Superhero Media: Gamera Vs Viras

As a fan, I tend to defend Kaiju films in general, but also particularly the Gamera series, which gets a bad rap thanks to being known mostly through Mystery Science Theater 3000 internationally. Personally, I find most Gamera films to be at least interesting, if not downright compelling. That said, Gamera Vs Viras is pretty bad and you can probably skip it. The film opens when an alien spaceship composed of bee-themed xmas baubles attempts to land on Earth, but is destroyed by Gamera, as the last transmission is made, the plan is clear, destroy Gamera! Meanwhile, two boy scouts, one Japanese, one American, steal a miniature submarine and encounter Gamera, providing vital exposition in case the audience hasn't seen any of the previous films. Actually, if you haven't seen any previous Gamera films before watching Gamera Vs Viras, don't worry, because there's plenty of footage from the previous films padding the run-time. Yeah, I don't what happened here, maybe they ran out of money, but once the aliens take control of Gamera and send him against the cities of the world, all of the footage is recycled, and much of it in black and white. 

Much of the story focuses on the two Boy Scouts running around the alien ship, trying to figure out how to help free Gamera so that he can destroy the invaders. To be fair, the inside of the spaceship and the glowing eye effects on the aliens are pretty cool, but aside from 'archival footage', Gamera is in very little of Gamera Vs Viras, with the only real action book-ending the film. Viras is revealed to be one of those alien groups where the species, planet and individuals are all called Viras, and they're out to conquer Earth for non-specific reasons. When Gamera is freed by the small boys, Viras is forced to combine all the crew together to become a giant squid monster and the battle begins. There's an extended sequence where the two men in rubber costumes are wrestling underwater, which is pretty cool, but not worth watching the entire film for, though I feel bad for the poor stuntmen that had to manage those suits in a swimming pool. 

There's a fair bit missing from Gamera Vs Viras that would be present in other Gamera films, like Gamera battling the enemy Kaiju once, losing, and learning tactics for the next fight, or Gamera miraculously healing from a dire injury, which creates the suspicion that maybe this wasn't a Gamera film to begin with? The basic outline comes across more like an extended script for Super Sentai or Ultraman which Gamera happened to stumble into. As a fan of mashing up every damn IP I can get my hands on, having Gamera stumble into an Ultraman villain's plot, the two heroes having a "misunderstanding fight" then teaming up sounds great to me, and I may have to run a Kaiju game along those lines at some point. Assuming that I can find both Ultraman and Gamera in the same scale as my existing Kaiju stuff for less that $80 each. I want some new Gamera films, and new Gamera merchandise.