Gamera vs. Barugon (1966) on Netflix

NR19661h 46mAction Adventure Fantasy

Gamera breaks free after a meteorite strikes its rocket and returns to Earth. Ichiro sends his brother Keisuke, Kawajiri and Onodera to New Guinea for an opal he hid in a cave.

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Netflix3.1/5
IMDb5.2/103,213 votes
Rotten TomatoesNot available

Plot summary

Six months after Gamera was last seen, a meteorite knocks the Z Plan rocket off course, and the monster comes home and strikes Kurobe Dam. The World War II veteran Ichiro sends his brother Keisuke, Kawajiri and Onodera to the island of New Guinea to recover an opal he found and hid in a cave years before. The local villagers warn the men off, but they locate the stone and carry it out of the jungle. Karen, an islander, learns what they took and sails with Keisuke to Japan. The ship carrying the party and the opal makes for Kobe Harbor.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Gamera vs. Barugon (1966)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

Nagata chose Kojiro Hongo for the lead after wanting him to headline a film for some time, but Hongo felt "stuck" and tried to drop out by faking an illness, which delayed production for a month; he put blood-stained tissues in the trash and pretended to have chills to fool the managers who came to check on him.
Noriaki Yuasa, director of the previous Gamera film, was demoted to special effects director for Gamera vs. Barugon even though that film had been a financial success, while the sequel got acclaimed director Shigeo Tanaka; Yuasa later said he and Tanaka had a father/son relationship.
SPOILER
The shot of the Barugon suit sinking was scheduled for the last day of production, April 2, 1966, but the suit would not sink and delayed filming a full day; suit creator Ryosaku Takayama, who also made suits for Ultraman, removed the head from the body so the prop would sink.
For American television, AIP-TV retitled the film War of the Monsters and removed 12 minutes of footage so it would fit commercials into a two-hour timeslot and keep children from growing restless.
Gamera vs. Barugon was first developed as Gamera vs. the Ice Giants, in which humanoid ice monsters bring a new ice age until Gamera returns to challenge them; the story outline was written by Yunosaburo Saito.
Noriaki Yuasa noticed at screenings that children grew bored during long stretches without monsters, decided the film had lost its core audience, and made later Gamera films show the monsters earlier and consistently.
The shrieking sounds for the film's cave bats were not new: they had originally been produced for the rat creatures of Nezura, a film that went unproduced.