After my write up on Dirty Work Jonathan has asked me to do a more detailed Guilty Pleasures. So unlike previous guilty pleasures I’ll be discussing content of the movies, so I guess that means spoilers. Be warned!
Don’t be fooled by the cover. Luke Skywalker in tact does not play the Guyver
THE GUYVER
When I was a child I used to watch A LOT of cable television. I don’t know if that’s considered good parenting or brilliant parenting but it meant I saw a lot of weird shit (in my blog I even discussed the time that I accidentally watched Re-Animator and had many a sleepless night). On one particular moment of unsupervised television viewing I saw two monsters boxing and one crushed the other’s head and I was freaked out and turned off the TV.
Later, as if by some type of twisted torture (or a moment of divine intervention) that weekend, I stayed at my friend’s house and he had rented a movie called The Guyver. The film began with a long text scroll and voice over. This is always a good sign. I mean, Star Wars had text scrolls and that movie was good. In reality though, this means that the film is too complicated for someone to understand it ‘off the street’. The Guyver was no exception. The text explains how Aliens created humans (the scientologists were right) but gave some humans the ability to transform into super monsters. However to even the playing field the aliens created a device called “The Unit” which gives no advantage to this super monsters but can turn the average human into THE GUYVER (hey that’s the name of the movie).
Immediately after the text scroll, it shows an Asian scientist running from Jimmie Walker, a fat Russian dude and Michael Berryman. I remember in my brain thinking ‘oh shit, this seems familiar’. Then the Asian and Michael Berryman transformed into Monsters and started boxing ‘oh no, this is the scene I saw earlier this week! I can’t act scared in front of my friend.’ Luckily the scene was nothing in reality and I was able to enjoy the film.
It turned out that that the Asian scientist was supposed to meet up with a detective (overacted by Mark Hamill). He witness the murder from afar (thus he didn’t see the monsters) and informs his daughter about it. Her boyfriend Sean Baker follows them (thinking that something is going on between them) and stumbles onto the unit and through a humorous mishap of falling into The Unit turns into the Guyver.
Meanwhile Detective Skywalker and Asian girlfriend are kidnapped. Sean goes through a 30 minute or so battle only to lose and die (or so we think). The evil head of the monsters is giving Asian daughter a tour of the labs where they meet Dr. East (played by Jeffery Combs; apparently cast in the role because in Re-Animator he plays Dr. West). Despite Sean dying, the Guyver tries to clone itself and brings Sean back from the dead. Why? Because in cinema the laws of logic take a backseat to the laws of convenience. Sean saves the day and walks off into the sunset.
The Guyver was a direct to video release by a first time director. This basically means it’s already set to fail from the start. Add in the fact that it’s also based on a beloved manga and there wasn’t much of a chance for this movie to begin with. However, it became one of my favorite movies at the time and I’d constantly show it to people (almost all of them hating it).
I can understand why people would hate this movie. For starters, Mark Hamill over acts like there’s no tomorrow. His character is like Sam Spade without the charm, wit or likability.
Beyond that there’s a massive amount of monster characters in this film, most of which are there as comedic relief. They’re so overly animated though that all the humor (for the most part) falls flat (although I thought it was hilarious as a kid). They actors walk around throwing random shit across rooms and it feels like your watching a Ghoulies movie with actors playing the titular characters instead of puppets. The only one who brings in a slightly enjoyable performance is Jimmie Walker. Most of the humor of his character though is driven on the fact that he’s a walking ball of rapping and jive talking stereotypes.
The fight sequence in the middle is so extended and hard to follow that there’s a clearly ADR-ed line of dialogue in which a character says ‘Oh Good, The Whole Team is Here Now’. This dialogue exists strictly because it’s hard to keep track of exactly HOW many monsters there are and this is truly a shame because the best element of this movie (and the reason I still love it) is Screaming Mad George’s creatures.
Screaming Mad George might be ass at directing, but he’s an incredible effects man. Before directing this he did the creature effects for Arena, Predator and Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Dream Master. In the latter, he did the infamous cockroach death scene considered by many fans to be the best death in Freddy history. His quality in effects continue in the Guyver which legitimately contains some impressive transformation sequences.
The original intention of this film was to be a modern American Tokusatsu film. In that, it’s more successful in it’s goal than say 1998’s Godzilla remake. For those of you who don’t know, Tokusatsu is an Asian film genre in which people in rubber monster costumes fight. It has even inspired a wrestling federation (Kaiju Big Battel). However, Screaming Mad George’s mistake is going too far in the real of Monsters. He’s trying to make Destroy All Monsters but instead he should have aimed for Godzilla Vs. King Kong. What made Destroy All Monsters work is that over the years we had gotten used to these various monsters and cared about some of them (mainly Gojira). In the Guyver, we have so many different monsters and our hero that we barely have time to get to like them (even the villains, we hardly get to enjoy the creature design).
The Guyver was followed by a sequel Guyver: Dark Hero which was much more well received and while I enjoy it, it will never hold the space place in my hear that the original head-squishing Guyver has.
When he’s not watching poor Americanized adaptations of classic Japanese manga Matt Kelly is found tweeting, writing in his blog Pure Mattitude and hosting his podcast The Saint Mort Show.