Catalina: A New Kind of Superhero

Director: Kenneth D Barker
Writer: Kenneth D Barker
Producer: Kenneth D Barker
Cast: Nathan Lubbock-Smith, Laura Martin, George McCluskey
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.wotr.co.uk

Ken Barker ploughs his own furrow, making films which seem to be somewhere inbetween obviously commercial and defiantly individualistic. His debut feature was the 1999 children’s fantasy adventure Kingdom which, while its effects were by necessity a long, long way from Jurassic Park, was nevertheless the first British live-action feature film to include entirely computer-generated characters. You’ve got to give Ken credit for that.

A few years after Kingdom, Ken was kind enough to invite me up to Leeds for a screening of his second feature, Rosetta: Prima Donna Assoluta. In complete contrast to the first film, this is a serious drama, set in 1960s Italy, about an aspiring opera singer. What is frustrating about both these movies is that, unless you know Kenneth D Barker personally, your chances of actually seeing them are virtually zero. Perhaps Catalina: A New Kind of Superhero will be Ken’s breakout picture.

But before we begin, you have to approach a Ken Barker film in the right way. The effects will be cheap but, rather than pushing the cheapness into your face, and rather than over-reaching in defiance of the tiny budget, those effects will be something different and offbeat and imaginative.

Although ostensibly a superhero film - in fact the world’s first transvestite superhero film - Catalina takes a long, long time to reach any superhero stuff. The first twenty minutes is all space operatics, interspersed with numerous short captions about people and planets. In a nutshell, there is a very rare element (called Thrixium) which is only found on one planet and there is a distinctly bad fellow (called General Krillgarth the Negative, played by George McCluskey - The Zombie King, The Last Transmission - without anywhere near enough bombast) who wants it for himself. I think it’s vital for some super-weapon or something although Krillgarth seems to have plenty of weaponry on his space fleet already. There are various space battles and Krillgarth is captured by some sort of Galactic Senate (or something) one member of which lives on Earth.

This alien-disguised-as-middle-aged-woman (Martina McClements, who was a nurse in a few Emmerdale episodes in 2008 and is also a dancer and choreographer) is tending her flowers when the call comes through and she is teleported away to do her senatorial duty. Although she does reappear briefly at the end, the fact that she is living on Earth as a human is never explained or explored and seems to have no relevance.

So anyway, Krillgarth can’t be executed because that would make him a martyr so he’s going to be exiled. He’s put onto a spaceship, the pilot of which (Matt Cain) has a touching but completely irrelevant vidphone conversation with his girlfriend (Jennifer E Jordan) before blast off.

This whole prologue goes on far, far too long and could have been summed up in a couple of minutes: very evil, very dangerous space criminal being transported into exile. That’s all we need to know. Frankly, that’s all we do know because despite the sequence going on for so long, the actual details of Krillgarth’s crimes are as complex as they are irrelevant to the plot.

It is possible however that there were some clear explanations that I missed because I was distracted by the spaceships. In a valiant attempt to depict massive interstellar space battles between rival fleets, Ken has gone for the unusual step of depicting all the spaceships using cut-out, flat images. Craft can go left, right, up, down, whizzing everywhere in two dimensions. Sometimes they even go towards or away from us by simply being enlarged or shrunk. But of course, however much they may twist and turn, the pattern of shadows on the spaceships remains constant - because they are, to all intents and purposes, photos.

It would be very easy to mock this technique and I’m sure some people will do but I prefer to think of it as a clever trick which not only gives the film greater scope but also provides a unique, frankly Gilliam-esque air to the proceedings. Once you get used to it, this cut-out spaceship thing is actually great fun. And it’s not like Catalina: A New Kind of Superhero takes itself seriously.

No, the problem here lies not in the effects but in the whole space thing dragging on so that we’re a full twenty minutes into the film before we even meet our central character. And it will be another twenty minutes before we see any superpowers.

Ben Gerick (Italia Conti-trained Nathan Lubbock-Smith, who was a prefect in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) is a hotshot young executive in a successful law-firm, working his way up both the company ladder and the floors of the office block. But there is something that neither his snooty posh girlfriend Philomena (South African radio presenter Cleone Cassidy) nor his work buddy Imran (Waleed Khalid, who played the Ernie Hudson character in a student remake of Ghostbusters!) know about him. When he’s alone, Ben likes nothing more than to kick back and relax in a bra, blouse, skirt and pair of slingbacks. Thus clad, he is watching telly when Philly unexpectedly walks in and demands to know who he is.

Now this bit caught me off-guard. We hadn’t met Philomena before so it took me a while to realise that the woman who unlocked the front door and walked in as if she owned the place was actually Ben’s girlfriend (with her own front door key). Because her reaction, on spotting the person on the sofa is not, “Oh my God, Ben, what are you doing?” but rather, “Who the hell are you?” I was confused. Was Ben in someone else’s flat? Was he taking transvestism to a new level which involved not only wearing women’s clothes but also sitting on women’s sofas watching women’s televisions in women’s city centre apartments?

Eventually I realised: this is his girlfriend and she doesn’t know that’s Ben. And the cause of my confusion is simply this: tranny Ben doesn’t wear a wig. He mousses up his normally straight, short, fair hair a bit but that doesn’t substantially alter his appearance. With a long, dark wig on, Philly’s confusion would be credible. Her boyfriend has short, fair hair; there’s a young woman with long, dark hair sitting on her boyfriend’s settee; what’s going on? But this young woman she confronts has short, fair hair, very like Ben’s and consequently the distinctive shape of Ben’s face (which a wig would alter) remains the same old fizzog she’s used to and should recognise.

In a nutshell, the person on Philomena’s boyfriend’s sofa does not look like a woman, it just looks like Philomena’s boyfriend in a blouse and a skirt. In fact, Ben actually has small sideburns and no amount of eye-shadow or lippy is going to distract attention away from them.

On the one hand, there’s a degree of accuracy here. I’ve known several transvestites in my time - hey, it’s a modern world - and they were mostly nice enough blokes. But the one thing they all had in common - and I believe this to be a general tendency among those who partake of this particular lifestyle - is that not one of them looked like a woman. It’s a cruel irony that those men who want to dress as women are those with the least feminine body shape and build. Every tranny I have ever met has looked like a bloke in a dress. Whereas, on the other side of the irony equation, I’ve seen some straight fellas togged up in female fancy dress so realistic that even their close friends are completely taken in.

That’s the way the world works, I’m afraid. Only those men who don’t get a kick out of women’s clothes can get away with looking like a woman rather than a bloke in a dress. One of the reasons why Eddie Izzard was always able to get away with looking stylish in a skirt was that he made no attempt to ‘be’ a woman. Remember, he used to say: “They’re not women’s clothes, they’re mine.”

So the fact than Ben, in a skirt, simply looks like Ben in a skirt is true to life. Philomena’s failure to recognise him... well, that’s very Lois Lane. As has often been pointed out, the central love triangle of the Superman mythos is based entirely on Lois Lane’s inability to recognise her boyfriend without his glasses. Similarly, central to Catalina is Philomena’s inability to recognise her boyfriend with a dab of make-up and his haired slightly mussed.

Thinking on his feet, Ben adopts a falsetto voice and claims to be his own sister whom he names ‘Catalina’ because - I kid you not - he was reading a magazine about flying boats. It’s a great name - and a great aeroplane - but man, where do you even find a magazine about flying boats? All kudos to whoever located that prop.

In a scene that maybe should have been played a bit more farcically, Ben retreats into the bedroom, has a conversation with himself and emerges in men’s gear, saying that his sister is feeling tired and is having a lie-down. While the quick change act is believable, you do wonder how he’s managed to get the make-up off so thoroughly and so quickly, not to mention getting his hair back to its original style. And remember, this is before he gets any superpowers.

All this malarkey takes another twenty minutes. If this was on celluloid we would be two reels in by now and the projectionist would be wondering whether he had threaded up the wrong movie. At the forty-minute mark, the story goes back to General Krillgarth, being transported to his planned exile.

Something goes wrong - possibly the transport ship is attacked by some of Krillgarth’s troops - so the pilot and prisoner are forced to abandon ship in an escape pod, heading towards a nearby blue-green planet. In a notable contrast to the massive over-the-top security around the prisoner in The Planet, there’s just this one guy and in the escape pod the two men have to lie down next to each other (subtext ahoy! - maybe not...) without the prisoner being restrained in any way. As the pod hurtles towards Earth (specifically West Yorkshire - well, why not?), Krillgarth attacks the pilot and then actually leaps out of the little spaceship, several metres above ground, moments before it crashes into a park. The pilot also survives, just.

This crash is witnessed by Ben-in-drag and the injured pilot gives him a glowing ball (about the size of a cricket ball) which is made of Thrixium and which somehow embeds itself inside Ben’s chest. That rotten old General Krillgarth, before leaping from the crashing escape pod, snatched a glowing ball of Thrixium off the pilot... but the pilot tricked him, letting him take a fake glowing ball of something else.

The question is: if this stuff is so valuable and if Krillgarth was prepared to lay waste to planets to get his hands on it, why was a lump of it being transported in the pocket of the solitary crewmember of the spaceship which was charged with transporting the unrestrained prisoner into exile? I fear that Ken’s script comes apart around here. It’s all very well having a McGuffin - for that is what the Thrixium assuredly is - but that McGuffin must be consistent in its concept. There is just no reason for the pilot to be carrying Thrixium (plus a dummy Thrixium ball, just in case his prisoner decides to pinch it) except to give Krillgarth a reason to hunt down Ben on Earth.

Everything gets a but confused from this point on, to be honest. The main thing is that Ben discovers he now has ‘superpowers’ - basically telekinesis, which he tests by changing the TV channel without using the remote! - but only when he’s in drag, which somehow causes the Thrixium ball in his chest to glow.

Hang on a moment, doesn’t this sound familiar? A good alien and a bad alien both crash onto Earth and the good alien, in dying, passes a glowing item to a human which sits on that human’s chest and gives him incredible superpowers, with which he can vanquish the evil alien. Isn’t this the Ultraman origin story? Yes indeed, as originally recounted back in the 1960s and re-recounted in start-from-scratch reinventions such as Ultraman: The Next, that’s how Ultraman came to be. Kenneth Barker has, possibly unwittingly, written and directed a cross-dressing British remake of Ultraman!

But anyway things, as I say, get complicated from hereon. There are quite a few other characters. Krillgarth acquires a working class female assistant (‘Kylie the Chav Git’, adroitly played by Laura Martin with precisely the comic touch that the character requires) who is too thick to realise that she’s dealing with an alien warlord while Ben/Catalina meets a Chinese hacker named Dr Xan Terminus (Jeremy Tiang, who was in Dean M Drinkel’s production of Clive Barker’s Frankenstein in Love) who seems like he’ll be the superhero’s sidekick but gets killed a couple of scenes later. Philly splits up with Ben, not over his crossdressing but over the lack of trust exemplified by the fact that they went out for three years without him even mentioning his sister. Ben seeks (a quantum of) solace in his old friend from university, Casey (Gemma Head, a regular with Murder One Theatre Company) who is astute enough to already know about his cross-dressing and who insists on ‘rehearsing’ a rather saccharine song for Ben (and us). Fortunately Ben meets a girl named Kerry (Anna Fiorentini, who runs her own award-winning theatre and film school in London) in an art gallery who, in the final scene, accepts his sexual quirk.

There is also an inexplicable subplot about a scientist named (according to the credits) Professor Critchon (Warwick St.John, who was in The Seamstress with Marysia Kay) who has hooked a badly scarred, badly injured man up to a computer. Ro Goodwin is under the prosthetic make-up and wires, credited as ‘Mainframe Symbiot’; he also plays ‘Man in Theatre’, ‘Space Command Officer’ and something/someone called Yatook Boze. I couldn’t follow this part of the story at all, to be honest, and its connection with the main Ben/Catalina/Krillgarth plot remains a mystery to me. On top of all this, Sarah Waddell turns up as a deeply irritating Scottish character with multiple personalities (but only one trouser suit) who is credited as ‘The Enigma aka The Tritium Gang’. She is also looking for Ben and/or the Thrixium for some reason.

As for Krillgarth, there’s some sort of climactic showdown where Ben/Catalina whooshes off up into space to battle the bad guy. (There was no previous indication that he could either fly or survive in a vacuum but Ben - and indeed Ken - seems to have assumed that these capabilities are integral to generic ‘superpowers’). I think he flings all of Krillgarth’s spaceships into a black hole or something. To be honest, I had difficulty following this bit, not least because I was disappointed at the realisation that we weren’t going to see this ‘new kind of superhero’ actually doing any superhero stuff.

Call me picky, but in a superhero movie I expect some crimefighting. I realise that the archetypal superhero, Superman, is an alien and so many (not all, by any means) superhero tales involve some degree of extraterrestrial shenanigans. But surely ‘heroics’ are integral to ‘superheroics’: defence of the weak, punishment of the wicked etc. Aren’t those the tropes that define the superhero mythos as a genre? Granted, there are exceptions. Ultraman, for starters, but Ultraman is almost his own subgenre and his role is to act as Earth’s defender, growing to giant size and wrestling monsters, rather than being a ‘superhero’ per se.

Defeating some intergalactic villain whose sole aim is to retrieve the glowing ball which gives our protagonist his ‘powers’ is just unsatisfying. It makes Catalina a new kind of space soldier, not superhero. Rather than that endless first reel of spaceships whizzing back and forth and Galactic Senate deliberating, couldn’t we have had a sequence in the middle of the film, inbetween Ben discovering his powers and Ben defeating Krillgarth, when ‘Catalina’ finds him/herself using these superpowers in an Earthbound setting, scaring off muggers, rescuing trapped people from buildings, saving potential suicides - all the while generating confusion among people as to who (or indeed, what) this new superhero could be? Because that’s what the premise of the film promises. And this could have provided a build-up to the climactic battle with Krillgarth which, as it is, is both too sudden and too swift. There’s no real sense of achievement and afterwards there’s no real sense of resolution when Ben is contacted by the Galactic Senate (who appear in the sky like Yoda, Obi-Wan and Anakin) asking him if he wants to keep his powers. It’s not as if he has to give them up to be with Kerry, the woman he now loves, so his shrugging them off is almost incidental.

Basically, he acquires superpowers, bustles about for a bit, gets chased by the villain who wants the Thrixium then kicks some arse in outer space and comes home. There’s no build-up to all this and, I’ll say it again, the lack of any actual superhero-stuff leaves the viewer dissatisfied. It’s like there’s a missing reel or something.

Don’t get me wrong, there is stuff to enjoy in Catalina, not least a corking central performance by Nathan Lubbock-Smith, both in and out of drag (he even says, “I’m a lady,” at one point). Some of the other cast are good too (others less so) and the actual direction of scenes is fine. Camera-work and editing are good although the sound is poor with many of the alien voices (in the space battles and on a little digital computer-monkey-thing that Krillgarth steals from the escape pod) treated beyond the point of intelligibility. And some of the (human) dialogue is simply too quiet to make out clearly, which is a shame.

But it’s the script where Catalina hits its biggest problem. It’s not just that it’s top heavy with this massive, unnecessary prologue about Krillgarth, it simply never explores the premise of a transvestite superhero. Which, let’s face it, is what the punters are here to see. The fact that only Catalina has the powers, not Ben, is simply glossed over. We never find out how it affects Ben and it never affects anyone else because he doesn’t actually do any of the crime-fighting that we’re expecting. It’s a quirk but it’s irrelevant to the film’s actual plot and that can’t help but leave audiences disappointed and frustrated.

Catalina simply doesn’t do anything unique or distinctive that would justify the ‘new kind of superhero’ tag. Somewhere along the way, Ken has become distracted with all his neat cut-out spaceships and other effects and forgotten about the central selling point of the film. Even when Catalina flings Krillgarth into that black hole, it’s really just Ben doing the flinging. Yes, he’s wearing a skirt. So what? Krillgarth never even notices. And it’s not like most other superheroes wear three-piece suits or T-shirts and jeans. Wearing a skirt is not that much more outrageous than wearing your underpants outside your tights, is it?

And if Superman wears tights, how ‘new’ can the concept of a cross-dressing superhero actually be?

But Catalina is a British superhero - and that is indeed something rare and unusual, if not completely new. British superheroes are few and far between. There’s Marvel Comics’ Captain Britain of course and Zenith in 2000AD of yore and on screen we’ve had a couple of sitcoms: My Hero and No Heroics. And there’s the occasional porn spoof; I’m reasonably certain that Boobwoman was a British production (don’t ask). So a new British superhero feature is to be celebrated. But it pains me to say that Catalina just doesn’t hit that mark. Too much space opera, not enough superhero stuff and frankly not enough cross-dressing stuff either. Perhaps if the film was marketed as a sci-fi film about a threat to Earth, viewers might have a clearer idea going in what they were about to watch. Because if you promise a viewer one thing and deliver something different, the quality of the production becomes less important than the viewer’s expectations and almost unavoidable disappointment.

Ken pulled quadruple duty as writer, director, producer and editor with James Ritchie as associate producer. The film was shot in HD by Jun Keung Cheung who also photographed Steve Rehman’s psychological chiller The Shadow and Christopher Hutchins’ sci-fi/horror picture Horace K48. No production designer is credited but the art director was Daniel Holloway.

Effectsland ‘a subsidiary company of WOTR Ltd’ (ie. Ken’s prodco, Water on the Rock) is credited with ‘visual effects, 2D models and compositing’ while Dark Raven Digital (who also worked on Kingdom, Rosetta, Ironwerkz, The Demon Within and The Witches Hammer) provided ‘additional visual effects’. Gary Rowntree’s GazMask Studio handled ‘live action prosthetics, miniatures, special make-up and Alien Ambassador design.’ Also in the cast are Bob Mallow (who played Archduke Franz Ferdinand in a short film called Turner’s War) and Anthony James Berowne (who was in Rosetta and also in Charly Cantor’s Blood).

All credit to Kenneth D Barker who, together with his cast and crew, has put a lot of hard work into Catalina: A New Kind of Superhero, as evidenced by the copyright date of ‘2005-2008’. But I fear that somewhere during the film’s protracted genesis the basic concept of a transvestite superhero has been mislaid. The whole cross-dressing thing is simply never explored and is entirely irrelevant to the main plot - and would still be so, even if Catalina looked more like a drag queen and less like a bloke in a skirt.

I really enjoyed some aspects of this film, not least the performances by Nathan Lubbock-Smith, Laura Martin and others and the funky cut-out spaceship battles. But the script is so crammed with ideas and characters that there’s no room left for the central premise. It pains me to point out that Catalina simply isn’t a new kind of superhero.

MJS rating: C+

Ultraman II

Director: Sidney L Caplan
Writers: Sidney L Caplan, Tom Weiner, Steve Kramer, Wally Soul
Producers: Noboru Tsuburaya, Sidney L Caplan
Cast: Barbara Goodson, Steve Kramer, Joe Perry
Country: Japan/USA
Year of release: 1983
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Isn’t it bloody typical? For years I search the video shops of this land for Ultraman tapes (or indeed any other Japanese superheroes). All I ever find is multiple copies of Ultraman: The Alien Invasion, a feature-length re-edit of the first few episodes of the Australian series Ultraman: Towards the Future. I’m not even sure that the second volume of that was released in the UK; I assume it must have been but I’ve never seen it.

So, in the summer of 2005 when I was writing about the character’s history in a feature on Ultraman: The Next for Neo magazine, I stated with some confidence that the Aussie series is the only one ever released in the UK. And while that issue was on sale - while it was on sale! - I came across this 1983 tape of the 1979 animated version, which was simply called The Ultraman. Bloody typical.

The on-screen title, clearly generated after the fact, is Ultraman 2: The Further Adventures of Ultraman which is all very odd because of the four episodes which make up this faux feature, the first is the series’ opener about the creation of 'the' Ultraman himself. So what, if anything, was in the first animated Ultraman ‘film’, if such a beast exists?

Okay, here’s the set-up. In response to some weird writing that appears in the sky, the Earth Defence Force (sometimes called the Earth Defence Organisation) establishes ‘Emergency Science and Defence Squads’ in every ‘zone’ on Earth. Captain Adam (sometimes called Captain Adams) is put in charge of the Eastern Zone ESDS. He agrees to the job provided that he can have at his disposal a super-amazing aircraft (and occasional submarine) called the Super Star (sometimes called the SS13 - as you can, see there’s not much consistency here).

He gathers around him a team of four people: fat comedy sidekick Marconi, tall engineering genius Glen (who is not mentioned by name until the second episode), beautiful Lieutenant Ann Johnson and enigmatic Commander Harris who has been serving aboard Earth Space Station 3. Piloting his one-man spaceship back to Earth, Harris goes through the usual Ultraman scenario: red light blah blah blah lose control blah blah blah giant figure blah blah blah. Ultraman (for it is he) tells Harris that he must go to Earth, using Harris’ body: “The survival of the whole universe, including Earth, depends on it.”

The story proper starts off with an iceberg that crosses the equator without melting and which eventually cracks open to reveal a giant bipedal dinosaur thing which somehow, shortly afterwards, turns into four identical giant bipedal dinosaur things. And let me tell you folks, with their little arms akimbo and mincing gait these are the campest monsters you ever saw. Nevertheless, the crew of the SS13 - which can launch smaller aircraft from itself - succeed in keeping a straight face long enough to defeat the beasties with the assistance of a mysterious giant stranger dressed in red and silver. (Harris has a green star which he places on his forehead to become Ultraman for a limited time. Of course, as is traditional, none of the others have a clue that their giant benefactor is actually their colleague.)

And so, 22 minutes in, we leap to a different episode which takes place just before Ann’s birthday. Marconi and Glen both have crushes on her, of course, but she is most interested in Harris. In this episode a tornado attacks a power station which derives energy from a giant whirlpool. Investigations reveal that at the centre of the tornado is a monster that looks like a five-tentacled heart. After some more flying around, Ultraman appears and gives it a good hiding.

The third story starts with the team enjoying a bit of a holiday but they are swiftly called back into service to investigate a giant red cloud. Glen manages to capture some of it in a bottle, takes it back to the lab and discovers that it coalesces into a living thing when it gets wet. Adams tells him this is very useful information but it’s not really because it has already started raining and the cloud has become a giant pink yeti. The SS13 battles the big beastie until Ultraman appears, dispels the rain clouds and causes the monster to revert to cloud form.

Probably the best of the four stories is the final one, not least because it has a vaguely decent monster, a sort of giant crocodile thing. We start with Marconi destroying this threat by himself using a hand-held rocket launcher at close range - which everyone agrees is very impressive. We then see something that must happen after most kaiju eiga but rarely gets shown: somebody clearing away the bloody great reptilian corpse. The guy supervising the crane and lorry involved turns out to be the Chief of the Space Biology Group who wants the body to study. Oh, and it’s not quite dead (sorry, Marconi). At the same time, a young boy discovers a baby version of the monster and adopts it as a secret pet, despite local warnings that the authorities are looking for a strange creature which could be dangerous. Of course, ‘Baby’ grows at an alarming rate and eventually becomes a full-grown crocodile-thing. Both plots in this episode show some promise and it’s just a shame that there is no apparent connection between them.

Oh, and there’s one really curious thing which I haven’t yet mentioned: the obligatory robot sidekick. In this case it’s a squat, crinkly, alien-looking blob named PDQ who carries a very tiny grey monkey on his shoulder. He makes no significant contribution to any of the stories, is absolutely never explained (nor is his monkey) and really only serves to raise the weirdness quotient of this otherwise distinctly lacklustre cartoon.

Even if you enjoy anime (and as I have observed elsewhere, I can’t stand the stuff) you have to be pretty tolerant to sit through Ultraman II. Stuff like Battle of the Planets may have been fun when we were kids but it doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of 21st century eyes and The Ultraman isn’t even up to Battle of the Planets standards. Frankly it’s barely up to Thunderbirds 2086 standards.

The characters are one-dimensional, the plots arbitrary - not nonsensical enough to be entertaining, just boring - and the animation is as simplistic and basic as the scripts. The music is derivative and obvious, the monsters for the most part are bollocks and Ultraman is hardly in it at all. This is definitely one for completists. I watched the tape once then gave it away for someone else to ‘enjoy.’

The Ultraman/Ultraman II has no connection with the rest of Ultraman continuity, kicking off with an origin story in a world where the Ultra Brothers are completely unknown (much like Ultraman: The Next, but there the similarities end!). In Japan this version of the character was apparently known as Ultraman Jonias or Ultraman Joe and featured in some stage shows as well as the cartoon. It took me a while to track down confirmation but apparently there was a previous western release of animated episodes which was called The Adventures of Ultraman. However, as this ‘sequel’ kicks off with episode one, it’s difficult to see what could have been on the first volume.

Despite the very obvious breaks between episodes, it’s clear from the linking narration that it was added after the shows were combined into this ersatz feature. The ‘film’ finishes with a series of still images which presumably were designed to play under the closing credits of the episodes if the show was broadcast. There was evidently a Region 1 DVD release of this a while back but that is now deleted.

The voice artists are Barbara Goodson (who was the voice of Rita Repulsa in the early series of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and both Power Rangers films, and also contributed voices to Akira, Vampire Hunter D, Robotech, Digimon, Cowboy Bebop and stacks of other interchangeable anime), Steve Kramer (who wrote the English script for Zeram), Tom Weiner (also credited as narrator) and Joe Perry. Director/writer/producer Sidney L Caplan apparently also produced Bert I Gordon’s Necromancy and Reginald Le Borg’s So Evil, My Sister. The film is presented as ‘produced by Tsuburaya Production Company Ltd and Associates Entertainment International’; Noboru Tsuburaya’s credit as producer is the only Japanese name to be seen.

MJS rating: C-

[Addendum: Would you Adam and Eve it? Less than a month later, I found a 1987 reissue of this film so it was actually released twice in this country. - MJS]

Ultraman: The Next

Director: Kazuya Konaka
Writer: Keiichi Hasegawa
Producer: Kiyoshi Suzuki
Cast: Tetsuya Bessho, Kenya Osumi, Kyoko Toyama
Country: Japan
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: screener DVD

Watching this latest incarnation of the long-running movie/TV series, I couldn't help thinking about the similarities between Ultraman and Doctor Who. Both franchises started in the 1960s ('63 for the Doctor, '66 for the big silver guy) and star an alien who comes to Earth where he befriends and protects humans, while also continuing his adventures in outer space. Both characters have 'superhuman' abilities of some sort and super-advanced technology without being conventional superheroes and can pass for human when necessary.

Both series have changed constantly over the years, including not only their lead actor but the nature and identity of the lead character, even though that lead character has in other ways remained constant (and both have experimented with teaming up different incarnations of the lead character in various combinations). Both are primarily TV franchises which have spun off into films, books, comics, stage shows and other media as well as inspiring plenty of toys and collectables. They are, on the one hand, children's series yet enjoyed by many adults - not merely for nostalgia value - and have attracted a cult following outside their country of origin where the subtleties and intentions of the stories can be widely mis- and re-interpreted.

On the negative side, Ultraman and Doctor Who have both become bogged down - the former with repetition and formula, the latter with continuity and back story. They limit themselves by catering increasingly for established fans at the expense of those coming to the franchises anew. And their effects, especially their monster effects, have become outdated and a little embarrassing - or at least, are viewed as such by many people who don't actually watch the series, which is almost as bad.

In 2005 Doctor Who returned after a 16-year-hiatus (the longest that Ultraman has ever been absent from the screen, I think, is four years) with Christopher Eccleston in the lead role. The new version skipped over a lot of the old continuity without contradicting it or throwing it out, leaving viewers pleasantly uncertain/unbothered about whether this was a sequel (effectively, a continuation of the old series) or a reinterpretation (basically starting from scratch again). The essential premise remained unchanged, successfully fulfilling both the concept of that premise as it existed in the wider cultural zeitgeist and the concept as understood by the hardcore fans. Sufficient iconography was there to please everyone, no matter how detailed or vague their memories - TARDIS, Daleks, sonic screwdriver - without getting in the way of those for whom the series was something completely new.

Around the same time, the character of Ultraman was similarly reinvented in this movie which hit Japanese cinemas in December 2004 - and with, in this reviewer's opinion, similar success. What do we know about the Doctor? He's an alien, a 'Time Lord', who travels in time and space using a spaceship that looks like a blue telephone box (called the TARDIS) which is bigger inside than out. He has a young female companion with him in a strictly platonic relationship, and of all the races he encounters the most deadly are his sworn enemies, the Daleks.

And what do we know about Ultraman? He is an alien who comes to Earth and somehow melds with a military or quasi-military individual. When danger threatens, usually personified by one or more giant monsters, that individual can transform into Ultraman who is a giant humanoid, clad in a silver and red outfit including a helmet with blank staring eyes. Ultraman is never seen without this outfit which may actually be part of him - is that really a helmet or is it his head? He is handy in a fight against any giant monster, whether grappling one-to-one or blasting off rays. But he can only exist for a short time and must return to human form when a light on his chest starts flashing to indicate that his strength is nearly exhausted.

The more recent series - Ultraman Tiga, Ultraman Dyna and Ultraman Gaia - sought to reinvent the franchise from scratch and although they were evidently more successful than the rather poor 1996 Doctor Who telemovie, nevertheless they may end up being viewed as some sort of 'alternative' franchise. On the other hand, the new TV series Ultraman Max (featuring episodes directed by Gamera helmer Shusuke Kaneko and Takashi Miike!) which is in production as I write this in mid-2005 apparently returns the character closer to his roots and it could be this movie which becomes the equivalent of the Paul McGann Who film.

So what is Ultraman: The Next all about? Tetsuya Bessho (Godzilla vs Mothra, Parasite Eve) plays air force pilot Lieutenant Shunichi Maki, who flies an F-15 Eagle and whose nearly-six-year-old son Keimu (Ryohei Hirota) suffers from a terminal blood disease that means he may not see his seventh birthday. Understandably wanting to spend more time with his little boy while he has the chance, Maki retires from the air force and takes a job piloting a light aircraft for private travellers, operating from a small local airport.

Just before Maki retires, he and his wingman Captain Kurashima are scrambled to intercept a mysterious radar blip travelling at incredible speed. Kurashima's instruments go haywire and force him to abort but Maki carries on and finds that the UFO is a glowing red light which envelopes his plane. He finds himself seeming to float in some sort of glowing tunnel where he can see a giant humanoid. (The tunnel effect is, by coincidence, basically the same as that used in the title sequence of Doctor Who!)

Maki's Eagle explodes and he is believed dead, but he later stumbles into a roadside diner, tattered and bruised but without any serious injuries, and with no idea how he survived.

Once into civvy street, Maki's life settles down until a passenger on one of his flights (who has been secretly following and photographing him) pulls a gun and forces him to divert to a nearby highway, which has been specially closed by the military in order for his plane to land. He is then driven to a top secret military base where he is interrogated about what really happened on that mysterious flight. Back at the airport, Keimu waits for his daddy with Maki's wife Yoko (Nae Yuki) and their joy when his plane lands turns to dismay when they find that the pilot is not Maki but Kurashima, accompanied by two soldiers. Kurashima can't tell them anything about where Maki is, but he can at least confirm that he is alive.

That female passenger who pulled a gun and is now interrogating Maki is a military scientist named Sara Mizuhara (Kyoko Toyama: An Obsession) who works for an anti-terrorist organisation called the BCST. She explains that a similar (but blue) light was reported in the seabed location of a downed UFO a few weeks earlier and had similarly affected the minisub pilot who was sent to investigate it: the sub was destroyed but he somehow survived. Archived security camera footage shows this poor soul, Takafumi Udo (Kenya Osumi), in a cell where he can be seen to be gradually mutating into some sort of reptilian beast. He later escaped, drawing to himself and absorbing hundreds of lizards which enabled him to grow and mutate, eventually blasting out of the base. We actually saw this in a dimly lit prologue, with Sara unable to fire at the monster as Udo's human face reappears briefly.

With the monster (codenamed 'The One', and still played by Osumi inside the costume; interestingly he is actually a professional dancer) now on the loose somewhere, the military are naturally keen to contain and study Maki as his development may give them some clue about how to defeat The One. He is codenamed 'The Next' - which explains the movie's apparently ungrammatical title - and held in a fortified underground cell. When The One comes calling, apparently attracted by some sort of psychic link with The Next, something takes over Maki and he is able to break out of his cell, then grows to about twenty feet tall and mutates into some sort of silver-clad alien being.

It's a measure of the maturity of the film-makers that we are nearly halfway through the film before we get our first sight of Ultraman (and that the character is never referred to by that name until right at the end of the film, when a news reporter comes up with it).

The two large (but interestingly, not giant) aliens fight as Sara looks on, incredulous. At one point, she is about to be thrown aside by The One's lengthy, powerful tail but The Next throws himself in the way. Eventually The One smashes its way out of the building, as a light on The Next's chest starts to flash and he collapses into a heap, morphing and shrinking back into the form of Maki.

There are further revelations between this point and the climactic return match, but they mostly concern the people, not the monsters. We never find out what The One and The Next actually are, or where they come from, or what sort of hold they may have over their respective hosts. We do later see Udo once again in human form, further cementing the similarities between the two aliens, although the alien-human connection seems to be different with Udo/The One. The implication is that two warring entities have come to Earth and are continuing an existing fight, with humanity now caught up in the middle. This gives the film a strong narrative thread which stands alone without requiring any foreknowledge of Ultraman's past.

Where the movie really scores is in exploring the way that all this impacts on the lives of Maki, Sara and everyone else who is directly or peripherally involved, which I have always held to be a large part of what good science fiction is about. Take your science fictional premise - whether it's aliens or artificial intelligence or time travel or nanotechnology or whatever - and show how that would affect people. (The new Doctor Who does this terrifically too. For the first time, we get to see how the sudden 'disappearance' of the Doctor's companion affects those closest to her.) We learn more about Sara and discover why she didn't kill Udo/The One when she had the chance, and there is redemption for Kurashima who feels guilty over his collusion with his friend's kidnappers. There are some great minor characters too, including the boss of the airport where Maki works and a junior military officer who challenges Sara over her actions which have resulted in the deaths of some of his men. When did you last see a monster movie where somebody was actually bothered that a squad of miltary grunts had been killed by the beastie?

Although the 'terminally ill son' subplot gets a wee bit soap opera-esque at times, it gives the character of Maki greater depth and clearly defined motivation, both in seeking normality and in resolving to accept the responsibility thrust on him to aid the military organisation which kidnapped him. But more than this we get some real insight into what it might be like to actually be Ultraman's host - a concept which of course implies that Ultraman himself is a form of parasite. Maki doesn't know that he is (or could be) the defender of mankind against alien attack. All he knows is that under certain circumstances he loses consciousness and/or control and something alien (in every sense) takes him over for its own ends. We do later see Ultraman save a mother and child from a collapsing building, but we are left to make up our own minds whether this is the action of a sympathetic human father (Maki is the first ever Ultraman host to have a wife and kid) or a philanthropic alien - or some melding of the two.

Ultraman/The Next may be a superhero (he isn't really one in this movie, except in the broadest possible sense, but he could become one) but Maki isn't any sort of hero at all, super or otherwise. He's just some poor guy who is being used by something beyond his, or anybody's, understanding - and also being used by the military. The great irony lies in the fact that Maki was a military man himself, a terrific Eagle pilot, but he tried to escape the responsibilities of that life, only to have something bigger and worse thrust upon him (and by proxy, upon his family) against his will. It's his acceptance of this, but only on his own terms as much as he can (for example, he briefly escapes his captors when he hears that his son is in hospital) which makes him an ersatz hero, not his uncontrollable ability to grow to 50 metres high and fire energy blasts from his forearms.

The difference between this version and previous incarnations is summed up perfectly in a line that a shaken, confused, possibly even terrified Maki says after that first big fight with The One: "I became a monster." In fact there are numerous dialogue references to Maki's new giant alter ego as a 'monster' - and none as a 'hero'.

And yes, Ultraman does grow to his traditional giant size before the final battle, to match the now-similarly enormous The One, although there is an unusual scene at one stage where the good guy, even at 20 feet or so, is dwarfed by the newly grown monster, something that has rarely if ever been seen before.

As well as a script which brings new depth and breadth to both plot and characterisation, Ultraman: The Next also benefits from good special effects, including a CGI Ultraman for the climactic flying sequences (these were directed by Ichiroh Itano whose anime credits include Urusei Yasura, Macross and Megazone 23). Those who consider anything less than state-of-the-Hollywood-art effects to be 'cheap' will no doubt bring their prejudices to bear and still mock, but this movie is a huge step up from 1970s/1980s series that many people in the West might recall. There are still limitations in the suitmation; for example The One has a quite long but completely rigid neck - the actor's head is between the costume's shoulders - which means that the monster often tends to not look at where it is going or what it is doing. This is a shame because the head itself is an excellent animatronic effect with moving jaw and eyes. If a flexible neck couldn't be achieved on the budget available, then the neck should have been shortened to almost nothing. It's a design problem rather than a construction one.

On the whole, however, The One is a terrific monster. There is a marvellous sequence towards the end of the film when he draws to himself, and absorbs, hundreds of crows. As with the lizards (and rats in another sequence) this causes him to grow and mutate, in this case sprouting a massive pair of wings in preparation for the climactic aerial showdown with The Next. In striking a heraldic pose, and in another shot when he bursts out of the ground, The One reminded me of the recent Thai monster flick Garuda, though this is probably just coincidence. The removal/destruction of these wings, incidentally, is arguably the highlight of the film, a pair of successive images which form a real 'double wow' moment.

Ultraman's own costume is fantastic. It looks enough like the (many) previous incarnations to be recognisable but has been given a 21st century make-over, resembling a suit of body armour or an android body. As mentioned above, I subscribe to the theory that what we see as a 'costume' is actually the being himself, and this stylish, effective design plays to that idea much more than the old silver ski-suits with their baggy wrinkles at hips and shoulders ever did. We do, incidentally, finally get to see the iconic crossed-arms pose but like so much else here a rationale has been found for this. It's a way for the character to steady his forearms and blast off his energy bolts accurately. He doesn't just stand like that because That's What Ultraman Does and the fanboys expect it. Similarly, the flashing light on the character's chest, which has always previously been an entirely gratuitous 'ticking clock' to add tension (and sometimes to keep effects sequences to an affordable length!) is finally given a genuine reason to exist in this movie.

Another interesting point of note is that there is very little miniature work on show. Two of the three main Ultraman-vs-monster fights (monster-vs-monster?) actually take place indoors and the third is mostly green-screened (very effectively, using low-angled shots) against real buildings, before shifting up into the sky. The camera is frequently positioned at human eye-level, looking up at the two giants, which works wonders. There is a tendency for effects unit directors on kaiju eiga to place their camera at the eye-level of their protagonists which often hinders the suspension of disbelief required to accept that these are giant beings, not just two men in costumes. Similarly, many effects directors on these pictures don't bother to overcrank the camera during action shots, which is essential to slow down the movement slightly and give these giant beings weight; it's done properly here. Ultraman: The Next is a film made by people who have looked at current and previous productions within this genre and learned from them, without ditching what made them great in the first place.

This is director Kazuya Konaka’s fourth Ultraman movie, following Ultraman Zearth 2, Ultraman Tiga and Ultraman Dyna and Ultraman Gaia: The Battle in Hyperspace (which was actually a three-way team-up between Messrs Gaia, Tiga and Dyna). He also directed the thoughtful sci-fi picture Dimension Travellers and ghost story Shigatsu Kaidan. Keiichi Hasegawa’s other scriptwork includes the aforementioned Gaia/Tiga/Dyna picture, various episodes of the Ultraman Tiga TV series and the Godzilla kaiju-fest GMK: All Monsters Attack. The cinematography is very dark but that is more likely a problem with the timecoded DVD-R screener that I watched rather than the work of DP Shinichi Ooka. Yuichi Kikuchi (GMK: All Monsters Attack, Godzilla X Mechagodzilla) is credited as special effects director.

I would love to see more Ultraman like this, although by all accounts Ultraman Max restores such temporarily absent elements as the character’s origins in Galaxy M-78 (and slightly baggy silver ski-suits). Maybe production company Tsuburuya have decided that pleasing the hardcore fans is the way to go. But given how many times the character has been reinvented over the years, I would like to think that there is sufficient room for both sorts of Ultraman.

Being picky, my biggest problem with the film is the music. I recall a meeting with the UK Sci-Fi Channel in the mid-1990s, trying to persuade them to show Ultraman and the biggest stumbling block (apart from the fact that the channel was only prepared to pay peanuts) was the martial, orchestral music, which the channel said would need to be replaced with something more techno. Unfortunately (or possibly fortunately) nothing ever came of that meeting. In this film, the music (credited to Tak Matsumoto aka 'B'z') is rockier and generally very good but unfortunately his 'Theme from Ultraman' which plays whenever the F-15s appear on screen (and that’s quite often during the first 20 minutes or so) is a stirring pastiche of the Top Gun theme which rapidly becomes as irritating as it is derivative.

That’s a shame, but not nearly enough to spoil a corking movie, and most of the other music is great. (The closing credits play under an English language song by Matsumoto's group TMG called 'Never Good-bye', written by bassist Jack Blades, formerly with Night Ranger and Damn Yankees, and sung by Eric Martin from Mr Big - who must be a kaiju fan because his 2003 solo album was called Destroy All Monsters.)

I can't claim complete familiarity with every incarnation of Ultraman - God knows there have been enough of them - but I really did enjoy Ultraman: The Next hugely. It works not just as a new version of a cinematic/televisual icon, and not just as a terrific sci-fi romp, but as one of the new breed of more sensible kaiju eiga. If you can accept the basics, not least that a fifty-metre tall humanoid could exist and move freely without collapsing under his own weight because of the vastly increased size-to-mass ratio, then what you will find here is a well-written, well-made, exciting, thought-provoking science fiction adventure which explores its premise and builds to a rip-roaring finale.

It's not your parents' Ultraman.

MJS rating: A

Yak Wat Jang wu Jumbo A

Director: various, cobbled together by someone on a Friday afternoon
Writer: as above
Producer: as above
Cast: Naoki Tachibana and a bunch of guys in rubber suits
Year of release: difficult to tell, probably late 1990s
Country: Thailand/Japan
Reviewed from: Thai VCD

When I invested in a VCD of this Thai film (aka Yak Wat Jang Vs Jumborg Ace, Yuk Wud Jaeng vs Jumbo A and many other varient spellings) I expected it to be an undubbed, slightly different edit of the Tsuburaya-produced, Thai/Japanese co-production which I had previously reviewed in its Italian incarnation as Mars Men. In fact, this is an almost entirely different film, sharing probably no more than 20 minutes out of its 80-minute running time.

What we have here is a mishmash of footage from the original Yak Wat Jang Vs Jumborg Ace, footage from the Jumborg Ace/Jumbo A television series (which ran for 50 episodes from 17th January to 29th December 1973), and newly shot footage. It is edited together so haphazardly, with characters appearing and disappearing at random, that it’s debatable whether there is in fact supposed to be a single narrative thread here or whether it’s just a compilation of Jumborg Ace’s greatest fights. I’ll try and sum up what happens, but be warned, this is a lo-o-o-ong summary!

We open on Earth with Dr Suriya and his wife Nipha from the Protective Attack Team exploring a Thai temple using their geiger counter. They don’t find anything but do stop to look at a giant statue of Yak Wat Jang. An alien then sends a bunch of cyborg-monsters down to earth and from five minutes in we have unfettered, unexplained, massive destruction of property by giant kaiju, which is frankly what we’re paying to see here.

In their control centre are a team of five people in silver suits who are possibly meant to be a new incarnation of the PAT. There’s a couple, a young boy (with a shaved head) and two extremely camp and unfunny comic relief characters, one with dark skin and red hair, the other very tall.

Cut to golden-haired Jump Killer and spiky-shouldered Antigone, two evil Martian types in their flying saucer who were the principal villains in Mars Men (one difference is that Jump Killer is female here). They watch some TV footage of Thailand.

A Cessna light aircraft is caught up in the big kaiju destruction and goes spinning into a blob of green light. When the pilot Naoki Tachibana (played by... Naoki Tachibana!) comes to, he is in a misty limbo, being addressed by an Ultraman-style character who shows him the mighty cyborg Jumbo A which can turn into his plane. Then he’s suddenly back in his plane so he tries transforming.

The alien we saw earlier sends a robot double of Jumbo A against our hero so we get to see the giant cyborg fight himself, or at least a version of himself with detachable flying forearms. He defeats the evil doppelganger by turning into an animated green streak which decapitates it.

Then we get the creation sequence of Jumborg Nine. The Ultraman-style character is seen again, this time giving Naoki the power to create a giant, world-saving cyborg out of, not a Cessna, but a Mini! The Italian Job was never like this... We then get a brief shot of the two Jumborgs fighting each other.

Jumborg/Jumbo Nine (wasn’t there a pop hit called ‘Jumbo Number Nine?’ oh, please yourselves) fights the alien we saw earlier (who is now giant) and a goofy muppet monster. He blasts the monster’s head and arms off with a fireball and stabs the alien with a sword from a slot in his chest; the alien collapses and spurts blood from his mouth.

Back in the New PAT’s control centre (the location of which is never hinted at), a strange, dark brown idol of an old man frightens the two camp characters, though it’s not clear why. This is the same character who battled Yak Wat Jang at the end of the Thai demon’s first cinematic appearance, Tah Tien, although I still don’t know who he is. Outside, there are a couple more Jumbo vs monster fights.

At 28 minutes in, we get the first bit of footage recognisable from Mars Men, as Dr Suriya and Nipha put on silver protection suits and helmets - complete with face-plates which steam up as the poor actors try and breathe - and explore some caves. There they spot Antigone fighting a three-headed dragon (not Ghidorah or even a rip-off of same) with his glowing sword - footage which was missing from Mars Men, possibly wisely given the awful dragon costume. Antigone takes from the cave wall a massive crystal, the solar eclipse diamond, which causes uncontrolled extreme weather conditions to suddenly hit the planet.

As a giant Antigone trashes the city, the boy and two camp blokes from the New PAT send the old man idol to become giant size and fight him, with all the traditional collateral damage that ensues.

Elsewhere in the city, the appearance of the Martians’ flying saucer causes stock footage panic. The Mini that can turn into Jumbo Nine (the Jum-Car or Jum-Z) stops and out get Naoki and Lin, the little kid from the original PAT who is (I think) Nipha’s little brother. A white-wigged woman dressed in black beams down from the saucer and says something to the crowd, before turning into the giant Jump Killer and trashing nearby buildings. Back in the control centre, the five members of the New PAT and the old man idol watch this happening.

Now we’re 47 minutes in, more than halfway through, and we get another bit of footage from the original film, as PAT aircraft blast at a giant laser which Jump Killer has set up on the Moon, using the solar eclipse diamond, to blast Earth. One of the craft crashes. At the old control centre, Naoki dashes off to his Cessna to create Jumbo A and other members of the team blast off in the, um, aircraft which we’ve just seen them piloting to the Moon. Hmm...

In the New PAT control centre, a doll of Yak Wat Jang which we saw earlier being waved about is made life-size somehow, then becomes giant and flies off, but this is new footage, vastly inferior to the creation scene in Mars Men (imagine - something actually being inferior to Mars Men!). Meanwhile, Jumbo A straps himself onto a space rocket to launch himself at the Moon, where he proceeds to fight Jump Killer and Antigone.

The second disc kicks off, 53 minutes in, with footage from the original movie of Yak Wat Jang and Jumbo A fighting each other on the Moon before realising their mistake and teaming up to battle Jump Killer and Antigone, plus a subplot of one of the PAT craft coming to rescue the downed ship. One thing that is very noticeable is that throughout the fights the giants never shut up. It seems you can never have just action, the character must always be saying something like, “Ah, Jumbo A! I will defeat you! You are no match for me! And then I will defeat Yak Wat Jang too! Hahahahaha!” and, “No, you will never defeat me! For I am Jumbo A!” etc.

After our two heroes defeat Antigone, Yak Wat Jang wanders off into a cloud of purple smoke, leaving Jumbo A to fight Jump Killer.

Next up is the most extraordinary scene of all, lifted from the old TV series. Jump Killer is back on Earth and is human-sized (continuity be damned!). She and three of her anonymous alien goons fight Naoki, who gets out of his Mini but obviously doesn’t think to turn it into Jumbo Nine and just squash her. Captured, he is strung up from a scaffold by his feet, while other members of the old PAT, even little Lin, are strapped up around him - crucified! Even by the outré standards of this ‘film’, this is an incredible scene, made all the more memorable by the soundtrack which eschews the normal vocal, orchestral pomposity (“Yak! Yak! Yak! Yak Wat Jang!”) for a lone trumpet. This plaintive music gives the scene the air of a spaghetti western, an idea exacerbated by numerous atmospheric shots of crows perched on the scaffolds and crucifixes. Sadly this can’t last long, as the PAT ship returns from the Moon, causing Jump Killer to grow giant and try to swat it out of the sky.

This is followed by inexplicable footage of Jump Killer on Mars looking at the graves of Antigone and two other Martians, Betagone and Satangone.

Jumbo A appears and fights her, then Jumbo Nine appears and fights her, but not both together because these are from two separate episodes it seems. She counters by transforming into a super-scary version of herself, complete with horns. Jumbo Nine grabs an enormous shard of crystal and rams it straight through Jump Killer’s stomach, causing an eruption of green blood and killing her.

Then, because continuity is for wimps, Jump Killer is fine and is setting two monsters against Jumbo A, the two who fought him on the Moon in Mars Men but we now seem to be on Earth (possibly, some of the time) because there is vegetation on the set. Defeated, Jumbo A lies on the floor but - hooray! - here comes Yak Wat Jang out of his cloud of smoke to kick Jump Killer’s arse! (All this with occasional cutaways to the New PAT team in their control centre, following the action on video screens.)

Jumbo A recovers and helps Yak Wat Jang defeat the monsters but Jump Killer disappears. The smoky atmosphere clears and the sun shines through on our planet. Huzzah!

But the solar eclipse diamond-powered laser is still on the Moon, blasting at Earth and causing millions of dollars of stock footage destruction. Jump Killer and Antigone appear on the Moon in their flying saucer but Yak Wat Jang and Jumbo A turn up to fight them, which they do by deflecting the laser onto each villain in turn, causing them to catch fire and then explode. Our two giant heroes destroy the laser, take the diamond, thank each other and fly back home to Earth.

Well, what the bloody hell was all that about? Here’s what I can determine: there are two Protective Attack Teams, the old 1970s lot which included Dr Suriya, Nipha and Lin and had access to the Jum-Cessna and the Jum-Car, and a 1990s version with two camp, irritating twats. Jump Killer is very much the main villain, or rather villainess, and has at least two other forms of herself into which she can transform. When I originally posted my Mars Men review I had Jump Killer and Antigone (aka Anchigoné) mixed up but I have now corrected this. Jumbo A, who was described in Mars Men as ‘il gigante robot Americano’ is very definitely Japanese here as he can be heard saying “Arigato” and “Sayonara” at the end. That’s about it.

Although the main plot of the original film - Antigone’s theft of the diamond from Earth and its use in a giant Moon-based laser - is still just about visible, it is mixed up with way too much footage from the TV series to make any sense. Characters die hideously and then are fine (and somewhere else) a moment later. And the inserted footage of the crappy new version of PAT is just horrible, especially their two gibbering ‘comic relief’ characters.

Actor Naoki Tachibana was also in a TV series called Kagestar and allegedly was imprisoned for murder in 1985! There are no on-screen credits on this movie.

I’m not fond of recommending bootlegs, but I have to say that if you only want one film of a giant Ultraman-esque cyborg hero teaming up with an enormous living Thai stone idol to defeat giant Martians - and it’s difficult to see who would want two - then you’re better off getting Mars Men, even with its Italian dubbing. I can also recommend the two other Tsuburaya-produced Thai kaiju movies Hanuman vs 7 Ultraman and Hanuman vs 5 Kamen Rider. This VCD on the Tiga label is only of interest as a sort of Jumborg Ace sampler.

MJS rating: D

Night Falcon

Director: Ram Thanadpojanamart
Writer: Ram Thanadpojanamart (possibly)
Producer: Ram Thanadpojanamart (probably)
Cast: Peter Louis Mioxy, Areesuang Nilwan, Nukrob Tripoh
Country: Thailand
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: Thai VCD

I feel sorry for Ram Thanadpojanamart. He made a storming, expensive-looking superhero film which was very obviously aimed at the international market. It’s not as good as the best that Hollywood can offer, but it’s a lot better than its worst. And yet Night Falcon seems to be virtually unknown outside Thailand. I can find one French language review on the web and that’s it. The film isn’t even listed on the Inaccurate Movie Database and you would expect something this flashy to be there. It looks like Night Falcon might have been a bomb, especially as Thanadpojanamart does not appear to have worked on anything else since.

Peter Louis Mioxy (Iron Ladies 2) plays the eponymous superhero, clad in a stylish red and black leather/kevlar outfit with a pointy, slightly birdlike mask. He has no superpowers, just top-of-the-range strength, agility and fighting skills. But the real star of the film is Areesuang Nilwan (La Fe’lina, Kiss) who plays a young woman named (I think) Mae.

Driving home one night with her husband/boyfriend, Mae’s car is forced off the road when she runs into a battle between Night Falcon and local drugs baron Mr White (the characters are all helpfully introduced with English captions in this surprisingly unsubtitled film). Mae’s boyfriend is killed and she blames the kevlar-clad vigilante that she saw at the scene, who left a red, falcon-shaped throwing star that she keeps as a reminder of the event. She trains herself up in martial arts, determined to track the costumed man down and take her revenge.

Mae has two friends who we will call Peter and Sarah because I don’t know their real names. They are close but we never see a kiss so my guess is that they’re brother and sister. I don’t know how Mae knows them or whether she knew them before encountering Night Falcon - maybe that’s in the dialogue that I can’t understand - but I do know that Peter actually is Night Falcon. I don’t think Sarah knows this and I’m almost certain that Peter has no idea that Mae was the girl who was peripherally involved in his battle with White (which ended when White’s face got accidentally hit with acid that spilled from a large barrel).

Mae and Sarah are sparring beside a public swimming pool when a drugged up guy wanders into the building and starts knocking people around. They do their best to restrain him but he pulls a knife and slashes Sarah’s arm. Fortunately Peter turns up and kicks the guy into the pool, then Peter and Mae take Sarah to the hospital.

By this time we have been introduced to our villain, Iron Mask, who wears a full-cranium mask and and 1920s-style greatcoat, both shiny silver (which is kind of odd because iron is a dull grey in colour - steel mask would have been a better name). He has a squad of anonymous masked goons and three equally image-conscious sidekicks: Nikolai is a big guy with a robotic left arm and semi-robotic head, a stock cyborg strongman as found in everything from Fudoh: The New Generation to Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn; Kojiro is a lean guy with a long ponytail, a deadly samurai sword and a painted face that makes him look like the fifth member of Kiss; Black Swan is Iron Mask’s moll, a whip-cracking redhead dominatrix pricktease sex-kitten with metal eyebrows and a leather bustier designed like a skull. These four are seen cracking down hard on a rival gang, establishing Iron Mask as the local Mr Big.

As well as his costume, Peter/Night Falcon has a high-tech computer at his secret base; one of those futuristic ones with a multiscreen interface that hangs in the air, requiring him to make dramatic sweeping gestures to do things and allowing us to see his face while he’s doing it. Basically it’s a rip-off of Minority Report, or possibly a rip-off of the Currys TV ads that ripped off Minority Report.

Mae is on her motorbike when she spots a suspicious lorry and follows it to find Kojiro overseeing some sort of drug-smuggling malarkey. Then Night Falcon turns up and fights Kojiro and Nikolai, watched by Iron Mask and Black Swan. Our hero takes a serious wound from Kojiro’s sword but he makes it into his high-tech car and drives off, followed by Mae on her bike.

At Night Falcon’s base, some sort of large warehouse-type building I think (we never get a good look at the exterior), Mae follows a trail of blood, slipping in through a closing door. When she finds Night Falcon in the corridor, she beats him up, determined to avenge her boyfriend but Peter removes his mask and reveals himself. Unfortunately, Iron Mask and his gang have followed Mae and confront them, the supervillain removing his own mask to reveal - good grief, it’s you - that he is acid-marked Mr White. At this, Mae realises that it was White, not Night Falcon, who shot her boyfriend; White’s distinctive pistol, now pointing at her, confirms this.

Peter/Night Falcon and Mae have a big set-to with Kojiro and Nikolai, escaping just before the building blows up (two of Iron Mask’s goons stand in front of Night Falcon’s computer, evidently confused by the digital countdown hanging in mid-air just underneath a big flashing caption that says ‘Red Alert’; possibly they can’t read English...). Anyway, Mae bundles Peter into his high-tech car which has its own mini-computer that guides them to somewhere which I initially thought was the hospital but is actually a second base (which we also don’t get a good look at). Here we meet a bespectacled young scientist - let’s call him Jeff - who is basically Deacon Frost to Night Falcon’s Blade. I think.

With Peter critically ill, Jeff tells Mae about the set-up and shows her a room where the Night Falcon costume and weapons are kept. This is a rather groovy bit of production design with a giant Night Falcon logo cut in the back wall, behind which are extremely long wind-chimes creating a slightly zen ambience.

And what of Sarah? She is kidnapped by Iron Mask and strung up by her wrists in a warehouse somewhere. The villain calls Sarah’s cellphone, Mae answers and realises it is up to her to rescue her friend. Fortunately Jeff is a dab-hand with a needle and a soldering gun and promptly runs up an outfit that resembles Peter’s but fits Mae’s hot body with satisfying snugness. Mae is now... Falcon Girl!

Mae/Falcon Girl tracks down the place where Sarah is being held and rescues her but then Iron Mask, Black Swan and Kojiro turn up. Fortunately Peter is back to full fitness and he arrives in the nick of time, all costumed up, to even the odds. (It’s a good job that Nikolai is on annual leave, or whatever.) Kojiro gets his arse kicked and Black Swan runs away but Iron Mask proves a formidable opponent, topping himself up at one point with a needle of his own drug (which we follow in extreme close-up through his CGI veins to his CGI heart).

Things get knocked over, flames leap around and it comes down to Night Falcon and Falcon Girl versus Iron Mask while Sarah looks on helplessly from beyond a flame barrier which doesn’t look insurmountable but we have to assume, is. Then, would you believe it, the silver-clad arch-villain grabs hold of a barrel of acid which tips up, depositing more of it on his face and blinding him. How unlucky is that? The two heroes give him a good kick as he flails around ineffectually then Night Falcon throws Falcon Girl bodily over the flames to the safety of Sarah’s arms, courageously sacrificing himself.


The building then blows up, although apparently not in the bit where Sarah and Mae are crouching.

There are two epilogues. The first sees Black Swan, now apparently defacto leader of the gang, with Kojiro and - where were you when we needed you, mister? - Nikolai, plus a couple of unidentified knife-wielding rogues. There are two bodies on trolleys, swathed in bandages. One of them opens its eyes - but which one is it? That’s intriguing but I didn’t fully understand it. What I did understand was the second epilogue which shows us that Jeff has now made a costume for Sarah - Falcon Woman, no less - so that she and Mae can take up the mantle of her brother. The final shot is the two women standing moodily atop a tall building, matching our initial view of Night Falcon at the start of the movie.

There is some behind-the-scenes footage under the end credits and the VCD finishes with two videos for songs from the soundtrack (one of which seems to actually be called ‘Night Falcon’). These consist entirely of clips from the film and include several plot twists so it’s a good job they’re at the end of disc 2, not the start of disc 1. (Before the film are trailers for Gra-hung, Lizard Woman and another supernatural horror movie that I could not identify, plus an advert for Re-teen soap!)

I’ve got to say: I enjoyed Night Falcon a lot. It’s a good, solid, unpretentious superhero movie, not bogged down by adaptation from a comic-book. Much as I enjoy the likes of Batman, Spider-Man, Superman et al, those are a different sort of film - and not just because of the A-list stars and enormous effects budgets. Night Falcon reminds me of Krrish in the way that it simply takes the concept of a costumed superhero, accepts it and runs with it, using the story as a framework on which to hang character development and action scenes. Any tale where the main protagonist leads a double life naturally leads to questions of identity and trust; that’s what Night Falcon does, and does well.

Billed on its cover (in English) as ‘the new ultimate Thai action hero on digi-film’, the movie has its problems although I’m always hesitant about discussing the script quality of any film where I can’t understand a word they’re saying. The first half is somewhat fragmentary with a series of apparently unconnected scenes showing the three friends in various situations or cutting away to other material such as news reports. Some of these seem designed to simply showcase flashy moves; for example a sequence in a skate park with lots of shots of Thai kids on skateboards and BMX bikes. We see Mae chatted up by a cocky guy in a pink shirt (toting a big ghetto blaster and an even bigger afro!), then Sarah and Peter arrive.

But did we really need so many cool shots of skateboarders jumping hither and thither? At 95 minutes, the film could lose a few minutes of this footage without coming to harm. There is also an all-pervading pop soundtrack, much of it just endless techno beats, which gets a tad irritating at times.
But mitigating this are sympathetic leads, delightfully over-the-top villains and a bunch of exciting fights. These are shot flashily - Ram Thanadpojanamart loves using his ‘digi-film’ to blur movement - and there are a lot of fast edits. We’re not watching a Tony Jaa film here, though I’ve no doubt that the actors are all accomplished martial artists who could kick my white arse. Thanadpojanamart has a nice eye for composition and frequently sets up the characters in poses which manage to look cool without looking silly.

Above all, what impressed me was the story. Granted, the whole drugs thing disappears fairly quickly (I assume that White/Iron Mask’s imported smack was responsible for the zombified knife-kid at the swimming pool) but in terms of character development through plot development I really can’t fault this. Even without understanding a word of dialogue I could understand motivations and actions (eventually) and in fact there are lengthy sequences with little or no dialogue.

A few subtitles and an international distributor could have made Night Falcon a hit, I’m sure and I’m intrigued about why the movie seems to have gone nowhere. It’s stylish, laden with neat-looking production design, rarely drags and delivers both plot and action. Maybe it will be rediscovered one day.

The film’s terrific website has now closed but fortunately most of the pages are archived at Thai Toku, a groovy Thai superhero website. The text is all in Thai but there are lots of great photos. The cast also includes Nukrob Tripoh, Prapimpom Kanjinda, Pinpetch Goonshorn, Taweesuk Suwanpist and Natawoot Chaijaroen although I don’t know who plays which character.

MJS rating: A-