Bleeding Cool Looks At The Gamera Trilogy of the 1990s

Above, Sendai Station is featured (and blown up by a Legion flower pod) in Gamera 2. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Ten more days from now, the new Godzilla epic will be unleashed on theaters across the United States (some lucky countries will have it in theaters a day earlier).

In the meantime, Bleeding Cool takes a look back at Japan's other big-name kaiju, Gamera. They focus in on the "Heisei Trilogy" of movies produced in the 1990s by Daiei and directed by Shusuke Kaneko.

They begin with:

For the fans and pop culture watchers who like to watch these things, the new Godzilla movie is eagerly-awaited, and the studios are taking advantage of this interest by releasing the older movies on remastered Blu-Ray, including the darker, more series movies from the 1990′s. 

There is, however, another Dai Kaiju series that deserves attention, and that is the Gamera Trilogy from the 1990′s. These movies are considered by fans of the genre to be the ones the new Godzilla movie has to beat.

The article has one interesting line:

 What Alan Moore did for Swamp Thing, this trilogy of movies did for a giant flying turtle.

Of the three Shusuke-directed Gamera movies, my favorite is Gamera 2: Advent of Legion. It has plenty of monster action with great special effects by Shinji Higuchi and topped off with an interesting and compelling story.

Above, the tickets to the April 29, 2006 Gamera The Brave premiere in Tokyo.

The article leaves out 2006's Gamera The Brave (also known as Gamera, The Little Braves). It is not part of the Heisei Trilogy and is (at least so far) a stand-alone film. It is a lot better (as a film) than most of the Showa Gamera movies. I attended the 2006 premiere of Gamera The Brave in Tokyo.

To read the full article, go here.