Gamera: Super Monster

Gamera: Super Monster (Uchu Kaiju Gamera) (1980)

Runtime: 92 agonizing minutes

Directed by: Noriaki Yuasa... and also apparently Shigeo Tanaka

Starring: Random actors from prior installments via stock footage, along with actors in the new segment which (poorly) attempts to tie everything together and they all deserve better

From: Daiei

Despite some of the ineptitude being incredible, the movie is not as joyful as I may make it sound.

It wasn't the original plan to see two Gamera pictures in a row; due to my schedule and not being able to post anything yesterday, that was why I went with something I heard was terrible... and this was amazingly bad. An important note concerning the movie and why it was so cheap: the production company (Daiei) went bankrupt right before Gamera vs. Zigra was released, which is why another company released it. In 1974 they returned and to try and earn some coin at the box office, they made this. If only they actually had the money to make a proper Gamera picture...

Much of the movie is stock footage from the previous seven Gamera movies, thus we see again parts of all those kaiju battles. The new footage: incredibly lame. Aliens that we never see aside from a human-looking lackey (and their ship is a thinly disguised Star Destroyer) wish to take over Earth and bring along those gaggle of kaiju monsters. There's a little boy who OF COURSE wears too small shorts and in addition, there is a trio of young ladies who are “space women” and they say they have superpowers but they are barely used, do their posing routine a dozen times, and as you see in the final act, besides them hardly doing anything at all, they have a code where they don't kill or injure their enemies! What terrible “heroes” they are!

Even worse than that or a plot that is full of illogical moments, are the “special effects.” Aside from them looking atrocious, they were all done on video; this means that every time an effect more complicated than what can be done in an edit or camera switch happens, the entire scene is shot on videotape. So that's right, it often switches being a nice-looking print and terrible quality video footage-it was just embarrassing. The “final battle” was so embarrassingly amateur, it might as well have been better done by people holding models of Gamera and the Star Destroyer and you see those hands moving the models around. Heck, the end credits rip off a famous scene from Superman: The Movie.

I realize it may sound so bad it's funny... and it is easy to laugh at such bad heroes, the miniscule budget, the space women spending time in what is best described as a TARDIS handbag, a crappy 70's Mazda van, the implication that every Japanese house has a Yamaha synthesizer-but this was usually a painful watch. If it wasn't bad enough that they had a brand new Gamera theme song that was inferior to the original... for reasons unknown to me there are 30 second clips each of anime! It was nonsequitor footage from both Spaceship Battle Yamato and Galaxy Express 999; all it made me do was track down any iteration of either property. The fact that they had the temerity to take a potshot at Godzilla while he was on sabbatical at the time-I shake my head at all of this.

Eventually I'll see the apparently great 90's reboot of the franchise but I need at least a little break from this kaiju madness.