This may not be relevant, but did you know that Gamera is a friend to all children? — Mystery Science Theater 3000
Despite the fact that I’m kind of a movie geek, I really don’t pay much attention to the Oscars. Probably because find the whole thing tedious, crass and self-congratulatory. Whenever they do the montage of dead people and the audience spontaneously plays applause meter based on the fame of the deceased, I pirate ten new Hollywood movies just out of spite. Plus, there’s the fact that I stubbornly refuse to care about the lives of my favourite actors and directors apart from the movies they make. (Though I’ll admit to secretly being pretty happy that No Country For Old Men did so well.)
So instead of watching the Oscars, I spent the evening watching Japanese giant monsters fight in Gamera vs Guiron. I actually liked it quite a bit better than the last Gamera movie I watched, Gamera vs Gyaos, mostly because this one uses the scenes without giant monsters fighting as an excuse to trowel in a whole lot of low-budget weirdness. This mostly comes in the form of Guiron’s keepers, a couple of sexy brain-eating Japanese space babes in capes and helmets (which, coincidentally, exactly corresponds to a fetish I didn’t previously know I had). Not to say that there is anything non-bizarre about the giant monsters! Because not only do we have the turtle-shelled, jet-propelled, low-rent Godzilla knock-off that is Gamera, but his opponent Guiron is fucking surreal: he’s 80 meters tall, has a giant paring knife for a head, shoots throwing stars out of his face, and has the power to make water flow uphill. Let’s face it, you can’t tell me you’ve seen a whole lot of that before.