Honourable Mention: Gamera: Guardian of the Universe

Having exercised our ‘Vamp or Not?’ muscles over the kaiju film Gamera Vs Gyaos and deciding that Gyaos was a vampiric bat, you’d have thought that looking at anything with Gyaos in would become easy. Not so.

In the 1995 Gamera daikaijû kuchu kessen, director Shûsuke Kaneko reinvented the blooming wheel. Gyaos become a species, rather than a single creature, and the background is changed. The elements that perhaps drew us to announce Gyaos as vampiric are lost or watered down.

Gyaos waste

The film starts with a ship carrying plutonium colliding with a floating atoll. Round the same time we see people on an island attacked by something from the sky. The police contact ornithologist Mayumi Nagamine (Shinobu Nakayama) and ask her to travel to the island as she was a friend of a scientist there and the last message they received mentioned a bird. There is destruction across the village, which Mayumi doesn’t tie into a bird until she finds a giant bird pellet that contains a pen and pair of glasses owned by her friend.

the obelisk

The two stories run in parallel for a while. The atoll has a mysterious obelisk with Etrurian runes on it. The obelisk crumbles and energy exudes from the atoll as Gamera is awoken. Meanwhile they discover that the “bird” is a 15 meter carnivorous flying creature with scales and teeth that isn’t actually of the bird genus. Plus there are three of them. They attempt to capture them (in a stadium with a closing roof) using cattle carcasses as a lure. They get two as Gamera reaches land and fights the third, merging the two threads of story. The other two use their sonic rays to escape. At first the military target Gamera rather than the Gyaos due to his size.

Gyaos attacks

Now, originally Gyaos was killed by the sun. These are nocturnal but capable of being active in the sun. They are carnivorous but a love of blood is never mentioned. They are still sort of a bat/pterosaur cross but they show no ability to release a smoke/fog screen and any fear of fire is normal and not notable. The source of the creatures go back, in this, to Atlantis. The Gyaos were created to tackle pollution (hence these ones awakening) but they started to multiply and attack humans. The Atlanteans created Gamera to destroy them but it was too late and, whilst the few remaining Gyaos went into hibernation, the Atlantean civilisation was doomed and so they bequeathed Gamera to a future civilisation.

Super Gyaos

We discover that they appear to be all female but actually they are asexual, with only one chromosome and able to self-reproduce. The main Gyaos in this evolves into a Super Gyaos with a 100 meter wingspan. But, despite the added background, we lose much of the vampiric elements and this, because of the history of the creature only gets an honourable mention due to its lost genre overlaps. The imdb page is here.

Bonus Honourable Mention: Gamera Vs Viras

The 1968 Noriaki Yuasa directed film Gamera Vs Viras deserves to get a bit of a bonus mention here.

Gamera

In it Gamera is pitted against the aliens Viras who intend to invade earth and colonise it (as it is the closest to their planet in size and atmosphere in the universe). At the head of the film Gamera destroys the first of their spaceships and so a second is despatched. It catches Gamera in a stasis field and scans the creature’s memories to find a weakness.

stock footage

This leads to a lot of stock footage (19 minutes in the US release, and to be honest other films in the series showed some this footage too but no other to this extent) some of which shows Gamera’s battle with Gyaos from the film the year before. So, unlike the Gyaos above, this Gyaos is still a vampiric bat but, of course, it is all memory and old footage and thus gets an honourable mention only.

The imdb page is here.

Bonus Honourable Mention: Gamera Vs Guiron

space Gyaos

The year after Gamera took on Viras he was out in space again, this time to rescue two young whippersnappers who had climbed on board a UFO and been whisked off to another plant (Earth’s twin that followed the same orbit on the far side of the sun and so was never seen from Earth).

Gamera’s enemy in this was Guiron but the planet had its own version of Gyaos, who appeared in what we might call a monster cameo. This Gyaos seemed un-phased by the sun but otherwise was identical to the original Gyaos – mainly because it was the same Gyaos model but spray painted silver and known as the Space Gyaos.

The imdb page is here.

Vamp or Not? Gamera Vs Gyaos

Daikaijû kûchûsen: Gamera tai Gyaosu was a 1967 Japanese film directed by Noriaki Yuasa. It was drawn to my attention when I received a comment from Superheroinegirl who wondered if I had considered doing a ‘Vamp or Not?’ of the film. I must confess that I hadn’t, but I did some quick research and decided that I should.

The film is a kaiju film, essentially a Japanese giant monster movie. It starts with volcanic eruptions across Japan. The kaiju Gamera (Teruo Aragaki) is drawn to an eruption at Mount Fuji. Gamera is a hero monster and is essentially a giant turtle. He can walk on two legs and, when withdrawn into his shell, he can fire jets and fly like a rotating flying saucer. He can eat heat sources (fire, lava etc) and stores it. When necessary he can breathe out a jet of flame.

Gamera flies to Fuji

A village near Mount Fuji is in the path of a new expressway. The foreman of the work, Shiro Tsutsumi (Kôjirô Hongô), has been tasked with getting the villagers to sell up but the village elder (Kichijirô Ueda) has persuaded the villagers to hold out for more money. A group of researchers are due to fly over the mountain to observe Gamera and Tsutsumi would like to halt work until that research has been carried out. Unfortunately the company won’t allow it, expecting him to sort out the issues with the villagers and resume work – this, of course, brings conflict.

in the cave

As the researchers fly over the area sonic beams are shot out of a cave, destroying the helicopter. Meanwhile the village elder’s grandson, Eiichi (Naoyuki Abe), has shown a reporter (Shin Minatsu) a route up the mountain. They notice an eerie glow from a cave and investigate. Once inside there is an earth tremor and rocks begin to fall. The reporter leaves Eiichi and runs outside – straight into Gyaos, who picks him up and eats him. It is Gyaos who concerns us.

Gamera breaths fire

The creature is said to be a cross between a pterosaur and a bat. I could actually see the bat like quality of it despite the toothed beak. Although it is supposition on the film scientists’ part, we discover that Gyaos’ spine is forked and this acts like a tuning fork creating the sonic beams. It also means that Gyaos cannot turn his neck (an evolutionary disadvantage I would say). In the first battle between Gamera and Gyaos, it is Gamera who comes of worst – indeed it is the first film in which Gamera bleeds, his leg cut by the sonic wave.

Gyaos' head in sunlight

They discover that Gyaos is nocturnal and, in a subsequent battle, Gamero manages to bite off part of Gyaos foot as it tries to escape the coming dawn. The brief exposure to sunlight makes its head glow red. From this we get two interesting things. Firstly we see Gyaos in his cave as his foot regenerates. Also the humans get hold of the discarded toes but they seem to be shrinking. They discover that exposure to ultraviolet light eats away the flesh. We also discover that the creature hates fires and will put out blazes with a yellow smoke like substance expelled from its chest.

drinking fake blood

A plan is hatched to immobilize Gyaos by luring him to a revolving roof and spinning him (thus wrecking his balance) until the sun comes up! But how to lure him? They figure that since he likes eating humans he could be lured by the scent of human blood. Now they don’t use real blood but a synthetic substitute that looks and smells like blood. They then use planes to set a trail of blood vapour and do indeed lead him to a blood fountain which he actually does drink from.

snack time

So there you have it – drinking blood (though whilst his natural eating habits involve popping the humans whole into his beak we can argue that they are too small in comparative size for him to just drink the blood), dislike of fire, ability to create a fog, shaped kind of like a bat and destroyed by sunlight. I want so very much to go Vamp on this, and if you look at the Wikipedia page for Gyaos his species is listed as Vampiric Bat/Pterosaur, so I am going to say Vamp but you are, of course, free to disagree.

The imdb page is here.