Gamera vs. Viras

Gamera vs. Viras is the movie where Gamera's love for children became the main plot-point. It features stock footage from Giant Monster Gamera, Gamera vs. Barugon, and Gamera vs. Gyaos. Space aliens want to colonize the Earth, but are thwarted by Gamera attacking their ship.

Two young Boy Scouts, one of whom is good with machines, mess around with and eventually get to ride in an experimental submarine. They encounter Gamera in the ocean just before the aliens temporary trap him in a force field and read his mind to find that the stock footage shows that he is powerful but his weakness is a love of children. The children return and the adults don't believe that they saw Gamera until the children are kidnapped by the spaceship to force Gamera not to attack them. The aliens then take control of Gamera and more stock footage ensues. The boys plead with the military to not care about their own lives (in a rather noble moment of self-sacrifice) and to destroy the aliens' ship, but the UN refuses to endanger them.

The boys manage to escape and free Gamera from the mind control by Reversing the Polarity. The aliens are revealed to be nonhuman, and fuse into one giant monster, so there is indeed a battle of Gamera versus a monster named "Viras" rather than Gamera versus aliens called the Viras. When the alien spears its pointy head into Gamera, Gamera takes it into the upper atmosphere to freeze it, then drops it in the water; it is presumed dead and in fact is not seen again in further movies (except as stock footage).


 * Adults Are Useless: Yeah... pretty much.
 * Alien Invasion: Yep.
 * Ascetic Aesthetic: The interior of the ship. No furniture, no decorations, panels made of featureless triangular lights, and several parts that are functional such as the matter replicator and the blocks making up the Gamera control device come out of the wall.
 * Gamera Can Breathe In Space: Yep.
 * Can You Hear Me Now: This movie manages to do it before cell phones were invented. Masao has a wrist radio, which he designed and was made by his father's company.  It even works from the aliens' spaceship, but fails briefly when the kids are in a force field.
 * Cardboard Prison: You'd think that highly advanced alien races could do better at keeping two kids trapped. At first they let the kids have the run of the ship, and when they do shackle them the shackles are so bad thast the kids can escape spontaneously with a piece of rope (the aliens also forgot to confiscate any of the prisoners' possessions).  Once the kids escape, they walk right to where the aliens are controlling Gamera, without even trying to hide, and are ignored.  They later manage to transport themselves out of the ship.
 * Chekhov's Skill: The two boys' knack for screwing around with device controls and setting them in reverse. It comes in handy later on.
 * Defeat Equals Explosion: Destroying the mind control device in the ship leads the device on Gamera to explode, which is the equivalent of blowing up a TV station and watching everyone's televisions explode.
 * Denied Food as Punishment: The kids are told they will have no dinner because they were screwing around.
 * Friend to All Children: Gamera, which the aliens take advantage of.
 * Glowing Eyes of Doom: Seen on the aliens in human form.
 * Humans Are Japanese: The children, when taken aboard the ship, actually comment that the aliens look like Japanese, rather than just that they look like Earthmen.
 * Kaiju
 * Kill It with Fire: Gamera destroys ship segments with his flame breath.
 * Matter Replicator: The ship responds to the kids' thoughts and creates juice and sandwiches for them. The aliens warn them that it won't let them create anything that damages the ship; they ask for unpeeled apples and a knife, and the ship produces peeled apples.
 * Meat Puppet: The aliens disguise themselves as human by taking the bodies of humans they killed.
 * The Mockbuster: While Gamera is its own series, some releases of this movie were named "Destroy All Planets" so that people would think it is related to Destroy All Monsters.
 * Reverse Polarity: Both as per the trope, and literally. The boys have reversed some wires on a sub to make it go in reverse.  Therefore, reversing the wires on the device that controls Gamera will reverse the commands being given to Gamera.  (And they don't actually even use wires; they pick two random alien blocks and switch their positions.)  They then proceed to reverse more blocks on the transporter to transport themselves out instead of in.
 * Spheroid Dropship: In fact, the aliens' entire ship is made up of five of these attached together. When one escapes, Gamera throws another one at it like a ball.
 * Stock Footage: Used when the aliens read Gamera's mind to find out his weakness for children, and again when they command him to attack. They didn't even bother colorizing the black and white footage from the first film.
 * Too Dumb to Live: Jim and Masao are smart when it comes to engineering, but they seem to lack, what's it called? Oh yeah, the sense of self preservation.
 * United Nations Is a Super Power. Not only is it the UN who decides whether to attack the aliens' ship, making the decision only takes them around five minutes.