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Gamera: The Guardian of The Universe

Gamera: The Guardian of The Universe

List Price: $24.98
Your Price: $22.48
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: BUY IT!
Review: I very rarely bother reviewing anything, but this DVD is so great I had to write. I don't have a fancy stereo or a huge screen tv or anything like that, so I can't help you out with that...it looks fine to me and sounds fine to me (some of the speech on the japanese track sounds a little bit quiet). But, the care that went into this is amazing! It beats the tar out of every single official Godzilla/Gamera DVD release I've seen in the US. They got all the extras from the Japanese DVD, and subtitled them! I almost wet myself when I saw the extras menu! The interview with the special effects guy is great, and the press conferences and promo appearances and trailers everything are good fun too. The fact that they actually subtitled all of those materials just stupifies me. I was also completely amazed that they put the japanese audio track on the dvd, I figured that they'd just go with the english dub like is the norm with american dvds of these movies, but I was overjoyed to find that they had the Japanese language track with subtitles! For the 3 people who prefer english dubbing, the dubbing isn't bad (as far as dubbing goes...it's way worse than subtitles of course!). This is the first DVD i've seen of a Kaiju movie that actually was worth buying over imports/bootlegs! It's great!
About the movie itself...it's about a giant turtle that fights giant birds! It's got a lot more going on, but that's the basic plot. It's got a sense of weight which is absent from just about all of the Godzilla movies, and the special effects are occasionally really, truly impressive (they got better as the series went on, culminating in Gamera 3, in which they're mind-blowing!). The characters are better than those in many other movies of this sort (such as the last bunch of Godzilla movies!). It's a good movie, not a great one...probably a 3.5/5.
The movie itself is by far my least favorite of the gamera trilogy, but it's still pretty good. And, if the next two dvds are like this one (widescreen, subtitled in japanese, with subtitled extras from the Japanese dvds), I will buy them as soon as I possibly can! This is just great, and I wish this company would get the rights to the Godzilla films, cause they have treated this movie with the respect that I've never seen another american company give to a movie of its kind. BUY IT!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: One of the best Japanese monster movies...
Review: To me, with a lot of the 90's Godzilla movies, the special effects and especially the miniatures don't look as good as they did in the classic 60's Godzilla movies. But with the 90's Gamera, EVERYTHING is better. The FX, the miniatures, the pacing, the story, the action--it's all excellent. If you have any affection at all for Japanese giant monster movies, then you will definitely enjoy Gamera, Guardian of the Universe. And, this ADV release is widescreen, has optional subtitles and is full of extras and behind the scenes stuff. Highly recommended.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: One of the Best Kaiju Flicks of the 90's ! Great ComeBack !
Review: Gamera, The Guardian of the Universe is one the best monster films in a long time. Gamera returns and faces of with his greatest enemy, Gyaos, in order to save humanity from extintion in this non stop action, special effects kaiju film exstravaganza of the 90's.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Great, Fun Cool Movie
Review: Fans of Japanese monster movies are going to love this movie. The Gamera series has usually been aimed at kids, but this film has an involving story line, bi-sexual flying bird monsters, and really nice Gamera stomping through big cities footage.

Much better than it had to be. TOHO, the home of Godzilla, took over the studio that did the Gamera films, and I think that may be why this film is so good.

Whether you watch this with the kids, or have friends over and pop up some popcorn and drink some brews, you are really going to have fun with this one!

And thank goodness the disc has the Japanese language version with sub-titles too! A must get!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: GAMERA KICKS BUTT
Review: With a good script, a good director, and top-of-the-line special effects, GAMERA - GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE was considered during its release in 1995 to be the all-time best giant monster movie, a title it lost the following year to its own sequel. The DVD contains both the original Japanese dialog as well as the English dubbed. Do yourself a favor and watch the Japanese with English subtitles, as the dubbing--good as it is--glosses over some of the effective subtleties of the original script. This is a great sci-fi movie and can be enjoyed even by those who don't normally go into the giant monster movie genre.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: GAMERA THE GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE!
Review: A man-eating squad of three birds circle the sky. They are from an evil race. And now the giant turtle Gamera is out to stop him! Helpfully guided by a girl, Gamera struggles to defeat his birdy foes.....

I reccomend this movie if you are the Toho Godzilla fan. It's a cool film. ...

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Hey! That's no atoll. That's Gamera! He's back!
Review: "Gamera: The Guardian of The Universe" ("Gamera daikaijû kuchu kessen") brings back the giant flying jet-powered flame-spewing turtle of a series of less than distinguished Sixties and Seventies Japanese movies. But despite the big budget Gamera has the same old problems. All he wants to do is defend Japan and small children from the bad monster Gyaos, a giant prehistoric bird who likes to sit on Tokyo Tower (Hey! I took a whole bunch of photographs from the top of that in the late 1960s; it was monster free then). Apparently the Gyaos are the ancient enemies of Gamera and so he rises up from the Pacific Ocean, the Ocean of Death, and does battle.

The special effects are actually better in "Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe" than we have seen in any Gamera film; yes, the monsters are still rubber suits, but the Japanese defense forces moving into position are actually decent this time around and the fireballs Gamera spits out at the Gyaos are pretty kewl. Then again, if you want your Japanese rubber monster movies to have bad dubbing, then this film will certainly meet your needs. So this is better than what came before (ask Kojiro Hongo who plays the Captain of the Nojima because he was in most of those original films), but it is hard to take great pride in that conclusion. But one final warning: you better like techno music.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Finally a good Gamera Film.....
Review: I finally saw this movie at a friend's house today. I must say that I was impressed. This new Gamera is much better then his earlier film version. They place his origins with the City of Atlantis and it's really loaded with all sorts of mythology and anicent stories of the lost civilzation. Very cleaver. It's also good that Toho is now doing these movies...That being the case, I wonder how long it will be before we see a Gamera/Godzilla crossover....?!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Apparently the universe consists of one planet!
Review: The so called update is bad stuff. The plot-line consists of alot of Atlantian nonsense to justify the existance of the creature. Bad FX shots like the creatures locked behind the horizon, never venturing to where the people are running around. Buildings that explode for no good reason, Gamera walking through a construction site, the girders explode from within each piece. Buildings scraped by the creature explode from the inside-out. Is Tokyo a storage house for nitro-glycerin or what? The ineptness is such that it could be mistaken for brilliant parody. The same could be said about Godzilla 2000. Gamera is full of meat!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: excellant
Review: It is a great movie. One that I never saw before and would love to see it again. I'm trying to find where I could buy it but it is hard to find.I like the way the japanese make their films.


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