Tuesday 19 January 2016

Gamera vs Zigra (1971)



After what was a pretty good film, at least by the standards of original Gamera movies, the series plummets back to its usual form with this 1971 effort.

It is the last years of the 20th Century.  Humanity is expanding into space.  Japan has even founded a moon base ... but we are not alone among the stars.  A strange spaceship appears and devastates the moon base, then flies down to Earth.  There, it kidnaps four humans in a small boat.  This being a Gamera film, two of the four are "cute" (for which, read "obnoxious") children.

The alien invaders then explain their evil plans of evilness.  Why the aliens do this is anyone's guess, since they demonstrate they have the ability to broadcast to the whole planet.  Anyway, it's your typical "conquer the planet and eat the humans" deal.  Humans seem like they'd be a very inefficient food source, to me.  Pigs have more meat and grow to maturity much faster, alien dudes.

Then we follow the standard drill: Gamera turns up to stop the aliens.  He gets beaten in the first fight of course, though not until after he smashes the alien ship, which is revealed to be just a shell for the actual alien, which is a massive shark monster.  Later, Gamera recovers and wins the day.  In between those few minutes of "excitement", we have lots of ... not much, really.  The alien uses its brainwashed human minion to chase the obnoxious brats for a while, and then there's lots of scenes of people standing around looking worried while mouthing painfully bad dialogue.

Not even entertainingly terrible.

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