Space Adventure Cobra (1982)

Space Adventure Cobra (1982)

Directed by: Osamu Dezaki

Starring: Dan Woren, Barbara Goodson, Jeff Winkless

Apparently this movie was supposed to have been animated in a ‘revolutionary process’ which makes it look like it was 3-D without the glasses. Not having known that beforehand, I didn’t catch it at all. I’m pretty sure if I watched it again now that I do know that, it wouldn’t seem any more 3-D than it did before. In fact, I don’t even have the slightest idea what the revolutionary process could possibly be. Ah well.

In the future of space, there is an adventurous snake who travels across the space barnyard, dodging barrels and ice– wait, that was an idea I had for an NES game. No, Space Adventure Cobra makes more sense than that. In the future of space, there is an adventurous outlaw named Cobra (Woren) who travels across different planets in space, evading the Space Mafia Guild and their leader, his fearsome arch nemesis Crystal Boy (Winkless)! Yep, the scary bad guy is named Crystal Boy. I honestly thought they were just making fun of him when they called him that in the movie (because his body is made of crystal, you see), and it wasn’t until I actually looked at the IMDb page that I saw that was his real name. That’s ridiculous.

Cobra meets a woman bounty hunter named Jane (Goodson) whom he falls in love with. She turns out to be one of the last three of the Miras Star People, and she enlists Cobra to help her get back to her planet and find her two identical sisters. The first sister turns out to be mind controlled by Crystal Boy and kills Jane, but she transfers her love for Cobra to her other sister, who is on a snow planet. Cobra then takes this new sister to the Miras planet, which is actually a giant planet-shaped spaceship, to keep Crystal Boy from taking control of the planet and using it to destroy an entire galaxy by crashing it into a star. During the fracas, the other sister dies, and so does Crystal Boy, breaking his hold over the held sister, who then gives her life (because she now also loves Cobra) to destroy the planet, which was the very thing they were trying to prevent all along. Then there was a Matthew Sweet music video with footage from the movie.

So yeah, it was kinda weird and confusing and it wasn’t really 3-D or 2 1/2-D or whatever, and it was anime. But on the other hand, it actually had some character development (which I skimmed over in the synopsis, and which very few anime movies actually have) and an interestingly confusing story, and some of the art design was neat. Apart from Crystal Boy. He was just terrible. I mean, he had a gold skeleton and a clear body around it, but was impervious to lasers because apparently his skeleton could also be crystal, and he pulled out his ribs to use as spears to kill people. And his name was Crystal Boy. Just terrible.

I have a feeling that more people are familiar with the Matthew Sweet music video for “Girlfriend” than with this movie, but I really don’t know. I mean, I’ve only ever heard the song in Guitar Hero and heard of the guy anywhere else from an episode of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast he was on where he told a sad story about cutting his hand on a broken bottle while Space Ghost played the harmonica. Hee hee, that was funny of him to do. Because you see, he was playing a harmonica! Oh man, that’s wacky.

Biohunter (1995)

Biohunter (1995)

Directed by: Yuzo Sato

Starring: Matt McKenzie, Matt K. Miller, Sherry Lynn

Here’s a pretty common anime for ya. People turning into monsters, monsters chomping off bits of people spraying blood everywhere, tentacle rape… Yep, thanks, Japan. I have no doubt at all that if we hadn’t dropped the bomb on them, they wouldn’t come up with so much fucked up entertainment. So I guess anime is all FDR’s fault. That’s a weird juxtaposition.

Biohunter is about two biochemistry professors, Komada (McKenzie) and Koshigaya (Miller) who use their skills to hunt down what they call the Demon Virus. The Demon Virus infects people and turns them into terrible monsters, each person turning into something different. They explain it as a sort of out-of-control evolution forced by the virus, and that this virus is the explanation for every monster legend the world has ever had. Apart from just having knowledge about the virus, Komada is also infected with it, but he has an above-average immune system that allows him to control his transformations into a big ol’ wolf-bat thing.

This of course leads to a bunch of monster fights with the aforementioned gore and etc. The final boss of the film is a… some important guy, I don’t really remember. Let’s just say he’s a senator… CEO. Of finance. So anyway, turns out the senator CEO of finance has the demon virus and has to eat the livers of young girls to stay alive because of it. They never mention how he knows that it has to be the livers of young girls exactly, but I guess when you’re an infected monster guy, you just instinctively know which livers are delicious and life-sustaining and which are just livers. There’s an exciting fight scene and a lot of stuff explodes into gooey messes of blood and ectoplasm or whatever, and finally the good guys win. Hooray for good guys!

One thing anime is good for is neat creature design. I mean, a lot of the time you get the exact same neat creature design as every other anime, but it’s still neat. In Biohunter, there are some neat monster designs, and a couple of them are fairly unique, like one chick who gets little faces growing all over her body (including one on her breast, which eats the hand of her boyfriend to start the movie off on a weird-ass note). I guess this is the sorta stuff that people who love stuff like this love, so there you go, I guess. What a recursive sentence. I think I need to go to bed.

Cinderella 2000 (1977)

Cinderella 2000 (1977)

Directed by: Al Adamson

Starring: Catharine Burgess, Vaughn Armstrong, Jay B. Larson

Today’s… bizarre movie comes from the esteemed direction of Al Adamson, who is one of those semi-famous directors known for advancing that cause of B-movies in the 70’s. Normally he did gory horror films with a bunch of toplessness, but Cinderella 2000 is a separation from his normal fare and is instead a softcore sex comedy musical based on the story of Cinderella. I imagine the amount of drugs consumed over the course of the production of this movie would shock Timothy Leary.

The basic plot of Cinderella 2000 is, obviously, the same as that of Cinderella. A girl lives with her stepmother and stepsisters who treat her like dirt, until a fairy godmother comes along and gives her a makeover so she can go to a party and marry a prince. Every deviation from this is given about a second and a half pause afterward, as if they expected you to think that having a fairy godFATHER instead of godmother was just hilarious. Of course, instead of taking place in… whenever the hell Cinderella is supposed to be taking place, Cinderella 2000 is in the far off future of… well, I think you can guess. In this future, the society is controlled by one man with a Terry Thomas mustache called the Controller, and he has outlawed non-sanctioned sex. All sex is controlled by a computer that will randomly pull numbers and put them together. It’s not like there’s an overpopulation problem or anything like that, he just doesn’t want people having sex because it’s dirty.

Everybody on the entire planet except for “Cindy” (Burgess) constantly thinks and talks only about sex, and sometimes they even sing atrocious songs about it. On Cindy’s off day, she goes for a picnic in the woods and is accosted by a wiry man with little silver wings and a wand who introduces himself as a fairy godfather (Larson). His job is to get the planet Earth back on the right track, which means letting them all have free love again. He sings a song about how great love is, and then tells Cindy that she’ll be instrumental in saving the planet, then goes away for a bit so we can see some more terrible songs. Meanwhile, Tom Prince (Armstrong), the foremost male partner that the computer matches (apparently no other men get to do the randomized thing or something. They never explain it because it’s just a stupid plot device) has gotten tired of fornication. He persuades the Controller to throw a party inviting random people in hopes that he could find someone to love (and/or have sex in a different position with). To the party comes Cindy, and etc etc, you can figure it out.

Cindy and Prince boff, but then it’s midnight and she has to leave (right, who hasn’t used THAT excuse?). Tom falls in love, and apparently is also blind or has no short-term memory or something, and doesn’t remember what the person he just had sex with looks like. And neither does anybody else who was at the party. Since she didn’t leave behind a shoe or anything, Prince has to… uh… well, he has to still find something that fits, if you follow me. He goes around the town, screwing everything that moves to find his true love (who hasn’t used THAT excuse, either?), which he finally does by just finding her and looking at her. It’s almost like his master plan to bang every woman in the country wasn’t necessary! The two, along with the fairy godfather, go to the Controller and convince him to allow everybody to go crazy and have it be the 70’s with sillier clothing. Oh, and there’s songs. Terrible songs.

The songs are what drive this movie from being simply boring, predictable and sad to utter nightmare. There is obviously one person who sings all the songs, and she doesn’t even try to match her voice to those who are supposed to be singing. This works out fine, though, since the people lip syncing don’t try all that hard, either. In fact, nobody tries to do anything in this movie, except for whoever designed all the clothes. The lack of material while still making it look all Jetsons-futuristic would make the costume designers from the original Star Trek series proud. Anyway, the songs are horrible. There’s one about being horny, one about how people like having sex, a coda of the horny song in a minor key (which made my ears bleed, I’m pretty sure), a song about how Cindy wishes she was Cinderella (okay, so that one wasn’t about sex), and finally, a country song sung by a robot about how he wants to have sex with a computer, but he doesn’t know “where do I plug it in?”

You know, I like campy stuff. It’s fun. This is an extremely campy film, but it isn’t fun. It’s just kinda sad and leaves one feeling hollow afterward. Still, if I hadn’t watched this movie, I never would’ve learned that Al Adamson was shot and buried in concrete under his new kitchen floor by a guy who stole his identity and credit cards for a couple months before he was caught. And that’s awesome.