A Creature Special Report: The Gamera Gauntlet

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.

The Stuff (1985)

This one is belatedly tying into a few of my previous themes: another in the “non-animal monsters” series, the final entry in the Tubi overview (consider it a bonus since they took Rubber off the service as soon as my post ran), and also my interest in covering some of what I would consider the “Old Creature Canon”, which is to say monster movies that are already sort of vaunted but I haven’t seen yet (my post about Matango was technically the first one of those.) I’d been planning to do this one for a while, and we already passed its 35^th anniversary, but hey, better late than never. Anything to keep your memory alive, Larry.

One of the earlier monster-based reviews I wrote for this blog was about the late Larry Cohen’s bonkers classic Q The Winged Serpent, a giant monster movie filled with eighties grime and wackiness. The Stuff was Cohen’s horror follow-up released three years later, and in some ways is even more heightened and ludicrous than Q—but that’s what made Cohen’s work so special. All of his genre films have some sort of animating idea behind them, and will boldly express those ideas in whatever ways he finds striking and entertaining, no matter how out there it gets. There’s something very heartening about an artist with that much confidence—even if it means that they end up eternally niche, they stand by their aesthetic convictions, and their output becomes all the more distinct because of it. Something like The Stuff is not afraid to look implausible or even utterly nonsensical in order to get its point across (that goes for both the script and the acting choices), and sometimes in spite of itself the point it’s making still resonates. Fact is, for as silly as the basic premise of the movie is (killer dessert, one of those pitches that probably either gets you greenlit immediately or tossed out the door, with no response in between), many of the satirical observations about consumerism and corporate culture are actually remain fairly realistic, which only makes the monster angle that much better—it’s reality taken to its illogical extreme.

Yamasong: March of the Hollows (2017)

Continuing on with our Tubi run, and if I end up being the Internet’s top source for reviews of independent puppet-based fantasy films, it is an honour I must humbly accept.

While Blood Tea and Red String, which I wrote about back in February (remember February? ‘Cause I don’t), was entirely stop-motion, Yamasong is mostly traditional puppetry, with movement that at times resembles a modernized version of the “supermarionation” of Gerry Anderson TV shows like Thunderbirds, mixing things up with computer effects (and a bit of stop motion.) You don’t see a whole lot of movies made in this way, by which I mean I have never seen a movie made in this way, so this is new and exciting for me. Like I probably said in my Blood Tea piece, there’s tactile nature of puppets gives the imaginative characters in a fantasy story a feel that can’t be replicated with any other medium, and even if they move in a way that doesn’t read as “natural”, it just makes the world seem all that much more removed from our own. That’s very true of this movie’s combination of puppetry and digital effects, giving all its characters a very unique and designed look (clearly meant to invoke an “eastern” aesthetic, which is complemented by Shoji Kameda’s score, which uses both traditional instruments and Tuvan throat singing), and making its world very dream-like in the way it embraces artifice—it also feels very appropriate in a story where about half the characters actually are artificial.

Rubber (2010)

I planned which movies on Tubi I was going to watch a while back, but by the time you read this, this one will no longer be available on the service. That’s always a possibility whenever you’re talking about streaming movies—there’s a non-zero chance that some or most of the movies I’ve written about in this subseries will be removed some day. Oh well! Here it is anyway!

Rubber is one of those movies I read about back in my cult movie website reader days, the kind of high concept film festival debut that got talked about a lot, even if it was only about the trailer (this is a similar context to how I first heard about Incident at Loch Ness.) It’s the exact kind of intentionally ridiculous premise that put daily news recaps and early social media in a tizzy: a killer tire! How droll! The sheer amount of slight guffaws at the basic idea of Rubber easily overwhelmed the contingent asking “How does this sustain a feature-length running time?” If there was one thing I remember from that era of film discussion, it’s that it sometimes felt like something that existed primarily as an elevator pitch was all some genre fans really wanted (see: Snakes on a Plane, Hobo With a Shotgun), and not many actually ended up really talking about the movie itself.

Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973)

We’re back to looking at another streaming service: my next few posts will feature movies available on Tubi, a free-with-ads service that I had never heard of before very recently, and whose business model leaves more questions than answers. In any case, it runs fairly well (the pacing of the ad breaks are mostly non-intrusive, a fair bit better than other similar ones I’ve used, although you still run into the same small group of commercials over and over again), and has a surprisingly robust selection of movies and TV shows that apparently can’t find a home anywhere else. The monster movie selection is also quite decent, so I have a lot of interesting material to choose from.

Godmonster of Indian Flats is an independent movie made by conceptual artist Fredric Hobbs, and it certainly feels like a movie made by a conceptual artist. While it often appears to be your more standard low-budget seventies schlock, it is suffused with an experimental style in its filmmaking and a story that is a lot more interesting than you’d expect. The film has two parallel narratives—one featuring the titular monster, and one more down-to-earth drama—that play out separately and then collide near the end of it, and while the eventual unleashing of the monster plot (after so many scenes of not much action but plenty of vague scientific jargon) doesn’t play off the other stuff as much as I would have wanted, there are plenty of really interesting ideas raised, and some of those are even carried to genuinely surprising conclusions. We’ve seen some good examples of the “humans are scarier than the monsters” around here, but this one takes that to another level.