‘Gamera Vs. Gyaos’ or — The Battle To Find a Decent Restaurant?

(Slight Spoilers)

The story’s so stupid only a complete idiot would attempt to explain it.

So a new expressway is being built near Mt Futago. There are some problems though. Firstly there are some defiant locals refusing to sell their land. Then there’s the fact Mt Futago is a volcano that’s now erupting, the heat and lava drawing the giant turtle Gamera to its slopes. Thirdly, these eruptions have unleashed the people-eating, blood drinking abomination Gyaos, a flying death monster with vamipric tendencies and a powerful laser it can shoot from its mouth and a toxic gas it emits from it’s er… chest?

So powerful is Gyaos’ mouth-laser that when he battles Gamera Gyaos severs off Gamera’s paw forcing the heroic tortoise to retreat under the sea to nurse his wound. With Gamera out of the action Gyaos runs amok and it is left to the humans to figure out a way to defeat Gyaos, no matter how crazy or insane the idea!

The idea is to create vast quantities of synthetic human blood and place it on top of a rotating restaurant. This fake blood will lure the vampiric Gyaos onto the rotating restaurant when he comes out at night to feed which, when given a huge surge of electricity from the local power-plant, will rotate extremely quickly thus making Gyaos dizzy and, hence, incapacitated. It’s a plan so simple a child could’ve come up with it… except they didn’t; the adults did.

Shockingly the ‘Let’s make Gyaos dizzy by using a rotating hotel’ plan doesn’t work. In the slightest! So they decide to bomb the shit out of him instead. Gyaos quickly slices up the Self-Defense Force’s fighter-jets with his laser beam and it seems all is lost until the fires on the slopes of the volcano draw the now healed Gamera to the scene where a climatic battle takes place between the two colossal beasts until only one survives.

What’s most shocking about ‘Gamera Vs. Gyaos’ (1967) isn’t the idiotic rotating restaurant idea but the fact that it is actually, sorta, set-up earlier in the movie. Early on Gamera rescues a kid by flying it to safety on its back except because Gamera knows spinning makes you dizzy Gamera doesn’t rotate whilst flying so the child doesn’t throw up. I had no idea watching this scene at the time that this was a subtle piece of set-up and narrative foreshadowing. Never underestimate giant monster films.

Gyaos himself makes for a fantastic villain. He’s unashamedly based on Count Dracula but this lends him a cool, and very pronounced, air of menace. Factor into this that Gyaos actually eats people and feeds on their blood means that he comes across as a genuinely threatening presence and isn’t just stomping things into rumble. He has an awesome design too and is easily one of the best looking Kaiju baddies.

‘Gamera Vs. Gyaos’ is just great. It’s not only a fun giant monster film that’s decently paced and with plenty of action but, like the rest of Daiei’s Gamera films, there’s a really unique look and vibe to it all. The scene when a greedy Gyaos is clinging onto the rotating restaurant feasting on the bowl of vaporous, artificial blood is ridiculous in the extreme but it’s a sight I’ll never forgot and is genuinely evocative, although I’m just not quite sure of what.