aka Mutronics

• Directed by Screaming Mad George and Steve Wang
• Written by Jon Purdy, based on characters created by Yoshiki Takaya
• Starring
  • Mark Hamill
  • Vivian Wu
  • Jack Armstrong
  • Jimmy Walker
  • Michael Berryman
• Produced by Brian Yuzna

If there ever was a movie made for fan appreciation only, this is it. Adapting a Japanese manga to American live-action, using creatures and combat styles that weren’t familiar to an American audience (remember, this is before the Power Rangers popularized cross-Pacific superhero entertainment), and throwing in handfuls of cult genre actors, it’s no wonder that it went *thud* with wider audiences. But not everything can be blamed on audience unfamiliarity; there are plenty of elements in this movie that don’t work even by fanboy standards.

Dr. Segawa (Greg Paik), a scientist, escapes from the Chronos Corporation with a mysterious object and, in time-honored fashion, hides said object in alley junk before he’s caught by the EE-vil Lisker (Michael Berryman) and his goon squad. In a last-ditch attempt to get away, Dr. Segawa does what you rarely see in these movies: transforms into a gill-man! Without missing a beat, Lisker transforms into his own brand of ugly, and promptly crushes Segawa’s skull, whereupon Segawa’s body dissolves. End prologue, with no complaints from me yet.

“Baa-by faaace, You’ve got the cutest little baa-by faaaace…”

No, we have to wait until after the credits for my first big complaint to show up: Sean (Jack Armstrong), all-American jerk who keeps getting his ass handed to him at the Aikido dojo. He’s impetuous, easily angered, and whiny, and therefore I pegged him immediately as our “hero.” Sigh. His girlfriend, Mizky¹ Segawa (Vivian Wu — jeez, couldn’t they find any Japanese actors to play the Japanese characters?), waits for him until she gets a visit from the world’s least likely CIA agent, scuzzy-looking Max Reed (Mark Hamill in a moustache) to inform her of her father’s death. Seems that Segawa was supposed to meet Reed and give him something the Chronos Corporation didn’t want to get out — something called “the Guyver.”

Now, let’s stop right here and have a discussion about that whole “CIA agent” thing, okay? Now I know it may seem silly to harp on such things in a movie where people can change at will into goofy-looking monsters, but yes, this is where the premise became unbelievable for me. I’m no expert at federal law enforcement and intelligence, but I do know that of all possible agencies who would be investigating an American corporation dabbling in forbidden biotech, the CIA is the least likely. The CIA is involved in gathering intelligence on foreign political agencies and operations, not on policing American corporations; they don’t have any authority for domestic law enforcement. Better to have Reed be FBA or NSA or Defense Department Intelligence or even BATF; hell, even the Department of Agriculture has a better claim to interest in the Chronos Corporation than the CIA. This is the kind of mistake that I might overlook if it were a foreign movie set in the US, but when that kind of off-the-cuff carelessness shows up in a domestically-produced movie, it sets my teeth on edge and lets me know that we’re probably going to have similarly sloppy writing all the way through.

You thought I was gonna make a lame Star Wars joke here, didn’t you? HAH!

Okay, then. Reed takes Mizky off to the death site, which is now crawling with police, and Sean, not knowing who this moustachioed creep is driving around with his girl, follows along on his moped (giggle). He watches from afar, and accidentally (and literally) stumbles across the discarded plastic lunchbox in which Dr. Segawa hid — the Guyver! It starts glowing when he knocks into it, so naturally he puts it in his backpack to take home.

Meanwhile, the head of the Chronos Corporation, Balcus (David Gale) is upset about the loss of the Guyver — so upset that he does that entire enraged/creepy thing that he also does in Re-Animator and The Brain (makes you wonder if that’s how he was in real life, hm?). He uses his mind control to make Lisker beat himself up and grab at his own face, which is truly one of the most entertaining scenes in the movie. He also sends Lisker and his little posse out to search the alleys around the death site — but since Sean already has taken home his “found art” object, you know they’re not going to find anyone. Said posse, by the way, is composed of rapping homeboy Striker (Jimmy Walker), fat Russian Ramsey (Peter Spellos), and bad girl Weber (Spice Williams), all of whom can also transform into uglies. It makes one wonder that an EE-vil corporation like Chronos entrusts such tasks to dunderheads that would have flunked out of Lex Luthor’s School of Villainous Sidekicks.

Now, I don’t know where this movie’s supposed to be set — Los Angeles, I assume — but wherever it is, it’s a city composed of nothing but dark alleys and aquaducts. Sean goes down one of these to get home, and when his moped (giggle) acts up, he falls afoul of some street toughs who hide in deserted alleys waiting for mopeds to break down. His poor grasp of aikido failing him, he gets knocked all around until the Guyver falls out of his bag and he accidentally lands forehead-first on it — and is suddenly enveloped in impervious bio-mechanical armor. He is the Guyver, and he kicks ass! Thank goodness the alley is full of old cardboard boxes to break the fall of all the toughs he sends flying. Then he catches sight of his reflection, realizes that something strange has happened to him (the fact that bullets bounced off his torso didn’t clue him in), and is immediately dismayed; the armor then responds by instantly retracting into the back of his neck, and he stumbles home.

You’ll never look at sushi the same way.

The next morning, Reed is called off the case by his superiors (and rightly so, I think — and let’s not ignore the fact that said superiors wear actual suits and ties, so at least they look like real intelligence agents), but because he’s a loose cannon, plays by his own rules, etc., etc., he continues on his own time. And not a moment too soon; he arrives back at Mazky’s apartment just as Sean is discovering that Lisker and his goons have kidnapped her to take back to Chronos. The three good guys escape into an abandoned warehouse, where they’re stalked by the uglied-out Lisker and Co., until events finally push Sean into becoming the Guyver again. Cue up twenty minutes of man-in-suit combat!

The fighting’s pretty odd, to tell the truth. The monster suits and their inhabitants are such that they walk and move just like creatures in a Power Rangers episode — i.e., like a bow-legged Neandertal. And on top of that ugly-Striker has prominent lips and googly eyes, and ugly-Ramsey has a pot belly and an elephantine trunk. (That’s all without mentioning the scene in which ugly-Striker stumbles into the set of a horror flick and is mistaken for their monster. Hyuk, hyuk, make it stop.) But juxtaposed with this frankly juvenile humor is more violence than one normally sees on Saturday morning; limbs are ripped off, necks are snapped, and buzz saw blades are lodged deep in monstrous crania. In the end, Lisker discovers that the Guyver’s weakness is the shiny chrome medallion sitting like a bull’s-eye in the middle of his forehead, and knocks him down by headbutting him — and then tears the medallion right out of his head, causing his body to decompose before out eyes.

Jurassic Park 4: Dilophosaurus in the ‘Hood.

The medallion and the two remaining good guys are taken back to Chronos, where Balcus goes all out with his spooky-ass lech routine over Mizky, and shows her the big lab where the uglies (”Zoanoids”) are created. You can ignore his explanations of the Guyver itself — a misplaced bit of alien technology or something — because frankly, it doesn’t make any sense or any difference. All seems lost, until the Guyver medallion is accidentally swallowed by the ugly version of Dr. East (Jeffrey Combs — get it? get it?), and ta-dah! Sean the Guyver is literally reborn from his body! Let another twenty minutes of Zoanoid-kicking begin, complete with the uneasy coexistence of violent mayhem and juvenile humor!

Looking at that weird juxtaposition, I can’t help but think that the filmmakers weren’t sure who their audience was. The violence is more than most parents of the day (and even some now) would show to younger children, but the humor is such that ONLY someone of that age group will appreciate it. As it stands, there’s a little something to irritate everyone. (Making matters odder, this is one of Michael Berryman’s few roles in which he’s not put to comic use — not that I’m complaining, but it’s just odd that he’s the one person not made the butt of any jokes.)

And then, I must repeat, there’s the annoying demeanor and lack of personality of our hero, Jack Armstrong. He ends up coming across as “all-American” in all the worst ways: whiny, demanding, and conceited. I appreciated that time his character was inside the suit, because every time he showed his face I just wanted to smack him.

“Can you read the label on this for me?”

Maybe the problems come from wanting to make a “comic-booky” movie — unfortunately, no one realized that in translating Japanese media to English media, there were two contradictory definitions of “comic-booky” that didn’t mix well.

But I suppose that part of my unwillingness to really like this movie comes from the week in which I watched it — the first week of the War on Iraq. Given the news reports all full of cruise missiles, VX gas, and other weapons with awesome destructive capabilities, the fight for a supposedly “all-powerful” space weapon whose main power seems to be the ability to whomp on monstered goons seems… I dunno, trivial. Maybe even too trivial for me to get behind.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 12
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
  • Michael Berryman (Lisker) played “Starfleet Display Officer” (under tons of latex) in Star Trek 4, and “Captain Rixx” (under blue makeup) in the TNG episode “Conspiracy”
  • Spice Williams (Weber) played “Vixis” in Star Trek 5, and was a regular stuntwoman on DS9
  • Dennis Madalone (”Gang Member #4″) was stunt coordinator and a bit player on TNG, DS9, and Voyager
  • Jeffrey Combs (Dr. East) has had two recurring roles on DS9 (Weyoun and Brunt) and one on Enterprise (Shran), plus other roles on both of those series and on Voyager

1. I assume this is a corruption of the Japanese name ‘Mitsuke’. [back]