ExorSister 2 (1994)

Also known as Chō-yōma densetsu Uratsuki-dōji: Hakui jigoku-hen, this is the second in a series of four horror-comedy-porn movies, starring the multi-talented darling of 90s american anime fandom Ippongi Bang as the eponymous Exorsister, a half-demon demon hunter named Sister Crow. In case you're wondering, she doesn't have any sex scenes. Anyway, ExorSister 2's plot involves an influx of immigrant vampires coming into Japan after the fall of the USSR, and a mafia plot to exploit them by selling cheap knock-off synthetic blood.

It's a very rare movie, and as far as I know, has never had a DVD release anywhere in the world. The copy I have is a .avi rip of a french VHS release from 1996, with french hardsubs and english softsubs super-imposed on top. I think watching a seedy old piece of crap like this in such a way adds something to the experience. Please understand, though, that I use the term "seedy piece of crap" as one of endearment, as I did enjoy this movie. It really seems like it was made as a labour of love for no money, and it honestly is pretty funny. It's so cheap that, along with a joke ad for an electric shaver aimed at the werewolf market, there's also a trailer for the first ExorSister movie partway through it. (The first movie seems to feature sukebans and a vampire with a penis for a nose, by the way.)

A lot of the movie revolves around very lowbrow comedy: slapstick, terrible special effects, dirty jokes, breaking the fourth wall, and so on. I think we can say that it actually breaks the second and third walls, too, as the plot wraps up via Sister Crow chasing another character, the Neon Medusa Fairy, across the set, coincidentally landing them right next to the nurse who'd been blackmailed into supplying the cheap knock-off blood. The Neon Medusa Fairy is a great character, by the way. She's a fairy with multcoloured hair that flies around in a skimpy dress, wrapped in christmas tree lights who jumps on men's backs and brainwashes them into sleeping with prostitutes. She's also a greedy backstabbing jerk and a coward, making her a great enemy/sidekick/comedy foil to Sister Crow. Plus, she stars in the only remotely entertaining one of the three sex scenes in the movie!

Yeah, there's three sex scenes, making up about a quarter of the film's length in total. Two of them are both boring and incredibly unpleasant, being demon-on-human rape scenes (one with wiggly tentacles, one without). The third is The Neon Medusa Fairy having a fun ol' time with a naked salaryman in a bathroom. It's not particularly sexy, but it's a lot better (and easier to watch) than the other two (which i actually skipped, so unappetising were they). To be honest, this would be a much better movie if it stuck to innuendo and boob/butt-flashing, eschewing the actual sex scenes and just being a particularly blue comedy.

So yeah, mostly, I liked this movie, and if you like the sound of it, look it up if you can. I think there are rips going about the internet of the first ExorSister, and possibly the fourth one too? But I don't think either of them have English subs.

Bishoujo Kamen Poitrine, Episode 1

Bishoujo Kamen Poitrine is a superhero show from 1990, created by the legendary Shotaro Ishinomori. It's a lot lighter in tone than the works for which he's usually known, though, being part of Toei's "Mystery Comedy Series." On her way to school on the first day back after the new year holidays, Yuko visits the local shrine, and by chance meets a strange old man for magic powers. For no obvious reason, the old man tells her she should fight against crime and injustice, and gives her the power to turn into the eponymous superheroine, Poitrine. Later that day, her younger brother goes to the local videogame store to buy the latest Dragonball Z game (really!), where he also hears of a local rumour about the Phantom Videogame Thief, a weird goblin-like thing dressed like Sherlock Holmes, that stuns people with a cattleprod and steals their Famicom cartridges.

Obviously, he later falls victim to that very same thief, though since he's out of the room at the time, doesn't get shocked. Somehow, this all culminates in a showdown between the Phantom Thief and Poitrine in some kind of industrial wasteland, where after a very short fight, the thief's identity is revealed, Scooby Doo-style, and everyone gets their games back.

It's a cute, silly little show, and you know I'm always going to be at least a little biased in favour of live-action Japanese action shows from the 80s and early 90s, so I definitely recommend giving it a look. Unfortunately, there's only one subbed episode available, having been released on the 1st of April, 2015, a day that will live in infamy.

On that day, a few weird old shows had their first episodes subbed as "April Fools" jokes by various groups, most notably (because they were shows I've been wanting to see for a long time) this one and the original Taiketsu Lionmaru. Oh well, hopefully someone'll pick up these shows in the future, and either way, one episode is better than nothing, which a fair few of my wishlist shows still have. And the tokusatsu subbing scene is a lot better than it was ten or even just five years ago! Luckily, though, this episode doesn't end on any kind of cliffhanger, so you can watch it on its own with no problems.

Kamen Tenshi Rosetta

Kamen Tenshi Rosetta is a thirteen episode long superhero show from 1998. It aired at 1:30am (or 25:30, as Japanese TV schedules would put it), so it's safe to say it was aimed squarely at an otaku audience. It was also subbed in that interim period in the history of fansubs, after the decline of VHS, but before the rise of Bittorrent, when fansubs were distributed on DVD-Rs and VCDs. This, coupled with the fact that western tokusatsu fandom was still very small, made getting ahold of it in 2015 slightly more difficult than usual. It centres around a teenage girl, Jin Asuka, who learns one night three important things: firstly, humanity is being preyed upon by demons called "Dueltos", her salaryman dad Kenichiro is an egyptian-themed superhero named Jin Kamen Pharoan, and the ankh charm he gave her long ago is magic and allows her to become a superhero herself, Kamen Tenshi Rosetta.

From this premise, the show spends most of its run as a typical monster-of-the-week affair, with a bit of Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque angst towards the start, as Asuka never asked for her powers or destiny and so on. It doesn't even get a main villain until the last few episodes, just individual monsters that turn up, do evil stuff and get defeated. The show's writers were obviously big fans of Sailor Moon, too, as some of the plots feel very similar to the weekly monster plots in that show. In fact, there's an episode early on that's almost the exact same premise as a Sailor Moon episode: a mysterious audition looking to cast teenage girls is actually a front for an evil monster that wants to eat the girls. Rosetta's version of the plot is a little darker, though, as rather than audition for a TV drama, it's heavily implied to be an audition for porn, or at the very least, something seedy and unwholesome.

Kamen Tenshi Rosetta is generally somewhat darker in tone than most modern Japanese superhero shows, especially ones with female leads. But don't misunderstand: it's not bogged down in gritty drama and edgy grimness, in fact, it's got a lot of quite silly humour, even right up to the final battle. It's just that it feels a little less safe, the streets seem a little dirtier, the shadows a little darker than the usual. But like I said, it's never too dark, it's never depressing, and there's always some lovably terrible Japanese comedy round the corner to lighten the mood.

The action scenes are not bad, about as good as to be expected from a late-night low budget TV show. The worst thing I can really say about them without feeling like I'm being unfair is that a lot of the fight scenes take place in dark locations, and are shot quickly and often from a bit of a distance. Obviously, this is a decision the makers made to try and hide any weaknesses in the effects and monster suits, and it doesn't look too bad when you're watching the show, but it does make it harder to take cool screenshots of the fights to put in blog posts about the show!

All in all, Kamen Tenshi Rosetta is a pretty good show. It's nothing special, and it doesn't have the knowing winks to the camera that more recent otaku-targeted TV shows have, but it's a decently entertaining superhero show with a good balance of action, drama and comedy..

Environmental Superhero Ecogainder

Ecogainder is a low-budget tokusatsu TV series, and while this usually means a weird late night show made specifically for an adult audience, in this case, it's actually an educational show aimed at kids. Ecogainder himself is an android sent from the future to educate the people of 21st century earth about preserving the environment, though he seems to focus all his efforts on one middle class Japanese family. The villains, trying to tempt this same family into wasting energy and not recycling are the Eco Crushers, Mudaana (played by AKB48's Sayaka Akimoto) and Hakais, who are working under the orders of Queen Deathgaia.

Mudaana and Hakais are the most interesting characters in the show, as the Suzuki family are just generic "everyman" types, and Ecogainder himself barely has a personality at all, beyond giving environmental advice. They're based on the old Doronbo Gang archetypes started by Yatterman and seen in a ton of shows and comics and videogames since, though they're missing a fat guy, having only the attractive woman and skinny guy parts of the trio. Hakais is a pretty good example of exactly how low the budget for this show was, as the weapon he wields is clearly just a plastic Doctor Octopus arm toy, not even modified or repainted.

What's interesting about those two is how their relationship with the Suzukis changes over the course of the series. A typical episode sees a member of the family thoughtlessly doing something that's mildly environmentally unsound, like forgetting to recycle, or leaving the TV on standby, at which point the Eco Crushers will turn up and aggressively state how great it is that the family are helping the cause of environmental destruction. Then Ecogainder shows up, and the three of them go off to the "battlefield", which is some kind of big white tent thing, and Ecogainder shoots his ecology beam and the Eco Crushers are banished away.

But over time, the Suzuki family's reaction to the Eco Crushers changes: at first, they're scared and confused when Mudaana and Hakais show up to harass them, over time, they treat the villains as a mild nuisance, and the series' big turning point is a few episodes from the end, when the kids are bored and turn the heating up specifically to summon Mudaana and Hakais so they have more people to play cards with.

I'm sure I'm not spoiling anything when I reveal that in the last episode, Mudaana and Hakais turn against Queen Deathgaia and help Ecogainder in the final battle. It's predictable, but still nice. Ecogainder is definitely no must-watch series, but it's only fourteen nine-minute episodes, so if you really need to see a cheap superhero show, this one isn't too painful. Be warned though, that the series focuses mainly on comedy and educational value, with pretty much no real action on offer.
This series is also known as Kankyou Choujin Ecogainder

Rebirth of Mothra (1996)

So, one day a big logging company finds an ancient seal, so one of their executives takes it home and gives it to his daughter as a present. Turns out, though, that this seal being in place was the only thing stopping an evil fairy called Belvera from summoning a horrible monster, so she does, and it's up to the good fairies, the Elias (not the Shobijin for some reason) to summon Mothra to save the day. Oh and that exec's family were all drifitng apart, but they bond of the shared trauma of being caught up in a battle between enormous powerful beings and remember that they all love each other. Aww.

The horrible monster in question is named Desghidorah, and like long-time Toho antagonist King Ghidora, it's a giant evil three-headed dragon, but it's black and grey instead of gold. It's not just a simple, lazy recolour, though, as Desghidorah has four legs, shorter necks and a stockier build in general, as well as having a spikier and more agressive/less regal to it. The easy thing to do here would be to assume that Desghidorah's design is simply supposed to be a Satanic-looking Ghidorah variant, but I think it could be interpreted as representing pollution and unchecked industrialism.

Desghidorah is black and grey and spiky, and its powers include breathing fire and causing the ground to explode, while Mothra is a goddess that exists to protect all life on earth, and is implied to be connected to the earth's lifeforce. In fact (and there are spoilers from this point on), when the original Mothra is killed, one of her larvae creates a cocoon for itself to transform into a new Mothra, named Mothra Leo. This scene happens in the midst of incredibly lush greenery, and is interspersed with footage of animals living peacefully in the wild. Furthermore, Belvera rides around on a mean little robotic dragon named Garu Garu, while the Elias ride on a cute tiny Mothra named Fairy Mothra.

Anyway, Rebirth of Mothra is a pretty good film. I can't say it's one of my all-time favourite kaiju movies, but it's definitely worth a watch. This is thanks in no small part to the effects: Toho were really making incredible monster effects in the late 80s through to the 90s, and this movie is no exception. The monsters, minature sets, pyrotechnics and other effects all look amazing, and it's made even more impressive by the fact that none of the monsters in this movie are humanoid or even bipedal. Despite this handicap, the battles also look great, when they could easily have ended up looking like two inanimate puppets smashing into each other.

The only part I didn't really like was the ending, where the dad of the family looks out at the devastation caused by Desghidorah and/or the logging company and vows to change his ways and help create a better world for future generations. Then Mothra Leo flies overhead and magically turns the wasteland into a vast, fertile meadow. It's all a bit sappy to be honest. But yeah, as long as you turn it off after Desghidorah gets re-sealed, Rebirth of Mothra is a great movie.
(This movie is also known as Mothra, but if you call it that, then people will think you're talking about the 1961 movie of the same name.)