Movie Review: Shin Kamen Rider - Prologue

Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue [1992]

It's the 90's, all the franchises were trying to do a dark'n'gritty reboot. So was Kamen Rider.

After Kamen Rider Black's explosively popular series ended in 1988, the franchise went dormant for a while until 1992, where they decided to do a dark and gritty reboot for the series' 20th anniversary. And the result is... this movie. 

I'll talk about the good parts that I actually do enjoy about this movie first. By and by, especially in recent years, I've enjoyed stories that embrace their sillier sides and their silly inspirations far, far more than those that try too hard to be too adult, gritty, and angsty. But there's something to be said about making works of fiction be truly mature... particularly if it's an adaptation of a franchise that's originally a lot friendlier.  It doesn't happen often, but sometimes, adaptations of shows or comics that are originally a lot less brutal or gory ends up becoming good. Several decades after the release of this movie, Kamen Rider Amazons would prove that, yes, you can have a series about a transforming psychopath with lots of gruesome murders and a cannibalistic race be actually good. Opinion varies on the quality of the second season (I don't like it), but Amazons' first season was pretty damn awesome. 

Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue... isn't. I'm absolutely intrigued by the practical effects, for what little we see of it. While the other one-shot Kamen Rider movies made after this movie (ZO and J) had pretty gruesome monsters too, I feel like the action scenes in Shin are pretty damn awesome. The gruesome transformation scenes, the monstrous cutaways in the main character's hallucinations as he imagines him turning into a flying locust-human-head hybrid, and the sight of the bad guy monster literally ripping his face off to reveal the cyborg body beneath... superb work. Oh, and Shin killing Cyborg #2 by ripping his head and spine out, Predator style? That's cool. Cyborg #2's utterly cool-looking half-melted cyborg look revealing the skin underneath is also pretty A+ monster design in my book. 

Also done well is the handling of 'the Foundation', if this was meant to be the first movie in many, keeping the Foundation as ambiguous as possible and only hinting at it, showing only its operatives and its rivals, is also well done. Even more well done is the usage of dr. Onizuka as an utterly rogue scientist, far more interested in making his dream world where everyone is as obedient as a swarm of grasshoppers, leading to a more 'realistic' version of how a world with a more down-to-earth and sci-fi vibe has a grasshopper armoured man running around. 

And the suit design. Hoo boy. Shin is a Kamen Rider that everyone lambasts for not looking like a Kamen Rider, but it's honestly one of my favourite suits. I do admittedly have a weakness for very organic-looking and monstrous mutant rider forms... but, well, I'm also going to admit that the monstrousness of Shin would definitely turn a segment of the intended audience off. 

That, and the quality of the movie itself. Put into words, perhaps most of the movie isn't terrible. A lot of it feels like a reboot of the very first Kamen Rider origin story, while putting a more realistic and mature spin on it. Our main character, Shin Kazamatsuri (hoo boy, thank goodness for that name being the same as his Rider name) is a volunteer test subject in 'the Foundation', and his dad's a scientist there. He keeps having nightmares of doing gruesome murders, and eventually ends up snooping around and getting vague answers. Up until slightly after the halfway point of the movie, at which point Shin realizes he's not actually responsible, turns into a monster, angsts, and then we get a rescue plot as he tries to save his girlfriend and father from the Foundation while the CIA tries to raid it and capture or destroy all the cyborgs. 

The biggest problem is easily the pacing. I did touch upon it a little when I reviewed ZO, but that movie at least kept the amount of characters to a relative minimum. In Shin, there are probably around five or six main characters you kind of have to keep track of, in addition to the faceless entity that's the Foundation's group of unnamed operatives. Onizuka being a rogue agent, the love interest Ai being a Foundation loyalist that becomes good because of the power of love (it's that kind of movie), Shin grappling with a sense of guilt for murders that he may or may not have done, and the CIA as a third party are all interesting bits, but none of it ever really get any sort of proper conclusion. 

A good chunk of the 90-minute movie's screentime is just devoted to Shin just... sort of going around and trying his best to figure out what's wrong, but none of it is really interesting. Shin's father and his argument with Onizuka is a subplot that I don't care about, Shin's love interest Ai has zero characterization, and Shin himself doesn't have much beyond a vague ball of stoic vagueness. 

Worse, of course, is the plotline that shows up around halfway through the movie about Shin and Ai's hideous mutant half-grasshopper, half-human embryo... which... yeah. Maybe done with better care the idea of a mutant, half-grasshopper psychic baby might be interesting, but all we have here is some bizarre cutaways to a fetus early on in the movie, and this hideous CGI abomination. This baby really goes nowhere, but basically hijacks the plot in its final act, using its vaguely defined psychic powers to knock people out but also keeps silent while its mother gets gunned down in a pretty hilariously terribly convoluted way. And I watch a fair amount of old TV shows, so yeah. 

Also, this movie's not afraid of showing some nudity. Shin and Ai have a scene of swimming naked in a pool at one point, which doesn't really add anything other than 'look, pretty people being buck-ass nude in a pool' and I guess foreshadowing that these two made a baby? But the very first scene of a monster attacking a young woman and explicitly slashing her chest so her bra is visible when her corpse hits the ground is pretty eye-rollingly juvenile. There's also a lot of egregious blood, all of which looks like pretty terrible paint. The scars and the constant showcases of Shin's body mutating when he's finally transformed are okay, though. 

The idea that this movie is a 'Prologue' ends up possibly being its biggest downfall. Watching Godzilla movies, I've seen a bunch of them that tried to stand out from the pack by having unconventional endings and whatnot, or trying to set up a sequel. This one does a spectacular job at going off the rails near the end, though. The tragic death of Ai being shot by main bad guy Iwao Himuro is followed by Shin slaughtering him as well as Cyborg Level 2, which is... okay, sure. I wasn't digging the utterly bizarre mutant psychic baby plot, but sure... but then you have the ending after that, which just a random Foundation helicopter show up, grab Shin and his dad, only for the CIA lady to shoot a rocket that blows everything up. It's not only unnecessarily depressing, but also terribly paced.

As much as I adore Shin any time I spot him doing things in one of those huge Taisen movies, his movie is pretty doo-doo. It's worth checking out for the fights, but unlike J or ZO, this one doesn't even have a solid-but-poorly-realized story to go with it.