Gamera Vs Guiron (1969)

Plot

Two young boys see a UFO land and sneak inside, only for it to take off back to the aliens' home planet. The boys find out that the planet is facing destruction and the aliens intend to devour their brains to absorb their knowledge before they invade Earth. Thankfully for the boys, Gamera is here to save the day but he must do battle with the alien monster, Guiron.

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If you're planning an invasion of an alien world, would you really want to absorb the knowledge of two school children who dream about milk and donuts and know nothing of the Earth's defensive capability? You'd want to kidnap some heads of state wouldn't you? The Earth's top scienists? Common sense seems to have deserted this series a long time ago, if it ever had any. However, it's all too easy to totally hammer Gamera Vs Guiron. It's quite possibly one of the worst giant monster films ever made and has been ripped to pieces on things like Mystery Science Theater 3000 so it's not like I'm the only one who thinks it's a total dud. I'll try and look on the positive side although that's about optimistic as a lobster in a restaurant tank.

Unlike the bulk of the Showa Godzilla series which I loved in my early days, I never saw the Gamera films as a child but I'd bet even a ten year old wouldn't be drawn in to this nonsense. The fifth entry in the original series, it was clear already by this point that things weren't going to get any better (though they were still going to get a lot worse). By now, audiences knew how low budget, terribly paced and plain dull these films were. Gamera was never as interesting a giant monster as Godzilla and it shows with the like-for-like comparison as to where the two series were at this point in time - Godzilla had just come off the all-time classic kaiju monster mash in Destroy All Monsters but was about to head for one of his lowest ebbs with Godzilla's Revenge whilst Gamera was fresh from the awful Gamera Vs Viras and was about to head into this turkey.

The Gamera series was aimed at a younger audience than the Godzilla films and thus the main stars of the film are a bunch of whiny little kids who wear way-too-small shorts and seem to hit it off with giant monsters. To be fair that's the stereotypical image of Japanese kids that these kaiju films depict, be they Gamera or Godzilla but it's rather off-putting. If there's no sign of Gamera on the screen then these little brats are the main focus, wandering around the alien planet and gawping and laughing at everything they see. The dubbing jobs on all of the actors are pretty ear-wrecking but the kids get the worst. Not just content with destroying your sense of hearing with awful dubbing, Gamera also has annoying theme song which is played a lot during the film and will no doubt provoke some suicidal tendencies. Switching events to an alien planet allowed for the makers of the film to throw in plenty of garish colour which they wouldn't have been able to do had it been set on Earth.

The Gamera series never had the sort of budgets that Toho gave the earlier Godzilla films but come on, they had to find something better than this! Guiron is a complete and utter joke of a giant monster and its design is laughable. He looks pathetic and his head is so cumbersome that he can't even stand up properly. He has to walk around on all fours, constantly looking down at the floor as if he's dropped some loose change. Maybe the intention was for the creature to stand on two legs but the bulky head wouldn't allow it. It beats me how this design even got the greenlight; even Godzilla's worst enemies in their cheapest costumes still looked semi-believable opponents than this dud. Gamera isn't spared either and looks really worn out by this point in the series. His eyes constantly roll backwards and forwards like he's having some sort of seizure. To be fair, the fights between the monsters aren't the worst you're going to see in this series but because the monsters themselves look so contrived, the whole thing looks like two drunk guys in fancy dress having an argument. Gamera also pauses during a fight to have a go on some parallel bars, swings around numerous times before returning to the battle. These monsters certainly pull off some acrobatic moves during their confrontations.

Gamera Vs Guiron does contain one of the most brutal moments in kaiju history as Guiron actually chops off the legs, wings and head of the monster Gyaos before cutting up the rest of his body with his huge sword-like head. It's not gory (although there splashes of purple blood!) and looks rather silly now but the intent is still there and it's shocking to see these scenes in what is technically a kid's film. It does sell Guiron as a massive threat to Gamera but it's completely out of place with the rest of the juvenility. For every minute of half-decent monster action, you get another three minutes of the Japanese kids messing around with the spacegirls on the alien planet. Back home on Earth, the subplot about one of their sisters trying to get everyone to believe they're been abducted is just ditched half-way through, presumably with the writer realising no one cared about it.

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Final Verdict

Without a shadow of a doubt Gamera Vs Guiron is one of the worst kaiju films I've ever seen. It's not even ‘so bad it's good’ and no amount of people retorting with ‘oh it's only a kid's film’ will make me change my mind. Even a small child who had never seen a single film before would hate this as much as everyone else does.

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Gamera Vs Guiron Also Known As: Attack of the Monsters Director(s): Noriaki Yuasa Writer(s): Niisan Takahashi Actor(s): Nobuhiro Kajima, Miyuki Akiyama, Christopher Murphy, Yûko Hamada, Eiji Funakoshi, Kon Ômura, Hiroko Kai Duration: 82 mins