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Guyver: Dark Hero
Guyver: Dark Hero 1994
After watching the first Guyver movie and seeing how campy it was, I was very curious to see how the follow up would be considering that it is one of the very rare cases where it goes from PG-13 to R instead of vice-versa and completely loses the comedy angle. Unfortunately, when you take out the comedy angle of the Guyver, what’s left is the same amount of poor acting but without nearly as much camp to make it as enjoyable as it was. There is still some laughs to be had at the cheesiness of it all, but it ends up being a lot more boring than the first one and the small handful of really interesting practical special effects have been replaced with really crappy looking first generation digital effects. It aims at being a more serious story, and yet it also tosses in a large number of cliched and soap opera-ish plotlines that don’t make it any more interesting. Which is disappointing, because there is the seed of a good story that could be told within all of this greater mythology, it’s just being presented in one of the poorest ways possible.
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The Guyver
The Guyver 1991
I was always a relatively big fan of anime. I watched a lot of the anime films shown on cable in the 90’s as well as the cartoons and shows inspired by anime and Japanese shows. This movie reminded me a lot of those types of kids shows with a mix of Ultraman, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Sailor Moon, and whatever else got in the mix. It also has a couple icons of TV and cinema, albeit for completely different reasons, as well as a small stable of horror regulars from both behind the camera and in front. The one thing this movie does well is a large number of creature effects including a small handful of amazing transformation. On the other hand, even though there are a few noted actors, there are plenty of amateurs and it definitely shows. There’s not a Troll 2 or the Room level of bad acting, but no one is winning any awards for their delivery here. There’s an overly complicated setup that makes very little sense when you get right down to it, and yet the whole thing is more or less supposed to be a comedy. While it did make me laugh out loud a small handful of times, it was often for the wrong reasons.
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Hentai Kamen
Hentai Kamen: Forbidden Superhero 2013
What better way to bring in the Christmas spirit than to talk about an asian movie about a superhero who wears a pair of panties as his superhero mask and dresses like Borat was way too modest. Really though, this is a superhero spoof movie that’s much better than the awful Superhero Movie while going through a lot of the same types of conflicts and story beats, except in every case it turns it into something so ridiculously sex-related that it becomes absolutely hilarious. I’m sure some people won’t get the joke, but I thought that the level of seriousness this movie treated a superhero with a pair of women’s panties on his face was just the right amount of absurdity and obscenity to make me laugh hysterically through most of this movie.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 