Movie Review: Dragon Ball Z - Lord Slug

Dragon Ball Z: Lord Slug [1991]

Dragon Ball Super might be on a break last week, and as we wait for the final conclusion of Super and the Universal Saga, I ended up watching this old movie.

This is the fourth of the many non-canonical (or you-might-insert-this-somewhat-tenuously-to-the-anime/manga-canon) Dragon Ball Z movie, "Lord Slug", also known as "Dragon Ball Z: Super Saiyan Son Goku" in Japan, is... is honestly a bit of a mixed bag. For the most part, it's another typical anime tie-in movie. A brand new threat shows up, in this case being the renegade Namekian, the titular Lord Slug. Whose name really is the least threatening thing you could've given a villain. We spend the first act having him do some wanton destruction, then the second arc having the good guys beat up his army of colourful minions, and then the final arc having Goku fight Slug. 

And honestly, the parts of the 50-minute movie that deals with the actual Lord Slug plotline is actually decent. The movie starts with a fun little visual as Goku and Krillin try to deflect a falling meteor without blowing it up, only for the meteor to actually be Lord Slug's ship. We get some neat invasion scenes, we get a rare occasion of DBZ Chi-Chi actually fighting, we get a brief montage of Slug's men collecting the Dragon Balls and wish Slug back to the prime of his youth. 

Then we get to the fighting scenes with his minions and... okay, it's pretty perfunctory. We've got huge big orange brute Wings, creepy frog-dude Medamatcha, and stretchy-arms bishonen dude Angila. There's some neat visuals with Piccolo and Gohan fighting the two, including one that involves Piccolo brutally breaking Wings' arms through a store. Poor Krillin ends up being the butt of "ha-ha-Krillin-is-useless" jokes, which honestly hit him harder in these movies than it does in the actual DBZ anime/manga. The Slug battle is actually decently animated, too, with Slug displaying the ability to become a giant -- which I completely forgot was something Piccolo did in original Dragon Ball.

Sadly, the movie might perhaps have the largest amount of problems that make it fall short of being actually good. Slug's backstory is honestly quite decent, but it ends up being a literal carbon copy of the original Piccolo from Dragon Ball -- an elderly evil Namekian who uses the Dragon Ball to regain his youth and then menace our heroes. Sure, the talk about Lord Slug being a mutated 'Super Namekian' that's stronger than Freeza (all the movie villains really love to name-drop other people as a cheap yardstick) is neat, but the movie doesn't do anything with it, and beyond some "why are you not fighting with us?" dialogue with Piccolo, doesn't actually explore anything about the Namekians' whole demon-alien deal. 

We also have "Fake Super Saiyan", because the movie went into production before the actual climax of the Freeza arc (timeline-wise it probably took place between the Saiyan and Namek sagas, although it's a tenuous handwave) the movie-makers just shoehorned this power-up form and in the movie it's actually treated by King Kai as if Goku has became the legendary Super Saiyan. It's pretty weird, gets used for one fight scene and then tossed aside in favour of the Spirit Bomb killing Slug. 

But perhaps one of the biggest problems is the huge amount of filler. I've made my peace that Oolong keeps finding his ass into these movies just to crack a couple of one-liners, but a good one-third of the movie is focused on Gohan and that goddamn irritating dragon of his, Icarus (or Haiya Dragon), who adds even less to the movie than Oolong does. Add that to an extended random whistle-dance sequence at the beginning of the movie, which is a shitty set-up to the Namekians' Kryptonite... whistling... and... yeah. As badass as Piccolo ripping his ears is, bringing Lord Slug to his knees with an overly drawn-out whistling scene is a pretty silly thing to build one of the climaxes in this movie around. 

Overall, while it's not bereft of good moments, the execution is pretty slip-shod, Slug's not particularly interesting (in fact, his bit role as a brutish recurring thug in the Xenoverse 2 game is far more memorable than anything he does here) and some really questionable plot points make this a far weaker movie than it could've been.