Gamera: the Giant Monster

 Anyhow, it is very frightening!

Oh hell yeah now we're on some real jank film making! Time to hunker down and look at some badly dubbed Japanese actors being menaced by another Japanese actor sweating their balls off inside a giant rubber outfit kicking over miniature buildings made of balsa wood held together with hot glue. It's time for one of the classics of the Kajiu genre, Gamera, the Giant Monster (1965)! This is gonna be some real high quality trash! I went into this film with that exact mindset, a preconceived notion informed by all the cliches that you see in English-Speaking media that mention the genre.

First things first, Gamera is not a Godzilla Franchise character, he's a product of Daiei Films, more specifically of the minds of Yonejiro Saito and Noriaki Yuasa, who wanted to make their own giant lizard to compete with Toho's big green monster. The film was thrown together with a micro-budget and old rickety equipment and a cast and crew that were not happy to be directed by Yuasa, who was widely considered an inexperienced screw-up captain of a ship that was doomed to sink. And yeah this movie quite literally scrapped by to get out the door, and yeah the pacing is poor and the stick out even more than they usually do and the script is pretty damn weird. But it has that thing I keep mentioning with all these “Bad Movies” that are actually really enjoyable. It is played totally straight and the director pushed himself to his limits. And as always, it really shows.

So what takes this picture from being a simple, by the numbers Kajiu flick to a thing all its own? In truth, I think it's the same thing that made the original Godzilla (1954) stand out, but in a more derivative way. It sets out to be the best movie it possibly can be and tries to do something new, but it is still the Pepsi to Toho's Coke. Not better, kinda derivative but still enjoyable. And apparently it worked out quite well, as there have been 12 Gamera films, and he was the launch pad for Daiei's own menagerie of monsters that are still kicking around to this day, without any questionable American adaptations to boot.

Something else that sticks out about Gamera is its subtextual message. Where Godzilla was a lament about how the world lives in the shadow of the Fat Man and Little Boy detonations and the unpredictable nature of nuclear energy, Gamera is somewhat hopeful. In the end, the defeat of Gamera is only achieved by a gathering of scientist from around the world working together to save the world. For something produced during the Cold War, the film says that the threat of Nuclear power, or any other world threatening situation, can be solved by cooperation and intelligence, rather than sheer brute force. And it is worth noting that, in later films, Gamera becomes a force for good way quicker than Godzilla ever did. So the film's message and themes leave you feeling more hopeful than the ending of Godzilla movies do. Rather than staring out a ravaged hell scape, you wait for the giant turtle to come save the day again, and that's a nice feeling to have after that last year and half, isn't it?