What do you do when you want to end your giant monster movie franchise and you're bankrupt? Stock footage. Lots and lots of stock footage. That’s Gamera Super Monster, the final entry in the first Gamera series that started back in 1965 and ended up here in 1980.

There’s hardly a better movie for Elvira to zing than this one. Super Monster is a mess for fans of the giant, fire-breathing turtle. Inserted between footage of every monster fight is an incomprehensible, cartoon sequences, grade-Z storyline involving space women, an annoying singing kid, and a disembodied voice telling an evil space woman to take over the world.

New special effects scenes are nothing short of painful, including one where Gamera stomps past a faux Godzilla poster and knocks it down, an apparent in-joke that fails given the quality of Super Monster. A shot of the space women’s van (apparently the best they could do is a reject from the ‘60s) disappearing is the stuff Z-movie legends are made of.

To be fair, for someone who has never seen any of the original Gamera series, this would be a fun piece of schlock. The monster fights come frequently, and last for a while. The best parts of all of them are featured, and no time is wasted having scientists explain how they should be defeated. Gamera shows up, takes them out, and moves on.

For kids, this probably isn’t a bad choice either. Since most of the stock footage comes from films intended for the younger set anyway, this seems to be right up their alley (excusing the odd choice of dubbing in four-letter words). Incomprehensible wouldn’t be a problem for the under five years old set.

There’s still no excuse for this production from the standpoint of a giant monster fan. While the Godzilla series would succumb to this same stock footage tactic in Godzilla’s Revenge, at least there we were treated to an entirely new monster and fight scenes. You get nothing of the sort from Super Monster.

As the first time the film has ever ended up with a home video release in the US (it premiered on US TV on MTV of all places), it’s a shame Shout Factory apparently didn’t care enough to find anything else other than a 20-year-old VHS of an original TV recording. The only benefit here is the widescreen transfer, funnier yet since most of the stock footage comes from movies filmed in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and Super Monster is 1.85:1 cropping the original frames.