“Gamera vs. Viras” was to be the final film in the series but its success in the box office spurred Daiei Film to ask Noriaki Yuasa to continue the series with the main focus being children. The budget was to be the same as the previous installment, a paltry 20 million yen (more than a few times smaller than that of the original “Gojira”), and the shooting schedule was again a few weeks. The movie premiered in March 1969 and was, again, a huge success, earning more money than Toho's “All Monsters Attack.”
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One night, Akio (Nobuhiro Kajima), his sister Tomoko (Miyuki Akiyama), and their friend Tom (Christopher Murphy) see a flying saucer landing near their house. Like any healthy and curious about technology children, they go investigating without telling their parents. Akio and Tom end up on the planet Terra where two female aliens who subsist on human brains learn about Earth and plan on invading it. But before they achieve their goal, they will have to fight Gamera, the friend of children, who has come to save the two earthlings. However, they have a trick up their sleeve, the knife-headed giant beast Guiron.
As we can see from the previous paragraph, there isn't that much of a complicated story here. There is more of a premise instead. Like in the previous entry in the franchise “Gamera vs. Viras”, the story is used only as a vehicle for the monster fights, of which there are quite a few, and the exploration of new sets. However, there is a slight innovation here and that is the fact that the Terrans capture the boys with the intention of eating their brains. This, undoubtedly sounding familiar to the Japanese audience, is nothing more than a space version of the story of Hansel and Gretel with giant monsters.Â
The premise is not the only recycled thing. Like many of the entries in this legendary for its low budgets series, there are many recycled shots and monster costumes, too. Most notable among the latter is that of Gyaos who appears here covered in silver paint only for a brief time before he gets brutally dismembered by the eponymous baddie, the knife-headed Guiron. Speaking about dismemberment, Noriaki Yuasa ups the ante of brutality in this entrance of the what is by now a children's series. There's decapitation, dismemberment, a bit of playing with corpses, and a ton of colorful blood. From a contemporary perspective, this is not the thing to show children but it seems it was fine in the 70s, as this is the movie's intended audience and many of the tokusatsu TV shows from the period are pretty violent and brutal. I guess the times are really a-changin'.Â
All of the gripes about the plot and reused monsters fade into the background when the actual exploration of Terra starts and the monsters begin to clash. And mind you, that is pretty early on in the film. After that, it's pretty much non-stop excitement with numerous fights, chasing sequences, and other fun thrills. This all is made even more appealing by the set design which is cheap yet highly effective.
The design of Terra is simply awesome in a cheap retro-futurist kind of way with tons of blinking lights, big colorful buttons, and tons of screens everywhere. It is every young boy's dream place to go, and it proves to be such for the young science maniacs Akio and Tom who feel perfectly at home with all of the gadgets. They are so well-versed with these things that they in fact teach the older people, something that grows more prominent as the series progresses. This is something we see with many kaiju movies from the period such as the South Korean “Yonggary”. Of course, as is also usual with the franchise, the theme of collaboration between countries is playing a central role here, too, with Akio acting as the natural leader of the group.
Sure, the acting by the children actors is super stiff, though Tomoko is impossibly cute, the story makes absolutely no sense, and some of the special effects are pretty shoddy. But who cares when Guiron's design is so damn cool with his cooking-knife-for-a-head and shurikens-for-a-nose. He chops and slices and shoots the giant turtle which meets one of his most formidable foes in the face of this knife-headed monster. Watching them fight one another and do overall weird stuff like Gamera's sublimely illogical gymnastics or his way of destroying Guiron is a pure pleasure and brings the viewer to a much simpler state of mind.
Though not dealing with any interesting themes and being made primarily for entertainment, “Gamera vs. Guiron” is another highly entertaining entry in the beloved series about the giant space turtle that is friend and savior to all children.
