Okay. So the last Gamera movie wasn’t great. It had its moments, but overall, it was a significant step down. Hopefully it was just a misstep. Surely ‘Gamera VS Guiron‘ won’t be worse, right?
R-right?
In the vast reaches of the universe, a distant star comes under trouble. A spaceship lands in Japan, catching the eyes of three curious kids. When they accidentally take it into space, they’re launched to another planet dominated by kaiju! Now it’s up to Gamera to find the kids and bring them home!
Once again, our two leading characters are a pair Japanese and American boys. Unlike the previous film, however, these two are so unbelievably boring that I couldn’t even be bothered to learn their names. At least in ‘Gamera VS Viras‘ they had little gadgets and they were pranksters; they weren’t much, but they had something. These two have a toy pistol, and they’re brain-dead morons. That’s all we’ve got to work with.
You might think I’m being too mean with my ‘brain-dead morons’ comment. But how else can I describe it? During their thrilling ‘escape’, the two disassemble a bit of alien tech, and instead of just using the opportunity to run away, they sit around smashing the already broken pieces with rocks long enough for the aliens to come back and capture them again. It would be really funny if it weren’t mind-numbingly flat and boring.
You can tell that the actors weren’t taking this film very seriously across the board. Some were clearly having fun with it, making silly voices and faces and otherwise goofing off. Others look and sound bored. Hell, the kids look straight at the camera several times like they’re Jim from the Office. The American kid spends the whole movie looking like he wants to be literally anywhere but on set. These performances are pretty much the most entertaining part of the movie.
Thank god, too. This movie has some of the slowest pacing I’ve ever seen in a kaiju film. The first fifteen minutes feel like an hour. Getting through this one was a chore.
Like the last movie, this one wastes your time with more flashbacks to the prior movies. Hope you like stock footage! Luckily, the flashback only lasts three minutes as opposed to twenty. It would’ve been better if they weren’t here at all, but hey! Small improvements are still improvements.
Rest assured, the movie finds other ways of wasting your time. Such as the scenes on Earth that last way too long, go nowhere, and mean ultimately nothing to the plot. Unless you love watching a little girl get verbally lambasted by every single adult around her like some kind of sick sadist, there’s really nothing to be gained from these scenes. You could cut them out of the movie and you’d only improve the final product.
But is it at least campy enough to be entertaining? Is the movie just dumb enough that you can point and laugh at it? I’m disappointed to say: no. I’ve had more fun staring at a blank wall than I had watching this movie.
Not that it doesn’t have its moments.
The aliens are clearly supposed to be creepy. While they put on a friendly face, behind closed doors, they make plans to *checks notes* eat the children’s brains raw (poor aliens; these kids don’t have brains). They even used the same effects as the Viras aliens did in the last movie for their introductory scene, with the silhouettes and the creepy eyes. Except with their silly costumes and Animal Crossing gibberish language, it’s hard to take them seriously.
Then they start speaking Japanese and they transition from being entertaining to being incredibly boring.
Finally, we have the titular antagonist kaiju: Guiron. A cleaver-headed fish-thing with… shurikens? How did they make such an entertaining sounding creature so uninteresting? He doesn’t even have a cool roar or anything! This movie couldn’t even give me a funny monster, man!
That just leaves us with the kaiju fights. Are they any good? No. The editing is jarring, and the monsters just kind of jump and flop around. When the highlight of your fight is Gamera doing a flip, you’ve lost me.
So, the story is a dud. Does it at least look good? The answer to that is a resounding: meh. The sets are creative, but cheap looking. The shots are flat and boring; some aren’t even stable, so the frame shakes like the cameraman is about to faint! Others are edited together so poorly I had to rewind half a dozen times just to figure out what the hell happened!
The kaiju suits are a mixed bag. Some of them are just recycled costumes from the first movie but painted a different color, like the silver Gyaos. Others, like Guiron, look surprisingly good, even if the design itself is pretty silly. I’m pretty sure Gamera’s is the same suit from last movie, so there’s no drop or improvement there.
Well… at least the music is catchy.
Man, this movie didn’t give me anything. No campy story, no silly kaiju shenanigans, nothing. It’s just… empty.
‘Gamera VS Guiron‘ was nothing short of a slog. This strikes me as one of those awful kids movies, the kind that say, “Well, kids will like it anyway!” so they cut the budget and half-ass it. Finding good things to say about this one was a genuine challenge. I wanted to abandon ship after the first ten minutes, and it only got worse from there.
With how things are going, I get the feeling I’ve stepped into a series slump for Gamera. It’s not uncommon; Godzilla went through something similar with his films around this point. But at least the bad Godzilla movies were still entertaining. If things don’t improve, I hope at least they devolve into utter hilarious madness in a similar fashion.
If not… well, we’ve only got three more to go before the Heisei era starts. Perhaps that will be the refreshing change of pace both Gamera and I need.
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