Tag Archives: Noriaki Yuasa

Gamera vs. Jiger (1970)

"As you can see here, there's a flaw built right into the heart of this series..."
“As you can see here, there’s a flaw built right into the heart of this series…”

This, the sixth Gamera film, (released in the U.S. as Gamera vs. Monster X) is really the third part in a Pentalogy that ends the series, all following the same basic outline. A New Monster arises, Gamera loses his first fight, and spends half the movie down for the count as the Military/Scientific/Industrial Complex fails to combat the latest kaiju threat. A pair of Annoying Kids (one Japanese, on Token Anglo), Designated as Our Duel Protagonists, take it upon themselves to deal with a human-sized problem, and their plucky spirits rouse Gamera, Friend to All Children, from his mid-movie stupor. He wins the Climactic Battle as the Kids watch from Minimum Safe Distance, ruining the fun for everyone with their high-pitched color commentary. Cue credits.

With this one, I can’t even escape the opening credits without deducting points for stock-footage. Someone’s mom obviously told them to “put their best foot forward,” but I doubt “reuse fight scenes from the previous five films” is what she really meant. In fairness, the is the last we’ll see of previous battles…though not, as I’ll discuss later, the last time we’ll see stock footage. However, Gamera vs. Jiger can still boast the least amount of stock footage in any Gamera film since Gamera vs. Gaos. Marvel at that for a moment. It’s almost as if Team Gamera enjoyed a budget increase after their success with vs. Viras and vs. Guiron. If so, it only accelerated Daiei Studios collapse into bankruptcy. But we’ve one more film before that happens. Continue reading Gamera vs. Jiger (1970)

Gamera vs. Gaos (1967)

Insert indigestion joke here.
Insert indigestion joke here.

This is the exact midpoint of Gamera’s original (or “Showa Era”) film series. Not chronologically, or in any other terms material, but in terms of tone. This is the point where everyone at Gamera’s home studio, Daiei Film, gave up on the daikaiju genre as anything other than a cash cow. You can barely blame them. By 1967, the writing was on the wall and it said, “the only people stupid enough to abandon their TVs and visit some run-down, overcrowded, food-and-drink-stained movie theater are children.” Film as a whole suffered, but few suffered more than our favorite flying turtle, who would go on to star in some of the most notoriously bad films in daikaiju eiga as the seventies rose up to choke us all down with mediocrity, bad music, and even worse clothing.

Things didn’t have to be this way, but the makers of mid-60s Japanese cinema made the same mistake their American counterparts so often make and assumed (A) kids were the only ones watching their films and (B) kids were stupid. But there’s a difference between being stupid and not being able to articulate why you like something. My ten-year-old self knew Gamera was awesome on a molecular level but my current self still struggles to articulate why that is. Why do you think I’m writing these things in the first place? To finally pull back the curtain and figure out why, whenever someone goes, “Gamera? Really?” I always go “Fuck yeah, Gamera! He’s awesome.”

Pictured: awesomeness
Pictured: awesomeness

His movies, on the other hand, stopped being  the “unbelievable, imaginatively cool” kind of “awesome” and started being the “incredibly cheap and incredibly crappy” kind of “awesome” right in the middle of this film. I can even show you where it happens: it’s the scene where Our  Kenny – an incredibly annoying little snot named Eiichi (Naoyuki Abe) – takes a joyride on Gamera’s back. Continue reading Gamera vs. Gaos (1967)

Gammera the Invincible (1965)

Nothing Freudian about this, is there?Though he began life as a humble Godzilla rip-off in a land and time glutted with them, Gamera would come to symbolize everything that went so horribly wrong with the Golden Age of daikaiju cinema. But let us not tell sad stories about the death of kings just yet…like his more famous cousin/industrial competitor, Gamera began life as a serious apotheosis of the paranoia and insecurity of his age. But even here, at the beginning, we can see his creators at Daiei Studios sowing the seeds of their creation’s destruction.

And speaking of destruction…it’s 1965 again, and despite rising tensions between the Superpowers, someone’s still managed to scare up the funding for an Arctic expedition (chasing  that fabled Northwest Passage, no less). As the film opens, the expedition’s official zoologist, Dr. Hidaka (Eiji Funakoshi), his typically hot assistant, Kyoke (Harumi Kiritachi), and your standard news hound, Aoyagi (Junichiro Yamashiko), stop by an Eskimo hut to warm up and quiz the natives. A formation of toy planes interrupts their welcome. “Russian planes,” Hidaka says. {More}