Two children—this time a boy and a girl, who are younger than in previous films—are kidnapped along with their astoundingly stupid fathers by aliens who plan to takeover the world with their earthquake machine and then live in the oceans. The kids outsmart the alien woman and return to Earth. Will Gamera defeat the aliens? Will the kids be crucial in reviving Gamera? Will this be the dumbest movie in the franchise? All will be revealed, unfortunately.
While the previous four films had been juvenile and primitive, this one is those things topped with being frustrating. It goes on and on with the spacegirl chasing our too-young-for-film children. They go down corridors, in and out of doors, down more corridors, up some stairs, across the plaza, etc. But then no one was even pretending to try in this production. This was the last of the regular Showa films. The company was in shambles and no one had any ideas. The alien spaceship is a gumball machine and the evil monster is a stiff-looking model shark. Much of the third act is a dozen people huddled together around a screen in a very small room. What very little monster action we get is not worth seeing. At least Gamera trying to sneak up on the sleeping shark should have been funny, but it isn’t. Partly that’s because Gamera vs Zigra wants to be taken seriously and pretend that the children are in real danger. Plus it dumps a theme on top: Pollution is bad. Pollution was becoming a popular subject for Japanese monster movies and this was Gamera’s ham-fisted shot at the theme. It works as well as everything else in the film.
Outside of the cute spacegirl who puts on a bikini, and Gamera playing his theme song with a rock on the shark’s back like a xylophone, Gamera vs Zigra doesn’t even work at a drunken party. Choose a different one and let this be forgotten.