Having watched my fair share of daikaiju movies recently with the original lot of Gojira and Gamera from the 1950's and 60's, I thought I would check out the newest version of Gamera from 2006 *fan fair* do do do do! Gamera the brave!!! *put sock back in the trumpet*
I thought they did pretty well with this - they stuck to the whole thing of Gamera being a friend of the children and all that stuff, they mentioned his past sacrifices for human kind, and somehow children just all randomly knew how great he is and expected him to save the day etc etc - just like the previous movies (though we dont talk about the gamera vs guiron debarcle. god that was bad. and super monster gamera... well it's more 80's than should be legal, lets forget that one too.)
Gamera this time round comes complete with a cute face and smaller size, and a big ass scarey enemy in the shape of the usual lizardy dinosaury type angry faced b*stard.
We meet Gamera as a little hatching baby turtle - when you see a little baby turtle flying about with rocket launchers blazing out of his limb holes, run the f*ck away - it means Gamera is needed for some impending sh*t and soon you should expect a big f*ckin' lizard lord!
So some little kid looks after the baby turtle as it grows into this mammoth great thing, the kid still all the time defiantly refusing to believe it is Gamera, all hell breaks loose when the big f*ckin' lizard lord starts running about eating people and stamping all over the place squashing buildings as you do when you're a daikaiju lizardy thing.
Some girl friend of the kid is in hospital and has Gamera's red egg thing, he needs it back because he is getting fully floored by the big f*ckin' lizard lord, as usual the grown ups are all pretty useless so she cant do anything about it, the kids in town start doing a relay run to get the red egg thing to Gamera and by the time the main kid gets it Gamera has been launched into a skyscraper and been stabbed in the ass by the big f*ckin' lizard lord's creepy tongue thing.
The kid rants at Gamera for about 15 f*cking hours while Gamera looks like he's gonna smack him in the face if he doesn't just hand over the red egg thing, then finally it all goes supernova and we get our long awaited typical Gamera show down.
I couldnt help thinking of Big Man Japan throughout this one though. something just kept making me think of that stupid movie. i would love to have seen Gamera have to try and stop two daikaiju mating in the middle of tokyo. that would have been f*cking hysterical.
So anyway, they didnt do too badly with this i dont think. Tsuda Kanji (ju-on, vampire girl vs frankenstein girl, 20th century boys, blood, one missed call series,) plays the kid's dad and he's always great. and the kid is likable too. this couldve been much worse, *cough* Gamera vs Guiron *cough* and due to the pretty good cast it didnt feel sickeningly cheesy - just enough to stay true to form. massive nuclear turtle form.
i dont think i will ever get sick of daikaiju movies, which is good as i have about 30 versions of Gojira, a few Gameras, and god knows what else. I have way too many movies.
The point is though, these kind of monster movies are great fun and easy to watch, usually suitable for kids, and rarely a waste of time *cough* Guiron's human-eating aliens - never again *cough* never ever again *cough*
I will keep this review brief as i think i am getting a bit of a sore throat. But i will say that it works as a later addition to the saga of the great daikaiju Gamera, though why he bothers to save our asses all the time is beyond me. Didnt we, like, try to kill him a million times and couldnt so we just chucked him in a rocket and shot him into space, and then freaked out when he came back even though he totally drowned that f*cking stupid d*ck of a monster in the sequel for us, and still thought he was gonna fry us all even after he fought a million Gyaos-bat-dragon-things and saved those rediculous kids from that stupid shark and the unbelievably idiotic alien tw*ts who tried to eat them but only got so far as to shave one of their heads - im that is only up to the 70's.
do yourself a favour, after watching the original trillogy, skip ahead. watching Gamera fly through space on strings infront of the windscreen of the kid's accidentally-stolen-rocket-ship-thing - oh god i really cant even - the alien's out fits, and the stoopid american kid, - oh god and the american kid's mother! god i'd forgotten about her - jeez. seriously. just skip Guiron. actually id just skip space monster / super monster whatever the f*ck it was called as well. too many bad aliens again. too much 80's. lets just pretend that didnt happen.
getting way off the point again, but basically yay for them not totally screwing up the Gamera thing by changing it into something it should never be, and yay for them being pretty good at refraining from doing that in general anyway. Good old Japanese film makers.
movie poster:
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