Cast:
Eiji Funakoshi (Dr. Hidaka), Michiko Sugata (Nobuyo Sakurai), Harumi Kiritachi (Kyoko Yamamoto), Junichiro Yamashita (Aoyagi), Yoshiro Uchida (Toshio Sakurai), Yoshiro Kitahara (Mr. Sakurai), Jun Hamamura (Dr. Murase), Yoshio Yoshida (Eskimo Chief), and George Hirose (the Japanese ambassador) Directed by Noriaki Yuasa.
Review:
"This may be cliché, but the only thing I have to say is, “Gamera is immortal.” Gamera is not dead. If we want to bring him back and create a new story, we can. He’s immortal. [Shigeo] Nagashima said, “The [Yomiuri] Giants are immortal.” But I want to say, “Gamera is immortal.” Gamera is really forever. That’s all I have to say. I’m grateful for being inspired to create such a great character.
Oh sure, there have been plenty of kaiju films for Japanese viewers to watch, but how about one parallel from Godzilla for one? Gamera (derived from the Japanese word kame that means turtle) is an on-and-off again franchise that has inspired twelve feature films, with two distinct periods to them that all started 55 years ago with the original production, as made by Daiei Film, which you might recognize from Warning from Space (1956) and subsequent kaiju works like Daimajin (1966, which involves a giant stone). There were eight films in the original line of Gamera (1965-1971, 1980), with Noriaki Yuasa directing seven of them. The son of a stage actor, he had made his debut in film with Shiawase nara te o tatakō (1964), and it is one of only two films he directed that didn't involve Gamera. It is also the only film of the franchise to be in black-and-white and to not have a second monster involved in the action. One might go with the easy generalization of this being a ripoff of Godzilla, and the basic framework of that seems to ring true. After all, Dalei wanted to make a kaiju (monster) movie, inspired by The Birds (1963) and the Godzilla films...so they first turned to giant rats. No, seriously, actual rats were going to be used in ravaging the world (since stop motion and other methods didn't work out); if you can believe it, this did not last long, since the wild rats they brought in resulted in health infections. Studio head Macaichi Nagata came up with another idea while on an airplane, where he saw something shaped like a turtle swimming that suddenly dropped out of sight. But wait a minute, it gets better, since we are talking about a turtle with tusks that also happens to fly like an UFO. In that sense, maybe it explains the strange ways the film sets up its own monster, because it begins in the Artic (which they refer to as a continent, for some reason) with Eskimos as military planes (which happen to be carrying nuclear weapons) happen to fly by. After a brief skirmish that is harmless enough to never stoke front page headlines but still enough to create Gamera, one finds themselves watching the other shoe drop: an ancient stone that displays Gamera and some mysterious markings (which they think is waves...joke's on them!). There has been arguments made about similarities to mythology from other sources with the Four Symbols of the Chinese constellations that had a guardian with the Black Tortoise, known in Japan as Genbu (of course this film floats around the idea of this being deriving in some way from Atlantis), although writer Niisan Takahashi stated that it was simply just a "100% original" script done at the wishes of Nagata and producer Yonejiro Saito (who told him about the turtle story). Takahashi would write for all eight films.
Maybe a turtle can be a really imposing monster if one gets the focus just right. This...in an odd way to go by it, since sometimes the creature will look fine for destroying models, and then other times one nearly cracks up at the execution of a flying turtle with big teeth and eyes. There had been plenty of monster movies with dinosaurs or beasts looking like them for decades, so why not another strange monster? Godzilla was still going strong at the time this film was released, with Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) being released just a month after this film (that film, a Japanese-American production to be covered at a certain time, involved aliens that wanted Earth to send Godzilla to their planet). There were some weird films for the 1960s, and Gamera sure is one of them. It isn't exactly a good film by any means, but it sure proves a silly time for those who desire a kaiju film with that mix of exposition and payoff with a flaming turtle. It isn't too long either at 78 minutes (probably owing to Dalei's lingering doubt about this being a hit that meant a low budget), depending on exactly how one views its devil-may-care attitude to story depth. Oh yes, I forgot about the actors. Honestly, the only things that stick out from those moments spent explaining the methods of taking the monster down/looking for it involve a kid (Uchida) that is obsessed with the beast because he believes it is his friend (which he let out after being told by his parents that he is too obsessed with turtles and then rescued by Gamera after causing the circumstances to not just crush him in the first place). He may not be too wrong, since the next film turned Gamera into a more sympathetic creature, and it is from those films that he earned the nickname "the Friend of All Children". No one does awful here, so that isn't too weird. Truly, there are some strange times to be had with some of the lines from either version, beyond just asking about turtles in the Artic, such as one talking about ancient legends mentioning fire-eating turtles but finding it difficult to believe now, or one replying to someone drawing turtles by saying they drew girls when they were young (oh, and one character that thinks of the other as some sort of charm). They aren't really wooden, just kind of used as a means to an end. If you can believe it (and this is a movie full of that statement), they don't really take the monster down. Maybe they were planning a whole franchise in advance, because they resort to a plan that not even Godzilla tried: lure the monster to a rocket and send it to Mars! The whole world I guess can be comforted in the fact that they couldn't defeat a giant turtle with all their might, but they can lure it away instead like you would a possum. Gamera is a film of different perspectives in the sense that there are different versions of this film to watch. The first English-dubbed version was with "Gammera, the Invincible", released a year after the original that featured new footage with American actors that was usually included on a double bill. This film would also be edited for television by American International Television, and there exists public domain releases of those VHS/DVD releases. Two decades later, Sandy Frank (known for his syndication services in film and TV) acquired the film and four others to dub over (Mystery Science Theater 3000 would mock these versions in later years); this film, alongside all the others are also readily available in the video market (or one can settle for a shabbier version on the Internet). In any case, what we have here is a strange little movie, one that while obviously not holding a candle to Godzilla is at the very least an intriguing piece of cheese that set the stage for further adventures for all the right reasons.
Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.
