Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gamera vs barugon, October 23, 2001
This is the second instalment of the first Gamera series. It's the follow-up to Daei hit Gamera the invincible (Aka Giant monster Gamera). The first Gamera film was shot as a back up plan after a crashed film project, and with a shoe string budget. In this film the filmmakers had had a much bigger budget to play with, it's also in colour. Gamera is here, as in the first film, bad to the bones, and a friend of no one...Story; In the end of the first film Gamera was jettisoned into space in a pod, in transit to mars. The pod is however smashed by a huge interstellar rock; Gamera is released! He/she returns immediately to earth! The first thing Gamera does is to smash up a power plant, in search for food/energy, with a disastrous result when a dam collapses.
3 men goes to New guinea, to recover a huge opal another man have hidden in a cave 20 years earlier. They get warned in a local village, that evil spirits live there. They find the opal, however greed grabs one of them, only he returns; One is dead, and the other left in the collapsing cave. However it's no opal...
Exposed to infrared light, it hatches - Barugon is born! Barugon seems to be invincible; The freezing vapour from the tip of his tongue, is a horrific weapon - Even Gamera is defenceless!
However a girl from the village in New guinea, with a fistsize diamond, says she knows a way... It's a good film, made with a big budget - I liked it very much!
The negative as, in all of the early Gamera films, the monster suits are a bit crude.
|
|
|
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The "Thinking Man's" Gamera, May 18, 2004
(...) The adult theme (greed) works very well & one can really get a sense of the main character's desperation & self-guilt as he, along with a native girl, struggles to find a way to destroy the monster "Barugon", hatched from an egg that he thought was an opal.Most of the first run Gamera films were kiddie fare with the costume looking very "cute." This film is the exception & Gamera looks more "realistic" (well, as realistic as you can get from a '60's rubber monster suit!) It should be noted that this version is the Sandy Frank video release from the 1980's. This film was previously released in the U.S. as "War of The Monsters" in the 1970's (& that's how most U.S. fans in their 30's remember it, having watched it on local tv stations growing up.) I first saw it when I was eight years old in 1977, on San Jose California's KNTV 11 5:30 Movie. Both versions contain one inconsistency. When Barugon first appears, reporters on radio call the monster by name. However, later on, when Kara (the native girl) calls him by name, everyone acts as if they've never heard of the name "Barugon!" (Apparently, Kara is the one who's supposed to tell everyone who the monster is, but the dubbers decided not to correct that!) This version, "Gamera vs. Barugon", has superior dubbing to "War of the Monsters" & includes important scenes that were deleted in the later's tv release. (The scenes included in "Gamera vs. Barugon" heighten the human story & the tension.) However, the opening credits to "Gamera vs. Barugon" are written in "kiddie" crayon-type fonts. (Obviously, Sandy Frank geared their videos to a children's market.) I'm not too sure if "Gamera vs. Barugon" (the Sandy Frank edited version) is still available on vhs for purchase, but recently, Alpha Video has re-released "War of The Monsters" (tv version, I think AIP?) on dvd. If you're a fan of the "Golden Age" of kaiju-eiga, particularly those films from the 1960's, then both versions are worth checking out.
|
|
|
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great Old Gamera Action, March 11, 2003
This one really takes me back. In Chicago I saw this one on Son Of Svengoolie a program where an odd looking local tv personality (done up like a cross between Gene Simmons from Kiss and Bela Lugosi in White Zombie) would pop in and make goofy comments about whatever was happening in the monster movie he was showing. And all Saturday long after this was over I went around making the Barugon noise (kind of between a hiss and a car turning the corner in a mall parking lot) and sticking out my tongue, really believing if I left an opal under a heat lamp it would hatch into a monster. I felt like a kid again watching this.Great stuff. Basically three `pals' go to the interior jungles to fetch a big opal that one of the guy's brothers hid in a cave there during World War II. Well, they ignore the natives' warnings, one gets bit by a scorpion, and the other goes all Humphrey Bogart and tries to kill the other one. But then on the boat back to Osaka, he leaves the thing under a heat lamp and Barugon hatches and proceeds to destroy everything with his spectacularly long tongue (which spouts a freeze spray from its tip) and his devastating rainbow attack. Meanwhile Gamera, who has just returned from space to feed on Japan's power supply is attracted by the rainbow like a moth to a flame and proceeds to attack - chaos ensues! Fun stuff, a little sleep-inducing in the first half, but when the monsters show and the humans fail again and again to get the water allergic Barugon in to lake Siwa (Biwa?), its time for Gamera, once reviled, to redeem himself and take charge.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
DVD ~ Kojiro Hongo
DVD ~ Albert Dekker
DVD ~ Nobuhiro Kajima
