Mutronics - The Movie

Listless nonsense that, bizarrely, combines the slapstick suit acting of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze with the cutting-edge splatter gags seen in Brian Yuzna's Society. Co-directed by special effects artists Screaming Mad George and Steve Wang, Mutronics - The Movie nominally adapts Yoshiki Takaya's Bio-Booster Armor Guyver manga, the never-ending tale of mutated high-school children taking on the extraterrestrial overlords who have woven themselves into corporate Japan. Mutronics lifts the action out of bubble-era Tokyo, relocating it to a tagged and trashed American wasteland shot through with spacious warehouses and steaming boiler-rooms. Following the bone-melting murder of his prospective girlfriend's father, Jack Armstrong's Sean Barker stumbles across an alien artefact that covers his body in a sparkling toxic slime.  

This seeping encounter leaves the otherwise deathly dull Sean able to summon a biomechanical armour that multiplies the strength and stamina driving the teenager's apprehensive Aikido skills, allowing him to tear muscled arms off snake men or send oversized Gremlins sailing through the air. These creatures - if not the situations or choreography that underlines their confrontations - are easily Mutronics' greatest asset. Although rubbery enough to facilitate sustained mayhem, these (surprisingly diverse) latex threat displays, as portrayed by Levie Isaacks' sympathetic lighting and camera work, carry these suits through the prolonged scrutiny demanded by an all monster finale. The mottled pigments airbrushed onto the hide of the close-up Guyver costume are especially impressive, accentuating the strange invertebrate qualities - in this case a lobster - inherent to this specific strain of masked hero tokusatsu. 

Mutronics is Kamen Rider taken into the techno-organic realm; with twisting transformations that are inflicted upon our heroes rather than willingly, or tidily, summoned. Despite this excellent menagerie, Mutronics remains a boneheaded film riddled with missed opportunities. While the special make-up effects trespass into the realm of genuine horror, the hairbrained mulch that surrounds this smoking sludge somehow seems to be pitched directly at very young children. The most tantalising of the film's would-be innovations is a particularly aggressive insert shot that focuses on a component of the defeated Guyver wrapping its pulsing veins and jet black wiring around the wrist of Vivian Wu's Mizuki. For a brief moment the intention seems to be that, rather than have to scurry away from the plaster moulded brutes that have kidnapped and poked at her, this beleaguered love interest will be elevated to the level of active participant. Sheathed in the Guyver armour Mikzuki could take on her tormentors and avenge her father's murder, all thanks to a parting infection from a brief, romantic, dalliance. Sadly this escalation was not to be.