Gamera vs. Jiger

Gamera vs. Jiger (Gamera Tai Daimaju Jiaga) (1970)

Runtime: 83 minutes

Directed by: Noriaki Yuasa... and Shigeo Tanaka

Starring: Tsutomu Takakuwa, Kelly Varis, Katherine Murphy, Kon Ohmura, Junko Yashiro

From: Daiei

I am glad Gamera is against both colonialism and the theft of cultural artifacts.

To add more variety into my movie-watching, it was time to revisit a Gamera movie for the first time in over 6 months. By this point the series was deep into the juvenile, not only designed for children but having children as the heroes, making the adults look kind of dopey in the process. Like with vs. Viras, a mini-submarine is used by two boys and like with the past few pictures, presumably for the purpose of marketing it to the West a Caucasian boy teams up with a Japanese boy.

In this case, this was an advertisement for Expo '70, where the World's Fair was held in Osaka that year. In fact, a few minutes are spent hard-plugging it as if it was a commercial. For the expo, they decide to take a giant statue from “Wester Island” (yes, in contrast to Easter Island) despite the protest of the natives and even Gamera's attempt to stop this nonsense. Besides how gross it is with modern eyes to see cultural artifacts being taken from those seen as minorities, this statue (known as The Devil's Whistle!) prevents Jiger from rising up and raising hell, using sometimes goofy powers and instruments of destruction. Soon this quadruped monster resembling a cross between an iguana and a triceratops reaches Osaka and our turtle's attempt at stopping this results in him... being injected with larvae and subsequently, the two kids go inside him w/ the mini-sub to discover the larvae is actually a mini version of Jiger??? Silly, this was.

With the caveat that some of it is on the goofy side, the miniatures and kaiju action at least looked fine. But it is ironic that Jiger does not have the moves like Jiger (to steal a line many have used already) and instead sort of lumbers around; in addition, there is a gross film clip-used as stock footage-involving an elephant that caused me to react in abject horror like the characters in the movie did.