Back in the sixties, Gamera was Godzilla’s poor, trailer-trash cousin. This flying, fire-breathing turtle (but of course!) gallumphed his way through a series of films. The first, under its North American release title Gammera the Invincible (the one time there was a double “m” in the name), is a pretty decent monster flick for that period, with some fine destruction, and introduces Gamera’s fondness for children (so though he trashes cities, he can’t be all bad). US-shot scenes were added to the original, and...the producers seem to have gone out of their way to find a Japanese actor whose mispronunciation of English was as stereotypical as possible (as his every “l” becomes an “r,” imagine how he utters the line, “Our fuel supplies are dangerously low”). The subsequent films degenerated almost immediately into full-on juvenilia. Most of these films are available in one form or another (none fabulous) from various budget labels. Check the bins at Wal-Mart.

Flash-forward to 1995. After a long hiatus, the turtle came back in Gamera: Guardian of the Universe. And everything changed. Where before the Gamera pics were hard-pressed to live up to even the weakest of the Godzilla movies, now the situation was reversed. Director Shusuke Kaneko here began a trilogy that set a new high watermark for giant monster movies. Gamera is now the creation of a lost civilization, and his mission is to defend the Earth against whatever might threaten it. In this case, the threat is the flying monster Gyaos, though it could almost as easily have been humanity. There are scenes of stunning pictorial beauty, and the monster battles are as thrilling as the child in you remembers the fights being in the older Godzilla flicks. One scene in particular (involving a failed missile attack on Gyaos) was stolen holus bolus by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich for their misbegotten Godzilla (1998), but rendered nonsensical.