#kilara

While this may be a film that copies some of its most exciting elements from popular Hollywood films of the time, Gamera: Super Monster is automatically braver, bolder, and more ambitious than any of those movies because it actually has the guts to make women the main characters. We’re introduced to Kilara, Marsha, and Mitan very early on – three superheroine alien refugees hiding out on Earth. Spacewoman Kilara is a lovely femme-butch seven-foot-tall amazon and the one who does just about everything important, the others are mostly there to give their partner moral support. But it barely matters because Mach Fumiake gives the best performance of anyone in any Gamera movie. She could really carry the film on her expressiveness and enthusiasm alone, but likely in part from just being in her presence, the others step up to the plate and give it their best. This film is like if an A-list cast made one of those zero-budget parking garage movies, and it’s the best thing of all time.

With clever cover identities as a pet store owner, a Mazda car saleswoman, and a schoolteacher, the three spacewomen share a home base of Kilara’s apartment and spend their nights in the pet store’s van, which houses a cat-carrier, which is actually a miniaturized living environment they apparently sleep in. The box’s interior appears to have just one three-person-wide lounge chair/couch with one decorative throw pillow, so I guess they must be sleeping in a sitting position and all leaning on each other’s (or let’s be real, the other two on Kilara’s) shoulders, which is adorable, but probably uncomfortable in the long run.

After they’re given a stern warning not to interfere in the plans of the invading starship/alien species/pirate warlord Zanon, they get drawn into a plot involving a young boy named Keiichi and his connection with a giant flying turtle called Gamera, all while being pursued and targeted by Zanon’s agent and fellow spacewoman Giruge (I’ll talk about Giruge more below, because her entire character arc is both the best and worst, most heartwarming and most upsetting part of the movie, and comes with a serious content warning). Kilara especially, despite being the take-charge leader of the group and the one to consistently shoulder the weight of responsibility, shows a warm and encouraging side as she easily befriends Keiichi and treats him as a member of the team. She also gets to fight Giruge in hand-to-hand combat, and I’m gonna make a point to avoid thirsting over the characters because this is a very wholesome movie so that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

The special effects in this film… well, some of them are an acquired taste, and you have to roll with the cheesiness. The rest are fairly top-notch, at least for the series up until that point, because they’re scenes from all the other Showa era movies, re-used. Stock footage, stock footage, whatever. The fights in this film are cut down to be faster-paced and set to great music. So what if you’ve seen them before? If you’ve ever watched a Showa Gamera AMV on Youtube (and if not, why haven’t you?) then you’ll probably enjoy watching the monster fights in this film too. And these movies have always been about more than the monster fights, anyways.

This is one of two Gamera films that made me legitimately tear up, and as a warning as much as it is a statement, after my first viewing of Super Monster, I found myself in a moderately distressed state where I had difficulty concentrating on anything productive other than watching it three more times over the next three days and writing a fix-it fic. The next section of this post (marked by ~ dividers so it can be skipped over if needed), will discuss two suicides that occur in this film.

~~~~~

I was prepared for Gamera. I think anyone who knows at least two things about this movie knows that Gamera sacrifices himself at the end to destroy Zanon. And it hits differently, but probably even less surprisingly, after Gamera the Brave, because now, sacrificing himself in a huge explosion to defeat an enemy is just an established part of Gamera’s character.

What struck me deeply was how the film handles Giruge, I think in part because I wasn’t expecting it and also probably because she’s human and not a giant turtle represented by a flying prop. It’s clear the film was setting up Giruge’s death the same way, as a sacrifice for the greater good, which is a common trope in media and doesn’t always directly involve a character being suicidal, but whatever outs this film could’ve taken to soften the blow… it didn’t.

To begin with, Giruge is suicidal, as established after her fistfight with Kilara, when after briefly holding Giruge at gunpoint, Kilara refuses to kill her on principle and gives back her blaster. At first, Giruge takes cruel advantage of this mercy and has a clear shot to kill any of the heroes she wants, but after seeing them all interact as one, happy family, she ultimately can’t go through with it, and points the gun at herself instead. Her reasons for doing this are different across film versions, with her either ridiculing herself as a compete failure, or expressing her fear of the punishment Zanon has continually threatened to inflict on her.

Kilara, the other spacewomen, and Keiichi all spot her attempt in time, and rush over to stop her. And I think that’s what endears me so much to this film. Everyone shows immediate concern, there’s no cynicism, no conflict over whether to offer kindness to her, it’s treated as a universal fact that Giruge needs help and everyone is willing to lend it. Even Keiichi’s mother, who up until this point has been dismissive of Keiichi’s stories and could care less for his love of turtles or monsters, apparently has a reality check when (in an offscreen event later relayed) he and his new friends bring home an unconscious, suicidal woman who needs a place to stay.

Giruge wakes up to find Keiichi having fallen asleep while watching over her, an injury from the fight having been carefully bandaged the night before, and Keiichi’s mother coming in to check on her and explaining the situation. (the English dub all but directly states Keiichi is there acting as her suicide watch). Keiichi’s mother invites her to stay as long as she needs to, mentioning that Keiichi has always wanted a sister (something built up for the entirety of the Japanese version, as Keiichi refers to all the spacewomen with a term of endearment meaning ‘older sister’).

But then we get the film’s finale, where a still-injured Giruge is contacted once more by Zanon, and gives him fake coordinates for the spacewomen while, in actuality, putting herself in the line of fire instead. In the English dub, the first version I watched, this comes off as entirely avoidable, and certainly appears more like a successful suicide than any legitimate heroic sacrifice.

It’s slightly better in the Japanese version. In one version of the subtitled original dialogue, Zanon states that he already knows the spacewomen are still alive, explaining why Giruge couldn’t just lie and report her victory like the English dub suggests she could’ve. She also doesn’t mention the signal being targeted to her watch in the subbed version, just that she’s relaying the Spacewomen’s coordinates to Zanon, explaining why none of the others tried to stop her this time – she intentionally left them with some doubt as to whether she was actually betraying them.

It's not over there, she does get a tearful death scene in the arms of her new family, where she thanks them for their kindness before disintegrating into motes of light, but she’s forgotten shortly after – as is Gamera, whose own sacrifice was just moments away when Giruge made hers. Kilara dries Keiichi’s tears for them both and the last shots as the credits roll are upbeat and hopeful.

In my view, this is a clear mishandling of an explicitly suicidal character, though I have to imagine that in the time the film was made, fully redeeming a villain might have been something there were restrictions on. If that was the case, and if the other option would’ve been cutting out the scenes that made her character arc so compelling, than I can allow myself some understanding for why it needed to be presented the way it was. Still, the hurt I feel every time I watch it can probably account for at least 30-40% of why I’ve been slacking so much in getting content out on-time.

(If you need that fix-it fic now, it’s here)

~~~~~

In my haze of emotional hurt and fixation on this film, I picked up a copy of Constantine Furman’s The Unofficial Tokusatsu Fan’s Handbook for GAMERA, SUPER MONSTER, which I kinda felt like I was required to own as someone who actually likes this movie. I highly recommend it as a read-along commentary and a window into the production history of not only this film, but (in part due to the matter of the stock footage and the fact the commentary continues over said footage) the history of the Gamera Showa era as a whole.

And, if there’s anyone out there who absolutely CANNOT watch Showa Gamera without the aid of a certain spaceman and his robot friends, I find this book an acceptable substitute for that as well, entertaining as much as it informs. Comedy is always a matter of taste, and one or two jokes didn’t land quite right with me, or were just puzzling (one remark about Barugon’s rainbow seems a little sketchy, but I’m assuming I’m just reading too much into it), but just like MST3K’s goes at Gamera, it’s all done in good faith by someone who genuinely loves the film, and I can respect that, enough that I’ve read along with the book for two of the eight times I’ve watched Gamera: Super Monster since mid-February.

…I may have a problem.

So, in conclusion, how much do I love this movie?