I watched Fugitive Alien this morning before I went to work. For some reason, the DAP release didn’t play in my DVD player, but played fine in my laptop.
Anyway, Fugitive Alien is a movie spliced together out of a Japanese TV show. It’s about outer space, but there are no giant monsters. At least not yet. And it’s a bumpy ride in, let me tell you. First, a group of evil “wolf raiders” are pillaging Earth. When ordered to kill a young boy named Ken, the main character (also named Ken) has a fit of conscience and stops his partner from killing the boy. Unfortunately, the partner dies accidentally. This puts Ken (the wolf raider Ken, not the boy Ken) on the run from his superiors, who now want him dead.
Ken (again, the raider Ken—the boy Ken ends up dying anyway) hijacks a space ship and flies away, but gets blasted by a weird smelling cloud (don’t ask) and he spaces himself so he doesn’t blow up with the ship. He is picked up by an Earth space ship that doesn’t realize he’s a raider. They take Ken back to Earth, where he escapes their care and tries to hijack another space ship to leave Earth. At this point I have no idea where Ken is going, and I have my doubts whether he does either.
The captain of the Earth space ship (who’s wife and son Ken—yes, that Ken—were both killed in the raid ) shanghais Ken into being one of his crew. They take off to some other planet to defend the natives against the Wolf Raiders, Ken gets captured because he can’t follow orders, but then escapes and rescues an imprisoned soldier and brings him back to the space ship. Ken’s love interest, who happened to be his partner’s sister, is sent to kill Ken because of what he’s done, but ultimately she can’t follow through with the order and dies in an ambush. They escape the planet and the movie ends with a great big To Be Continued. Great…
I rate this movie three empty seats one for each friend or relative of a main character that dies on screen.
I recently watched Gamera vs. Guiron, another classic Japanese monster movie. When a young boy, his friend, and his sister spot a UFO with their telescope land near a river, they set out to find it. When they do, and board it (against their sister’s wishes), they play around hitting buttons and it takes off, leaving the sister behind. When the UFO (which was, apparently, unmanned) leaves Earth, Gamera shows up to try to rescue the two boys.
Alas, the UFO is too fast for Gamera’s rocket-powered turtle shell, and quickly outdistances Gamera. They land on a planet in Earth’s orbit, but opposite the sun. Sound familiar? Anyway, this planet is dying, and there are only two strangely-dressed women left on it. Well, them and some giant monsters. Gaos makes an unexplained return from the volcanic lava that Gamera threw him in to in Gamera vs. Gaos, but is quickly and brutally diced up by Guiron, the monster “controlled” by the two women.
The women are cannibals, and shave one of the boys’ head trying to eat his brain or something, but Gamera shows up and they decide to beat feet instead, taking off in the UFO the boys arrived in. Unfortunately for them, Guiron has gotten out of their control, and uses his giant knife-shaped head to cut the UFO in half whilst in midair and they die.
Gamera and Guiron go at it, Guiron almost wins with the ninja stars he shoots out of his face, but Gamera triumphs in the end (as usual), puts the two halves of the UFO back together, the boys board it, and Gamera carries it back to Earth in his mouth.
I rate this movie one planet worth of empty seats, one for each of the people that died on the planet opposite Earth’s orbit that seems to be so common in Scifi movies.
PS Did I mention Cornjob? There’s a bumbling police officer in this movie whose name sounds like Cornjob. Weird.