Subatomic Brainfreeze

I was actually pretty busy at New York Asian Film Fest

No, really! It just all went to people who pay me. I can't pay me, you know! On ANN you can see my review of the adaptation of Tezuka' Buddha (hint: I couldn't stop talking for days about how botched it was). On Otaku USA there are currently three reviews up, of Yakuza Weapon (see me pose like a big dork with Tak Sakaguchi!), Milocroze, and Zaborgar. The fourth and final NYAFF review for OUSA, of Takashi Miike's Ninja Kids!!!, is forthcoming as I write this. On Colony Drop, we'll be revisiting the live-action Riki-Oh (The Story of Ricky), which I saw at the fest as well.

Don't worry, I'll think of stuff for this blog too! (Unloved anime or fighting games or mahjong...)

New York Asian Film Fest: RAW FORCE

I am unapologetic: my favorite part of New York Asian Film Fest is the superb trash that the curators find. At last year’s midnight show, LA Streetfighters changed the way I think about middle-aged high school gang members. This year it was Raw Force, a humble martial arts film which-- despite Hitler, cannibals and zombies, all of which appear in spades-- aims only to put some breasts on the screen.

A synopsis: a pothead and a fellow who resembles Hitler guest-starring in an episode of Wacky Races run a successful jade import business by trading kidnapped women for their product on the mysterious “Warrior’s Island”. Now the island is inhabited by monks who eat these women in order to cast a magic spell that animates the corpses of martial artists that cover the island. The monks use these zombies to... well, it’s not really clear why these guys raise martial artists from the dead on a regular basis, because there isn’t anybody on the island for them to fight with until our heroes arrive!

You might think this was a B-horror film, but so little time is spent on that premise-- and its appearance is so abrupt-- that it’s almost besides the point. Our heroes, you see, are unsuspecting Karate Club tourists who board a party boat (really, this movie is about half karate and half partying) which is inexplicably headed for this mass kung-fu graveyard, which everybody is pretty sure is covered in the living dead. And they party!

“When we get together, the way to get by
is pull out the booze and let’s get high!”

Raw Force is a comedy, in ways it means to be and ways it does not. The film’s constant broadsides with ill-timed non-sequitur one liners and the many, even weirder lines hidden in the background of every conversation indicate that someone was definitely trying to be funny. They didn’t quite know how, though, and the film gets even bigger laughs than it was looking for when the scene cuts immediately after an exchange like:

“Do you love him?”
“No.”
“I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to hear that.”

Blurring the “are you joking?” line further are the supremely low production values: the “effects budget” was clearly set aside for a single basket of dynamite and a small army of women willing to get naked on camera. One of the highlights of the film is the bar-fight scene, in which a nude dancer awkwardly continues her dance on the bar as the menfolk throw each other into tables, all the while surveying the scene below her with a puzzled “so do I stop?” expression on her face. The crew could hardly even afford fire (a blaze aboard the ship is represented by an explosion effect that’s superimposed over the frame), and the zombies’ martial arts outfits appear to have come from Godfey Ho’s leftover Halloween costume stash.

So yes, the NYAFF midnight crowd and I agree: Raw Force is a tremendous success. It’s not the kind of slow-burn exploitation film where you have to wade through a dull hour or so for a crazy thirty minutes: it’s a mean, lean and utterly incoherent 80 minutes of laughs and chaos with no downtime. Raw Force is indisputably trash, but it knows what its job is, and it delivers. Did I mention that the film ends with a “To Be Continued”?

Unfortunately, while low-quality copies are floating around online, the film is not legtimately available on DVD. Happy VHS hunting!

The Fuccons: THE ULTIMATE METHOD OF WHOOPING IT UP

I want to take you back into time (as I tend to do) a couple years to the early-00's days when AD Vision was still the biggest US anime distributor around. DVD had been good to the anime business, and ADV reaped more of the benefits than anybody else.

ADV always acted like fans, for better and for worse, and they were often overly ambitious in a way that only really devoted (and stubborn) fans could be. In their heyday, ADV dumped all the money they made into projects that nobody could have possibly believed were viable. ADV's brief and disastrous run in manga (they licensed thousands of titles in the thick of a completely saturated market, never released very many, and completed very, very few), and their ten-year stillborn effort at getting a widely available cable network (as, today, cable TV shrinks into irrelevance), were probably major money sinks.

But the company did things on a smaller scale that made me scratch my head, and The Fuccons is certainly one of them. Originally Oh! Mikey, a series of sketches on the Vermillion Pleasure Night variety show (also released by ADV), The Fuccons is a three-minute sitcom about an American family in Japan and their interactions with other wacky foreigners. By the way, the characters are all mannequins and the show consists almost entirely of voiced-over shots of their forever posed and frozen plastic bodies.

At the end of most episodes they laugh. Ahahahahahahaha. It's kind of creepy.

It takes a certain taste and a high level of tolerance to watch this show at all. It was apparently a big hit in Japan and elsewhere in the world (though apparently ADV lied about exactly how popular), but despite the "GET READY, AMERICA" marketing talk all over the DVD boxes I don't think the show has a lot of American appeal. The comedy is dry enough to remind me of what British sitcoms I've watched: the obliviously cheerful Mikey stumbles through a world of people who are either awful human beings, severely mentally deranged, or both. No matter whether he's beat up or humiliated or defaced, everybody has a nice, hard, forced laugh at the end of the day. Ahahahahahahaha.

The show doesn't really play up or call attention to its inherent absurdity, even as stranger and stranger situations get involved (Mikey's neighbor Time Boy probably takes the cake). If you watch one of these episodes and you don't throw out the DVD, you're probably going to watch the rest.

So The Fuccons is already a really strange little thing, and the DVD release is also strange. ADV only put out three Fuccons discs (during the days when people bought single discs of anime series, so of course it would work with this live-action mannequin sitcom), each priced at $20 and under an hour long with 17 three-minute episodes. The show is both presented in the original Japanese and dubbed in English.

The reason the DVD is so short is that rather than one long video with dubs in two languages, the Japanese and English versions of The Fuccons are completely different videos. It isn't that the English version is cut for content in any way, but most of the English episodes are a little shorter or longer by a few seconds, likely as a result of shaving quarter-seconds off here and there for comic timing reasons. The dub, done with the direct involvement of the series creator, is pretty impressive. I mostly watched the show in Japanese anyway (force of habit), but the voices are dead on.

If you watch the Japanese side, it becomes clear that the episodes are being presented out of order from their original airing.The episodes don't really depend on being watched in chronological order, but like most sitcoms there's a certain continuity that isn't really paid any mind here. Early episodes with character introductions are just run in the middle (so that they can now do a bunch of episodes with that character), and the flow of it can be strange.

You can get the DVDs for really cheap online, and you should probably give it a look if that Time Boy picture does anything for you. I mean, why wouldn't it?

Since you can't watch Fractale, WATCH AZTECKAISER INSTEAD

I was going to stop for the day, but drama's exploded all over the anime-watching internet, and I am a hero. In what is perhaps the dumbest move since the last time some Japanese company did the exact same thing, the Fractale Production Committee has cut off Funimation's legal streams of Yamakan's career-saver. Why, you ask? Because people out there are pirating it. The committee has decided that until Funimation-- I shit you not-- singlehandedly ends all piracy of their product, they will allow Funi to resume broadcasting their show.

Hey, guys, thing about digital data. People copy it. This is one of the things computers do. You can make it ask nicely "please don't copy me, people need to be paid for this", you can lock the data down, you can force this fact not to be as hard as you can. But at the end of the day, some guy will copy your digital data, and he'll give your digital data to about a million other people and there'll be nothing you can do about it.

Every week Crunchyroll runs the new anime shows mere hours after their TV airings, and every week two or three different groups rip those shows and distribute them to the masses. Far more people pirate these shows than pay for them. Is this fair to creators? No, of course it's not. Are creators everywhere-- especially in small niche scenes like our own-- rather upset with the idea that there are lots and lots of people out there watching and enjoying their work in full with no revenue whatsoever coming back to them? Who wouldn't be?

Has anybody, anybody who's tried to stop piracy-- from Hollywood to the RIAA to the Fractale Production Committee-- ever been successful? Hell, no. By shutting down the only legal means for Fractale's viewers to watch the show (and finding out if it's actually going to get good) all these guys are doing is ushering them directly towards piracy. So good job, old guys who don't know anything about the Internet. You're fools.

Hey, anime fan. The people who make Fractale don't want you to watch it, so why not respect their wishes (after all, it's only gonna hurt them to do so) and do something different. Why not watch Star of Pro Wrestling AZTECKAISER?

I don't even need anime in a world where this exists.

Check it out: when our hero sees his bro Strong Ricky get totally wasted by the evil Dark Mist Wrestling Federation, do you think he pusses out? Do you think he weeps? Do you think he rolls into a ball and just closes his eyes until everything goes away? Well, you're wrong!

He goes to the field, hits the shit out of some balls, and bullies his Little League baseball team. WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? GO GET THAT BALL, YOU IDIOT!! FASTER!!!!

Then once you've powered up, you go out there and announce yourself as the Hero Of Justice and go fight, dammit! Gotta fight! Go, go fight! Oh, fight go! Fight! Yeah!

Azteckaiser's secret power is so strong that it destroys the very fabric of reality. Yes, that's a person down there. I know it's hard to tell. Did I mention that Go Nagai and Ken Ishikawa came up with this show? Because it explains a lot: especially villains with names like Demon Satan and Red Bloody Hell.

Azteckaiser drives this sweet three-wheeler. Check out the spikes on the wheels! This show kicks major ass, and I hope the guy who translated it does the whole thing. I just hope the Fractale Production Committee doesn't come after him!

So I opened a gimmick blog - FOR GENIUS WRITER KINOKO NAISU

A couple posts ago I did a bit about the Kara no Kyoukai DVD release, and it went over pretty well with people. I've already had a pretty big success with gimmicky gag posts like this, so I figured I would do what I never actually did with Badass Manly Anime Review: just put the things up on a Tumblr.

Anyway, forget all that, I don't really have anything to do with it. This is the personal blog of one of the breakthrough minds in otaku fiction, Kinoko Naisu. Certainly you've heard of him. Mr. Naisu has graciously agreed to comment on the pressing otaku issues of the day in his inimitable style. I'm absolutely in his debt, and I think that you'll feel the same way. Payments may be made out to me, of course. I'll get them to him!

Kara no Kyoukai hits Blu-Ray in America: A SPECIAL WORD FROM KINOKO NASU

The Kara no Kyoukai BD box set will be released for $400.

"What, indeed, is money?" I asked.

She flipped her long auburn hair with the casual elegance of a spider walking among snakes, and began to speak.

"Currency is a system that man has devised in order to give his efforts-- which you and I understand are ultimately meaningless on the astral scale, but the thrashing of a fly whose legs have yet to be torn off--"

(I recalled that like the dinosaurs, humanity would eventually be destroyed by some mundane natural occurrence like a meteor: we were too insiginificant for gods to take notice of.)

"--value. The wealth number, such as it is, can be increased by work and decreased in exchange for goods and services, like our morning tea and the maid who brings it to us."

And indeed, the frills she wore. I understood this concept. It was like the use of male reproductive liquids in the magical world. In a corner of my mind, I began a series of calculations that would eventually result in my magical wealth number.

"A box set of the Japanese animated feature film series Kara no Kyoukai on Blu-Ray Disc will cost the big brothers in America four hundred of their dollar-bills. Each film would cost fifty of these strange paper strips."

This is more than the typical American big brother pays for a motion picture recorded onto any sort of discus, and many are concerned that there will be no papers left for them to ward off demons with. In Japan, 100,000 big brothers paid even more yen-coins for their discs, but as they view the discs less as a practical item than as religious offerings of an odd sort, they are pleased."

I'd made up my mind. I had to ask her.

"Sis--"

"Yes, simpleton?"

A hint of joy was mixed with her disdain.

"I want to buy Kara no Kyoukai. Is there a way to exchange my semen for some of these dollar-bills?"

She paused, blushing.

"That is possible."

Idol Fight Suchie Pai: I WILL PROBABLY FORGET YOUR KINDNESS

Hirameki International was a company that only could have even existed during the too-optimistic anime boom of the early oughts: these folks’ main business was publishing visual novels, those religious texts (with pictures!) of the hardest otaku. Video gamers don’t buy VNs-- there’s not much game there, in the traditional sense-- and anime fans involved enough to even know what they are just pirate them like they do with everything else. Even at the time, visual novels were never really viable, particularly the weird “game-on-DVD” format that Hirameki tried to bridge the gap with.

So Hirameki gave anime distribution a shot with just about the only thing less marketable than a visual novel: Idol Fight Suchie Pai II, a one-shot OVA based on a Japanese strip mahjong arcade game. At least Kenichi Sonoda’s name was on the box!

A long search comes to an end: HERE IS THE PRINCE OF TENNIS FANDUB

Here's how this went, guys: earlier today, my bro Ko from welcome datacomp found a guy with the file in question, one thought lost to time. I will credit him with his amazing Danbooru tag. As my router is currently torrent-averse, I put this up on Megaupload, but apparently it was already there. The file "uploaded" instantly. Well then, what we were looking for must have been under our noses the whole time. The treasure was always inside your heart! Without further ado, here's the fandub. If you want to stream it, here you go. Don't chicken out!

Deadly Premonition impressions: I SAW EVERY SINGLE RICHARD DONNER MOVIE THE DAY IT CAME OUT

There is a little videogame sweeping the nation about now, and it's called Deadly Premonition. It is named for the fact that the hero's coffee tells the future. It costs 20 dollars, and consistent with that price, the quality of the gameplay itself is low. On a raw, mechanical level, Deadly Premonition isn't a well-made game. But Deadly Premonition is a great game. I don't mean that to say that the game is "so bad it's good", I mean that it's actually a ton of fun for every other reason. If you're willing to put up with short stretches of a bad videogame, the rest of the game is completely worth it.

Subatomic Brainfreeze sells out to The Man: YOU LIKED IT BETTER WHEN IT WAS STILL UNDERGROUND

If you're reading this, then I'm doing awesome, because my first piece of work for Anime News Network just went up. I'm taking over Astro Toy, the ANN toy review column. I've never really talked about it on the blog, but I used to really be in love with Japanese toys, to the point where I just ran out of room for them. Every few years I buy something nice for myself, but I've mostly been away. When I was approached with the opportunity to re-awaken the terrible, plastic-and-diecast-craving beast inside of me as a part-time job, I really had no choice but to say yes. The first piece is a review of Max Factory's Figma Golgo 13, and I hope you all love it. I'm gunning for other opportunities, so hopefully this won't be the last of me you see around the internet. Tell your friends! Tell your friends who can pay me to write for them! In fact...

HIRE DAVID CABRERA TO WRITE FOR YOU TODAY.

Hey, everybody! If there's one damn thing David Cabrera knows in all the world, it's stupid crap like Japanese videogames and cartoons! I'm proven to have spent way too much time on this stuff. I:

-am Anime News Network's new toy reviewer
-have been writing about videogames and anime on this blog for over three years, and am a founding member of Colony Drop, the angry anime fan's favorite destination.
-have guest written at places like Insert Credit and Action Button
-was famous, filthy-mouthed 4chan gimmick poster Badass Manly Anime Reviewer
-have a functioning work ethic
-am regularly asked things like "How do you even know things like that?" and "You're an Akiba-type, right?"
-love this stuff too, too much.

Potential employers are welcome to contact me at subatomicbrainfreeze at google's email service.

(Don't worry, guys, the blog isn't going anywhere.)