The fifth entry to the Gamera series continues the space theme of the previous film. It involves three children seeing a spaceship through a telescope and going out to investigate. Two boys end up on the spaceship, which then returns them to the planet Terra, which is in the same orbit of the sun to Earth, but on the other side of the sun so we can never see it. Gamera follows them through space to save them.

The child who is left behind, goes back and tells her mother that her brother and cousin are taken in a spaceship, but no one believes her. No one remembers the events of the previous film, even though there’s a flashback at one point. They also literally shot Gamera into space at the end of the first one, but spaceships are too far fetched. No one believes her when she’s trying to convince people that the others were kidnapped.

The plot on Earth, once the two boys are in the ship is pretty much just there to pad the run time to eighty minutes. There’s also a lot of reused footage again of the previous films. Overall it’s the poorest entry to the series so far, it feels cheaply made and a cash-grab all the way through. There’s some horrendous rear-projection effects that are some of the worst of the series. It also feels like a full on children’s TV show at points with Gamera’s theme song playing space.

The new monster, Guiron, is pretty epic though. He’s beyond brutal. When we first get to Terra, Guiron fights Space Gyaos, a slightly altered version of Gyaos from the earlier film. He slices his foot off, then one of his wings, before cutting his head off and slicing his body up. It’s ruthless. Guiron looks like a dinosaur with a giant knife for a nose, it also has shuriken that it can project at things, which causes Gamera a fair bit of issues. The fight between Gamera and Guiron is pretty good, but it’s not as good as the fight in the previous film.

The fifth entry of the Gamera series isn’t as goofy as the previous one, but it’s still fun. It doesn’t have the same charm as the earlier films in the series, but it’s not the worst thing in the world, not by a long shot.

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