Gamera vs. Barugon (1966)

directed by Shigeo Tanaka

Japan

106 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Full disclosure: I was drifting in and out of sleep pretty heavily for about the last half-hour of this movie, so this review may have some gaps where I could not stay awake. I highly, highly recommend watching this on archive.org if you're looking for it; they have the Blu-Ray rip which is in absolutely beautiful quality.

Anyway. After quickly recapping the events at the end of Gamera, we're told that midway through its journey to Mars, Gamera was hit by a random asteroid and knocked off-course, spiraling back to Earth. Convenient for us puny humans, who are in more need of rescue than we had cockily assumed, but probably very confusing for Gamera. There is a marked difference in tone between this film and its predecessor, which is partially due to this one being in (quite vivid) color, but also this somehow just feels more like a movie. Gamera was all about Gamera, and it felt like a slightly unsteady step into the world of kaiju film from a studio hoping to capitalize on the booming popularity of Godzilla and tokusatsu on television. It was both visually dark and had a tone of mild dread, though nothing near as suffocating as Gojira. This second entry rolls onto the scene well-rounded; fully equipped with subplots, a grip of different characters all prepared to backstab each other, nice cinematography, and, as the title gives away, a second kaiju.

For a long time, this does not feel like a monster movie at all. I'm used to this from the Godzilla series, which is fond of introducing Godzilla in a very roundabout and sometimes even completely unrelated way: We have to follow people doing other stuff before anything interesting happens just to get some plot so that the movie isn't 20 minutes of epic kaiju battle and no substance whatsoever. Oddly, though, and maybe this is just because I wasn't sitting there waiting impatiently for my beloved Godzilla to show up, it feels like vs. Barugon does this better. I was perfectly satisfied with the story, which concerns a couple of would-be jewel thieves trying to steal what they think is a huge, priceless opal but is actually the egg of a dangerous creature. I wasn't waiting for the action to arrive - this movie does non-action things perfectly fine.

The amount of blackface here just can't not be addressed, though. It casts a shadow over what is otherwise a really good film. The first movie had this same issue, with fake Arctic natives trying and failing to warn the main characters about Gamera, but where the people in brownface in that film were at least treated as intelligent and made part of the plot, in this one they're nothing but shield-toting stereotypes. It is quite disgusting, and tokusatsu at this period in time was rife with it. There's no excuse for it, and unfortunately when we remember the Gamera series for everything great that it is, we do have to remember that it had some moments that were, at best, ill-conceived.

After some time and a lot of people ignoring the advice of fake natives, the "opal" hatches. I was so impressed by the hatching sequence that I wanted to make sure I mentioned it, because it was done with such delicacy that I was immensely thankful for a beautifully clear picture so I could see it well. The steam rising from the inside of the egg, the way the infant Barugon looks slick and newborn... I thought it was all amazing. (Wikizilla says that the coating on the newborn Barugon was made of "special material imported from the United States", which... just sounds kind of ominous, honestly.) It's not 1:1 realistic; it doesn't look like documentary footage of a hatching egg, and it shouldn't. What makes practical effects scenes like this unique and admirable is that we can see the work that went into depicting a real-life event, and instead of criticizing it where it might not resemble real life, we should appreciate the skill that it takes to execute it. This goes for everything else effects-related in this film as well. Adult Barugon doesn't in any way resemble a real creature, and for that matter neither does Gamera, but it's the manufacturing of such elaborate, fantastical things that makes them beautiful, not whether or not they fool us into thinking they're real.

Longtime Gamera fans will probably read this and think "duh", but what is interesting to me about Gamera as a creature is that it really does feel like a large, confused animal. I've said this before, but my personal headcanon for Godzilla is that he operates at a level of cognition incomparable to humans, and while he is, like Gamera, also ultimately an animal who is not at fault for his destructive nature, he does feel like he has more agency. Gamera is pure instinct, at least in these early installments. Gamera wants to eat and is afraid of being awake in a world that is hostile to it. The same goes for Barugon. Barugon fights Gamera not as a hateful enemy but as a more aggressive animal versus a usually docile one. And this is where I lose the plot a bit, because I had fallen asleep by this point, but I don't remember Gamera even having that much of a role in defeating Barugon - from what I can recall, Gamera gets frozen by Barugon's rainbow beam (yeah) and spends a lot of the battle out of commission while the humans' defense and military forces try to figure out how to stop a huge lizard who can shoot rainbows out of its back.

This is getting lengthy, so I'll stop soon, but what also stuck out to me about this movie is that it is so much about greed - personal greed, not the kind of societal hubris and blindness that leads to Godzilla. Although I suppose the greed of individuals in this film suggests the presence of greed in all individuals, so maybe it's not so personal after all. But at least one (again, apologies, I was exhausted and not fully observant) of the characters who steal the "opal" spends the aftermath deeply regretting what he's done and taking basically the whole brunt of the responsibility for Barugon leveling Osaka. He's disgusted with himself and can't believe that he was so focused on his potential gains in the short term without considering anything else. There are a lot of moments I'm familiar with as a Godzilla fan where the nature of humanity itself is brought to light in all its occasional ugliness, but not since the very first film have we really seen someone personally saying "I am responsible for this, alone" and then dealing with the guilt of that.

There's an interesting mix of elements here, of things that we'd see more and less of in future Showa-era Gamera films; it's brighter and more colorful than the first but also carries a slight soberness to it. It has that weird in-between feeling where it's not quite a children's movie but could at any moment become one. I don't think this is one of the best of the series, but it is an integral one.