directed by Haruyasu Noguchi
Japan
84 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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I watched this several years ago and had a fairly negative opinion of it, but that was back when I was not as familiar with tokusatsu as I am now, and I may have also been watching the dub, which is generally not the optimal way to watch a Showa-era kaiju film. This is fairly easy to find in gorgeous quality (on archive.org), and I'd recommend watching it that way just for the miniatures, if nothing else. More on that later.
Nikkatsu is the oldest film studio in Japan, but they're not known for their kaiju output. It is very obvious that this movie represents the studio trying to cash in on the kaiju boom on film and television. Just looking at the director's previous work should prove that: Dozens of nothing but crime films, and then this. Watching the movie itself does give one a sense that this isn't intended to be particularly deep or sentimental material; it kind of just... hits all the right beats, does all the right things, accomplishes mostly what a kaiju film should accomplish, all without ever feeling like it's doing anything unique. The things that it does are by and large taken from other sources: The plot is nearly identical to 1961's Gorgo, which is itself, arguably, a ripoff. Tokusatsu has a long, long history of recycling plots, and for that reason I don't think a film's originality should have much bearing on what sort of value it has to you, the viewer. Just because something's been done before doesn't mean it can't be done good again. And judging from a couple of YouTube commenters saying things along the lines of "Thank you for uploading this, I saw it when I was a kid and it scared the boogers out of me", Gappa at least achieved its goal of being appealing (?) to small children.
So the film begins with a set-up we've probably all seen before. A developer announces pie-in-the-sky plans to open a theme park based around a sort of amalgamation of South Pacific island culture, in Japan, so that consumers won't have to go far to get the "exotic" entertainment they're looking for. At the same time, volcanic activity and strange events have been reported occurring on an island. A few groups are sent to investigate and are met with an isolated culture living on the island, who have "legends" about a large creature living inside a cave protected by a stone idol. The seismic activity on the island breaks the idol and opens a passage into the cave for the outsiders to stick their greedy little hands into, and they find inside a giant egg, which quickly hatches into a baby monster - dollar signs in the eyes of all involved. If they can bring back the monster, along with the people of the island, and exhibit both in the new theme park, it'll make bank. The monster is captured and brought back to Japan to be experimented on before its unveiling. As viewers, we've been counting all of the mistakes being made thus far, and we know a reckoning is about to come.
The racism in this film is very typical of kaiju cinema of the time, but that doesn't make it any less gross. As happens often, the outsiders ignore all the warnings of the indigenous people on the island, and when it comes back to bite them, they look pretty stupid. There's this weird cognitive dissonance in plots like this where whatever made-up indigenous culture the film portrays are shown as intelligent and (sometimes) helpful, and it's the Japanese outsiders who are clearly in the wrong, but the film goes about presenting this using Japanese actors in blackface and cheap tatty clothing. The general idea is there - respecting indigenous knowledge and lifeways - but it's presented through the worst possible means.
If we've seen Gorgo we kind of know what's coming next, but we can figure it out either way. Baby Gappa's parents come looking for it, and they're huge. The destruction they cause is almost entirely collateral, there's no real sense of anger, just two animals looking for their baby and oops, there happens to be a human civilization in the way. No matter how much damage is done, the theme park developer refuses to give up baby Gappa. This is probably the most realistic aspect of this film: Somebody who knows something will make him money refuses to give that thing up, even when he can see that it is actively destroying the world around him. But in an interesting turn of events, both the guy we're supposed to hate and one of the film's main "good" characters are sort of in agreement about not giving up Gappa. In spite of some characters seeming more measured and rational than others who are just greedy and stubborn, nobody is exactly embracing the idea of giving baby Gappa back to its parents, except - in Gamera fashion - for a little girl, the developer's daughter, who immediately recognizes her own pain of having lost her mother in the separation of Gappa from its parents.
When I first reviewed this I said it felt like a "one and done" kaiju movie for me, and it still does. I enjoy it as an artifact of the "golden age" of tokusatsu, but there's not really much here. A thin plot; stiff, uninteresting characters (big fan of the woman who just randomly decides to quit her job at the end to be a housewife and have babies); and a heaping helping of racism keep this from ever feeling memorable. But I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the miniatures, because, like, oh my god. I had actually been starting to fall asleep a little around when the Gappa parents made landfall, but when I saw the miniatures I snapped to attention. They built a city set here that is absolutely stunning in its detail. The scale is relatively small; it's only a small area that the Gappas rampage around in, but the amount of work that was put into the buildings is just some of the most incredible miniature-building I've ever seen. The city just looks like a city, not a city in miniature. To my knowledge this is pretty much the only time Nikkatsu ever did a tokusatsu film of this scale, but when they did, my goodness. I like to imagine they had a practical effects team on hand who were all huge tokusatsu nerds and knew in their bones that their time had come as soon as they got wind of this project. Considering that Nikkatsu had come up with five other kaiju projects and this was the only one that got made, said practical effects team was probably raring to go by the time production actually got under way.
I'll end by talking about the Gappa suits themselves, as I like to cover suit design when talking about kaiju films. I'm not too hot on these guys, but their appearance is interesting and strange and actually somewhat eerie. The moniker of a "triphibian" monster references the way the creatures can fly, swim, and walk on land (Gamera can do all this as well, of course, as can Godzilla - do not let anyone lie to you and tell you Godzilla cannot fly). They sort of look like gargoyles. Not quite avian, not quite anything else. Baby Gappa in particular is straight up unnerving - its eyes are too human. In the middle of such unbelievably detailed sets, the clunky, awkward Gappa suits look a little out of place. imdb does not credit the suit actors, so I'm going to name them here, because suit actors are always underappreciated and these folks deserve to be remembered: Hiroshita Atami and Takashi Konagai played the male Gappa, Ken Misugi and Shiro Tonami played the female. I am not sure if one of them also played baby Gappa, but I can't find information on who was in that particular suit.
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