In Attack of the Monsters (Gamera tai daiakuju Giron, 1969) two boys & a girl with a telescope see a flying saucer landing & the next day investigate. The boys go on board the empty ship which automatically kidnaps them to outer space. The girl doesn't get to go on this adventure because a girl's role is to wait at home stewing & worrying then eagerly great the little men upon their return.

The lads nearly crash into a meteor, but Gamera the Space Turtle "always the friend of children" (well, boy children at least) saves them from the meteor. The saucer speeds up, however, outdistancing Gamera, whisking the boys away to a planet that shares Earth's orbit but is on the other side of the sun.

They meet a couple of pretty young female aliens in silly hats, who seem quite nice at first, but who turn out to be cannibals. They sent the automated saucer to kidnap the little boys because they needed "rations." Plus they learn new things about other races by eating their brains. It's a good thing Gamera is searching for the boys to save them.

The planet's guardian is Guiron, a knife-headed creature genetically engineered to fight other monsters in defense of the cannibals of Tera. The cannibals had formerly been a very advanced civilization but only two members of that race presently survive, along with a little of their technology, & they want to move to the Earth to get away from the monsters on their own planet, & where there'll be plenty of human beings to learn from by eating their brains.

Their culture was doomed after one of their computers went wacky & engineered uncontrollable monsters such as the only one we get to see, Silver Gyaos, the laser-spitting pterodactyl, a different colored Gyaos than the one Gamera himself once fought back on earth.

A bit of monster-fight footage from previous episodes gets recycled into this one as padding, but there are mostly new scenes of kaiju battles. Guiron's knife-head reflects lasers, so when Silver Gyaos tries to laser-blast his foe, the laser bounces back & sheers off one of Silver Gyaos's legs.

Silver Gyaos hops around on the remaining leg flapping its wings then goes away (in the American television edit) but in the full original sequence, Guiron follows up with some heavy duty chop-chop kitchen action, his knife head turning Silver Gyaos into meat market pieces. Then Guiron slinks back into its underground lair until next needed to defend the two good-looking but evil alien women.

Most of the action takes place on the earth's twin planet Tera. When Gamera shows up, the knife-headed Guiron quickly defeats him, & Gamera is stuck laying on the back of his carapace unable to right himself, while the boys run about protected only by their own wits. But as the boys become increasingly endangered, Gamera recovers to save the day, & even does some cool gymnastics along the way.

When Guiron is destroyed, Gamera picks up the the original flying saucer that had gotten broken, & proves what a good mechanic he is, repairing the ship with his acetylene torch breath. The boys climb back into the saucer & Gamera carries it back to Earth in his mouth, where the little girl who didn't get to go on the adventure has been watching for them from their telescope.

The mothers provide the moral of the story: "Sometimes our children aren't lying!"

Most of the early Gamera films are vastly more childish than the majority of "kaiju" or rubber-suit monster movies, because they really were aimed at very young children. As such Attack of the Monsters is an okay film for children still too young for all slightly less childish kaiju.

For another kaiju prehistoric creature film, see:
Monster from a Prehistoric Past (1967)

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl