Guyver: Dark Hero (1994)

 

Director: Steve Wang

Screenplay: Nathan Long and Steve Wang

Based on the manga by Yoshiki Takaya

Cast: David Hayter as Sean Barker; Kathy Christopherson as Cori; Bruno Patrick as Crane; Christopher Michael as Atkins; Stuart Weiss as Marcus

Ephemeral Waves/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

Next up, more Elvis sightings.

Guyver: Dark Hero is a vast contrast to the original 1991 adaptation of the Guyver. Aki Komine and horror legend Brian Yuzna are gone as producers; notable, and needing a paragraph to begin this review as this sequel, are the producers which took over, showing this from the get-go was where things got serious. Ken Iyadomi was Executive Vice President of Bandai Entertainment at its inception in 1996 to 2006, and VHS anime publishers LA Hero and Manga Entertainment beforehand, and from 2018 at Sunrise Inc., the legendary animation studio; he was involved as a producer for the likes of Ninja Scroll (1993), Ghost in the Shell (1995) and The Visions of Escaflowne (1996), just in three random choices three significant anime titles, Escaflowne a series, from that era, and he even involved as a producer for an episode of the 2021 live action Cowboy Bebop series. Hirohiko Sueyoshi, producer on Wings of Honneamise (1987), Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's adaptation of the Kazuo Umezu manga The Drifting Classroom (1987), and Macross Plus (1994), alongside being involved with Guyver: Out of Control (1986), the first attempt to adapt the original manga, as an executive producer. Yutaka Wada, with this one of his last productions as a producer, can at least credit in his small filmography being a producer on Mamoru Oshii's Angel Egg (1985), one of the most experimental theatrical anime ever made and a holy grail for Western fans to have, and being on the production committee for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), one of the first films Hayao Miyazaki made alongside The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) as the director, rather than in the animation department or directing animated television series.

Vivian Wu is gone, the romance between her and the lead character completely ignored, with Kathy Christopherson in the equivalent position here, an actress who would return in Steve Wang's Western interpretation of Kamen Rider, Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight (2008-9), and in terms of tone, this sequel changes a lot. Having watched this film multiple times before, having never seen the 1991 adaptation until much later, Guyver: Dark Hero is a b-movie but as a curious attempt to meld an older American monster movie with Japanese tokusatsu action sequences, one which wanted to get the tone of the source material right. Even with strange touches like the monsters having cat noises mixed into their grunts, this was a more successful production in terms of the premise.

It is still attached to the prequel, nodding to this existing after the end of the prequel but with the life of Sean Barker, now played by David Hayter, a troubled one afterwards. Having been able to watch this film without needing to know about the prequel, this feels severed entirely in that Sean is a figure possessed by an alien bio-armour called the Guyver, part of his form permanently, which now pushes him to stalk criminals randomly at night as the opening sequence has. When a television report, for a show devoted to fringe Elvis sightings and UFOs, brings up an apparent werewolf attack in Utah, Sean to his surprise sees images involved with this news report, near an archaeological dig, which are close to his experiences with the Chronos Corporation in the prequel and dreams from co-existing with alien armour in his body.  

David Hayter is now the Guyver, going on a journey to Utah where an archaeological excavation has found symbols on the wall similar to those found in his notebooks recording his dreams. The result is far more a no-nonsense sci-fi plot, ditching most of the comedy of the prequel as the archaeologists are working for a deeply suspicious company, with something in the woods killing any locals bumbling near the excavation site. Hayter, continuing the 1991 Guyver having a fascinating cavalcade of pop culture figures, is inexplicably linked from this to the future of American box office blockbusters as. Alongside his legacy as the voice actor playing Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid video game franchise, he wrote the screenplays X-Men (2000) and X-Men 2 (2003), arguably among the first films before the wave in the Millennium, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe came to be and Batman was revived with Batman Begins (2005), when superheroes dominated pop culture. Even at this time, Hayter was more a voice actor, from the 1996-7 Spider-Man animated series I grew up with, playing Captain America, to anime English dubbing for the likes of Fushigi Yûgi (1995), so it is befitting his legacy as Solid Snake in an iconic series is also one of his most important roles in pop culture, as important to the Hideo Kojima developed franchise as the gameplay in the West.

Baring badly dated computer effects, and some compromise for losing Screaming Mad George and the higher practical effects budget, there is however such a bizarre irony to be found in how Dark Hero was probably a lower budget production next to the prequel, but has such a drastically improved sense of production value and ambition in its smaller scale. Noticeable is Steve Wang's collaboration with Koichi Sakamoto and his Alpha Stunt Team, Sakamoto the fight coordinator, which is a huge virtue for Dark Hero. This film will recycle Michael Berryman's monster costume from the prequel for a random goon, to show some penny pinching, but this production ups the scale drastically in ambition and to fight scenes which are utterly exhilarating. Considering he has worked in a variety of roles after this film on Power Rangers, Kamen Rider, Ultraman and Japanese tokusatsu productions, the Tokyo born Koichi Sakamoto brought a huge weight to the film, and that is not ignoring others on the crew. Among those credited with stunts with Sakamoto - Ken Goodman, Tatsuro Koike and Akihiro Noguchi - you can connect dots before and after this film to Jackie Chan film from his early Hong Kong superstar era, Hollywood box office films to even stunt coordination for videogames like Sega's Yakuza series. You can argue the plot's a little flimsy, but seeing a man, even with the padding of a giant rubber monster costume, get propelled into metal scaffolding is still painful and striking to witness, rough but efficient fight scenes that replace the grace of Hong Kong martial arts for a more visceral nature of Japanese combat movies.

The result, mentioning that cross between the American monster movie and a martial arts film, does stand out more from its forest setting and exterior cave sets too, a sense of atmosphere in general the original adaptation of Guyver never had. For every line reading slightly under the mark or the clichéd plotting sticking out, I cannot help but admire the clear love put on display to make a great film, more so as the woodlands have a significant positive effect on the mood and that, even if the transformations are cut down and simplified, the production value is actually superior everywhere else in the film against the prequel. Even in mind that, yes, this is a low budget film where actors in rubber suits are fighting in the middle of the Angeles National Forest in California, posing as Utah, that in itself has a pleasure in itself that is simple, more so as this is a significantly more serious film in tone even with a few moments of weird humour. The gore, when there, is in its nastiest form, whilst the plot becomes the back-story of the Guyver's origins, leading to the film going as far as having an elaborate living interior of a spaceship for a set with multiple rooms. There is even an elaborate flashback to primitive times with stage bound sets, model work and almost psychedelic colours as cavemen dance around a bonfire and turn into monsters to explain the origins of the Zoanoids.

In the perfect world, the Screaming Mad George effects and David Gale would have been used in a film like Dark Hero rather than the 1991 Guyver film, making one better film, but in the real world this is still a superior work even if one sadly less easy to access. That is also unfair to Bruno Patrick, an actor who barely has a filmography with this the most well known of his films, as Crane, effectively the main villain though he serves a figurehead of the Chronos Corporation. One scene, a monologue even as an outright villain, has an unexpected choice of words to it, almost coming off as subtext in he and Hayter's Sean Barker being people with secrets that force them to be shunned from the world, wishing to be normal again. You can as a viewer indeed read a variety of different contexts in that sequence, even a queer one, despite this very much being a monster fighting film where Crane then turns into a monster a moment afterwards. Even how this deals with the idea of an evil Guyver, least taking the idea of what happens when a Zoanoid gets hold of a Guyver unit, is at least an escalation.

This is a film which stands by its technical qualities in the areas the production wished to focus on and improve from the prequel, and they stand out well. With these virtues, the foundations are prevented from collapsing like so many examples in the same areas do so easily, with a lot of these type of genre films of this ilk not being this well made. I say this in mind to the 1991 The Guyver, which is not a good film but I have nothing by sympathy for those on and behind the camera for trying; the problem with it was how it did not clearly has a consistency with the tone and material. If more films were like The Guyver: Dark Hero in genre cinema, despite its flaws in story and composition, the ideas and their recreation are beautiful to see by themselves, their macabre physicality evoking far more than a rush job, either with practical or CGI effects, would. Steve Wang's career is sadly smaller than it should be, though he worked over the decades, but he went on after this to Drive (1997), that production vaulting this film in terms of quality. Among comic adaptations like this, The Guyver: Dark Hero can climb out the pit of bodies, with its head held high and a severed spinal column of a weaker film of a higher budget, in its bloodied claws, managing to be more impressive to me for having to work with less and still getting so much right in the process.