Mask of Zeguy

Mask of Zeguy – 1993 – Japan

I’ve had an irrational desire to watch Mask of Zeguy for years. There is no good reason for this. I knew it would be crappy and not make any sense, and I was right. But sometimes, a person gets an idea in their head and can’t get it out. To me, Mask of Zeguy seemed like the quintessential dumb anime OVA, and I had to know how true that was.

In short, it was completely true. Mask of Zeguy is such a pastiche of other anime that it could almost pass as a parody. A high-school girl gets warped into a magical world. She is searching for her lost friend, and she might also be an immortal priestess of an ancient religion. Isn’t this also the plot of Fushigi Yugi (1995)?

The Craft

The Craft – 1996 – United States

Hear me out: The Craft (1996) and Hackers (1995) are almost the same movie. Both are about teenagers with powerful but dangerous abilities that adults don’t understand. The characters are cool, fashionable outcasts that come from troubled homes. Each movie is targeted at a specific teen subculture (goths and nerds), and both seem to be written by people highly familiar with those groups.

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell – 1995 – Japan

Sometimes, all a movie needs is a really silly title. Troma made a whole business out of movies like Surf Nazis Must Die and A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell. Although Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell wasn’t released by Troma, it certainly benefits from its Tromatic name.

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell is an extremely low-budget horror movie from Japan about a bodybuilder, a paranormal investigator, and a psychic as they explore a haunted house. It builds slowly, and there are a few genuinely spooky moments. A scene of a ghostly hand reaching from a mirror is memorable. However, at some point, the movie flips a switch and transforms into a comedy with lots of wacky, extreme gore. For the last 30 minutes, the bodybuilder main character smashes an unkillable corpse into bloody pieces using an assortment of weightlifting equipment.

Audition

Audition – 1999 – Japan

I tried watching Audition a long time ago but quit because it was boring. Now, 20 years later, I kind of love it. Maybe I’m more mature now, or maybe I’m just more boring.

The premise of Audition is uncomfortable, but that’s probably the point. After his wife dies, a lonely television producer tries to meet women by organizing a fake audition for a TV show. He falls in love with a quiet woman named Asami who is much younger than him. It turns out that Asami is totally deranged, and she tortures and mutilates the television producer in a really hard to watch scene.

Predator 2

Predator 2 – 1990 – United States

Predator (1987) is a movie that does more with less. The whole thing is about a few guys fighting an alien in the jungle. There is hardly any plot or dialogue. For an action movie, there isn’t even that much action. Predator 2 is basically the opposite. It has more plot than it probably needs, and the outrageous action setpieces come nonstop. The movie opens with a massive shootout with dozens of people. There is smoke and fire everywhere. Several cars gets shot to pieces. Dudes are reloading machine guns while snorting fistfuls of coke. This sets the tone for everything that follows.

Hackers

Hackers – 1995 – United States

Hackers might not be a realistic movie about hacking, but it’s probably more realistic than almost any other movie about hacking, and that should count for something. It authentically depicts what nerds in the ‘90s thought being a hacker was like. Everyone rollerblades everywhere. They drink Jolt cola and have cool names like Acid Burn and Crash Override. Some of the hacker jargon seems pretty legit too.

Fallen Angels

Fallen Angels – 1995 – Hong Kong

The trailer for this movie makes it look like one of those hard-boiled Hong Kong hitman movies. It isn’t really though. One of the main characters is a hitman, but the story of Fallen Angels is more about how the hitman’s handler has an unrequited romantic obsession with him. Also, the movie might sort of be a comedy.

Blade

Blade – 1998 – United States

This movie opens with a bunch of vampires at a rave. Sprinklers in the ceiling spray blood all over the crowd. Then Blade busts in and kills everyone. The rest of the movie never quite reaches this height again.

Who is Blade? He is a half-vampire on a vampire-killing crusade. He wears a trench coat and sunglasses, and he has a goofy anime-like haircut. He kills vampires with swords, boomerangs, guns, and martial arts. He has a cool muscle car and a motorcycle. He barely talks, and he is constantly battling his vampire instincts. Also, I should mention, he is played by Wesley Snipes. In other words, Blade is just about as cool as a movie hero could be in 1998.

Screamers

Screamers – 1995 – United States

Starting in the 1970s, sci-fi seems to take a pessimistic view of the future. Obviously, there are lots of causes for that: nuclear escalation, climate change, ubiquitous surveillance. This is one reason why sci-fi author Philip K. Dick is so ahead of his time. The stories he wrote in the ‘50s and ‘60s are just as bleak and paranoid as anything since. Movie adaptations of his work include Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), and Minority Report (2002).

Screamers, based on a 1953 Philip K. Dick story, is oppressively pessimistic in the best way. It is set on a war-torn planet where an endless conflict between a corporation and a labor union has turned the world into a wasteland and made basket cases of the soldiers on both sides. One army defends their territory with “screamers”, insect-like killer robots covered in buzzsaws. They burrow underground and consume corpses to harvest methane gas for fuel. Now the screamers are evolving and targeting all human life on the planet.

Deadly Manor

Deadly Manor – 1990 – United States/Spain

Considering its generic title, you shouldn’t be surprised that Deadly Manor is a generic movie. The most notable thing about it is how little sense it makes.

Some young people on a camping trip stay in a seemingly abandoned mansion during a rainstorm. Except it isn’t abandoned, and it doesn’t even look abandoned, but they stay there anyway. In the yard, there is a wrecked car that has been made into a monument. There are coffins in the basement. Every wall in the house is covered with pictures of the same woman. And there is a closet full of human scalps. Why would anyone stay in this house? In those most ridiculous scene, one of the young people finds a photo album full of pictures of naked corpses. After flipping through it, he shrugs and puts it away.