Writer-director Jordan Peele’s Nope follows the critical and commercial success of his horror films Get Out and Us, and using all the cultural clout he has accumulated over the last five years, he has produced one of the most high profile creature features in recent memory. It’s a true blue classic-style monster movie, too, one that readily engages in some of the genre’s oldest themes (in a story engages with the history of the American entertainment industry in general) in ways that are smart and modern. Seeing this combination of expensive-looking action, B-movie enthusiasm for the weird, and interesting characters in a mainstream film is impressive, and is even more so because of the way it respectfully contributes to the history of its genre.
Gamera is, of course, Japan’s second favourite giant monster, one of the staple kaiju of the sixties Monster Boom whose yearly appearance in theatres (and, in the rest of the world, on television) has given him and his films an outsize influence on pop culture. You’d be hard-pressed to find a turtle in any kind of Japanese media who doesn’t fly by spinning around in its shell, and thanks mainly to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, fans of silly movies in the English-speaking world have formed a real soft (shell) spot for the terrapin tornado. Although starting out as Daiei’s answer to Toho’s Godzilla—considering the original movie was in black-and-white even though it was made in 1965, one might say their direct rip-off—the series eventually diverged in tone, even while maintaining a similar monster fight formula. While both monsters are beloved by children in the audience, Gamera was the one that was directly positioned as the “Friend to all Children”, a playful figure who would usually star alongside young actors in increasingly goofy plots, which is a level of direct pandering that Godzilla never really engaged in (at least until it started directly lifting stuff from Gamera in the late sixties and early seventies.) Gamera was even successfully revived in the mid-nineties with a trio of highly-regarded films directed by Shusuke Kaneko and written by Kazunori Ito, which I wrote about years ago.
While I’ve seen some of the movies in the original series, I’ve never had the opportunity to sit down and soak in the entire 1966-1971(+1980) run until I found the whole series available on our old pal, Tubi TV. The experience of running through the entire Showa Gameras (most of them directed by Noriaki Yuasa) has not only provided a more detailed context for the series and its place in monster history, but also demonstrates the wild evolution the series and its title kaiju took over those five years—what you thought you knew about Gamera is only partially true (he is still really neat and also filled with meat, however.) So, in this special extra-length post, I will compactly address each of the seven sequels—yes, it’s time to fire up the old capsule review machine.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 