(Originally posted on
The Gamera Heisei trilogy comes to a rousing finale in Gamera: Revenge of Iris. Not only is this a solid movie, but it explores issues heretofore ignored or glossed over in kaiju movies. The first two films (which I discussed here and here) skirted some of these issues, but it isn’t until Revenge of Iris that they smack you in the face.
Movie starts out with background information that more Gyaos(es?) like from the first film are alive and killing people again. The numbers aren’t known, but there may be many of them.
Ayana Hirasaka (Ai Maeda) lives in a small village. Gamera accidentally ophaned her during his first battle with Gyaos. It has filled her with a burning hatred of Gamera.
A down-and-out Osako (Yukijiro Hotaru) is reduced to selling magazines in Tokyo to support his drinking habit. This poor guy appears in all three films. In Guardian of the Universe, he’s a police inspector who runs into the first Gyaos. In Legion, he’s a security guard (because he explains he lost his nerve for police work) in the beer manufacturing plant attacked by the Legion swarm. His PTSD has driven him to rock bottom. Which makes sense, considering his experiences.
Revenge of Iris is the first movie I’ve ever seen address PTSD from survivors of giant monsters. One might assume that this should be a relatively common occurrence in the genre.
Osako’s luck is as bad as ever, when Gamera battles two Gyaos over Tokyo. Gamera blasts the first out of the air. It falls, crippled, into a train station. Gamera lands and finishes it off with a massive fire blast. Unfortunately for the commuters (and pretty much everyone within a several block radius) Gamera doesn’t care about civilian casualties, crushing or incinerating many. The remaining Gyaos flies overhead, trading blasts with Gamera and slaughtering thousands. Gamera fires one blast point-blank through an occupied restaurant, finally killing the second Gyaos. Chunks of flaming Gyaos fall to the ground, killing still more. There is only one scene where Gamera might have protected a child from Gyaos’s killing ray, although it is ambiguous.
Over twenty thousand people are dead in Tokyo before Gamera finally flies off.
I enjoyed this scene quite a bit, as the writers and director show us in unflinching detail what might happen if two kaiju engines of destruction fought in a city. We don’t see some distant model building blow up. Humans are incinerated like flies. Later movies like Cloverfield explored this theme, but I think Revenge of Iris is the first.
(It is implied that Gamera lost his connection with humanity in Advent of Legion, and now only concentrates on destroying threats, rather than protecting humans.)
Meanwhile, Ayana has discovered a weird egg in an ancient shrine. It turns out to be a variant on the Gyaos. Ayana names it after her dead pet cat “Iris”. The creature forms a symbiotic relationship with Ayana, inheriting her hatred of Gamera. (It’s never explained exactly how this mutated creature happened, although the implication is that the Gyaoses adapt to Gamera’s threat.) Iris absorbs Ayana, but is separated from her before the link is complete. This doesn’t stop Iris from wiping out half Ayana’s village and an infantry battalion.
Iris’s creature design is quite unusual, much like Legion’s. The ground “man in suit” scenes are done well enough that it’s difficult to see a humanoid shape. All of the airborne scenes are CGI, but done competently enough for the time period.
Iris pursues Ayana while battling Gamera. Unfortunately for Gamera, the Japanese military doesn’t have a soft spot for him after he killed 20,000 people in Tokyo! They slam a couple of missiles into Gamera and Iris outruns him. Iris arrives in Kyoto, where Ayana waits at a train station.
Note: Ayana arrived in Kyoto via a couple of weird characters named Asukura (Senri Yamazaki) and Kurata (Tooru Teduka). They believe Gamera must be killed so the Gyaos will destroy the decadent civilization. Their significance escaped me at first, but after later viewings I think they’re supposed to be analogues or parodies of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult. In any case, Iris crushes them both to a pulp.
Gamera gets the worst of the battle as Ayana lends Iris her strength and hatred through their psychic link. Iris finally absorbs Ayana entirely for a few moments, before Gamera rips her out of Iris’s chest. Iris responds by pinning Gamera’s hand to a wall with a talon. Before Iris can drain Gamera’s life through the wound, Gamera blows off his own hand! He then follows it up by absorbing Iris’s energy blasts through his stump and punching the flaming stump through Iris’s chest, blowing Iris to smithereens.
Gamera is hard core.
The film ends with the mangled Gamera preparing to fight a giant swarm of Gyaoses descending on Kyoto. The gist is that Gamera never stops fighting, not matter the odds. Kind of a ‘down’, scary ending for the trilogy, but definitely awesome.
