aka: Gamera tai daiakuju Giron, Directed by Noriaki Yuasa

There were a lot of drugs in the sixties. Particularly in 1969, when this gem of a monster/alien flick, Attack of the Monsters, was made. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

The story centers around three kids – a little boy named Akio (Nobuhiro Kajima), his little sister Tomoko (Miyuki Akiyama), and their American (or English?) friend Tommy (Christopher Murphy). The kids see a flying saucer through their telescope, and go running off into the woods to find it. Granted, the movie BEGAN not with this scene, but with a room full of scientists talking about strange waves from space, but since none of them can find what two seven year olds and a preschooler could, I’m assuming from this point on that they’re fairly useless to the overall story.

While on their way to the landing site, they shoot a suction dart into the forehead of the local law officer, Officer Kondo (Kon Omura), whose response to them is: “I'll tell you what - remember, the next time, if you are naughty again... I'll shave your heads!” Pretty odd yet lenient sentence for cop shooting, I think, but then he IS the comic relief in the movie, so tazing the punk probably wouldn’t have been nearly as amusing. Well…not to MOST people, anyway.

Anyhow, the kids get to the spaceship, which is everything you could possibly hope for in a sixties-era flying saucer. It’s round, lights up, has some funky spinny thing on top, AND has these triangular appendages on the edges that make it look like some rotund, pimped out version of a ’57 Cadillac. So naturally, the boys had to go inside and start pushing all the buttons in it. Sadly, they never found the 12-CD changer, wet bar or GPS system, but instead wind up launching themselves into space, leaving sis behind.

In space, they start fiddling around with the buttons some more, but instead of turning home they get themselves right into the path of an asteroid. Luckily, their good old buddy Gamera, the giant flying turtle with the rocket-propelled shell, comes to rescue them – or at least get them out of the asteroid path, before they’re forced to land on a strange new planet. At the new planet, there’s good news and bad news. Good news is that they can breathe the air, and the two remaining psychic alien women on the planet are insanely hot. Bad news? The surface of the planet is quickly dying and covered with bizarre giant monsters like the hatchet-headed Gaos, and Guiron, a giant walking half iguana/half steak knife that shoots shuriken out of his nostrils. Oh, and those hot alien chicks? They just want them for their brains (sorry, boys).

Do you think these aliens actually needed the psychic powers to control grade-school boys? Yeah...me neither.

Barbella and her assistant Florella SEEM sweet at first, but when Barbella finds out about their buddy Gamera coming to get them (thanks to some friendly mind-probing), she then decides to trick them into eating donuts filled with sleeping drugs, so they can saw open their heads and eat their brains raw (because on top of being a low-carb alternative to powdered donuts, that will apparently this will give them all their knowledge as well). The look on Florella’s face when she suggests this is beautiful. In one glance, she says what any sane woman, alien or not, would’ve been thinking right then: “Wait just a minute here…you’re saying that even though we have the technology to make ANY dang food we want, INCLUDING jelly-filled donuts, yet you want us to eat raw brains? HOW is that better than DONUTS?!?” But you don’t question the boss, so off she went to the space kitchen to make the donuts of death.

Back home, poor Tomoko is trying to tell her mom about the alien abduction, but to no avail. The goofy cop halfway believes her, but no one seems to value his opinion much on the matter, so he’s ignored as well.

Once the boys are asleep, they sit Akio up and clamp his noggin into a device that makes it easy to shave his head (seriously – what is it with the head-shaving fetish?). Before they can slice him open like a can of human Ragu, however, Gamera makes it down to the surface and starts raising hell. They send their pointy monster after him, thus beginning some of the most insane, over the top and unbelievable monster fight sequences I have ever seen (needless to say, I loved every minute of it). In all the chaos, the kids manage to escape, one of the females gets injured and as is customary to her people, is shot down like a lame horse (no WONDER there were only two of them left!)

Meanwhile, Tom wakes up and arouses Akio so they can escape during the chaos. Herein lies one of the most WTF moments, where little Akio, knowing he is about to be eaten and their only chance for survival is to run off immediately, pauses to say “But Tom…what about my hair?” Tom is his friend, so he loans him a cap for it instead of calling him out for the vain little bugger he is, and off they go. After loads of monster-fighting, a weird little dance number and Gamera’s classic parallel bar routine near the end, it’s the kids who end up finishing the fight, by closing Guiron back into his underground pen and fleeing with Gamera.

Finally, as the pack of clueless scientists on earth finally manage to convince the boys mothers that their little girl might ACTUALLY have a point about the saucer, they return just in time to see Gamera flying back with the rescued kids. No one seems particularly surprised about this, because the moms are smiling and happy about Gamera “A Friend to All Children” coming right for them, instead of screaming “Holy crap, that’s a giant flying turtle with my kids in his mouth!”

A....friend to ALL children? Are you sure?

You might have noticed that unlike past reviews, I didn’t add a quote to the top of this one. That’s because the most memorable lines in the film are the beautiful and all-encompassing hope-for-a-better-world speech given by the balder-but-wiser Akio at the end:

“We thought that they would be a highly civilized planet where there were no wars or accidents…but we found out Earth’s the best and that we should work to make it better instead. We shouldn’t long for other stars…just try love instead, stop wars and no more accidents. I guess that’s all I can ask.”

Brilliant. I think that says it all, don’t you?