This month sees the release of the oft-delayed Shin Ultraman, the movie re-imagining of the original series directed by Shin Godzilla effects director Shinji Higuchi (and produced by Shin Godzilla director Hideaki Anno.) That has inspired me to spend the month covering the most exciting of all topics: franchise extensions! Get ready to be synergized this May!
Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue is not the prologue to Shin Kamen Rider, the movie directed by Anno scheduled for next year—in fact, it is technically a prologue to nothing. Produced in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of the Kamen Rider franchise (although it didn’t release until early 1992, slightly after said anniversary), this is a direct-to-video reboot of the motorcycle-riding bug cyborg superhero created during one of the franchise’s quiet periods, the long stretch between new TV productions that also saw the release of the Ultraman vs. Kamen Rider special I wrote about. Being V-Cinema (although it apparently did get a theatrical run as well), the term for DTV stuff in Japan that has an interesting history of its own, and also being made in the early nineties obviously meant that this new Kamen Rider is very different from the ones that came before—taking on all the dark elements from Shotaro Ishinimori’s original concept (he seemed to be fascinated with the idea of people being transformed against their will) and making them the emphasis, changing its superhero tale into a full-on monster movie, a bloody and dour experience replete with body and psychological horror. This was apparently done to appeal to the now-adult Kamen Rider fans, although it’s difficult to say if it actually did—in any case, it’s a bizarre and fascinating exercise.
You know we’re no longer in the realm of explosive kicks and guys named Ambassador Hell from the get-go, as our hero Shin has nightmares of a monstrous serial killer cutting up women and massacring cops in an orgy of arterial eruption, only to learn from the newspaper during a gym visit that these things really happened. Shin seems pretty on edge in general, which could probably be attributed to him being part of a medical experiment, led by his own father Dr. Kazamatsuri and his partner Dr. Onizuka, to see if they can rejigger human genetics to make a person immune to “incurable” diseases like cancer and AIDS. As we later learn, Shin only did this to spare his father the guilt of accidentally killing more volunteer test subjects in the process—I know I’d be a bit stressed out in a situation like that! The experiment is being run out of the Institute of Super Science (what exactly constitutes “Super Science”? It’s just one of those indelible mysteries), funded by a mysterious group that is not at all suspicious. During a demonstration for some interested party (among which is Ishinimori himself, very recognizable thanks to his glasses and wacky old man hair), Kazamatsuri and Onizuka have an argument over whether they should risk taking the experiment to the next level—it’s clear that Onizuka is not one to let something as superfluous as ethics deter him from advancing his goal to, in his own words, “win against God.” He, in fact, explains that multiple times—seems like he’s not quite on the level.
Stuck in a state of sweaty distress, worried that his nightmares means that he is the mysterious serial killer despite the reassurances of his best friend and his girlfriend, the latter of whom is a lab assistant in the experiment (it seems very weird that one should have two loved ones taking part in their scientific mutilation.) His attempts to get answers from Onizuka only leads to a rant about the abilities of animals “unexplained by science” (like…the lights on fireflies? That seems pretty explainable), how grasshoppers will take over the world when humans destroy themselves, and how he wants to construct the “one true nation” of hive mind soldiers. Meanwhile, the money people funding the experiment note that someone has been spying on them (including those visitors from earlier in the movie), and begin making plans of their own. This all comes to a head when Shin follows Onizuka to a secret warehouse lab (full of green light and haunted house candelabras) and watches him hook himself up to a machine and freak out, just as a SWAT team descends on the building and is subsequently murdered. Somehow, Shin still seems to think that the only explanation is that he is the one who has been turned into some sort of monster, despite watching Onizuka do some very turning-into-monster-adjacent things right in front of him.
Shin only really figures things out when he is approached by a woman, leader of the team that attacked Onizuka (and who is quite handy with a rocket launcher), offering to help him if he helps her take down the experiment—we learn that she’s working with the CIA, investigating the people running the experiment, who are part of an organization called, uh, The Organization, and are secretly creating genetically-engineered cyborg soldiers. We are indeed dealing with a more “realistic” version of traditional rider villain groups like Shocker, which is only more realistic in that they don’t wear silly costumes and have sillier names, but still like making monster minions. As with the much later Ultraman: The Next, it also seems like the big idea for making tokusatsu more “mature” is by adding international espionage. When the Organization decides to send a “sample” to their New York head office, the truck is ambushed by the CIA operatives and blown up, revealing its cargo to be an insect humanoid—Onzikua himself—who telepathically calls out to Shin as he dies in the flames, activating his own transformation into his monster Rider form. This is very opportune because it’s also at that point that an assassin, who had been chasing Shin and the CIA ringleader and took multiple bullets without dying, rips his face off and reveals that he is some kind of robot man with a claw arm.
The movie has a television-like quality to the sets and lighting, shot with the same hazy, colour-sapped, dream-like cameras as the eighties TV shows—not surprising given that director Makoto Tsuji had previously been a director on Kamen Rider Black and Black RX. The big change from the TV show is in the depiction of Kamen Rider and his robot monster opponent, a more detailed, disgusting organic look that dovetails with the depiction of Rider as not a hero with a cool transforming belt, but an alien-looking carapaced being enduring something closer to a werewolf transformation, with flesh pulsating and morphing and parts painfully bursting out (personally, the most disturbing part is that his insect-like mandibles still have human teeth embedded in them.) These sequences are actually pretty neat, a horror movie interpretation of tokusatsu tropes, and even the elements that are derived from lower budget TV production (like having said transformations take place in a pitch black void) amplify the nightmarish quality of it. The action in this is also pretty serviceable, with plenty of high-flying jumps going on (a non-Rider Shin even gets to have a scene where he runs on top of some moving vehicles), and while there is only one evil monster for our hero to fight, he at least looks pretty cool. So yes, the tokusatsu film making works perfectly fine here—but that same filming style applied to, say, a fully nude swimming pool dalliance between Shin and his girlfriend is far more unusual.
The actual plot gets more convoluted and melodramatic when Shin becomes Kamen Rider. You see, Onizuka turning himself into a grasshopper cyborg was not part of the Organization’s plans, but they tolerated it until he proved to be too much of a nuisance—after the incident with the truck, they lock up Shin’s dad, as he is the only doctor who knows how to keep the experiment going. The CIA operative is commanded by her superiors to assassinate Shin and everyone else, and she reluctantly agrees despite being sympathetic towards him. Shin angrily confronts his girlfriend about her part in the experiment that’s turned him into a monster, and when she goes back to the Organization to get them to smarten up, she’s locked with his dad and, oh yeah, remember that fully nude swimming pool dalliance I mentioned? That got her pregnant with Shin’s mutant hybrid child, something else the Organization is keen on keeping under lock and key. Shin returns to the Institute of Super Science to confront his tormentors, and has one final battle with the evil robot assassin (who returns out of nowhere after seemingly being blown up) before ripping his head and spine out of his body several months before Mortal Kombat. Along the way, every other character, good or bad, dies. It’s a spree of relentless violence—the more traditional tokusatsu battle aside—and it ends with Shin nodding towards the astral projection of his unborn puppet fetus child while he carries his dead love’s body into a sewer. The end…or the beginning? No, it was definitely the end for this interpretation of Kamen Rider, but it’s quite an ending, at least.
This thing definitely includes almost all the changes you’d expect from a “gritty” and “mature” new take on a normally quite silly franchise, even if those changes are still derived from the text—more explicit violence (from a series that was never not violent, even), a tortured protagonist having downbeat conversations, ridiculous things made more “grounded”, and a never-ending feeling of bleakness permeating almost every scene in the movie. In many cases, all these things together would make something groan-inducing and dull, and it’s clear that Toei did not consider this experiment to be one worth continuing, as the next Kamen Rider V-Cinema film would feature a more traditional version of the character (although Shin’s disturbing mutant version still makes infrequent appearances in the franchise to this day and, hey, the version I watched was uploaded to Toei’s official tokusatsu Youtube channel.) But I did not find this dull, if only because enough of the over-the-top tokusatsu style is evident in the production, and combining it with some of those more melodramatic and horror elements makes for something unique even if it’s not entirely successful on whatever terms it’s going for. In some ways it’s like a particularly pretentious B-movie, but there’s enough of the B-movie in there that it’s hard to dismiss. It is an unusual object.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 