| Tomoo Haraguchi is a talented
individual. Like a Japanese Tom Savini, he's both
a special effects master and a director, doing
everything from creating the sickening gore in
the abhorrent torture flick All Night Long
to making the monster suits in Shusuke
Kaneko's Gamera trilogy as well as directing
a few films himself, including the fun Sakuya:
Slayer of Demons. Mikadroid is his
directorial debut, a highly entertaining and interesting,
if flawed, low budget sci-fi/horror hybrid from
Toho's direct to video line. The film was originally
going to be about a deceased Japanese soldier
coming back from the dead as a zombie, but the
sudden headline grabbing rampage of perverted
child killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, one of whose obsessions
was horror films, stopped that project in it's
tracks. Haraguchi was forced to go back to the
drawing board and invent a new, albeit similar
project, this time involving a modified cyborg
superman instead of a zombie.
The film opens in 1945, toward
the end of World War II, showing us an underground
bunker where the Japanese army was trying to create
an army of supermen. With Japan losing the war,
however, the army orders everything destroyed.
The scientist in charge of it sets two of his
test subjects free and activates his greatest
creation, Mikadroid, a half man/half cyborg creature
made from the modified body of an Olympic athlete,
before being shot dead. Years later, a disco club
is built over the ruins of the underground bunker.
Mikadroid, however, is still alive and reactivates
one night, whereupon it begins to kill the disco
club's patrons. A young electrician and a young
woman are trapped in the club's underground garage
with the creature and with the help of the two
former test subjects, still very much alive and
both whom haven't aged a day since WWII, must
try to escape.
Mikadroid is quite well
made considering it's low budget. Tomoo Haraguchi's
direction is quite energetic, with an ample amount
of nice camerawork and some brutal murder scenes
involving the film's titular creature, most notably
one in which a girl is slashed up with the thing's
katana and then spun around, that bring Dario
Argento to mind. The special effects are by Shinji
Higuchi, one of Haraguchi's colleagues and
the genius who would give us the eye popping effects
in Kaneko's Gamera trilogy. They aren't nearly
as incredible as the special effects in those
films, but are still quite serviceable with a
nice use of pyrotechnics and a cool design for
the Mikadroid, looking something like a cross
between a 50s sci-fi robot and Daiei's Majin.
The music by Kenji Kawai
is decent. Kawai is a very interesting figure,
like Shinji
Higuchi, he's another one of a handful of
figures to go back and forth between the separate
worlds of anime and live action Japanese films,
when he's not scoring such anime as the excellent
Vampire Princess Miyu and Mamoru Oshii's
Ghost in the Shell, he's scoring such
films as Hideo Nakata's Ring
(1998).His score for Mikadroid, while
at times sounding a tad bit like a direct to video
movie soundtrack, is quite effective in parts.
The acting is decent, but nothing
to scream home about. Yoriko Douguchi is most
noticeable in the film and gives off something
of a Sigourney Weaver vibe. The only other notable
actors the film features are Masatoh
Eve and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the soon to be renowned
director would go on to make such films as Cure
and Pulse
(2001), in a small role. In terms of character
development, the film has little as it's only
73 minutes long, but Yoriko Douguchi's character
does mature somewhat as the film progresses, toward
the end she faces off against the Mikadroid and
throws a grenade at it, but other than that there
is little character development to be found, which
leads us to the film's main flaw, that the film
is too short. The characters could have been fleshed
out more and I wish the film had more scenes of
the cyborg going around killing people, as those
sequences are easily the highlight of the movie.
The origin of the titular Mikadroid could also
have been explored a bit more thoroughly. The
film's finale, in which the Mikadroid is defeated
by one of the former test subjects, also seems
like something of a cop out. Those somewhat glaring
flaws aside, Mikadroid is still an underrated
and highly fun little indie horror film, and is
definitely recommended, though the film's gory
killing scenes may turn off those only familiar
with Toho's kaiju eiga. |
(3.5/5)