Uchu kaijû Gamera

Okay, before I saw this film my mind was filled with awful comments about how bad this film is. When I finally obtained my copy (a true kaiju collector would buy all monster films, whether they are good or bad), I expected a cheap, 90-minute stock-footage crap-fest. Instead, I found a rather enjoyable film, it was just great to see all of Gamera's foes in one movie. Sure the "superhero effects" are all crappy, but the stock footage was blended in with the movie quite well. Yes, there were some embarassing parts though, for example, when the stock footage is night and the new footage takes place day time, the film simply mixes both parts of the day and night into one scene!!!!!!! I kinda liked the superhero story, and honestly, with a very low budget, this film was fairly well made!! come on people! What more could we want besides giant monsters kicking eachother's tails and some hot superhero chicks mixed in with terrible kid acting? I have no idea!

Gamera, what a movie........ My mom and my brother took me to watch this film when I was very young and it has never left my psyche since! For me, it was one of the best films I've ever seen. Not just with the mindset of a child from the 80's, but also because I believe that you gauge a good movie by assessing how much it affected you....... In my case, It started a whole new genre for me in being a great fan of Japanese movie making and writing. No matter how cheesy the script was back then, Gamera and the 3 hero chicks in that movie instilled in me a fascination that only a true blue child fan would absorb, a lifetime of fantasy! Thus, all I have to say is, lucky are you few to know of such a movie.......... You are not alone.

Well I finally saw it. I finally watched GAMERA SUPER MONSTER released in 1980. I remember being a kid in 1980 and thinking great! A brand new Gamera film, there's hope for the Gamera franchise. Not so. This film is so bad that I don't know which one is better GAMERA VS. ZIGRA or this one. I think it's a tie, they're both equally bad. It took 9 years for this movie to come out and it was not worth the wait.

The vast majority of the movie is stock footage from all of Gamera's past movies, no new monsters to battle in this film. Even the Gamera image in this movie looks cheap and ready to throw away after the movie is done.

The story has a group of "space women" living on Earth trying to prevent Earth from being taken over (what else). A young irritating boy is once again the focus of this movie besides the alien women and the boy dubbing in particular is especially bad. The movie is cheap and INCREDIBLY BORING.

Nothing but a bunch of rehashing old movie scenes with a very weak story.

NO STARS.

In a last attempt to cash in on the titanic turtle's waning popularity, Daiei Motion Picture Company produced this incoherent clip-show in which Keiichi, a young Gamera fan (played by Koichi Maeda), and three benevolent spacewomen thwart an attack on Earth that involves the appearance of Gamera's kaiju foes from the previous five films. Similar to "All Monsters Attack" (1969; aka "Godzilla's Revenge"), the kaiju action may all be in the kid's imagination, as no one other than he, the space women, and the invaders seem be aware of the events. Unlike the polarising Godzilla film, which some people have interpreted as an insightful commentary on 'latch-key kids' and Japanese society in the late 1960s, the Gamera film is just a compilation of fight scenes connected by a silly story. There are only a couple of minutes of new kaiju material, the rest is lifted from the earlier films. In addition, there are some incongruous insertions of anime from "Space Battleship Yamato" and "Galaxy Express 999", some animated spaceships in the prologue, and a 'Zanon' starship that is a shameless copy of an Imperial Star Destroyer. The spacewomen are led by the hulking (relatively speaking) Kilara (played by wrestler Mach Fumiake) and can shrink, so they live in a box the size of a cat carrier in the back of a van that can turn into a spaceship (or at least a flying fuzzy blob of orange light). They have to wave their arms and pirouette to change into their space-hero suits, but then can fly. They also seem to have the ability to spontaneously teleport themselves (and their cars) when necessary and Kilara has an organ in the back of her pet store that when played seems to open a window/door to other parts of the Universe. There is also an evil spacewoman with a 'radar watch' who can teleport herself at will, and who is constantly being rebuked by the disembodied voice of Zanon. All of this is sufficiently incoherent and juvenile to support the hypothesis that it is all in Keiichi's imagination. The Gamera films were always budget outings (which is apparent from the clips), but the scenes with the spacewomen are even cheaper looking. As a final insult, the jauntily infectious "Gamera March" has been replaced by a new theme song (gratingly played by Keiichi on the organ). I watched a reasonably well English-dubbed version in which everyone had an incongruous trace of English accent but I doubt that the original would be much better. This film marked the end of the downward slide of the Showa-era Gamera series. The towering tusked turtle would not return until 1995's superior "Gamera: Guardian of the Universe", a much darker and less puerile interpretation of the character. Of note: in one of the rare fragments of new material, Gamera kicks over a poster of rival kaiju-star Godzilla, who is in turn revenged in "Godzilla Final Wars" (2004) when a kid throws a toy turtle into a fire.

If you missed out on the other seven Gamera movies leading up to this 80s release, this is the perfect chance to see all of them at once. If you've seen "Godzilla's Revenge", then you have seen nothing yet. This movie is about 92% stock-footage, with absolutely no new monsters and sparse new effect shots. By the time of this movie's release the studio Daiei was at death's door and so I'm confused as to why they even bothered to puke this one out. It had nearly been a decade since "Gamera vs. Zigra" in 1971, and by then I think any rational businessman could assume the series was done for. The only reason I rate it at the very least two stars is because the writers actually had the mordacity to actually kill Gamera off by kamakazing himself into a Star Destroyer. That's right, a Star Destroyer from the Star Wars series. That's how you know the writers had clearly told themselves, "F8ck it."