Gamera the Giant Monster

Gamera the Giant Monster (1965)
Daiei Motion Picture Company
Director: Yuasa Noriaki, Tsukiji Yonesaburo (special effects)
Also known as: Gammera the Invincible (1966) – the title of the US re-edit.

What’s this – a Japanese kaiju movie and it’s not produced by Toho?!

Toho Studios had been enjoying great success with their kaiju eiga, and Daiei wanted a slice of that pie. Daiei weren’t as well known for their tokusatsu (special effects movies) as for their ghost stories and jidaigeki (historical dramas), particularly samurai stories. They’d got in on the 1950s pulp sci-fi craze with Warning from Space (1956), in which Earth is visited by aliens who look like giant one-eyed starfish, and they’d had a go at a kaiju movie with The Whale God (1962), based on a novel that was itself heavily inspired by Moby-Dick. The Whale God had played to Daiei’s strengths with its historical village setting, a character-driven plot and a creature that didn’t require a lot of moving parts, but it hadn’t left them with a money-spinner to rival the Godzilla movie series.

In late 1963, a creative team at Daiei started work on a film for release in early 1964, called Giant Horde Beast Nezura. The titular menace would be a plague of rats (“nezumi” = “rat” or “mouse”, plus the “-ra” suffix borrowed from Godzilla) mutated to gigantic size by an experimental food supplement. In order to make scenes of the Nezura horde running amok in Tokyo both more realistic and cheaper, the team planned to fill their miniature city models with real live sewer rats. (Let’s just say that again with the Caps Lock on – REAL LIVE SEWER RATS!!) Unfortunately, the rodent actors infested the studio with parasitic vermin and public health officials ordered that the production be shut down.

It would be more than a year before Daiei would try again with Gamera.

The exploration vessel Chidori Maru has brought Dr Hidaka and his team to the Arctic Circle, where they want to interview the head of an indigenous settlement about the local folklore. (The locals are described as “Eskimo” in the film... Presumably these people are Aleutian Islanders or Alaskan or Canadian Inuit rather than Siberian Yupik, since the Japanese team are forced to talk to them in English. And yet...) Hidaka specifically wants to ask questions about legends of giant turtles living in Atlantis. (Which seems completely absurd – why would they know anything about the Mediterranean myth of Atlantis? But perhaps this suggests these are Greenlandic Inuit, notwithstanding the English dialogue, since that would at least put them nearer the Atlantic Ocean than the Pacific.)

No sooner have the team arrived at the settlement than four unidentified stealth bombers fly overhead. The officer in charge of a nearby American military base scrambles some fighter jets, and in the ensuing aerial chase one of the bombers is shot down. It crashes into the ice with an explosion that suggests it was carrying nuclear missiles. Even though they’re close enough to the crash site for one of his entourage to take photographs, Hidaka states (rather optimistically) that they’re far enough away to avoid any fallout. A gigantic turtle climbs up from beneath the ice and marches off to the coast, where it destroys the Chidori Maru. Hidaka and co are left to make their own way home somehow (and we’re not told how). As they leave, the head of the settlement gives them a stone engraved with a turtle motif and confirms that the creature they’ve seen is Gamera, “the Devil’s Envoy".

Gamera is reported as being 60 metres tall, walks upright and has tusks. He can breathe fire, which he does when he attacks the Chidori Maru. The name is the Japanese for turtle, “kame”, with the standard “-ra” on the end, but with the K softened to a G so that it doesn’t sound exactly like “camera”.

Some time later, Hidaka appears on American TV with his assistant Kyoko to talk about his experience. He assures the world that, with the amount of radiation Gamera was exposed to, the kaiju is probably already dying at the bottom of the ocean. The attention of the world’s media soon turns to a rash of UFO sightings.

We cut to Hokkaido, where young Sakurai Toshio is forced by his father to release his pet turtle into the wild in the hope that it will shake him out of his turtle mania. No sooner does he do so than Gamera wades ashore. In order to get a better look, Toshio climbs a nearby lighthouse, which Gamera promptly smashes with his forelimb. Much to everyone’s surprise, Gamera pauses to save Toshio from a potentially lethal fall and place him gently on the ground before lumbering further inland. The troublesome child later sneaks back to the beach and, failing to find his pet again, concludes that it must have transformed into Gamera.

As Gamera closes in on a geothermal power plant, the JSDF, advised by Hidaka, try to stop him by electrocuting him with the plant’s entire output and then by bombarding him with conventional artillery. The plant is ruined but Gamera is unharmed. It turns out that not only can he breathe fire, he can suck it in, too, as he absorbs the energy from the burning power plant. We’re later told that he also emits a radio-jamming frequency. The JSDF tries instead to slow him down with an experimental freezing bomb while they dynamite a rocky slope out from underneath him. This works and briefly leaves Gamera floundering on his back, but he now reveals another surprising ability – he can pull his head and limbs into his shell, fire rockets out of the holes and launch himself, spinning, into the sky. Remember those UFO sightings that were mentioned in passing a bit earlier? Apparently, that was Gamera. Hidaka worries that he might seek out nuclear energy sources for his next meal.

Gamera’s presence in Tokyo Bay causes catastrophic harm to local fishing, sudden floods and shipping collisions due to radio interference. At an international summit at the hastily convened Gamera Countermeasures HQ, Hidaka details the “Z Plan”, Japan’s last-ditch but supposedly infallible plan to solve the Gamera problem. It involves luring him to a research facility on Ōshima Island, but he’ll have to be kept busy until the final preparations can be made. The authorities scramble to evacuate Tokyo (the young people in a nightclub who haven’t heard about Gamera refuse to shift and are squashed soon after). Naturally, the Tokyo Tower takes a pasting. To stop him wandering off before the Z Plan team are ready, railcars full of petrol are sent rolling into the blazing wreck of an oil refinery where Gamera is feeding on the fire.

Little Toshio, who believes Gamera is his friend, slips away from his family during the evacuation, somehow gets onto the oil refinery premises and sneaks onto one of the petrol-filled tankers. The refinery chief is obliged to race after him and try to rescue him; the pair are blown out of harm’s way when a tanker ahead of theirs explodes. The chief sends an ungrateful Toshio packing. Undeterred, the little menace somehow manages to hide himself in a shipment of Z Plan materials bound for Ōshima Island. He’s immediately discovered by the team on the island and taken to the temporary HQ where Hidaka and the others are preparing to put their plan into action.

The Z Plan involves dumping oil barrels into Tokyo Bay and setting them on fire to create a path to draw Gamera from Tokyo to Ōshima Island. (This sounds... less than ideal? Depending on exactly where in Tokyo Bay they start from, it’s going to mean at best maybe 20km, at worst as much as 50km of burning oil fouling up the bay. If the local fishing industry weren’t already in trouble, it’d be totally screwed now.) A sudden typhoon puts out the fire and endangers the plan, but an extremely lucky and very short-lived volcanic eruption on the island puts it back on course. More fires lure Gamera further inland to the heart of the facility, where (surprise!) he’s trapped inside a spheroidal capsule on top of a rocket and launched into space. Toshio says he’ll become a scientist so that he can go and visit Gamera on Mars someday.

Gamera the Giant Monster owes an obvious debt to Godzilla (1954). It imitates the superficial features but not the substance of the earlier film – an enormous, ancient creature with fiery breath is woken up by something nuclear, destroys a ship, naps in Tokyo Bay, stomps across the city, chews on a train and is finally defeated by a bit of science-fictional gadgetry. Although the explosion that rouses Gamera is the result of a confrontation between two nuclear superpowers (America and an unspecified Other), it never feels as if the film is about to offer any deeper comment on the Cold War or on atomic weapons. It’s another rocket, in fact, that resolves the plot by sending Gamera off to Mars.

The scene in which Gamera attacks a lighthouse is an interesting one because, although it doesn’t echo any similar scene in Godzilla, it harks back to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) which had itself influenced Godzilla. Funnily enough, the most obvious similarity – the black-and-white cinematography – had nothing to do with imitating Godzilla and everything to do with cutting costs. Money, or rather the lack of it, will be a defining factor in the unfolding tale of Daiei and their Gamera films.

Another way in which Gamera the Giant Monster only accidentally resembles Godzilla is that it, too, was heavily re-edited for the American market. Unlike Godzilla, the Gamera movie actually gained nearly ten minutes in the edit, with the addition of several US-centric scenes starring Brian Donlevy.

As far as the special effects go, Gamera the Giant Monster may be cheap but it’s not too shabby. The kaiju itself is a bit disappointing – Tsukiji Yonesaburo can’t compete with Tsuburaya Eiji’s kaiju suit and puppet work. Gamera‘s design is cruder than Godzilla’s, although he looks better here than he or his adversaries will in many of the subsequent films. His fiery inhalations and exhalations are achieved not through optical effects trickery, but by having an actual flamethrower lodged in Gamera's throat (whether a close-up puppet or, in a couple of shots, the suit with a stunt actor inside). This is a Health and Safety nightmare but effective for the viewer. It also means the scenes of Gamera sucking up fire from the geothermal plant and the oil refinery can be achieved simply and cost-effectively by throwing the earlier close-up shots into reverse. The city and vehicle miniatures are quite impressive, there’s a pretty fair composite shot of people moving through the Z Plan compound interior... all in all, the film acquits itself well.

The plot’s more of a disappointment. It lurches from one set piece to the next in a way that makes it feel very pacy, until you stop to think about the story, and then it just feels choppy. The highly repetitive dialogue might be meant to paper over the cracks and hold everything together, but I don’t think it does the film any favours.

On the acting front, the award-winning actor Funakoshi Eiji is the stand-out as Dr Hidaka, giving a warm and sympathetic performance throughout. (Note: To be clear, he didn’t win his awards for this film.) Sadly, the character wasn’t reprised in any subsequent films and Funakoshi only returned to the series in the minor role of Dr Shiga in Gamera vs Guiron (1969), the fifth Gamera movie. The other Japanese actors give solid but unremarkable performances, and the American actors seen in the USAF base and the New York TV studio are passable – certainly better than any seen in any of the Godzilla movies up to this point. Uchida Yoshiro is memorable for all the worst reasons as Toshio, but then his character is meant to be an appalling little so-and-so, so that’s probably testament to his talent as an actor.

If Gamera the Giant Monster existed in isolation, it would be easy to conclude that Dr Hidaka is the central character and Toshio is a side character whose frequent, annoying intrusions into the story are just there to pad out the runtime. Put him alongside the scene of the oblivious kids in the Tokyo nightclub and you might imagine the filmmakers had a bee in their bonnet about “young people today” and Toshio was just an extended part of that. But in retrospect, it turns out Toshio was the key to this story all along. Who knows, maybe Daiei were hedging their bets at this point – the immediate sequel, Gamera vs Barugon (1966), has an entirely adult cast and no Toshio equivalent, which hints at the path this movie series could have taken. No one’s calling Gamera “the friend of all children” yet. All the Shōwa era Gamera films after that will revolve around child protagonists, with adults often sidelined into comic relief roles. The scene in which Gamera pauses in his rampage of terror to save Toshio’s life, which might at first look like a bizarre aberration, is actually the defining moment of this film.