the big battle between the headlining monsters takes place on a mockup of what looks enough like the Expo grounds that I don't suppose anybody would feel compelled to complain. And of course - also unsurprisingly - the film opens with what amounts to a commercial for the Expo, with some flimsy narrative pretext serving to introduce us to such wonders as the Swiss Pavilion, looking like an enormous prison made of glass cubes, or the Gas Pavilion, which resembles an enormous, smiling onion.

Actually, I have gotten out ahead of things: in fact, Gamera vs. Jiger opens with stock footage of the action sequences from the previous five movies, the earliest that the stock footage has reared its head in any of these films yet. And to accompany this unapologetic adventure in recycling, we have a new iteration of the themesong: instead of a boys chorus happily singing "Tsuyoi-zo Gamera" (you're strong, Gamera!) we now get two verses in which a different, rather fluffier boys chorus first proclaims "Ikasuzo Gamera" (which I gather to be idiomatically somewhat close to "You're awesome, Gamera!"), and then "Ganbare Gamera" (don't give up, Gamera!). If I linger on the song, it's for the unanswerable reason that we're now on our third consecutive film in which it is the best thing that happens across the entire feature. Because damn me, but it's a catchy, freakishly bouncy little march that Hirose Kenjiro left behind him before he was replaced as composer by Kikuchi Shunsuke and his far more enervating "kiddie" motifs.

The human element is less developed here than in any Gamera picture to precede it, but basically we have two tween boys one Japanese and one American, yet afuckinggain. There's Hiroshi (Takakuwa Tsutomu), wearing the traditional "boy in a daikaiju eiga" outfit of baseball cap and jacket, and Tommy (Kelly Varis), wearing the traditional... navy blazer and crisp slacks. What an odd notion of American children the good folks at Daiei film had. Oh well, it's not like we don't still harbor some terrible notions about the Japanese and the batshit crazy nonsense we accuse them of stuffing into their movies.

So anyway, back to the movie about a pair of tween boys piloting a submarine into a giant turtle's lung to kill the monster larva living there. We shift from Hiroshi and Tommy receiving a tour of the Expo '70 site to the South Pacific, where a team is busily extracting ancient statues from Wester Island to display the priceless, irreplaceable artifacts at the Expo alongside the building that looks like the giant smiling onion. One statue in particular, named the "Devil's Whistle" for the high-pitched squealing noise it makes thanks to a hole carved into it, is attracting most of the attention of the workers, and also a member of the African delegation to Expo '70, who has an enormous, crazy voodoo booga-booga reaction to seeing it, screaming "Jiger!" over and over again in a way that suggests that the Japanese had not, by 1970, seen any reason that wildly overt racism was a thing to be avoided. But even the voodoo African guy isn't the most pissed off at the excavation of the Devil's Whistle; from out of the ocean comes Gamera, hauling ass like a turtle out of hell, trying his best to disrupt the dig. For the first time in the franchise, though, human guns are sufficient to chase off a daikaiju, and the statue is pulled out entirely, triggering a volcanic eruption, and this in turn leads to the emergence of a giant quadrupedal lizard-like beast with all sorts of plates and crags and horns on its face - her face, since Jiger (and this is, of course, Jiger) is the first female daikaiju in Gamera's rogues gallery. The initial battle is decisively tilted in her favor; she knocks Gamera flat with some projectile quills. She then heads to Japan after the Devil's Whistle, Gamera follows, and their second fight is even more lopsided, as she uses a stinger to pierce his chest, afterwards throwing the statue into the sea.

Gamera starts to turn white from the head down, and Hiroshi and Tommy - you remember them, right? The protagonists? - quickly intuit that he's been poisoned somehow. In fact, as the scientists who take enormous X-rays of Gamera note ("he resembles a turtle" concludes one of them with and admirable refusal to take even the most obvious shit for granted), Jiger implanted an egg into Gamera, and it's growing. Before anyone knows that they're gone the boys hop into a sub, zip straight into Gamera's body, and fight a little version of Jiger inside the enormous turtle's respiratory system. Sheer accident clues them into the monster's weakness: loud sounds drive it made and eventually kill it. Reporting back to the human authorities while Gamera recovers from his infection, the boys end up revealing Jiger's secret weakness to high pitched noises, noises like the one coming out of the Devil's Whistle. Like all other human plots to save the day in these movies, all that this knowledge does, really, is to pad out the plot until the budget kicks in and Gamera comes back to save the day, which he does in this case with particularly bloody gusto.

Now, in case I somehow didn't manage to communicate this fact, Gamera vs. Jiger is a tremendously weird and frankly rather stupid motion picture, by daikaiju eiga standards or any other. Fantastic Voyage inside a Japanese giant monster? It has the merit of being unexpected, I suppose, though it's hard to find any other merit besides that. It's desperately cheap: not quite as desperate, nor as cheap, as Gamera vs. Guiron. Or perhaps its merely that director Yuasa Noriaki and his crew were doing a better job of hiding the limitations of their budget. Certainly Gamera vs. Jiger lets up on the process shots, and that alone is enough to make it look better. Only slightly better! There are still eye-popping shortcuts, including the use of totally unconvincing reversed footage to carry off the effects during the fight scenes, and once again, the editing seems fixed on separating the monsters as much as possible rather than suggesting that they're actually doing anything to each other. And even that's not the big standout bit of terrible filmmaking: that honor I reserve for the early shots, filmed with an anamorphic wide angle lens, with lots of pans thrown in to make everything look both stretched out and fish-eyed for a few seconds of some breathtakingly bad cinematography.

And even without resorting to its shortcomings as a work of cinema - and they are considerable - this is just terrible storytelling. Takahashi Nisan was on Gamera Script #6, and of course we can all understand why that would be a dismal, boring experience to arrive at, bu that doesn't excuse or really even explain the sheer dysfunction of a script that has no real plot or character beats to speak of: compared to most of these, it's a little more "about" the monster battles, but they still make up just a small portion of the whole. Basically, the framework is something like "people mill about, Gamera, people mill about, Gamera, people mill about in Gamera, Gamera, the end". The daikaiju eiga, as a form, is not invested in stories that stand up well on their own, but even by that standard, Gamera vs. Jiger feels like very little happens and what does isn't interesting. Still, it amps up the what-the-fuckery enough so that it's not quite as joyless to watch as Gamera vs. Guiron, and well, I've got nothing.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - SHELL! TEETH! EYES! FLAMES! CLAWS! BREATH! SCALES! FUN!

It eventually had to happen, of course. Across four films from 1965-1968, Daiei's series of films about the giant monster turtle Gamera had ranged from not too bad, to not bad enough to stop being delightful, to bad enough that their badness made them delightful. But the tank had been empty for a while, and finally the franchise just plain stalled out with its fifth entry, 1969's Gamera vs. Guiron, where we hit the point of complete unwatchability. It's not that much of anything has changed: for enormous swaths of its running time, Gamera vs. Guiron functions almost as a straight remake of the previous year's Gamera vs. Viras, made by most of the same creative team, including director Yuasa Noriaki and screenwriter Takahashi Nisan. Though one man who didn't come back from that film was composer Hirose Kenjiro, replaced in scoring duties by Kikuchi Shunsuke (his first Gamera picture, but not his last - he scored all the remaining first-wave films in the franchise). And this confirms my suspicion that Gamera vs. Viras only turned out to be as fun as it was thanks to Hirose's unexpected, jazzy surf-rock score, adding just the right touch of "...wait, what?" to an otherwise junky kiddie monster movie. Oh, sure, the most salient contribution he made to the series is back, the rousing march "Tsuyoi-zo Gamera" with an all-boy choir spouting their nonsensical praise of the turtle savior of humanity and humanity's children. It shows up twice, no less! But there's a lot of movie beyond that, and it is slow-burning death. Not even one of the most shockingly daft monster designs in the entire history of the daikaiju eiga can turn Gamera vs. Guiron into anything pleasant to watch. I consider myself a purist about watching subtitled foreign-language films versus dubbed ones, but in this case, I think the morbidly curious would be better off watching American producer Sandy Frank's VHS dub from the '80s; at least that's so outlandishly incompetent that it's funny.

But fool that I am, I watched the Japanese original for this review, an in that version we open with a gambit taken right out of the '50s American sci-fi cliché grab bag, Over blurry still photos of nebulae and galactic objects, a stentorian narrator (is there any other kind, in cheap monster movies?) spouts some kind of portentous nonsense about the unknowability of the universe, and the discovery of a new wave from space. "WAVES FROM SPACE" bellows the newspaper headline, in a shot taken right out of the '30s American cliché grab bag. And this wave is quite exciting to everyone, leading Dr. Shiga (Funakoshi Eiji) to hold a press conference to find out what it is.

Dr. Shiga, however, matters not one whit to the rest of the movie, since we have a cluster of young people who already know what's up. Japanese boy Akio (Kajima Nobuhiro), his American friend Tom (Christopher Murphy) - there's bound to be some fascinating sociology explaining why these movies made for an audience of Japanese children suddenly found it very important to have American co-leads for their juvenile heroes, but I am afraid I can't even guess what it might be - and Akio's little sister Tomoko (Akiyama Miyuki), are a trio of space nuts, and they're well aware that it has to be aliens. Akio and Tomoko's mother (Hamada Yuko) is rather down on this, but not enough to prevent the children from going off and doing whatever silly nonsense they like, which involves biking to what proves to be the landing site of a small spaceship. Over Tomoko's objections, the boys scramble in, and are immediately whisked away, almost dying in a collision with a meteor, saved only because Gamera suddenly flies in to bounce the debris from their path. Because Gamera is not merely friend to all children, apparently he stalks them as well.

The craft lands on the planet Terra, which is on Earth's exact orbit but precisely on the opposite side of the sun, so we've never been able to see it. We don't learn that yet; all we know now is that the boys have landed in wildly unconvincing rear-projection of a ruined city, where a silver Gyaos shows up to attack them (you remember Gyaos, right? The daikaiju vampire from Gamera vs. Gyaos? Because this one is just that, spray-painted silver). The monster triggers the arrival of another creature from beneath a pool outside the biggest building, and though we don't know yet that this is Guiron, we've seen the title, and can guess.

And Guiron? Oh, he's a pip. Basically a quadrupedal hammerhead shark with an enormous blade extending straight out from his body instead of the hammer. And with enormous, disconcertingly expressive cow eyes. His fight with the Gyaos is easily the film's highlight, the only action sequence in the whole thing that's remotely well-edited, and astonishingly violent, to boot: Guiron uses his giant knife-nose to reflect the Gyaos's sonic beams and slice limbs off the space bat, one at a time, ending with its head. This gives us a good chance to see that Gyaoses apparently have uniform purple interiors with neither a skeletal structure nor organs.

Guiron returns to his pen after beating this enemy, and the boys are warped into the control room of, apparently, the last two Terrans: a pair of evil Space Babes called Florbella (Kasahara Reiko) and Barbella (Kai Hiroko). Not that they seem evil at first; they're actually quite plaintive in explaining to the boys the history and doomed fate of Terra, overrun by space monsters and running out of energy, with only Guiron to protect it. This may or may not be true, but it's a blind, anyway: what they women really want is to eat the boys' brains, and to do this they lull them into a stupor and scan their memories. Yes, this means stock footage of the previous Gamera films. And having learned that all the children of Earth are protected by a giant turtle guardian, the Terrans are prepared for a fight, and when Gamera arrives to fight Guiron, he is shortly bested and dropped, bleeding and near death, to the bottom of the sea.

To this point, Gamera vs. Guiron has merely been bad; from the start of Gamera vs. Guiron, Rd. 1, it becomes actively unpleasant and never ceases. The fight is a colossal misfire, edited with an eye towards making things as complicated as possible (the physical relationship between the two kaiju is at times literally indecipherable, and staged clumsily between two rather unwieldy fighters - Gamera is played, often as not, by a rigid model that's just kind of swung into Guiron. And once it's over, the film's plot just fucking stops, with scenes that meander around, and cutaways back to Earth, where the boys' mothers are hugely unconcerned with their sons' disappearance, and no clear sense of what, exactly the Terrans are planning to do besides eat two random Earth children. The second monster fight is at least moderately better than the first, owing mostly to how much sillier it is (like the raptor scene in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, it involves using the power of gymnastics to save the day), but it's still not "good", and the movie needs a lot more to redeem it by that point.

It's just so, so dreadful: the effects work is embarrassingly shoddy, with process shots that look so bad, it's almost easier to assume the characters are watching a low-resolution TV monitor than looking through a window at the monsters, and a Gamera who spends most of the movie looking like a big toy. The score - again, the primary reason that Gamera vs. Viras turned out halfway decent, despite sharing all of this film's flaws and compounding two of them (it had a much worse American boy actor, and far more stock footage) - is particularly terrible, bogged down in frothy, frivolous "happy kids! yay!" noodling around for much of the film. The adult actors are all irritating, though how much of that is the performance and how much is the writing, I cannot say. Certainly, Omura Kon, playing the local goofy cop Officer Kondo, target of the kids' mockery, could never redeem his role, and playing it as the Japanese Don Knotts is probably the best he could manage to do.

The movie is boring and ugly, but neither of these are as devastating as how insipid it is: the worst kind of children's entertainment, in which everything is pitched at a goofy, jolly level that prohibits any real sense of drama, and the kid protagonists are idealised to ridiculous lengths. Such as an endless scene in which they discuss the ins and outs of supersonic travel, showing off their incredible knowledge and strangling the movie to death with unwonted fury. It's all very silly, but not the fun kind of silly, not the energetic kind; it's the silly that happens when you've made five Gamera films in five years, and you begin to hold them in a kind of tangible, toxic contempt.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - HIS WEAKNESS IS HIS UNUSUAL AND OVERPOWERING KINDNESS TO CHILDREN

The first three entries in Daiei's Gamera franchise are, for the most part, competent enough despite their incomparable cheapness that we can talk about them like they were real movies. I am terribly excited to say that we have come to the point where that's no longer a concern: 1968's Gamera vs. Viras (a dubious Romanisation, but one that has taken on the status of being more or less official) is the exact point at which the series pitches over the cliff into outright "don't give a fuck" territory. And oh, what a glorious place it is to be: later films start to tip into unwatchable bilge, but Gamera vs. Viras has juuuuust enough warped silliness that it's fun-bad and not simply bad-bad.

(Incidentally, the film was one of the two overlooked by distributor Sandy Frank when he picked up five of the first wave of Gamera movies to overdub and distribute on video in the United States in the 1980s; and as such, the film didn't show up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 when that show attacked the Frank releases in 1991. It is, as such, one of the most obscure of the Gamera pictures, and the first one we've reached that I haven't previously seen in any form).

Almost all of that silliness comes from one of two sources: first, this is the movie where the series firmly and fully committed to the frivolous concept that Gamera, a fire-breathing turtle capable of destroying buildings just by touching them, is a "friend to all children" (that iconic, much-mocked phrase makes its first appearance in this movie, in fact). Which means, in turn, that the story takes place almost exclusively at the level of a particularly giddy kids' flick, beginning with the fact that its heroes are literal Boy Scouts. The second thing is that Gamera vs. Viras is the solitary Gamera film with a score composed by Hirose Kenjiro, whose approach to the music is wildly far away from the more or less serious action movie cues previously found in the series. His score is pitched somewhere between jazz and surf rock, and it's quite possibly the most damned peculiar score for any daikaiju eiga I've ever seen, blowing right past the atonal funk that Manabe Riichirō composed for Godzilla vs. Hedora three years later, which had prior to now been my reigning standard-bearer for off-kilter daikaiju eiga music. And not least of his weirdly buoyant, out-of-place compositions is for Gamera's new theme song, a playful march with a boys' chorus shouting their way through an exorbitantly random assortment of thoughts about Gamera, including the fact that he is strong, that his spinning jets can save the day, that he can fight monsters from Mars or Venus, as needed. And that he is strong, a sentiment repeated no fewer than six times, in two bursts.

Hirose's daffy music almost single-handedly raises the energy of the film, making its extreme silliness and bargain-bin effects work seem like they might possibly be part of some greater strategy, and not just the result of Daiei giving up any pretense that these movies were designed to do anything else but put children's asses in seats. Let me be sparkingly clear: Gamera vs. Viras is contemptible shit in many ways. Suggesting that it was made on a shoestring budget doesn't even begin to cover it: after the lengthy effects sequence in the first 15 minutes that showcases what is transparently a plastic submarine of at most a few inches in length being waggled around in an aquarium, we're already compelled to give up the remotest hope for impressive spectacle, and at that point we can't guess that almost 15 minutes of the 81-minute feature will be comprised solely of footage culled from the previous three Gamera vehicles, an obvious bid to provide the movie with a semblance of action that its own plot and ambition are completely incapable of realising. The acting is impossible, with the film's second-largest role being filled by a preteen American boy who is clearly unequipped to take direction in Japanese, and spends most of the movie staring fixedly at whatever his preteen Japanese co-star is watching with far more investment and personality.

And yet, I find its accumulation of idiocies charming. Mostly. The stock footage interludes are murderous, and so is the film's scattershot plot, which throws a bunch of incidents at the screen and prays they form the semblance of a dramatic arc. What we've got is a race of aliens from the star Viras flying into our solar system to take over Earth - the planet most like theirs in the entire universe - but stymied when their vessel, which resembles five plastic bumblebees glued onto a metallic ring, is battered to pieces by Gamera, who zooms right through outer space to stop this invasion. Realising that they cannot conquer the planet with this heroic turtle guarding humanity, the Virasians plot to take Gamera out of the picture by trapping him in an energy dome, reading his memories, and cuing up an uninterrupted 10 minuets and 44 seconds of stock footage of the battle sequences from the earlier films, which is enough to teach them that his weakness his his kindness to the human children of the Earth. But this has nothing to do with their plot to stop him, which is the more straightforward "use a mind-control ray" gambit that had already been trotted out twice in the Godzilla series over at Toho by this point.

While that's been going on, an apparent international Boy Scouts colloquium has been gathered, with the two Boy Scouts we care about being Nakaya Masao (Takatsuka Toru) and Jim Crane (Carl Craig). Masao is an obnoxious, nauseating little perfectionist, who takes over a high-tech sub after the adults showing it to the scouts fuck it up, and while he and Jim are tooling around underwater, they spot Gamera, not yet under mind control. They engage the turtle in a playful underwater race - a playful underwater race, what the actual Christ - which stops when the aliens capture him, and the boys too. Masao and Jim are relatively free to move around the spaceship at first, looking for a way to escape from the aliens who dress like French beatniks and can have their eyes turn to plastic balls that flash in the dark. Eventually, they break the beam controlling Gamera, and the aliens trot out their back-up plan: shedding their human form to reveal themselves as squid-like creatures who can combine to form the giant squid-like creature also called Viras, who does battle with Gamera for a few thoroughly unengaging minutes of the worst-choreographed daikaiju battle in the Gamera franchise to this point.

The chief joy of Gamera vs. Viras is in how it keeps coming up with new stupidities to be darling and fun: everything from Masao's wrist communicator with a comically enormous antenna that he can use to communicate with the outside world during his and Jim's sojourn on the space ship, thus ensuring that there's no danger of this building up to anything but a low-stakes boys' adventure; to every single hilariously bad effect, with several different Gamera models and suits, all of them looking like plastic and none of them looking alike; to the robotic intensity of the non-actors playing Jim's parents; to the lazy incorporation of footage from the original Gamera during the period when the aliens control him and force him to destroy things, that blithely ignores the fact that Gamera was shot in black-and-white, and Gamera vs. Viras is in color.

Director Yuasa Noriaki, making his third Gamera film of seven, does a surprisingly good job of making something out of the limited budget and the small scale of Takahashi Nisan's script, which spends an inordinate amount of time on the spaceship, saving the expense of building too many sets. The results are undoubtedly cramped - the middle chunk of the movie resembles a TV show more than a movie - but Yano Tomohisa's sets are actually pretty creative and colorful in their adherence to late-'60s sci-fi visual tropes, and Yuasa does a fair job of staging the action to keep from emphasising just how rickety and limited the film's resources actually were. He's at a total loss to make the plot seem engaging: it amounts to nothing more than "two boys get kidnapped by aliens, they mess around, they escape, and also a giant turtle is going crazy out in stock footage", and it hardly manages to fill 81 minutes even with that enormous streak of recycled material. Parts of it are, undoubtedly, very boring. And all of it looks like it was made in somebody's backyard. But it's sufficiently manic in the early going to give it some momentum to get through its mid-film slowdown, and the whole of it is so cheerily crappy that one needn't have a lifetime of experience being delighted by completely awful filmmaking to see why it's all more amusing than enervating. Even the annoying little kids aren't as grating as they could be, and though parts of the film are just terrible, there's also some silly bullshit to come along and make it fun again.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - GAMERA AT THE BAT

In Gamera vs. Gyaos, Daiei Film's third film in as many years featuring the fire-breathing, flying, giant tortoise Gamera, the formula of a "Gamera film" was nailed down in its final form, while his most iconic and beloved opponent was introduced. A certain Gyaos by name, because whatever else is true of daikaiju eiga they believe in truth in advertising.

The point being, it is quite and all-round impressive milestone in the franchise, and it's immensely entertaining on top of it. I'm not sure if its for the right reasons or not: Gamera vs. Gyaos is by any meaningful objective standard a terrible, terrible movie, but it's also a huge amount of fun, and not only because its terrible elements are so hilarious. Let us make the obvious comparison: in 1967, when Daiei released this film, the more well-heeled Toho contributed to the more storied Godzilla franchise the execrable Son of Godzilla, while also handling the American co-production King Kong Escapes, a dumb-headed cartoon adaptation that's campy enough for its shortcomings to as a story to really stand out. Next to either of those films, Gamera vs. Gyaos is the clear winner: it's cheap as hell and virtually nothing done by any of its characters could possibly be mistaken for rational human behavior and it includes a subplot so totally, obviously unacceptable for the rest of the movie that I can't even imagine how it was dreamed up in the first place. But unlike Toho's offerings in '67 - unlike most nominally bad daikaiju eiga of any era - its insanity is unrelenting, and for 86 of the most batshit silly minutes that Japanese genre cinema has to offer, it's not boring for even a second.

And just to prove my point, when the movie opens, it's already running at speed. There have been volcanic eruptions across Japan! The latitude and longitude of the first one are given! The most recent one was at Mount Fuji! People had to be evacuated! Every one of those exclamation points is absolutely unmistakable in the original, too. The narrator catching us up on the chaotic goings-on is goddamn ecstatic to be telling us all of this.

All of this activity attracts the giant monster Gamera, to the immense pleasure of Eiichi (Abe Naoyuki), a little boy living in a farming village near Mount Fuji, where his grandfather Kanamura Tatsuemon (Ueda Kichijiro) is leading a protest against the construction team led by Tsutsumi Shiro (Hongo Kojiro). Which, with the eruptions and giant monsters and all, is looking like a pretty doomed project, but Shiro still insists on buying out the farmers for rip-off prices, and Tatsuemon still stonewalls him. But all of this of infinitesimal interest, no matter how much screenwriter Takahashi Nisan insists on returning to it over and over again throughout the movie, never feeling like anything but an abrupt downshift into a completely different film. Far more important is the discovery that Gamera loves lava, and will thus be sticking around Mount Fuji for quite some time, which is convenient, for as we're about to learn, the eruptions have awakened another monster from its millennia-long sleep. We don't see it as anything but a strange green glow in the forest, at first: a green glow that shoots yellow energy beams and destroys a UN research helicopter. The first and second people to actually see the beast are Eiichi and Okabe (Minatsu Shin), a shady news photographer whom the boy catches lurking around the village. Eiichi is the only one who counts, though, given that as soon as it becomes clear that something huge is hiding in the woods, Okabe runs in terror, leaving the unaccompanied child to fend for himself. In punishment for this greediness, the photographer is picked up by the huge soemthing and tossed in its mouth like a handful of popcorn. And this gives us our first good look at the face of the enemy.

Oh, these Gamera antagonists! Between Barugon in the second movie, and now Gyaos (so named by Eiichi, who shapes up to be the film's monster expert, advising scientists and the military on the proper way to deal with the new threat and support Gamera - I'm deadly serious), the films are two-for-two on creatures that are not really at all imaginative, and extravagantly crappy in execution, and precisely because they are both such complete botch jobs, they're hilarious and delightful and infinitely memorable. I'd still give the edge to Barugon, a far more defiantly shabby, weird concept, but Gyaos is a real special beastie, combining the basic shape of a pteranodon (and thus Rodan from Toho's bestiary) with the details of a bat, and a shovel-shaped flat head that resembles nothing so much as a piñata with little angry yellow eyes, and a perfectly triangular mouth that flops open to reveal its nubby teeth. The non-existence of a Gyaos plushie is heartrending to me, and I don't understand how the internet allowed that to happen.

The film's plot from here on resembles a perfect hybrid of Gamera and Gamera vs. Barugon. From the latter film, we have the basic shape of the narrative, in which Gamera and his titular foe square off, with Gamera ending up worse for the wear, and forced to go into hiding to patch up his wounds; after this, the Japanese government and military try their mightiest to defeat the new, far worse creature on their own, but their plans only succeed in slowing it down until a resurgent Gamera comes along to finish the job. From the earlier film, we have the human anchor for all this being a preteen boy who is rescued by Gamera and persists in regarding the giant turtle as his very best friend. And now, at least, he has every reason to: the shift from Gamera-the-destroyer to Gamera-the-unambiguous hero was complete largely by the midway point of the second movie, but without a chipper, rather smug child to prattle on and on about how wonderful Gamera is, it wasn't so violently clear that was the case. But with Eiichi popping up everywhere from disaster areas to top-secret planning sessions to bluntly insist that Gamera won't let harm come to humanity, it becomes extravagantly, unmissably clear.

Eiichi is the film's most present (annoyingly so) character, but the one who makes the most delightful impact is Dr. Murakami (Murakami Fujio), who instantly becomes one of the truly great characters in all daikaiju eiga during his conference where he's asked what, in his opinion as a great scientist, is the nature of Gyaos, and he pleasantly retorts that it's some kind of inexplicable giant monster. He is one of the chief reasons that Gamera vs. Gyaos is a marvelously entertaining bad movie instead of just an irritating one: the most damned deranged things come out of his mouth on a regular basis, and Murakami the actor does a phenomenal job of playing all this with wise sincerity, but without trying to convince us that it's anything but overheated cartoon nonsense. When he is soberly explaining that Gyaos has two throats, and that's why it can't turn its head but can shoot a beam of yellow sound waves, he doesn't talk down to the material. When he suggests that the best way to stop the blood-drinking, sun-fearing monster (Gyaos is baisically a daikaiju vampire) is to use a blood-scented mist to lure it to the top of a rotating hotel and make it dizzy until the sun comes up, he seems to have deeply considered that this makes the most sense out of all possibilities. He is both the conduit and the antidote for all of the film's most aggressively silly impulses, and because of him, Gamera vs. Gyaos finds a perfect mixture of kiddie goofiness and some kind of meaningful stability.

But it is still a giant monster movie, and it naturally enough lives and dies on its giant monsters. For all the remarkably cheesy limitations of Gyaos's construction, the effects work is actually quite good: there are some surprisingly ambitious composite shots that are executed flawlessly, or at least what passed for "flawlessly' in Japan in the latter half of the 1960s. The fight choreography is unexpectedly good as well: the film has a violent streak to it (including a memorably gross moment when Gyaos re-grows its toes after Gamera bites them off), and the fights turn into frenzied brawling that's legitimately exciting, if a little bit mystifyingly cut together. Blood spurts, Gamera flails and tears, and Gyaos is cunningly positioned so that you only notice about half the time that the suit has barely any points of articulation.

It's cheap, and it looks cheap (the attempt to give the Gamera suit more range of expression only serves to highlight how awkwardly stiff and unyielding most of it is), but there's a friendliness to this cheapness that sets it far above the junkier Godzilla films that were just starting to make themselves known at this time. The tone remains madcap and blazingly upbeat throughout, perhaps director Yuasa Noriaki's attempt to united the irreconcilable portions of a a film that wants to be half kids' horror movie, half adult sci-fi adventure. The film that emerges makes no sense and feels more than a little incompetent most of the time, but it has such an irresistible enthusiasm for being thus deranged that it's impossible not to fall in love with it a little bit; soon enough, the Gamera films would commit to being kiddie schlock, and the random, captivating mixture of impulses that make this such a singular film would start to look even more unique.

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