Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

The Basics: A clip show of the previous Gamera films spliced together with the opening scene from Star Wars, various animes, and a film about a trio of groovy, superhero space women fighting another space woman...but this one's evil

The Plot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamera:_Super_Monster

The Kaiju:

Gamera:

He's pretty much just a flying prop in this movie and it's a pretty bad prop at that.

And he's the only kaiju in this film that comes from original footage so I'm not going to mention the others here outside of a brief line up:

Zigra
Barugon
Gyaos
Viras
Jiger

So...all of the Showa Gamera monsters are here...this should be Daei's version of DAM right? Wrong!

The Acting:
It's there...people do things...occasionally while saying lines of dialogue..


The SPFX:
Pretty craptacular I'm not going to lie


The Other Stuff:
-I was surprised to find that I don't hate this film as much as I mildly loathe it...some good stuff here, none of it involving kaiju really except

-I guess I can give some lethargic props to the fact that the kaiju footage here is edited in a very tight manner that leaves out everything but the highlights of these kaiju fights

-Ok, the Space Women are just plain dorky...they make me think of Reading Rainbow/The Magical School Bus...basically they're something you'd see on PBS

-God those anime scenes suck monkey balls...if those monkey balls were full of LSD

-So this finishes up the Showa series proper...I'm in a minority here but I'd rather watch most of these films than any Godzilla film...yep, I said it. The Showa Gamera films are more fun than most Godzilla movies, the Hesei Gamera films are better made. Gamera the Brave is a solid mix of the two.

-I'm going to try really hard not to watch this film ever again

-Ok, I changed my mind...I DO hate this film...but not as much as I hate Final Wars or Megaguirus..

The score was one of the better points of the movie, that's for sure. I don't know; I just found myself getting into the human story a lot. It was ridiculous, but not too far away from the other films in the series.

This was the only Gamera movie of the Showa series that I was seeing for the very first time when I watched it recently,

Super Monster Gamera really doesn't feel like a sequel to the seven films that came before it. The mega-cheap production values, the narrower aspect ratio, the video-generated titles, and the lack of any attempt to maintain continuity with the prior entries all make this feel more like a made-for-TV spinoff of the Gamera series than a film unto itself. The story here really seems to imply that Keiichi regards Gamera as the fictional hero he is and that Gamera appears for the first time in this world after growing from the turtle that Keiichi released into the wild. The stock footage monsters are all presented as though they originated from the alien Zanon's home planet, rather than being revived versions of the monsters in the earlier films. All of that makes me think this wasn't meant to be Gamera 8 but a patchwork one-off a la Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.

I have to give the crew props for editing the stock footage so attentively. I noticed a few brief new close-ups of Gamera that were tossed into the battle with Jiger for some reason. I think it's cool that they mixed up the monster lineup instead of going chronologically. Gyaos, Zigra, Viras, Jiger, Guiron, Barugon. Shunsuke Kikuchi's original score works well with the editing.

But this movie is pretty painful to watch. There's a surprising amount of time devoted to the aliens vs. aliens shell of a plot. It's just bad, and not in a fun way. The ripoffs of Star Wars and Superman: The Movie are stunningly shameless. It's neat to see how they edited the monster battles here but I'd rather watch any of the films they originated from, even the ones I didn't care for.


:th-dn:


This is Gamera's darkest hour. He killed himself at the end just to get away.