Gamera Vs Barugon (1966)

Plot Outline: An expedition to retrieve a huge opal goes wrong when it is revealed that the opal is in fact the egg of a giant monster called Barugon. This beastly brute has a deadly tongue and a rainbow beam and begins to destroy Japan. Only Gamera, the giant turtle with flame breath and rockets in his shell can save the day.

The Review: Gamera has always been seen as a poor man's Godzilla (at least during the original series of Gamera films, not the more recent 1990s versions) and you can see why. This is a pretty feeble effort to say it's only Gamera's second outing and they look to have run out creative ideas already. Barugon looks nowhere near as good as he did in Godzilla films. Instead he looks very pathetic like a lizard/dog hybrid. He crawls on all fours and therefore doesn't physically interact with Gamera as a two-legged opponent would during the fight scenes. His tongue-weapon is so fake-looking it has to be seen to be believed. How can the studio get away with this? As for Gamera, we see very little of him and therefore hardly any giant monster battles. The battles that do commence are short and quite uninspiring. In fact the best fights in this film are between the human actors. There are two decent fight scenes and although they are ruined by some more bad dubbing, they are still the highlight of the film (pretty sad considering the film is about giant monsters fighting each other). As always the human sub-plot is equally uninteresting. This time we are given a moral story about getting greedy....blah blah. If the studio had cut out some of the unnecessary characters they could have spent more money on the monsters. But alas this did not happen and as a result we are left with a very poor kaiju film.

Final Verdict: It's almost as bad as some of Godzilla's lesser attempts. With this only being the second installment in the series, it was obvious things were about to get worse! Avoid unless you are a Gamera completist.

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