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| All images courtesy: Visual Vengeance |
In the mid to late 1980s, Japan embraced the booming home-video market in some very unique ways, creating entirely new, distinctly Japanese genres/forms of straight-to-video media which did not have exact western counterparts. Anime fans the world over will be familiar with the OVA (original video animation): sometimes films, but often serialized anime series produced for video. But less known in America is Japan’s V-cinema movement, a unique strain of straight-to-video genre films, typically in the categories of gritty, violent action or extreme splatterpunk horror. While in America, the convention was that straight-to-video films still needed to be feature-length, still maintaining the format and runtime of theatrical movies, Japan’s V-cinema had no such runtime-related hangups. This meant that in Japan, there was a distribution model for short or short-feature films, which in America typically had nowhere to go beyond festival screenings. V-cinema movies could be half and hour, just short of an hour, or a more standard feature-length, varying from project to project. The unusual runtimes may have been a factor in how most of these films never got any US distribution; the brutally violent gore that never could have gotten past the MPAA also being a likely factor. But for whatever reason, V-cinema movies never made the jump to the US, until recent boutique releases like Arrow Video’s V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal box set, which focused on the movement’s action/crime side.
Perhaps even more notorious in cult-cinema spaces online are V-cinema’s splatterpunk titles: ultra-gory horror films known for their elaborate, outlandish, DIY but still very impressive practical creature and gore effects. Many of these films have become minor cult classics due to bootlegs circulated online: Gakidama (1985), Biotherapy (1986), Guzoo (1986), Cyclops (1987), and Conton (1987) among them, all creature-feature gorefests with runtimes between 30 and 55 minutes. But none of these films have ever gotten any kind of official US distribution… until now, when Visual Vengeance brings us Cyclops (1987) on blu-ray for the first time.
THE FILM:
A team of amoral scientists have been conducting hideous human experiments, pursuing the next steps in human evolution through bizarre birth defects and deliberately-induced mutations, stemming from research on mutated stillborn fetuses. In need of a new test subject, the scientists and their stoic, sunglasses-wearing cyclops enforcer go out into the city hunting for victims. But one of the scientists on the team is starting to think that they’ve gone too far, and the stage is set for a bloody, body-altering confrontation where the repressed mutations hidden beneath the skin will start coming out. It’s… a loose premise, which operates with the minimum necessary narrative cohesion within the lean 52-minute runtime. Cyclops is a film made entirely to justify an absolutely wild climax, loaded with practical creature effects and gnarly gore, tailor-made for horror fans of the video-store boom looking for the most outlandish things they could find. It is also a calling-card first feature for director Joji “George” Iida, who would go on to find success with films like the original Ring/Ringu sequel, Spiral/Rasen (1998) and the cult-classic J-horror oddity Another Heaven (2000). You can read about a couple more of Joji Iida's films in this previous Movie Sleuth feature by Michelle Kisner.
Iida proves his chops here well enough: Cyclops is quite well-shot for a micro-budget indie, with strong shot compositions and very effective camerawork, filmed on 16mm. As a proof of concept to show that its director can stylishly shoot a film, it does the job. And as a gory and splattery practical-effects showpiece, the climax more than delivers. But is Cyclops a good movie? Definitely not. The problem is that the film really is only a setup made to justify a climax; there is otherwise just nothing to it. The plot is paper-thin, and the characterization equally vague, which would be fine if the movie kept the practical effects coming; Guzoo and Biotherapy have equally little to them in terms of story and characters, but are very fun because they keep the creatures and gore flying at the viewer every couple minutes. Cyclops, on the other hand, holds all of its creature craziness for the climax, leaving the rest of the film oddly lifeless and inert, in the absence of a particularly compelling story. It feels like very little of interest happens for the first 35ish of its 52 minutes. Though at the very least, that’s why it’s so good that films like this were allowed to be short features, and not stretched out to full-length; Cyclops stretched to 75 or 80 minutes would be unbearable, but when it’s this short, it doesn’t have time to wear out its welcome too badly (though those first 35 minutes do start to feel pretty long).
The climax of Cyclops is, however, very much worth the price of admission. The film’s final confrontation packs in as many wild creature effects as possible. We get gore, we get wild transformations, we get some very memorable and icky body-horror monstrosities that would make Cronenberg or Carpenter proud. The effects seriously are impressive, and can hang with much more expensive films. The last 15 minutes definitely deliver everything I had hoped to find in Cyclops… the only problem is that I wish these qualities were spread out across the entire film, rather than just being a great final 15 minutes after a patience-testing first 35. Part of me wants to say that Cyclops is worth checking out because of how well the climax delivers; part of me feels like it’s too little too late.
If this release was a double-feature or a box set, I would certainly say that it’s worth watching Cyclops for the ending. But is it worth buying a film that is only worthwhile for its last few minutes? Maybe that depends on how much you like practical effects. At any rate, I wish this was packaged as a double-feature with the similar but better Biotherapy, especially since the two films together would still only be 90 minutes. Or I wish Visual Vengeance had just chosen to release Gakidama or Guzoo instead. As far as this wave of mid-80s V-cinema splatterpunk goes, Cyclops is far from the best of the bunch, even if it may have some of the best effects work.
THE VISUAL VENGEANCE BLU-RAY:
Cyclops comes to us in a brand-new 2k restoration from the 16mm negative, and it looks great, for what it is. And the ways in which it does not look great are honestly part of the charm. The 16mm elements are quite scratched up, with damage throughout, and a pretty consistent presence of wear on the image, but for a low-budget, grimy, DIY splatterpunk relic like this, that just feels right. The film also has the lo-fi idiosyncrasy of how every time there is an on-screen title, the superimposition of the text discolors the rest of the image and turns it green. Visual Vengeance probably COULD have color-corrected that away, but it also feels appropriate for the scrappy homebrewed quality of the thing. But beyond that, it’s a great scan: detail is sharp and strong, it looks very filmic with a nice healthy grain structure, and the colors (when there is not a title on-screen) look great. If you’ve only ever seen this movie in a VHS-sourced bootleg, this restoration that very faithfully looks like celluloid will be a revelation. Sure, it’s rough around the edges, but I would not want those edges smoothed out. Less ideal, however, is how the subtitles are a little goofy, with occasional typos and odd translations. They feel like fan-subs from an online bootleg. Though again, given the distribution history of films like this, that does kind of feel true to the classic experience, I guess. I do wish they had gotten an extra proofread and edit though.
The disc’s extras are solidly great. They almost entirely come from Justin Decloux, of The Important Cinema Club, who co-hosts a commentary along with Patrick Macias (author of TokyoScope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion), and also presents two different video-essays. The first video-essay is about the films of Joji Iida, and his fascinating and very eccentric career, and the second vide-essay is about the Japanese V-cinema movement, into which these films fit. These extras do an outstanding job of putting Cyclops in context, and will greatly add to any viewer’s appreciation of the film. The other extra on the disc is an almost hour-long interview (yes, slightly longer than the film itself) with director Joji “George” Iida. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about his career, influences, and thoughts on film, well beyond just Cyclops. It is an absolutely outstanding roster of extras.
This is one of those discs that I struggle with just how much to recommend it… on the one hand, the extras are excellent, giving great context that makes the film much easier to appreciate, and the last few minutes of the film are an absolute blast that I highly recommend to fans of practical creature and gore effects. But 15 good minutes do not a good film make, and I found the first almost 2/3 of Cyclops to be a real slog. If you’re a fan of the film or really want to check it out for that climax though, this is definitely a very good disc. I just wish that Visual Vengeance had made it a double-feature with a better film from the movement. And I hope they have more of these Japanese VHS-era oddities on the way!
- Christopher S. Jordan
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