Daikaijû Gamera (1965)

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Gamera, Godzilla's nearest competitor, starts her giant turtle life 11 years after GZ premiered, but in a similarly black-and-white film, lending it some gravitas and perhaps the illusion that, like Godzilla'54, it's about something (Hiroshima swapped out for the dangers of modern power production). But though they look like contemporaries when you file off the copyrights, the content shows Gamera to definitely be set in the Golden Age of kaiju movies, poaching such tropes as a the child empathic to the monster and a "one foot in the future" approach to its world. Derivative though it may be, the film does put in an effort to differentiate its protagonist from the King of Monsters. Gamera has Atlantean connections, is released from a glacier, is drawn to and consumes heat and energy, and can turn itself (I really want to say herself because turtle in French is a feminine word, but I don't actually know the monster's sex) into a flying saucer. But like Godzilla in his first outing, she's strictly a menace, at one point destroying buildings implicitly filled with people. Like GZ, she'll become Earth's guardian, but in Gamera the Giant Monster, that's only obvious to one very, very foolish kid. A lot of fun, nice period effects, plenty of destruction, what more do you want? 7 years 10 months ago