Gamera vs. Guiron (1969) Review

 

Gamera vs. Guiron (1969) Review

Like the fourth film before it, the fifth entry in the Gamera series once again features extraterrestrials, but in Gamera vs. Guiron, it isn’t the aliens who travel to the people of earth, it’s the people of earth who travel to the aliens. Unlike the great opening of the previous movie, though, this one opens with shots of the starry sky, then the titles play over stock footage of lava. After that, one of the most boring scientists in the history of giant monster movies gives an astronomy lesson, as if it’s supposed to make what we’re about to see more believable. Elsewhere in Japan, two boys named Akio and Tom are looking at the night sky through their telescope and see a spaceship touch down in the nearby woods. The next day they ride their bikes out there to investigate, and Akio’s little sister Tomoko insists on tagging along.

Akio and Tom are the equivalent to Masao and Jim from the previous movie, but I find them a bit more annoying, mainly Akio. He’s a jerk! He repeatedly calls his sister an idiot and completely disregards her words of caution as they approach the spaceship. Masao and Jim get on the ship and discover it is being controlled remotely, so they are flown to a distant planet against their will, but they’re still pretty excited about it. Then, during their flight, Gamera shows up! They call to him from inside the spaceship repeatedly, and it seems he can somehow hear them, because he roars in reply over and over. How can he roar in space? Or breathe? I’ll tell you why: because he’s Gamera.

Gamera vs. Guiron is a completely ridiculous movie. Akio and Tom debate how fast Gamera is flying, and Akio shuts Tom down, telling him he’s wrong, that Gamera isn’t going Mach 3, he’s going Mach 33! For the record, Mach 1 is about 1200 kilometres an hour, so Gamera, according to Akio, is flying over 40,000 kilometers an hour! I guess that’s how they’re able to get to the other side of the galaxy before Akio’s sister can even tell their mother what happened. How could Akio know this? What bugs me about him is he acts like he’s smart but he doesn’t really demonstrate his intelligence at any point in the movie. Unlike Masao from the last movie who actually knew what he was doing, Akio and Tom just walk into the space ship and get taken on this journey, then when they get to the planet Terra they just gawk at all the monster action and stumble through the alien environments. I’m getting ahead of myself, let me back up.

Gamera tries to stop the spaceship, because he’s the friend of all children, remember, and I guess he instinctively knows whatever aliens brought the kids to Terra are bad news. Gamera can’t stop the ship or outfly it, and it crashes on the planet, which has breathable air. It also has a river that runs backwards so the ground can open up and let out a giant monster from an underground lair. This monster is Guiron, with a giant knife-shaped head that is basically indestructible. Guiron was clearly the inspiration for the kaiju Knifehead in Pacific Rim. Guiron also has mini tusks very similar to Gamera’s, but I’m not sure why, because I don’t think the two are related. Unlike the quadrupedal Barugon suit from Gamera vs. Barugon, the four-legged Guiron doesn’t have a tail, and he looks very awkward when he’s crawling around on all fours because it’s extremely obvious there’s a guy inside the suit just moving around on his hands and knees. Even though he looks pretty silly at times, Guiron is an awesome monster.

At first the boys encounter a Space Gyaos, which is just a silver version of the Gyaos monster from the third Gamera film, but it’s great to see him back. Guiron deflects Gyaos’ sonic ray beam with his knife head, and the beam cuts off Gyaos’ leg, making him unable to stand. Then, Guiron leaps up and cuts his wing off! Gyaos crashes and Guiron finishes him off, literally chopping him up into slices! It’s surprisingly brutal, and an effective intro to the new enemy monster. Guiron goes back into his underground lair, and now we know what he’s capable of, and we’re just waiting for him to come back out and tangle with Gamera. But, before that happens, the boys use big cone-shaped teleporters to traverse the planet and they go inside one of the strange buildings, eventually encountering two Terran women who have hilarious costumes, but they are more interesting than the alien race from Gamera vs. Viras. They are the last of their kind, and the boys agree to help them. Meanwhile, back on earth, the mothers of Akio and Tom don’t believe Tomoko’s story of the boys being taken away by a spaceship, and this part of the movie is easily the most boring, but luckily it’s not a big part.  

The Terran women use hypnosis technology to learn about Gamera from Akio. Cue the stock footage! It isn’t too extensive, but we get to see the highlights of Gamera saving kids in the previous movies—Gamera, the Giant Monster, Gamera vs. Gyaos, and Gamera vs. Viras—while Akio narrates, explaining all these events. How does Akio know that Gamera saved Toshio from the collapsing light house in the original movie? That happened many years earlier in a pretty remote locale. Did Akio go to school with Toshio? Was Toshio on National Television talking about the incident later on? I get that Akio is a Gamera fan, but he seems to know more about the history of Gamera than should be possible. They don’t even bother to read Tom’s mind, I think because they know his head is empty.

So if the Terrans can read Akio’s mind, they could probably just use that technology to learn everything they need to learn about earth, right? Well, no, apparently they need to eat Akio’s brain in order to gain all his knowledge! It’s a classic sci-fi/alien trope, and just as they are about to cut into Akio’s skull, an alert goes off, telling the Terrans that Gamera has arrived! The giant turtle fights Guiron, and it’s a great battle. Guiron can fire shuriken blades from the base of his knife head, and they stick into Gamera’s face, making him bleed profusely. He puts snow on his face to stop the bleeding, and it seems to work, but then Gamera throws himself into the nearby lake and sinks to the bottom, apparently defeated. By this point in the series, it has become a tradition to have Gamera incapacitated around the midpoint of the film, so Gamera recovers at the bottom of the lake while the boys try to figure out how to escape the evil Terrans.

Using Tom’s dart gun, they shoot at the computer controls and let Guiron out. The Terrans try to escape in their ship but Guiron slices it in half, and one of the Terrans becomes trapped and injured. The other mercilessly kills her and proceeds to escape alone. Grumpy Guiron knows Gamera is just chilling down on the lake bottom, so he clunks his big knife head against some rocks and knocks one down. It bonks Gamera on the head and wakes him up, prompting him to surface. Then, their fight resumes! Gamera gets Guiron’s shuriken in his arms and legs, they throw each other around, Gamera does gymnastics on a pole, and Guiron gets his knife head stuck in the ground. The boys launch two giant missiles, and one of the missiles blows up a building and kills the last Terran, while Gamera catches the other missile and throws it in the hole in Guiron’s head where his shuriken came from. Gamera then breathes fire on the missile and it blows up, killing Guiron, seemingly by blowing off his entire head. Having been saved, the boys cheer on their shelled savior, and Gamera repairs the ship to send them back to earth.

Gamera vs. Guiron is definitely ridiculous, but it is also an extremely entertaining giant monster movie. To me, it’s the better version of Gamera vs. Viras. Even though they’re similar in multiple ways and this one recycles some things from previous movies (including the Viras alien spaceship set), Gamera vs. Guiron is more entertaining, pure and simple. The monster fights are hilarious, it’s imaginative, and there are multiple Gamera highlights.