Fun fact: The artwork on vintage arcade game cabinets is one of the most significant cultural achievements of humankind. From the backlit haze of the marquees to the wild collages on the side panels, the prismatic imagery on these machines is an endless source of joy. Laser battles! Drop kicks! Barbarians punching wizards while jumping off an asteroid! It’s too bad that motion pictures have never been powerful enough to channel this type of raw energy into a real-life thrash party.
Until now.
I love Kamen Rider. From the original manga by Shotaro Ishinomori to the kick-off television series in 1971, this is a property that isn’t afraid to add fourteen rails of cocaine to its hallucinogenic recipe of hellish monsters and impossible fight scenes. That’s why I love it. Like the Spectreman TV show, strapping in for a Kamen Rider adventure means strapping in for ANYTHING. And Kamen Rider ZO might be the be-all and end-all of anything and everything.
After waking from a coma in the middle of a swamp, Masaru (aka the motorcycle-riding superhero Kamen Rider) receives a telepathic distress signal from a kid named Hiroshi. It seems that Hiroshi is being attacked by a monster named Doras. Naturally, Masaru transforms into Kamen Rider and unleashes an avalanche of violence on Doras, which results in severed limbs and gushers of neon-green blood. Doras is impaled on a pile of garbage, but the fight isn’t over! The multidimensional being known as Neo-Lifeform is behind Doras’s attack, and has targeted Hiroshi for a specific reason. So the big bad enlists the hideously deformed creatures Spider Woman and Bat Man to finish the job. There’s also a living brain in a jar.
Watching Kamen Rider ZO is the equivalent of eating at a buffet restaurant that only serves candy. It’s a breathtaking, all-you-can-eat explosion of rotoscoping, CGI morphing, slimy rubber monsters, animated transitions, body horror mutations, and trippy violence. And it rarely slows down. Released directly to home video in Japan the same year as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers debuted on American television, ZO carries the reckless energy of all tokusatsu productions. But it’s totally amped up, as if Golan and Globus from Cannon Films were in the coke-smeared driver’s seat.
This movie is an intoxicating experience. The sets are gorgeous and intricate. Experimental edits (flash cuts, karaoke music video inserts, overlaid imagery) work well with the score, which combines the baroque synths from a Castlevania soundtrack with the guitar shredding from the theme song of American Gladiators. The stunning creature designs wouldn’t feel out of place in a higher-budgeted version of Basket Case 2. When the Bat Man showed up with his eyeball-hands, I clenched my couch and gasped—and that’s basically how I felt during the entire 48-minute runtime.
If you ever need a reminder of the human race’s potential for good, watch this movie.
