Shamelessly cribbing from three vastly superior giant monster films — specifically KING KONG (1933), MOTHRA and GORGO (both 1961), but most especially from GORGO — the film tells the uninvolving story of a bunch of Japanese who show up on a South Seas island (complete with Japanese actors in head-to-toe shoe polish and adorned in Halloween party "native" garb), ostensibly to bring back animals to populate a theme park, but instead find the egg of an ancient and feared monster called Gappa. The party steals the baby monster in spite of the natives' profuse and vehement warnings, and in no time the baby's enormous and very pissed-off parents make their way to Japan in search of their offspring, causing much death and destruction along the way. The adult Gappa pair can fly and emit a devastating heat ray, so, just like when faced with the rampaging Mothra, mankind's feeble efforts are pretty much useless.
By the time that the humans relent and let the baby loose to join its parents on an airport landing strip where they all fly away (also as seen in MOTHRA), I simply did not care. While ripping off three of the best giant monster movies ever made, MONSTER FROM A PREHISTORIC PLANET is dull, dull, dull, and completely lacks even a trace of the fun or magic of any of its inspirations, but the shortened-for-TV version livens up the full-length version's glacial pace by excising long bits of boring and pointless dialogue that only served to unnecessarily pad out the running time. I bet that the 4:30 MOVIE's cut would still hold up as an at least passable bit of filler programming, but that edit was unfortunately not included on the Gamera disc. Whatever the case, I'm glad I saw MONSTER FROM A PREHISTORIC PLANET just so I could speak on it from an informed standpoint. Now that that's done, I most likely won't ever revisit it. In short, miss this one and you miss nothing.
Poster from the original Japanese release.
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