The Guyver Review

Long time, no see. I've been busy.

Let's face it: we all love Mark Hamill. C'mon, you know it. It's like the man said: "don't f*** with the Jedi Master, son." Whether we were watching him beat James Earl Jones's ass with a rotoscoped laser sword or hearing him murder our inner child, Mark Hamill helped define an entire genre and lent his talent to films, television shows, and video games everywhere. Try very hard to remember that when watching The Guyver, a 1991 motion picture mutation that leaves the viewer with sympathy for Mr. Hamill and ridicule for just about everything else.

Based on a long-running Japanese manga series, The Guyver's plot concerns the eponymous Guyver, a semi-biological suit of advanced power armor created by aliens, who also created humans as some sort of "perfect killing machine" thousands of years ago. I think. Frankly, the whole thing comes off as more than a little ridiculous, although this may have more to do with its origins as a manga than anything else. Regardless, our story begins as a scientist hides the Guyver from some thugs who transform into rejected monsters from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II. The Guyver is found by a young man named Sean (Jack Armstrong), whereupon it bonds with him (symbiote-style) and he is hunted down by a megacorporation led by one of the aliens who seeks to harness the power of the Guyver for himself. Along the way, Sean runs into a cop played by a mustache-sporting Mark Hamill (easily the best performer in the whole film) investigating the disappearance of the scientist, but his importance to the story is suspect. The same goes for the scientists' daughter Mizky (Vivian Wu), who happens to be Sean's girlfriend. She and Hamill spend most of the film running around while Sean dons the Guyver suit and does battle against the aforementioned alien monsters, all of whom would probably be laughed off the set of Power Rangers.

In fact, laughing is what I was doing for most of the film. Not that the film is intentionally funny; I've seen better humor out of Family Circus. No, The Guyver is entrenched firmly in the soil of the Mystery Science Theater brand of comedy, the kind where one is inclined to add the word "pilgrim" at the end of every one of Mark Hamill's lines as he spouts out a terrible John Wayne-esque dialect. Looking back, it's almost as if the movie was trying to achieve this exact variety of B-movie status, not good enough to be a film, but not bad enough to be unwatchable. The kind which induced both a cringe and a spasm of guffaws when I noticed Jeffrey Combs in a cameo as a scientist named "Dr. East." And that's only the tip of the iceberg: the Three Stooges-style special effects, the rapping lizardman, the Russian monster with some sort of wiggling proboscis, a scene near the beginning where the alien overlord mind-controls his hapless minion into punching himself in the face (from which we recieve the immortal line: "I'll make you slap yourself into OBLIVION!"), watching Mark Hamill get transformed into a low-budget animatronic giant cockroach (oooh, big spoiler), and let's not forget the obvious and over-the-top "whoosh" sound effects that play whenever the Guyver hurls someone across the room.

But don't be so quick to dismiss The Guyver as nothing more than a cinematic toilet drain. Despite being a 90's film, the film always has one foot in the good old 80's, and I suppose I'll watch anything with a little blue lightning thrown in there. It's cheesier than the Cheesecake Factory, but it's a good kind of cheese, the kind you can enjoy with friends, or if there aren't any reruns of Quantum Leap on to satisfy your 80's mania. Well, that's all for now. Peace out.