Kaiju Watch: Gamera the Giant Monster (1965)

Gamera just stepped on a Lego

Watched:  03/29/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Noriaki Yuasa

Selection:  Jamie, kind of

We've both seen a lot of Godzilla movies, but I confess to a Gamera gap.  I have not ever really watched Gamera movies outside of MST3K.  

Gamera is from Daiei Film, a competitor to Toho, one supposes.  And it's not like Japan has the lock on movies riffing on popular ideas from other studios.  It's a way of life for popular media here in these United States.  

Anyhoo...  Gamera: The Giant Monster (1965) is the first Gamera movie of what Wikipedia tells me is a dozen films.  It's... a rip-off of Godzilla in some ways, and it's own weird, wacky thing, so you can see how it took off and found it's own voice and following.

The basic gist is that the Russians are flying over the arctic where some scientists are hanging out with what I believe are supposed to be Inuit people trying to determine... something about turtles or something.  I don't know.  Anyway, they're engaged by the USAF who shoot one of the Russkies out of the air, crashing a nuclear payload into the ice.  Which frees Gamera, just in time for the title sequence.  

There's some guys I assume are Americans playing US military monitoring the situation, and, friends, these are clearly just guys who speak American English, not trained actors, and it's *magical* to see on screen.

After this, Gamera heads for Japan (because this is a Japanese movie) where he meets the worst character in cinema history - Toshio.  Toshio is a very dumb boy who has no friends but his small turtle, PeeWee, and what seems sympathetic rapidly just becomes tedious and you can see why everyone avoids this kid.  He's the worst.  

A couple of points:  

Gojira debuted in 1954, but sequels were slow to come til 1962's King Kong vs. Godzilla was a hit.  Immediately, Toho was making new movies every few months for a while.  So no shocker other studios jumped on the bandwagon.  Especially as Toho started aiming G movies at kids.

Also, Daiei Film seems to have cut out the middle man of the American cut of Gojira as Godzilla: King of the Monsters and just went ahead and included Americans in their film from the start.  Might as well make that movie have other markets from Day 1.  

Gamera, however is *not* Godzilla.  In this movie he looks like Godzilla's stupid cousin if he was roadkill, run over across the middle, and his head just sort of waggles around because turtles aren't designed to walk on two feet.  

But, y'all... our boy Gamera can breathe legit fire.  None of this animated FX stuff - they put a flamethrower in his head.  It is *wild*.  And!  He can pull his head and limbs into his shell and shoot flames out so he can fly around.  It's actually pretty neat.  Also, he doesn't just murder everyone in his path, he does help out the turtle boy.  

There's essentially two groups - 1.  The scientists and their tag along journalist/ photographer who is an absolute sex pest when it comes to the pretty lady scientist.   2. Turtle Boy and his sister (and their dad).  

Then a whole bunch of military.

Look, this movie is really boring for really long stretches.  It plays hide-the-ball with the master plan for dealing with Gamera for what feels like 25 minutes, refusing to tell anyone what's going to happen (fair enough, but it gets tiresome hearing about the plan).  It does introduce various ideas about Gamera eating energy sources, which seems like something Godzilla has since stolen as a concept.  But it's also a lot of Toshio the Turtle Boy being a scamp, and ain't no one got time for that.  

Someone lock that kid up, he's a menace.

The movie is fine, but has that B-movie deadweight in the middle.  But you can't put out a 45 minute movie, so here we are.

Anyway, glad to have finally seen it, and will check out more Gamera, but this is not the same "holy shit" start to a franchise that we get with Gojira.