If you see only one Gamera adventure from the Daiei studio’s initial run (not to mention outside of all those Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes), might as well make it Gamera: Super Monster. Playing like Gamera’s Greatest Hits, the Saturday-matinee movie largely comes cobbled together from the giant flying turtle’s previous adventures. This eighth flick inadvertently sent the Godzilla knockoff to the franchise cemetery, where it stayed buried for a full 15 years.
Directed by Noriaki Yuasa (as with the other seven), the film opens on a pirate spaceship in battle. Don’t get your hopes up for an epic star war, however; Super Monster is so cheap that the skirmish is depicted only via stationary illustrations. Nonetheless, the ship sends a female alien to attack Earth, yet Earth is protected by the Spacewomen, a superhero trio. When not in their matching costumes, the three ladies individually work at a pet store, a school and a Mazda dealership. The Spacewomen occasionally shrink to fit inside a dog carrier; ride in the pet shop’s van, which takes flight as a glowing orange oval; and have a loyal friend in the genre’s required little boy in short pants. Not to stereotype, but like all good Japanese students, he plays a mean rendition of “Camptown Races” on a Yamaha keyboard.
If there’s one thing the kid likes to do more than smile, roam the metropolitan area freely and hang out with older women, it’s watching Gamera defend the world. The Spacewomen don’t do a whole helluva lot beyond some kung-fu sparring with the alien; a good two-thirds of Super Monster is given over to the fight scenes culled from the aforementioned other movies (the American versions of which often have vs. in the title). Gamera pulls out all his tricks — breathing fire, spinning like a goddamn pinwheel, doing gymnastics on industrial constructions — as he goes head-to-turd-resembling-head with the creatures Gaos, Zigra, Viras, Jiger, Guiron and Barugon — or, in respective scientific terms, a bat-dragon, a shark thingie, a squid with an extra chromosome, a dentally challenged dinosaur, a knife-headed reptile with built-in ninja stars, and I don’t even know what.
Early on, a kooky cop dismisses a Gamera manga as “just funny old fairy tales” — as good a review as any for this and any other Gamera outing. They have their place. —Rod Lott