Trailer
Plot summary
A Japanese expedition in the Arctic is nearby when an aircraft is shot down and its atomic bomb goes off, waking a giant turtle with tusks from under the ice. An Inuit chief hands the scientists a stone tablet bearing the creature's name, Gamera, before the monster destroys their ship and vanishes. Sightings of flying saucers follow in Japan. On the coast at Sagami Bay, Toshio, a boy who has just given up his pet turtle, watches Gamera attack the family lighthouse. Toshio comes to believe the creature is his own lost turtle. Dr. Hidaka, his assistant Kyoko and the reporter Aoyagi join the military as Gamera approaches a geothermal power plant, drawn to its flames, and the defense turns to experimental freezing bombs.
Cast
- Harumi Kiritachias Kyoko Yamamoto
- Jutarō Hōjōas Self-Defense Force Commander
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Gamera, the Giant Monster (1965)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Stop-motion props failed, so Daiei's planned monster film Nezura used live rats crawling over miniature cities, but the rats were wild and infested with fleas, and the health department shut the production down.
- The warm response to a scene in which Gamera saves the boy Toshio led later films to make the monster a protector of children; director Noriaki Yuasa said it brought many letters from children.
- Artist and filmmaker Tomio Sagisu, co-creator of Spectreman, claimed that Daiei's Masaichi Nagata stole the idea of Gamera from him, pointing to his 1962 demo reel The Colossal Turtle, a stop-motion turtle monster that pulled in its limbs, expelled flames and flew.
- Gamera, the Giant Monster was the only film in the series shot in black-and-white, after the studio cut the budget over low confidence and the cancellation of Nezura.
- On the low-budget shoot the flying Gamera prop burned through the wires holding it and crashed, and the ice three trucks delivered for the Arctic scenes melted, flooding the set and delaying filming for three days.
- Daiei head Masaichi Nagata conceived Gamera in 1965 while flying home from the United States, claiming he saw a tortoise flying alongside his airplane, or an island or a cloud shaped like a tortoise.
- The song "Gammera" was written for the film by Wes Farrell and Artie Butler, performing as The Moons, and months after release a bootlegged instrumental version came out in the U.K. as "Shing-A-Ling At the Go-Go."
- The final Gamera suit weighed over 60 kilograms, was made of plaster reinforced with latex, and walked on all fours to make filming easier and set the monster apart from upright creatures; it was worn by "tough" members of Daiei's prop department.
