Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Friends of Zeiram

Friends of Zeiram

Friends of Zeiram (2005)

From a review of Zeiram 2 on kfccinema.com:

Iria is your normal everyday hard working gorgeous bounty hunter. Of course, it’s just not safe for a gal to fight alone. With the help of her friend Fujicrow and her computer “Bob”, she repeatedly kicks universal ass. Things get out of hand, however, when Iria’s android bodyguard, who was built with a Zeiram [sometimes spelled "Zeram"] unit implant, begins hunting Iria and her friends after being damaged. With the help of its powerful Zeiram unit, the robot traps them in a 3-dimensional zone and wreaks mad havoc for over half the movie!

[...]

On the other hand, Zeiram does manage to produce some interesting fights that create some cool effects and leave a few lasting impressions. Of course, the battle that sticks out most in my mind is the epic struggle between Iria, her partner, and the twisted would-be bodyguard robot...Not to mention the Zeiram unit implanted in his chest. Being the root of all his evil, it looks like an evil pasty faced Japanese girl.

From Stomp Tokyo's review of Zeram:

Zeram himself looks like a member of the Mummenschanz from Hell. You remember the Mummenschanz; they were those weird-ass performance artists that used be on The Muppet Show every now and again. They wore black body suits with only their hands and feet showing. They wore masks of various types, including one with a face made of clay that could be manipulated by hand, and one with facial features drawn on pieces of paper that could be torn off revealing new features underneath. The Mummenschanz also occasionally dressed up in sleeping bags and pretended to be insect larva. None of this is really related to the movie at hand, but the Zeram alien forced us to recall this twisted chapter of our youths, and there's no way we're letting you off easy, either.

With Friends Like These...

Is it my complexion or my penchant for drinking the blood
of pets that puts you off?

And from the ispitonyourmovie forums -- a comment by Proteus about Zeram:

Really neat premise inventive special effects and creature fx save this from being a vamped up Power Rangers feeling flick. Basically it's about a bounty hunter that traps villains in a virtual reality world of sorts in order to slay them and bring em to justice only this time they've caught one of the biggest and baddest Villains ever Zeiram. A large cloaked figure that has various weapons at his disposal including various guns, blood that makes little mutant henchmen and a quite freaky innocent looking geisha women cameo on his head that ends up turning into a tentacle of sorts and has a nasty attitude.

Today's image is fairly new and probably of interest primarily to fans of esoteric Asian cinema. Zeiram is an android baddie who battles with young heroine Iria in an anime series and several films. Zeiram's makers cheaped out by replacing tactical circuitry with a "Zeriram unit" -- a bad-tempered alien bearing the white face of a geisha. The faces seen in Friends of Zeiram reminded me of the various permutations of the alien's face as seen in the movies.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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