Ingrid and I are back again with last installment of our Gamera Movie Marathon as we rewind through the original 8 movies of what is known as the Showa Era, going over its highs and its incredibly painful lows. Now for the record. We’ve been watching the AiP dubs/re-edits of the movies when applicable. The Sandy Frank dubs were just too corny (but one movie gave us no choice).

In this installment, Ingrid and I watch the final movie of the Showa Era ‘Gamera: Super Monster’ from 1980 and it was absolutely, positively, the WORST movie of the entire franchise and could hardly be called a film! Basically we get a movie that’s 90% stock footage – and it shows.

This movie features a kid who is worse than Toshi (YEAH believe it or not) and three “Super space women” who are meant to protect the earth…yeah…uh huh… We also get a villain team made up of an evil Super Space Woman and a Star Destroyer rip off! Somehow, without any explanation, all the old villains from the other Gamera movies are back (through re-used stock footage) and it’s up to Gamera to defeat them all…again!

This movie’s quality is so bad that the experimental green screen technology cannot even be remastered and stands out way too obviously from the rest of the film! The stock footage usage is also blatant and annoying. What little original new Gamera footage we get is equally as bad! And did I mention that the writing is atrocious?

The ONLY positives we can give are

• 1) the space women had potential (but even that gets wasted)
• 2) They actually come up with a smart way to reuse the black and white footage from the first movie
• 3) There is one nice tongue in cheek jab at Godzilla!

Other than that this movie is an utter bomb!

And to make it even worse, the creators involved saw the dumpster fire it was becoming and decided to have Gamera die at the end, to ensure that no more embarrassing movies would come out ever again! And they wouldn’t… until the Heisei era would begin in the late 90s!

Gamera ended not with a bang, not even a whimper, but with a mercy killing! This was such a pain to watch, but Ingrid and I managed to make it through! Unless you’re a completionist… AVOID this movie at all cost! It’s not even a “so bad its good” level of watchability!

Tune in next time as Ingrid and I recap our entire Gamera Marathon with a retrospective on the entire franchise and add our own take on how we’d bring back the fire turtle to a modern day audience!