PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*
When I saw ZEIRAM the first time on DVD sometime in the nineties, I thought it was a reasonably good action-movie, even given its limited budget. This time, though, screening it on streaming TV, I found myself constantly noticing lots of bland talking-heads scenes, designed to burn up time at very little cost.
The plot has a simple cat-and-mouse structure. Interplanetary bounty hunter Iria (Yuko Moriyama), aided by her living-computer partner Bob, sets a trap on modern-day Earth for an alien marauder, Zeiram. I never did catch why Zeiram wanted to come to Earth in the first place, but take that as a given. In order for Iria and Bob to keep from revealing their presence, they construct a headquarters in an abandoned Japanese building. and further create a "Zone," looking like an empty faux-city, in a subsidiary dimension. However, this process requires energy, so the two ETs siphon it from the local electrical company. Before Zeiram arrives, two doofuses working for said company stumble across the HQ while looking for the power-drain. Inevitably, the two goofs get mixed up in the crossfire between alien marauder and ET bounty hunter, with Iria trying her best to keep the innocents from being annihilated.
Though Moriyama isn't the most charismatic Japanese actress to play a standard tough girl role, there's no doubt that she's the focal character of the story, despite its being named after her monstrous opponent. Still, Zeiram himself is the most memorable element of both this movie and its sequel. The alien, a towering, robot-like entity, wears a large helmet that I believe is meant to suggest, at least to the original Japanese audience, the huge straw hats sported by cinematic samurai. In a combination of old and new, Zeiram is seen to create one or two mini-monsters when he feels like it, and he has some sort of extensible tendril with a Kabuki-like face on the end. This was a clear callback to the 1979 Alien, who could extrude a tongue with little snapping jaws on the end. Zeiram is presumably intelligent but he acts like nothing more than a relentless "alien terminator," without being nearly as much of a chatterbox. At the big climax he's reduced to a skeletal form which, while more attenuated, recalls the first TERMINATOR film, with the killer robot turning into a fleshless metal form.
ZEIRAM 2 is just more of the same. Some time after Iria's destruction of Zeiram, she pursues other bounties on other worlds, and then accepts an assignment on Earth, where she and her computer-assistant Bob hope to meet up with the two Earth-shlubs they befriended on their previous visit. Iria is assigned to test a combat-robot, but when the robot goes berserk in her presence, she and Bob eventually figure out that the robot has a "Zeiram unit" inside it. This might have been a good time to explain just what the original Zeiram was, and what relation this "unit" has to the original. But no, the writer and director, the same ones from the first flick, can't be bothered with such minor matters. To be sure, the action this time is better, possibly due to a somewhat better budget. And I must admit that the two electrician guys have slightly better characterization, enough that I could tell them apart. Anyway, for the rest of the film Iria finds herself contending with "Zeiram 2," but though the robot somehow manifests a "face-tendril," the menace lacks the visual impressiveness of the original antagonist. Both movies, though, are mediocre compared to the best action-cinema Japan can offer in any decade.
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