10 Sci-Fi Rip-Off Movies (That Messed Up What They Copied)

Now, we're admittedly going to tread a little carefully here because Gamera has a lot of fans in his own right, but in speaking specifically about 1965's "original" Gamera, the Giant Monster, it was objectively produced by Daiei Film as a knock-off of Toho's hugely successful 1954 Godzilla.

The big hook? Though Gamera was also a reptilian-looking creature, it was more specifically a giant prehistoric turtle, albeit one similarly informed by the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yet produced for roughly 40% of Godzilla's budget, Gamera can't hope to conceal its overpoweringly cheap, thrown-together nature. From the wafer-thin storytelling to the uninteresting action and generally weak-sauce suspense, this is basically just trailing the fumes of its inspiration.

But to be completely fair to the movie, it nevertheless fared well enough to establish Gamera as a pop-culture icon in his own right, spawning eleven other films in the near-six decades since.

Though the inaugural '65 film can't help but feel like an ersatz Godzilla - because that's precisely what it is - Gamera at least carved out a more unique identity for itself in the more warmly received films that followed.