In 2016, the Brian Yuzna-produced, Mark Hamill-starring cult classic The Guyver came to Arrow Video's illustrious blu-ray library in a UK-exclusive special edition, featuring a slipcover, a booklet, and a new interview with Yuzna. But at the time, due to the film's North American distribution rights, which are controlled by the notoriously-difficult-to-license-from Warner Bros, Arrow's release had to stay on that side of the pond, despite being region-free. But now, Arrow has at last been able to sort out The Guyver's North American rights - sort of. This week, Arrow's release is finally available in North America - with the caveat that it is technically a Canada-exclusive, as Arrow's rights to the film still don't extend stateside. However, America and Canada share the same region-code, Amazon.ca ships to the US, and DiabolikDVD is importing the disc, so for all intents and purposes The Guyver is now available from Arrow in America as well. To celebrate, here's our look back at this peculiar cult favorite, and the details on Arrow's release - including the big question of which version of the film it contains.
 |
In the early-1990s superhero movies and comic book adaptations were nowhere close to being the money-making powerhouses they are today. Far from being the stuff of mega-budget blockbusters, comic-book movies were seen as more niche items for the cult film market.
That is, at least until the massive success of Tim Burton's Batman,
which started to change the game. Batman
showed studios not only that superhero movies could be successful,
but also that they weren't just kids' stuff: Burton's moody, gothic
vision proved that there was an appetite for darker and more
adult-oriented superhero-style fare. This revelation led to a small
but distinctive wave of early-'90s comic book movies for older
audiences, like The Crow and
Darkman, which took
that dark style even further, into R-rated territory. One of the
filmmakers who jumped on this trend was cult-horror producer Brian
Yuzna (Re-Animator,
Society, The
Return of the Living Dead 3),
who saw an opportunity to blend this darker take on the superhero
genre with the sorts of bloody monster-movie thrills that he
specialized in. He secured the rights to an anime and manga series
which had recently become a cult hit in the U.S. - Yoshiki Takaya's
Bio-Booster Armour Guyver
– and began to assemble a live-action adaptation. At the heart of
the film would be some excellent creature effects by Steve Wang and Society's Screaming Mad George (the two of whom also directed), and an
impressive ensemble of cult horror and sci-fi actors including
Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes),
David Gale (Re-Animator),
Linnea Quigley (The
Return of the Living Dead),
Jeffrey Combs (Re-Animator
also),
and Mark Hamill. All the pieces looked like they were falling into
place for an awesome R-rated monster battle... but then something
happened. Specifically, 1990's live-action Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles movie
happened, and the creative team behind the film started to wonder if
an adult-oriented, horror-tinged approach was the wrong choice, and
if they should make it more kid-friendly instead.
So they injected goofy slapstick humor, and moved away from the horror to focus on TMNT or Power Rangers-style martial-arts action, in an attempt to make it a hit with (older) kids. Yet they kept some of the gore, and the cast of actors known for R-rated cult films, leaving no doubt as to the original intention of what the movie was supposed to be. The result is a weirdly dissonant exercise in trying to have your cake and eat it too; a film which isn't sure if it wants to be the next Ninja Turtles or the next Re-Animator. It makes the wildly misjudged decision to try and be both, and in doing so lands itself in an awkward netherworld between target audiences. It never gels into a remotely cohesive tone... but ultimately, that weird dissonance is one of its most endearing qualities. The Guyver may not exactly work, but it is a very fun and entertaining movie in its own bizarre way; it certainly is unique in its subgenre, for good and for bad. Its odd blend of awesome creature effects and camp silliness has earned it a passionate cult following over the years, and that cult following makes it a perfect selection for the Arrow Video library.
The Guyver tells the story of a college student who accidentally finds and activates a mysterious living suit of alien armor, which throws him into the middle of an underground conflict between humanity and a shadow organization of shape-shifting monsters, called the Chronos Corporation. The story began in the mid-1980s as a manga (comic) series in Japan, and was adapted shortly thereafter into a two-season, twelve-episode anime. In both mediums, the series was excellent: outwardly it may appear to work with plenty of well-worn anime tropes (high school kids, mecha armor, monster battles, etc), but the story is so well-written, with such a unique and well-developed mythology, that it feels totally fresh. I think it's safe to say that The Guyver was among the very best anime or manga series of the late-1980s, thanks especially to that deep and fascinating mythos behind Chronos, their shape-changing Zoanoids, and the Guyver unit. It's no surprise that it became a cult favorite here in the U.S. during the early days of the proliferation of anime in this country, and it is equally little surprise that it was licensed for an American movie to capitalize on that popularity. Unfortunately it is just as unsurprising that Brian Yuzna and company weren't able to do justice to the original series mythos. The story is all still here, and when it delves briefly into the anime's mythology you can clearly see the much better movie that this could have been, but the bizarre tonal inconsistencies undercut these stronger elements. I must emphasize that I am not saying this as a fan of the anime and comic complaining about the adaptation being tonally different from the source material; the flaws of this movie are entirely its own. The silly and serious sides of the script feel like two different movies, and the shifts between these modes can be extremely jarring. It feels very obvious that this was originally intended to be a much darker and less comical film, and it had humor forcibly injected into it during some late-in-the-game rewrite, like the cautionary tale that Suicide Squad should have payed attention to.
But with all that said, this patchwork style gives it an unexpected power to entertain: The Guyver has – probably unintentionally – a frenzied, overcaffeinated, off-the-wall style with which you never know quite what the movie will do next. There could be a brutal, crazy fight between its extremely well-designed monsters, or one of those monsters could break into a cheesy rap. That unpredictability is in itself a whole lot of fun – at least, if you have the ability to watch it with a sense of humor and a certain amount of irony. This is a true guilty-pleasure movie: one that definitely isn't objectively good, but is awesome all the same, in its own cheesy way. It is camp of the most purely early-'90s variety, and in that regard it has only gotten more entertaining as its distinct '90s-ness has become more and more obvious with time.
Of
course, there are some things that the film genuinely does really
well. It is quite well-shot, with stylized blue lighting that evokes
the story's comic-book roots. It also boasts a strong musical score,
with a great, very memorable main theme. But by far the strongest
aspect of the film is Steve Wang and Screaming Mad George's creature
effects work. The rubber suits – and the animatronics used to bring
their very expressive faces to life – are great. This is especially
true of the Guyver himself, Michael Berryman's villainous Lisker, and
the seriously awesome third-act big bad, all of whom could give the
creatures from most other genre flicks of the early-'90s a serious
run for their money. The film also boasts some first-rate
transformation sequences every bit as well-done as those from the best werewolf movies. On the strength of these things alone The
Guyver
is a must-see for fans of this style of practical effects. Granted,
some of the minor monsters who pop up briefly are pretty cheesy (it's
a rule – every aspect of this film has to be at least a little
uneven), but the star creatures easily carry the show.
The cast is likewise a mixed bag. As our out-of-his-depth college kid turned superhero, Jack Armstrong (Student Bodies) is good, though occasionally wooden. Vivian Wu, on the other hand, is extremely wooden as his girlfriend (the one character from the comics who wasn't whitewashed for this adaptation), and her weak performance does nothing to improve a character who is already written as little more than an unfortunate damsel-in-distress stereotype. It is no surprise that among our ensemble of heroes the best performance by far comes from Mark Hamill, as a hard-boiled CIA agent with his own bone to pick with Chronos. Hamill has a lot of fun delivering his tough-cop lines, and broodingly smoking cigarettes in alleys like a sci-fi Robert Mitchum. He clearly knows that he is in a cheesy movie, but rather than phoning it in, he amps up his acting with just enough camp to steal his scenes while still coming off as the strongest actor of the bunch. Injecting some more outright comedy into the film are two slightly-postmodern cameos by '80s cult-horror icons Jeffrey Combs and Linnea Quigley, both of whom clearly have a good time spoofing their star images. Combs is great in every movie he's in, and has saved more than a few weak films with memorable performances; he's a lot of fun here, and one wishes that his role was expanded to more than just a glorified inside-joke. At least it's a good joke, though... and it's cool to see him opposite David Gale once again, in something at least slightly better than Bride of Re-Animator.
As the two main
villains, David Gale and Michael Berryman are both as entertaining as
always, chewing the scenery through maniacal grins. Gale's Dr. Balcus is more or
less a PG-13 variation on his Dr. Hill from Re-Animator: a
crazy-eyed evil scientist with a penchant for yelling
pseudo-philosophical monologues in a moutache-twirling bad-guy voice,
and for terrorizing his co-worker's daughters. Berryman gets to do
something different from his iconic Hills Have Eyes psycho...
though it's not always the good kind of different. His character is
handled in a really odd way: sometimes he is portrayed as a sadistic
heavy (which he does really well), and sometimes as a comedic
bumbling henchman stooge (which makes him seem very miscast). Again,
it seems that he was a victim of those late-stage comedy rewrites
interfering with what his character was supposed to be, and he just doesn't do comedy very well here. The really
cringe-inducing acting – and the really ill-advised comedy –
comes from the trio of idiot monster henchman who work for Berryman.
All three are very unfunny in their one-note characterizations: The
Dominatrix MMA Fighter, The Angry Russian Slob, The Hip-Hop-Loving
Comedic Black Man – the latter of which is a cringe-inducingly
racist characterization, in a deeply awkward way. Jimmy
(“dyno-mite!”) Walker from Good Times plays said rapping
monster, and is not only very irritating, but also gives us one of
the most uncomfortably stereotypical portrayals of a black man in
modern genre cinema, right alongside Jar Jar and those robots from
Transformers 2. Why did he agree to basically play a
minstrel-show character? Did Spike Lee watch this when he was writing
his scathing indictment of Hollywood racism, Bamboozled?
Because this is literally exactly what he was talking about. Why did
anyone think this was a good idea? For that matter, why did anyone
think making The Guyver into a slapstick comedy was a good
idea? We may never know the answers, since Arrow's blu-ray doesn't
include any interviews with Jimmy Walker or the other actors to put
it into context. Maybe someday a subsequent release will get more of the cast to answer the questions
about just what the hell happened on this production, but for now it remains a mystery.
Fifteen years after its release, opinions are still fiercely divided over whether The Guyver is first and foremost an entertainingly off-kilter guilty-pleasure or a frustrating wasted opportunity to make an actually good Guyver movie. I land firmly in the guilty-pleasure camp, but the truth is that it's both; though fortunately the wasted-opportunity aspect was mitigated when, just three years later, the series got another chance. This first film became a big enough cult hit on cable and home video that New Line ordered a straight-to-video sequel, and Steve Wang was brought back to co-write, direct, and helm the special effects – this time without Brian Yuzna or Screaming Mad George. It seems that he shared many fans' frustrations with the original film, because his follow-up 100-percent corrects its predecessor's missteps. Rather than making a true sequel, Wang went the soft-reboot route (think the Edward Norton Incredible Hulk), recasting all the roles and making a much darker and more serious film with a story that delves deep into the mythology of the comics. Ditching the humor, ramping up the horror elements, staying much more tonally faithful to the source material, and earning an R-rating, Guyver 2: Dark Hero is exactly the movie that The Guyver should have been before its production went off course (you can read our full review here). Now that Arrow Video has brought the original film to blu-ray, hopefully this superior sequel will follow close behind. But even if the first film isn't as good as its successor, it remains a very entertaining slice of early-'90s B-movie history, and it is great to at least have one of the Guyver films on a North American blu-ray at last.
This
Arrow blu-ray claims to contain The
Guyver's
director's cut... but let's take a minute to go over what that means, and whether or not that's true, because there's a lot of confusion, and it doesn't mean what you think it means. When the American DVD of The
Guyver
came out in the mid-2000s, the box claimed that it was the
director's cut, but while it did have extra little bits of dialogue
here and there that weren't in the VHS version, fans were
disappointed when they noticed that bloodiest bits of the movie's gore had been
removed or toned down. This lead to a myth that the director's cut is inherently an inferior version of the film that is less violent, but that's not exactly true, because the American DVD is
incorrectly labeled, and isn't actually the true director's cut. It is
mostly the director's cut, which is a bit longer than the VHS version and features some cool comic-book-style scene transitions, but actually it is
just the American theatrical version, which is close to the director's cut, but had the gore trimmed by
the MPAA to get a PG-13 rating. Meanwhile, the VHS release, which is how most of
us remember the film, is actually the unrated cable TV cut, falsely
labeled as PG-13, which reinstated all the gore that was snipped from
the theatrical release, but trimmed little bits of inconsequential
dialogue here and there (mostly comedic banter between the members of
the Zoanoid gang) to tighten up the pacing and keep the movie at 90
minutes (and it also took out the comic-book transitions in the interest of time). So if you ever wondered how The
Guyver was
able to get away with those limb removals and throat-slashes under a
PG-13 rating, the answer is that it didn't; the version we all grew
up watching was unrated, and the PG-13 on the back of the box was a
mistake. The true director's cut contains everything from both versions:
all the dialogue and all the gore. It has never been released in
America, but came out on VHS and laserdisc in Japan, and on the film's German blu-ray (though with the gore inserts sourced from an SD master, spliced into the HD transfer).
So, which version of the film is on the Arrow Video blu-ray? Unfortunately, the same theatrical cut featured on the DVD, once again falsely identified as the director's cut by Warner. Those few snippets of unrated gore are still missing. When Arrow was asked about this after the UK disc came out, they addressed it honestly and said that this was the master that Warner/New Line provided them with, and the only transfer that they have either the access to, or the rights to use. Their hands are tied, from the sound of it, and as per their agreement with the studio, this is the cut that they have the rights to give us. It's very unfortunate, especially since the box once again erroneously calls it the director's cut instead of the theatrical cut, but it is what it is. At the very least, I must emphasize that the cuts are really pretty small: there are exactly three cuts for gore (a head crush in the pre-credits scene, and an arm getting ripped off and a blood-spraying throat slash in the big warehouse fight), and they add up to probably five or seven seconds altogether. It's a shame that they're missing, and fans will understandably be bothered, but it's not a situation that totally changes the film, like if they'd pressed the R-rated version of Re-Animator by mistake. Even in this version it is an extremely fun movie, and even with a bit less blood its odd mix of clashing tones is still intact. I wish that the disc contained the true director's cut, but if this is the only version that Warner can be bothered to give us (as I said in the first paragraph, they are notoriously difficult when it comes to licensing to third-party distributors), I'd rather have this version on blu than no blu-ray at all. If you really want the true unrated director's cut, you can always import the German blu-ray from DigiDreams/'84 Films, which is region-free, but can be a bit pricey (also, the special features are in PAL SD, and will not work on many region-locked American players, though the feature and the menus will). For those who don't want to go to that trouble for a few extra seconds of carnage, the Arrow Video disc is still a solid release, and especially in these times when importing from overseas can be a gamble due to COVID slowing intercontinental shipping, having the film available at last in a North American blu-ray release is nice. Of course, this is the sort of quintessentially-90s film that part of me will always prefer to watch on its native VHS format, if only for the nostalgia factor, but it absolutely deserves a good HD presentation, and I'm glad that Arrow has given it one. If you're a fan of this film, or an appreciator of awesomely cheesy '90s genre fare in general, this is definitely one to check out.
So they injected goofy slapstick humor, and moved away from the horror to focus on TMNT or Power Rangers-style martial-arts action, in an attempt to make it a hit with (older) kids. Yet they kept some of the gore, and the cast of actors known for R-rated cult films, leaving no doubt as to the original intention of what the movie was supposed to be. The result is a weirdly dissonant exercise in trying to have your cake and eat it too; a film which isn't sure if it wants to be the next Ninja Turtles or the next Re-Animator. It makes the wildly misjudged decision to try and be both, and in doing so lands itself in an awkward netherworld between target audiences. It never gels into a remotely cohesive tone... but ultimately, that weird dissonance is one of its most endearing qualities. The Guyver may not exactly work, but it is a very fun and entertaining movie in its own bizarre way; it certainly is unique in its subgenre, for good and for bad. Its odd blend of awesome creature effects and camp silliness has earned it a passionate cult following over the years, and that cult following makes it a perfect selection for the Arrow Video library.
The Guyver tells the story of a college student who accidentally finds and activates a mysterious living suit of alien armor, which throws him into the middle of an underground conflict between humanity and a shadow organization of shape-shifting monsters, called the Chronos Corporation. The story began in the mid-1980s as a manga (comic) series in Japan, and was adapted shortly thereafter into a two-season, twelve-episode anime. In both mediums, the series was excellent: outwardly it may appear to work with plenty of well-worn anime tropes (high school kids, mecha armor, monster battles, etc), but the story is so well-written, with such a unique and well-developed mythology, that it feels totally fresh. I think it's safe to say that The Guyver was among the very best anime or manga series of the late-1980s, thanks especially to that deep and fascinating mythos behind Chronos, their shape-changing Zoanoids, and the Guyver unit. It's no surprise that it became a cult favorite here in the U.S. during the early days of the proliferation of anime in this country, and it is equally little surprise that it was licensed for an American movie to capitalize on that popularity. Unfortunately it is just as unsurprising that Brian Yuzna and company weren't able to do justice to the original series mythos. The story is all still here, and when it delves briefly into the anime's mythology you can clearly see the much better movie that this could have been, but the bizarre tonal inconsistencies undercut these stronger elements. I must emphasize that I am not saying this as a fan of the anime and comic complaining about the adaptation being tonally different from the source material; the flaws of this movie are entirely its own. The silly and serious sides of the script feel like two different movies, and the shifts between these modes can be extremely jarring. It feels very obvious that this was originally intended to be a much darker and less comical film, and it had humor forcibly injected into it during some late-in-the-game rewrite, like the cautionary tale that Suicide Squad should have payed attention to.
But with all that said, this patchwork style gives it an unexpected power to entertain: The Guyver has – probably unintentionally – a frenzied, overcaffeinated, off-the-wall style with which you never know quite what the movie will do next. There could be a brutal, crazy fight between its extremely well-designed monsters, or one of those monsters could break into a cheesy rap. That unpredictability is in itself a whole lot of fun – at least, if you have the ability to watch it with a sense of humor and a certain amount of irony. This is a true guilty-pleasure movie: one that definitely isn't objectively good, but is awesome all the same, in its own cheesy way. It is camp of the most purely early-'90s variety, and in that regard it has only gotten more entertaining as its distinct '90s-ness has become more and more obvious with time.
 |
The cast is likewise a mixed bag. As our out-of-his-depth college kid turned superhero, Jack Armstrong (Student Bodies) is good, though occasionally wooden. Vivian Wu, on the other hand, is extremely wooden as his girlfriend (the one character from the comics who wasn't whitewashed for this adaptation), and her weak performance does nothing to improve a character who is already written as little more than an unfortunate damsel-in-distress stereotype. It is no surprise that among our ensemble of heroes the best performance by far comes from Mark Hamill, as a hard-boiled CIA agent with his own bone to pick with Chronos. Hamill has a lot of fun delivering his tough-cop lines, and broodingly smoking cigarettes in alleys like a sci-fi Robert Mitchum. He clearly knows that he is in a cheesy movie, but rather than phoning it in, he amps up his acting with just enough camp to steal his scenes while still coming off as the strongest actor of the bunch. Injecting some more outright comedy into the film are two slightly-postmodern cameos by '80s cult-horror icons Jeffrey Combs and Linnea Quigley, both of whom clearly have a good time spoofing their star images. Combs is great in every movie he's in, and has saved more than a few weak films with memorable performances; he's a lot of fun here, and one wishes that his role was expanded to more than just a glorified inside-joke. At least it's a good joke, though... and it's cool to see him opposite David Gale once again, in something at least slightly better than Bride of Re-Animator.
 |
Fifteen years after its release, opinions are still fiercely divided over whether The Guyver is first and foremost an entertainingly off-kilter guilty-pleasure or a frustrating wasted opportunity to make an actually good Guyver movie. I land firmly in the guilty-pleasure camp, but the truth is that it's both; though fortunately the wasted-opportunity aspect was mitigated when, just three years later, the series got another chance. This first film became a big enough cult hit on cable and home video that New Line ordered a straight-to-video sequel, and Steve Wang was brought back to co-write, direct, and helm the special effects – this time without Brian Yuzna or Screaming Mad George. It seems that he shared many fans' frustrations with the original film, because his follow-up 100-percent corrects its predecessor's missteps. Rather than making a true sequel, Wang went the soft-reboot route (think the Edward Norton Incredible Hulk), recasting all the roles and making a much darker and more serious film with a story that delves deep into the mythology of the comics. Ditching the humor, ramping up the horror elements, staying much more tonally faithful to the source material, and earning an R-rating, Guyver 2: Dark Hero is exactly the movie that The Guyver should have been before its production went off course (you can read our full review here). Now that Arrow Video has brought the original film to blu-ray, hopefully this superior sequel will follow close behind. But even if the first film isn't as good as its successor, it remains a very entertaining slice of early-'90s B-movie history, and it is great to at least have one of the Guyver films on a North American blu-ray at last.
 |
So, which version of the film is on the Arrow Video blu-ray? Unfortunately, the same theatrical cut featured on the DVD, once again falsely identified as the director's cut by Warner. Those few snippets of unrated gore are still missing. When Arrow was asked about this after the UK disc came out, they addressed it honestly and said that this was the master that Warner/New Line provided them with, and the only transfer that they have either the access to, or the rights to use. Their hands are tied, from the sound of it, and as per their agreement with the studio, this is the cut that they have the rights to give us. It's very unfortunate, especially since the box once again erroneously calls it the director's cut instead of the theatrical cut, but it is what it is. At the very least, I must emphasize that the cuts are really pretty small: there are exactly three cuts for gore (a head crush in the pre-credits scene, and an arm getting ripped off and a blood-spraying throat slash in the big warehouse fight), and they add up to probably five or seven seconds altogether. It's a shame that they're missing, and fans will understandably be bothered, but it's not a situation that totally changes the film, like if they'd pressed the R-rated version of Re-Animator by mistake. Even in this version it is an extremely fun movie, and even with a bit less blood its odd mix of clashing tones is still intact. I wish that the disc contained the true director's cut, but if this is the only version that Warner can be bothered to give us (as I said in the first paragraph, they are notoriously difficult when it comes to licensing to third-party distributors), I'd rather have this version on blu than no blu-ray at all. If you really want the true unrated director's cut, you can always import the German blu-ray from DigiDreams/'84 Films, which is region-free, but can be a bit pricey (also, the special features are in PAL SD, and will not work on many region-locked American players, though the feature and the menus will). For those who don't want to go to that trouble for a few extra seconds of carnage, the Arrow Video disc is still a solid release, and especially in these times when importing from overseas can be a gamble due to COVID slowing intercontinental shipping, having the film available at last in a North American blu-ray release is nice. Of course, this is the sort of quintessentially-90s film that part of me will always prefer to watch on its native VHS format, if only for the nostalgia factor, but it absolutely deserves a good HD presentation, and I'm glad that Arrow has given it one. If you're a fan of this film, or an appreciator of awesomely cheesy '90s genre fare in general, this is definitely one to check out.
Score:
- Christopher S.
Jordan
Share this review!