Review of Gammera the Invincible

"Gammera, the Invincible*" was Daiei Studio's chelonid answer to Toho Studio's popular Godzilla series. The film was targeted at a younger audience than contemporaneous Godzilla movies and one of the main characters is a young, turtle-loving boy. The monster design is on par with the late Showa-era Godzilla characters, although making a turtle look menacing is challenging. The film opens with the accidental detonation of a nuclear bomb, which releases Gamera from his 200,000,000 year icy hibernation. This is a one-monster-show, so most of the action revolves the shelled-kaiju's destruction of cities and power plants, and the JDF's various fruitless attempts to destroy him. The dubbed version I watched had a lot of tedious, cheap-looking English footage added (including, among others, Brian Donlevy), primarily cold-war tinged discussions about what to do about the situation). In keeping with his later appearances, Gamera is child-friendly, catching young Toshio (Yoshiro Uchida) when he falls from his lighthouse home (unfortunately, as the kid turns out to be an incredibly annoying character). Even by Showa-era kaiju films, the 'science' that explains Gamera's evolutionary history and current existence is ridiculous, as is the cunning plan devised to get rid of him. While silly, the black-and-white film is much more somber than later entries in the series (noticeably absent is the cheerily infectious "Gamera theme") and resembles the original Godzilla (1954) in style (although the Toho film is substantially better). Some of the matte scenes are reasonably well done, as are the miniatures (esp. the thermoelectric plant), but the gigantic, tusked, bipedal, flying turtle pretty much strains 'suspension of disbelief' beyond the breaking point. Kaiju fans will want to include the towering turtle's debut on their life lists but other than fans of 'camp' (who will probably prefer the MST3K annotated version), I can't imagine a modern audience showing much interest in the movie (although the Japanese version may be better that the 'westernised' version I watched). *The American title of the film seems to be the only instance of the "Gammera" spelling.