Movie Review: Kamen Rider J

Kamen Rider J [1994]

A year after the attempted reboot with Kamen Rider ZO, they decided to do another movie, and this one, Kamen Rider J, is probably the one that's most memorable to modern audiences. Because of the three in-between stepchildren of the Kamen Riders, Kamen Rider J is the one with the most memorable gimmick, and one that is prominently used anytime there's a huge "let's show off all our Kamen Riders here" movie... J is the one that becomes a giant. He never gets a line and he never really does anything important in any of the movies, usually just the source of a quick huge impressive scene (most memorably for me in the Gaim Showa-vs-Heisei movies; and in two Decade-centric movies). 

But he has a movie of his own, another 40+ minute affair like his predecessor (and doppelganger), Kamen Rider ZO. And watching the two movies back-to-back it's kind of interesting. ZO is definitely the more solid movie, with a more tighter and solid plot, but said plot is so repetitive in terms of a Kamen Rider show. Whereas J's storyline is... it's interesting. It's certainly not a new concept, and I'm pretty sure I've seen this a lot in like, Doraemon or whatever, but I don't think Kamen Rider has actually done anything with a heavy 'save the nature' theme, huh? Which is actually kind of surprising, considering how you'd think that would be an easy well to draw from. But oh well.

In addition to starring the big J himself (J stands for Jumbo, apparently, according to the creators), Kamen Rider J is notable for starring Sentai alumnus Yuta Mochizuki, otherwise known as Geki, Tyranno Ranger of Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger fame. Oh, and having one of the monsters be called Agito, which, let me tell you, is kind of surreal to see and hear. 

The approach to this movie is basically the opposite of ZO, with not a whole ton of mystery or exposition. The bad guys show up, monologue, kidnap the obligatory child-in-distress and the whole 48-hour movie is just Kamen Rider J fighting against a little series of miniboss kaijin enemies before finally fighting the main villain. The introduction is quick -- the Fog Empire are aliens on an alien ship looking for food (they're apparently responsible for the dinosaur extinction by eating the dinosaurs millions of years ago), for some reason they decide to kidnap Kouji Segawa's little sister Kana and go through a very elaborate ritual to feed her to the children of the Fog Mother. Kouji himself is an environmentalist taking photographs to investigate pollution of a random lake. Kouji gets murdered by the three goons Agito, Zuu and Garai... but almost as quickly, gets resurrected by a bunch of 'Earth Spirits', who handwave their existence and infuse Kouji with the powers of Kamen Rider J. Oh, and he also gets a talking grasshopper friend called Berry. Which... uh... yeah. 

No time to think about the bizarreness of everything, because Kouji gets tossed straight into non-stop battles with very brief cutscenes to dead animals and pollution, and Fog Mother being a generic evil monster! The first fight with Agito (hee) is probably the highlight, although part of it might just be because I do like the Agito suit. It's got a Godzilla monster vibe to it. He then gets kidnapped by Zuu, who dies anticlimactically, then fights Garai while Kana nearly gets herself fed to a bunch of (actually very cool looking) nasty alien worm-bugs. There's a pretty random bit where Kamen Rider J gets beaten by a bunch of flesh-wall props, but then the power of the earth and nature (tm) pull off a deus ex machina, and allow Kamen Rider to go gigantic, save Kana and beat the shit out of Fog Mother's true form, which is a giant mountain-sized spaceship. 

And you know what? The actual Ultraman/Sentai giant monsters duking it out is actually quite neat, and there's always the novelty of Kamen Rider never actually having something like this before. No complaints here, the exploding prop buildings are pretty neat, and while Kamen Rider J doing a little "J" pose with his fingers after his transformation and finishers is a bit lame, it's at least something that makes him stand out compared to his doppelganger ZO. (The two suits actually have different accents side-by-side, but honestly, considering how these guys never really had much of an exposure, it's easy to handwave them as looking near-identical). It's just real hard to say anything much because this is just a single, standalone project. 

Ultimately, though, there's some... neat concepts here. The giant form, obviously, as is the idea of a straight up alien empire as an enemy... both concepts that are admittedly cribbed and used a lot in other tokusatsu shows like Ultraman and Sentai. But, again, even if the movie itself is pretty thin in terms of depth and characterization, it sort of succeeds in being just a simple one-off tokusatsu movie? Both the three mid-Showa, mid-Heisei riders are honestly kind of quaint and part of me really wished that someone could've done more with them in subsequent entries, but at the same time there's also so little material around them that the producers probably thought 'why bother'? At least Toei likes ZO, J and Shin enough to count them among the 'main riders', so even if they don't do a lot, at least they keep showing up in random movie here and there. This movie is... well, it's not a bad 45 minutes to spend; I've certainly watched much worse tokusatsu than this.