gamera

OK, I’ll admit it. A 100-foot-tall, firebreathing Japanese turtle isn’t really scary by anyone’s standards. But you’ll be surprised just how effective director Shuseke Kaneko’s ‘90s Gamera trilogy is at realistically staging Godzilla-scale destruction without all the unintentional humor. Particularly the third film, Revenge of Iris, which focuses on the real emotional aftermath of all that monster mashing. A young girl whose parents were killed during one of Gamera’s previous battles finds and raises an orphaned monster with the intent on getting revenge. Very rarely does a kaiju film (Japanese for “monster movie”) even acknowledge that its creatures are responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, let alone build an entire script around the idea. Iris does this with such skill you almost forget you’re watching men in rubber suits. All three films are now out in a handsome Blu-ray box set that you can get on the cheap.