About the Author: Paul Andolina is back on our site. You can check out his blogs Wrestling with Film and Is the Dad Alive? for more.

Gamera 2: Legion sees Gamera once again defending the planet against an attack, this time from outer space. There is a meteor shower over Japan. The investigating of the giant meteor crash site, however, reveals no meteor! It turns out the meteor was a bunch of evil alien insectoid creatures, who have come to take over the planet. They attack a warehouse full of beer and steal the bottles, they burrow under the subway as well and cause a ton of mayhem, they even plant a strange flower pod that will launch seeds carrying the creatures from city to city.

Gamera attempts to stop these creatures destroying the flower pod that has taken over the city but is swarmed and taken down by the insectoids. Because there are so many of these creatures swarming, a soldier quotes the book of Mark, specifically the part where Jesus encounters the demon who calls itself Legion. From then on the creatures are referred to as such. Gamera eventually revives and defeats the giant Queen of Legion.

There are parts of this movie that make it feel more like a horror film than a typical kaiju film, especially the subway attack scenes, which were bloodier than I expected, when one of the legion bugs kills a subway engineer, the engineer’s body splatters against the glass. The legion insectoids even look horrifying. When the bugs attack the film takes a pretty dark turn. I had a lot of fun with this movie, maybe even more than it’s predecessor. The only thing I didn’t totally love about this movie was the end theme song.