In short: The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968)

Original title: Hebi musume to hakuhatsuma

Young Sayuri (Yachie Matsui) has spent most of her life in an orphanage. Not a Dickensian one, mind you, but a rather pleasant place with grown-ups who actually are positive attachment figures for her.

Nonetheless, Sayuri is both confused and excited when her long lost family finds her and takes her home. It is not an ideal home, to say the least. Mom’s crazy, herpetologist Dad zips off on an expedition the same day Sayuri arrives, only leaving his snake collection, and Sayuri’s secret sister? Is usually hidden away in an attic room and looks a lot like a snake person. She loves to peep at Sayuri through a hole in the ceiling of our heroine’s room and makes her life a living hell. So much so, the kid is also starting to be plagued by surrealist nightmares.

And because all of that isn’t quite a bad enough time for the girl, there’s also a silver-haired witch haunting the borders of the movie, and some murders to look forward to.

This Daiei horror movie is strictly aimed at kids and adapts some tales by the great mangaka Kazuo Umezu, from the phase of his career when he was involved in creating horror shojo manga (that is horror manga aimed at a teen female audience).

Director Noriaki Yuasa – also the guy responsible for most of the Gamera films of the time – often achieves the proper movie version of the manic, hysterical energy of Umezu’s girls’ horror work. As is tradition in this genre, our virtuous heroine is confronted with indignities, injustices and child-sized horrors and mainly comes through them by keeping her chin up and the innate goodness of her heart intact.

The horrors are certainly not something to disturb a contemporary grown-up, yet there’s an inherent weirdness to the whole tale that makes the film a fascinating and fun experience even for us, the elderly. There’s nary a scene going by where Yuasa doesn’t take the crazier way to portray something as long as he can keep to a beautifully crisp black and white aesthetic at the same time. The dream sequences, looking like Dali meeting Umezu, fittingly enough, are particularly great, suggesting that the really rather square Sayuri must have a more interesting side buried under all her straightforward goodness. They also look not quite like anything I’ve seen before, even actual Dali dream sequences.

In short: Gamera (1965)

Original title: Daikaiju Gamera

A pretty hot moment in the Cold War somewhere in the Arctic ends in a plane carrying an H-bomb exploding. The explosion sets free the ancient devil of the Inuit tribes, the giant fire-breathing turtle Gamera. After eating a Japanese research ship, only leaving alive zoologist Dr. Hidaka (Eiji Funakoshi), his assistant Kyoke (Harumi Kiritachi) and journalist Aoyagi (Junichiro Yamshiko), Gamera disappears to parts unknown.

Some time later, the turtle lands on Hokkaido and smashes up a lighthouse. Because he's a suicidal, dumb little twat, a turtle-loving boy named Toshio (Yoshiro Uchida) is climbing the lighthouse while Gamera is already smashing it. Then Gamera makes a grave mistake. Instead of letting the little bastard fall to his well-deserved death, Gamera rescues him, leaving Toshio free to spend the rest of the movie whining, moping, shouting for Gamera and wandering into danger. Thank you so much, Gamera.

When the film doesn't show us the non-adventures of the most stupid boy in Japan, it does from time to time allow us to watch Gamera's further adventures and the attempts of scientists and military to somehow get rid of the fire-breathing menace.

The plan that succeeds in the end is very special indeed.

The first film in Daiei's Gamera series (the studio's attempt to create a monster as successful as Toho's Godzilla/Gojira) is actually two films. The first one is a pretty fine kaiju eiga about one silly yet wonderfully imaginative monster, with some fine suitmation - clearly the best in a Gamera movie before Shusuke Kaneko got his hands on the character -, pleasant city-smashing and what might just be my most favourite way of getting rid of a monster in all of kaiju-dom. In other words, that film isn't as good as the best Toho productions - it's lacking a bit in emotional resonance and depth for it - but it is a smashingly good time. Director Noriaki Yuasa even manages to let Gamera quite often look like the threatening force of nature a giant monster should be. That Yuasa does this with a rocket-propelled, fire-breathing turtle deserves all respect.

It's just too bad that Yuasa loses that respect again with the second film you can find inside of Gamera. This Gamera is about a whining little brat named Toshio who neither possesses a sense of self-preservation nor empathy with the suffering of others nor a brain and is always at hand to distract from the stuff that's fun and important in a kaiju eiga, that is, a monster smashing things and earnest people in white coats talking SCIENCE(!). I know, I know, Toshio's supposed to be the audience identification figure for the children Daiei was mainly aiming the Gamera movies at, but you can't tell me that anyone - child or not - could watch him going on whining and moping and not come out of the experience hating him with great passion. What makes Toshio even more infuriating is the fact that you could cut all of his scenes out of the film, and nothing at all about the plot would change, making Toshio not only annoying, but also completely useless.

How much you'll be able to enjoy the parts of Gamera that don't contain Toshio will really depend on how hardened your are against annoying child characters in movies. I found myself suffering so much from the child's scenes that I began to wish for odious comic relief instead.

 

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Gamera vs. Guiron (1969)

Original title: Gamera tai daiakuju Giron

(This is not about the Sandy Frank version, thank Cthulhu!)

Mysterious radio waves from space hit Japan's space telescopes. Space scientists theorize these might be messages from aliens, but since humanity's lacking in proper technology, the only way to meet our brothers and sisters from space would be if the aliens came to Earth. Oh well.

The space diplomatic state of affairs changes when one evening three children - siblings Akio (Nobuhiro Kajima) and Tomoko (Miyuki Akiyama), and their friend for the international market Tom (Christopher Murphy) - witness a mysterious object going down through their telescope.

Obviously, the trio goes off to take a look at where the object must have landed the next day, only to find a proper, empty two-person flying saucer (from space!). The boys manage to trap themselves in the ship, and hurtle into space through the judicious random pressing of buttons. Poor Tomoko has to stay home and try to convince her stupid mother and a not quite as stupid, mild-mannered cop (Kon Ohmura) of what happened in a boring subplot I don't need to bother with further.

At the same time, the boys are merrily flying on their way through space, have a meeting with everyone's favourite flying turtle thing Gamera that's just long enough for the big G to save their lives from a meteorite and take part in a little song, until their ship leaves Gamera behind and finally crashes onto a planet.

There, the boys first witness the local monster Guiron making mincemeat (you can take that pretty literally) of a Gyaos just like Butcher Pete with a sword instead of a head, and then have fun with teleporting devices and one of those conveyor belts Arthur C. Clarke once prophesied would replace all sidewalks.

Eventually, the boys meet and greet the only inhabitants of the planet they're stranded on, space girls (short capes! helmets with little horns! ray guns!) Barbella (Hiroko Kai) and Florbella (Reiko Kasahara) who tell them a rather impenetrable story about how their planet's nature-controlling computer malfunctioned, produced monsters, etc. The space girls thought themselves trapped on the planet forever, until they somehow located the little spaceship and brought it back via a remote control. Now, it'll soon be time for them to flee their home and make off to Earth with the boys.

Or rather, with the boys' brains in their bellies, because these space girls may be charming, but they sure are hungry - and also need to eat the boys' brains to understand Earth better, it seems. Oh well.

Fortunately for Akio and Tom, Gamera truly is the friend of all children and will soon arrive on the nameless planet and go out of its way to save them, even if it means to fight a creature as freakish as Guiron.

Of the two biggest series of kaiju cinema, Daiei's Gamera films did identify themselves much earlier and clearer as made for and possibly by children than Toho's Godzilla films, what with their annoying child protagonists, horrifying/funny songs and tendency to be very, very silly. I do suspect that part of the reason for the silliness (and even some of the childishness) was the films' shrinking budgets. It is, after all, much less work-and-money intensive to let one's monster suits trawl through a rocky planet in outer space with a handful of domes than let it crush famous and beloved Japanese landmarks.

As far as I understand it, Gamera vs. Guiron is the most childish of all classic Gamera movies. Generally, that would make the film very much not my thing, but besides its childishness, its annoying protagonists, and its total lack of plot construction, GvG also features two of the most important hallmarks of many of my very favourite strands of Japanese filmmaking: it's absolutely batshit insane and (on paper) completely inappropriate for the audience it was made for, what with the brain eating and monster body parts flying in all directions.

You might think my plot description might give a slight hint of the film's insanity, but the brain eating, the aliens' non-plans (1. get space ship 2. eat child brains 3. travel to Earth 4. profit!!!), and Gamera's stoned facial expression and eye-rolling are just the tip of the iceberg here. Especially Gamera's two big fight scenes against Guiron are a "wtf!" a second - no wonder with Guiron's (who looks like a cross of a little child's nightmare and a sword) main fighting techniques being to saw its enemies apart with its head and to shoot shuriken from its neck. Gamera's answer to that is hiding away in water a lot, bleeding, getting revived by the annoying screeching of children - wearing a facial expression that says "they don't even leave me in peace when I'm dead" - and showing off its horizontal bar gymnastics skills.

In other words, if you like your kaiju cinema dignified, this is probably not going to be the film for you, but if you always wanted to experience what would happen if a kaiju film were scripted by a little boy on drugs, and realized for said boy's pocket money, this is just what you're looking for.

 

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