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| Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995) | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 13 2011, 08:43 AM (435 Views) | |
| Laughing Gravy | Dec 13 2011, 08:43 AM Post #1 |
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You remember Gamera: the giant turtle who can fly and shoot fire out of his shell. He befriends children and fights other monsters. For an enormous flying fire-shooting turtle, he's actually quite pleasant. Gamera was around for a series of movies in the 1960s, which played on TV in the 1970s and taught an entire generation of TV-watchers that there were worse things than Godzilla movies. In 1995, Gamera got a "reboot" for a new film series, and the first one is actually quite well done, fun, and enjoyable. It seems that three giant pterodactyls have awakened from a prehistoric slumber and are munching on Japanese food. Well, on Japanese. Despite this, the Japanese government decides to capture them for study, so they (get this) dump tons of raw meat into a baseball stadium that's got a retractable roof, and when the birdies come along, they snap the lid shut. That sounds good on paper, but what they end up with is not three caged giant birds but one baseball stadium with a huge hole in the roof, just like where the Dallas Cowboys play! Just at about that point, Gamera shows up. The Japanese scientists figure out (don't ask me how, I watched this part in both Japanese and dubbed English and I couldn't follow it) that the scientists of Atlantis created the big birds genetically to eat their garbage(!) and when the birds ran out of garbage and started to eat Atlanteans, they created Gamera to slay the birds. Now, maybe it's just me, but the last thing I'd think of if I had a carnivorous bird problem would be, "I'd better go get myself a flying turtle to take care of the problem." In any case, it didn't work, and the Atlanteans paid for their folly with their lives (dang, I sure write purdy when I want to). The rest of the movie is taken up with Gamera fighting birds, a young man wooing the impossibly young and beautiful turtle scientist (she's about 24 years old and looks like a server in a sushi joint) with lines like, "I'd like to take you out when Tokyo is monster-free," and a little schoolgirl who has a psychic connection with the giant turtle, as do we all, don't we, really? A really fun film that I enjoyed a lot. It's on a very cheap (less than $10!) Blu-ray with one of its sequels (yep, there's more)... |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Dec 14 2011, 10:42 AM Post #2 |
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Mouth Breather
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Thanx for the warning... |
| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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| JazzGuyy | Dec 15 2011, 01:51 PM Post #3 |
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Balcony Gang, Foist Class
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I used to love watching the Toho monster epics when I was young because the special effects, plots, acting, etc. were so bad. The last time (about 20 years ago) I tried to watch one I couldn't get past the first 5 minutes. I think these movies only worked for me during a brief moment of my life. I automatically pass on all of them now. |
| TANSTAAFL! | |
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| AndyFish | Dec 16 2011, 07:26 PM Post #4 |
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Movie Watcha Foist Class
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I HATED all the Gamera films as a kid, they were (and still are) vastly inferior to the Godzilla films-- even the bad ones-- but I really liked this one a LOT. Probably the best giant monster movie made outside of GOJIRA (1954). |
| www.andytfish.com | |
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| Laughing Gravy | Dec 16 2011, 10:38 PM Post #5 |
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Yeah, it's really good... But have you seen The Host? |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| AndyFish | Dec 17 2011, 06:39 AM Post #6 |
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Movie Watcha Foist Class
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I did, I liked it very much. It was much more 'straight' than Gamera, but I still liked Gamera just a bit more. |
| www.andytfish.com | |
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6:37 AM Jul 11