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.

 

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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.

 

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