“Gamera: Super Monster” was the final instalment in the original franchise produced by Daiei Motion Picture Company. The giant turtle later returned in the 90s in Shusuke Kaneko's trilogy which offered a fresh and darker take on Gamera. A reboot was necessary mainly because of Daiei's poor financial situation, but also due to how little new ideas “Gamera: Super Monster” had to offer.
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Commonly considered one of, if not the worst film in the entire franchise, this kaiju turns out to be an uninspired and repetitive collage of fights between Gamera and its earlier opponents from the series. The reason for that is surprisingly straightforward. Due to financial limitations, the studio decided to opt for a controversial strategy of repurposing entire sequences from all of the earlier films. Thus, the protagonist has to face Gyaos, Zigra, Viras and other monsters once again, in the exactly same footage.
Not entirely aware of this practice whilst watching the film, I was rather surprised to see how many creatures the eponymous character had to fight. The movie's narrative is a disjointed patchwork of action scenes interspersed with more regular sequences in which a schoolboy Keiichi (Koichi Maeda) has a special connection with his turtle whom he believes to actually be Gamera. There are also good and evil space women who are predominantly irrelevant to the main plot and don't add anything meaningful to the movie, apart from a bizarre fight scene in a playground. Ultimately, scenes with all those characters serve only to offer some context for Gamera's clash with yet another monstrosity. Zanon is the final opponent of Gamera – despite having a human voice, he still remains as anonymous and bland as Jiger (a reptile), Guiron (half-knife/half-alien) or Barugon (another reptile).
“Gamera: Super Monster”, despite boasting an almost all-female cast, fails to make any significant usage of that. Akira Kitazaki's cinematography doesn't add too much to the film too; “Gamera…” is populated with long and medium shots, thus creating a distancing effect between the viewer and the events on screen. Add typically-80s drastic zoom-ins, funky music, really poor acting and a knock-off Star Destroyer from the Star Wars franchise to get a clear answer as to why fans had to wait 15 years for another Gamera movie.
