The Guyver (1991)

 

Director(s): Steve Wang and Screaming Mad George

Screenplay: Jon Purdy

Based on the manga by Yoshiki Takaya

Cast: Jack Armstrong as Sean Barker/The Guyver; Vivian Wu as Mizky Segawa; Mark Hamill as Max Reed; David Gale as Fulton Balcus; Michael Berryman as Lisker; Jimmie Walker as Striker

Ephemeral Waves/A 1000 Anime Tie-In

 

Note: The version of The Guyver (1991) watched is the director's cut, which involved a flashy editing technique added to cut between scenes, but also visibly removing shots of violence which is brought up in the review.

This review will also be re-posted at my other blog 1000 Anime for a little cross-promotion between them. Please take a look at a wide selection of reviews I do there as well.

 

Yoshiki Takaya's manga The Guyver was at one point one of the first Japanese manga and anime franchises to transition over to the West, and one of my earliest memories as a child to the idea of "manga" or "anime" involved the 1991 film itself, a small news article about The Guyver with the exceptionally deceiving poster of co-star Mark Hamill's face against one-half of the iconic Guyver helmet. In Japan itself, Yoshiki Takaya's manga started in 1985 and is still going thirty plus years on through multiple magazines, with two anime adaptations for straight-to-video, 1986 and 1989, and one I grew up with getting into anime, a television series between 2005 to 2006 which was an attempt rejuvenate the franchise. The OVAs, specifically the 1989 multi-episode one, gained an infamy when released in the West for its violence, whilst the TV series was undermined by not having ultra-violence that made the anime notorious, despite the late anime distributor ADV Films selling the series off this infamy, and that it does not have an actual ending. In the West, two live action films were made, one produced by Brian Yuzna with Steve Wang and Screaming Mad George making their directorial debuts, the sequel three years later with Steve Wang on his own in the director's chair and taking a drastically different direction in tone. Together they are curiosities.

Made as a Japanese co-production, Yuzna himself is a man I admire. Connected to Stuart Gordon, the director famous for Re-Animator (1985), Yuzna himself as a filmmaker has a fascinating series of strange and imaginative horror films, some involving Screaming Mad George, birth name Joji Tani, a practical effects designer from Japan whose reputation when he moved to the United States and worked in cinema have had a lasting legacy. Steve Wang, a Taiwanese makeup artist and creature designer who emigrated to the USA as a child, would comes into the directorial chair in his small filmography here as a co-director, and especially with a film called Drive (1997), gained himself cult recognition.

The Guyver, as the 1991 film, is however a strange mess. The plot is from the source - an evil corporation called Chronos are after an alien bio-armour, the titular Guyver. Set in the United States, a young man named Sean Barker (Jack Armstrong) finds the Guyver and is infected by it, creating living armour which grows from his body when he needs it. The Guyver is a tokusatsu influenced production, like an ultra-violent Power Rangers in the image most have of it, as Chronos has its members and test victims used in experiments where they turn into horrifying monsters. This is contrasted by the weapons the Guyver has, with its arm blades to a chest laser beam, designed to slice them the pieces.

Yuzna's Japan-US co-production decided not to follow his wheelhouse of gore and elaborate special effects in films like Society (1989) or Bride of Re-Animator (1990), but only have the special effects...at least at times. The director's cut, the more readily available version, has scenes of gore cut, but even the film without these missing fragments is incredibly goofy at times, creating a contradiction of a film you could not give to a child without causing potential nightmares, at least its most lasting moments, but other times has incredibly silly humour. The first Guyver film, the more easy to find, is a peculiar thing with its tendrils connected to Stuart Gordon and Yuzna, with the evil Chronos Corporation headed by leader Fulton Balcus, played by David Gale who is famous for Re-Animator. Balcus wants the Guyver bio-armour and sends "Zoanoids", humans who can turn into humanoid monsters, after Sean Barker.

The one success, the only success, in terms of consistency is the practical effects. Screaming Mad George is legendary and notorious for his work, from the human cockroach sequence from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) to the "Shunting" scene from Society, visceral body horror which even if you can see the seams is so nightmarish and gooey that it borders surrealism. Moments show this in The Guyver, seeing him and everyone in the practical effect department having a field day with the premise. Whether it is horror film veteran Michael Berryman and various actors turning into various humanoid beasts or the spectacular Guyver armour itself, a warrior with cyberpunk and insect-like traits, they are all applaudable. It is, however, a film struggling with a premise, possible in anime and manga, which has an apocalyptic tone on a large scale, and also requires martial arts to pull off even fights between men in rubber suits. Guyver: Dark Hero will try to overcome this, to greater success, but this prequel struggles.

It is a really strange film, not in surrealism, but how it ended up as it did. Mark Hamill, the legendary Star Wars actor a year before he took on the voice of The Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, creating for him a career flourish as iconic as Luke Skywalker, does stand out, playing a cop on the edge trying to get the scope on the Chronos Corporation, with a sense of grandeur to his appearance. The late David Gale steals scenes with his bizarre intonations and wall chewing, even enraged by burning toast as he is by the incompetence of his minion. Vivian Wu, as the female love interest, is visibly struggling with her dialogue and not helped in the slightest by a wet, one dimensional female character she has. Alongside the fact she is cast as a Japanese character, which is dubious for her as it is as casting, she is a really strange inclusion as between Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987), a huge film in his later career which was her onscreen debut, and Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (1996), Wu, a Chinese actress whose career is mostly in dramas in the West and China, found herself in this film sandwiched between a Bernardo Bertolucci film and Greenaway which is a curious tangent. Even her appearance in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993) at least makes sense as a second sequel to a franchise which was huge at the time and whose first feature film was a box office success.

Jack Armstrong as the hero sadly struggles out of the whole cast, in a role that, to be brutally honest, was made an a absolute charisma vacuum even by the standards of a pulp story that emphasises practical effects first, which does not help him out at all. These stories, and this is something I think of in terms of the Guyver television anime, is structured around protagonists, male leads, who are usually bland, especially in many ultra-violent anime too where the worlds and context around them are more meaningful. More so as he is put against Hamill, the advertising cynically suggesting a key Star Wars figure as the lead in some posters, as well as against Michael Berryman as the main henchmen, one of the most visually striking figure in cult cinema. Even Spice Williams, a prominent stunt actress who stands out physically here with Berryman as a physically imposing female henchwoman, gets to play out a more memorable and playful romance with Berryman in one of the few jokes of the film which do work.

Despite Steve Wang's later work such as with the Guyver sequel and Drive (1997), with fight choreography from the tokusatsu school, and of an incredibly high quality in terms of fighting and stunt work, the fights here look stilted and suffocated by the presentation, lacking what the sequel did. In sacrificing some of the practical effects in terms of beast designs in favour of men in rubber monster suits, likely injuring themselves in painful stunts but bringing an exhilarating air of chaos to the proceedings, that sequel as we get to found a kineticism which works. The result beforehand in the prequel is as stiff. More surprising is the lack of scale even by the standards of a small budget genre film, feeling like only a couple of rooms and some exterior shots were used, the script as swift in getting to its end without any sense of dramatic conflict being found.

The final issue, ultimately the creative decision which maims the film fatally at many times throughout itself, is deciding to play most of the film as a comedy, coming clearer to me now as a result of having to work around the limitations. Even if it worked on other Brian Yuzna productions like Re-Animator, the humour in those cases was incredibly grim even if there was slapstick. This has more broad, goofier with characters being buffoons, and one of the more contentious running gags being the character of Striker. Jimmie Walker, playing him, is a prolific comedian and actor especially in television, all the way back into the seventies with shows like Good Times (1974–1979), a spin-off of a series called Maude which is significant in terms of an American sitcom from that time period about an African-American family. I can see Walker's completely natural charisma here, though when he suddenly indulgences in some early nineties cheesy rap, you realise with The Guyver how tonally this is not an adaptation of Yoshiki Takaya's manga. His fish-monster character is a memorable costume, and he has one good gag of accidentally wandering on a cheap horror film scene with a Linnea Quigley cameo, but his character in general has mostly cringe inducing humour from Striker as a gag character, more an issue as his character in general and especially how his monster version looks has uncomfortable stereotyping that cannot be ignored.

This version of the concept does not really work with its material at all, and it is telling that, with a Director's Cut cutting out violence, there is a misinterpretation of the source material that undercuts it. There are moments you could not show children, and yet they are actually some of the most striking moments. Taken from the source, and recreated in the TV- series, is that the giant orb in the centre of the Guyver's head is its weakness, leading to the death of the lead and an absolutely memorable sequence of body-horror resurrection. Even if it is played for goofiness, with a knock-off Jaws theme riff, that sequence has a morbid grace, and has some humour which actually works beforehand, mainly the fact that Yuzna alumni Jeffrey Combs, of Re-Animator, makes a cameo chewing the scenery and is involved as a weird goat creature by that point. Famously [Spoiler Warning] this is the film where Luke Skywalker gets painfully turned, with Hamill submerged in practical effects latex, into a cockroach-locust hybrid, a moment that if it had been in another production would haveve been up there in Yuzna and Screaming Mad George's filmographies as being iconic. Here, the film around it does not live up to what, in between both films, is the best sequence of these American adaptations, a scene which is actually horrifying, actually tragic and adult, and is one of Screaming Mad George and the prosthetic team's best moments on this film. It is a scene which has clearly stayed with George as, alongside the woman turning into a cockroach in an Elm Street sequel, he is referring to this idea with Paranoiascape (1998), an experimental pinball game he worked on exclusively for the Japanese Playstation One market that explicitly references this as much as Society in some of the grotesque sights within it. [Spoilers End]

The Guyver is a film so painfully bad in its humour at times that it both makes little sense tonally but loses its power in context. It feels like a cheesy American action film from this era, not in terms of when they are fun, but just the clichés, whether it is the moment with a multi-ethnic gang of clumsy hoodlums, or the humour being at the expense of Michael Berryman, rather than embracing his comic timing and imposing nature more, or that no one is taken seriously even as comic characters. Jimmie Walker is even paired up with an actor named Peter Spellos as bumbling henchmen, with Spellos having a vague Eastern European accent, in scenes that undercut the actors themselves. Peter Spellos, who can go from Jim Wynorski films like Sorority House Massacre II (1990), sometimes playing the same character of Orville Ketchum, to a career in anime voice acting for work like Naruto to Cowboy Bebop (1998), is someone with clearly a lot of charisma to try to make this material work, but The Guyver is a case of a cast of fascinating individuals, from a variety of idiosyncratic areas of pop culture, not being helped by the script and tone. From anime voice acting to Star Wars to Peter Greenaway art films to prolific American sitcoms, everyone in and behind the film camera is a fascinating figure who could bring a lot to the table, but the work onscreen from the production really does not connect together.

Ultimately, it is the emphasis on the humour especially, against the paltry production, which makes The Guyver insufferable at times even when it can be charming at other times. A Jeffrey Combs goat demon, or Vivian Wu and Mark Hamill running away from what apparently is a flea monster, like characters in a one-reel silent film comedy, are charming to see, but in mind that this is The Guyver, a tokusatsu work at heart, whether you kept the gore or not, this feels like a project which grabbed at the wrong point. This is stranger considering Brian Yuzna, even if he might have not had a taste for martial arts, had a taste for horror films which got the tone for humour and the monstrous perfectly, or his fellow producer Aki Komine, who produced a series of films with Yuzna or by himself which did attempt manga adaptations with heavier leanings on action, by it Christoph Gans' Crying Freeman adaptation from 1995, or the Fist of the North Star film from 1995 which, whether good as an adaptation or not, was an attempt to get the original violent post-apocalyptic narrative to the screen¹. Komine, with Steve Wang, would also work on Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight (2008-9), Wang's attempt to bring the legendary Kamen Rider series from Japan to American children's television, so there was a sense of Komine being interesting in the type of storytelling The Guyver did not turn into inexplicably. With these curious names involved within its production, it feels instead a sense that, together, The Guyver whilst fascinating just did not gel at all in terms of creativity.

In contrast, Guyver: Dark Hero even with its own flaws managed to be more successful, but that is a review for another day....

To Be Continued...

 

=====

1) That and this Fist of the North Star adaptation has the curious mix of action star Gary Daniels, Malcolm McDowell, professional wrestler Leon "Vader" White,  Costas Mandylor, Downtown Julie Brown, Chris Penn, and African-American cinema pioneer Melvin Van Peebles involved, which is a strange cast to ever get in an adaptation of a Japanese manga.