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 It is the "far future" and the people of Jesus Town live in a "false utopia"
ruled by a guy named Gurjev and his "cyborg enforcer Michael." There are some
rebels that are looking for a new weapon to fight Gurjev and far from Jesus
Town a "dark force begins to stir." Hakaider, who is a "destruction rider" is
found by some rebels and Karou, a rebel, asks Hakaider to join their fight.
Gurjev decides he needs to defeat the rebels and Hakaider "once and for all.
"Will Hakaider prove to be a long desired savior, or an unstoppable force that
will destroy all?" 1995, 77 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
I'm not going to lie to you here. Even after all these years and all these
movies that reek, I still get sucked in by slick packaging and cool sounding
names when making my informed purchases. Case in point is this stinky heap of
Japanese robot trash. How dumb was I, you ask? Well, even after I perused the
back of the DVD and casually noted that the Director's Cut of the film only ran
77 minutes, I still thought that things might be okay. See, the cover of the
DVD was pretty slick, all black and evil looking with a mysterious cyborg face
on the cover. Big red letters announcing that he probably had something to do
with a Mechanical Violator Hakaider. I didn't know at the time what Hakaider
meant and only later learned that it was Japanese for "short robot movie about
nothing, but bad special effects." It always amazes me what other cultures
develop words for. As far as the "mechanical violator" part, I was assuming
that there would be a lot cyborgs getting raped or something like that. Now, I
wasn't hoping for that and in fact felt that perhaps this dude with the black
head on the front cover might actually be some type of robot detective three
days away from retirement and currently on suspension for getting too close to
the case of all these other robots that were getting raped in Mecha City or
whatever cool robot-sounding city all this mechanical action took place in.
They other thing that made me think I was in for something special (and in
actuality I was, after a fashion) was that on the cover of the DVD, the good
folks at Tokyo Shock ("No Japanese movie too pointless and stupid to release on
a thirty dollar DVD") had denoted with pride that Mechanical Violator Hakaiderwas a pillar in something called " Keita Amemiya Collection." I had no idea
what or who Keita Amemiya was, (I thought maybe that was the name of the robot
detective who would undoubtedly bring the MVH to justice or that maybe it was
some Asian dude in the Tokyo Shock office that for some unknown reason got to
pick out a bunch of movies he liked and have them made into a DVD collection),
but I immediately knew I had to have the whole Keita Amemiya Collection to sit
along side my Wade Williams Collection ( Who the heck is that? Did he play for
the Phillies in the
70s?) and MGM's Avante Garde Collection (really, do they think I'm going to
believe that Fritz The Cat and The Handmaiden's Tale are part of the same series?). It turns out that the collection includes other
films somehow related to this Keita Amemiya and they have equally obtuse names
like Zeram (Japanese for "Kenny in rubber suit smash stuff"), so I figured that this was
all
a done deal and I was already wishing that this movie could be longer than its
77 minute running time, because I wanted to spend as much time with the Keita
Amemiya Collection as I could.  Things get off to a less-than-promising start with a group of heavily armed men
tomb raiding some building that may have been an old prison or was probably
just some warehouse in Osaka that the director's brother-in-law owned. These
guys are after some type of loot and end up in a chamber where there's this
dude all dressed in black and chained up to a chair. Now, considering the fact
that this facility has been abandoned for years, the chained up guy looks like
his been in that same position for about those same years, and that somehow he
is still alive, it would probably be a safe bet to say that a bunch of guys
whose only skill seems to be running around the old dark hallways of a deserted
building because someone told them there might be some treasure there should
probably cut and run at this point. Here's another observation about these
guys: if they're just going after some treasure in a deserted building, why
are they dressed and armed like they were a platoon of space marines? Luckily
they were though, because this chained up guy wakes up and busts out and starts
taking care of business. A big gun battle ensues with the space marines
getting wasted and this guy taking shots and showing no ill-effect. After he
takes care of all those goons, he goes over to where his motorcycle has also
been chained up, breaks it free, hops on it, and rides off into the night, all
to the strains of some really bad Terminator-style music. I thought it was really neat that his bike was chained up, you
know, so it couldn't escape or something. It was also pretty cool that it
still ran like a dream when he finally paroled it after all those years in the
clink. Must be a Harley or something. Now, this guy is riding his motorcycle
and he comes to some type of checkpoint that he just blows on by and heads
directly to this city called Jesus Town.  Okay, at this point, you're still a little confused over some issues. See,
you're not sure whether you should cringe about the annoyingly bad
faux-futuristic music, the fact that all the action is going to take place in
some place called Jesus Town (not far from Metaphorville and just down the
turnpike from Allegory City), or the fact that this guy dressed in black turns
into a really crabby cyborg whenever the going gets tough. I would urge you to
wait and not make up your mind as to what is the most cringe-inducing aspect of
this whole simple-minded affair. See, you haven't met the resistance fighters,
the evil dude ruling Jesus Town, or his cyborg called Michael. This doesn't
even begin to address the repetitive shoot outs, heinous special effects, or
the utter lack of any drama in the proceedings (so, I wonder if he'll fight
Michael, defeat him, and then fight his boss, defeat him, and end this
thankfully short flick?) If it sounds like an import video game you would
overpay for and regret doing so, that's because it was way back in 1996 for the
Sega Saturn. Can someone please tell me what a Sega Saturn exactly was? Okay,
I did mention that this dude (it turns out that his name is Hakaider) on the
motorcycle is really a cyborg that changes into his way cool mechanical outfit
whenever there's trouble afoot. Of course his supercool outfit looks about as
functional as tits on a boar, with its big shoulder pads and face plate that
has a scowl permanently etched into it. Believe it or not, the mayor of Jesus
Town doesn't really think his city would benefit from having a
motorcycle-riding cyborg cruising around with his Terminator-style sawed off shotgun strapped to his hog so they shoot stuff at him and we
see that bullets, missiles and nuclear weapons don't do anything but scratch
the skin on his head revealing his cyborg innards (just like in Terminator!). Jesus Town then decides they should send out the JTPD to initiate a traffic
stop. What follows is one of those long motorcycle chase scenes where people
shoot, get chucked off bikes, get blowed up and generally wish that they had
never gone off to catch an invincible cyborg on his motorcycle with their own
motorcycles. These bad guys that chase him around all pretty much look like
the storm troopers from The Empire Strikes Back that had the bad luck to draw
the Hoth tour of duty. That's another thing about how cutting edge and thought
provoking this movie is: the bad guys are all dressed in white, while the good
guys are dressed in the kind of tight black leather that gets you free drinks
at certain bars. And I thought it was just another pointless Japanese movie
about dudes in ridiculous costumes riding around on bikes for no reason and
fighting other guys in similarly unrealistic attire. 
While all these guys are driving around on their motorcycles so that I thought
I was watching an episode of the late lamented television series Street Hawk, we also see this small band of resistance fighters. There's about eight of
them and they seem to be those kind of resistance fighters that don't do a
whole lot except whine about the oppressive government authority, shoot at
cops, and counterfeit Jesus Town's money (geez, haven't they switched over to
the Euro yet?). They're being chased by the storm troopers for some type of
scheme and that's when they run into Hakaider. They watch as he pretty much
wipes out all the soldiers they send at him. One of the rebels, a woman whose
name might very well be Karou, but I don't really recall that knowing anything
about these characters was, including their names, too high on the
director's "to do" list, is instantly enamored with the hunky Hakaider and
starts begging him to join her team because he's really good and the people of
Jesus Town need to be freed and all that jazz. Karou also periodically has
these visions where she's somewhere else, dressed up in some Xena get up
(complete with wings!) and is saved by some dark knight on a horse. I'm not
sure what she's being saved from other than a bad wardrobe decision, but later
it turns out that this knight was Hakaider so I guess she prophesied his
coming. Either that or the director thought these were really cool scenes and
could pad the movie out beyond the magical sixty minute barrier. We find out
that Jesus Town is run by a really soft-spoken (wink, wink) dude named Gurjev.
He's one of those bad guys that has two-toned long hair and wears a way out of
season white suit, complete with skeleton of a bird creature draped over his
neck like some type of Addams Family mink stole. He babbles endlessly to his
white cyborg named Michael about how he helps out the good citizens of Jesus
Town when they go astray by giving them a new lease on life with a government
sponsored lobotomy. Not a bad idea in some cases, but I'm not sure that Gurjev
is the kind of guy the public would accept as the one to implement it. You'd
probably need someone like Rudy to get away with trying that one out. After the rebels get themselves killed off in a confrontation with the storm
troopers and Hakaider seems dead after his unfortunate encounter with a bazooka
and the fifth story window he fell out of, Karou wanders around Jesus Town in
shock and faints into the arms of none other than Hakaider! They go off to her
special place which is somewhere in the wilderness and she tells Hakaider he
needs to go beat up Gurjev and Michael. Hakaider, even though he is robot,
knows that there's no use arguing with your girlfriend once she goes and gets
some crazy idea in her head and he goes back to Jesus Town and brawls with
Michael in a very slow and witless battle, culminating in Hakaider going up
against a souped-up version of Michael (Mike's head got ripped off by Hakaider
but it got re-attached to a really big mechanical tank like thing that is played
by a Monogram model along with some special effects that haven't been that
special since the days of Ray Harryhausen). Somehow Hakaider goes and gets his
arm blown
off. Finally he unleashes his top-secret cannon that is embedded in his chest
and blows Mike up real good like. I guess it was so top-secret that he forgot
to use it earlier, like say at the very beginning of the fight, but the
important
thing is that he remembered it before both his arms got ripped off. Then he
has a
confrontation with Gurjev (we learned earlier that Hakaider was an earlier
cyborg built for Gurjev but Hakaider and the inventor left because they didn't
get along with Gurjev) and kills him. Then he rides on out of Jesus Town and
re-unites with Karou. A dumb film, hampered by its meagre budget and even
smaller scripting budget. This is another one of those deals where they just
drop a bunch a generic good guys and bad guys into a generic totalitarian future
and expect us to ohh and ahh because the guy rides a motorcycle and the the
town is named after a religious figure. The concept of Jesus Town was never
explained in any detail so it was hard to get worked up over the importance of
overthrowing Gurjev beyond the generic "he's taken our rights away" whine, plus
in the whole town there was only Karou who really cared if Gurjev was in power
or not (her rebel comrades were in it just for the counterfeit money). The
costumes are pretty bad and you can clearly see that they were designed to look
cool, not actually be useful in the real world. I don't see how these cyborgs
can run around real quick with all their metal, shoulder pads, and spiky
fingers. Maybe this kind of stuff appeals to people who think those sentai and Kamen Rider TV shows from Japan are hip and happening stuff (are you the same
people that cause my comic book store to clog up shelf space with models of
Gundam mechs and debate which Ultraman was the best?), but normal people will
wonder why they spent thirty bucks on something they ignore for free on TV (Go,
go Power Rangers!). This movie just didn't develop any of its "ideas" enough
to make anything that went on interesting. Who are these people? Where are
they? How did they get like this? Combine that with the fact that nothing
remarkable happens, plot wise (he battles some soldiers, then he battles the
head bad guys and that's it). And what about all those poser visions that
Karou had? Your best bet if you accidentally wasted thirty bucks on this is to
turn on the English subtitles and the English soundtrack and compare the
information you get about the story from the two. Frequently, they don't agree
and sometimes they manage to convey two separate ideas as to what was said. I
found this an innovative feature that more junky import movies should adopt. I
also now know what the title of this movie meant when they talked about
"mechanical violator." Guess who mechanically violates who when you lay down
your three Alex Hamiltons for this one?
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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