Gamera vs Gyaos

What to do when a modest but genuinely excellent creature feature like Gamera vs Barugon underperforms at the box office? Well, you aim the follow-up squarely at youngsters and hope they end up dragging along the rest of their family for the show. Thankfully, despite this inauspicious conceptual detour, director Noriaki Yuasa's Gamera vs Gyaos has, in Naoyuki Abe's Eiichi Kanamura, a central child performance that registers as delightfully chaotic rather than prim or pandering. Eiichi, usually seen combing through phone registry-sized comics or firing cap guns at his toy police car, is only lightly threaded into a human-level intrigue that takes in a village full of ageing farmers who are trying to wring the maximum amount of money out of a nearby road development that has, naturally, disturbed the more predatory of the title monsters. Since it's extremely difficult to care about greedy adults too timid to actually commit any exciting crimes, Yuasa's film depends on the stout, indefatigable Eiichi to stumble upon the people chomping bats that menace this parochial prefecture. 

Snatched up by a ravenous monster then rescued by everybody's favourite rocket-powered turtle, Eiichi takes all of these developments in his stride; quickly returning to his bedroom to depict his blazing hero in a lurid crayon etching. In this sense Eiichi's adventures prefigure Ishiro Honda's undervalued All Monsters Attack, the Godzilla franchise's belated attempt at catering directly to the younger audience it had cultivated. Unlike All Monsters though, Gamera vs Gyaos isn't hobbled by recycling footage culled from earlier instalments. Instead Yuasa, who also helmed this film's special effects photography, stages a series of impressively barbarous encounters between these warring behemoths that sees flippers lasered to the flapping bone, toes chewed off then regrown, and an injured Gamera raging underneath an emerald mask of his own blood. A special mention then for Gyaos, a pointedly malevolent animal who looks and even behaves like a cute capsule toy in chuckling close-up but, when fully revealed, also manages to transmit the terrifying uncanniness of a man's body adorned with massive, leathery wings. Unlike its benevolent, reptilian opponent - who suffers slathering injury to protect a child - Gyaos is pure consumptive glee, never happier than when it's able to scoop up screaming bystanders and feast on them like a skyscraper-sized vampire.