One summer I was staying with my dad and stepmother in Indiana; one particularly boring Saturday afternoon I was flipping through the channels and happened to come upon a double bill: War of the Gargantuas and Destroy All Planets. That was it – I was hooked on these goofy, beautiful, imaginative monster movies thereafter.

While all daikaiju (giant monster) films these days are seen to be kiddie fare, the truth is that when they were released, both Godzilla and Gamera were meant to be taken seriously (more or less) as horror film characters. Of course, their audience demographic kept sliding younger and younger, until they really were being packaged exclusively for the kids. Destroy All Planets sits right smack in the middle of that sensibility. It has no pretensions to be great art or even horror; it’s strictly an adventure for the short-pants crowd.

Japanese kid Masao and American kid Jim are kidnapped by aliens who wish to take control of the giant fire-breathing turtle known as Gamera. Knowing Gamera to be ‘the friend of children everywhere,’ they use the kids to lure the monster to their planet where they implant a mind-control device on him. Gamera is sent to attack Earth, before the boys are able to shut down the mind-control software to free him. The aliens’ god, a tentacled monster with a pointy head and the face of a bird, battles Gamera, and that’s about it.

What makes this movie a fun ride (if you like such things) is the sheer sense of play and imagination inherent in the whole thing. Like its similarly-named companion featuring Godzilla, Destroy All Monsters, this film takes several kids’-adventure clichés and mixes them into a satisfyingly goofy whole.

As a kid, I thought the monster-god Viras was fascinating, as was the aliens’ spaceship. To look at them as an adult, of course, the effects are silly. But this movie isn’t made for me – the modern adult me; it was made for the 10-year-old me who loved it beyond reason.

Let’s face it: these Gamera films aren’t for everybody. Even many daikaiju fans see Gamera as the bastard nephew of Godzilla, who is of course King of the Monsters, and whose films didn’t begin to descend into quite this level of childishness for a few years. But it’s fun if you can turn off that nagging internal critic.

Recommendation: I find the immediately-previous Gamera feature, Attack of the Monsters, to be more satisfying overall.