Past Misdeeds: Garo: Red Requiem (2010)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Makai Knight Kouga (Ryosei Konishi) is still protecting his part of Japan from the incursions of extra-dimensional evil beings known as Horrors. This time around, our hero has left his home city for some other unnamed Japanese city to hunt the particularly loathsome "Lord" (who just happens to quite clearly be a Lady) Karma (Saori Hara voiced by Kouga's TV show love interest Mika Hijii, for some reason). Karma resides inside of a mirror which can only be entered by others under very specific circumstances, and uses her victims' hidden desires (and a couple of freakish henchpeople owning a goth club) to lure them in.

The city in which Kouga is seeking Karma has its own protectors already: the experienced Makai Priest Akaza (Yosuke Saito) and his assistant Shiguto (Masahiro Kuranuki). For once,  both residents seem pretty okay with letting Kouga do his heroic loner thing. That's not the reaction of another Makai Priest, Rekka (Mary Matsuyama), who arrives just when Kouga does, with a chip on her shoulder and obvious hatred towards Karma in her heart. Rekka wants to kill Karma herself, the fact that she isn't bonded to a magical armour (it's not allowed for girls, you know, I suspect because of girl cooties) notwithstanding, and really, given that we'll later learn that Karma ate Rekka's father, it's a reasonable wish.

Obviously, Kouga and Rekka will come to blows, and it will take a series of cheesy speeches to convince the priestess that it's the job of all female characters in tokusatsu to cast spells (or - as in this case - play magic flute) at the main baddie from the side-lines while a rude, arrogant man with a very large sword does the main fighting, even when she has been shown to be quite good - though not so good as to embarrass the main character - at kicking peoples' asses.

Anyway, Karma is powerful enough for Kouga he actually needs the magical help, so it is a good thing that he's upgraded his interpersonal skills from "insufferable" to "just not a people person".

Despite my problems with its use of its female lead character, the (3D, but who cares?) theatrical feature following the "mature" (and pretty damn great) tokusatsu show Garo is an at times very entertaining piece of work, at least if you're willing to go with it.

Now, when you hear "theatrical feature", don't imagine the film's budget to be visibly higher than that of the TV show. The rather humble number of locations, the shooting style and the quality of the special effects should make the low budget nature of the endeavour quite obvious.

Fortunately, Red Requiem is still as much Keita Amemiya's baby as the original show was, and Amemiya is a director and creature designer with a great talent for milking low budgets for all the spectacle they are worth. After all, he's the guy who once used re-jigged cuckoo clocks as gigantic war machines in a movie, and it kinda-sorta worked.

Whether you thinks the quality of the CG effects helps or hinders Amemiya in his creative efforts will depend on your tolerance for extremely cheap looking CG.

I have made my peace with unnatural looking digital effects by now, as long as I like the concepts and ideas that are being put on screen with their help. Given my predilections, it would be pretty difficult for me to dislike the aesthetic the digital tech is trying to bring to life in Red Requiem's case. It's a strange, sometimes silly, sometimes cheesy, always very Japanese visual world, where classically Japanese style meets Western kitsch, mock-Gothic trappings, hack and slash videogame choreography and the free-form bizarre, until it becomes pretty difficult to decide on the appropriate reaction to it all. One could of course be an art snob and snort derisively, but it's just as fair a reaction to be charmed by the combination of the childlike and naive, the exploitative and the imaginative on display. (And yeah, there are some of Amemiya's trademark mime-alike monsters and someone with white wings, too).

Most of the not-so-digital action and the wire fu is quite good too. Konishi and Matsuyama are convincing at striking the appropriate poses, and Amemiya is still a friend of staging action sequences so that the audience is actually able to see what's going on. There are two or three moments of too obvious stuntman substitution, but I take a scene that's so clearly staged I can identify someone as a stuntman over one where I don't see what's supposed to be going on at all any time.

The acting's about like you would expect from a project like this. Konishi still doesn't move a facial muscle to do anything but scowl, but he is pretty fantastic at scowling by now, and everybody else plays his or her role a bit broader than contemporary Western tastes in acting styles would suggest (though Konishi would fit right in). However, the characters the actors are playing are pretty broad archetypes too, so I can't help but find these performances fitting. Certain characters are not meant to be portrayed naturalistically.

On the writing side, Red Requiem is clearly a step back from the comparative thematic richness of the show that spawned it, back into the safer territories of overlong speeches about heroism that take turns with emotional cheese. Still, I can't say I found myself getting too annoyed by it all, because there's nothing cynical about this aspect of the film, never a feeling that Red Requiem is going through the motions when it sprouts its not very clever philosophy. It's all honest heart-on-its-sleeve goodliness that takes itself terribly seriously, and while it seems proper to giggle about that, I won't blame it for being good-natured, silly and a bit dumb. See also, "(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding".


So, while I would have loved to watch a Garo movie that kept closer to the clever (or the exceedingly strange) parts of the show it came from, I had my fun with what Red Requiem has to offer, especially in its final third, when Amemiya seems to pull out all the stops and begins to bring anything on screen he could imagine and somehow squeeze in.

Past Misdeeds: Garo (2005-2006)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


A secret war is raging (at least in Japan). Creatures from the Underworld known as Horrors regularly creep through the cracks between dimensions to possess humans whose darkest impulses accommodate the character of the respective horror and use them to commit various atrocities. Fortunately, humankind is protected by the Makai Knights, warriors of mystical bloodlines who are able to use a magical metal known as soul metal. When need be, a Makai Knight can conjure up full body armour made from the material, but (because that's how it goes in tokusatsu shows) they can't stand being clad in the magical armour for long.

Garo follows the attempts of the perma-scowling Golden Knight Kouga Saezima aka Golden Fang aka Garo (Hiroki Konishi, now called Ryosei Konishi to confuse everyone as much as possible) to keep his territory (which might be the Eastern half of Japan or of Tokyo) save from the Horrors.

In the first episode, Kouga protects the artist Kaoru Mitsuki (Mika Hijii) from the attack of a horror, but can't prevent the dying beast's blood spattering all over her. Horror blood is quite insidious. It makes the person tainted by it a magnet for Horror attacks, and - as if that weren't bad enough - also kills the victim after exactly one hundred days in a gruesome and painful manner. By the laws of his order, Kouga is bound to kill everyone tainted thusly by the blood, but he decides to let Kaoru live and use her as bait for the various monsters of the week. Not that he's telling her anything of this, mind you.

Of course, Kouga's scowl and his absurdly abrupt manners hide a very soft core, and in truth he has a plan of trying to save Kaoru through an obscure ritual whose existence makes the whole "kill people who came in contact with Horror blood" rather problematic. Later on, Kaoru will turn out to be closer connected to the fight between the Makai Knights and the Horrors than anyone would suspect.

Apart from the secrets of Kouga's and Kaoru's pasts and family histories, and the monsters of the week, the show does (of course) also feature an equally scowl-prone rival with a chip even bigger than Kouga's on his shoulder, and a terrible conspiracy that might or might not have something to do with the three little weird girls working as Kouga's bosses.

Would you believe that everybody will learn something about showing one's feelings and stopping the damned scowling before the 25 episodes are over?

The Japanese TV show Garo is another project by master monster designer Keita Amemiya, who here is also credited as creator of the show and as its "chief director". I suspect that makes him something comparable to a very hands-on show runner for a US show.

Garo is the rare case of a tokusatsu superhero show that isn't made with a kid audience in my. Themes and tone of the show are comparatively mature (even if the emotional lives of the main characters aren't), there's even some thematically appropriate - dare I say "classy"? - nudity.

Amemiya's monster designs for the show are frequently quite brilliant, often mind-bogglingly bizarre and always completely in tune with the thing the respective monster is a metaphor for. The show's tone is often quite close to horror, with the hosts of the Horrors usually representing (and living out) the least pleasant impulses and feelings of humanity. In most episodes, Garo aims for a mood of the creepy and the bizarre, and hits its aim more often than not. Of course, there are a few other episodes. Two of them ("Doll" and "Game") have the sort of weird acid-dream quality only Japanese filmmakers still seem to want to achieve with their works from time to time, a few others are doing some rather interesting world building (that even comes together to build something like a coherent philosophy, though not exactly a deep one), and some others are doing their best to melodramatically explore the lead characters' inner demons.

The latter episodes are unfortunately the least successful ones. While the older and more experienced actors are as solid as can be, the young lead actors are ill-prepared for what the scripts ask of them here. Mika Hijii is probably the best of them; at least she's really getting into the melodramatics her character has to go through. Male lead Hiroki Konishi (and his "brooding rival" Ray Fujita, too) is often rather dreadful and at times doesn't even manage to scowl convincingly. I did have the impression that his acting improved a little over time, though. However, it is also quite possible that I just got used to him.

What Konishi and Fujita are quite good at, on the other hand, is physical acting and stunt work. Unlike many other contemporary tokusatsu shows, Garo has a lot of fighting going on when its heroes aren't wearing their stuntmen and digital effects enabling armour. At least half of the fights is actual screen fighting between the actual actors, and it is this aspect of the show where Konishi and Fujita shine. Both really seem to throw themselves into their fight scenes with enthusiasm, a certain verve, and even competence, and manage - with the help of Makoto Yokoyama's more than solid choreography and direction that knows the difference between intense and fast, and impenetrable - to make the non-suit fights memorable and exciting.

Once the suits are donned, the fighting becomes nearly all CGI all the time. Those CGI fights are an acquired taste. Where the choreography of the real life fights is oriented on martial arts cinema (with a dose of wuxia), once the armours are donned the fights begin to look very much as if they came out of a (good) hack and slash videogame (say Devil May Cry). After a few episodes of getting used to the show's very distinct two types of fights I started to enjoy the contrast between them.

Amemiya makes it quite easy to enjoy the CGI elements of the show. While everything in these scenes looks as artificial and unreal as it gets, the things it represents are frequently so imaginative and bizarre and would not be realistically achievable through practical means anybody could afford, that it would need someone much more curmudgeonly than me not to be charmed by them. How else could you witness a giant monster clown bleeding fireworks?

While a lot of Garo's basic elements are pretty generic, much of the show is pervaded by a palpable feeling of enthusiasm - for silly monsters, for metaphors, for melodrama, for the genre its working in, for the healing power of art, for fights and for batshit insanity - that makes it utterly impossible for me not to be excited about it. It's the type of genre work I like the most, working inside the clichés of a given style, but exploring how far a show can go while doing that.

The Japanese public was at least excited enough about the show to lead to a two part special/TV movie named Beast of the White Night or Beast of the Midnight Sun (that turned out to be a very silly, yet entertaining cheese-fest front-loading the show's fantasy elements and mostly eschewing the horror) and an honest to Cthulhu big screen movie, Garo: Red Requiem that came into Japanese cinemas just at the end of this October. You'll sooner or later hear from me about the latter, I'm sure.

Three Films Make A Post: DOLL DWARFS versus the CRUSHING GIANT BEASTS!

Amer (2009): Amer is a film I suspect I should admire quite a bit more than I do, seeing as it works as a visual and (in part) thematic homage to the style of Dario Argento in his prime, with a bit of Mario Bava and the giallo at large thrown in. Alas, the film is so heavily metaphorical and so incessantly technically perfect that it becomes tiresome to watch pretty fast.

All its visual beauty and technical accomplishment is put to work to overwhelm the audience with as many symbols for sexual awakening and repression as the directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani could squeeze into ninety minutes of running time, but an unrelenting barrage of pretty symbols is all their film ever is. There's really no good reason for this to be any longer than thirty minutes, which - incidentally - was about the point in the proceedings when my interest turned into impatience, because I had already understood what the film was trying to say and didn't need any further repetitions.

Vampire (1979): Speaking of tiresome, this US TV movie written by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll (both better known for their cop shows, and not showing much of a feel for horror here) does come to mind, too. Half mumbling cop character actors spitting out mock-naturalistic dialogue of the type beloved by professional TV critics and no one else, half a series of melodramatic declamations, the film goes through a lot of the suspected vampire movie motions without ever finding an original or just entertaining angle. I'm also a bit confused by its attempt to cast Richard Lynch of all people as a seductive vampire, but what do I know?

Garo: Kiba The Dark Knight Gaiden (2011): Finishing the trilogy of films I didn't much care for is this spin-off detailing the background of the big bad of the generally excellent tokusatu show Garo. Kiba suffers from the usual problem of gaiden (side-story) films in that it details things that were left vague in the show its spinning off from for a reason and doesn't do anything else of interest.

It's the sort of thing that only exists so that fans of the show can watch it, nod sagely and later start a message board flame war over some of its minor details, but isn't out to provide any actual entertainment, insight or a narrative that's interesting in itself.

 

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On WTF: Garo: Red Requiem (2010)

Remember Garo? The (probably) best Tokusatsu show of the last two decades or so was honoured with its own (3D) feature film last year, at least in Japan.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of the fansubbing community, we poor Western fans can finally watch and understand the thing, too. So I did. I report about my findings over at WTF-Film.

 

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In short: Kamen Rider ZO (1993)

A guy (Hiroshi Tsuchikado) wakes up in a rather strange looking cave in the mountains. Someone informs him through the telepathic powers of an overly large grasshopper that he has to protect a little boy named Hiroshi from something called a "Neo Life Form".

Once our hero arrives wherever it is Hiroshi lives with his grandpa, a semi-mad scientist, he realizes that the voice in his head was just too right: a few nasty beasties are trying to abduct the boy, obviously not realizing into what a world of painfully whiny child-acting that would transport them. Fortunately for the sanity of monster-kind, our nameless hero can transform into a variation of the always popular Kamen Rider (what a surprise in a Kamen Rider movie!), and will spend the rest of the film enduring said whiny child-acting himself and beating (and, being a Kamen Rider, of course, kicking) the stuffing out of the nasty creatures.

The whole affair turns out to be the fault of Hiroshi's father, whose attempts to create a perfect life form went so pear-shaped that the best idea he had to correct the problem was to transform his lab assistant (our nameless hero) into a cross between grasshopper and human, obviously without the guy's consent.

Little Hiroshi sure is lucky Kamen Riders like children.

This is the first of the two short Kamen Rider features Keita Amemiya signs responsible for - the second one being Kamen Rider J - and it's also the weaker of the two by far.

The creatures and much of the strange bio-technological stuff that makes up that part of the backgrounds for the scenes of creatures mauling each other that doesn't consist of the usual empty factory buildings are as lovely designed and lovingly executed as one can expect from Amemiya, and the monster fights are fun enough if you like this sort of thing (and really, if you don't, no Kamen Rider show or movie will ever make you happy). Alas, the film makes it needlessly difficult to enjoy these elements by giving Hiroshi (and the gnome who plays him) way too much room for that most terrible of all mawkish and syrupy things - terribly executed child-actor melodrama. It sure doesn't help that the script spends so much time on Hiroshi that it either forgets to provide the Rider even with the most basic of motivations or forgets to inform the audience what that motivation might be. It's possible that leaving out the random J-Pop video clip right in the middle of the movie could have provided the time to go into the Rider's psyche for the two seconds of motivation I'm asking for here, but then as now, selling merchandise is much more important than providing a satisfying movie.

Anyway: if you just look at those pretty (and "green child-face in a big petri dish"-type grotesque, once Amemiya gets really going) monsters and the hitting, and go and make yourself some tea once Hiroshi begins to whine, Kamen Rider ZO is still watchable enough, just not as merrily insane or fun as the best examples of its superhero franchise.

 

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Three Films Make A Post: Father and Son Related By Blood!!! Everyone's Blood!!

Inception (2010): Somehow, we have managed to arrive in The Future, a strange place where major Hollywood studios throw money at really pretty great directors like Christopher Nolan to make Philip K. Dick adaptations not based on an actual book by the author that still really feel a lot like Dick. It's quite unlike The Past, when major Hollywood studios threw money at directors to make Philip K. Dick adaptations based on actual books by the author that didn't have the slightest idea of what Dick's books were all about (and yes, I do count Blade Runner among the latter, which is a triumph of production design, but not much of an adaptation of the book it purports to be based on, what with it completely ignoring anything but the simplest among the questions the book asks).

I for one greet this bright future, even though I wasn't as confused by the film as many mainstream film critics seem to have been. Is it really that difficult to follow a clearly told, mostly linear story?

Child's Eye (2010): Some travelling young non-entities from Hong Kong find themselves trapped in Thailand during the red shirt protests. Stranded in a cheap, dark hotel, the group is soon confronted with the local female ghost and a dog-faced boy, and the dark secret of the hotel's owner.

The Pang Brothers are a sad case. While all of their films show a pair of directors perfectly able to apply their slick technical chops in interesting and visually arresting ways, most of these films are too conventional at heart to be memorable. This one is really no exception, even though (or because?) it is in 3D. There are a lot of really pretty pictures to gawp at, but not much is going on with them. Characters are uninteresting, the plot is about as fascinating as a slide show about your parents' holiday in Buxtehude, the timely historical background is wasted as a mere impediment to the protagonists running away, and there's no thematic depth or interesting subtext worth half a brain cell. To make matters even worse, the shocks are just not working at all, which leaves the audience with a film that's professionally boring and as vapidly pretty as its lead actors.

G-9 (2006): How little of interest there is about the Pang Brothers' film shows even more when I compare it to this fifteen minute ganime (which is a word that can be used for many types of non-traditional Japanese animation, but in this case means "narrated ink-drawings") by the (somewhat inescapable on this blog these days) Keita Amemiya. It's really a just a small trifle mixing elements of new wave SF with a bit of monster bashing and a sense of melancholy given expression more through the mood of the drawings and the simplicity of (barely) animation style than anything more concrete. Yet even so, it's much more human than anything that can be found in Child's Eye.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,hong kong movies,japanese movies,christopher nolan,leonardo dicaprio,pang brothers,keita amemiya,in short,sf,horror

In short: Kamen Rider J (1994)

Environmentalist photographer Kouji (Yuuta Mochizuki) has come to some unnamed place in the Japanese countryside to document (and presumably identify the reason for) the mass-dying of local animals. He meets an adorable little girl (Yuka Nomura) there, who seems at once quite taken with her new big brother figure.

But all too soon the reason for all those dying animals becomes clear - a bio-mechanical (and quite despicable) life-form known as Fog Mother has come to Earth to repeat with us what she did with the dinosaurs once. The time for her attack has almost come, she just needs to wait a little for her spawn to hatch. Then, it will the all-night Earth buffet can open. Oh, and of course, Fog Mother's children need some wake-up food. That's what adorable little girls are for, right?

So Fog Mother's hench-creatures kidnap the girl and push Kouji down a mountain. It doesn't look good for humanity or the future of adorable little girl-dom. Fortunately, some…people with roots deep underground (I'm not talking figuratively) revive Kouji and turn him into a new version of everyone's favourite insect-themed superhero on a motorbike, Kamen Rider J. And give him an incredibly creepy looking talking grasshopper as a guide.

With the help of his new powers of ecological motorbike riding and kicking monsters in the face, Kouji will have to conquer Fog Mother's trio of favourite monsters, free his little-sister-in-spirit, and do an unexpected Ultraman on Fog Mother's fortress.

This is another entry in my irregular and untitled series of write-ups on the body of work of Japanese creature designer and tokusatsu director Keita Amemiya. This time around, I've stumbled onto one of Amemiya's few contributions to Toei's humungous Kamen Rider mythos in form of a forty-five minute feature film (to be shown as part of a double feature), that were the franchises main outlets in this phase when there weren't any TV shows featuring the Rider. It's the director's last contribution to Kamen Rider as far as I understand.

Amemiya's talent for working with filmic shorthand without losing coherence makes him quite a good fit for this sort of low budget movie special. What there is of characterization is broad but effective enough to motivate the plot (and it's not as if anyone would ask the two human characters what the want anyway), and the plot in its turn is just present enough to make the series of fights and the monster design feel like part of a whole.

Speaking of monster design (very obviously at least in part also done by Amemiya), Kamen Rider J tends as far to the freakish side of tokusatsu monstrosities as possible in what is at its heart a franchise for kids. It's as if H.R. Giger had developed a sudden interest in classic Japanese art and decided to bio-punk that tradition up a bit, with the expected consequences.

As a whole, Kamen Rider J delivers exactly the thrills it promises, and is sure to put a smile on the face of everyone who is even faintly predisposed to like stuff like this.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,japanese movies,tokusatsu,keita amemiya,sf,yuuta mochizuki

Mechanical Violator Hakaider (1995)

Original title: Jinzo ningen Hakaida

Some rather dystopian future. A luckless bunch of thieves breaks into an old, locked down prison searching for valuables, but ends up awakening the android/robot/cyborg/whatever Hakaider, who's about as much of a morning person as I am and therefore kills them all.

Hakaider then grabs his motorcycle and makes his way to the city of Jesus Town, where a certain Girjev (overacted, somewhat effeminate, accessorizing with angel wings) lords over what he sees a paradise of order, but what is in fact a place where every dissent is destroyed through a silver psychopathic robot named Michael, masked stormtroopers and the judicious application of lobotomies.

Hakaider falls in with a small band of morally rather dubious revolutionaries against Girjev's interpretation of freedom, but making the guy's acquaintance and getting slaughtered all lie in the space of just a few minutes for the not very righteous few. Still, at least one of the freedom fighters, the comparatively pure-hearted Kaoru (Mai Hosho), has had prophetic dreams about Hakaider, so surely the kinda-sorta hero will go and do some mechanical violating on a certain bad guy's ass.

I don't seem to be able to get away from the works of tokusatsu specialist Keita Amemiya these last few weeks. Fortunately, most of his films are well worth a minor obsession, Mechanical Violator Hakaider being no exception.

As seems to be the case with all of Amemiya's feature films, he's obviously not working on a budget much higher than those of the tokusatsu TV shows he's spent a lot of his artistic life on here, so there are the usual tolerances against stiff (Hakaider) or overly broad (Gurjev) acting needed if one wants to get something out of the film.

While Amemiya's design sense, crossing the borders between kitsch and art, and arriving somewhere in the middle, is as wonderful as always, much of the futuristic production design has the look and feel of something a genius mad scientist put together out of normal household items in her garage (though there's nothing as extreme as the cuckoo clock battle robots from Mirai Ninja). It gives the effects the feel of something made by actual people instead of faceless design functionaries, so I tend to find this sort of thing charming and very human, but I know the film's obvious monetary poverty will be enough to make it nearly unwatchable for some without constant mocking.

As is also typical of Amemiya's work, Hakaider does some rather clever things within the bounds of its chosen genre. Most obvious is casting Hakaider as his film's hero, a character that was an enemy of classical tokusatsu hero Kikaider/Kikaida (depending on whom you believe either as a plain bad guy or some sort of anti-hero; I can't afford the overpriced DVD box of the show, so I'm going by hearsay here), and putting him against a robot that looks as much as a typical tokusatsu good guy as Michael does. Amemiya does the same thing with the white/black colour coding of good and evil, using mostly whites for the bad guys and their lair and black for the revolutionaries. So far, so obvious, but the director does take the deciding step further and also shows the revolutionaries (except for Kaoru) as violent egotists and even takes an empathic look at the victims of one of the scenes of Hakaider's awesome violence, complicating the usual bad guy/good guy affair quite a bit more than he has to.

Obviously, Hakaider is still mostly a film about that awesome violence, guys in spandex beating each other up and explosions, but to me, Amemiya's attempts at adding complexity make all the difference. Watching the movie, I also couldn't shake the feeling that the film's political side, sledgehammer-y as it might be, isn't some perfunctory stuff the director just threw into the mix to make his film more "mature", but based on actual anger about a state of things that's not so different from what is happening in the world right now. Except that the real world has a decided lack of robotic heroes or easy solutions through cathartic violence, but one of the beauties of genre cinema is of course that its problems are a lot easier solved than those of our world.

 

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On WTF: Garo (2005-2006)

It looks like I just can't escape Keita Amemiya's work at the moment, so why not entertain the rest of the Internet with a piece about his "mature" tokusatsu show Garo, especially when the show turns out to be pretty great?

If you want to read more about it, my write-up on WTF-Film will enlighten you.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,ryosei konishi,keita amemiya,mika hijii,tokusatsu,reviews,horror,other places

Three Films Make A Post: The First Monster Musical!

Darkside Blues (1994): Surely, you can't go wrong with an anime based on a manga written by Hideyuki Kikuchi, the guy who wrote the novels Vampire Hunter D and Wicked City are based on? Turns out that you really can't, at least in this particular case.

Although its plot is rather distractible and opaque, and it is prone to revolutionary kitsch, this anime concerning the emotional and political awakening of some inhabitants of Shinjuku, or to be more precise, Kabukicho, one of the last places on Earth not bought out by an evil multi-national corporation who now lords over its realm as a semi-benevolent dictatorship, is really quite something. It's filled to the brim with wonderfully bizarre details even in the least important corners of its universe, and it tends to do quite clever things with its details when you'd least expect it.

It's probably a bit too full of ideas and characters. There's enough fascinating stuff in Darkside Blues to fill one or two full seasons of an anime TV show, so it is at times actual work for a viewer to unpack everything that's going on. Not that I mind when a movie accepts that its audience doesn't consist only of people unable to use their brains.

Zeiram 2 (1994): Evil space thing Zeiram returns to Earth in a new, less impressive body for a rematch against galactic bounty hunter Iria (Yuko Moriyama) and her electrician friends (Yokijiro Hotaru and Kunihiro Ida). After some back and forth, everyone ends up in a parallel universe again, and a bit of fighting ensues.

Sounds exactly like the first movie, but plays out in a much less entertaining fashion. One reason for it is the rather draggy pacing of the whole affair. The annoying humour to Iria fighting a guy in a rubber suit ratio is skewed in the wrong direction. Even Amemiya's monster design is just not as good as it was in the first movie. There are still moments when the film becomes excellent silly fun (just watch Iria go all Mary Poppins on us!), and the last twenty minutes are pretty swell, but Zeiram 2 contains just too much unnecessary baggage to come close to its predecessor.

Genocyber (1993): There is a reason why the name Koichi Ohata strikes fear into the hearts of even the more hardened friends of anime from the 80s and 90s, and that reason is M.D. Geist, possibly one of the worst examples of the form ever made - and if you know worse ones, please don't tell me. Ohata's later attempt at lobotomy through anime, Genocyber, is not much better than his anti-classic. Throw a bunch of ideas "borrowed" from a dozen better anime into a pot, add footage of children dying in sprays of gore, and heat it with the help of random, confused storytelling, and voila, you have cooked yourself some Genocyber! I have to admit that some of the bio-mecha-demon transformations are somewhat awesome, but nothing would be awesome enough to slog through the rest of this crap.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,anime,sf,horror,in short,keita amemiya,koichi ohata,yuko moriyama

In short: Zeiram (1991)

Intergalactic bounty hunter Iria (Yuko Moriyama) and her partner, the computer Bob (Masakazu Handa), come to Earth to capture a dangerous creature named Zeiram (Mizuho Yoshida) who has escaped from some sort of imprisonment. Don't ask me, the film doesn't tell anything more.

To not endanger any primitives, the bounty hunters plan to fight their prey inside of a dimensional bubble that looks like an exact copy of the Japanese town Zeiram will appear in, just without any inhabitants. Unfortunately, things don't work out completely as Iria and Bob had planned, and two bumbling electricians (Kunihiro Ida and Yukijiro Hotaru) cross over into the alternate dimension with them. Still, after some fighting, Iria manages to capture Zeiram.

Alas, various mishaps - and the fact that Zeiram is quite a bit more resilient to her ways of freezing him than Iria had expected - soon find the space monster up and running again and Iria stranded on our side of the dimensional barrier. Will the supposed audience identification characters survive until she'll be able to return?

Zeiram is one of the directorial live action works of Keita Amemiya whose work as a character and monster designer (especially in the tokusatsu realm) make him beloved by millions. At least I imagine him surrounded by a host of admiring young women and men like the character designer version of the young Rolling Stones. As usual with Amemiya's films, Zeiram's small number of locations and actors hints at a budget probably lower than most people's electricity bill, but most other typical problem fields of films just scraping by don't apply here.

The acting - a classical breaking point in low budget films featuring men in rubber costumes (even Japanese ones) - turns out to be perfectly decent for a plot and characters as slight as what the film needs. Nobody will win any acting awards for her performances here, but Moriyama knows how to handle herself in the action sequences, Ida is as bland and annoying as a white wall, and Hotaru just annoying, so everything's just as it should be.

One could certainly complain about the slightness of Zeiram's script. It is, however, the exactly right sort of slight for what the film is going for - being a decently paced, fun piece of fluff about people fighting a guy in a rubber monster suit (that later goes all stop-motion on our asses) and its rubber-monster-suited friends. And it really succeeds at that, mostly by avoiding all the ballast attempts at doing deeper meaning and character would be in a film that only really ever wants to show off some cool monsters and a pretty woman fighting them.

Another reason why Zeiram is as fun as it is to watch is Amemiya's very charming monster design, crossing a bit of classical slimy monster with the silhouette of a wandering chambara film swordsman and a wee little No mask head on a tentacle to excellent effect. There's also a slight family resemblance with the Predator in Zeiram's face. Amemiya also mixes things up a bit later on by cribbing from the Terminator, which provides a nice change and can therefore only be a good thing.

I know, it's only a film about a girl in a re-worked stormtrooper costume and two bumbling idiots fighting monsters, but I like it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,sf,in short,keita amemiya,yuko moriyama

Unholy Women (2006)

Unholy Women is a nice little horror anthology movie consisting of three stories by different directors in wildly varying style and tone, connected through that hoary old chestnut, the Ebil Woe-man. I wouldn't be much surprised if the movie had something to do with one of the many Japanese supernatural TV shows we in the West usually don't get to see. Two of its directors did at least some work in that direction.

TV shows and misogynist undertones aside, the film is well worth watching, if one isn't completely averse to Japanese horror.

It starts out with Rattle by Keita Amemiya, who is probably better known as the director of a few Kamen Rider films. It's the story of a young woman's terrible night. She is going to marry her boyfriend soon - after the divorce from his present wife is through, that is. Until then, she'll just have to survive the attention of a weird, knife-wielding woman dressed in red. At first, said woman seems to be her future husband's future ex-wife, then, after some more obvious supernatural occurrences have taken place, her future husband's future ex-wife's ghost, later one of those passerby ghosts who just happen to pounce on random people. Our heroine's night of screaming and running around finally leads her to the truth of the matter, in one of the more non-sensical and just plain silly twist endings of my movie watching career (with !bonus time travel without a cause). Well, nobody would have expected that explanation.

It is quite a shame about the ending - up to a point, Rattle is an unoriginal but solid genre piece, in the beginning nicely paced, with a few moments of rather clever sound design and an equally clever use of colour, held back from being something more by the terrible scenery chewing performance of the mad ghost woman's actress and the complete lack of motivation for her actions. The latter often works out nicely in Asian horror, but feels mostly incoherent here.

Fortunately, Rattle is the worst of the three stories.

The second one, Steel, tells of a young, painfully shy mechanic. One day (and very suddenly at that) his boss talks him into going out with his sister. Having never met the woman outside of a photograph (which turns out to leave out some important details), our hero is rather surprised when he meets the girl. She is wearing a brownish sack over her whole upper body, with no face or arms or much of her body above her mini-skirt visible. Even stranger is the way his boss is acting - he doesn't seem to think his sister's interesting fashion sense in the least strange or noteworthy; and hero boy is, of course, much too shy to just ask.

But, if you put two young people together, they are bound to fall in love or at least in lust, sack or no sack. After some abortive attempts at sex, which are made slightly problematic by her love of the old ultra-violence, the things she hides under her sack, and his tendency to either run away from her or try to kill her, the two outsiders slowly learn to love and trust each other...No, wait, it actually ends in a sack-themed variation on the vagina dentata. But it is still a happy ending.

Steel is a story that is bound to anger or irritate some viewers. It would be difficult not to find the story a little distasteful and the vagina dentata/woman in a sack business at least problematic, but I was won over very fast by director Takuji Suzuki's dry tone in the presentation of the utterly weird and wacky. The whole thing has some wonderfully funny moments derived from the kind of very Japanese humor that just takes something extremely weird and treats it with shrugging matter of factness, very much like our hero's boss.

In The Inheritance, the third and final episode, a freshly divorced woman and her young son return to her family home in the country. Her mother is still alive, but has not been in the most stable state of mind ever since her young son one night suddenly disappeared. Soon the grandmother isn't the only one in the house acting weird anymore. Something that she discover's in the old shed in the yard seems to break something inside the boy's mother and she's starting to act as erratically as her own mother. Then there's also the ghost of the boy's uncle and his connection to the shed for the child to cope with.

This last episode was directed by Keisuke Toyoshima, and "supervised" (whatever that may mean) by house-favourite Takashi Shimizu. The plot doesn't have a lot of surprises in store, but Toyoshima shows a very fine sense for mood and is able to present the kind of small gestures that are much more effective for me than things like spring-loaded cats. I was also quite taken by the unflinching way the film looks at child abuse - not so detailed as to be sensationalist, but with a well developed sense for the dreadfulness of the whole thing, the kind of dreadfulness that's a lot more difficult to take than ghosts.

So, even if the first story ends in a most irritating way, the other two episodes make Unholy Women well worth watching, unless you are one those people who just can't take looking at Asian people. You know, the kind of person all those American remakes of Asian films are made for (see also: things which are worse than death).

 

Technorati-Tags: reviews,horror,japanese movies,takashi shimizu,keisuke toyoshima,keita amemiya,takuji suzuki