Destroy All Monsters

Destroy All Monsters (1968)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Arikawa Sadamasa (special effects)

So here’s a great big celebration of Toho’s kaiju eiga to date, an indulgent jam that throws together a whole bunch of their giant monsters in a lightly plotted, high-stakes runaround with rockets and aliens. Plenty of costumed fighting, plenty of showy miniature work for the special effects team, surprisingly little reused footage (although it’s there and it’s not hard to spot).

This might seem odd because 1968 wasn’t a significant anniversary for Godzilla, or for Toho Studios; this is only the ninth Godzilla film, and I don’t think it was a milestone number for the studio overall (assuming they kept count after The Three Treasures (1959), allegedly their thousandth production). The fact is, Destroy All Monsters was meant to be the last Godzilla film (yes, again, for real this time). This was supposed to be a big send-off for the franchise at a time when television was draining away Japanese cinema audiences.

Moreover, Godzilla was now getting the same treatment as Gamera in America – Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966) had gone straight to television in the US, and Son of Godzilla (1967) was about to go the same way. The American dub of Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) wouldn’t even find a distributor until 1970, although it would at least debut in cinemas. With its unprecedentedly high monster quotient, Destroy All Monsters might recapture the American market’s attention and give Toho back a foreign theatrical outlet for their tokusatsu films.

Destroy All Monsters did get a theatrical release in America, and it ended up reviving Godzilla’s fortunes, at least for a little while. For the domestic market, Toho found another way ahead and made another Godzilla movie in 1969 (of which, more in the next blog post), but this was certainly the last Godzilla movie of the Shōwa era that was expected to fend for itself in Japanese cinemas.

Most of the kaiju featured have previously appeared in other Godzilla movies, but some may need an introduction. And as ever, being killed in their debut movie is no bar to kaiju making a reappearance. Godzilla, Minilla and Kumonga were all seen as recently as Son of Godzilla, while Rodan, Mothra, Anguirus and (spoiler alert!) King Ghidorah should all have made enough of an impression on everyone’s memory. The others are new to the franchise. Gorosaurus, who looks a bit like a Tyrannosaurus Rex but with an even more disproportionately large head, first appeared in the previous year’s King Kong Escapes (1967). He’s a native of Mondo Island and was last seen re-enacting the famous 1933 “Kong vs random dinosaur” scene. Fun fact: he wasn’t named in that movie, so he’s been promoted from bit player to star cast. Manda, a long wyrm-style dragon with stumpy, barely visible legs, was the monstrous antagonist in Atragon (1963). Atragon is an anti-nationalist fable about a flying submarine with a corkscrew drill attachment on the front. (You heard me the first time.) Fun fact: “Atragon”, a portmanteau of “atomic dragon”, was originally meant to describe Manda, but because that isn’t Manda’s name it’s sometimes mistaken for the name of the flying drilling submarine (which is actually called the Gōtengō). Baragon, the quadruped with a horn and big, floppy ears, comes from Frankenstein vs Baragon (1965, a.k.a. Frankenstein Conquers the World). It seems the costume wasn’t available for Baragon’s first scripted appearance, so Gorosaurus ends up subbing in for him, but he can be seen in the film’s climactic showdown. And Varan, the eponymous star of Varan (1958) who looks like a reptilian flying squirrel, isn’t even named in this film but can be seen floating into shot in a single scene (and it’s not reused footage, either!).

So without further ado, on with the show...

It's the end of the 20th century. There's a UN moonbase serviced by daily commuter rockets. The UN has also established a marine research station underwater near the Ogasawara Islands, where they’re apparently creating new species of fish. While they were there, they’ve also corralled all the world’s giant monsters onto one of the islands, which is now popularly known as “Kaiju Land”. We’ll find out later, in a press conference given by Dr Yoshida, that the island was sealed off from the outside world 10 years ago and the kaiju roundup started 20 years ago. (So around 1979, which I suppose works with the dating of the films so far. But see below.) In a helicopter flypast of the island, we’re shown Godzilla, Rodan, Anguirus, Mothra (in larval form) and Gorosaurus. Gas is automatically released along the coast to prevent the kaiju swimming away from the island, and magnetic force screens stop Rodan from flying away. The whole operation is controlled from an underground base, where we can also see uniformed staff at workstations monitoring Minilla and Manda.

Yamabe Katsuo, an officer on the moonbase, is in the middle of a videophone call to Manabe Kyōko, who’s just started work as a research assistant studying the inhabitants of “Kaiju Land”. (Their relationship isn’t explicitly spelled out, although they’re probably meant to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Some sources claim that she’s his sister, possibly on the basis of one of the film’s American dubs, but then some sources conflate the characters’ different surnames.) The signal suddenly drops out and the base’s electrical systems are disrupted before the scientists – and, above ground, the daikaiju – are knocked out with gas; all lines of communication with the island are lost. At the UN’s Science Council office in Tokyo, Dr Yoshida tries to re-establish contact and is shocked to see camera footage of the island deserted. Reports then start to come in of kaiju attacks on major cities around the world: Rodan in Moscow, Mothra in Peking, Manda in London, Baragon in Paris and Godzilla in New York. (Of these, we’re actually shown Rodan buzzing a Russian Orthodox cathedral, Gorosaurus destroying the Arc de Triomphe on Baragon’s behalf, although he’s burrowing like Baragon would, and Godzilla flaming New York’s harbour area.)

On a patrol of the lunar surface in his rocket, Moonlight SY-3, Katsuo and his crew see a black saucer-shaped object and try to pursue it. Tetsuo claims this is important because it’s humanity’s first contact with a UFO. (This makes a nonsense of Invasion of Astro-Monster and, although the UN might not know about it, Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster (1964). Just to recap, Astro-Monster was explicitly set in the 1960s, and this film’s set at the turn of the 21st century, but in just 30 years everyone’s forgotten the attempted alien invasion and all the UFOs.) The crew return to base and are ordered to head back to Earth to investigate the island. They’re met by Kyōko and her boss, Dr Otani, who act as if in a trance. Otani demonstrates how his team are remote controlling the destructive daikaiju – on a workstation screen, we see Mothra destroying a train, Godzilla a ship, Rodan an aircraft. The masterminds behind this are the Kilaaks, ensconced in the heart of the island base.

The Kilaaks come from an unspecified asteroid between Mars & Jupiter. They look straightforwardly human and seem to all present as female. We’re only introduced to one at this point. She wears a silver jumpsuit, gloves, cape and head covering. Rather like the Xiliens in Astro-Monster, her voice sounds like it’s being relayed through a PA system. She claims to be on a mission to advance civilisation on Earth. An invisible shield of some kind makes it impossible for the SY-3 crew to shoot or physically attack her. When the crew try to take Kyōko and Otani away with them, the Kilaak gasses them and sets the other base personnel on them. A gunfight breaks out in the control room. The crew succeed in retreating with Otani, whom they take to the UNSC office. Otani doesn’t answer any questions and instead jumps to his death from a window. Kyōko and some of the controlled scientists, armed with alien handguns, try to recover the body and kidnap Katsuo and Yoshida, but are chased away by the police. An autopsy later discovers a small pellet implanted behind Otani’s ear, made from an unfamiliar metal, that seems to be the means by which the Kilaaks are controlling the humans and the kaiju. The control signals are being relayed through devices, roughly the size of a football, concealed all over the world.

Kyōko draws Rodan, Godzilla, Manda and Mothra to Tokyo, destroying the city. The daikaiju then head towards Izu. Kyōko walks into the UNSC’s emergency headquarters to deliver an ultimatum: the Kilaaks have staged the monster attacks to force all humanity to submit to their control. When everyone has been subjugated, the kaiju will be returned to “Kaiju Land”. Kyōko confirms that the Kilaaks’ new base is in Izu, but Katsuo tears off her earrings, through which the Kilaaks were controlling her, and she collapses, unable to remember any further details of their plans.

The Japanese military, accompanied by rocket Moonlight SY-3, tries to storm the Kilaak base in Izu but is routed by Godzilla and Anguirus. Rodan chases the rocket crew away from following a glowing UFO to the alien base, which seems to be somewhere in the vicinity of Mt Fuji. Exploring the area on foot, Katsuo finds a way into the base through a cave with one of his crew and army Major Tada, but they are soon trapped by the Kilaaks (the one seen previously and five others in less sparkly clothing). They repeat their demand that humanity surrender to them or die, then release the three men. Meanwhile, the UNSC has reclaimed control of the “Kaiju Land” base and tracks the Kilaaks’ control signal to the Moon. The SY-3 returns to the moonbase and sweeps the lunar surface in search of the Kilaaks’ headquarters.

Following a black saucer like the one they saw earlier, the astronauts find their target inside a crater. They break in, decompressing the base and causing the Kilaaks to revert to their true form – something like a silver slug with a rocky shell. The crew find an important looking piece of technology and remove it to take back to Earth – this is, as they guess, the aliens’ master control device. They also take a dormant Kilaak back with them. The UNSC boffins believe the Kilaaks to be living metal and that, although they’re essentially immortal, they need warm temperatures to maintain their human disguises and will need even higher temperatures – perhaps several thousand degrees – to revive them once they go into hibernation. Humanity can defeat them by cooling them down.

The UNSC redeploys the daikaiju, now under their control, to the Kilaak base near Mt Fuji, while the JSDF lines up the artillery in support and the press gives running commentary. The monster army consists of Minilla, Godzilla, Mothra (still only in larval form), Anguirus, Manda, Baragon, Gorosaurus, Kumonga (who only appears in reused footage from Son of Godzilla) and Rodan. (Varan puts in a brief appearance in the montage but isn’t named.) In response, the Kilaaks send in King Ghidorah, who isn’t among the kaiju now under human control. (Poor old Ghidorah, controlled by aliens again. It’s never stated whether the Kilaaks are his original owners or have him on loan. The shot of his materialisation is lifted from Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster.) A pitched battle ensues, in which Godzilla, Anguirus and Gorosaurus seem to do most of the work in taking down King Ghidorah. Ghidorah doesn’t fly away this time but looks as though he might actually be dead. The Kilaaks have one more trick up their sleeve, releasing a “Fire Dragon” that dogfights briefly with Rodan then strafes the UNSC base on “Kaiju Land”, destroying the stolen master control device. Godzilla takes the opportunity to break into the Kilaaks’ base – even though he’s no longer under control, he clearly views the aliens as enemies. With their base destroyed, they all go into hibernation. The SY-3 chases down and destroys the Fire Dragon, which turns out to be one of the Kilaaks’ flying saucers.

In a return to the status quo of the film’s opening scenes, our heroes Katsuo, Kyōko and Yoshida take a helicopter tour of “Kaiju Land” to see all the daikaiju peacefully returned there.

And what a send-off it would have been. There’s a literal fin-de-siècle feel to this movie, set in the barely imaginable future of the end of the 20th century with its moonbase and videophones, reflected in the sheer decadent indulgence of the proceedings. The global scope is refreshing and raises the movie above the usual run of the mill, making it feel like the stakes are as high as the alien invasion plot wants them to be. Having Toho’s kaiju constantly attack Japan before may have been no more ridiculous than the antagonists in American pulp SF movies only ever attacking America, but it’s nice to go a little further afield. So far Godzilla and his pals have only ventured outside Japan to visit fictional Pacific islands or outer space (or “New Kirk City” in Mothra (1961)) – I can hardly believe it’s taken them this long to get around to France. Alas, the international scenes are far too brief.

The model work and matte shots are great all round. It's painfully obvious that there are no people in the scenes of Moscow, Paris and New York, but that’s perhaps the only blemish on what would otherwise be an excellent showcase for Toho’s post-Tsuburaya special effects department. The big monster battles towards the end certainly deliver plenty of spectacle, and the crew have managed to sidestep any wire-related problems by not using the imago Mothra and only bringing Kumonga in through reused shots, allowing them to concentrate on manipulating Ghidorah’s three heads. As obvious as that reused material is, it’s used sensibly and woven into the story quite well.

The real problem is the plot, which is perhaps the most superficial one yet in this series of movies. Some aliens want to take over humanity because they just do, they use remote controlled kaiju to devastate a few major cities in arbitrary displays of intimidation, and they all spontaneously curl up into inert metallic balls the minute their bases are overrun. The characterisation is close to non-existent – just look at the complete lack of development around the relationship between Katsuo and Kyōko. Are they lovers or siblings? The lack of obvious concern on his part while she’s under alien control and the cold violence with which he frees her from that control don’t offer much hint either way. That said, Kubo Akira (making a quick return after starring as the journalist Goro in Son of Godzilla) gives the liveliest performance of the movie as Katsuo. Tsuchiya Yoshio (also recently seen in Son of Godzilla) is wasted as Dr Otani and Tazaki Jun (most recently seen as the lead villain in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep) doesn’t fare much better as Dr Yoshida.

Perhaps the greatest wasted opportunity is the concept of “Kaiju Land”. The idea that humanity has somehow tamed all of these near-supernatural creatures – reduced them again to pest animals and handled them as such – and contained them on an island is one that needs more consideration than it gets here. There’s a brief voiceover explaining the premise right at the start, and after that we’re expected to take it as much on trust as the rest of the plot. We see Rodan fishing a dolphin out of the island’s waters, but what do the rest of the kaiju eat? There’s not that much wildlife to be had, apart from other kaiju or scientists; there’s not even a nuclear reactor to keep Godzilla perked up. Don’t they get under each other’s feet the whole time? Do they get territorial in this foreign, enforced territory? What actually are the consequences of taking them all out of their natural habitats? Who’s defending Infant Island, or indeed the entire planet, if Mothra’s been locked up here?

With hindsight, the real legacy of “Kaiju Land” is that it establishes the idea of a single “home” for Earth’s giant monsters, a toybox they can be pulled out of and go back into as the situation demands. This idea will take on greater significance in films to come, starting with the very next one.

Son of Godzilla

Son of Godzilla (1967)
Toho Studios
Director: Fukuda Jun, Arikawa Sadamasa (special effects)
Also discussed: The X from Outer Space (1967), Gappa (1967), King Kong Escapes (1967).

1966 is often cited as an annus mirabilis for tokusatsu: the three Daimajin movies, Gamera vs Barugon, The War of the Gargantuas... well, and Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, I suppose... not to mention the debut of Tsuburaya Productions’ acclaimed “Ultra” series on TV.

But 1967 is remarkable for being the year in which all the major Japanese film production companies decided to have a go. Perhaps it wasn’t the most advisable time for it, given the decline in cinema attendance, but this is the year Shochiku and Nikkatsu released their sole Shōwa-era contributions to the canon of kaiju eiga. (Toei, meanwhile, were providing animation for Rankin-Bass’ The King Kong Show (1966-67) and producing the TV series Captain Ultra (1967), by a comfortable margin the fastest knock-off of Ultraman (original series 1966-67). The TV network had actually commissioned Captain Ultra to fill Ultraman’s timeslot while Tsuburaya Productions were preparing the follow-up series, so any resemblance is surely intended.)

At the end of March, a week and a half after the release of Daiei’s Gamera vs Gyaos, Shochiku’s film The X from Outer Space debuted (Japanese title: Giant Space Monster Guilala). In this, an extraterrestrial microbe is brought to Earth where it grows into a gigantic bipedal creature that wanders around destroying cities and absorbing energy from power stations. A joint Japanese and American team of astronauts and scientists names it Guilala and races to synthesise the substance the microbe was originally encased in, in the hope that it can be used to contain Guilala and transport it back into space. Guilala has a reptilian body with frilled limbs but birdlike feet. Its head, certainly its most distinctive feature, looks like a spiky, metallic UFO with a beak and an enormous pair of deely-bopper antennae. Its rampages all seem to take place at night, presumably in an unsuccessful attempt to hide the fact that the scenes are studio-bound. The movie is most memorable for its absurd 1960s pop-rock soundtrack and for spawning a parody sequel 41 years later.

April brought Nikkatsu’s film Gappa (also known as Gappa the Triphibian Monster and, in America, Monster from a Prehistoric Planet). This film sees Japan’s fictional answer to Hugh Hefner developing a holiday resort on a Japanese island. The main attraction of the island is to be a zoo populated with exotic creatures plundered from the Pacific Islands. The businessman’s minions find one such creature, called Gappa by the human inhabitants of its island, and bring it to Japan, with the predictable consequence that its parents come to reclaim it. The Gappas, like Guilala, are visually a blend of reptile and bird, although overall they look a lot more like monstrous eagles. (Despite the similar name, apart from the beak they don’t resemble the kappa, a well-known variety of Japanese folkloric monster.) As the word “triphibian” suggests, they swim, fly and trample. The story is highly derivative, with the familiar old tropes of an innocent kaiju being exploited by an unscrupulous businessman and a community of Pacific Islanders played by blacked-up Japanese actors, but the execution is as good as anything else produced in 1967. The movie’s probably best known to British science fiction fans as the source of the “unconvincing prehistoric monster droid” clips used in “Meltdown” (1991), the fourth season finale of the comedy series Red Dwarf.

In July, Toho released King Kong Escapes, their first kaiju movie of the year and their second attempt to tie in with the Rankin-Bass/Toei animated series. It lifted several concepts directly from the series. Firstly, Kong’s home island, which still hadn’t been named on-screen as Skull Island and had been named Faro Island in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), is referred to as Mondo Island, the name used in the cartoon. Secondly, the chief antagonist is called Dr Who, which fans of British science fiction are likely to find confusing or hilarious. In the cartoon, Dr Who is a small, bald-headed man dressed in the white tunic, gloves and goggles of a caricatured mad scientist. In King Kong Escapes, actor Amamoto Hideyo looks uncannily like he’s cosplaying William Hartnell in the first episode of Doctor Who (1963-present), suggesting someone somewhere might have got their visual reference materials mixed up. Thirdly, Dr Who controls a metallic replica of Kong, called Mechani-Kong. In the cartoon, Mechani-Kong looks a lot more like Kong and has to be piloted from a cockpit inside its head; in its first appearance, Dr Who tries to use it to discredit the real Kong, an idea we’ll see used again when Godzilla meets his own robot double a few films from now. In King Kong Escapes, Mechani-Kong is unmistakeably a robot, all silvery and either autonomous or controllable from Dr Who’s headquarters.

Dr Who plans to use Mechani-Kong to excavate a highly radioactive mineral in the Arctic on behalf of his associate Madame Piranha, who wants to turn her nation (which explicitly isn’t the US, the USSR or China) into a nuclear superpower. Even Mechani-Kong, with its thick metal hide, can’t withstand the radiation, so Dr Who resorts to his backup plan: abduct Kong and force him to do the dangerous work. This doesn’t work, nor does kidnapping and coercing Kong’s American friends. Kong escapes and swims to Japan for... reasons?... and Dr Who sends in Mechani-Kong to retrieve him, leading to a kaiju bust-up in Tokyo before the triumphant ape finally heads for home. It’s only appropriate that this movie should be simplistic and cartoonish, but it doesn’t have a lot to offer beyond that. Mechani-Kong is a lot of fun, and it’s sad that this was the robot’s only cinematic outing. Kong, meanwhile, looks as bad as he did in King Kong vs Godzilla. Even the fact that it’s directed by kaiju eiga colossus Hondo Ishirō isn’t enough to recommend this movie to anyone but completists.

And then, in December...

Flying through a storm near the tiny, isolated Sollgel Island, a small Japanese aircraft encounters two strange phenomena. The first is a lot of unexplained radio interference. The second is the presence of Godzilla, wading through the water towards the island.

From this we segue into the extremely perky title theme, which should give us some flavour of the film to come...

On Sollgel Island, the all-Japanese members of Dr Kusumi’s United Nations research team inspect their field equipment and pick up interference on their radio. (The signage on their headquarters shows the UN logo and the acronym “WFPO”. They’re apparently doing work for the World Food Programme, founded in 1961, which has the acronym WFP and its own logo, but never mind.) A plane flying over the island drops two parachutes – these prove to be carrying Maki Goro, a freelance journalist, and his equipment. Goro has come in search of a story and insists he won’t leave without one. Unable to get rid of him, the scientists decide they’ll let him stay around as a cook and cleaner. On his first night on the island, Goro hears and sees one of the man-sized praying mantises that haunt the jungle; Fujisaki, Dr Kusumi’s deputy, warns Goro not to wander off at night.

On his daytime wanderings, Goro sees a young woman swimming in a deserted bay, but scares her off before he can photograph her. The research team later tell him that the island is uninhabited.

Over dinner, Dr Kusumi explains to Goro that the team is investigating the possibility of changing the environment in localised areas to make formerly barren land produce food crops. The global population continues to increase, and the “WFPO” is concerned about the possibility of mass starvation. The research is being carried out in secret because of the danger that this kind of weather control technology could be weaponised and abused. The team has been waiting for favourable conditions and is at last ready to carry out their first experiment the next day.

Goro runs through the jungle to the bay to warn the woman he saw about the experiment, but doesn’t see her. He’s caught at the bay at zero hour (well, 11am), when the team detonates a freezing device above the island and fires silver iodide into the air. The temperature drops as planned. The team moves on to the second part of their experiment, launching a small radioactive capsule with the intention of stabilising the new microclimate they've created. However, the unexplained interference prevents them from controlling the capsule, which explodes too soon, reacting badly with the cooled air and causing a massive heatwave and catastrophic storms. The team and Goro bunker down in the base. Four days later, the temperature on the island has returned to normal and the terrain around the team’s headquarters has been reduced to mud.

Kusumi orders a full systems check and strides off into the jungle, pursued by Goro. The two of them see three of the mantises, now grown as tall as the research team’s testing station. (That’s an astonishingly fast radioactive mutation, even for a fantasy film.) The mantises home in on the source of the mysterious radio interference, a pile of rocks that conceals an enormous egg. The next morning, Goro heads back out with another of the team, Morio, to spy on the mantis kaiju, which he’s named Kamacuras. (“Kamakiri” is the Japanese word for “mantis”. In the American dub, they’re renamed “Gimantis”.) The Kamacuras are attacking the egg with their forelimbs, and when it shatters they continue to jab at the creature inside it. Goro recognises this creature as “a baby Godzilla”. (God knows how, though, because the resemblance is less than entirely convincing.) At that very moment, Godzilla arrives on the island, trampling the scientists’ base and striding inland to defend the newborn creature from the Kamacuras.

The ”baby Godzilla” is unnamed in this film, but will come to be known as Minilla. (This is just “mini”, i.e. little, plus “ra”, and some sources give his name as “Minira”. At least one American dub has gone with “Minya”, but we’ll draw a discreet veil over that. Because Gojira is known in the Anglo world as “Godzilla”, it follows – and Toho has decreed – that his son Minira should be known as “Minilla”.) He has smooth, sluglike skin, somewhat paler than Godzilla’s, and a rounded face with no muzzle and a big, gummy mouth. He grows a couple of buck teeth later in the movie. He does have a tail, but like the rest of him, it’s stubby and pudgy. He has no dorsal plates. He makes sounds that are disturbingly like those of a human baby. (Actually, what he sounds like – and looks like, more than he resembles Godzilla – is the child/worm creature in Eraserhead (1977).)

Godzilla, meanwhile, looks greener and more cartoonish than before, with a taller head and large, round eyes.

Having routed the Kamacuras, Godzilla initially acts as if he’s mislaid Minilla and wanders off. The young woman Goro saw earlier takes the opportunity to befriend Minilla, calling to him and throwing fruit into his mouth. But Godzilla soon reappears and carries Minilla away on his tail. The woman returns to the cave she’s been living in, where she finds Goro, who apparently stumbled in there while fleeing from the kaiju fight. Goro learns that her name is Saeko and her father, an archaeologist, had gone into hiding on Sollgel Island after the war and died seven years ago, leaving her to fend for herself. He introduces her to the scientists. As a surviving Kamacuras threatens what’s left of their base, Goro suggests moving their equipment into Saeko’s cave.

The scientists soon start becoming feverish. Saeko says that the cure for this is the warm, red water that can be found in the volcanic lake right around the place Godzilla has settled in. It should be possible to get past him while he’s sleeping, but she’ll also need to get past the underground lair of Kumonga, a giant spider. (“Kumo” being the Japanese for “spider”. The American dub crassly renames it “Spiega”, because that sounds a bit like spider.) Saeko and Goro head out in search of the miracle cure. At the lake, they find Godzilla and Minilla behaving in an extremely human way as the parent trains the child in the arts of roaring and breathing fire. Minilla can only blow smoke rings at first, but manages a blast of flame when Godzilla steps on his tail. Godzilla proudly ruffles Minilla’s total absence of hair and the two settle down to sleep. Saeko and Goro seize their chance to collect some water from the lake, and soon enough the scientists back at the cave are feeling better. Dr Kusumi belatedly announces that the team will have to abandon the island.

Some time later, Saeko is attacked by a Kamacuras while foraging at the edge of the jungle. She calls Minilla, who unsuccessfully tries to chase off the Kamacuras. Godzilla follows behind and sees off the giant bug, but the fighting has disturbed Kumonga, who was buried nearby. Kumonga pursues Saeko and Goro, spraying sticky webbing from its mouth (suggesting it’s more like the larval form of Mothra than a typical spider) which Goro is able to burn through with a cigarette lighter. They escape back to the cave, but Kumonga follows them and traps everyone within. Saeko reveals a back exit that leads from the cave to the bay, and she and Goro swim out with the radio equipment that Fujisaki has just finished fixing. The team receives word that a rescue ship is on the way. Minilla happens to pass by and distracts Kumonga, who cocoons him in webbing – the ruckus between the two threatens to collapse the cave. Kusumi decides to use the team’s surviving test equipment to freeze the island again, so that they can have a chance to get past the battling kaiju and escape.

Outside the cave, the surviving Kamacuras has joined the fray and been swiftly defeated by Kumonga. The detonation of the research team’s freezing device wakes up Godzilla, who comes to save Minilla from Kumonga, but it’s Minilla who ends up saving Godzilla when Kumonga’s webbing gets the better of him. Father and son together destroy Kumonga with their radioactive breath. As snow falls on the island following the scientists’ successful second experiment, the team make their escape in an inflatable dinghy together with Goro and Saeko. Minilla and Godzilla are trapped on the island and buried in snow as the island freezes over; Goro thinks they’ll hibernate until it thaws out again.

Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) could easily have wrapped up the Godzilla movies, the conclusion of a loose trilogy begun in Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) and, barring the following year’s The War of the Gargantuas, a last hurrah for the directorial dream team of Honda and Tsuburaya. Then Godzilla was dropped into the script for Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and Toho decided they weren’t done with him yet. Now here we have another tale of secretive scientific research and mutated beasts on a remote Pacific island, but apparently targeted at a child audience with the inclusion of Godzilla’s own infant son.

In the context of kaiju eiga, it feels like the title and concept of Son of Godzilla are overtly referencing Son of Kong (1933). There are two problems with this. Firstly, although the words “son of Godzilla” do actually appear in the original Japanese title as well as the international Anglo title, Son of Kong was renamed Revenge of Kong for the Japanese market, so the reference would be lost on the domestic audience. And secondly, Minilla has absolutely none of the appeal of Little Kong. Years before Trolls and Cabbage Patch Kids, here’s a childlike thing that looks ugly but is also supposed to be cute. (Apparently the specific Japanese term for this is “busakawa”.) His appearance is sometimes compared to that of the Pillsbury Doughboy, an advertising mascot for a baking supplies company. He certainly doesn’t look much like Godzilla. He’ll turn up again in Destroy All Monsters (1968) and be a viewpoint character in All Monsters Attack (1969), but he won’t stick in the long term. The Heisei-era Godzilla movies will present a different and (in my opinion) much better take on the concept. Although Minilla himself crops up once more after that, in Godzilla Final Wars (2004), it’s in the context of a film that throws almost every single element of Toho’s Shōwa-era output into one big nostalgic bucket.

Minilla and Godzilla aside, the new kaiju are realised entirely through puppetry. The results are more than acceptable – the fact that the Kamacuras and Kumonga are puppets allows for a more convincingly insectile shape, and the wirework is good. And the matte effects in this film are better than in many of its predecessors. The shots of human characters trying to avoid flaming, disembodied Kamacuras limbs flying through the air are particularly well done.

Actor-watch: the scientific team on Sollgel Island is a veritable Who’s Who of contemporary kaiju eiga. Habitual viewers should have no trouble spotting Takashima Tadao (the hero in King Kong vs Godzilla) as Dr Kusumi, Hirata Akihiko (Dr Serizawa in the OG) as radio operator Fujisaki, Tsuchiya Yoshio (the lead alien in Invasion of Astro-Monster) as the cranky equipment inspector Furukawa and Sahara Kenji (the villain in Mothra vs Godzilla) as the younger equipment inspector Morio. Parachuting in as the reckless journalist Goro is Kubo Akira, who played the inventor Tetsuo in Invasion of Astro-Monster.

The name “Sollgel Island” is distinctive enough that it looks like it ought to mean something, although feeding the Japanese characters into Google Translate doesn’t offer me any potential leads. The nearest thing I can find is the sol-gel process, an industrial process whereby colloidal mineral solutions are used to fabricate novel solid materials. This was at least a scientific concept at the time Son of Godzilla was produced, although the real developments postdate it. It isn’t the same thing as cloud seeding, whereby metallic iodides are dropped into clouds in the hope of causing rain to condense out of them. Still, it’s possible the island’s name was meant to tie in somehow to the theme of weather control, even if only by invoking what was then a cutting-edge field of science.

Weather control’s an interesting subject, and a popular one in science fiction. The practice of cloud seeding postdates the Second World War but was a common enough idea by the time of Son of Godzilla’s production. Starting in 1962, the American government had sponsored Project Stormfury, a lengthy study into using silver iodide to affect the behaviour of tropical cyclones. There was some press coverage in 1965 when the project was wrongly blamed for a hurricane that caused significant damage in Florida. It was eventually abandoned in the mid-80s with inconclusive results.

The US Air Force did explore the possibility of using cloud seeding as a military tactic in the Vietnam War, but this experiment (later known as Operation Popeye) didn’t start until 1967 and wasn’t revealed publicly until 1972. There’s no chance that Dr Kusumi’s concern about weaponised weather control technology was a comment on this or a way of tying Godzilla back symbolically to American militarism.

The other thematic subject to consider is parenting in Japan in the 1960s. The post-war era saw Japanese society shift, much as in other industrialised nations, towards a norm of smaller, urbanised families in which both parents were likely to be working. The mid-60s also saw the rise of gakushū juku, after-hours “cram schools” offering supplementary tuition and extra-curricular activities to shepherd children through an increasingly competitive education system and into employment. A “pushy parent” stereotype gained currency in the 1960s, but specifically around mothers, “kyōiku mama”, not fathers. Goro uses the specific phrase “kyōiku mama” to describe Godzilla in the scene in which he and Saeko watch the kaiju educating Minilla. This would imply a broader view of Godzilla’s performance of gender in the film’s original context than comes across in the available Anglo versions. (The English language subtitles to the Japanese version replace the phrase with the bland "education fanatic", while the American dub substitutes the male-gendered "his father's a real study nut!") But Godzilla does also have time to give Minilla rides on his tail, so his parenting style is perhaps a more balanced one. Once the reference is explained to her, Saeku pities the hothoused children of 1960s Japan, but Goro seems more ambivalent, possibly reflecting ambivalence on the part of scriptwriter Sekizawa Shinichi. Sekizawa will have more to say about parenting and kaiju in All Monsters Attack, and it’ll be interesting to revisit this topic then.

Gamera vs Gyaos

Gamera vs Gyaos (1967)
Daiei Motion Picture Company
Director: Yuasa Noriaki (also handling SFX, and ditto for all the rest)
Also known as: Return of the Giant Monsters (the extremely bland title of the version first shown on American TV).
Also discussed: Gamera vs Viras (1968), Gamera vs Guiron (1969), Gamera vs Jiger (1970), Gamera vs Zigra (1971).

A series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions – an undersea volcano and one on Miyake Island – culminates in an eruption at Mt Fuji. Gamera promptly turns up to absorb the heat energy of the lava. (At this point he still has to be drawn to the scene by the prospect of a meal – subsequent films will have him just turn up to defend people, and particularly children.) He’s watched by a delighted child called Eiichi. A research team flies in by helicopter to investigate the seismic activity, but their helicopter is sliced in half by a mysterious yellow beam that shoots out from a glowing cave in the foothills.

Meanwhile nearby, road corporation foreman Tsutsumi is struggling with the delays to his expressway project. The work’s been stopped because of the eruptions, and Tsutsumi’s bosses want it resumed quickly, but the local residents want a higher price for their land and are taking advantage of the hold-up to sabotage the workers’ facilities and further delay construction. While Tsutsumi and the villagers are arguing, the journalist Okabe sneaks past in the hope of trekking up to the mysterious cave and getting an exclusive story on what’s up there. He runs into Eiichi and persuades him to act as his guide by suggesting Gamera might be hiding in the cave. Spoiler alert: there’s something hiding in the cave, but it isn’t Gamera. Okabe abandons Eiichi and tries to save himself, but is seized and devoured by the inhabitant of the cave, which then turns its attention to Eiichi.

This creature will later be named Gyaos by Eiichi, in imitation of its distinctive call. It looks like an enormous, angular bat, or possibly some sort of black-skinned pterosaur. It has a wedge-shaped head, eyes with red irises and yellow sclera and a rather flappy lower jaw. Its presence in the cave is denoted by a pulsing green glow, although it’s never explained what actually produces the glow and how it relates to Gyaos.

Before Gyaos can eat Eiichi, Gamera turns up to confront him. Gyaos fires a yellow beam from his mouth – the same one that destroyed the helicopter earlier – and cuts deeply into Gamera’s forelimb. (For the record, Gamera’s blood is green – it seems it’s OK to show blood gushing all over the screen in a kids’ movie provided it isn’t red.) Gamera responds by pulling his head and limbs back into his shell and rolling edge-on down the hill into Gyaos. Gyaos drops Eiichi and Gamera catches him. He then torches Gyaos with his fiery breath – presumably he was holding that back while Eiichi was in danger. With Eiichi on his back, Gamera flies to the village, where he lands next to a ferris wheel so that Tsutsumi can ride up and take Eiichi safely away. Gamera flies off, and Eiichi is suddenly the centre of attention for the local reporters.

Later, the JSDF convenes an emergency meeting to discuss the threat Gyaos poses and how they can neutralise it. Eiichi is invited, presumably because he’s seen Gyaos closer up than anyone else. A scientist, Dr Aoki, theorises that Gyaos’ ray is a high-frequency sonic beam, generated by a bifurcated spine and windpipe like a tuning fork. The JSDF officers speculate that Gyaos could be attacked from behind because of his inflexible back. They launch a squadron of fighter planes, but Gyaos shoots several of them down and they’re forced to abort. In a slightly peculiar fantasy moment, we cross-fade from Eiichi at JSDF HQ urging Gamera to recover quickly to a shot of Gamera underwater, his forelimb healing.

That night, Gyaos emerges from his cave and eats all the cows in the local cattle farms; the villagers blame the road workers for bringing bad luck. Privately, the villagers debate whether to sell their land while there’s still the chance to sell it. Meanwhile, the despondent, idle road workers move out, except for Tsutsumi and his two deputies. Eiichi, who’s been keeping a scrapbook, deduces that Gyaos is nocturnal. On this basis, the JSDF sets up bright lights around the village and fires experimental extra-bright flares into the sky, with the co-operation of the three construction workers who’ve stuck around. It doesn’t work – Gyaos still shows up. The JSDF attacks, but Gyaos creates hurricane-force winds by flapping his wings and destroys their tanks, then takes to the air and heads south. He terrorizes Nagoya with a lot of low flying, takes the top off a train and eats the passengers. There’s also a fun shot of a car being cut in half by his sonic beam. As he moves off to the north-east, Gamera shows up and tries to ram him but is outmanoeuvred. Gyaos fires a yellow powder out from his underbelly that extinguishes Gamera's rocket jets. (What even is that?! It’s never explained.) Gamera plummets into Ise Bay, but is able to launch himself back out and latch his teeth onto Gyaos’ foot. The sun begins to rise and Gyaos’ head begins to glow red – in obvious distress, he fires his beam through his own toes so that he can escape. The fight reportedly causes a tsunami.

The next morning, Gyaos' severed toes are found floating in the bay. They’re taken to a lab for study, by which time they’ve shrunk to a third of their original size. Meanwhile in his cave, Gyaos regrows his toes. The scientists determine that ultraviolet light is harmful to Gyaos and prolonged exposure might kill him. The JSDF devises a new plan to lure Gyaos out by night and hold him in place until sunrise. Because Gyaos apparently has a taste for human blood, they will synthesise an artificial substitute and put an enormous bowl full of the stuff on top of the Hotel Hi-Land near the JSDF HQ. The bowl will be resting on a turntable – when Gyaos lands there, the turntable will spin and the dizzying effect will prevent him from flying away.

Dr Aoki’s team work all day to develop the artificial blood. Meanwhile, the villagers approach Tsutsumi to offer to sell their land but are told the construction work has been halted and the expressway will be rerouted. The trap is finally set and Gyaos is lured out that night by aircraft spraying a mist of the artificial blood. As planned, he’s drawn to the bowl of artificial blood and lands on the turntable, and is pinned in place when it starts spinning. Unfortunately, the motor overloads with only a couple of minutes to go, causing a fire at the local electric substation. The turntable grinds to a halt. As Gyaos regains his balance, he smashes the hotel, sprays his yellow vapor over the fire and flies safely back to his cave.

The villagers angrily confront their local councillor, Kanamura, at his home, complaining that he made them hold out too long on selling their land and demanding that he compensate them. Kanamura happens to be Eiichi’s grandfather. When Eiichi hears all the shouting, he pelts the villagers with his toys and tells them to go away and leave his grandfather alone. He consoles himself by drawing a picture of Gamera, and suggests to his sister that Gamera would sort out the Gyaos problem if they simply called him in by setting the nearby forest on fire. Kanamura overhears this and takes the suggestion to the JSDF, who agree to it. The mountainside is quickly deforested and the logs are doused in gasoline.

JSDF fighters buzz Gyaos’ cave to get his attention shortly before dawn, then set the wood on fire by launching missiles at it. Gyaos is able to put the fire out with his weird yellow powder, but Gamera arrives all the same. The resulting fight ends when Gamera lobs a rock into Gyaos’ mouth to stop him firing his sonic beam, sinks his teeth into his neck and drags him to the top of Mt Fuji. As the sun rises, Gamera drops Gyaos into the volcanic caldera and flies away.

The film ends with a montage of scenes from the three Gamera movies to date, accompanied by a cheery song performed by some kids. (This is not the infamous “Gamera March”, although it could be seen as testing the water for it.)

It’s hard to find insightful things to say about the Shōwa era Gamera movies when, increasingly, their sole purpose is “cash in on the kaiju eiga that have gone before”. (Then again, the same could be said of some of the Godzilla movies covered so far and others still to come.)

Let’s instead ask the question, when’s a good time to get off the Shōwa Gamera train? At what point do these films become too much of a slog to watch? Opinions vary, but I’d say Gamera vs Gyaos is the last truly enjoyable instalment in this series. The filmmakers have clearly decided who their target audience is going to be from now on – move aside, Tsutsumi, Eiichi is indisputably the star character here, a little smartarse who outmanoeuvres a slippery journalist, puts the greedy villagers in their place and holds court in the JSDF’s planning room. But there’s still room around him for at least some of the adult characters to have a bit of dignity and drama. And although Gyaos suffers from the rigidness and cartoonish appearance that will be a hallmark of Gamera’s foes in the rest of the series, he's a lot of fun and his attack on Nagoya is a sustained highlight of the film. He was evidently a hit at the time, since Gamera vs Guiron featured the cameo appearance of a “Space Gyaos” and a reimagined Gyaos would be a core element of the Heisei era Gamera films.

After this point, the series will fall into a predictable formula: two kids, one Japanese and one American, outwit the adults around them and team up with Gamera to defeat a hostile kaiju and save the day. Gamera, rebranded as “the friend of all children”, will turn up and fight purely to defend Earth and humanity, not because he happened to be in the area absorbing energy from a volcano or a power station. The abrasive “Gamera March” will feature prominently on the soundtrack. The kids will tend to be both boys, the sole exception being Gamera vs Zigra. The guest kaiju will tend to be an alien invader, apart from Jiger who’s a “demon beast” unleashed by the removal of an ancient statue from a fictional island.

With a reduced budget for each movie – slashed in half after Gamera vs Gyaos – the series will resort to two methods to cut costs even further. The first and most obvious is the increasing reuse of footage from earlier movies. Gamera vs Gyaos reuses some old footage, as do a number of Godzilla films, but in a way that’s skilful enough that you might not notice unless you already knew to look for it. That’s not true of the later Shōwa Gameras, particularly when monochrome shots from Gamera the Giant Monster (1965) are jarringly dropped into a colour movie or when the script contrives some way to redeploy the lengthy scene of Gamera destroying a dam from Gamera vs Barugon (1966).

The other money-saving measure is for director Yuasa Noriaki to use contemporary events or attractions as a source of cheap crowd scenes or location footage. Gamera vs Viras will benefit from a collaboration with the 4th Nippon Scout Jamboree, under which Yuasa seemingly gains a ready-made background cast of scouts and campground set in return for shooting a short promotional film for the scouts. Gamera vs Jiger will take full advantage, in its setting and plot details, of the preparations being made for Ōsaka to host Expo ’70, the 1970 World’s Fair. Gamera vs Zigra looks very much like a publicity exercise for the then recently opened Kamogawa Sea World.

Why continue to produce these films, with their requirements for new kaiju costumes and effects sequences, if money was so tight? The fact that they had a willing overseas distributor might have been an incentive to keep going, even if it was only American International Television (AIT), the TV department of AIP. The inclusion of an American child co-star in each one, the junior equivalent of Toho casting Nick Adams and Russ Tamblyn in the mid-60s, looks like a ploy to keep the US distributor sweet. But it wasn’t enough to keep Daiei afloat. They’d been suffering cashflow problems despite their rapid turnover of non-kaiju films, and they’d been hit hard by the rise of television and the decline in box office sales during the 1960s. In 1970 they formed a shared domestic distribution company with Nikkatsu, another ailing film production company, in a last-ditch effort to cut costs. Nikkatsu bailed out in late 1971, and by the end of that year Daiei had declared bankruptcy. (Nikkatsu, incidentally, deferred their bankruptcy until the late 1980s by moving into exploitation movies.)

Daiei’s long-running series of films about Zatoichi, the blind itinerant masseur and master swordsman, continued for a while over at Toho Studios, but only because the lead actor had been part-funding the films through his own production company and was consequently able to take the franchise away with him. Everything else went into mothballs until Tokuma Shoten, a publishing company who’d acquired Daiei’s assets, set up a new company called Daiei Film in 1974. Daiei Film’s production output, small and infrequent, would include four Gamera films, one best forgotten and three with a much better reputation.

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)
Toho Studios
Director: Fukuda Jun, Arikawa Sadamasa (special effects, although Tsuburaya Eiji gets the credit on-screen)
Also known as: Godzilla vs the Sea Monster (the US title).

In a remote mountain village, a priestess tells bereaved mother Kane yet again that her son Yata is not in the land of the dead. Yata’s ship was wrecked in the South Seas some time ago, but his body was never found. Distraught (and milking her one scene for all it’s worth), Kane refuses to listen to her naysaying neighbours and insists that Yata’s still alive. She’s sent her other son, Ryota, to demand that the authorities search for him.

Ryota doesn’t have much luck with the local council and has turned to the press instead. (A local radio news report later in the movie suggests this is somewhere near Hayama, in Kanagawa Prefecture.) Waiting in a newspaper office for a journalist to interview him, he sees a flyer advertising an endurance dance marathon. First prize is a yacht. Ryota hurries over to the venue, where the marathon is already in its third day and the number of contestants has dwindled from 300 to 15 (easier on the budget, I suppose). Two of the dancers, Ichino and Nita, drop out as he stands there, staring like a psychopath at the model of the prize yacht. The three of them drive down to the harbour to amuse themselves by looking at the boats tethered there. One, the Yahlen, catches their eye and they sneak on board, only to be surprised by a man with a rifle. This is Yoshimura, who accuses them of trespassing on private property but says they can stay until morning provided they let him get back to sleep. Why he does this is anyone’s guess. Naturally, he regrets it in the morning when it becomes clear that Ryota has commandeered the vessel to search for his brother, and they are now in the middle of the ocean and heading south.

From a local news report on the radio, Ichino and Nita deduce that Yoshimura is not the American owner of the Yahlen (as if the name painted in English on the side weren’t enough of a hint), which has been reported stolen, and that he has in fact committed a recent break-in and theft at a corporate office. Nonetheless, they’re stuck with each other. As the yacht’s supplies run low, they see some strange clouds on the horizon, sail into a storm and are attacked by a gigantic crab claw. The yacht is lost, along with Yoshimura’s briefcase full of stolen money. The four men are washed up onto the rocky shore of an island. They climb further inland in search of food.

At the top of a cliff, they find a cutlass with an ornate hilt, suggesting there might be other people around; they also find a dense forest offering a feast of bananas and orange citrus fruit. On the far coast of the island, they see a flashy modern-looking ship approaching, spraying some sort of yellow substance in its wake. Unable to catch the crew’s attention, they hack and slash their way down towards a dock, patrolled by armed men in uniform and with a scientific compound of some kind behind it. The ship pulls in and unloads a couple of dozen captive Pacific Islanders under armed guard. (Readers of this blog can probably already guess what I’m going to say about the portrayal of these captives: Japanese actors in brownface make-up and “primitive” costume. In a positive departure from previous kaiju eiga, they speak for themselves and do so in fluent Japanese, not in an exoticised way or a made-up pidgin dialect.) A few of the captives make a break for it along the beach and are shot at by pursuing soldiers and from a guard tower. Two of them surprisingly find a canoe in an inlet and set out to sea; the commander of the guards orders a cease fire. The fleeing men are stopped instead by a clawed sea creature, the same one that sank the Yahlen. It smashes the canoe, spears the two fugitives with its claw and submerges again. The islanders still on the dock recognise it as Ebirah.

Ebirah looks like a giant orange-red lobster. (“Ebi” could mean prawn or lobster, although I suspect non-Japanese viewers would be more familiar with its use as “prawn” in the context of sushi.) There’s not really much more to say about it.

While everyone else was watching the men trying to escape, one of the female islanders slipped off in the other direction. The guard commander missed this, but his superior officer, holed up in a high-tech office inside the compound, saw it all on camera and orders a search. The woman runs into the four Japanese men in the jungle, and all of them together evade the armed search party. They take shelter from a sudden thunderstorm inside a cave. Here the men learn that the woman, Dayo, is one of Mothra’s people from Infant Island and that the people who are holding the other Infant Islanders prisoner are called the Red Bamboo. She doesn’t know anything about who the Red Bamboo are or what they want. She also reveals that Ryota’s brother Yata is alive and well on Infant Island.

Dayo prays to Mothra for assistance but believes Mothra is sleeping. In a barred cavern inside the Red Bamboo’s compound we see the captive Infant Islanders also praying and singing. Their guards order them back to their work, which seems to consist of crushing the juice out of industrial quantities of a large, round, yellow fruit. Meanwhile on Infant Island, Mothra’s people sing and dance to try to rouse her. What we see of Infant Island is a dusty outdoor clearing ringed with palm trees, with a small stone altar to Mothra in the middle of it and Mothra herself lying inert beyond that. This is the imago form of Mothra, not an egg or larva, and she looks a bit moth-eaten (pun intended). The Shobijin (although once more, they aren't named as such) stand next to the altar. They’ve been recast! They still wear their hair long, but somewhat more bouffant on top, almost a mini-beehive. They wear long floral dresses and have yellow garlands around their beehives. They have a new song, and this time the lyrics are in Japanese.

Yoshimura suggests finding out more about what the Red Bamboo are up to, and the others are persuaded not to stay behind when they discover Godzilla sleeping in a deeper recess of the cave. They sneak into the Red Bamboo compound at night with the help of Yoshimura’s lockpick and find a nuclear reactor inside. Yoshimura surmises that the Red Bamboo are producing heavy water to make atomic weapons. After a couple of close calls with the guards, Nita is captured and Ryota is caught up in the ropes of a balloon that carries him away, while the other three return to the cave.

Nita is thrown in with the captive Infant Islanders, one of whom explains to him that the juice they’re extracting from the yellow fruit acts as a deterrent to Ebirah. This is why the Red Bamboo want more of it produced, and why their ships spray it around as they enter and leave the island harbour. Nita suggests sabotaging their plans by replacing the juice with a dummy batch made only from the leaves of the fruit.

Meanwhile, the balloon has safely carried Ryota all the way to Infant Island. He lands in the middle of a reprise of the earlier song and dance and is reunited with his brother. Yata hasn’t heard about the Red Bamboo (doesn’t he know anything about the abductions?) but the Shobijin describe them as the enemy, operating from their base on Letchi Island. (Is this perhaps meant to suggest “Litchi” or “Lychee”, in reference to the island’s unusual fruits? I admit that that’s a stretch. It could legitimately be rendered as “Retchi”, maybe suggesting to Anglo ears that it’s a wretched place. The American dub gives it the more straightforward name of “Devil's Island”.) Yata and Ryota propose to return to Letchi Island and fight to free the Infant Islanders. The Shobijin send them off with a supply of the yellow fruit juice, which they just happen to have to hand, and tell them to make a large net once they’ve got the islanders clear of the Red Bamboo compound – they’ll find out why when the time comes.

The Red Bamboo soldiers resume their search of Letchi Island for the fugitives. As they close in on the cave, Ichino suggests giving Godzilla a jolt of electricity, using the cutlass they found earlier as a jury-rigged lightning conductor. They know he’s just sleeping and not dead because they can hear his heartbeat (although it doesn't seem as deep or slow as one might expect). After three days of waiting, a storm brews up and wakes Godzilla as planned. This is right around the time Ryota and Yata are nearing the island, and their yellow fruit juice is knocked overboard by the storm, leaving them at the mercy of Ebirah. Fortunately for them, Godzilla and Ebirah are distracted by each other and fight. This first kaiju fight involves some comedic business with large rocks being batted back and forth, before the two monsters tussle in earnest and Godzilla eventually scares Ebirah away. During the fight, a stray rock alerts the Red Bamboo to Godzilla’s presence. They contact their headquarters and ask them to send in the air force.

Godzilla looks a bit like he did in Mothra vs Godzilla (1964), with large, round eyes, a broad, soft mouth and a puffy upper lip. He looks a bit froggy, to be honest – some commentators have suggested that he looks like Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster. His radioactive breath is a bit more misty than usual.

Yata and Ryota find the others in the jungle and lead them on a reckless expedition to the Red Bamboo compound. As they scatter with guards in pursuit, Dayo is cornered by Godzilla, who is now wandering around the clifftops. He takes an apparently benevolent interest in her and settles down in front of her. Just as he’s nodding off and the others are about to run in and rescue Dayo, an enormous bird swoops onto the scene. (Toho refers to this creature as the Giant Condor, although honestly it looks more like a ginger buzzard.) It viciously attacks Godzilla and is swiftly roasted for its trouble. It’s soon followed, however, by the Red Bamboo’s fighter planes. (Online sources suggest these are specifically Shenyang J-6 jets, a type used by the Chinese military, although they could plausibly be knock-offs or stolen.) Our heroes escape as Godzilla swats away the jets. He’s next seen stomping towards the Red Bamboo compound. Conventional artillery doesn’t deter him, although a high voltage electric fence does give him pause (which is in keeping with his previous films but makes his earlier revival by electricity seem even stranger). He soon smashes his way through, prompting the Red Bamboo officers to set the nuclear reactor to self-destruct and evacuate the island. Yata rushes into the compound and is able to free Nita and the captive Infant Islanders.

Stocked up with the false fruit juice, the Red Bamboo ship is unable to elude Ebirah and is quickly destroyed. Godzilla spots Ebirah and is eager for a rematch, which ends when he pulls off Ebirah’s claws. He tauntingly clacks one of the claws as Ebirah swims away. Meanwhile, after a lot more chanting and dancing back on Infant Island, Mothra has finally woken up and is flying to Letchi Island. (And on a small side note, this hardly feels like enough effort to earn Mothra the equal billing she gets with Godzilla and Ebirah in the film’s original Japanese title.) As instructed, the freed islanders have constructed a large raft suspended in netting. Godzilla wades ashore in order to attack Mothra, but Mothra fends him off not just by flapping her wings at him but by actually barging her wing into his chest. She picks up the net and carries the humans off the island. Godzilla jumps into the sea just before the Red Bamboo’s reactor blows up and destroys the island. The survivors are delighted to see that Godzilla also got away, since he helped them defeat the villains.

Actor-watch first. Yoshimura, the criminal with a heart of gold, is played by Takarada Akira, most recently seen as the lead Japanese astronaut in Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965). Tazaki Jun, the Red Bamboo leader, was also in Astro-Monster playing Takarada’s boss and was in charge of the JSDF forces in The War of the Gargantuas (1966). The Red Bamboo guard commander is played by Hirata Akihiko, the eyepatch-wearing Dr Serizawa in Godzilla (1954) – and he’s even wearing an eyepatch in this movie! Dayo, the Infant Islander with the highest billing, is played by Mizuno Kumi, who seems to just pop up in everything around this time.

When discussing Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), I mentioned the geopolitical interpretations some commentators have made about the Godzilla movies and that I felt there was plausible deniability around Ghidorah being some kind of stand-in for China. I don’t think there’s that deniability in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. I mean, the name “Red Bamboo” is a bit of a giveaway. It’s never stated outright whether the villains of this movie are supposed to be actually Chinese or some kind of terrorist organisation, but they do have a very convincing military uniform as well as a navy and an air force, and that air force is flying Chinese fighter jets or a very close approximation. The Red Bamboo also have an active nuclear weapons programme, which might not be beyond the kind of villainous organisation you might find in a James Bond movie around this time but was certainly true of China, who’d been testing fission bombs since October 1964. What’s more, Chairman Mao had launched the Cultural Revolution seven months before this movie was released, which might have ramped up Japanese anxiety about the militancy of the Chinese Communist Party.

Relations between Japan and China would eventually be eased somewhat by the “Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and China” signed in 1978, two years after Mao’s death.

The other big thing to say about Ebirah, which is fairly well known already, is that this started out as a King Kong movie. Getting the rights to Kong now involved talking to Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment, who were developing a King Kong cartoon series that would premiere on American TV in September 1966, and in Japan in the same month as Ebirah’s cinematic release. The tie-in potential was obvious. (Funnily enough, the animation for The King Kong Show (1966-67) was created by the animation wing of one of Toho’s rivals, Toei Company Ltd.) But The King Kong Show, which was similar to but not as polished as Hanna-Barbera’s later animated Godzilla (1978-79), included some distinctive original elements that didn’t mesh neatly enough with the proposed script for Ebirah. Rankin/Bass objected, so Kong was replaced with Godzilla. Toho would go on to make King Kong Escapes (1967), which actively used a couple of those elements from the animated series.

And it’s not hard to spot the joins. Godzilla can usually be found in the sea, not sleeping in a cave. That one of the characters suggests reviving him with electricity, and that this works, is in line with minor plot elements of King Kong v Godzilla (1962) even if it has no precedent in the American Kong canon. Once again the plot involves some sort of fruit juice that sedates kaiju, yellow instead of red this time (although, then again, magical juice also featured in Mothra (1961)). Shots of Godzilla picking up boulders and lobbing them at Ebirah or at parts of the Red Bamboo compound make more sense when you imagine Kong doing it. Godzilla calms down and stares doe-eyed at Dayo in exactly the way Kong would, and exactly the way Godzilla generally doesn’t.

That Godzilla is more heroic than usual here, that he seems to take at least some interest in the different human factions on the island, that he’s so humanly expressive and that the kaiju fights look so much like choreographed wrestling matches doesn’t necessarily add to the list of anomalies. Yes, these are all things that would have suited a Kong movie, but they’re also somewhat true of Godzilla in Invasion of Astro-Monster. Perhaps we might say that Astro-Monster, fortuitously in hindsight, laid some of the groundwork for Godzilla’s shift in personality here.

Ebirah is a movie that seems targeted at a youth audience, as distinct from the child audience subsequent movies are evidently aiming for. There’s all that surf rock in the incidental music for a start, as well as the dancing endurance contest early on. I think our heroes suggest the age bracket the filmmakers might have been aiming for. What fashion there is consists of the young men’s polo shirts and brightly coloured jackets (terrible camouflage when trying to hide from foreign soldiers, by the way) and the hairdos and dresses the Shobijin are wearing, which wouldn’t have looked at all out of place in a contemporary domestic scene in any other Toho movie.

That later Godzilla movies didn’t continue to chase this audience but went instead, and with some blatancy, for younger cinemagoers could be partly a response to the Gamera movies. Daiei had made a bid to break into the kaiju market and enjoyed some success with child viewers, and Toho would certainly have wanted to compete. But their biggest domestic rival wasn’t Daiei – it was their own expert special effects director.

Tsuburaya Eiji is still credited on Ebirah, but he didn’t oversee its tokusatsu sequences himself – he was already halfway out the door and building up his own TV production company. He’d founded Tsuburaya Productions in 1963 as an independent effects company, and in 1966 the in-house productions started in earnest. Ultra Q (1966), which might be thought of as a kind of kaiju-heavy Japanese precursor to The X-Files (1993-2002), aired across the first half of 1966, and Ultraman (original series 1966-67) debuted in the second half of the year. The anthology nature of these shows and the rapid turnaround of TV production meant that Tsuburaya could quickly test and iterate new effects techniques. And if something didn’t work, the viewers at home would soon forget about it and there’d be something different on screen a week later. Kids hungry for novelty could now get their fix of slambang monster violence at home on TV practically every week, so the film studios would have to work harder to get their attention and, through pester power, their parents’ ticket money.

Ultraman was a massive success – there’s been a new Ultraman series or special on Japanese TV in more of the 58 years since than not, and inevitably it spawned some very successful imitators. Toei Company Ltd enjoyed great success with their Kamen Rider (original series 1971-73) and Super Sentai (original series 1975-77) franchises. Toho would be hard pressed to keep up.

The War of the Gargantuas

The War of the Gargantuas (1966)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)
Also discussed: Frankenstein vs Baragon (1965) (a.k.a. Frankenstein Conquers the World, the fantastically inaccurate US title).

On a stormy night, a Japanese fishing boat is attacked by an octopus as large as the boat itself. (This one’s a kaiju effect, not a real octopus matted onto the action like in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962).) The crew are saved by something large, hairy and apelike that emerges from the water and fights off the octopus. Their relief is short-lived, however, because the creature immediately turns on them.

We cut to a hospital room where the sole surviving crew member is being tended to. A delegation from the Yokosuka Maritime Safety Agency pushes into the room and tries to harass the patient for information, but he tells them that Frankenstein sank the ship and picked off the other four crew as they tried to swim for shore. The officials are sceptical, although not for the reasons we might expect, as we’ll shortly discover. They send divers down to search for signs of the missing crew members, and recover several sets of torn, bloodied clothes. It looks like the crew have been eaten. The maritime agency phones Dr Paul Stewart, an American scientist based in Kyoto and the number one authority on the subject of Frankenstein.

“Frankenstein” in this case refers to a hairy, humanoid creature Dr Stewart and his team discovered and brought back to their lab some years earlier. In a flashback, we’re shown a scene of Stewart and his colleagues Akemi and Mamiya simultaneously studying and hand-rearing the child-sized Frankenstein, which looks like a tiny ginger Yeti, or perhaps the Orang Pendek of Indonesian folklore. Frankenstein later ran away, grew to enormous size and died at Mt Fuji in an incident not detailed here. In conversation with the maritime agency, and then with a gaggle of journalists that invades his office immediately after, Stewart agrees that Frankenstein could have come back to life – he’d died and come back a couple of times before that Stewart knows of – but denies that there’s any chance he would be living in the sea or preying on human beings.

After another couple of coastal attacks, we get our first good look at the creature in daylight. It has a somewhat lumpy head, muddy green-grey hair all over its body with an abundant thatch on its head, and large, protruding teeth. The press and public continue to speculate that the creature is Frankenstein. Stewart thinks it more likely Frankenstein would be living in the mountains than the sea, and has received photos of large humanoid footprints found in the Japanese Alps. He and Akemi go off to investigate that while Mamiya investigates the salvaged wreck of a ship. Mamiya finds an organic substance on the wreck which, when analysed, proves to have the same cellular structure that Frankenstein had.

The creature is next seen at the coastal Haneda Airport, panicking passengers waiting in the terminal building, causing flights not to land, snatching an airport employee from the admin building and eating her. It’s an overcast day, and when the clouds clear briefly, the creature startles and runs back into the sea. This gives Mamiya the idea that it might have an aversion to light. Stewart, Akemi and Mamiya meet up and travel to an emergency conference in Tokyo to discuss the situation, although the scientists still insist the creature can’t be Frankenstein. The JSDF plan to deploy an electric barrier along the shoreline to stop the creature coming ashore.

They obviously don’t manage to get the barrier up in time, because the creature comes ashore anyway that night. It closes in on an open-air restaurant, possibly drawn to it by the sound of the singer performing there. (Yes, this film has a musical interlude.) It snatches up the singer, but the restaurant staff turn on all the lights, which startles the creature into dropping the singer and running away. As it makes its way into the mountains, the people living in the area light bonfires and evacuate. The JSDF deploys tanks to attack the creature. Conventional guns, mortars and artillery fire set its fur alight and enrage it – the troops retreat as the creature picks up the tanks and throws them into nearby houses.

The next day, the JSDF flies in more troops and begins to set up for Operation L, a plan to capture the creature. Lured into a prepared trap by low-flying helicopters that night, the creature is bombarded with beams from flatbed-mounted Maser Cannons (these look a lot like the fantasy weapons seen in Mothra (1961) and Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)). The JSDF have also electrified a nearby river, cutting off the creature’s probable line of retreat. Just as they seem to have the upper hand, a second creature with orange-brown hair appears on the scene. When Stewart and Akemi hear about this, they guess that this ginger giant must be their own Frankenstein. Frankenstein pulls the hostile creature to its feet and escorts it away. He seems to actually be waving the JSDF troops back as he does this. The Ministry of Defence announces later that it’s designated the green-haired sea creature Gaira and the brown-haired mountain dweller Sanda.

The three scientists scour the ruined mountain forest for tissue samples the next day. They recover material from both creatures, and lab analysis shows that the pair have identical cells. Stewart hypothesises that Sanda must have been wounded during his previous escapade and that Gaira, an entire second Frankenstein, grew from the tissue he lost at that time – one of Frankenstein’s defining features was his remarkable regenerative ability. Sanda clearly still has the gentle disposition the scientists were expecting, but Gaira has grown up untamed and violent. What worries Stewart most of all is the possibility that, if either creature is wounded by the JSDF, they might shed more tissue samples that could grow into more wild creatures.

Meanwhile, Sanda and Gaira have retreated to a lake near Mt Fuji where Gaira can lick his wounds and the pair can hide from patrolling helicopters. Completely unconcerned as long as there’s bright sunshine, hikers continue to wander about the area, as do Akemi and Stewart. A pleasant afternoon is ruined when a bank of mist rolls in and Gaira chases after the hikers. In the rush to escape, Akemi slips into a ravine and is left clinging onto a protruding tree root. As she loses her grip and falls towards the river below, she’s caught by Sanda, who returns her to the path above where Stewart is waiting. Sanda limps away, having hurt his leg when he scrambled down into the ravine. The JSDF now plans to napalm the forest as well as electrify the lake, in order to kill both creatures. They’re not against using chemical weapons to prevent the regenerative cells from splitting off and creating more creatures.

Sanda finds Gaira sleeping off his most recent meal, which has clearly consisted of several unlucky hikers. Appalled, Sanda uproots a tree and beats Gaira with it. There’s a brief scuffle and Gaira runs off back to the sea, leaving the limping Sanda behind. As he charges through the settlements at the foot of Mt Fuji, the scientists and soldiers realise he doesn’t seem to be afraid of fire any more. He also now seems to understand that where there are electric lights, there might be food.

Stewart still hopes to capture Sanda and keep him confined for further study, but the JSDF are determined to destroy both creatures. Gaira returns to Tokyo and Sanda closes in on him. The JSDF advise civilians to hide in the subway as they roll in the tanks and Maser Cannons. Akemi and Stewart head out to try to find Sanda and steer him away from danger, but they’re soon cornered in a subway entrance by Gaira. Sanda appears in time to save Akemi from being eaten and attempts to communicate with Gaira in a form of sign language. Gaira isn’t interested, and they resume their fighting. The JSDF attacks Gaira with tanks and then, as the two creatures move towards the coast, with Maser Cannons. Sanda and Gaira fall into Tokyo Bay and, wrestling all the way, eventually swim out to sea. Helicopters bomb the pair as they fight in the open water. Unexpectedly, the bombs trigger an underwater volcanic eruption, with Sanda and Gaira caught at the centre of the smoke and falling rocks. A little later, Mamiya reunites with Stewart and Akemi and tells them that, although no one can confirm anything, it’s assumed that Sanda and Gaira died in the eruption.

When is a sequel not a sequel?

The War of the Gargantuas both is and is not a sequel to the previous year’s Frankenstein vs Baragon. (Note: that’s the Toho kaiju Baragon, not to be confused with the Daiei kaiju Barugon, who clashed with Gamera in 1966.) This probably wasn’t anything to do with the “King Kong vs Frankenstein" script treatment that had led to the production of King Kong vs Godzilla – there seem to have been multiple Frankenstein-themed ideas knocking about at Toho in the mid-1960s. Without wanting to get into the full blow-by-blow detail of it, here’s the gist of the earlier movie:

Towards the end of World War Two, an object makes its way out of Nazi Germany, from a U-Boat onto an Imperial Japanese submarine and into the hands of an unscrupulous scientist in Hiroshima. That object is the still-living heart of Frankenstein’s Creature. You read that right the first time. It has supernatural regenerative properties, and the scientist is hoping to use it to engineer an army of immortal Imperial super-soldiers. Before he can start on that, the Enola Gay drops the “Little Boy” atomic bomb and destroys his lab, along with roughly three quarters of the rest of the city.

Some 15 years later, American scientist Dr James Bowen is studying the effects of exposure to radiation in Hiroshima with his colleagues Sueko and Kawaji. They both witness and are given reports of a feral male child in the area, which they capture and take back to their lab for study. They learn the history of Frankenstein’s Creature’s heart – implausibly, one of the Japanese submarine officers and the former Nazi scientist who provided the heart are still alive, at liberty and readily available for interview – and conclude that the heart has regrown an entire body for itself, namely the child in their lab. He’s immune to the harmful effects of radiation, has a prodigious appetite and is rapidly growing all the time. Dubbed “Frankenstein” by the press, the now giant-sized child escapes back into the wild.

Meanwhile, a kaiju referred to as Baragon is popping up around the countryside, levelling villages and eating the inhabitants. Baragon is a quadripedal, reptilian, burrowing creature with a single large horn on its head and a pair of large, floppy ears. Frankenstein is initially blamed for the attacks, but ends up confronting Baragon himself to protect his human friends. The two fight near Mt Fuji and, as an earthquake suddenly strikes and opens up a sinkhole beneath them, both fall in.

Gargantuas makes frequent references to this earlier film, yet makes some surprising revisions. The three main scientist characters are renamed and, with the exception of the female scientist and romantic lead, recast. Dr Bowen in Frankenstein vs Baragon was played by Nick Adams, who went on to star in Invasion of Astro-Monster later that year. There’s no obvious reason why he couldn’t have appeared in Gargantuas – he was in Japan and available, and he’d work for Toho again in a 1967 spy thriller. Instead he was replaced by Russ Tamblyn, the Mercutio substitute in West Side Story (1961) and Luke in The Haunting (1963), as Dr Stewart. To date, this is the only Japanese film Tamblyn has acted in. Like Adams, he was recorded speaking in English and then dubbed over by a Japanese actor. Mizuno Kumi, the semi-villainous Namikawa in Invasion of Astro-Monster, played both Sueko in Frankenstein and Akemi in Gargantuas. Dr Kawaji, played by Takashima Tadao (Sakurai in King Kong vs Godzilla) was replaced with Dr Mamiya, played by Sahara Kenji, who’d been a hero in Rodan (1956), a villain in Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) and, funnily enough, a bit-part lab assistant in Frankenstein vs Baragon.

In order to show a flashback scene of the scientists working with the young Frankenstein, the film-makers are thus obliged to reshoot it with their new scientists, and they take the opportunity to recast the monster as well. The 1965 Frankenstein was a fairly ordinary looking boy with an extremely pronounced brow, presumably meant to evoke Boris Karloff’s squared-off monster head but looking more like a depiction of a Neanderthal. The 1966 Frankenstein, later renamed Sanda, looks much hairier and more animalistic, in line with the realisation of the adult Sanda and Gaira. The overall effect of these changes, together with the vague callbacks to key events from the earlier movie, is to make Gargantuas seem like a sequel not to the movie itself, but to some approximated half-remembered version of it, perhaps a version Toho wished they had made in hindsight. The American dub increases the distance between the two movies by replacing all mentions of Frankenstein with the word "Gargantua", including in the title (which, translated from the original Japanese, would have been “Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs Gaira”). Toho have happily adopted the American dub title as their preferred Anglo title for this movie.

I think the most notable thing about this revisionism is that it erases any suggestion that the boy Frankenstein was made possible by the wartime collaboration of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, which is never hinted at Gargantuas. I’m not sure which is more remarkable, that a 1965 Japanese film would make explicit reference to this bit of history or that a 1966 film would so suddenly pretend not to have been listening, and I’m not aware of any major developments in either year that would explain these choices.

Considering Gargantuas on its own terms, the pacing’s very leisurely but the presentation is a success. The early scenes featuring Gaira are kept quite dark, which allows for some effective menace to start with and a big reveal around the 15-minute mark. And there are definite advantages to using humanoid costumes instead of animalistic ones in kaiju eiga, as Daiei’s Daimajin movies also show. You’re not asking your stunt actor to move in an awkward, unnaturalistic way. Seeing a 1960s kaiju actually run, as Gaira does, is an astonishing thing. It’s easier for the audience to suspend disbelief in a monster that looks like a person in a costume when it’s actually supposed to move like a person. (Incidentally, I think this might be part of the reason for the success of Godzilla and King Kong, both bipedal kaiju, in the days before CGI.) If your monster doesn’t have a tail or wings, you don’t need extra puppeteers to move those things around convincingly. You can use the expressiveness of the actor’s own eyes, perhaps even more of their face (although Sanda and Gaira’s big, protruding teeth hinder more than help), instead of having to rely on close-up shots of puppet heads or, if you’re lucky, animatronics. You might even end up with a lighter, more streamlined costume than the typical daikaiju, something that isn’t so likely to have your stunt actor fainting under those hot studio lights. When Sanda and Gaira fight, it doesn’t look like a carefully choreographed bout between two men in heavy costumes, it looks like full-on wrestling.

The human drama is a bit lacking, but who cares about that, eh?

Sanda and Gaira will be referenced in at least one Godzilla movie (just when you least expect it!) but probably this film’s greatest legacy to Toho’s kaiju eiga is the introduction of the Maser Cannons. These will end up being the fantasy JSDF’s anti-Godzilla weapon of choice in years to come.

Gamera vs Barugon

Gamera vs Barugon (1966)
Daiei Motion Picture Company
Director: Tanaka Shigeo, Yuasa Noriaki (special effects)
Also known as: War of the Monsters (the American title).

The film opens with a voiceover recap of Gamera the Giant Monster (1965), which ended with Gamera being launched towards Mars on board the Z-Plan rocket. This was six months ago, since when a meteor collided with the rocket and released Gamera, who returned to Earth. (Presumably this means Gamera was three months towards Mars when the meteor hit and he flew three months back again. It’s nice to see a genre film making a plausible estimate of interplanetary travel times – NASA currently reckons it would take them nine months to send a crewed ship to Mars.) Gamera’s first stop is the Kurobe Dam in Japan. He destroys the hydroelectric plant next to the dam, feeding on the ensuing fire, then batters the dam down and floods the surrounding area. He then flies off to bask in the heat of a volcanic eruption south of the equator. (All of this is narrated by the mysterious voiceover, which will be back again later in the movie to fill in the occasional montage or other lull in the plot.)

Meanwhile in Osaka, Hirata Keisuke resigns his job as a commercial pilot so that he can join his brother Ichiro’s expedition to New Guinea. Ichiro was injured in the Second World War, so he won’t be going to New Guinea and is instead sending his friends Onodera and Kawajiri with his brother. Although it isn’t explicitly stated what Ichiro does for a living, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that he and his pals are gangsters, because they have ready access to handguns and grenades, which they’ll be taking on the expedition. (“You never know what’ll happen in that jungle”, says Ichiro, although the example he gives is highly venomous scorpions, against which grenades feel like a disproportionate response.) What they’re looking for is an enormous opal Ichiro found on the island during the war and left hidden in a cave. Keisuke will be needed for his skills as a pilot. The three set sail as crewmen aboard the Awaji Maru.

When they arrive at New Guinea, Keisuke brings the team ashore in a helicopter. They land in a small village where they interrupt one of those exotic “native” dances (which is, sadly and all too predictably, being performed by a lot of blacked-up Japanese actors). They inspect the symbols carved on an obelisk in the clearing while the suspicious villagers close in around them. Just when it looks like things are about to turn nasty, Dr Matsushita and his assistant Karen turn up. Matsushita is a Japanese physician who lives in the village and gives medical aid to the villagers, helped by Karen, who’s a local but speaks Japanese. The expeditionary team say that they’re looking for something hidden in the jungle, and Karen warns them not to go into what she calls the Valley of Rainbows. The carvings on the obelisk apparently tell of the great danger that waits there. The trio ignore the warning, firing into the air to keep the villagers back, and run into the valley despite Karen’s pleas.

Following an interlude with some quicksand, the three reach the cave where Ichiro hid the opal. They soon find it, wrapped in a cloth and tucked underneath a pile of rocks. Kawajiri starts dancing around and shouting about how rich they’re all going to be and is promptly stung by one of those venomous scorpions. Onodera, who could have warned Kawajiri but didn’t, also takes his time fetching the first aid kit while Keisuke tries to treat the wound, and Kawajiri dies in agony. While Keisuke lingers over Kawajiri’s body, Onodera makes for the exit with the opal and throws a hand grenade behind him, apparently burying Keisuke in rubble. Onodera heads back through the jungle to the Awaji Maru.

Keisuke wakes up some time later in Matsushita’s clinic. There’s a fair bit of noise going on outside – it turns out the villagers are fearfully appeasing their gods. Karen enters and confronts him about stealing something from the cave, although she’s surprised when he talks about an opal. Matsushita apparently knows something about the “opal”, although as yet neither he nor Karen will explain what it actually is. Karen drops broad hints about it causing misery. She persuades Keisuke to take her to Japan so that together they can warn everyone about the danger.

In the meantime, Onodera is sailing back to Japan aboard the Awaji Maru and supposedly recovering from malaria. He’s also using an infrared lamp to treat a case of athlete’s foot he picked up in the jungle. As the ship approaches its destination, he’s invited to make up the numbers for a game of mah jong among the crew. He leaves the opal in his jacket pocket underneath the infrared lamp, which he’s carelessly left switched on. Unattended, the opal begins to glow, burns its way through the coat, then bubbles and cracks open. A small reptilian creature breaks free from the shell, and shortly after that the ship starts to break apart. The survivors are brought ashore; Ichiro finds Onodera and asks him about the mission. Onodera tells Ichiro that he got the opal, but Kawajiri and Keisuke fell off a cliff. Although he believes the opal was lost when the Awaji Maru sank, he suggests they can hire divers to retrieve it from the harbour floor. It’s at this point that a much larger reptilian creature wades out of the water and starts smashing the buildings in the area.

We will later learn that this creature is called Barugon. Barugon has a very large, wide mouth, a large horn on his head and spines along his back. He’s quadrupedal. He has a prehensile tongue that he uses to topple a light-tower; his spines light up when he does this. He has other unusual abilities, which will shortly be revealed.

Later, in Ichiro's apartment in Osaka, Ichiro and Onodera plan their next move. Ichiro’s wife Sadae relays the news that the monster’s heading their way and wants to leave now. Onodera accidentally lets slip that he killed Kawajiri and Keisuke, and Ichiro attacks him with his crutch while Sadae tries to stop the men fighting. Onodera overpowers them both and leaves them trapped in the apartment, where they’re killed by Barugon.

The military are powerless to stop Barugon with tanks and artillery. He fires a mist from the end of his tongue which freezes tanks, buildings and aircraft on contact. When the JSDF prepare to launch missiles against him, he fires a rainbow out of his back that destroys the missiles. Again, his spines light up when he does this. As Barugon approaches Osaka Castle, Gamera is attracted by his rainbow ray and flies overhead, apparently trying but finding it difficult to absorb the energy. While the citizenry huddle in underground shelters, the daikaiju fight. Although Gamera draws blood (and in case you were wondering, Barugon’s blood is purple), Barugon wins the fight by tipping Gamera onto his back and freezing him solid with the mist from his tongue.

When Keisuke and Karen land in Japan, they see a TV report about the fight, and it’s now that Karen names Barugon. She says they are too late but also that Barugon has a weakness. After a brief confrontation with Onodera, they contact the JSDF so that Karen can tell them what she knows. She reveals that Barugon disintegrates if he’s submerged in water and finds shiny things irresistible. In the past, the people of her village would lure Barugon’s kind to their deaths by dropping large diamonds into the ocean; the Barugons would be compelled to follow, and the water would kill them. As luck would have it, she’s carrying a diamond the size of a grapefruit with her right now. The JSDF develops a plan to drop the enormous gem into Lake Biwa. They also announce the plan on the radio, so Onodera finds out about it.

The JSDF lowers the diamond from a helicopter and flies it about in front of Barugon, but he isn’t interested. The plan is a failure, but when a Dr Sato arrives at the countermeasures HQ and relays the detail that Barugon's egg was incubated by an infrared light, Karen realises this Barugon is different from those of the past. He’s supposed to take 10 years to hatch, for one thing, so the infrared has clearly affected his development. Karen suggests the diamond’s sparkle will need to be magnified somehow to get his attention. The JSDF stalls Barugon by spraying him with water. By firing an experimental ruby laser through the diamond, they’re finally able to lure Barugon to Lake Biwa. Here they transfer the laser set-up from their truck onto a boat.

Rather than allow another huge precious stone to elude him, Onodera races to the lake, commandeers a boat and rides out to hijack the JSDF boat. He manages to grab the diamond and escape with it, but Barugon follows him and swallows him and the diamond. Everyone retreats and the JSDF reverts to spraying Barugon with water to keep him contained.

Despondent, Keisuke and Karen mooch around the remains of the missile launchers Barugon destroyed earlier. Keisuke notices by chance that the vehicle’s wing and rear-view mirrors were left untouched by the rainbow beam. This suggests another possible vulnerability. Keisuke suggests that the JSDF build a large parabolic mirror to reflect Barugon's rainbow beam back at him. They do this and get Barugon’s attention by firing some tanks at him by remote control. Sure enough, when Barugon fires back, the mirror reflects his beam and gives him a nasty burn. However, the wound isn’t fatal and Barugon is smart enough not to fall for the same trick again. Just as all seems lost, Gamera finally thaws out and flies over from Osaka. There’s another fight in and around Lake Biwa, during which Gamera realizes that water harms Barugon. He holds Barugon under the water until the beast dissolves into a mass of purple blood, firing out one last feeble rainbow beam as he goes, then flies away. It’s strongly hinted that Karen and Keisuke will shack up together back in New Guinea.

Of all the Shōwa era Gamera movies, this one’s the looker – filmed in colour and with twice the budget Gamera the Giant Monster had. It’s still only about half of what Toho were spending on their Godzilla movies around this time, though. And it’s all downhill from here – there’s a 25% drop in the budget for the third Gamera movie, and films four through seven only get half as much as that. There are reasons for both the declining budgets and the continued spending, but we’ll come back to those.

The money’s been well spent on effects, including a very nice scene of a dam breaking and flooding out the surrounding area in miniature. (It’s such a good scene, it will be cut into film after film later in the series when the funds run out.) The kaiju costumes aren’t terrific, but they’re mitigated by some good models and other effects. Barugon’s freezing mist and rainbow beam add a bit of visual interest and the egg hatching effects make for a satisfying set piece. A lot of the credit belongs to Yuasa Noriaki, who was shunted from the role of main director to SFX director to make room for incoming star director Tanaka Shigeo. Yuasa would shoulder both roles for subsequent Gamera movies.

There’s not much opportunity to play Spot the Actor in Daiei’s smaller kaiju eiga oeuvre, but two of the stars here might be familiar. Hongō Kōjirō, playing Keisuke, was formerly the driven young hero Shaki in Whale God (1962) and will reappear in heroic roles as the male lead in Return of Daimajin (1966), the construction site foreman Tsutsumi in Gamera vs Gyaos (1967) and a scoutmaster in Gamera vs Viras (1968). Karen is played by Enami Kyōko, who acted opposite Hongō in Whale God as the village chief’s daughter Toyo; this is her only Gamera movie appearance. She went on to star in Daiei’s “Gambling Woman” series of crime movies – 17 films produced in just five years (1966-71), many of them directed by Tanaka Shigeo. Her prolific acting career continued until her death in 2018.

The plot of Gamera vs Barugon is pure pulp and contains more than its share of nonsense. Barugon can be killed by being submerged in water, but we saw him wading ashore from a wrecked ship in Kobe harbour with no problem at all. His egg is supposed to take 10 years to hatch, and it’s a plot point that Onodera’s infrared lamp supercharged it somehow, yet it sat inactive in its natural habitat for 20 years. Just as implausible is the fact that Karen flies into Japan with a diamond as big as a tortoise in her pocket, which seemingly didn’t cause any problems with the airport customs officials. At least some effort is still being made to rationalise Gamera’s behaviour as seeking out energy sources, so it’s not a total coincidence that he runs into the beam-emitting Barugon, but it is all a bit perfunctory. The whole script smacks of the back of a napkin on a Friday afternoon in the bar.

Gamera vs Barugon was picked up for release in the US by American International Pictures, who had also acquired Daimajin (1966) and, prior to that, an assortment of Toho kaiju eiga including Mothra vs Godzilla (1964). However, while AIP gave Godzilla a cinematic release, they syndicated the Daiei movies through their television arm, AIT, instead. Daiei seemed happy enough to have found an American market for their turtle tokusatsu and pressed on with the next one. But Daiei was about to run into financial problems. I don’t know if it was a desire to compete with Toho, or to hold onto an overseas source of revenue, or both that kept them producing Gamera movies. As cheap as the Gamera series might have been compared to the competition, it wasn’t as good for the cash flow as Daiei’s jidaigeki and crime thriller series – one tokusatsu film a year means a less regular source of income, and less of it, than four or five a year with no expensive special effects. Whatever the case, the success of Gamera vs Barugon wasn’t the blessing it might have seemed at the time.