Oh, Japan. You silly little guy, you. Just when we think we've seen it all, just when you get us believing that there aren't any more crazy, awesome, tripped out movies that you've been hiding up your sleeve, you wave your arm with a magician's flourish, and before us appears yet another hour and a half of WTFery.
This film, which is apparently a spinoff of the popular Kikaider series (which has seen treatment as an anime, manga, and tokusatsu live action series) stars the titular robot fighting against an evil, oppressive government which rules its citizens through the use of super-human cyborg-soldiers, and by robbing them of their emotions. It's a fairly straight forward plot, so I won't spend too much time commenting on it.
Apparently, the film was not well received by the Kikaider fanbase when it premiered in 1995. I'm not familiar with it personally, so I really can't comment. That's probably for the best, as I was able to take this film for what it is, and do so without any preconceptions or comparisons to the parent material.
This movie is insane. Persons familiar with the likes of Casshern, Kamen Rider and Garo will find themselves in familiar territory, but that's not to say that the movie is without it's own unique style and charm.
The movie kicks off showing a group of anonymous armed men running through dark, dank corridors. They find a locked door which they open with some weird electronic key, and inside they find a man chained to a wall. After yelling about how they had hoped to find treasure and not a person, the man in the chains looks up. Then they shoot him. A lot. They shoot him like you would shoot a skinless four headed dog, if it showed up in your bathroom and you just happened to have an assault rifle handy.
Suddenly the guy is neither in chains, nor is he a guy anymore. He's a heavily armored, heavily armed robot, and he kills everybody. He then spews some cliche, "WHO AM I I CAN'T REMEMBER" dialogue, and reclaims his motorcycle which nobody noticed before. It should be noted that the motorcycle was chained to the floor.
From here, Hakaider drives his newly liberated motorbike across an undefined distance to Jesus Town (it's actually called this, in both the Japanese original and translated version) where he fights guys in white robot suits and eventually liberates the people from their oppressive overlord, Gurjev (who wears a dead bird on his shoulder at all times).
I can say with relative confidence that any impressions you may have of Hakaider after reading the above summary are absolutely accurate. The movie is absurd on every level, and while one may find it somewhat more digestible if they are familiar with the Kikaider series, I suspect that bewilderment will follow a first time viewing of this film regardless of who's watching.
Over all, the movie is a lot of fun. The special effects are inventive, and include some early, and painfully obvious, CGI (it was 1995, after all). The action scenes are fairly well thought out, and the final battle between Hakaider and Michael (Gurjev's robot minion and the archetypal counterweight to our mechanical hero) is riveting. Fans of the Tokusatsu genre, wild Japanese cinema, and robots will find a lot to like here. I certainly did.
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