Guyver: Dark Hero

Revisiting Guyver: Dark Hero, for the first time in nearly three decades, it's a surprise to learn that the edit of the film that found its way onto UK tape rental shelves was twenty-odd minutes shorter than the original (straight-to-video) US release. Aside from the usual hair-splitting deletions demanded by the BBFC, Steve Wang's second stab at the bio-booster armour also lost a few instances of somnambulant exposition, as well as some much needed belt-tightening in the film's long-winded first act. These demands for expediency, presumably made by Dark Hero's British distributors 20/20 Vison (a division of RCA/Columbia Pictures), does ensure that the unconvincing acting that drives the human element of the story is pruned, in effect compressing Wang's film around its better qualities; specifically, acrobatic battles featuring a variety of rubbery, bleeding monsters. 

These infrequent bursts of mayhem are reminiscent of Tsuburaya Productions' Redman, a short TV schedule filler from the early 1970s that recycled costumes from the Japanese studio's more prestigious properties. A typical episode might revolve around the crimson superhero wrestling with a couple of crumbling creatures in a quarry and very little else. Once the woodlands-set Dark Hero has chewed its way through clanging archaeological intrigue, the film is able to strike a similar wobbly-but-exuberant tone. This Guyver - whose costume is now notably trimmer and less agreeably nauseating than the draft seen in Mutronics - The Movie - pummels his adversaries in over-edited, but still legible fight sequences that tend to end with our transmuted hero serving up cranium cracking trauma. Gore aside these set-tos, choreographed by Koichi Sakamoto and performed by Anthony Houk (with Akihiro Noguchi performing a flying feint kick that would later be bequeathed to Scott Adkins), also wear a Hong Kong influence on their sleeve. The gravity-defying flurries of Jet Li, as seen in Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China series (or, for that matter, Wong Jing's supernatural spin-off Last Hero in China), are quoted liberally.