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.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016: The Guyver (1991), directed by Screaming Mad George and Steve Wang

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", by Daft Punk

     In this day and age, we are all very well-acquainted with the idea of the ‘comic book movie’. Well, ‘superhero movie’, to be more precise. What with all the cinematic universes and television universes and netflix originals and all that shit, it’s easy to forget that comic books still exist, or that there are comics that aren’t about people in silly costumes punching each other in this world. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy a good cape book every now and again, but at some point I realized that the vast majority of discussion around superheroes weren’t about the comics themselves, or even about the heroes really. It was arguing over box office numbers and Rotten Tomato scores, and how everything was sexist or racist or rants about those darn ol’ SJWs and I just didn’t give a shit. Or I did to some extent, but not enough that I wanted to be subjected to that white noise of the same shit over and over. So I stopped, and don’t feel like I missed out on all that much.

     Still, what with the enormous popularity of ‘CBM’s’, it’s a bit surprising that not many attempts have been made to capitalize on adapting manga for the Western market. There’s been a few obviously, Fist of the North Star (starring Malcolm McDowell for some reason) and Dragon Ball Evolution (starring the crushed dreams of anyone who was a young boy in the mid-to-late 90s) come to mind, and the Hollywood rumour mill always threatens us with a version of Cowboy Bebop with Keanu Reeves or an Akira that takes place in Vancouver, but rarely do these plans seem to come to fruition. Maybe the studio heads don’t want to put money into a property that hasn’t already been driven into the dirt, or maybe they’re afraid that the culture gap is too great and Western audiences wouldn’t be able to relate, I don’t know. Seems to me that if you’re so convinced that something won’t work that you don’t try then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, but then I’m not in the movie-making business. I’ve also seen a bit of Dragon Ball Evolution, so maybe it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie after all.

     Moving on to The Guyver…

     Based on the 1985 manga by Yoshiki Takaya, The Guyver (co-directed by Screaming Mad George and Steven Wang, they also did some of the monster designs), shares the basic premise of the source material but is otherwise it's own thang. In it, the film posits that thousands of years ago, aliens arrived on Earth in order to create the ultimate organic weapon, which happens to be man (suck it xenomorphs). Some humans found out about this alien influence however, and through genetic manipulation were able to produce the Zoanoids, humans with the ability to transform themselves into monstrous super-soldiers. The strongest of all the Zoanoids, the Zoalord, then established the Chronos Corporation, not only to hide their army under a public facade but also to research the bizarre alien relic known as the ‘Unit’. The only known device of its kind on Earth, it supposedly grants Zoanoids a great defensive power. In the hands of a human who can activate it however, it can transform them into a living weapon of unimaginable power. It transforms them into...The Guyver.

     You find all this out in the first two minutes, by the way. Just felt like giving it here.

     One dark night, Dr. Tetsu Segawa learns of the world-domination plans of the Chronos Corporation and decides to steal the Guyver unit and hand it over to Max Reid (Mark Hamill, of Mark Hamill fame), an agent of the CIA. Before he is murdered by the Zoalord’s goon squad Tetsu manages to hide the device, where it is ultimately discovered and activated by Shawn, the boyfriend of Tetsu’s daughter and grade-A whiny fuckboi. When the Zoalord decides to send in his goon squad to capture the daughter (I honestly never caught her name. Mizzki? Mitzi? Mizuki? Something like that), Shawn must master the abilities of his bio-boosted armor and eliminate the Zoanoid threat once and for all.

     When you watch The Guyver, the first thing that comes to mind is that old Pizza Bagel commercial, you know the one. Not because there are any pizzas or bagels, but because of this pervasive air of ‘Hey kids! Isn’t this cool?!’ that permeates this film to the core. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II also came out in 1991, so you can’t help but think this is a case of The Guyver trying desperately to compete and just utterly failing to be in the same league You’ve got wacky sound effects, Scooby Doo-esque chase gags, motherfuckin’ Jimmie ‘J.J.’ Walker (what 90’s kid didn’t love Good Times?) doing his best impression of what white people thought rap was in those days, just...I don’t even know what to say about it. If I were a young boy at the time I might have eaten that shit up like it’s sherbert, but in the modern day it’s that right amount of awkward and unfunny that it’s actually not funny in an ironic sense. I’ll watch TMNT II any day of the week, invite a bunch of friends over, but if even one person came in and saw me watching The Guyver, I’d have to go chop woods or do taxes or something. Just to prove I’m still a man.

     You want to make a movie that’s fun for the whole family to enjoy? Fine. The trouble is that Guyver is a seinen manga, meaning it’s geared towards adults, and the violence is at a level considered suitable for adults. Rather than dropping the kiddie and going for a teen-geared film or toning down the violence for the kiddies, The Guyver attempts to mesh the two into one cohesive whole, which ends up making it a surreal experience. In one scene you have Mark Hamill and Vivian Wu running from a goofy rat creature, and in another you have Guyver tearing himself out a monster’s stomach. Not to mention SPOILERS Reid’s transformation into a Zoanoid, otherwise known as the creepiest fucking thing outside of a John Carpenter movie SPOILERS. I’m not a parent, so I don’t give much of shit, but I can’t imagine Cronenbergian body horror is the selling point that will drive parents to get little Timmy a Guyver action figure for X-mas.

     In The Guyver’s defense, the work that went into the design for this movie is worthy of praise. In an era where Tim Burton’s Batman was so rigid that he couldn’t turn his neck, the Guyver suit not only looked damn close to the source material, but offered a much greater degree of mobility, so fights could in fact look more flashy and complex than simple punches. The Zoanoids also look pretty top-notch, and a lot more diverse than you might expect a B-movie to attempt. I guess an emphasis on special effects is what you should expect when you get special effects guys in the director’s chair, but when it works out it works out.

     The Guyver is a dumb movie, but unlike movies like Nightbreed, it doesn’t pretend it’s deeper than it is. So if you the type of person who doesn’t mind early 90s cheese movies like The Monster Squad or Super Mario Brothers: The Movie, or you’re not such a diehard Guyver fan that the idea of treating it like a joke sends you into fits of rage, then you’ll probably be okay. It’s not something you need to rush out and see, but if you ever need a movie to make fun of with your rifftrax buddies, keep it in your back pocket.