Product Details

• Actors: Kojiro Hongo, Kichijiro Ueda, Reiko Kasahara, Naoyuki Abe, Taro Marui
• Directors: Noriaki Yuasa
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Image Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: June 8, 2004
• Run Time: 150 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00022PZ2O
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #26,715 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The saga of Gamera continues, and his opponents keep getting weirder and wilder! It's the Return of the Giant Monsters when giant vampire bat Gaos squares off against everyone's favorite giant turtle, and in order to weaken the fearsome foe, humans devise a giant record turntable with a large vat of synthetic human blood! Then the rarely-seen Japanese fantasy The Magic Serpent combines samurai warriors and giant monsters, including the title beast, a dinosaur toad, and a gigantic flying spider. It's a monster marathon that's foot-stomping fun for the whole family!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Gamera vs Gyaos + The Magic Serpent: Old-School Fun!, August 10, 2004

By	M. Frantz "Kaiju Samurai" (Tejas) - See all my reviews

I remember watching "Return of the Giant Monsters," aka "Gamera vs Gyaos" when I was much younger. I loved every minute of it, because it was so "out-there," so nutty and contrived that I was foaming at the mouth with its kaiju-goodness. Now, I've found a movie that tops it: "The Magic Serpent."
I am very grateful to Retromedia for releasing both of these movies on DvD (and the Magic Serpent especially, because you probably won't find it anywhere else), because they are both such sheer campy fun that they would HAVE to be on the same DvD.
What's great about these films is that they aren't "good" per-say, but they aren't supposed to be. They're supposed to be FUN. People who criticize these movies for being cheaply made and poorly dubbed basically have nothing better to do with their time. It's pointless to really criticize these movies unless you're a real kaiju-fan and know about this kind of stuff. But even with the critical eye of the fanboy (or fangirl), these flicks are hard to nitpick about because they are so...much...fun!
The only thing keeping this movie from getting higher marks is the fact that there's nothing else on the disc besides a scene selection and Retro's website. Plus, the quality of the print is pretty bad, but that's to be expected, these being such old films, and Retro probably having limited resources.
I highly recommend this DvD to anyone who is a fan of good-'ol giant monster rampages, or to anyone who is looking to introduce children to the kaiju genre (but not before a few Godzilla movies).

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Daiei's(and Toei's) Heyday!, July 25, 2004

By	Bob Eggleton "zillabob" (Providence, RI United States) - See all my reviews

Back in the day, these versions of RETURN OF THE GIANT MONSTERS and THE MAGIC SERPENT regularly appeared on Saturday Creature Feature on fuzzy UHF TV.(I remember watching RETURN OF THE GIANT MONSTERS on Channel 6 from New Bedford,abruptly put on at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon, because a baseball game got rained-out). They are the AIP-TV versions, as the widescreen prints of the films were never shown theaterically in the US, so, they don't exist in the US(only in Japan). That said, what we have are great copies of some vintage films from a time gone by. THE MAGIC SERPENT(bonus on the disk) is a Toei entry from l966, one of their very few forays(aside from the Johnny Sokko series) into Kaiju-type films as mostly they stayed the course with superheroes vs human-sized monsters. It's also highly entertaining and very colorful in ways US films never were. Alot of young people today complain if the disk isn't in widescreen or doesn't have dozens of extras. This 16mm copy of these films are the best document of their time, and with a better picture than I ever saw them on TV so long ago...

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE ORIGINAL AIP VERSION, August 17, 2004

By	A. C. Cronvich (Planet Zeist) - See all my reviews

It should be noted that this is the original AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL version
and not the mediocre SANDY FRANK version from the 1980s.