If you’re not schizo you’re not schizo posting

One of the many great things about the Gamera franchise is that it is completely schizo. The first Gamera is a kid friendly Godzilla, dropping the radiation burn victims and Oxygen Destroyer for a human plot that focuses mostly on a kid who just loves the shit out of this giant turtle. The giant turtle sort of reciprocates by saving the kid's life at one point (admittedly, the kid was only in danger because of Gamera's destruction, but whatever).

Gamera vs Barugon completely ditches the kid angle. The human plot is a dark morality tale about greed, revenge, and colonialism. There's still admiration for the monster, but it is comparable to Monsters as the female lead speaks in admiration about how beautiful Barugon's rainbow is and how no one has seen such terrors in a thousand years.

Then Gamera vs Gyaos swerves hard back into being a kid's movie, bringing back the child lead who is smarter than all of the adults and who drives both the human and monster plot. The kid even watches the final monster battle, cheering for the giant turtle to vanquish the dreaded Gyaos. But Gyaos also introduces another distinctive bit of Gamera schizo in that it is gory by kaiju standards. Gyaos nearly severs Gamera's arm in one battle and his tail in another, there's a giant pool of blood to lure out Gyaos because he lusts for blood, Gamera bites into Gyaos's neck and worries him like a dog with a feral cat while blood sprays across his face before the Friend to All Children drags his dying prey into a volcano. Godzilla Showa movies largely followed the rules of 80's kid's cartoons, where judo throws, blunt objects and energy blasts are okay, but thou shalt not shed blood in anger. Gamera Showa movies followed the "rules" of an illegal dog fighting match, where you bite down hard through the jugular and keep shaking your head and don't let up until the hated Enemy stops moving.

The remaining Gamera Showa movies follow a similar logic of obviously kid targeted but inexplicably gory kaiju movies. Sometimes they did this with honor like Gamera vs Jiger (a movie written for 12 year olds but with adults in mind and that presages the rival Godzilla franchise's Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla entry in it's commentary on Japan's relentless quest for modernization and monoculturalism at the expense of native cultures, and a movie that followed the logic of the first Gamera in constantly asspulling newer and crazier powers for the baddy just when you thought the heroes had this in the bag), but mostly they were not very good. Gamera: Super Monster was the series’ nadir, coming from a place of pure contempt for the audience on the basis that unaccompanied toddlers who accidentally stumbled into the theater wouldn't realize they were watching 60% clip show of previous films and 40% super shitty Super Sentai rip off with no meaningful connection between the two parts because the audience has no object permanence. Nevertheless, these movies are something of a trip. Imagine that Barney the Dinosaur had a gritty reboot that was two-thirds exactly what you'd expect, and the other third featured a newly introduced character called KnifeMan who just hated children like crazy and would pin Barney into a corner and try to disembowel him with his knife body while blood spewed everywhere. Then the movie ends with Barney the purple dinosaur chomping down on KnifeMan's head hard enough to burst his skull sending gore everywhere. That would be fucked up, right? Well, that’s like half the Gamera movies.

Speaking of gritty reboots, the 90's Gamera trilogy hard swerves again and grittily reboots the series, ditching the Friend to All Children in favor of the Defender of the Universe. The 90's trilogy takes so much inspiration from Evangelion that one is almost tempted to give it the D-word label. They even use an ingenious and never again matched twist in Gamera 3 of showing a scene from the final battle of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (in which our favorite giant turtle bursts through an apartment building) from the perspective of the poor, stupid fleshbags who happen to be in the apartment building at the time. Two of those poor, stupid fleshbags had names and family and that family included a surviving daughter, and Ayana swears vengeance on the Friend to No One Actually He’s Kind of a Dick. The whole 90′s trilogy is really good and does everything that the American Godzilla series seeks to do so much better than any American Godzilla movie is likely to accomplish, and when I’m not being a contrarian I’ll acknowledge that it exceeds the first three Gamera movies, but it is also very much not a kid’s trilogy. Not to say that a child can’t watch it and enjoy it, I am a child after all, but imagine if a My Little Pony movie leaned so hard on Rescue at Midnight Castle that it broke itself in half and went full grimdark with Megan returning as a murderous, remorseless, Rambo-tier psycho who carves a bloody swath through Dream Valley in her relentless pursuit of Tirek, killing anypony that happens to end up in her path. That would be fucked up, right? It’ll be a few years before I show this trilogy to my niece, is what I’m saying.

And then the last (so far) Gamera hatches. Gamera the Brave is, in every possible way, a direct repudiation of Gamera 3. We’re a kid’s series again. We get a rehash of the central conflict of Gamera 3 (Gamera killed someone’s mom fighting a monster, that someone finds an egg, etc) but now that egg is Gamera’s offspring/sibling/reincarnated self and instead of the angry tot becoming an avatar of vengeance, he heals by bonding with a magic turtle that burps and farts fire. It is E.T. if E.T. was a kaiju. It is as gory it’s predecessors, but changing opinions and advancing special effects have decided that this degree of bloodshed is normal so it is fucking weird in context because it is normal.