Gezora, Ganime, Kameba: Kessen! Nankai no daikaijû

In Director Ishiro Honda's SPACE AMOEBA, those pesky space aliens are once again stirring up trouble by using giant monsters against us. This time, a giant squid creeps onto an island, waving its tentacles of doom. There's also a big crab and a titanic turtle.

So, it's calamary, crab cakes, and turtle soup tonight!

The subplot has the puny humans attempting to turn the island into a resort. Aliens hate resorts!

This isn't a bad effort from Mr. Honda, though one shouldn't expect non-stop monster fighting action. It's pretty low-key on that score...

Also known as "Yog: The Space Amoeba" which sounds mor Japanese.

The director is Ishirô Honda of home we all know and love.

Samuel Z. Arkoff as producer (US version)

Salvatore Billitteri as producer (US version)

Fumio Tanaka as executive producer

Tomoyuki Tanaka as executive producer

The standard formula "stay out of the water" film. Well, maybe not formulas as we get to cross over stories of the greedy developer, burnt-out photographer, scientist, female interest, Japanese style monsters, and even space Amoebas.

Everyone's agenda conflicts with each other's agenda. I was rooting for the amoeba. However, they may use bats for sound trouncing.

This is another alien-invasion movie from Toho studios. It features space alien (s) that invaded a tropical island, where it mutates a squid, crab, and turtle to the size of Godzilla. The aliens' main purpose: to conquer Earth. We have a group of explorers visiting an island to investigate the whereabouts of a lost space probe. There, they encounter the alien monsters, and try to stop them, with the help of some very courageous island natives. The hero of the film is portrayed by Akira Kubo. He has been portraying so many heroic roles by the time he filmed this movie that him being type-casted started to get annoying. Aside from that, we have monsters that were surprisingly very campy and rubber-ish looking.

Overall, an OK kaiju film that should have featured more monsters, providing that the aliens mentioned that they were trying to mutate a lot of animals to attack Earth. The film contains a pretty exciting "rescue-the-earth" mission, nonetheless.

Grade B

This is certainly not one of Ishiro Honda's better efforts; but it does kind of work. Some would-be alien invaders hitch a ride on a probe returning to the Earth that lands on a Pacific atoll. They set about creating supersized monsters bent on humanity's destruction so they can take over the world. Nothing new so far, nor indeed anywhere really, as a team of human hoteliers and local islanders try to fight off this threat. The visual effects are OK - the monsters; explosions and acting are low budget, but together keep this fun yarn moving along fine. The dubbing actors are way over the top and the music grates but it's still just about worth watching - for some reason really bad Japanese films of this genre are not as bad as anyone else's!

When I rented this movie I thought this would be a low budget, rubber monster type, bad acting movie you would see on a late late late show. All of that is true, but the movie plot and situation was kind of interesting.

Yog changes into three different giant size monsters, but Yog is more of a blue mist that takes control of the host. The side story with the space mission is very interesting as well and merges well with the rest of the story. This story also has the cutest oriental woman I have ever seen which kept my attention. But without her, I would still be watching the movie finding out how it turns out.

This movie was a surprise to see and I did enjoy the film very much.