Gamera vs Barugon

Although it would be absurd to claim Gamera vs Barugon as some sort of unfairly maligned masterpiece, director Shigeo Tanaka's film does contain individual ideas and moments that range from conceptually sound all the way up to genuinely beautiful. Gamera's second big screen outing largely dispense with the rocket-powered turtle to mooch around with a gang of lawbreakers chasing a magnificent opal that is, in fact, a monster egg. Koji Fujiyama's Onodera is the most thrilling element in this human strata, a greedy thug who is allowed a tremendous lack of repercussion for his murderous actions, enabling him to hurry the plot forward whenever the boring do-gooders hit a brick wall.

Onodera's most incredible moment arrives deep into the third-act: the burly wrongdoer staging a heist in the middle of a calamitous, barely-holding-together, military operation. With the Japanese Self-Defence Force distracted - their attention captured by a mission that demands they dangle glimmering trinkets in front of title pest Barugon - Onodera blasts in out of the darkness, interrupting the painstaking attempt to lure this materialistic monster to his doom. Fujiyama's thief crashes his speedboat directly into the military command vessel before jumping aboard then outgunning the soldiers guarding the dazzling diamond being used as bait.

Onodera's unapologetic villainy is such that he feels precisely zero shame about inflicting further Barugon carnage on the world. He just wants to get paid, even if that means stealing the solution to a problem he has directly caused. Human greed and an indifference to ecological balance is a frequent driving force in kaiju films but it's fun seeing these ideas expressed specifically in terms of street level criminality and a passionate (but illogical) self-interest. The Gamera series is so committed to making human ingenuity a plausible solution to monster landings that it seems equally important, not to mention exciting, to pursue the ways in which the individual can work to scupper an otherwise unified defence.

Which brings us to the monsters themselves. While both Barugon and the barely featured Gamera conduct themselves with a stiffness normally associated with poorly pressed pocket money toys, Gamera vs Barugon does have an ace up its sleeve - special effects director Noriaki Yuasa. Daiei Film may not have the same kind of money, or international appeal, as Toho's irradiated output but Yuasa is able to iterate and innovate on the established language of monster confrontation. The special effects director's approach is distinct from that of Godzilla powerhouses Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya in that Yuasa is less interested in terrifying cataclysm, preferring to luxuriate in the company of these special effects and their surreal, seismic relationship with our world.

Perhaps lacking the confidence that Gamera and Barugon's Imperial stamped outfits will stand up to close scrutiny, Yuasa hides the creatures in night-time sorties, lit by tracer rounds and blanketed by luminous, but sooted, smoke. The background and foreground are stacked with shattered detailing, stressing both the danger of proximity and the sheer scale of these beasts. This smouldering approach to monster mise en scene is absolutely rooted in Tsuburaya's work on the original Godzilla but Yuasa pushes the smoked-out technique further, accounting for clashing, blood-thirsty characteristics in these less otherworldly creatures. Tsuburaya's Kaiju tower over their surroundings, Yuasa's are caged by them, stuck thrashing against humanity's shattering structures. This is wonderful, influential, work. Yuasa's gloriously gritty approach to special effects staging clearly discernible in Teruyoshi Nakano and Eiichi Asada's later, exemplary runs with the Godzilla franchise.