Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 8 (Kamen Rider Shin)

You know, it wouldn't be a spooky marathon if we didn't get some Japanese media in here. In the past I've dabbled in anime, and of course a little of kaiju cinema. Good old Godzilla will be showing up soon enough, I promise, but before that it is time for Kamen Rider. I've been dabbling in karate bug men for quite some time now, having been on a podcast which covered all of the Zero-One series and is now partway through covering the Build series. I also did Shotaro Ishinomori's Kamen Rider manga as one of the Comics Challenge things, I believe as part of the Straight Story Six. Most helpfully, perhaps for this, I've seen Hideaki Anno's Shin Kamen Rider. That movie is quite distinct from Kamen Rider Shin, which we'll be talking about today, but it's quite good. It's a real love letter to 70's tokusatsu and karate bug men guys beating each other up while ruminating on the cycle of violence and the hateful spread of fascism. It is, I'm sorry to say, a better movie than Kamen Rider Shin. That's not to say this doesn't have its charms, just that I didn't have enough of them. Let me try and explain.

As far as I can tell, this was some sort of 20th anniversary celebration for Kamen Rider. It is also quite lurid and gory in places. Its opening moments are shot like a slasher film, with the killer POV except it also can leap very high into the air because mutant grasshoppers who know martial arts. When the Kamen Rider, who is more of a berserk monster than anything else at the start of this film, lets loose? You really feel it. Blood gushes and throats are ripped out and all sorts of other gross displays of shocking violence. I oddly find myself thinking of Batman, and how a lot of the movies about this costumed hero for children are shockingly not for children. I feel like Kamen Rider has a better balance between all-ages punch man action and disgusting displays of violence than Batman does, but this movie certainly is a display of the latter. Real focus is taken on the body horror of it all, and just how fucked up it would be to turn into a big bug man who goes apeshit and kills people and makes their throats spurt blood. Kamen Rider is a fucking disgusting thing with a pulsating head and open mandibles, and when the movie really goes for this is where it shines.

Unfortunately there's not that much there for the rest of the movie. Being a Kamen Rider adaptation of sorts (and having Ishinomori's name on it) you have all the hallmarks, of course. There's a shadowy organization running experiments and turning people into bug men for their own evil goals, there's mad scientists babbling bullshit about nationalism and grasshopper men being the new dominant species of the planet and killing God or something, there's the idea of using Kamen Rider to give the military industrial complex more money and power, and there's intervention from the CIA who fuck everything up. All the beats are there, just as they are in the Kamen Rider media I've watched prior, but something about it all feels muted this time. We're going through the motions, playing through the beats, but I'm not feeling anything beyond "Oh yeah, that sure is a Kamen Rider beat.". It's trying to say something, but it all just feels hollow. I don't understand it. It's not hard to do. Ishinomori's manga did it. Anno's movie did it 30 years later. It should be a slam dunk, and yet this movie just manages to be an okay thing. Even its tokusatsu fights feel kind of muted. There are great monster designs, all two of them, and the right choreography you'd expect from Kamen Rider, but if everything else is heightened it feels like this should be too. The fighting's not nearly brutal enough for the horror movie THIS KAMEN RIDER AIN'T FOR KIDS vibe, save for the part where Kamen Rider pulls a Mortal Kombat and rips the monster's head off along with most of its spine.

It's just kind of a mid Kamen Rider movie, I dunno. It's not the worst Kamen Rider movie I've ever seen by a long shot, mind: the confusing crossover mess of Kamen Rider Heisei Generations, or the sheer fuck you slap of the Kamen Rider Others movies which closed the plot of Zero-One come to mind. Compared to those, I will take going through the motions muted Kamen Rider which adds lots of blood and gory stuff any day of the week. That being said, if you at home want a good Kamen Rider movie... Goddamn, just fire up Shin Kamen Rider. I promise, you'll get that hit of nostalgia for 70's punch man shows and a good and thoughtful movie along with it. This? This is just, like... Fine.