Gamera 2:
Attack of Legion 
(1996)
review by Big McLargehuge

The success of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe convinced the newly solvent Daiei Studios to let Ito and Kaneko add another chapter to their Gamera reimaging. This film begins with a huge meteor strike, but strangely the meteor fragments simply vanish. Before long all the glass bottles at a Kirin Beer brewery disappear, as do all the fiber optic cables around Tokyo.

Something’s up, and astronomers Midori Honami (Miki Mizuno) and Obitsu (Mitsuro Fukikoshi) to find out what it is. Determining that the meteor wasn’t a meteor but the beginnings of an alien infestation, Honami and Obitsu team up with the increasingly harried Japanese Defense Forces led by Colonel Watarase (Toshiyuki Nagashima) to stop the glass-hungry aliens.

This isn’t the invasion common in both Kaiju and standard Earth-based science fiction, the aliens don’t want anything, they are a hive-minded group of silicon-based insectoids in service to a massive space seed. Actually, they spread like a virus but are most often compared to ants.

Once the monsters overtake a building in Hokkaido and build a massive flowering seed launcher, Gamera arrives to shove the glassy bugs back into space, and it’s monster smashing time.

The Legion bugs pose more of a threat than simply stealing glass and building massive seed pods. To fuel their seed launcher the bugs ingest glass and separate the silicon for their bodies and oxygen to power the launcher. That much compressed oxygen in one place means that when the launcher throws the seed into space most of the city around the pod will evaporate.

Legion, as it turns out, is two monsters in one, the six foot tall bug monsters that swarm over Gamera and have an attraction to electromagnetic energy, and a massive five hundred good tall multi-armed monstrosity who is more than a match for the flame spewing terrapin. Legion is prepared to fight to the death to protect the seeds.

Gamera 2: Attack of Legion also brings back two characters from the first film in the series, Asagi Kusanagi (Ayako Fujitani) and former Inspector Osako (Yukijiro Hotaru) now a security guard for Kirin Beer. Both will also play pivotal roles in the third film due for release in June.

With some interesting spiritual overtones, a profound sense of dread, and superb visuals, not to mention an intelligent script that again refuses to insult the audience, Gamera 2 Attack of Legion may well be the best giant monster movie ever made. It is certainly part of the best series ever created.

I do have a few minor gripes, and these are the same as with the first film in the series. That gripe is with Ko Otani’s lifeless score. A film of such breathtaking magnitude simply cries out for distinctive rousing music. Instead we get more swoopy strings that, to me at least, failed to spice the visuals.

ADV absolutely loads this DVD with extras including the second third of the interview with special effects supervisor Shinji Higuchi, footage from the premier, all of the original Japanese television spots, original trailer, and behind the scenes documentary, chapter stops, a dolby 2.0 English or Japanese language track with English subs, and glorious 16:9 letterboxing. To sweeten the deal further we get another hilarious outtake track featuring the creative goofiness of the English Dub team, and a twenty minute redub/edit called The Texarkana Lake Turtle that provides a hilarious take on the film.

If you have even a passing interest in Kaiju then you simply cannot let the Heisei Gamera series pass you by.