The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: The Guyver II: Dark Hero (1994), directed by Steve Wang

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Snake Eater", by Donna Burke

       Way back during the 201 Marathon, I covered an obscure little film known as The Guyver, directed by the team of Steve Wang and Screaming Mad George. Based on the long-running manga series by Yoshiki Takaya the film was something of a trailblazer; Getting a foot in the tokusatsu door a year before Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers would become the kid cocaine of the mid 1990s, boasting some respectable special effects (including some truly disturbing body horror), and with Jimmie Walker and Mark fuckin’ Hammill in the cast no less. It was also a truly shitty movie as well as adaptation, its desperate attempts to ape the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle style producing some of the most abysmal ‘comedy’ I’ve seen outside of a Troma movie. A novelty even in these modern times certainly, as studios have made only a few tentative steps at fucking up popular anime and manga, but not one that I would recommend, unless I recommended it in the review I guess. At the very least it’s not a film I would have thought financially or critically successful enough to warrant more than a passing mention in some no-name film blog, much less a sequel of some kind. I mean if The Guyver could get a sequel, then clearly the laws of filmmaking that we had once held so dear were now dust in the wind, and all the movies we once thought incapable of becoming series were now on the table. Where’s the sequel to Buckaroo Banzai huh? Or The Mystery Men? Or The Love Guru? If we’re living in anarchy then it better damn feel like it.

       Anyway, 1994 saw the release of Guyver: Dark Hero (or The Guyver 2: Dark Hero, I’ve seen some inconsistent labeling), with Steve Wang going solo in the director’s chair this time around. It’s been one year since our hero Sean Barker (played by everyone’s favorite Snake, David Hayter) found the fantastical bio-boosted armor known as The Guyver unit and destroyed the evil Kronos Corporation and its army of mutant monsters known as the Zoanoids, and it appears that he’s fallen on hard times. The Guyver lust for combat has been taking him down an increasingly more violent path, which hasn’t done wonders for his social life, while at the same time flooding his mind with strange inhuman symbols. Symbols which look exactly like the ones discovered at an archeological dig in Utah, where a hunter was recently mauled to death in what some people are calling a ‘werewolf’ attack. Sean needs to get all up in there, and he does, but soon finds that there is a lot more to this than simple scientific curiosity. There are eyes on this prize, human and Zoanoid, and whoever manages to get their hands on it first could not only discover the origins of The Guyver unit, but possibly of life itself.

       What a difference kicking ol’ SMG off the payroll makes, as it turns out. The comedic bits that had made the first Guyver film feel like a bad joke have been stripped away, leaving us with a Guyver that prefers slicing a fucker’s throat or stab a Zoanoid’s eyes out over wisecracks. Which might still be silly to some people, the fact that it’s a comic book movie where guys in rubber suits fight each other hasn’t changed, but to me the more serious tone is Steve Wang learning from the mistakes of the previous film and trying to correct the course. In a field that’s dominated (at least in the West) by goofy Power Rangers bullshit, it’s cool to see something that breaks with that status quo. In a way that actually goes with the source material rather than against it as well, as is too often the case. 

       If you’re going to give Dark Hero credit for anything though, it’s the fight scenes. The Guyver isn’t just a guy(ver) in a cool suit, his raison d’etre is to kick ass, and Steve Wang and co. know well enough to give us plenty of ass-kicking throughout the film. Although the number of cuts during some fights was a bit distracting, the choreography was fluid and the actor’s movements never seemed hindered by their costumes, which is sometimes the case in tokusatsu media. Less flashy than the fights can be in Super Sentai or Kamen Rider, but between it and the monsters it’s by far the highlight of the film.

       Unfortunately, this film is not one continuous stream of fight scenes, but rather an attempt at a narrative, which means it’s forced to rely on David Hayter to drive the story forward. Now I like David Hayter, his voice work on the Metal Gear Solid series is a large part of why I love those games, and he does have the right look in a Jason David Frank sort of way, but he feels like a freshman drama student who has wandered onto a movie. Well that might be a bit harsh, but it is the case that Sean comes off as awkward and unnatural when paired with another member of the cast, in a way that can’t be waved off by “the Guyver makes him antsy around other people”. Does it irrevocably damn the movie? No, but it does make that 2+ hour runtime drag a touch.

       What might damn Dark Hero however is its use of sound effects. Just about every single move during the film’s several fight scenes is accompanied by some sort of sound effect, sometimes several, and 99% percent of the time it’s noticeable to the point of distracting from the action happening on screen. For example, one of the recurring antagonists of the film is a Zoanoid that I’ll call ‘Rhino Man’, and when Rhino Man is feeling particularly he lets out the cry not of a rhinoceros, but of a cat. Not distorted in any meaningful way, just a barrage of stock yowling cat noises. I can understand the inclusion of sound effects to add some life into the scenes, because rubber on rubber isn’t that exciting outside of certain fetishes, but not when it makes your action movie sound more like a Korean game show or someone sleeping on the soundboard of a Morning Radio DJ. What should be serious threatens to turn into a complete joke, and we already had enough of that shit back in the first movie. Needless to the point of bafflement.

       In the end, while Guyver: Dark Hero is a cut above the first Guyver film, it’s own issues keep it from being a true hidden gem. If you’re interested in the idea of The Guyver or with tokusatsu in general I can recommend it as a decent enough jumping off point, especially as it explains enough about the backstory to remove the need to watch the first movie. With the amount of tokusatsu media there is out in the world though, Super Sentai, Ultraman, Kamen Rider, Garo, etc., and with The Guyver manga being in limbo for the past couple of years, my motivation to recommend has become severely dulled. If you skip out on this one come Halloween time, I don’t think you’ll be missing much out on much.