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Japanese Giant Monster Movie Review! "Gamera: Super Monster" (1980)
All the great film franchises end up in outer space: Ghoulies; Friday the 13th; The Fast and the Furious; Leprechaun.
Did I say "great"? Scratch that: When a movie series resorts to being set in space, you can pretty much bet that installment is gonna suck like a black hole. And when a franchise isn't a hot commodity to start with, the "let's take it to outer space" premise generally doesn't help. Such is the case with Gamera: Super Monster (aka Space Monster Gamera and Super Monster Gamera), which plunks everyone's favorite flying turtle (the only flying turtle) smack into the cold void. (Space, not my heart.)
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The following trailer has the audacity to call Gamera: Super Monster "the most riveting film in the history of motion pictures." Yeah, way better than any good movie! Whoever wrote this copy gets points for salesmanship, and the guy who straightly narrated such a boldface lie should've gone into politics.
Mill Creek has the dubious distinction of releasing the only official US print of Gamera: Super Monster, as part of a four-pack of Gamera films. I've owned my bootleg DVD of this epic since 2005, when I bought it at a b-movie convention in Syracuse, NY. Playing the disc on my laptop ended up crashing Windows. Gamera: Super Monster was too awesome to process!
Gamera: Super Monster is really a bunch of stock footage from six of the seven previous Gamera entries (excepting only the original black and white film), with a new wraparound story. And just for fun and budgetary constraints, Gamera: Super Monster also tosses in footage from the anime Space Battleship Yamato and Galaxy Express 999! Why not? The mashup works for what it is, namely a quick-buck cheapie aimed at kids. Much of the recycled content in Gamera: Super Monster would have been well before its target audience's time (going back to 1967), so the tykes wouldn't realize they were getting leftovers. The hard truth is that Gamera creator Daiei Films had been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for years due to dwindling theatrical attendance in Japan. The competition from television had proven too much for the studio, and Gamera: Super Monster was a quick-and-dirty cash grab. It's an interesting movie in that context. (Daiei Films has a history of corporate death and restructuring that we won't go into detail about here; the turtle is our only hurdle. Take heart that Daiei Television is alive and well.)
Three unassuming Japanese women are going about their jobs at a pet store, a Honda dealership and a school respectively, when they are revealed to be "space women" who can fly. They teleport to a central location by tugging on their earrings, and are warned by a disembodied voice (the same guy from countless kung-fu movie dubs) that certain doom from space is imminent via the bad guys' knockoff Super Star Destroyer, which "sends" monsters to earth. (We never actually see the monsters being transported, as that would require production values; the movie just cuts straight to the stock footage!) The space women and the prerequisite, annoying little boy (known in the genre as a "Ken") are throughout the film interspersed with copy-and-pasted fights with the flying Gyaos; alien fish Zigra; giant humanoid squid Viras; reptilian Jiger; knife-headed Guiron; and Barugon with his extendible tongue (kinky). Just add "Gamera vs." to any of those names, and you've got the source movie!
Gamera: Super Monster concludes with (gasp!) original footage of Gamera destroying the spacecraft, sacrificing himself in the process. The kid is depressed, but life goes on. The entire romp is classic low-budget kaiju fare, with bad dubbing, visible wires and all. You appreciate it or you don't, and I won't judge. Daiei's classic Gamera films were never at the level of any given Godzilla movie. (Well, maybe Son of Godzilla.) At least the space women are cute.
Gamera: Super Monster would be the last Gamera film until 1995's Gamera: Guardian of the Universe rebooted the franchise, and was followed by two sequels. A starring vehicle for Ayako Fujitani (Steven Seagal's daughter), Gamera: Guardian of the Universe brought the towering turtle back with a vengeance, and elevated the product to the Godzilla films of that era. Although Gamera: Guardian of the Universe was produced by a reorganized Daiei, it was distributed by Toho, the creators of Godzilla. Humble pie, anyone?
To recap, that's no Gamera movies for fifteen years, a full five years longer than the longest Godzilla gap between Toho's excellent 2004 Final Wars and Legendary Pictures' CGI cowpie Godzilla. (There was also a nine-year kaiju hiatus from 1975 to 1984, between Terror of Mechagodzilla and The Return of Godzilla, reworked for US audiences as the inferior Godzilla 1985). Why is any of that important? It's not, but I had to get it out of my system.
I think Gamera: Super Monster is a lot of fun. Not because it's awesome, like Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, but because it's so lame! Almost half of this film is recycled. It reminds me of the 1983 Raul Julia stock-footage stinker Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, except that movie had way more original content put into it. (Overdrawn ended up on Mystery Science Theater 3000, as did some Gamera films.) Gamera: Super Monster is basically a "clip episode" of a sitcom, padded out to feature length. It takes a lot of brass, or in this case, a studio fighting bankruptcy, to release a movie like this. I love low-budget schlock, and I'd rather watch Gamera: Super Monster than most of Hollywood's output from the last couple of decades. While certainly not "the most riveting film in the history of motion pictures," Gamera: Super Monster is a fun way to kill an hour and a half, especially if you haven't seen the source material of the recycled footage. This turtle is trouble, and to steal copy from the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles VHS cover, Gamera: Super Monster is "one shell of a good time!" By the way, my friend and I took a class on turtle puns. It tortoise nothing.
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