Two young boys sneak aboard a spaceship and find themselves whisked away to the mysterious planet Terra. There, they encounter Gamera's old foe Gyaos and two female aliens with a taste for human brains. Gamera must save the children and battle the new monster Guiron, whose entire body is a deadly living weapon.
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Reviews
The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.
Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
This movie is about two kids who find a space ship and get trapped by aliens who want to eat their brains. What kind of a movie is this you might ask? Well, it's a Gamera movie. Which basically means: Nothing to be taken seriously. I expected a lot of cheesy fun with this one. Unfortunately I was a little let down that it didn't deliver on all aspects.The design and look of Guiron is great. It is probably my favorite monster from this series. He and Gamera are the biggest reasons to watch it because all of the monster fights are funny. There are even some gory moments. It surprises me how they got away with it considering that it's a kids movie. The effects are overall charming.The human characters are bland and the child acting is very poor. But that's all to be expected from a movie like this. You are are here for the cheesiness and the ridiculous monsters. The plot alone will surely make you laugh. I would have liked it to have been faster paced though. The monster stuff is short and far apart. It focuses too much on the kids and they kept cutting back to uninteresting characters on Earth. There was one funny human character though: The mailman (or whoever he was). Although he didn't have enough screen time.There were a lot of scenes I wanted to skip past. So, I don't really recommend it. It's mostly aimed to those who like schlock B-movies. If you ever watch it, then skip ahead to the monsters. Those are the scenes that are worth it. They have that special cheesy vibe that just has to be seen to be believed.
The only Gamera films I have seen are the ones featured on the cult comedy riffing show, Mystery Science Theater 3000 with the exception of the trilogy made in the 90's. That being said, there were two Gamera films that I did not watch as I believe there was one in between Gaos and this one and this one and Zigra. So the last film I had seen was Gaos, which was my favorite of the Showa era Gamera films as it did have a kid, but it was still relatively dark too. In this one, however, Gamera is indeed a friend to children through and through and doing lots of goofy stuff. Granted, Godzilla had his moments of zaniness too as the film titled Godzilla's Revenge in the United States featured a boy visiting a dream monster land. Godzilla vs Megalon also featured a child in a more prominent role as did the one where Godzilla fought Hedorah. Though with both Megalon and Hedorah, the kid's role was more akin to the child in Gaos rather in this one where the whole plot of the movie revolves around Gamera trying to save two boys who get taken to another planet. The Gamera series would continue for three more films after this one and they would continue to feature Gamera and children while Godzilla would actually end his first run with the two less campy Mecha Godzilla films.The story in this one has people talking about the possibility of aliens communicating with the Earth, but that is not important. What is important is that two boys who are friends and the sister of one of the boys sees a spaceship land and they investigate the next day. The two boys go in and push buttons and accidentally launch themselves into space where they are whisked away. Fortunately, Gamera follows after them though he is a bit slower than the ship they hijacked. Soon the boys find themselves on a planet where there are two female aliens and lots of monsters. Lots of Gaos anyways and a monster with a blade for a head called Guiron. The sister remains on Earth and no one believes her story of the boys flight into space. Soon Gamera and Guiron will fight and the boys must try to escape the planet and the two female aliens who want to eat their brains! This made for a pretty good episode of MST3K, but I have to wonder just how bad the dubbing and such make this film. There are so many crazy lines such as the one boy constantly referring to planets as stars and always talking about the perfect planet with no traffic accidents. I have to say that the bad dubbing is where most of the best jokes takes place though the monsters fighting is pretty good too as Guiron chopping up Gaos was pretty cool. One of the jokes that got stale though was the fact that the one kid vaguely resembled Richard Burton. They even did a whole skit on it that took entirely too long as I just did not see that much of a resemblance...the kid looked more like Chunk from the Goonies to me.So, this one is a step back from Gaos. Not sure if the previous film was where the goofiness began, but in this one it is in full effect. It also doesn't help that the film had such a minimalist quality to it, like it was from one of those shows from Japan like Ultraman, rather than an actual film. I can sort of understand that they may have wanted to change things up as both Barugon and Gaos had the same type of plot of monster appears, Gamera fights it, loses and has to stay on the sideline for a bit as humans try and figure their own way of dealing with the monster, but here the only thing difference is there were no human plans. Everything else is the same, Gamera comes, fights, sort of loses and then comes back later for a final showdown. Only in this one, you just do not have all that much cool stuff going on.
O.K., so there's lots of laughs for this epitome of silliness that has a giant turtle with a gas problem that makes it spin around and makes it great doing flips and handstands on a chin-up bar. An adolescent Japanese brother and sister, along with their American friend, believe that they are hearing signals from another planet, and it turns out that they know more than the rocket scientists at Cape Canaveral. Boarding an abandoned ship left behind which they witnessed in their own telescope, the boys leave the babbling little girl behind. The aliens they meet when the boys land on the planet equivalently the same length on the other side of the sun as earth is on our side live on a planet in danger of becoming an ice star. With the help of Gamera ("the children's friend!"), they battle the two female survivors (who also happen to look Japanese!) and a monster who has a nose that looks strangely like a butcher knife. Children's matinée audiences must have howled at the sound effects and silly special effects involving the two monsters battling each other and the threats of the two aliens to eat the two children's brains in order to gain their knowledge.
"Two young boys board a flying saucer and are whisked to a planet on the far side of the sun, opposite the Earth. When they land, they are taken by two female aliens, who plan on eating their brains. Help arrives for the boys in the form of 'Gamera', their favorite monster, who battles the alien's monster 'Guiron' in order to rescue the boys and prevent the aliens from invading the Earth," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis. Yes, it's an incredibly silly Japanese kid film, in the "Gamera" series. In this, the fifth of the giant flying turtle's films, the "children's friend" heroically saves youngsters Nobuhiro Kajima (as Akio) and Christopher Murphy (as Tom) from being eaten by alien females Hiroko Kai (as Barbella) and Reiko Kasahara (as Flobella). Beware! You could die laughing.*** Gamera tai daiakuju Giron (3/21/69) Noriaki Yuasa ~ Nobuhiro Kajima, Christopher Murphy, Miyuki Akiyama, Reiko Kasahara