Directed by Noriaki Yuasa. Written by Niisan Takahashi.
This is the Gamera movie with the alien women who shave a kid’s head so they can eat his brains, Gamera performing a men’s gymnastics routine, and a monster that looks like a letter opener. It’s also the Gamera movie that decides plot is optional when all it needs is kids wandering around science-fiction sets watching monsters have outlandish battles. Gamera vs. Viras did something similar, and Gamera vs. Guiron takes the next step of stretching out the “kids wandering around spaceship” section to fill most of the movie.
This isn’t bad news: thanks to the reduced use of stock footage and an abundance of colorful weirdness, Gamera vs. Guiron ends up one of the more enjoyable entries in the Showa series. It’s arguably the Gamera film with the most appeal to young children — provided they aren’t squeamish about the threat of brain-hungry alien women.
The story could fit easily into a Little Golden Book. Two boys, Akio (Nobuhiro Kajima) and Tom (Christopher Murphy), discover an empty spaceship has landed near their homes. They go aboard, and the ship then whooshes them away to the planet Tera. There the boys must escape from two alien women, Barbella and Florbella (Hiroko Kai, Reiko Kasahara), who want to snack on their gray matter. The boys occasionally take a break from fleeing the incompetent alien pair to watch Gamera, who has come to rescue them, battle Tera’s guardian, steak-knife monster Guiron. Back on Earth, people worry about the kids, but they don’t achieve anything except brief distractions from the action. Eventually, Gamera destroys Guiron and repairs the spaceship so the boys can go home. (Gamera took shop in high school, don’t you know.)
The movie is a series of set pieces for the two boys to wander through, all designed to appeal to viewers of the same age. The “dull stuff” has been sliced out and what remains is colorful stimuli on Star Trek sets punctuated by periodic monster fights. The visual similarities to classic Star Trek are remarkable: the planet Tera resembles most of the original Star Trek’s Season 3 planet sets, and the constant use of teleportation machines with “beaming” effects will make any Trek fan feel right at home. The number of teleportation scenes eventually becomes monotonous, which makes me think it must have been the least expensive special effect the filmmakers had available.
Gamera continues to ramp up the superhero business. The mega-terrapin now has telepathic abilities to communicate with children so it can detect Akio and Tom in trouble from star-spanning distances. When Gamera repairs the spaceship and escorts the boys back to Earth, the final barrier falls down and Gamera essentially becomes Mr. Rogers with a shell and flame breath.
The monster Gyaos may have starred in a superior movie, but Guiron is my favorite opponent monster in the classic Gamera series. The bizarre thing has so much personality and takes such perverse joy in using its massive blade head as a weapon. The fight scenes all take place on the Tera space base, which places boundaries on the interesting things the monsters can do, so the staging is centered on the monsters exhibiting their personalities and using occasional ridiculous fight moves — such as the famous gymnastic spins that Gamera does with a parallel bar, complete with dismount.
Although it has slower choreographed fights than the previous two movies, Gamera vs. Guiron does contain the best “finishing move” of all, with Gamera driving Guiron blade-first into the rocks, then hurling a missile into the slot in Guiron’s head and flaming it until the evil beast explodes real good. The fights are adequately staged with several memorable moments. Really, nothing but memorable moments.
Speaking of memorable: the most infamous scene features a third kaiju, originally meant as a new monster, but presented as “Space Gyaos.” I.e. the Gyaos suit from Gamera vs. Gyaos spray-painted silver to save on the monster costume budget. To show how tough and mean Guiron is, the knife monster cuts down Space Gyaos one limb at a time in a perfect prognostication of the Black Knight sequence from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Guiron then slices Space Gyaos into serving portions while giving a deep, gloating chuckle.
The original US television release removed this slice-n-dice scene, although the 1980s Sandy Frank version restored it — which means Mystery Science Theater 3000 also got to enjoy this over the top gruesomeness. It may be a bit disturbing for the young ‘uns, but here is where the unreality of the special effects work in the movie’s favor. It’s difficult to take this seriously.
Unfortunately, the story cannot divorce itself entirely from its adult characters. The sporadic scenes on Earth are the worst part of the movie and interrupt the pacing. A bizarre film like this doesn’t need comic relief, yet we still have to endure scenes with Officer Kon-chan filled with miserable mugging. The opening starts as a miscue, with a typical scene of a scientist explaining a situation to a room of reporters. The sequence feels like a setup for a different movie, since it has no bearing on the rest of the story and offers scientific explanations regarding alien life that children in the audience don’t need.
The alien situation brings up an irritating point: Did everyone in Japan miss that an alien invasion occurred in the last movie — quite publicly? The adults here are all convinced that intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is impossible and has been disproved, and they harp on Akio’s poor sister (Miyuki Akiyama) as a liar when she insists her brother went up in a spaceship. Why doesn’t she just shout: “Didn’t any of you see the last movie?”
Stock footage still crops up, and once again it comes from aliens doing a brain scan in order to learn more about Gamera. Mercifully, we only have three minutes of repeat footage to endure: a jaunt through a trio of moments when Gamera helped children.
When first released in the US on television through American International Pictures, Gamera vs. Guiron was retitled Attack of the Monsters. I don’t know why AIP insisted on giving their Gamera releases generic titles like this, War of the Monsters, and Return of the Giant Monsters. At least the title Destroy All Planets (for Gamera vs. Viras) has some snap to it.
Gamera vs. Guiron has the distinction of being the best of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Gamera episodes. Not only is the film so consistently nutty that it supplies Joel and the ‘Bots with oodles of comedy material, but the Sandy Frank-commissioned dub is the worst I’ve ever encountered on a Japanese SF/fantasy movie. Not only are the dubbing performances terrible, the English script idiotic, and the dialogue synched apparently at random, but the actors’ cadences are otherworldly in how they start and stop. No human speaks this way. Or alien. Interestingly, some of the stranger lines that MST3K parodies, like Akio’s obsession with traffic accidents, the constant confusion between “planet” and “star,” and Gamera “dancing Go-Go,” are actually from the original Japanese dialogue.
Rating: Good
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