Gamera vs. Barugon (1966) Review

Gamera vs. Barugon (1966) Review

The very next year after Gamera made his debut, he came back in a production that was even bigger than the first one. The sequel kicks off with a few of the best shots of the monster from the first movie in black-and-white, then it shows the space capsule that imprisoned him, headed for Mars, and an asteroid breaks it open, freeing him. He flies straight back to Japan—his anger has been brewing for the six months he’s been trapped in that steel canister, and he wastes no time exacting his revenge. Gamera is back on earth, in colour, looking even better than before, and the first thing he does is fly to a dam to recharge his energy. He destroys the dam and it floods a valley in a spectacular miniature special effects scene. After this, though, Gamera disappears. Despite this epic opening, Gamera vs. Barugon is mainly seen as an inferior sequel, and for a few very fair reasons.

First of all, there isn’t much Gamera in this movie. The title is a bit misleading, because while the two monsters do eventually fight a couple times, this is mostly the Barugon show. Gamera comes in at the beginning ready to rumble, but his anger at having been trapped in a space ship destined for a distant planet seemingly evaporates when he’s off-screen. We don’t see him again until about forty minutes in, but in the meantime, the plot gets underway to establish his rival. A trio of explorers head out into the jungle of New Guinea to retrieve a valuable opal from a cave. This part of the film reminds me fondly of the parts of King Kong vs. Godzilla set on Faro Island, before Kong shows up. One of the explorers is a bad dude and lets his one comrade get killed by a fatal scorpion sting. The bad guy gets the opal back to Japan, but the other guy (who manages to escape and is revived by one of the locals) is warned that the opal is dangerous.

The egg-shaped opal gets left under a heat lamp, and to rather little surprise, it hatches, revealing a tiny monster. In the very next scene, it grows to be the same size as Gamera! How did it grow so fast in mere minutes? Uh, radiation, I guess? Godzilla had been around for over a decade by this point, so I guess it had already become common knowledge that radiation turns creatures into giants. You have to just accept that Barugon, as the natives call him, is now huge, and posing a major threat to Japan. I really like Barugon, in both concept and execution. He’s a four-legged reptilian monster with a long nose horn, a tongue like a chameleon’s that can shoot freezing breath from the tip, and he has a secret weapon. The natives call the place he comes from the Rainbow Valley, and at first the name doesn’t seem to mean anything, but then the giant Barugon lights up the spikes along his spine and shoots a giant rainbow ray from them that is ultra-destructive! How did they come up with that? A deadly rainbow ray? It’s science fiction genius.

The first Gamera movie made it clear that it was ripping off Godzilla, but this one is even more blatant, in regards to the monster and premise. Barugon is a quadrupedal monster with a nose horn. In the Godzilla series, there’s a quadrupedal monster with a nose horn called Baragon. Baragon and Barugon? It couldn’t be more obvious. This might be controversial, but I actually like Barugon more than Baragon. Barugon has a great roar, he looks creepy when his eyelids slowly open to reveal his giant glowing eyes, his attacks are unique, and he’s more than a match for Gamera. The giant turtle shows up to fight him, but their first fight is a bit slow and too short, ending with Gamera getting frozen with Barugon’s freeze breath and becoming incapacitated until the end of the movie.  

With Gamera out of commission, it’s up to the trusty team of scientists and military strategists to come up with a solution. Barugon doesn’t cause that much destruction (I think Gamera was actually more destructive in the previous movie), but he’s still a problem. Gamera was able to inflict some pretty severe wounds on him, making him bleed purple blood all over the place, but the scientists can’t injure him with their weapons, so they try to lure him to a lake to drown him using a radiated diamond, but it’s not effective. The scientists straight up call Barugon a “freak” repeatedly, and discover something interesting about his rainbow ray: mirrors reflect the energy. Believe it or not, this is actually set up earlier in the movie when Barugon uses his ray for the first time: there’s a shot that shows the destruction, and the side mirrors of a destroyed car are shown to be hanging from the wreckage, but still intact. 

They use a giant mirror shaped like a maser cannon from the Godzilla movies to reflect Barugon’s rainbow ray back at him, and it severely wounds him, but he realizes his mistake and doesn’t use the ray again, and now is even more pissed off. It’s not quite as outlandish as the Z Plan from the first movie with trapping Gamera in a space ship, but it’s still pretty out there, and quite funny when they’re calibrating the mirror to the exact spot, as if they can predict exactly where Barugon’s rainbow ray will reach. Gamera thaws out just in time and comes to finish Barugon off, dragging him into a lake and drowning him. It’s not a very creative ending, especially compared to how Gamera, the Giant Monster ended. It seems Gamera no longer poses a threat to the world, and is considered a hero from this point forward.

Despite all the flaws I’ve identified with Gamera vs. Barugon, I still enjoy it more than I think many Gamera fans do. Yeah, the first forty minutes are slow, but I like the adventure aspect of finding the opal that hatches into Barugon, and Barugon himself is a great villain. The original Gamera may have introduced audiences to a bizarre monster, but it took itself seriously all the way through, and in a way Gamera vs. Barugon takes itself even more seriously. There are no children characters in this one, the human villain gets eaten by the monster villain, and the plot with the explorers feels gritty and mature. Still, a giant turtle fighting a lizard that shoots rainbows from its back? They definitely had younger viewers in mind. Even though I like it, I feel like there were still some kinks to be worked out with the series, and while it continued to copy Godzilla by having Gamera fight against another monster and become a hero rather than a villain, it still pushed the giant turtle in the right direction and increased his potential for future movies.