“There are one hundred billion fixed stars in galactic space.”
Two kids, Akio (Nobuhiro Kajima) and Tom (Christopher Murphy) are looking through a telescope one night. They see a flying saucer land in the distance. The next day Akio, Tom and Akio’s little sister Tomoko (Miyuki Akiyama) go out looking for the saucer. The boys investigate the spaceship. The ship takes off with the boys on board.
Back home, Tomoko tells her mother and officer Concha what happened. No one will believe the little girl's story of alien abduction, not even Officer Concha.
The boys end up on a planet in Earth’s orbit, but on the other side of the sun called Terren. On the planet are two alien women in leotards and silver lame. They are the only ones left on the planet. The alien women have a machine that telepathically translates their language so that the kids can understand them. It appears that, with their technology they can control the laws of nature.
The down side of this technology is that it created some nasty monsters. They have a Gyaos type creature called Space Gyaos and a nasty knife-nosed watch dog type monster called Guiron. Guiron is affectionately known as the ‘knife monster’. His head is in the shape of a bowie knife and he can shoot ninja stars out of the side of it. Cool. As the boys watch Guiron kills Space Gyaos and goes back to a hole in the ground.
The two aliens are Florbella (Reiko Kasahara) and Barbella (Hiroko Kai). They hypnotize Akio and probe his mind for information about Gamera. Enter stock footage of prior Gamera movies. The aliens decide that they need to absorb the knowledge from the boys. The best way to do that is to eat their brains. Then, once they fix their ship they can go to Earth and eat everybody’s brains.
The boys are in a bit of a fix. They are on a strange planet on the other side of the sun. Outside the deserted alien city are giant monsters and inside are two cannibalistic space aliens that want to eat their brains. Their only hope is that Gamera will save them.
“Gamera vs Guiron” AKA “Attack of the Monsters” was released in 1969 in Japan and was directed by Noriaki Yuasa. The film was never released theatrically in the US, but was released directly to television as “Attack of the Monsters”. It was the fifth in the Gamera series. It is a children’s fantasy Kaiju movie.
There isn’t as much stock footage in this movie as there was in the previous Gamera film.
The notion of cutting open a kid's head to eat his brains raw seemed a little, well, gross for a children’s story. In the scene Akio is sitting in an enclosure with the top of his head sticking out. One of the aliens shaves his head and is just about to cut open his skull with a small bone saw when Gamera shows up. A little too close for comfort for me. I remember someone saying it reminded them of the monkey brain scene in the movie “Faces of Death”. The exact same thought came to me. Trust me, it wasn’t a pleasant thought.
Other than that hideous memory the movie was your basic Saturday afternoon kids show. Well, unless you are watching the Japanese version. One scene shortened from the American dubbed film that is in the original Japanese version is the fight between Guiron and Space Gyaos due to its graphic content. The original Japanese version and the international dub version are copyrighted but the AIP-TV version is in the public domain.
American dubbed
Japanese subtitled