Two young boys sneak aboard a spaceship and find themselves whisked away to the mysterious planet Terra. There, they encounter Gamera's old foe Gyaos and two female aliens with a taste for human brains. Gamera must save the children and battle the new monster Guiron, whose entire body is a deadly living weapon.
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This is a very hokie movie but it is also entertaining because it is so lame-o. Gamera is the defender of children in this one. Two kids, one Japanese and the other white and I guess American end up on another planet where two women, obviously Asian, want to eat the kids brains so they can learn about Earth because their planet is dying and they want to go there. The aliens have their own monster that looks like a cross between a crocodile and a great white shark. Any way once the kids show up on the alien planet things start to happen. Gamera shows up and fights sharkodile more than once finally winning. The alien women are defeated and the Gamers returns the kids to earth. Very trite but hey so is the old Godzilla movies.
What? Is that logical? Absurdity takes new meaning with is film. The year is 1969, so at this point both Godzilla and Gamera were in the pits. Hell, 1969 was the fateful year Toho released "Godzilla's Revenge" and I'm quite sure Godzilla would never sink so low again. However, the worse had yet to come for the original Gamera series. That's not to say "Gamera vs. Guiron", also known as "Attack of the Monsters", isn't a bad movie because yes, yes it is, but compared to crapfest like "Gamera vs. Zigra" this film excels. At one point a child hypothesizes Gamera can reach speeds up to Mach 60 I'll be damned.You would've thought the company Daiei and its writers would've learned from "Gamera vs. Viras" that children and spaceships don't go together. However, at the very least we are shown a new planet, Tera, in an attempt to divulge a better plot. For all its campy ridiculousness, it's an admittedly interesting story for a monster movie sucker like me. Making children the protagonists is probably its greatest blunder. Guiron himself is a weird monster, but I suppose more attractive than Jiger. Still, Guiron looks like something you'd see in, I don't know, Pokémon? The Space Gyaos are an interesting facet of the story and some frightfully odd yet amusing action sequences take place. Zany and peculiar, definitely cheesy as hell, but a gas to watch and scrutinize.
Gamera 3: Awakening of Iris is by far the best Gamera movie. I also loved the original, but the most memorable Gamera movie has to be this one. It is the ultimate bad movie. Two kids board a space ship that flys them to another planet. Once there they see Guiron fight a Gyaos painted silver. We learn that Guiron is a watchdog that defends the aliens from Gyaos. The aliens are Asian girls that (this is so original) eat human BRAINS!!! Basically Guiron gets on the lose and GAMERA comes to save them. This is where the movie goes crazy. Did i mention that Guiron is a knife that shoots Shurikens out of his head?? It's awesome. So Gamers fights it, does some gymnastics, then brings the kids home. The kids are really annoying, but arnt the humans in kaiju movies always? It would actually be a decent kaiju without them, but the end fight is definitely worth it. I HIGHLY recommend to kaiju and bad movie fans.
Like many others, I was introduced to this movie on MST3K, and while it's hard to forget a lot of the humor they added to it, it's still genuinely weird and charming on its own merits. Although yes, that little girl does look like a little old lady, and the white mom does indeed look like David Bowie.This is very much a children's kaiju movie, in fact while watching it I thought it was a lot like something out of a kid's imagination- the monster with a knife for a head, the strangely sexy space women, the awesome pet/big brother/guardian that is Gamera. I like the kid-like logic the boys display when they try to disable a teleporter's control mechanism by pulling the knobs off, then smashing them with rocks. Or the deadpan seriousness on Akio's face, when he informs Tom that Gamera can easily attain speeds in excess of Mach 60, except if he did he'd blast clear out of the solar system. It's the same tone in which a young modern geek would tell you that Pikachu requires a Thunder Stone in order to evolve to Raichu.The SFX are good, the little space city looks really great. The costumes aren't on the level of a Godzilla movie, but in this day and age of digital effects, it's pretty hard to suspend one's disbelief when watching a rubber kaiju battle anyway, and I choose to enjoy them for what they are rather than what they could be. Overall this movie was a lot of fun, a great movie for the kids.
