Superhero Media: Gamera Super Monster

Here we are, the last film in the classic Gamera run, coming nearly a decade after Gamera Vs Zigra and clearly just a cheap cash-in on the existing property. As much as some of the Gamera films aren't all that great, I hazard that any one of them is actually outright terrible, but Gamera Super Monster is pretty terrible. For starters, there is no new footage of Gamera in the film, only clips from the previous films interposed with sections involving a young boy and the three good space women he teams with to fight the evil space woman. This is barely a Gamera film, more like a clip show episode of a long-running series with a nonsense framing device to hang a lampshade on the laziness. All in, there is probably more action in Gamera Super Monster than other films in the series, through virtue of access to the clips of previous fights, but the fights are disjointed, cut down and keep coming back to the kid and the Space Women. 

Ok, so there are some things that really stand out in Gamera Super Monster that I need to talk about, because they're so damn weird and got stuck in my head for days after viewing the film. One, the evil alien spaceship is a really obvious Star Wars Star Destroyer knock-off that looks like it was borrowed from a different film. Two, the three good Space Women really seem to be in a poly clique, as they all live together, take their lead from the main one and sleep in the same bed. Three, there is a decent pun where a police officer spooks three kids and remarks about "shonen jump", as in the long-running Japanese comic, but it's not translated in the subtitles and I only picked it up because of the smattering of Japanese I know. Four, the film starts with the main kid and his friends reading Shonen Jump, including a comic about Gamera being owned as a pet turtle by a police officer; if you know what the hell this is, please let me know. Five, the main kid's mother makes him abandon his pet turtle, which really bugs me because reintroducing pet animals to the wild is a good way to get them eaten by predators, but it works out because the turtle was Gamera all along? 

This would have to be the one Gamera film I really didn't want to finish, as all of the interesting parts were recycled from films I'd already seen, and the new sections were more frustrating than anything. Although Gamera Super Monster is framed as the end of the original series, with Gamera even dying to save the Earth in the conclusion, it feels disjointed and more of a fan-film than an actual continuation of what has come before. The repetition of the monsters from previous films only highlights how much better they were in their own films, with more time to develop. Throughout my viewing of these films, my girlfriend has seen bits and pieces and has questioned how I actually enjoy them; I am fortunate in that my first encounter with Gamera was through the 1990s films, which are actually quite good, considered some of the best Kaiju cinema of their era. Now that my next viewing is Gamera Guardian of the Universe, I'll be making some time for my girlfriend to watch it with me.