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| Friday, September 12, 2008 01:25 PM |
| (Last updated on Friday, September 26, 2008 03:00 PM) | | On the Viewer - Gamera: The Ultimate Collection |
 by Fëanor |
We're still working our way through the back catalog of Gamera movies. This installment is a DVD collection that contains an astounding 4 hours and 26 minutes of Gamera, spread amongst three different films, all of pretty horrible video quality, all with pretty terrible dubbing, all from early on in the series, and all made in the late '60s.
War of the Monsters
First up on the disc is this film, whose original Japanese title, literally translated, is The Great Monster Duel: Gamera vs. Barugon, which is really a better title, seeing as how it's about Gamera fighting Barugon. Well, to a certain extent, anyway; Gamera is introduced early on, but then the film completely changes gears and turns into a weird combination of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and an Indiana Jones movie, following a group of Japanese men as they head to New Guinea to find an opal. The main character is one of these men, and it's his brother who originally found the opal and hid it in a cave during the war. The brother is now crippled, so he has to send his brother and some buddies to retrieve the opal for him, with the understanding that the profits will be split amongst them all. When they get to the island, the natives implore them not to go to the cave, as it is cursed, natch. The cave is also infested with scorpions. But of course they go anyway, and find the opal. One of them is a despicable bastard and lets one of his companions be stung and killed by a scorpion, and then blows up the cave with a grenade to trap his other companion, so he'll have to share the opal with fewer people. He heads back home on a ship, and is within sight of home when all hell breaks loose. Unfortunately, he's afflicted with a condition that has to be treated with infrared light, and of course he's been holding onto the opal during the treatment, so it's been exposed to lots of the light, causing it eventually to hatch into the monster Barugon. The ship he's on naturally sinks, but he doesn't make the connection between the loss of the opal and the appearance of the monster, and wants to immediately launch an expedition to the bottom of the bay to get the opal back. He goes to the crippled brother of the man he trapped to try to get the funds to do so, but, in a pretty hilarious scene, mistakenly lets slip that he actually killed his two companions, and then finds it necessary to brutally murder the cripple and his wife. Jeez!
Anyway, at this point the movie suddenly remembers it's supposed to be about monsters and not utter bastards who want opals, and turns the focus back on Gamera and Barugon. Barugon is a big lizard with a long tongue that shoots freezing gas from the end. He also, it turns out, can project a rainbow from his back that blows up stuff. It's a rainbow of death! Brilliant! Definitely my favorite monster power of all time. Anyways, when Barugon shoots out his rainbow to blow up some missile launchers that are being fired at him, the narrator jumps in to point out that Gamera is attracted to heat and energy, and so Gamera shows up and the big fight finally starts. Woo hoo! Except, not. It's the lamest monster fight of all time. It's filmed like a Sergio Leone duel, cutting back and forth from close-ups of the monsters to a long shot of both, again and again, while the monsters scream annoyingly at each other. Then they finally get around to hitting each other a bit. It's endless and dull, with only a few amusing bits, until finally Barugon freezes Gamera completely and wanders off to cause more destruction.
In the meantime, the dude who was trapped in the cave has been healed by the natives, who explain to him about the opal and so forth. So he heads back to Japan with a hot native girl to try to stop Barugon. He finds his traitorous former companion, quickly guesses at the other terrible things he's done, and gets into a lengthy fight with him which ends with him and the girl tying the bastard to a post and taking off. Then all the sudden they're in a helicopter dangling a giant 6,000 carat diamond and trying to lure Barugon into a lake with it. The narrator quickly explains that Barugon's weakness is water, and that he's attracted by diamonds. Wha?! That came out of nowhere. And who gave them the helicopter? The diamond fails, and the narrator explains that the infrared light made Barugon too big for it to work. Wha?! That makes sense how? Then all the sudden the guy and girl are in a jeep with a scientist and they've got some kind of ray that's going to amplify the diamond. Meanwhile, the bastard guy has been untied by some woman (apparently his wife?), has heard about the diamond, and in an insane fit of greed, decides to go out and steal it just as they're luring Barugon into the lake to die. The crazy bastard jumps on board the army boat, shoots some guys, punches others, and grabs the diamond. He's about to get away when he finally gets his comeuppance and is eaten alive by Barugon. And not a moment too soon! Dude was very possibly the most despicable character I've ever seen in a movie.
Anyways, things seem hopeless, until our hero suddenly realizes by chance that mirrors are immune to Barugon's rainbow, and suggests to the scientist and the military that they construct a giant mirror. The extremely agreeable and impressionable scientist says, "Sure, okay," and they do so. Usually in Gamera films it's some little kid who is able to easily influence all military policy, but in this case it's a dude. It's all pretty hilarious.
Anyway, the mirror plan works, sort of, in that Barugon shoots at the mirror with his rainbow and sets his own butt on fire, which is very funny. But he's only hurt a little and is wise enough to give up on the rainbow after that. Luckily, at this point Gamera wakes back up out of his frozen state and goes after Barugon. They have another painfully long fight, until Gamera finally drags Barugon under the water to drown. Then the guy and the girl live happily ever after. The only question being - what about Gamera?! He's kind of a menace, and now he's unopposed!
This is a pretty strange Gamera film, but it definitely has some entertaining moments, especially the ridiculous sequences near the end, where the storytelling is so bad that the narrator has to jump in with lots of exposition to explain what the hell is going on.
Destroy All Planets
This Gamera film, which came out two years later, follows both War of the Monsters and Gamera vs. Gyaos, which you can easily tell, because a good half hour of it is made up of footage from those movies! It opens up with an alien spaceship flying towards Earth to conquer it, only to be attacked and destroyed by Gamera. Then we're introduced to the two annoying children who are going to be our main characters - a couple of prankster boy scouts named Jim (whose mother looks distinctly Caucasian) and Masao. They play a joke on their scout leader and a scientist by reversing the controls of a mini submarine, and then talk the scientist into letting them get in it by themselves and cruise around in it completely unsupervised (!), which is how they end up meeting Gamera under the sea and having a little race with him. Because, as we all know, Gamera is the friend to all children. It was clear from the very beginning that this was going to be a theme of the film, when the jaunty Gamera song started blaring out on the soundtrack right after Gamera finishes killing all those aliens.
At this point, another alien ship shows up, but this time they're ready for Gamera, and trap him in a bubble using their Super Catch Gun (sigh). Then they read his mind to get an idea of his weaknesses, which gives the filmmakers an excuse to show us, in painstaking detail, all of the monster fights from the previous two movies. Seriously, it goes on forever. Obviously they wanted to make a new movie, but they didn't really have much of a story, or much money, so they just reused other movies. Anyway, after watching the previous movies, the aliens realize that Gamera's weakness is his desire to protect children, so they capture the two boys and blackmail him into getting close enough so they can install a mind-control device. Then they send him out to start destroying things - which again gives the filmmakers a chance to reuse footage from previous Gamera movies of Gamera blowing up a dam and rampaging through Tokyo. One of these sequences is even from a black and white movie, and they brazenly use it anyway, despite the fact that this movie is in color!
But the aliens have stupidly allowed the annoying prankster children to wander around freely in a spaceship that is controlled entirely by thought, so they quickly start causing trouble. The governments of Earth are powerless to stop the aliens, because they're afraid the children will be hurt if they attack the spaceship, so it's up to the boys to figure out how to sabotage the alien technology, which of course they do, handily. Gamera gets his mind back and crashes the spaceship, but it's not over yet! The master alien combines his body with that of all his servants, becoming a giant squid monster which Gamera is then forced to square off against. It gets pretty brutal and violent for a while, but of course eventually Gamera prevails.
This is a particularly terrible Gamera film, as it is so focused on the irritating kid characters, and so clearly made to appeal to children, with a simplistic and nonsensical plot and lots of stupid, low-brow humor. And then of course there's the fact, which I've already mentioned repeatedly, that most of it consists of the most boring footage from previous Gamera films. Lame!
Gammera the Invincible
Oddly enough, the last film on the disc is the first ever Gamera film - sort of. It's actually a 1966 American version of the original black-and-white 1965 Japanese classic (note that at this point they were transliterating the turtle's name with an extra "m" in the middle). As with the original Godzilla, it was for some reason decided that it was necessary to film extra scenes with American actors and insert them at various points throughout the movie to make the movie palatable to American audiences. The scenes consist of the American military reacting to the emergence of Gamera; experts arguing about Gamera on TV talk shows; American politicians arguing about Gamera; and finally the UN arguing about Gamera and how to subdue him. In fact, the plot and some of the dialogue is changed to turn the defeat of Gamera into more of an international thing than a purely Japanese thing. Which is really kind of questionable. To make matters worse, when shooting the new scenes they appear to have deliberately hired only the very worst actors available. Seriously, this is really terrible stuff. A number of the scenes are clearly meant to be funny (especially the TV talk show bit), but they're all just irritating, with seriously cringe-worthy performances and dialogue. You can tell the actors are bad because all they seem to be able to do is get mad at each other, anger being the refuge of the talentless performer.
The original Japanese version of this film was bad enough, but with these American scenes added, it's nearly unwatchable. In fact, we almost turned it off, until I hit upon the happy idea of fast-forwarding through the American scenes. That at least made it bearable.
I'd forgotten that Gamera started out, in the very first film, as the friend to all children, for reasons that are never explained. He's a particular friend in this movie to an insane, turtle-obsessed child who risks life and limb just to get near him. Regardless of how friendly he is toward children, however, Gamera is still a terrible menace and ultimately must be shot into space for the safety of humanity. It's sad, really.
Anyway, even though these Gamera films are really quite terrible, they're still rather enjoyable in their own way, and we'll probably be watching more in the near future. |
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