Gammera the Invincible (1966) Review

An American producer imports a giant monster movie from Japan and splices in new scenes. Godzilla, King of the Monsters? No… Gammera!  The result is something kids will enjoy and adults will find very silly. Park your brain – you won’t be needing it for this movie about a 200ft tall flame spewing turtle. And just what is the mysterious Plan Z? UPDATED September 2012 with DVD screen captures and revised text.

In 1965, Daiei Studios released Gamera the Giant Monster to cash in on the giant monster craze started by 1954’s Gojira. It was a decidedly low budget film that surprisingly did well and spawned a series of sequels. While never as big as the Godzilla series, many a kid watched the films about Gamera, the children’s friend.

The version reviewed is the first Americanized one distributed by NTA, not the even more heavily edited Sandy Frank one most of us saw on TV back in the 1980’s. This one is only mildly incoherent by comparison.  On to the review!

Gammera the Invincible begins with an overly serious narration introducing the setup. Dr. Hidaka (Eiji Funakoshi) is in the Artic to conduct some serious research. On what, I do not know. But he is a serious scholar and don’t you forget it! There he and his lovely assistant Kyoke (Harumi Kiritachi) meet an Eskimo chief. Pleasantries are barely exchanged before a squadron of Soviet bombers fly by at low altitude.

BAM! A clumsily shoehorned scene filmed on a shoelace budget appears. General O’Neill (Dick O’Neill) is on the case and dispatches jet fighters from Alaska to intercept, but only after lots of unnecessary character scenes. Accompanying the scenes is the unrelenting din of a teletype. Duty in the Artic is hard enough, but that sound would drive someone insane fairly quickly.

Oddly, the model bombers are called “UFO’s” instead of bogey’s. Since they looked more like British V bombers it is strange to see them identified as Soviet. Why am I expecting accuracy?  The fighters scramble and look like a weird mix of XF-92’s  and spare parts from a model stash. Wait, they just changed into F-104’s for a moment and back again. Why am I expecting consistency?

Good thing this is aimed at kids.

Best line delivered so far is “Red. Alert.” by General O’Neill. Yes, it is said the way I punctuated it. You can’t beat acting of this caliber.

The U.S. Air Force fighters of dubious make their way to the bombers and try to get them to identify themselves. In Mother Russia we identify ourselves by how hard we hit each other, eat rearward firing missiles capitalist stooges! So Firefox didn’t have the first rearward defense missiles after all. Learned something new, I have.

One good missile attack begets another and soon there is a bomber in flames. This is actually a pretty cool scene as the burning bomber goes into an out of control turn and hits the ice. Uh oh. That mushroom cloud isn’t a good sign.

Sure enough a nuke was on board and it went off. You would think the radioactive fallout would be bad enough, but the ice cracks from the explosion and from it emerges a man in a rubber suit! Umm, I mean a ferocious prehistoric amphibian!

Excuse me, my phone is ringing. Be right back.

Sorry about that. There was a rather irate turtle on the other end who informed me I was slandering turtles everywhere with the wrong classification. The creature in question is in fact a reptile. My apologies to turtles everywhere for the mistake.

Weird. The turtle sounded a lot like Garry Shandling. How did he get my phone number? And more importantly how did he know I was writing this? I better sweep my PC for keylogging spyware.

In the midst of all this madness, the Eskimo chief gives Dr. Hidaka a stone with strange carvings of turtles on it. There is a legend of a monster named Gammera that is connected to the strange cloud forming. I suspect a story to sell trinkets to tourists, but the good doctor accepts it at face value.

The intrepid explorers find their radio is jammed so they can’t call their ride home. Tragically, it doesn’t matter as their toy boat is sunk. It was a nice toy boat too. At least the crew survived to face ridicule. Well, in this version that is.

Oh yes, for some reason people are having trouble believing in the existence of a 150 to 200 foot tall turtle. Of all the newspaper headlines shown, my favorite one is in English on a French newspaper, La Monde. But it gets even better when the “experts” weigh in.

An inserted scene of two experts arguing on TV over the possible existence of the monster is the highlight of the movie. The actors are clearly having too far much fun with their ridiculous material and the result is a grade A comedy skit. Excellent timing and a slow build up from needling into name calling had me laughing. If only the rest of the movie had this attitude.

At this point in the flick, the American produced material dominates. It isn’t exciting stuff and kids will get bored. I wondered if the original Japanese material was that bad it needed to be cut out to this extent. Or was the original just too short? It turned out the material was the problem and this was actually a change for the better.

Eventually, things get back on track with mysterious UFO sightings and the introduction of a turtle obsessed boy named Toshio (Yoshira Uchida). Present here is the beginning of the kids loving Gammera. But what a sullen and somewhat creepy kid he is! 

Toshio loves turtles. Toshio loves his pet turtle. Toshio love to draw turtles in class. Toshio loves turtles so much he is about to be suspended from school. Toshio loves turtles to the point that an intervention is required by his family. Toshio loves his little turtle, but must set him free.

Not to worry, Toshio. You are about to get a bigger turtle to love!

Much bigger.

And badder. This one is almost cool.

The other kids still won’t like you though.

I think this is the point where Gammera the Invincible caused my brain to cease functioning. Giant turtle trashing the lighthouse where Toshio lives – that’s okay with me. Giant turtle catching the little boy when he falls from it and not eating him? I draw the line at that. With that heroic rescue the turtle gains a stalker. Did I mention Toshio was obsessed with turtles? This can’t end well.

Later, at Tokyo Airport…

Nothing much happens. I just wanted to write “Tokyo Airport.”

Yeah, the movie is starting to get to me. Onward before I start listening to Vogon poetry.

You know how Godzilla likes to trash power plants and refineries?  So does Gammera. But instead of a nuclear plant, we see him trash a geothermal plant. Apparently he isn’t a fan of green energy. Toy tanks roll in supported by stock footage of the JSDF with much destruction ensuing.

And a giant turtle huffing fire. Not puffing, huffing.  Don’t believe me? Check out the photo below. Look at his eye. That reptile is feeling no pain.

Just when the movie couldn’t get weirder, it did.

I may have stated that too soon, because the battle moves on to a ridge where a “freezing bomb” that just happened to be invented by the military is used on Gammera. All it does is slow him down so we can watch a riveting sequence holes being drilled in rocks. You think I’m joking, don’t you? True, the holes are filled with dynamite sticks, but come on!

The plan? Blow up the ridge and flip Gammera on his back. That’s the brilliant strategy of Dr. Hidaka and the military. Unbelievably, it works. You see, a turtle on its back is helpless, so they’ll wait him out until he dies.

A slight problem arises when the steroidal turtle retracts his head and limbs to reveal four rocket plumes from his shell. It spins and he flies off. Yes, the UFO from before is a GIANT FLYING TURTLE. Project Blue Book should have ditched the whole Venus on the horizon/swamp gas explanation for sightings and used GIANT FLYING TURTLES instead.

Ahem.

Anyway, this is what happens when you let scientists run battles.

Hmm, Mystery Science Theater 3000 did the Sandy Frank version of this.It has been released as part of a special box set. Go watch that, it has to be better than my review. UPDATE: Or you could go read my review of that version here!

Suffice it to say there are more battles, scientists, Toshio stalking the giant turtle, and one of the weirdest endings to a giant monster movie ever. Plan Z is used without us ever seeing plans A through Y. Imagine how bad they had to have been to use Plan Z!

At the end of the movie, the American cast celebrates being liberated from the film.

Thoughts

My ISP upped the speeds for DSL, so I decided to check out Hulu for a streaming video test run. Low and behold, there was Gammera the Invincible listed on the site and I couldn’t resist torturing reviewing another giant monster movie. Since then I have obtained the original Japanese film and this one on DVD.

The Japanese  Gamera the Giant Monster is superior, but still jaw droppingly bad in places. The only improvement in the U.S. version is replacing the scenes involving American, which had non actors who happened to be in Japan. Here you get actual, well, acting and some amusing comedy. Note that I said “actual acting” rather than good acting.

I subscribe to the theory that Toshio is the real monster of the movie in a subversive statement against having children by the film’s creators. Not buying it? Well, neither am I but it makes about as much sense as anything else about the movie.

All joking aside, Toshio actually fares better due to edits and changes in the dub script. Here he comes off as a mere annoyance instead of the clearly disturbed head case of the original. The subtle romance between the photographer and Kyoke has been edited out entirely.

I still wonder why they added an extra ‘m’ to Gamera’s name. None of the following American releases made that mistake. Also, the American produced main theme is a crime against music that must be heard to be believed. Wes Farrel and Artie Butler are to blame for it. Don’t let it become an earworm!

The movie is unrated in the States and has a PG rating in Canada. There is no blood and while there are deaths, they are shown very briefly or only talked about.

Little kids will enjoy the movie a lot whenever the Japanese parts are on screen. Not so much during the talking head American sequences. Adults will only appreciate this if they have regular visitation rights with their inner child. Otherwise, I recommend the original Gamera the Giant Monster to giant monster movie fans or the MST3K version to everyone else.

Technical

Vintage Movie Classics Gamera, The Ultimate Collection was the DVD used for this review since it or the stand alone issue Gamera the Invincible are the only games in town for the U.S. version. Well, aside from Mystery Science Theater 3000’s expensive box set devoted to the movie series. I wish I were rich enough to afford that one to make the trifecta of reviews complete. UPDATE: Whine and you shall receive or something like that. At least the hat trick has been scored.

The quality of the video is abysmal and appears to be taken from a worn out television tape. It also suffers from being severely panned and scanned from a 2.35:1 to a theoretical 4:3 ratio. Theoretical, because it is only in the vicinity being made up of different ratio prints that look like they were filmed off of a 16mm being projected or even a VHS tape on a television set.

I decided not to trim the screen captures more in order to show how bad it is. Sadly, the ones from Hulu’s streaming were superior. If you want good ones, you will have to go to my review of Gamera the Giant Monster.

Massive amounts of dirt, scratches, and pops are accompanied by heavy grain. All of this is made even worse by poor video compression that reminds me of the early days of Video for Windows back in the 1990s. Digital artifacts and errors show up from time to time to add to the horrible quality.

The sound is not as muddy, but plagued by a constant audible hum. It is Dolby Digital AC-3 stereo, but appears to be a mono source.

The DVD disc is region free and has absolutely no extras. Also on it are the sequels War of the Monsters and Destroy All Planets.

BEWARE! HERE BE SPOILERS!!!

 

 

 

 

One of the biggest changes to the film takes place in the dubbing. Toshio’s insane belief his little turtle Peewee turned into Gammera is completely removed from this version. Instead, the dub has him addressing a rock as being the little turtle pulled back into his shell! It still makes the boy look more sane than in the Japanese original.

His obsession with Gammera is toned down too, though his nearly getting himself killed on the tanker car and stowing away on the boat are still there. If you think Toshio is annoying here, it is nothing compared to the original cut.

Gammera looks like Kermit the Frog here, doesn’t he? Now there would be a movie to behold with a giant Kermit rampaging through a power station. I’d pay money to see it.

Tear down power lines? Check. Trash Tokyo Tower? Check.

It seems to be mandatory to have those two things happen in kaiju movies ever since Gojira hit the silver screen back in 1954. Even weirder is that I now feel somehow cheated if I do not see one or the other happen in these films.

The American officials meeting is a classic example of hamming things up, especially in regards to the table pounding Senator Billings (Stephen Zacharias). Almost all of the added footage is of the talking heads variety with the performances reminding me of stage plays.

The United Nations meeting is unintentionally hilarious. Filmed on a very small set, the actors look like they have been shoved into a storage closet rather than an office. Token ethnic actors are there to make it look international, but the whole thing is ludicrous.

A big change between versions is the difficulty in getting the Americans and Soviets to cooperate. In the Japanese version, they volunteer to help the Japanese government with no strings attached and no dissension. Here they have to be coaxed to work with each other.

It is very hard to judge how good the effects were when the entire picture is so awful. That was one good thing about watching old movies back on television sets of the 1960s and 70s – the picture was so blurry you couldn’t tell bad special effects from good ones.

All the talk of Plan Z had me very curious what it was. They had to lure Gammera out to the island to where it was, which makes you wonder about death machines or some such thing. Instead it turns out to be a truly ridiculous solution that starts with a trap.

Yeah, they sucker the giant turtle into stepping into the world’s biggest space capsule and fire him off into space. I had to say I did not see that coming. I doubt anyone sane would.

Toshio is actually happy with this because they did not kill the turtle. Toshio needs to get a life. Or a  new hobby. Just saying.