On DVD: The Apocalyptic Poetry of Gamera vs. Barugon

Honestly, Japan terrifies me. While American pop culture, with its adolescence fetish, prideful ignorance, superhero love and video-game fantasias, can merely make me queasy, what I see flowing out of Japan triggers a flight response.

There's the cute cult, the raped-schoolgirl obsession, the giant-tentacle-penis-monster animated porn, the apocalyptic visions, the oceans of twisted-fairy-tale manga, the deification of inexplicable toys, the gold-plated poop-shaped cell phone trinkets, the mad casserole combinations of all of the above, and so on. No other nation in the world emits a tidal siege of pop culture that screams in its every manifestation that the source country is, in fact, goddamn nuts. That's why it's globally popular, of course -- insanity can be dazzlingly strange to us ordinary humans, busy with our three-camera sitcoms and rude-behavior reality shows.

I think Japan has gotten scarier since, say, the emergence of the personal computer, but if you're looking at pure pulp fun like 1965's Gamera vs. Barugon -- now issued on DVD via Shout! Factory -- it becomes clear that, at least since Hiroshima, Japan has been a roiling culture lava-pit with serious issues. I saw this film first in the '70s on local broadcast TV, and I was apparently too young to fathom its geeky oddness. But for anyone who's new to the well, let's thumbnail it: In response to Toho's popular Godzilla films, rival studio Daiei conjures up a... a giant flying monster turtle. With tusks. And laser breath. And a hunger for electricity. And the ability, nay, the propensity, to walk on his hind legs, like a man in a giant, laser-breathing turtle suit.

This is the second Gamera film; there have been 12 so far, with the most recent in 2006 and shot in anamorphic widescreen. Anamorphic -- just like The Robe! Here, Gamera is accidentally summoned from his underground slumber after another thing, a spike-backed lizard who, though his opal-like egg was found in New Guinea by treasure hunters (who so rudely wave off the protestations of the natives, dressed as they are in plastic grass skirts and polyester bras), breathes ice and wields its tongue like a cudgel. Barugon, as someone calls him, stomps around Tokyo like so many stilted behemoths before him, and eventually the film is reduced - or exploded out into - a clash of the titans.

Which is when these films, like so much memorable pulp, acquire a kind of apocalyptic poetry. There's a weird otherness to the wholesale monster fight scenes, which proceed with no dialogue, just echoing screaming animal noises, and are never convincing in the least. (This despite the carefully constructed mini-cities, the decimation of which, as in Akira and its anime spawn, is still kinda upsetting. All that craftsmanship!) The badly constructed and harebrained costumes, the unmoving eyeballs, the obviously uncomfortable actors stalking around this doomed mini-landscape -- it's like a movie cataclysm dreamed up and shot on another planet.

Called Japan. Like its brethren, Gamera vs. Barugon (which had a director and screenwriter, whoever they are, and a young star who admits in an interview about faking an illness so he could get out of his contract) is not as guilty-pleasure hilarious as you think it will be. The shadow of atomic holocaust looms over it all, darkly, and you get to thinking that if someone had dropped a nuclear warhead on Hollywood, American blockbusters today would be very different indeed. No other culture on Earth knows the drill of mass destruction like Japan does, but still, when yet another monster-fleeing urban refugee asks, "Are they going to drop another atomic bomb or something?", you don't know if they're referencing 1945 or the scores of bombs dropped in other kaiju(giant monster movies). You can't help wondering, in fact, if Japan will ever stop running as its cities crumble, over and over and over again.