GAMERA 2 - THE ADVENT OF LEGION (Japan, 1996)
GAMERA 3 - THE REVENGE OF IRIS (Japan, 1999)

Directed by: Shusuke Kaneko
Starring: Shinobu Nakayama, Ai Maeda, Ayako Fujitani, Senri Yamasaki

"... this dynamic piece of high-class pulp will knock you out of your seat."

- Tom Mes, www.midnighteye.com

A special message from Director Kaneko to New York audience:

“I am very happy to learn that my Gamera films will be playing in New York City at Asian Films Are Go!!! As one of the original giant hero monsters of Japanese pop culture, remaking Gamera for modern audiences was a great challenge. Luckily, I had the help of a number of talented people such as Shinji Higuchi on FX and Kazunori Ito as scriptwriter. All three films of the Gamera trilogy have a different flavor: Gamera 1 is a what-if-giant-monsters-existed story, Gamera 2 focuses on the war aspect of giant monsters, and Gamera 3 concerns itself with the psychological effect such monsters could have on people involved in their conflict. Please enjoy these films and when watching, keep in mind that Gamera is of pure soul and mind.”

Sincerely,
Shusuke Kaneko

Imagine that you've come home from a long, crummy day at work. You're hungry, and you're tired. You trudge up four flights of stairs, drop your bag, hang up your coat and open the fridge only to see that it’s completely devoid of life. Not only that, but you have no cash for take out. It's 9PM and the nearest ATM that doesn't charge you $4.50 is blocks away. How did your life come to this? What did you do to deserve this misery? You swell with anger and rage, wanting nothing more than to crush this entire stupid city beneath your stomping feet. To jump up and down on all the idiots who don't let passengers off the train before they shove their way on. All the Metrocard machines that are out of order, all the banks that close early, all the joggers who don't clean up after their dogs, all the NYU students from Connecticut who think piercings make them interesting. You want to destroy it. DESTROY IT ALL!

If you were Gamera, you could. The world's crankiest turtle, suddenly transformed into a god, Gamera is not satisfied with anything less than total destruction, and he wants you to watch because he knows it'll make you happy. When Toho invented Godzilla (giant lizard), Mothra (giant moth), Rodan (giant bird/bat/pterodactyl) and the whole gang back in the ‘50s and ‘60s they inadvertently tapped into a substrata of human feelings that only stories about giant monsters could tap into. By the mid-’60s, everyone was trying to get a piece of the pie. America was recutting Toho flicks and sticking in footage of Raymond Burr, Korea was making its own Yonggary movies, and Toho's Japanese rival, Daiei, was giving birth to a giant turtle named Gamera, the friend to all children. A giant, destructive monster that was also a viable caregiver to children? Sounds nutty, but the gimmick worked. In fact, it worked so well that annoying children soon became de rigeur for giant monster movies (kaiju eiga if you wanna show off) and this creeping crud of infantilization soon killed off the genre.

Bad Gamera.

In the ‘90s, Toho revived its Godzilla franchise (to general disappointment) and their Mothra franchise (for kiddies). Daiei responded by bringing back Gamera to general cries of "Whoa, Nellie!" Gamera's revival in the 1990's did for giant monsters what Bonnie & Clyde did for the gangster flick: it reinvented the genre, turning it into something dark and dangerous. The ‘90s Gamera Trilogy is regarded as the final word on kaiju eiga, so fasten your seatbelts because these are not your father's giant, rocket-powered, flying turtle flicks.

GAMERA 2 is straight up, wall-to-wall, Gamera vs. Space Insect action with a nitroglycerine edge. Cities are evacuated, office buildings become breeding chambers for alien eggs, and subways become snacks on wheels. Ferociously kinetic, and with rocket-fuel on its breath, this is the logical endpoint for the genre. It just doesn't get any better than this. (And it stars Ayako Fujitani, Steven Seagal's daughter).

But GAMERA 3 raises the stakes. A primal tale of god-like monsters bringing Armageddon in their wake, it's black as blood and dripping with endtimes panic. Studded with scenes of awe-inspiring beauty (the special effects are polished to a celestial sheen) and breath-taking Old Testament destruction, this movie welcomes you to a world where Gamera is more likely to charbroil children, than befriend them.

Americans are great at making big special effects movies that are about as much fun as sitting on the sofa. Gamera puts the unhinged, anything-goes, apocalyptic sense of mischief that characterized kaiju eiga in the ‘60s into a particle accelerator with Hollywood special effects know-how and sets the whole mad machine humming with the a pent-up power that can tear apart the base elements of our universe and suck out the yummy, frissionable bits. The 90's Gamera trilogy is the final word on making destruction fun again.