by
Published on 07-30-2020 08:22 AM
Released by: Arrow Video
Released on: August 18th, 2020.
Director: Noriaki Yuasa, Sandy Howard, Shigeo Tanaka, Shusuke Kaneko, Ryuta Tasaki
Cast: Eiji Funakoshi, Albert Dekker, Kojiro Hongo, Nobuhiro Kashima, Tsutomu Takakuwa, Eiko Yanami, Mach Fumiake, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Toshiyuki Nagashima, Shinobu Nakayama, Ryo Tomioka
Year: 1965/1966/1967/1968/1969/1970/1971/1980
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Gamera: The Complete Collection – Movie Review:
Arrow Video puts together an eight disc Blu-ray collection that compiles every single one of the popular Gamera film serious, complete with their fondly remember (in some circles, at least) compromised U.S. editions in a set loaded with extras.
Here’s a look at the first four discs in this mammoth collection.
Disc One – Gamera The Giant Monster:
When this classic black and white Japanese monster mash begins, we see the United States shoot down a Russian airplane over the Arctic sea. The plane’s nuclear cargo goes down with it and the ensuing explosion awakens a giant space turtle named Gamera, who had been in a deep sleep for untold years. Unfortunately for the citizens of Japan, Gamera wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and decides to lay waste to the island nation by trashing buildings, breathing fire, and spinning around in a circle very quickly! The Japanese also soon learn that their weapons don’t seem to have any chance of stopping this massive turtle – doom seems almost certain!
Thankfully, Japan finds hope in the form of a scientist named Doctor Eiji Hidaka (Eiji Funakoshi) and his fellow scientist, Professor Murase (Jun Humamura), who deduces that, since their weapons cannot harm this beast, that they should try to capture him and halt his rampage. To do this, they hope to lure him into the head of a trap and send him hurtling into space – a plot which they dub Plan Z. Gamera, however, will not be as easy to capture as our heroes would hope, much to the chagrin of an obnoxious kid named Toshio (Yoshiro Uchida), who is really way too into turtles for his own good.
While this isn’t the best of the original run of Gamera films (he’d be brought back decades later for a new audience in a trilogy of films in the second half of the nineties, also included in this set) it deserves credit for introducing audiences to one of the most iconic of giant monsters. Like Godzilla before it, Gamera’s movies would be re-edited and dubbed into English (and quite poorly at that – if you’ve seen the MST3K skewering you’ll know that it was completely deserved!) for American audiences but in its pure and uncut form here, the first of the Gamera movies proves to be a fairly dark film that, much like that other monster just mentioned, plays off of Cold War era fears of nuclear destruction. Obviously inspired by Toho’s success, Daiei’s Kaiju numero uno may owe a debt to the big green thunder lizard but would eventually go on to establish its own cool mythology and carve out its own deserved place in monster
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