Back in 1965, looking to capitalize off of the monumental success of Toho's Godzilla, Daiei film Co. went about creating their own fearsome giant reptile, a flying, fire eating, turtle of mass destruction known as Gamera. In '66 the Americans got ahold of the film, splicing in American made footage and over-dubbing the soundtrack and released the picture stateside as Gammera the Invincible (yes they misspelled it, hah). Nearly half a century later, Gamera is a household name in Japan, as one of the most popular giant monsters in cinema history, spawning multiple sequels, toys, comics, and tons of other miscellanea, surpassed, fame-wise, only by Godzilla (Gojira) himself. But I'm here to talk about the beginning, not the end result:
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| "You call that fire?" |
Gamera, not unlike his more famous counterpart, is awakened by a nuclear bomb explosion, and proceeds to smash on everything in sight, stopping his rampage only once to save the life of a young boy. The world gangs up to fight back against Gamera, shooting, electrocuting, and bombarding the gargantuan beast with missiles to no avail. At one point they even resort to using dynamite to flip the giant turtle onto his back (you know, the classic I've fallen and I cant get up routine), figuring if they can immobilize the beast they can buy some time and figure out a way to destroy it Somewhere along the line we find out Gamera just gets a little pissy when he's (it's?) hungry, his preferred dietary staple being fire. Eventually the warmonger gathering (the american added scenes, which oddly enough give the movie a kind of Doctor Strangelove quality) decide it's time to put them huge nuclear stockpiles to use, but are stopped in their tracks by some Japanese doctor dude, who everyone keeps insisting is such an important dude throughout the movie, and his plan. In the end they trick ol' Gammy into stepping into some kind of closing bubble thing on the tip of a missile and shoot him to mars, oh the oddities of film making.....
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| Ey! I'm Gamera, and I'm coming fo' that ass. |
Honestly the special effects in the movie far surpass modern CGI, one of the many examples being the classic 'run the film backwards to make amazing things happen' trick which allowed for some cool shots of Gamera eating fire. In a lot of ways Japanese special effects artists of today still use a lot of the same techniques, opting for live actors in suits instead of computer generated characters, model cities and rural areas instead of green screen cut/paste landscapes, and scaled to size model what have you's (cars, planes, animals, machinery) which in the end makes for a much better result, and allows the mind to be slightly more convinced of the reality of the situation, rather than the obvious lack of depth and proper coloring employed by the available computer generating programs of today. Now that is not to say that some of this movie isn't just utterly ridiculous at points, I mean the plot alone is laughable, and some of the effects make no sense (Gamera flying by shooting flames out of his shell and spinning like a top the entire time) but the quality of the effects employed are top notch.
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| Gamera having a dance, mid-mass-destruction. |
Be sure to pick this flick up, it's available in many of those 50 movie packs you find at your local Target or Walmart, which are a hell of a deal in of themselves, (50 movies for 8 bucks? Are you kidding me?) Or you can find it online in a singular title form, but it's gonna cost ya a bit more. This movie is one of the all time classic Daikaiju (giant monster, although literally translated as great monster) films, and the last one filmed in black and white, and is a must own for even passive fans of giant monster movies. (Pssst, its on youtube for free too) Also of note, the OG Japanese version, sans American actors is also available wherever the hell you can find a damn DVD store nowadays.
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