When kaiju movies were at their peak in the 1960s, the Daiei studio launched the Gamera series featuring the title flying giant turtle. The first film, Gamera (1965), became a big hit with kids and Daiei cranked out a total of seven series installments before filing for bankruptcy in December 1971.
In 1995 Gamera returned in Kaneko Shusuke’s Gamera, the Guardian of the Universe (Gamera Daikaiju Kuchi Kessen), a film made by Daiei’s then corporate parent, publisher Tokuma Shoten, and a consortium of other media companies. It featured Gyaos, Gamera’s bat-like nemesis from the earlier series, but offered fans far snazzier effects and a new heroine in Fujitani Ayako, the teenage daughter of action star Steven Seagal.
The film was a box office success and Kaneko ended up directing two more entries in a trilogy: Gamera 2: Attack of Legion (Gamera 2: Region Shurai, 1996) and Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris (Gamera 3: Jashin Irisu Kakusei, 1999).
Using tokusatsu (practical effects) techniques that had not essentially changed since the days of Godzilla maestro Tsuburaya Eiji, effects supervisor Higuchi Shinji created eye-popping illusions, culminating in the climactic fiery battle between Gamera and his similarly enormous opponent. Also, instead of the earlier series’ space operas for kids, the story offered a heady blend of ancient folklore and modern pseudo-science that delighted both fans and critics, with the consensus opinion being that Gamera 3 was the best film of the entire franchise.
It begins with the arrival of ornithologist Nagamine Mayumi (Nakayama Shinobu) in a remote Philippine village to investigate a dead Gyaos. The revolting critters have been multiplying like, well, bats. How to stop them?
Meanwhile, teenage Ayana (Maeda Ai) is recalling Gamera’s tromping of Tokyo four years earlier – a rampage that killed both her parents while sparing her and her younger brother. Naturally, she has developed an invincible loathing of the monster.
Living in the countryside with relatives, she is seemingly safe from more monster attacks, but one day bullying classmates force her to enter a cave where a fierce dragon god is said to be sleeping. There Ayana discovers a large rock that looks like a scaly egg. To her astonishment and delight it cracks open to reveal a cute baby monster with long wiggly tentacles. Is this the ally against Gamera she has been praying for?
The scene shift to Tokyo. Mayumi is attending a meeting of a government anti-monster task force, where she meets Asakura Mito (Yamazaki Senri), a deeply strange government researcher who is working with a similarly eccentric, but brilliant game designer (Tezuka Toru) on a computer simulation of monster behavior. While the meeting is still in session, Gamera and a Gyaos appear in the heart of Shibya, a major Tokyo entertainment district, locked in mortal combat. Crowds run in terror as the monsters thrash and buildings burn.
At this dark moment Mayumi encounters a fierce-eyed young women who has been up close to Gamera before: Kusanagi Asagi (Fujitani Ayako). The mass spawning of Gyaos, she says, has been caused by an earlier battle between Gamera and another monster, Legion, that upset the balance of the natural world. “Worse is yet to come,” she warns.
Like so many monster movies then and now, Gamera 3 expresses deep-seated, long-held local fears about not only the endless natural disasters that strike Japan, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunami among them, but also the modern horrors of atomic warfare.
The film uncovers the psychology of that insecurity, including its mythological underpinnings, with clarity and force. It also offers awesome battle scenes, shot and edited for maximum impact. Only a year earlier Hollywood had attempted to update the Godzilla franchise with a widely derided CG-filled travesty that reduced its title hero to a giant leaping iguana. Then Kaneko, Higuchi and company came along and showed the world, on a fraction of the other film’s budget, how to do a monster movie right.
Mark Schilling