The Heisei Gamera trilogy: Guardian of the Universe, Attack of Legion and Revenge of Iris; is considered one of the high benchmarks of Kaiju films. Those three films excel with story, special effects and Kaiju design… This is not one of those films… no, this is the first film starring the giant turtle that later on those 3 films would make amazing, but before that…
Gamera, the giant monster also known as Gammera the Invincible (no I didn’t spell that wrong, they did add an extra M in the name) was made by Daiei Film to try and catch that Kaiju boom started by our beloved Godzilla/Gojira. So I can’t help but compare it to that masterpiece.
The film starts in the Arctic where a nuclear explosion unleashes the giant turtle. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Beast from 20000 Fathoms, though unlike that they are accepting of the giant turtle right away rather than constantly doubt it exists despite mounting evidence and disaster.
That means we get a lot more scenes of the monster than people putting their fingers in their ears pretending it doesn’t exist. Which is a plus, who doesn’t like seeing a giant monster destroy cities? But there is one thing Godzilla and Beast don’t have… that we wish Gamera didn’t have too… for this is the film that introduced us to the ‘Kenny’.
The name comes from one of the dubs that renamed one of the main characters, a small child, Kenny. Kenny is a turtle lover that when letting his pet turtle go, is nearly killed by Gamera destroying the lighthouse only to be caught by him. This results in a complete delusion in Kenny that Gamera is his friend. Later on in the series (mainly the Showa era) Gamera would be known as friend to all children, but in this film he’s just a giant monster killing people. This could be an interesting plot point… except for the thing that made the Kenny infamous, that they are given constant attention and given permission to do things that no child should be able to do. Government officials listen to the Kenny when there is no way not only that the kid would know, but that the scientists would bother listening to him. If you ever see a child character thrown into a monster movie, or any movie they clearly have no place being in, yet get lots of attention, that’s a Kenny. And they are in all but one Showa Gamera film (note the Heisei films take this concept and do a good idea with it).
Also while Gojira had a sombre tone, showing the horror of the attacks, and the dark sacrifice done knowing the risk of what the weapon used to destroy Godzilla could do, instead the ending is a shmaltzy happy one with everyone working together to launch Gamera into space in an impossibly large rocket (this is undone right away in the first sequel)
I honestly can’t really recommend this film under normal circumstances. Fortunately MST3K have a riff of it you can easily find which makes it a lot more bearable. Ultimately this is just a very inferior Godzilla clone that fails to do what made Godzilla a masterpiece, while introducing an annoying element without even making it a fun over the top thrill.
Rating: 🎥🎥
