Puppet Master 2

Director: Dave Allen
Writer: David Pabian
Producer: David DeCoteau, John Schouweiler
Cast: Elizabeth Mclellan, Collin Bernsen, Steve Welles
Country: USA
Year of release: 1991
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Puppet Master II is notable for two reasons. Apart from a segment of the 1985 anthology The Dungeonmaster, this was the only film actually directed by special effects legend David Allen (who died in 1999). Also, this was one of the first attempts by Charles Band to extend one of his films into a franchise (Trancers II was also produced around this time but released six months later).

Despite the absence of any returning (human) cast members, this is a direct sequel to Puppet Master. Alex Whitaker, the only survivor of the original team of paranormal investigators, is now locked up in an insane asylum but his apparently lunatic ramblings have prompted the US government’s Department of Paranormal Investigations (or somesuch) to visit the deserted Bodega Bay Hotel, armed with surveillance equipment and a batty old newspaper psychic, Camille Kenney (Nita Talbot, who seems to have been in at least one episode of every drama series or sitcom produced for American TV since 1949).

The team consist of Carolyn Bramwell (Elizabeth Mclellan: Crash and Burn), her brother Patrick (Gregory Webb: Lifeform), vivacious Wanda (shapely Charlie Spradling: Mirror Mirror, Meridian, Bad Channels, Wild at Heart - who has a brief topless scene) and bearded Lance (Jeff Weston, who flashes his arse: Demonic Toys, Oblivion 2 and a 1989 version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth which was eight minutes of one film with an entire other, unrelated film tacked on the end!), the last two of whom have the hots for each other. They don’t know what sort of phenomena they might encounter but we do because we have already seen the little stars of Puppet Master digging up and reanimating the corpse of their creator, Andre Toulon (a scene which was later remade as the title sequence to the Filmonsters shorts such as Frankenstein Reborn!).

Toulon himself turns up unexpectedly at the hotel, swathed in bandages so that he looks like the Invisible Man (although Darkman would be a better comparison and is a more likely inspiration as, like Sam Raimi’s hero who made his debut the previous year, Toulon is not invisible under the bandages, just hideously scarred). Although we know that this is Toulon, the character calls himself Enrique Chanée, prompting Lance to call him ‘Chaney’.

By this time, however, the original quintet is down to three, Camille having disappeared and Patrick being dead. Camille had said she was planning to leave anyway because of the hotel’s bad vibes so the team assume she has simply gone off into town, although she has left all her belongings behind. We, of course, know that a couple of the deadly puppets killed her and dragged her away. Patrick, on the other hand, is very definitely dead by extraordinary means: Lance discovers him, screaming and bloody, as Tunneller drills into his forehead. The puppet is grabbed and smashed but too late to save Patrick.

However, this does allow Carolyn and the others to examine the doll, dissecting and even X-raying it. They find that it is mechanically detailed but has no power source or obvious means of control.

Apart from Chanée, the other visitor to the hotel is Michael Kenney (Collin ‘Brother of Corbin’ Bernsen: Frozen Assets, Future Shock), who comes searching for his mother and finds romance in the arms of the grieving Carolyn. Neither of them trust Chanée, who claims that he is the rightful owner of the hotel, and frankly they’re spot-on in their character judgement.

What Toulon’s creations are trying to do is collect human brains to extract the serum which gives life to inanimate matter. Although they have lost Tunneller - and Leech Woman is later destroyed when she attacks a local redneck couple - the puppets have a new recruit in Torch, a sort of German army android with a flame-thrower for a right hand (there are a couple of really rather good flame stunts). Sage Allen (Servants of Twilight, Armageddon) plays the redneck wife while George ‘Buck’ Flower, a regular face in John Carpenter films, is the husband. His extraordinarily cool CV also includes two Ilsa movies, The Witch Who Came from the Sea, Drive-In Massacre, The Capture of Bigfoot, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-rama, Maniac Cop, Back to the Future Part 2, Pumpkinhead, Waxwork II, Munchie, Wishmaster, Curse of the Komodo, something called Satan’s Lust and many, many more great movies.

A simplistic story about killer puppets would be enough for many stravisnuts but here we have a flashback sequence to Cairo in 1912 when a young Toulon (played by Steve Welles, who is also under the bandages - he had small roles in The Addams Family and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) purchases the secret of artificial life from a mysterious merchant who shows him a little green gremlin. With Toulon is his wife Elsa, also played by Mclellan, so naturally he sees Carolyn as a reincarnation of his long lost love (shades of The Mummy, and not just because of the Egyptian setting) and instructs the puppets to spare her.

What he’s actually planning to do is transfer his soul/lifeforce/whatever into a lifesize puppet of a young man (Michael Todd: Robot Ninja, Lurking Fear), and Carolyn/Elsa’s into a similar female puppet - so that they can live together. But when the puppets realise that this is what he wants the serum for, rather than to prolong their own existence, they turn on their creator in the traditional manner. An effective epilogue sees the little fellows heading off to pastures new as a children’s entertainment, headed by the female puppet (Julianne Mazziotti).

Puppet Master II is easily as good as the original, a fine example of a sequel that really works, taking the ideas into new areas and new directions without compromising the first film. Dave Allen’s direction is smart and assured so it’s a shame that he never followed this up. Cinematographer Thomas F Denove also lit The Last Horror Film, Steve Barkett’s Aftermath, Demon Keeper and episodes of Star Trek: TNG, Deep Space Nine and Ally McBeal. He won a Technical Achievement Oscar in 1990 for inventing a digital/analog exposure meter and now teaches at UCLA.

Production designer Kathleen Coates’ other credits include Trancers II, Crash and Burn and Night Hunter while costume designer Miye Matsumoto worked on Hard Hunted, Zipperface and at least two of the four 3 Ninjas movie. David Barton, later director of Dead and Rotting, handled the special effects make-up which is excellent, including a bandageless Toulon and the creepy, wooden-faced, lifesize dolls at the end (Barton also performed similar duties on Puppet Master III). Pete von Sholly (writer of Prehysteria) provided storyboards for this film. Two editors are credited: Bert Glatstein (Castle Freak, Subspecies II and III) and Peter Teschner (Scary Movie 2, Borat).

Co-producer and second unit director King Wilder was editor on Intruder, Deadly Weapon and the gloriously silly Piranha Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death and also worked in various capacities on the American Ultraman series. Charlie Band’s brother Richard provides the score, as he would do for all the Puppet Master films up to number five, and Band’s son Alex (later lead singer with The Calling) and daughter Taryn appear briefly in the audience for Toulon’s puppet version of Faust in the Cairo flashback.

The special effects that bring the puppets to life are credited to David Allen Productions but with Allen himself behind the camera, actually animating the wee things fell to various members of his team. John Teska (Tremors, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey) was ‘puppet supervisor’; nowadays he handles digital effects on things like Star Trek: Nemesis and Hellboy. Other names among the puppet crew include Mark Rappaport (one of the few people to have worked on both this film and its predecessor), Yancy Calzader (stop-motion credits include Demonic Toys and Robot Wars, now does digital effects for pictures like Boa vs Python and Dragon Fighter), Chris Endicott (now animating characters on films such as The Polar Express and Monster House) and Randall William Cook - who took home three consecutive special effects Oscars for the Lord of the Rings films.

As in the first film, these special effects are a mixture of rod puppetry and stop-motion, sparingly and hence effectively used. There’s real character in the puppets - just things like a slight movement of Blade’s jaw, cracking an evil smile - which marks out a David Allen effect, even if Allen himself was behind the camera. The matting of the stop-motion is faultless and there are a few brief shots where you really can’t tell what technique was used, which is always a mark of quality.

But a film is more than just effects, it also needs a great script. Puppet Master II is one of only three Band films - in fact only three actual produced films - written by Dave Pabian. But as the other two are Subspecies and Dollman, that’s an impressive hit rate! Not that those are Pabian’s only writing credits; in fact he has worked in various uncredited capacities as story editor, script agent etc for big and small Hollywood studios for many years. He’s a perfect example of how one should never take a listing on the Inaccurate Movie Database at face value.

The characters in Puppet Master II are sympathetic, believable and clearly defined, the only less-than-realistic lacuna being the way that Carolyn continues her work after the death of her brother. The story makes a sort of sense, fits in with what we know of both the puppets and Toulon from the first film, and adds in new stuff like the Egyptian back story. This is a terrific movie, easily one of Charlie Band’s best (he gets executive producer credit as usual, as well as ‘story by’), right up there with Castle Freak and Trancers.

Finally, a note of sadness. Elizabeth Mclellan seems to have finished her brief acting career (which included a soap stint on Santa Barbara and an episode of the Friday the 13th TV series) after this film. What she did for the next eleven years isn’t recorded but she apparently died in 2002, aged only 38.

MJS rating: A

Frankenstein: The College Years

Director: Tom Shadyac
Writer: Bryant Christ, John Trevor Wolff
Producer: Robert Engelman
Cast: William Ragsdale, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Vincent Hammond
Year of release: 1991
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK rental VHS (Fox)

Two hip but geeky students stumble across the body of a hulking, inarticulate scientific anomaly and somehow restore it to life. Trying to pass of their new ‘friend’ as a ‘surfer dude’ student at their college, they are amazed to find that his naivete makes him endearing and he becomes a star on campus. Can they maintain the illusion and if not, what will happen when people find out the truth?

Wait a minute, wasn’t that the plot of the moderately entertaining 1992 Brendan Fraser movie Encino Man/California Man? This TV movie is reminiscent of California Man (this is a UK site, so I use the UK title) and its entertainment value is even more moderate, especially without Fraser’s hunky bod.

When zany Professor Lippzigger (Robert V Barron, who was Abraham Lincoln in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and also did voices for Power Rangers) dies, his mysterious research work becomes the responsibility of his favourite pupil Mark Chrisman (William Ragsdale: Fright Night I and II, in a pair of really bad fake spectacles). With his room-mate Jay Butterman (Christopher Daniel Barnes, who voiced the title character in the mid-1990s Spider-Man cartoon), Chrisman explores the creepy old gothic house where Lippzigger worked and discovers an ancient book, written in German, monogrammed ‘VvF’. Further investigation reveals a secret lab containing the body of Frankenstein’s monster (six-foot-eight Vincent Hammond: Freaked, Species II, The Relic and various tall aliens in Stargate SG-1and Enterprise) which the two students revive using Kenneth Strickfadden-style equipment.

Meanwhile scheming, slimy Professor Arnold Loman (Larry Miller: Dean Richmond in the Nutty Professor movies, also in the Carnival of Souls remake and the voice of XR in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command) wants to find out what Lippzigger was working on so that he can claim it for himself and become the new Department Head. He is assisted by his unfunny comedy lab assistant Blaine (Patrick Richwood: Casper Meets Wendy, the truly odd Galgameth, and a bit part in the infamous Roger Corman Fantastic Four movie) whom he sets to spy on Chrisman.

When Frank goes walkabout in the Halls of Residence, no-one notices him except Token Black Guy Kingston ‘Kings’ Sebuka (De’voreaux White) who must be meant to be West African or something as he has a truly extraordinary French accent. With some ‘cool’ clothes and some foundation to hide his green skin, Frank passes for an exchange student (they register him on the college computer as ‘Frank N Stein’ - be still my aching sides).

Meanwhile Jay has fallen for glamour-puss Andi Richmond (Andrea Elson, who was the daughter in ALF) but his attempts to date her are constantly interrupted by problems with Frank. Things become even more complicated when Andi’s room-mate Gretchen (Margaret Langrick: Earth Star Voyager and the original movie of Harry and the Hendersons) falls for the tall, new student. And on top of all this, Frank is taken on as star kicker with the college football team. It all ends predictably enough with Professor Loman kidnapping Frank and making a presentation to the press which is effectively sabotaged by Mark, Jay and chums.

Frankenstein: The College Years is notable chiefly as the directorial debut of Tom Shadyac, who went on to helm Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Nutty Professor, Liar Liar, Patch Adams and Bruce Almighty. The humour here is basic and forced and while it’s not really bad there’s certainly no hint of a real comedy spark - so it’s exactly like all his later films.

This was the only ever produced script by Christ and/or Wolff but producer Engelman, who in a previous life was Second AD on films like Peewee’s Big Adventure and Footloose, had recently completed Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III and would go on to oversee Blade, The Mask, Scooby-Doo, Mystery Men and Revenge of the Nerds III. Special effects are credited to Tom Bellisimo (Tales from the Crypt) and Charlie Belardinelli (A Nightmare on Elm Street) who together worked on Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, The House on Haunted Hill, What Lies Beneath etc. Marc Hershon (Monster Makers) did some rewrites on the script.

There’s not a hint of originality in Frankenstein: The College Years and very few laughs; given the proximity of the dates, it was presumably made as a quick cash-in on California Man. The funniest thing is actually a clip from WC Fields’ The Dentist; there is also a clip from something which may be Reptilicus but I’m not sure, and references (but not clever ones) to Star Trek, ET and Mission Impossible. The two charisma-free central characters are certainly no Bill and Ted or Wayne and Garth, and Hammond’s duties as Frank extend to little more than an impression of Peter Boyle in the immeasurably superior Young Frankenstein.

In fact, there are plenty of Frankenstein comedies better than this one. For a film about two geeks coping with their Frankenstein-ian creation, watch Weird Science; for a film about the real Frankenstein Monster being reanimated and teaching someone the meaning of responsibility, see Frankenstein and Me; for a laugh-out-loud, brain-in-neutral Frankenstein comedy see Rock’n’Roll Frankenstein.

MJS rating: C
review originally posted before November 2004

Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki

Director: Izo Hashimoto
Writer: Izo Hashimoto, Chiaki J Konaka
Producer: Yoshio Saito, Tadao Masumizu
Cast: Shoko Nakajima, Rie Kondo
Year of release: 1991
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: R2 DVD (Artsmagic)

This has no connection whatsoever with the first Evil Dead Trap; one of the main characters works in TV but that’s really coincidental. This is also probably the strangest movie that Artsmagic have released so far. It’s not that it’s stylishly surreal like Uzumaki or low-budget nonsense like Junk or even plain bonkers like Wild Zero. Clearly there is a very complex, carefully worked out plot going on here, but the actual story is so eliptical that I simply couldn’t follow it.

That said, this is a gorgeous-looking film, with cinematography and lighting that beautifully shows up the copious quantities of blood. It’s brutal in places, gory in places, and supernaturally creepy in places. It’s great - I just don’t fully understand it. But given that the script is by Chiaki J Konaka, writer of the stylish but engimatic Malice@Doll, perhaps we’re not meant to fully understand what’s going on.

Slim, beautiful, slightly vain, outgoing pop-star-turned-TV-news-reporter Eimi Kageyama (Rie Kondo: The Last Frankenstein) and fat, plain, friendless, introverted cinema projectionist Aki Otani (Shoko Nakajima: All About Lily Chou-Chou) have been friends since high school. Eimi introduces Aki to her friend, a slimy creep named Mr Kurahashi (rock guitarist-turned-horror icon Shiro Sano: Godzilla 2000, GMK: All Monsters Attack, Violent Cop, Princess Blade) who comes on to Aki but conspicuously fails to mention his wife.

Aki is being troubled by a spooky-looking little boy whom she repeatedly spots in the cinema auditorium but who is never there when she goes to investigate, and whom nobody else has seen. Eimi is reporting on a series of brutal slayings, in which young women have been stabbed to death and had their ovaries cut out. Kurahashi is concerned that his wife Tokiko (Yoko Oshima: Ring, Another Heaven, Gamera: Guardian of the Universe) has not yet got over the death of their young son Hideki.

Eimi is unaware that Aki is carrying out these murders. Aki is scared by the appearance of the little boy one night after she has tarted herself up and picked up a couple of sleazeballs in a backstreet dive, and also sees him in the background of some of Eimi’s news reports. Kurahashi comes home one day to find that Hideki has returned - it is of course the weird kid (Shota Enemoto) that Aki has been seeing, with green-ish skin and staring black eyes.

Aki’s boss Mr Muraki (Sai Hiraiziumi, who was in Return of the Giant Majin and Gamera Vs Jiger!) recommends that she seek help from a weird sect called Shinki, presided over by a ‘psychic’ called Chio Kannazuki (Shino Ikenami: Village of Doom). Under the sect’s influence, Aki finds herself producing crude, child-like drawings of a figure bleeding profusely from mouth, hands and genitals. Meanwhile Eimi has discovered that she is pregnant (by Kurahashi) and ponders whether to have an abortion. And the murders continue...

Is any of this making any sense? Fitting together? Things get even stranger later on, when it starts to look like perhaps Aki isn’t the murderer - but if so how come we have seen her standing over the bodies, her dress soaked in blood? There’s a climactic fight - I won’t say between whom - which ultimately leads to one of the most truly extraordinary images I’ve ever seen in a horror movie.

Clearly the key to all this is the troubled spirit of Hideki, which may possibly be possessing people as well as manifesting itself. But I would be lying if I said I was sure about this. On the other hand, the film is consistent in its approach and doesn’t suddenly slip into ludicrous rubber monster territory at the end like its nominal predecessor.

The photography (by Osamu Fujiishi: Hypnosis) is terrific, adding greatly to the air of unsettling weirdness. This is a very stylish, very interesting, very Japanese film. I prefered it to the first Evil Dead Trap, which was easier to follow but let down by its ending and didn’t look as great as this (Artsmagic’s widescreen transfer is as flawless as usual). Evil Dead Trap 3 followed and had no connection with either of the first two.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted before November 2004

Dollman

Director: Albert Pyun
Writer: ‘Chris Roghair’
Producer: Cathy Gesualdo
Cast: Tim Thomerson, Kamala Lopez-Dawson, Jackie Earle Hayley
Country: USA
Year of release: 1991
Reviewed from: UK DVD

Dollman may not be the best film that Charles Band ever executive produced but it’s certainly one of his best - and from a personal point of view, this may very well be my favourite of all the Full Moon features I have watched.

Tim Thomerson (Trancers 1-5, Evil Bong, They Crawl) is absolutely superb as grizzled cop Brick Bardo, equipped with a bad attitude and the most powerful handgun in the universe. On a distant planet, he deals with a hostage situation in a laundromat where a criminal named Skyresh (Jamie Lee Curtis’ brother-in-law Nicholas Guest, who mostly does voice work but has appeared in screen in Puppet Master 5, Kickboxer 4 and even Star Trek II) is threatening to kill a group of fat people. The commissioner doesn’t like Bardo’s methods but his captain knows what a valuable maverick he is.

But this is all a prologue to Bardo, in a neato spaceship, chasing criminal mastermind Sprug in a flying saucer. Each time these two have met in the past, Bardo has blasted away another part of Sprug’s body and he now survives as only a greasy head, hovering on a couple of fanjets. (Sprug is played, under uncomfortable-looking make-up, by Frank Collison whose first credit was in a spoof documentary about 'Weird Al' Yankovic! He has since appeared in Amazon Women on the Moon, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, 12:01, the original movie of Alien Nation and the remake of The Blob.) When both spaceships pass through some sort of dimensional wormhole, Sprug and Bardo both find themselves on Earth, specifically in a rundown part of the Bronx in the early 1990s. Problem is: due to a slight difference in scale between their race and humans, Bardo is now only thirteen inches tall

Braxton Red (Jackie Earle Hayley: Nemesis, Maniac Cop 3) leads the most successful gang in the largely lawless area while Latino single mother Debi Alejandro (Kamala Lopez-Dawson, whose TV work includes Star Trek: Voyager, Lois and Clark and Medium) tries to organise the citizens into some sort of neighbourhood watch, despite the apathy of the cops. When Bardo saves Debi from Braxton’s thugs, she takes him home (lots of great shots of Thomerson being thrown around the cockpit of his craft) where her son Kevin (Humberto Ortiz: Arcade) is thrilled to have his own ‘dollman’.

Debi believes passionately in non-violence but Kevin and the neighbours are convinced that Bardo and his still-powerful handgun are the answer to their plight. Meanwhile, Sprug the tiny flying head is offering Braxton the use of a small-but-powerful bomb as well as some outer-space healing powers.

Dollman has a few things to say about violence, law and order, principles and society, but it doesn’t really say them terribly well. Debi’s abduction by Braxton raises the hope of things getting better in the neighbourhood as several of her neighbours rush out to try and stop the young hoodlums, but there is no chance for this idea to be followed up as we never return to the apartment block. Frankly the whole film falls apart somewhat towards the end - at least in terms of plot - where it becomes a stand-off between Bardo and the goons surrounding Braxton and the captive Debi. The final resolution is disappointing and looks like the production simply ran out of money.

But this is more than compensated for by good performances all round - especially from Thomerson - and defiantly bargain-bucket special effects. In an age before affordable CGI, most of the scenes in which Bardo interacts with full-size actors use simple editing, cutting back and forth between Thomerson looking up and the other actors looking down (or peering into the three-foot-long spaceship). There are a few green screen shots which are serviceable and allow just enough shared screen time to make the situation credible, if not believable. There’s even one glorious shot where Bardo, clinging onto the side of a speeding car, is stunt-doubled by a doll.

It’s the lead actor’s performance which really sells the film. Unlike other ‘tiny people’ movies and TV shows - The Incredible Shrinking Man, Land of the Giants, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - Bardo isn’t at all worried about how he will survive. He remains exactly the same misanthropic maverick cop that he was on his home planet and the enormous size difference between him and everyone else is just one more thing making a bad day even worse. He doesn’t really want to help Debi and is increasingly annoyed at Kevin proudly showing him off to the neighbours, but he’s a cop and he has a sense of justice.

Braxton Red and his gang of no-goods are kept just this side of parody, believably cocksure rather than over-the-top eccentric. This definitely isn’t a Troma film, although there’s a slightly Tromatic element to a scene at Debi’s workplace where she and her friend Maria (Merle Kennedy: Nemesis, Night of the Demons 2, Convict 762) sort ‘toxic waste’ by hand.

Hugely enjoyable for those in the right frame of mind, Dollman was one of only two collaborations between Band and the prolific Albert Pyun, the other being 1993’s Arcade. Busy guys both, this was one of three films directed by Pyun in 1991 and one of seven produced by Band. The screenplay is credited on-screen to ‘Chris Roghair’ but there seems to be universal agreement that this was a pseudonym for David Pabian whose other Full Moon pics were Crash and Burn, Puppet Master II and Subspecies.

Thomerson worked with Pyun on eight other pictures throughout the 1990s including the first and third Nemesis movies, Blast, Heatseeker, Spitfire, Knights, Hong Kong 97 and Brain Smasher: A Love Story. Also in the cast, most of whom have worked with Pyun on other films, are Judd Omen (Dune, The Howling II, CHUD II), Michael Halsey (who moved to LA in the early 1980s after spending the previous decade acting in things like Blake’s 7 and Are You Being Served?!), Frank Doubleday (Space Rage, Escape from New York), New Zealand-born Vincent Klyn (Cyborg, Nemesis, Final Equinox, Urban Menace), John Durbin (Demonwarp, Mutant on the Bounty, Cyborg 2), Luis Contreras (Suburban Commando, Alien Avengers II), Eugene Robert Glazer (Scanner Cop II and a regular on La Femme Nikita), Samantha Phillips (Phantasm II and III, Weekend at Bernie’s II) and overweight actress Laurianne Jameson who plays one of the fat ladies held hostage in the prologue and was also in that unforgettable sex scene in The Dark Backward.

The cinematographer on Dollman was George Mooradian who worked with Pyun on at least twenty other features including two Kickboxers and all four Nemesis films. His other credits include Retroactive, The Hitcher II and Pterodactyl. Producer Cathy Gesualdo, who served similar duties on Arcade, was Second AD on Friday the 13th Part VI and A Nightmare on Elm Street IV.

Special effects are credited to ‘Frazee’, actually Logan Frazee who also worked on Nemesis, Blade Runner, The Towering Inferno, at least four Star Trek movies and Satan’s School for Girls. Bardo’s spaceship was built by Gene Warren (Nightflyers, True Lies) and Leslie Huntley (Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Fright Night Part 2, Magic in the Water). Special effects make-up is credited to Mike Smithson who worked on things like House II, Scanners II and The Exorcist III and now works on stuff like the Spider-Man movies.

Production designer Don Day can boast Frankenstein General Hospital, Martians Go Home, Shadowzone and 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up on his CV. Editor Margaret-Anne Smith was a Full Moon regular throughout the 1990s, working on Trancers III, Prehysteria, Puppet Master 4 and 5, Robot Wars and Magic Island, while composer Anthony Riparetti was (and indeed still is) a frequent Pyun collaborator. His music can be heard in Alien from LA, Heatseeker, the Nemesis films, Omega Doom, and Tammy and the T Rex.

With such an array of top talent (hey, in my opinion at least!) on both sides of the camera, it’s no wonder that Dollman is such an eminently watchable movie. Charlie Band would have loved to spin it out into a franchise but in fact there was only one proper sequel, Dollman vs Demonic Toys (which I haven’t seen) although Thomerson appears briefly in character in an epilogue to the appallingly poor Bad Channels.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 2nd July 2007

Zeram

Director: Keita Amamiya
Writers: Keita Amamiya, Hajime Matsumoto
Producers: Hiroshi Ichida, Shigeki Takeuchi
Cast: Yuko Moriyama
Year of release: 1991
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Manga Live, 1995)

Hard to believe in these enlightened times when films like Evil Dead Trap and Uzumaki are available in your local HMV, but less than ten years ago it was almost impossible to buy Asian films in the UK. During my three years on SFX magazine pretty much the only Japanese films available on British video were seven (of the then 22) Godzilla pictures, endlessly repackaged and constantly on Channel Four, plus a handful of Kurosawa’s best-known features and a few other art-house titles.

We didn’t have DVDs in those far-off days of 1995 and the internet was still something of a hit-and-miss affair. One read about these amazing films in magazines like Cult Movies and Damon Foster’s unputdownable Oriental Cinema, but to actually have the chance to watch them ourselves, it was unheard of. So when Zeram appeared on the short-lived Manga Live video label, I grabbed the review copy straightaway. And I thought it was great.

Rewatching it again eight years later, it’s still fun but I’ve got more to compare it with now. Most of all, I was enormously surprised to find that this release was dubbed - and not very well dubbed either. DVDs spoil you for things like subtitling.

Zeram (Mizuho Yoshida, who was inside the Godzilla suit in GMK: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack) is a bio-engineered killing device which has escaped and is on its way to Earth. Iria (Yuko Moriyama: Reborn from Hell I and II) is a bounty hunter assigned to recapture it. Blimey - that’s the plot of Lilo and Stitch!

With the help of her talkative computer Bob - which really dates the film as early 1990s - Iria creates a sort of VR copy of the part of town in which Zeram is about to land. Unfortunately in transporting herself into the ‘zone’ she accidentally transports in two bumbling but well-meaning engineers from the phone company, Tepphei (Kunihiro Iida: Another Heaven) and Kamiya (Yukijiro Hotaru: Cure, Stacy and Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera trilogy).

The film then becomes a series of attempts to capture and hold Zeram, who creates small squidgy underlings from little bombs that he throws. It’s all fun enough but lightweight and straightforward. Iria looks sexy in her plastic body armour and Zeram looks even scarier when he drops his cloak, and the two guys aren’t as irritating as most comic relief. Zeram (also spelled Zeiram) is a fun film, but not an essential film, though I would definitely like to see a subtitled version.

Keita Amamiya also directed Mechanical Violator Hakaida, Robo Ninja/Cyber Ninja and Moon Over Tao as well as episodes of the 1992 TV series Zyu Ranger which formed the basis of the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episodes.

He did special effects on Gunhed and Peacock King, and his other directorial TV credits include Dynaman, Maskman, Liveman, Jetman and Kamen Rider Z (according to the Inaccurate Movie Database he was cinematographer on Kamen Rider J and costume designer on Kamen Rider Black RX!). He directed (but did not write) Zeram 2 in 1994 and wrote (but did not direct) an anime prequel in 1993 entitled Iria.

Hajime Matsumoto, his co-writer (also credited with the original story and sole scribe on Zeram 2) is a special effects technician whose credits include Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, Ju-on I and II, Ring and Rasen. The English dub was written by (and features) voice actor Steve Kramer who has also written episodes of Power Rangers and the utterly brilliant Samurai Pizza Cats. Robert Axelrod (Sorority House Massacre, Death Wish 4, The Blob remake, Deep Freeze) is also among the dubbing cast.

MJS rating: B
Review originally posted before November 2004