ZEIRAM is a goofy but entertaining Japanese sci-fi movie from 1991. I always thought it was based on an anime or manga, but now I’ve learned that the six episodes of Iria: Zeiram the Animation were a tie-in that came out the same year, like CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK: DARK FURY or VAN HELSING: THE LONDON ASSIGNMENT. But obviously there is some anime influence going on with some of the futuristic armor and weird creatures and stuff, which are given more consideration than the plot, so it might as well be a live action anime adaptation.

Zeiram (Mizuho Yoshida, who later played Gojira in GODZILLA, MOTHRA AND KING GHIDORAH: GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK) is the name of a villainous alien on a rampage. He looks like a guy with a Boushh-style slit mask and a wide brimmed hat. The hat has a little kabuki-white face on the front that sometimes looks like a doll head, but in closeup appears to be a living person. Sometimes it extends on a long wormy neck. Eventually it’s revealed that he’s a “forbidden biological weapon,” and the “hat” is actually Zeiram, the rest is a biomechanical attachment. He’s basically a manta ray driving a mech! Spoiler.

Extra-terrestrial bounty hunter Iria (Yûko Moriyama, TOKYO RAIDERS) and her partner Bob (voice of Masakazu Handa, one episode of Samurai Champloo) – who’s just a computer who talks to her – accept the assignment to capture Zeiram on Earth. I’m sure he would’ve caused a real scene walking around in public, but Iria gets there first and no one seems to notice her cool sci-fi boots and poncho. She fills an abandoned building with weapons, computers and salvaged electronic equipment she’s using to build a teleportation device. Although it means a smaller bounty, they have to use a “Zone” – a virtual reality simulation of the area – to trap Zeiram without any human witnesses/victims.

Or at least that’s the idea. Kamiya (Yukijirô Hotaru, GAMERA: GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE) and Teppei (Kunihiro Ida, WEATHER GIRL) are a couple of goofs from the electric company sent to check on “someone stealing electricity,” which of course is Iria creating the Zone. Kamiya bumps a lever and warps Teppei into the Zone just as Zeiram lands in a big horned pod thing that breaks open like an egg.

When Teppei first encounters Zeiram in the Zone he doesn’t know what’s going on, asks him who’s in charge, tells him to stop pointing his weird biomechanical laser gun thing at him – “That’s dangerous!” So maybe I was wrong, maybe no one would’ve noticed he didn’t fit in if he made it to the actual city.

Iria warps herself in, Kamiya jumps in with her, and the movie is mostly a series of back-and-forth skirmishes between Iria and Zeiram. The idea of alien bounty hunters on Earth reminds me of I COME IN PEACE, CRITTERS and (in a less direct way) THE TERMINATOR, but maybe even more than that this is like a simplified PREDATOR and PREDATOR 2 (released the year before). You have this masked, non-verbal alien warrior who keeps pulling out different weapons and devices and seems unstoppable. But ZEIRAM distinguishes itself with weirder, gooier tech. He throws a little egg thing on the ground and it stop-motion-grows into a monster guy to send after foes. Instant attack dog.

Iria has an arsenal of her own. She has a headset that makes her super-leap, and causes animated flashes with her kicks and punches. She sets up traps, including one that wraps Zeiram in a whole bunch of cables and is going to shock him. It seems like she’s got him dead to rights until that little white head extends out, knocks the control out of her hand, and chews through the cables.

Later she zaps him with a thing called a savegun that traps him in a crystal-shaped container, but those two dipshits from the electric company get left alone next to it before she figures out how to get them home, and they accidentally unleash him. (Also Kamiya eats a giant roach thing he finds sealed in plastic. He says it’s pretty good.)

Against Bob’s objections, Iria gets the guys to help fight Zeiram, not as punishment for being such idiots, but just because she thinks it’s their best chance of survival. Bob also disapproves of her giving Kamiya “the Metis cannon,” because they don’t have approval, which would take two weeks, and they haven’t even paid for it yet. Under pressure he agrees to send it over but adds, “I’ll say one thing regarding its use. I’m definitely against it. I’ll record this as evidence for the trial.” Bob, you fuckin cop.

A great part is when Zeiram coughs up a pod, squeezes white slime out of it onto the ground and it forms into this little guy:

I think maybe it’s a clone of Teppai, who the little head just bit a chunk out of. Zeiram points for him to attack but the poor guy refuses, so Zeiram stomps on his head, spraying green juice out of his eye sockets.

It’s got a real James Cameron you-think-it’s-over-but-wait-til-you-see-this sort of structure. One thing that reminded me of THE TERMINATOR is that Iria blows Zeiram up and he seems to be dead but then he stands back up as a stop motion skeleton and keeps coming for them. (Animator: Kazutsugu Kosugi, HIRUKO THE GOBLIN). Now do you understand why we need the Metis cannon, Bob?

But actually that’s not even the coolest one at all. Later Zeiram resurrects as this THE THING-type thing:

There’s also an undeniable similarity to tokusatsu shows (or, as we call them here, Power Rangers type shows), what with the costumed villain who creates blobby monsters of lesser intelligence that the hero kicks and punches and zaps away, emphasized by sparks and smoke and small explosions. It could almost be a TV show, but the look is a little grittier and more cinematic, and jelly comes out of the monsters’ eyeballs when Iria punches or stabs them. Also if you examine that screen grab above closely enough you can see that the last hideous monster form has a random boob on it like Monstro Elisasue.

I really dug (most of) the score by Hirokazu Ohta, whose only other credits on IMDb are the anime Liegui Aisha and two other movies by this director. I think there’s some influence from Brad Fiedel’s score for THE TERMINATOR, both in the electronic percussion and some of the synth riffs, but he mixes in violins, bells, chants and other counterintuitive textures.

Writer/director Keita Amemiya (CYBER NINJA, MECHANICAL VIOLATOR HAKAIDER) also works as an animator and character designer for many video games and a few tokusatsu shows. His first directing credit is on the show Kagaku Sentai Dynaman. He directed a sequel to this and also reunited most of the cast and co-writer Hajime Matsumoto for the 1997 movie MOON OVER TAO: MAKARAGA. In 2005 he created and directed the tokusatsu show Garo, which has spun off into an endless wave of related shows, mini-series, movies, anime, video games, even a stage show, so he’s directed around 20 of those. I’m not sure I’ll have time for those, but I’ll probly check out the sequel at some point to find out how the fuck Zeiram comes back from that.