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.

I am not an expert on Kaiju films. I dabbled very briefly with some of the Godzilla films years back but I never dove into it to the extent that some people have. I do enjoy them when I do see them and when Sam mentioned he was doing a mini Gamera marathon, I thought it was a good of a time as any to break out my Millcreek Entertainment set of the films. I was assigned Gamera: Guardian of the Universe from 1995.

I’ve never watched a single Gamera film so I really lucked out on getting this film as it is basically a reboot of the franchise. It is about the discovery of Gamera, who keeps floating into the way of ships, and ancient evil genetically engineered carnivorous birds that have been attacking people.

The film opens with a couple of ships on their way back to Japan that come across a mysterious moving atoll that almost tears a ship carrying plutonium right open. An investigation team is set up and they climb aboard the atoll where they find odd otherworldly metal comma shaped pieces and a very old looking plank with strange runes that read, “We commit to the cradle of time the Last Hope, Gamera. May he awaken with the Shadow of Evil, Gyaos.”There also was a team sent to the island to investigate the bird attacks. They are ordered to capture the birds and they do so using flash photography, tranquilizer guns, and a baseball stadium with a retractable dome. Unfortunately one of the birds escape but a giant tortoise arises from the sea and batters the escaped bird.

Everyone is straight freaking out about the tortoise thing because it is going to be a bigger threat than the birds. They’re a bunch of dummies though because it turns out that inscription is about that tortoise Gamera who is there to protect the world against the birds Gyaos. Along the way a young girl is gifted one of the strange metal pieces and becomes psychically linked to Gamera. Gamera’s injuries even appear on the young girl’s body! 

There is a lot to digest in this film. It is well-paced which I’ve noticed isn’t always kaiju movies’ strong points, and apart from some early CGI looks beautiful. In fact even with that early CGI I feel like it stands the test of time. The monster mayhem is top form stuff, with some physical fights and elemental blast effects. Gamera’s fireball breath and Gyaos’s steel melting bad breath are really neat. Gamera even has rocket boosters in its appendages! The icing on top of the cake that is Gamera: Guardian of the Universe though is its end theme, Myth performed by Bakufu Slump. A rocking little song that I would have definitely blasted loud in my Toyota Camry back in college had I discovered this movie then. I am looking forward to also watching the sequel to this film, Gamera 2: Attack of Legion. If you don’t feel like going all the way back to 1967 to get a fix of Gamera, this is the best starting point and you can work backwards or forwards from here.

Most of the budget of this movie went toward special effects, with stop motion dinosaurs that pay homage to the work of Ray Harryhausen. Hardly any of the budget went to the actors or the props, including the Kool-Aid that was used for the film’s berry juice. That said — the locations look great. The Vasquez Rocks area of California’s desert have been used in several other films and TV shows. You’ll recognize them mostly from Star Trek and as a result, the primary rock formation has been named Kirk’s Rock.

The spaceship Odyssey crashes on a planet that seems much like Earth but is many light years away. Within moments, the ship has sunk, the communications offer has been eaten by an undersea dinosaur and the radio is gone. Captain Lee Norsythe (Louie Lawless, who under the pseudonym Leo Rivers was the cinematographer and associate producer of the 1973 documentary Manson; of note is that due to his thick Canadian accent, director James K. Shea dubbed all of his dialogue, which is mixed much higher than anyone else’s) is in charge, but the remaining crew soon realize that they’re up against some pretty tough odds.

Then one of them drops the laser gun in the swamp.

Then one of them drops all their food off a mountain.

Then one of them tries to steal dinosaur eggs.

Then they all fight about whether or not they should establish a new civilization instead of doing something about it.

Yes, welcome to a movie with heroes so idiotic that you’ll boo when they finally kill the Tyrannosaurus Rex and win the day.

The only actors other than Lawless that had any previous experience were Max Thayer, who played Mike and his previous experience was Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks; James Whitworth, who was Jim, was in The Hills Have Eyes as Jupiter, The Candy Snatchers and Bury Me an Angel; and Harvey Shain had been in some softcore movies like 2069 A.D., Office Love-In and The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet under the name Forman Shane.

Derna Wylde, who played Derna Lee, the crew member who dumped the laser blaster, went on to be a researcher on Chained Heat. Charlotte Speer, who was smart enough to discover what plants were poisonous, was in one other film, the 1985 slasher oddity Appointment with Fear. And Pamela Bottaro, who was Nyla, who lost all of the food, shows up in Al Adamson’s Death Dimension, which has Jim Kelly, Harold Sakata, George Lazenby, Terry Moore from Mighty Joe Young and Aldo Ray. That movie, I gotta see!

Here’s another weird fact. Writer Ralph Lucas also was behind the screenplay of The Child! And James Aupperle, who co-wrote the story, also wrote Flesh Gordon and would go on to be the lighting technical director for the Twilight films, as well as the digital effects artist for the first Hellboy movie and various effects work for The Gate II: The Trespassers, RoboCop2 and many more movies.

The best actor in this movie? The Rhedosaurus, which was The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Harryhausen himself visited the studio and gave his consent for his creature’s cameo appearance.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime. It’s also available with commentary by Rifftrax on Amazon Prime and Tubi. How much do we love this movie? We also reviewed it back December 2019 as part of our “Ape Week.”

All the way back in 1979, the first issue of Fangoria came out with a psychedelic cover of Godzilla. I always wondered where this image came from and now I know — the strange and alluring 1977 Luigi Cozzi led version of the original film.

Yes, Italian filmmaker Luigi Cozzi (Starcrash, Contamination, Paganini Horror) created this colorized version of the original Godzilla, complete with a soundtrack that used a magnetic tape process similar to Sensurround.

Due to the success of the 1976 remake of King Kong, Cozzi attempted to cash in on the film’s success by re-releasing Gorgo, but it costs too much. Toho gave him a good price, but were only able to provide negatives for the 1956 American version of the film. Cozzi’s distributors refused to release the film, after discovering it in black-and-white.

At this point, Cozzi got the approval from Toho to colorize the film, provided they get the new negative when he was done. He had final approval over the stock footage, music, and choice of coloring.

To pad the film’s running time to 90 minutes, Cozzi added stock footage, saying “The decision to insert extra footage was because the original picture was 1 hour and 20 minutes. This was normal length in the fifties but in the mid seventies a picture to be shown theatrically had to be at least 1 hour and 30 minutes long. So we were forced to add material to it in order to reach that length. Its final length was 1 hour and 45 minutes.”

Cozzi wanted to give an old film an “up-to-date and more violent look,” so the director added real footage of death and destruction from war-time and Hiroshima  stock footage, as well as scenes from The Train, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Godzilla Raids Again. 

To make the movie even bigger, Cozzi added Sensurround effects that would be blasted from giant loudspeakers specially placed in each theater. Composer Vince Tempera wrote the film’s additional score on electric piano, with synth music being used to give the film a more modern feel.

Image from SciFi Japan

Then, the film was colorized by Armando Valcauda frame-by-frame using stop motion gel photography, a process that took three months. The effect isn’t really seeing the movie in color, as later colorization efforts would accomplish, but pretty much providing a tripped out version of the film that is constantly being splashed with neon colors.

So what was Spectrorama ’70? Cozzi told SciFi Japan, “Spectrorama 70” is just a name I did invent to help advertising. It refers to colorization but also gives a feeling of 70mm which at that time was typical of every big budget Hollywood blockbuster. This invented name, in the style of William Castle, helped to give a “bigger” look at my Godzilla theatrical re-release advertising materials.”

This is one of the hardest kaiju films to find and one that’s probably one of the weirdest and most interesting. There’s really nothing like this movie and you can say that about just about every film that Cozzi created.

You can download this on the Internet Archive.

Filmed near Dallas, Texas, this movie was produced by Dallas drive-in theater chain owner Gordon McLendon who wanted his own movies. This was shot back-to-back with The Killer Shrews. Unlike most regional drive-in films, both received national and even foreign distribution.

This movie is also a lie. That’s no Gila Monster. It’s a Mexican Beaded Lizard.

A young couple are pre-arrdvarking as they overlook a ravine when the giant Gila Monster appears and murders them. The rest of the movie is spent with their friends alternatively looking for them and running from the lizard.

If you ever wanted to see a small lizard play with a model train set and then bother some teens as a sock hop, then this is the movie for you.

Luckily, Chase Winstead is on hand, ready to drive nitro-filled hot rod dead center into the monster, blowing it, as they say, up real good.

Ray Kellogg, in addition to the previously mentioned The Killer Shrews, also co-directed The Green Berets. He got to direct this movie in exchange for creating the special effects. It was produced by Ken Curtis, who played Festus on Gunsmoke.

This movie features Don Sullivan (The Monster of Piedras Blancas), French Miss Universe 1957 contestant Lisa Simone (she’s also a Moon Girl in Missile to the Moon), former Sons of the Pioneers member Shug Fisher, Fred Graham (who falls to his death at the beginning of Vertigo) and local disc jockey Ken Knox, who helped pick the music for the movie.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime or download it from the Internet Archive. There’s also a colorized version on Tubi. You can also watch the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

The first Gamera film in nine years — following Gamera vs. Zigra — this is somehow the strangest of all the movies. That’s an accomplishment.

This entire movie is made up of recycled footage from the entire Gamera film series, as well as Space Battleship Yamato and Galaxy Express 999. This was an attempt to help Daiei get out of financial trouble. Bad news: the film failed to succeed at the box office and Daiei still had to file for bankruptcy six months later.

So they did what the Japanese do best. They kill off Gamera at the end.

Yes, the alien Zanon has come to enslave Earth and even the three Spacewomen, Earth’s defenders, can’t stop him. You know who can? A little kid. As always.

By the way — Mach Fumiake, who portrays the Spacewoman Kilara, was a pro wrestler.

That kid has a connection to Gamera, so he takes us back in time through all the films, as Gamera battles Gyaos, Zigra, Viras, Jiger, Guiron and Barugon before sacrificing himself to save the Earth from Zanon.

Depressing? Yeah. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched a Japanese film that ends this way and I end up thinking about it for years.

There is a funny scene where Gamera smashes up a Godzilla billboard. But this is the end of the so-called Showa Gamera era and there would not be another film with the giant turtle for fourteen more years until Gamera: Guardian of the Universe was made.

It’s sad. There’s no Gamera theme song. Only two minutes of new Gamera footage. And yeah — Gamera dying. You don’t need to be depressed. But I still found the YouTube link for you.

Shortly after Gamera vs. Zigra was completed, the film’s production studio, Daiei Film, went bankrupt. As a result, the film was distributed by another company called Dainichi Eihai. It only cost around $97,000, which is pretty amazing (Around $621,000 in today’s money).

This time, Earth is under attack by aliens. Well, we’re under attack by aliens again.

The Zigrans have enslaved a female astronaut to do their bidding and have a monster named Zigra which can stop the cellular activity of Gamera, who sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Luckily, the children, some dolphins and a bathysphere come to the rescue.

This movie has one of my all-time favorite Gamera moments, as the giant turtle uses a giant rock to play his theme song on the fins of Zigra before setting the beast on fire, because as we have all learned, Gamera does not play.

This would be the last Gamera movie for nine years, which is a shame. I knew none of  this as a child, as I began watching these movies probably in 1977 and had no idea of their history. I wouldn’t have seen this one anyway, as it’s the only original Gamera film to not be released in the U.S. It wouldn’t come over here until the VHS era.