Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: This is Rob Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's
Speaker 3: Mech Day on Weird House Cinema. Rob. Is this our first?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: Wait what am I asking? I was gonna say? Is
Speaker 3: this our first full on mech movie? But we did
Speaker 3: Robot Jocks that's like an all time fave.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this is coming. This would be our second
Speaker 2: mech film. It's gonna be what our second Japanese film?
Speaker 2: And in a very broad sense, I guess it's like
Speaker 2: what our second cyberpunk film.
Speaker 3: I guess it depends on what you count as cyberpunk.
Speaker 3: So today we're going to be looking at the nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty nine Japanese cyberpunk movie gun Head aka gun Hato
Speaker 3: and gun Head. I know what you're thinking. Is that
Speaker 3: spelled No, it is spelled with an hed instead of
Speaker 3: an hcha D like that. Isn't there a band that's
Speaker 3: called like head P or something. I don't know anything
Speaker 3: about that band. I remember them from when I was
Speaker 3: in high school and they also spell it CHD. No comment,
Speaker 3: there nothing interesting about I.
Speaker 2: Have nothing to add on that I don't know anything
Speaker 2: about p head, though a gunhead with the AGD spelling
Speaker 2: would be a great name for a band.
Speaker 3: It would be, Actually, I was just thinking that. Not
Speaker 3: only that, the logo for the movie, where the title
Speaker 3: is rendered in the full on screen font, looks like
Speaker 3: a band logo, looks like the van Halen logo or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now some of you might be wondering, especially if
Speaker 2: you're going to this episode's sight unseen, Is this about
Speaker 2: a Is this a Japanese cyberpunk film about a guy
Speaker 2: with a gun for a head? No, even though that
Speaker 2: would be a perfect perfect plot device for a Japanese
Speaker 2: cyberpunk film.
Speaker 3: Sure, Like a guy who gets some kind of virus
Speaker 3: inside him that causes his head to fu is with
Speaker 3: a gun and it's all about like his identity changing
Speaker 3: as his mind is taken over by the gun mind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that would be totally an expected plot device. In fact,
Speaker 2: it may exist. But no, gunhead stands for something.
Speaker 3: That's right, it's your classic acronym. This stands for rob.
Speaker 3: You dug this up, so I have to trust you
Speaker 3: on this one, But I think you're correct. It stands
Speaker 3: for gun unit of heavy eliminate device.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of those kind of cheap acronyms where
Speaker 2: they get two letters from the second word. So if
Speaker 2: we were being really strict about it, it would be
Speaker 2: goo head instead of gunhead. But you know, gunhead sounds cooler.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, it's like those government bills that are called
Speaker 3: like the Opportunity Act or something. An opportunity is an acronym,
Speaker 3: and they're grabbing three letters from here and one letter
Speaker 3: from there in the middle of a word. It's just
Speaker 3: all over the place. They're back engineering the actual name
Speaker 3: from the acronym.
Speaker 2: So again, this is a nineteen eighty nine film. And
Speaker 2: for those of you out there who you know follow
Speaker 2: like Japanese media, maybe a little bit enough to just
Speaker 2: know to have picked up on the title at times,
Speaker 2: you may have noticed that there is a manga. There
Speaker 2: are two different video games, nineteen eighty nine's gun Head
Speaker 2: for PC and Gunhead The New Battle for NES. It
Speaker 2: might make you wonder, like what came first? Is this
Speaker 2: a movie based on a video game? Is it a
Speaker 2: movie based on a manga, which is certainly something you
Speaker 2: see a lot of these days, But no, this film
Speaker 2: is original IP and these are all things that were
Speaker 2: adapted from it.
Speaker 3: God, I love a sci fi movie that's original. IP,
Speaker 3: it's a beautiful Unicorn.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean this, yes, especially today, but yeah, this
Speaker 2: was a this was this was an original IP and Joe.
Speaker 2: You even found us some screenshots from these games.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's right. So I found that. I don't know
Speaker 3: if it was ever released for the Nees in the
Speaker 3: United States or internationally, but it was released for the
Speaker 3: Famicom in Japan, I think, which was the Leave, the
Speaker 3: Japanese equivalent of the Nes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's my rough understanding. I'm not really an expert
Speaker 2: on that kind of stuff, but.
Speaker 3: At least the version I found as a Famicom game
Speaker 3: called Gunhead. I guess this was Gunhead the New Battle
Speaker 3: or something, but it looks like it is a combination
Speaker 3: of like a real time or turn based strategy game
Speaker 3: where you would be like managing Gunhead units, which are
Speaker 3: these big battle robots as they move around into positions
Speaker 3: on an island. So you know, it'd be like Warcraft
Speaker 3: or StarCraft or something. There's a map and you're managing units,
Speaker 3: and then I think when the units meet, it goes
Speaker 3: into a different type of gameplay where it's like a
Speaker 3: side view real time battle where you're shooting at each
Speaker 3: other and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, with some kind of amusing looking sprites.
Speaker 3: I like these now, based on what I saw within
Speaker 3: the game, this would not be based within the same
Speaker 3: timeline as the movie itself. It looks like this would
Speaker 3: be the prequel to the movie. I think this would
Speaker 3: take place during the Robot War that is the background
Speaker 3: we're told about in the opening text crawl of the movie. Though.
Speaker 3: I also read on the internet that the Gunhead I
Speaker 3: don't know that this is true because I really don't
Speaker 3: see much resemblance here, but I at least read the
Speaker 3: claim that there is a Turbographics sixteen game called Blazing
Speaker 3: Lasers that was also inspired by Gunhead. I looked it up.
Speaker 3: It's one of these vertical scrolling space shoot them up
Speaker 3: games I guess, kind of like Space Invaders, but where
Speaker 3: you're like moving quickly down across the background.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm glancing at footage from it now, and yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't see a lot of shared DNA, but maybe that's
Speaker 2: just me.
Speaker 3: I never had this game, but I did have a
Speaker 3: Turbographics sixteen. I had one of those weird off brand
Speaker 3: consoles that I remember playing games like Bonk's Adventure, which
Speaker 3: was a game where you play a think a baby
Speaker 3: caveman with a giant head and you would hit people
Speaker 3: with your head.
Speaker 2: So this is a system that didn't have Mario, didn't
Speaker 2: have Sonic, but it had Bonk the baby Caveman.
Speaker 3: It had Bonk and perhaps dubious gunhead rip off ip okay.
Speaker 3: I was trying to write the one line elevator pitch
Speaker 3: for this movie, and I was just failing. So that
Speaker 3: must be reflected in my actual pitch, which is, in
Speaker 3: the future, armored mechs will be so advanced that humans
Speaker 3: do not have the slightest chance to understand what they're doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this, I have to add the caveat here.
Speaker 2: So first of all, I'm not the initial intended audience
Speaker 2: for this. You know, this was released largely in Japan
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty nine, and the version I watched, obviously
Speaker 2: I'm watching it for the first time, you know, sometime later,
Speaker 2: decades later, I'm watching it dubbed. And of course anytime
Speaker 2: something has been dubbed, you know, there are some great
Speaker 2: dubs out there, there are some not so great dubs
Speaker 2: out there. So it's possible that that contributed to me
Speaker 2: maybe not understanding what was going on in the film
Speaker 2: most of the time. So I found myself watching the
Speaker 2: film while also checking regularly checking in on the Wikipedia
Speaker 2: plot summary for the film, which didn't really This didn't
Speaker 2: make the film like a poor movie VI going experience.
Speaker 2: It just kind of made it more. It's like reading
Speaker 2: a historical text where you need to keep checking in
Speaker 2: to see what's being discussed, like, all right, what are
Speaker 2: they talking about here? What's supposed to be going on here?
Speaker 2: Because if I just had to go on the movie itself,
Speaker 2: I would have been lost very quickly.
Speaker 3: I would argue that this was only really a problem
Speaker 3: for us because we're having to record a podcast about it.
Speaker 3: I think if I had just been watching this movie,
Speaker 3: I would not have looked up anything. I would not
Speaker 3: have understood a lot of what was happening on screen,
Speaker 3: and I would have loved the experience.
Speaker 4: Nevertheless, this is a goot.
Speaker 2: Like in terms of just recommending this movie, I highly
Speaker 2: recommend this movie to play in the background with other
Speaker 2: music on top of it. As we'll get into, the
Speaker 2: visuals in this are wonderful. The visual world of this
Speaker 2: movie is very rich. But yeah, if you're watching it
Speaker 2: for a podcast intending to speak coherently about what happened
Speaker 2: in it. That's where our cross referencing comes in.
Speaker 3: Actually, when I was reading about this movie before we
Speaker 3: decided to watch it, one of the most common things
Speaker 3: I saw in like user reviews all over the internet
Speaker 3: and stuff, was I don't know what happened in this movie,
Speaker 3: but I loved it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, let's hit some trailer audio.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, look at this junk.
Speaker 5: Give it up, Brooklyn ten seconds to contacts cross fire.
Speaker 2: Gun Head.
Speaker 3: Now in the English language trailer. I don't know if
Speaker 3: this is the part we just got clipped, but one
Speaker 3: of my favorite things about it was that it was
Speaker 3: it had the announcer, you know, the same guy who
Speaker 3: does the Inner World part, also reading quotes about the
Speaker 3: movie from critics. So it's this Duke nukeomb voiceover saying
Speaker 3: things like totally delivers the goods.
Speaker 2: Yeah, though, I have to say it did sound like
Speaker 2: a third rate in a world narrator, you know, like
Speaker 2: it's not the narrator who does the big cinematic trailers.
Speaker 2: This is the narrator type of narrator that does trailers
Speaker 2: that you watch on other DVDs that come out in
Speaker 2: the mid nineties, right, yes, yes.
Speaker 3: Well, actually no, I stand by my original comparison. He
Speaker 3: sounds like Duke nukemb I don't know who did that voice,
Speaker 3: but that was very close for me.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, let's start where we normally start. Let's talk about
Speaker 2: the people of note the connections here. The first connection
Speaker 2: to make here though, is not really you know, individual
Speaker 2: human specific. It has to do with the production company
Speaker 2: because this was a co production between Nippon Sunrise as
Speaker 2: well as a number of a number of other companies
Speaker 2: like Bandai the toy Company was involved.
Speaker 3: There were like seven companies listed yeah on the yeah.
Speaker 2: But the big one, the one that instantly gets our
Speaker 2: attention is of course Toho the best. Yeah, legendary film studio,
Speaker 2: most famous, I guess for many listeners for Godzilla, but
Speaker 2: also for various other films, such as especially the early
Speaker 2: films of Kira Kurosawa. But it was founded in nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty two as the Tokyo Takarzuka Theater Company. It controlled
Speaker 2: traditional theaters throughout Tokyo, and as films began coming in
Speaker 2: from overseas, they got in on the production as well.
Speaker 3: Every time I see the Toho logo at the beginning
Speaker 3: of the movie, I have a Pavlovian reaction to it
Speaker 3: because I know I'm about to watch something I adore.
Speaker 3: I know Toho must put out bad movies too, but
Speaker 3: I guess somehow the bad ones just never make it
Speaker 3: to me in my personal brain archives. It's either going
Speaker 3: to be like a lovely Kaiju meet Slam or a
Speaker 3: Kurosawa masterpiece, or something else of godly merit.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: If you're not like a regular consumer of Japanese cinema,
Speaker 2: then you you've seen a Toho film. It's probably a
Speaker 2: Godzilla film or a Kurosawa film, and in different ways
Speaker 2: the great results. So anyway, like I was saying, they
Speaker 2: started out as being just a theater company, but then
Speaker 2: they got into producing films as well. Their first film
Speaker 2: was nineteen thirty five's Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts. This
Speaker 2: was a drama, and apparently drama in historical pictures pretty
Speaker 2: much defined the first couple of decades of Toho films,
Speaker 2: which included the early films of legendary director A.
Speaker 4: Kira Kurosawa.
Speaker 2: Now during the post war period, specifically in nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 2: things got really interesting, so the company nearly bankrupt itself,
Speaker 2: putting out first Kisawa's latest historical film and a giant
Speaker 2: monster movie. These were, respectively, the Seven Samurai and Godzilla
Speaker 2: films that would become major box office successes and lead
Speaker 2: to a string of hits from both Karrosawa and The
Speaker 2: King of Monsters.
Speaker 3: Can you believe that Seven Samurai and Godzilla came out
Speaker 3: in the same year from the same company, I mean,
Speaker 3: that is a good year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they were taking a risk doing it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So Godzilla was to Hoos's first sci fi or horror film,
Speaker 2: depending on how you look at it. We were discussing
Speaker 2: this off Mike beforehand about just how dark that first
Speaker 2: Godzilla film is.
Speaker 3: Yeah. If in fact, if you've never watched it, you
Speaker 3: should definitely go back and watch the original fifty four
Speaker 3: Godzilla because it is. It is very unlike the silly
Speaker 3: monster romps that would come in decades following, Like, the
Speaker 3: first Godzilla movie is a dark, bleak, scary adventure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it was a monster movie. Was a success.
Speaker 2: So after this, Toho continued to bust out stuff. In fact,
Speaker 2: that very same year they busted out Invisible Man in
Speaker 2: fifty four, and then Godzilla was back in fifty five
Speaker 2: for the first of just endless sequels. Like even as
Speaker 2: we're recording this, Godzilla is debuting in a new motion picture,
Speaker 2: so he absolutely cannot be stopped, and he gets bigger
Speaker 2: every time.
Speaker 3: If you've never heard me advocate it before, one of
Speaker 3: the recent movies I have loved the most is shin Godzilla.
Speaker 3: One of it. It's not part of the recent I
Speaker 3: don't know what you'd call it, like the American partnership
Speaker 3: or the international Godzilla pictures that have lots of American
Speaker 3: actors and stuff in them. This was a Japanese production.
Speaker 3: I think it came out in like twenty fifteen or
Speaker 3: sixteen something like that. Does that sound right? Yeah? It
Speaker 3: is just magical. It's a movie that is surprisingly focused
Speaker 3: on government bureaucracy in a strangely compelling way, and it's
Speaker 3: got great music, great monster effects. I just love it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so absorbing. I remember I watched it in
Speaker 2: its entirety in mute with subtitles on an airplane one.
Speaker 2: So it was one of those where I was listening
Speaker 2: to music and I was like, Ah, another Godzola movie.
Speaker 4: Let me give it a preview.
Speaker 2: I'm just curious, and then I started watching it and
Speaker 2: I just watched the whole thing just sucks you in.
Speaker 3: Have you still not seen it with the original soundtrack?
Speaker 2: No, I haven't. I have no idea what it sounds like.
Speaker 3: Oh oh, oh, you've got rob I think you would
Speaker 3: love the soundtrack to it. It's got fantastic music, a
Speaker 3: great kind of nervous string theme. It's just wonderful, I
Speaker 3: guess I should say. By the way, directed by Hideakiano
Speaker 3: and Shinji Higuchi.
Speaker 4: Cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I need to come back to it for sure,
Speaker 2: real real quick. About some other Toho films of note,
Speaker 2: one of my favorites that we may have to come
Speaker 2: back to in Weird Else Cinema is nineteen sixty three's Matango,
Speaker 2: which is about a haunted island of mushroom people. It's
Speaker 2: really kind of grizzly with people being infected by spores
Speaker 2: and slowly mutating in the mushroom people.
Speaker 4: It's pretty errithic stuff.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's definitely on the list.
Speaker 2: And then of course one that I know has we
Speaker 2: have on the list already, and we've actually heard from
Speaker 2: some listeners about Toho also put out the nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: seven Film.
Speaker 3: House Best Haunted House film of all time.
Speaker 2: Now, speaking of Bandai, yes, there have been and are
Speaker 2: models and toys of Gunhead, which is the central robot
Speaker 2: slash mac slash tank in this film. And you know,
Speaker 2: I'm assuming they must have put some I'm really assuming
Speaker 2: they put some sort of toy out back in the day.
Speaker 2: I couldn't find evidence of it, but I was looking around,
Speaker 2: and you can still get a high quality model kit
Speaker 2: of Gunhead. There's a one thirty fifth scale model that
Speaker 2: was released in twenty twelve from Codo Bokeya, and it
Speaker 2: is a pricey kit, especially imported in out of production,
Speaker 2: but it's said to be really fun. It's a three
Speaker 2: hundred part kit to build, and it looks at Japan
Speaker 2: has a long had a very strong scale model culture.
Speaker 2: And I've never built a a kit from this company,
Speaker 2: but I understand that they specialize in both traditional kits
Speaker 2: and also pre painted collectible so stuff that includes major
Speaker 2: brands like Star Wars and even things like Texas Chainsaw,
Speaker 2: Massacre and others.
Speaker 3: I feel like this time in the late eighties here
Speaker 3: was a really high point for toy etic movie and
Speaker 3: TV development, unless I'm wrong. Like this was also the
Speaker 3: era of Transformers, right, which was a very much a
Speaker 3: toy driven media property, and there were others like it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I can only assume a film like this
Speaker 2: a major production. You would have had Gunhead toys back
Speaker 2: in the day. I mean they made video game I'm
Speaker 2: a video game of it for crying out loud, So
Speaker 2: there had to have been toys.
Speaker 3: So all of the existing Gunhead games they look like
Speaker 3: sort of high budget graphical affairs. But what if there
Speaker 3: was a gun Head text adventure like Zork, Right, it
Speaker 3: would be pretty good. You say, you say go East
Speaker 3: and then it says you were absorbed by a biodroid.
Speaker 2: All right, let's talk about some of the actual humans
Speaker 2: involved in this baby. First of all, let's talk about
Speaker 2: director co writer Masato Herada born in nineteen forty nine.
Speaker 2: As a director, it looks like most of his directorial
Speaker 2: credits are for the sort of non genre jama film
Speaker 2: that tends to be far more successful domestically in Japan,
Speaker 2: as well as some award winning historical dramas. As an actor,
Speaker 2: though this is fascinating. He only has two credits on IMDb,
Speaker 2: but they're both Wes films that Western viewers are likely
Speaker 2: to be familiar with. So he had a villain role
Speaker 2: in both two thousand and threes The Last Samurai starring
Speaker 2: Tom Cruise, and two thousand and six is Fearless starring
Speaker 2: Jet Lee.
Speaker 3: Interesting why is that so often such a pleasing turn
Speaker 3: when somebody who is primarily a film director later in
Speaker 3: their careers starts taking acting roles, especially as villains. David
Speaker 3: Cronenberg did out. I remember he plays a really creepy
Speaker 3: serial killer in that movie Night Breed, and he's had
Speaker 3: some other acting roles. Of course, Werner hertzog right for
Speaker 3: some reason later in his career, I was like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'll play some villains.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean like with Cronenberg for example. And granted
Speaker 2: he's a much older director at this stage, he's been
Speaker 2: far more active as an actor recently than a director.
Speaker 2: He's even shown up on one of the new Star
Speaker 2: Trek shows.
Speaker 3: Oh I didn't know that, but I wondered if you
Speaker 3: noticed this, Rob When I was watching the opening credits
Speaker 3: to Gunhead, the director was listed as Alan Smithy. Do
Speaker 3: you know anything about what the story is here?
Speaker 4: I do not.
Speaker 2: Of course, that tends to mean that there was something
Speaker 2: bad happened, he got out of control.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Alan Smithy Films. I'm not an expert on the industry.
Speaker 3: My understanding is that happens when the director has gotten
Speaker 3: their name removed from the film, or when the production
Speaker 3: company wanted their name removed. I mean, I guess it
Speaker 3: indicates some kind of dissatisfaction or dispute.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. Maybe at least it didn't say
Speaker 2: directed by Chiron five.
Speaker 4: Didn't you know? Something went really bad?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: But yeah, I don't know the full story on that.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: Another interesting thing about this film that pops up is
Speaker 2: when you look at the at the writing credits. Again,
Speaker 2: Herada also has a co writing credit. But then there's
Speaker 2: this guy James Bannon on there credited as co writer
Speaker 2: and he's written a couple of other things. But when
Speaker 2: you look him up on IMDb, you see that he's
Speaker 2: he's mostly involved in the industry for his work as
Speaker 2: part of an ad R loop group.
Speaker 3: Ah. Now that led me to suspect that his writing
Speaker 3: credit could have had something to do with writing English
Speaker 3: lines or possibly writing for the English dub.
Speaker 4: That.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's what I thought, Well, that sounds sounds
Speaker 2: pretty reasonable. But then I started looking around on IMDb
Speaker 2: more and the truth seems to be that he won
Speaker 2: a Godzilla screenplay contest hosted by Toho, and in this
Speaker 2: original screenplay, Godzilla would fight a giant robot, and this
Speaker 2: ended up no not being used, but various elements of
Speaker 2: his work eventually became Gunhead.
Speaker 3: Now, I guess this would post date Godzilla Versus Mecha Godzilla, Right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: so Godzilla has already fought a giant robot at this point,
Speaker 3: but I guess you can have different kinds of giant robots.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, Godzilla has done everything at this point,
Speaker 2: so it's just coming up with new ways to have
Speaker 2: him do the same thing over and over again.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you, James Bannon for whatever role your giant
Speaker 3: robot idea played in inspiring this wonderful film.
Speaker 2: All right, let's talk about the cast. Masahiro Takashima plays
Speaker 2: the character Brooklyn. He was born in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 2: This was only his fourth acting credit, but he's had
Speaker 2: a long career on Japanese TV and in Japanese film,
Speaker 2: including an appearance in Godzilla Versus Destroyer in nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 2: We'll talk more about Brooklyn as we go here. But
Speaker 2: you know, Takashima is perfectly acceptable in this role as
Speaker 2: the handsome hero who loves carrots.
Speaker 3: I warmed up to him as the movie went on.
Speaker 3: There's kind of a weird introduction to him because when
Speaker 3: we very first meet him, he's acting kind of like
Speaker 3: nervous and quiet. He's got a scarf over his mouth
Speaker 3: and he doesn't talk much, and I'm kind of wondering,
Speaker 3: how is this guy going to be the hero? But
Speaker 3: somewhere around I don't know, a third of the way
Speaker 3: through to halfway through, he just suddenly like reveals his
Speaker 3: very beautiful jawline and then starts delivering with confidence. I'm
Speaker 3: not sure exactly what the transition is there, but yeah,
Speaker 3: he works as the hero.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, And then we have another major character,
Speaker 2: and this is Texas Air Ranger Sergeant nim So. She
Speaker 2: is an American or at least a Texan.
Speaker 4: Character. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't know if if Texas is still part of
Speaker 2: America in this future you get into you often get
Speaker 2: into sort of weird like splintering of the United States
Speaker 2: and your your futuristic scenarios, especially cyberpunk stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a lot of actually This is something I've seen
Speaker 3: pretty often in either alternate histories or future sci fi
Speaker 3: written by people who were not themselves Americans. They often
Speaker 3: postulate somehow that Texas has taken over North America or
Speaker 3: that Texas is its own country. I feel like I
Speaker 3: could think of half a dozen things off the top
Speaker 3: of the head that have like a Texas like that.
Speaker 2: There's a post apocalyptic board game that I that I
Speaker 2: enjoy called Niroshima hex and it's also I think an
Speaker 2: RPG brand as well. They've kind of fleshed out the world.
Speaker 2: But it's a Polish company if I remember correctly, But
Speaker 2: it involves like, you know, I can't remember if Texas
Speaker 2: has its own army, but like Mississippi has its own army,
Speaker 2: New York has its own army. So it's it's stuff
Speaker 2: like that that you know, maybe it's a little more
Speaker 2: giggle inducing to American audiences and maybe you know, works
Speaker 2: a little more seriously in the Polish context, or I
Speaker 2: don't know, maybe maybe the you know, it's Polish inventors
Speaker 2: are also having a laugh. I don't know that there's
Speaker 2: a lot of a lot of satire and works with
Speaker 2: this nature.
Speaker 3: For sure, I will say that the atmosphere in Gunhead
Speaker 3: looks sufficiently polluted to be set in a world where
Speaker 3: Texas is a major international player.
Speaker 2: All right, So the character is Texas Air Rangers Sergeant Nam,
Speaker 2: played by Brenda Baki. If she sounds familiar, that's because
Speaker 2: she was in Tails from the Crypt Demon Knight, which
Speaker 2: we previously discussed, though we didn't really discuss Baki enough.
Speaker 2: I think we were too distracted by the other cast members.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Billy Zane, Jada Pinkett, William Sadler. There are a
Speaker 3: lot of people sucking up screen oxygen here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, though she was perfectly fine in that. She played Cordelia.
Speaker 2: If you remember, she's one of the regulars there at
Speaker 2: the down and out hotel that used to be a church,
Speaker 2: and she's kind of a mid film victim of Billy
Speaker 2: Zane's Demon crew.
Speaker 3: I believe she's the one who sets Thomas Hayden Church's
Speaker 3: nipples on fire.
Speaker 2: Yes, with the electrodes.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, she's good in that. And I remember
Speaker 2: watching some of the the behind the scenes features where
Speaker 2: various cast members were talking about how she was just
Speaker 2: super nice and a pleasure to work with. But yes,
Speaker 2: in this she plays Badass Texas Air Ranger Sergeant nim Now.
Speaker 2: Other than these two films, I guess her biggest screen
Speaker 2: roles were in La Confidential, where she played Lanta Turner,
Speaker 2: Hot Shots Part Due, and also Under Siege two Dark Territory,
Speaker 2: which we've also mentioned on the show before, not.
Speaker 3: Because we watched it. It seems there's a lot of
Speaker 3: intersection there. We keep coming up against actors and directors
Speaker 3: who worked on that film.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Baki's worked a lot in TV and film,
Speaker 2: but we should probably highlight her work in Death Spa
Speaker 2: from nineteen eighty nine, and interestingly enough, her first screen
Speaker 2: credit was a nineteen eighty six comedy that I've not
Speaker 2: seen called Last Resort, which also featured Charles Grodin, Megan Malay,
Speaker 2: John Lovett's Garrett Graham. Gary Graham, Yeah, who pops up
Speaker 2: in a lot of B films. He was in Chopping
Speaker 2: mall hm.
Speaker 3: But he was also Beef in Fan of the Paradise.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Mario van Peebles whoa and Phil Hartman whoa. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so interesting. I don't know anything about that film, but
Speaker 2: that's quite a quite a cast to kick off with,
Speaker 2: and I don't think it was a bit part for
Speaker 2: I think it was a fairly you know, decent part
Speaker 2: in the film.
Speaker 3: Now, I do think it's an interesting choice that they
Speaker 3: make the representative of Texas in this movie, not a
Speaker 3: character like texts in Robot Jocks, who's just you know,
Speaker 3: Buck Strickland from King of the Hill. That instead they
Speaker 3: make the representative of Texas this kind of cool, unflappable
Speaker 3: air cavalry lady.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's There's not really much I guess you'd say
Speaker 2: t exploitation going on with this character. She's not even
Speaker 2: wearing a cowboy hat.
Speaker 3: She doesn't even have an accent.
Speaker 4: No, no, I.
Speaker 3: Mean it's not a Texas accent. She might have writ
Speaker 3: more kind of West Coast sounding.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's you know, she's good. I guess she's kind
Speaker 2: of Ripley esque without you know, being that like strong
Speaker 2: screen presence at all. But you know, she does a
Speaker 2: good job. She's kind of a fun character as much
Speaker 2: as any human in this film as a fun character,
Speaker 2: but as far as other characters in the field. So
Speaker 2: there's a there's a whole crew. We'll discuss this as
Speaker 2: we go. There's a there's an initial crew in the
Speaker 2: film that gets weeded out pretty quickly, but there are
Speaker 2: some some fun actors in it, at least initially, and
Speaker 2: one of them is this guy, Mickey Curtis. Sometimes that's
Speaker 2: spelled Mickey, like Mickey Mouse in English. Other times you
Speaker 2: see it spelled with more with a I guess kind
Speaker 2: of a Japanese kind of spelling in English fonts M
Speaker 2: I K I. But this was one of those guys
Speaker 2: that I had no clue about this guy previously, but
Speaker 2: watching this film force me to look him up, and
Speaker 2: he's a super interesting character in this He plays the
Speaker 2: weird pilot Captain banshow but in reality he's a Japanese actor, singer,
Speaker 2: and media personality. Born in Japan to English jazz and
Speaker 2: his parents, and he's been in a lot of things
Speaker 2: over the years and is still active to this day.
Speaker 2: Born in thirty eight but still acting in things. Seems
Speaker 2: like he's one of these guys who's kind of just
Speaker 2: continually recreated himself and tried different things, like I think
Speaker 2: he's done country music more recently. But he apparently rose
Speaker 2: to fame initially, at least in part as a member
Speaker 2: of the avant garde rock band Mickey Curtis and the
Speaker 2: Samurai in the late nineteen sixties. They started out as rockabilly,
Speaker 2: but then they switched to more of a prog rock
Speaker 2: kind of sound, and their nineteen seventy one album Kapa
Speaker 2: is said to be a masterpiece of heavy progressive rock
Speaker 2: in Japan, at least according to proguarchives dot com.
Speaker 3: According to the Proguetologist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Now, I'm no prog rock expert or anything, especially
Speaker 2: within the context of the Japanese music scene, but I
Speaker 2: looked this up. I wasn't able to find it on Spotify.
Speaker 2: It's listed on Discog's certainly listed on prog archives dot com.
Speaker 2: I was able to find the full album on YouTube.
Speaker 2: I was streaming it there. I'll include it on the
Speaker 2: post for this episode at simmutamusic dot com. But it
Speaker 2: sounded really cool to me. I was really enjoying this album.
Speaker 3: Well, I will say, as a licensed and accredited progtologist
Speaker 3: that this is really good stuff. You know. It has
Speaker 3: some elements that will sound familiar from a lot of
Speaker 3: the sort of heavy psych of the late sixties early seventies,
Speaker 3: things that will remind you of like Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly,
Speaker 3: but it also very much has its own sound. I
Speaker 3: like it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the last track on the album, though, is a
Speaker 2: twenty minute percussion instrumental piece, so just be ready for that.
Speaker 2: But you know that's the last track on the album.
Speaker 2: By the end, you're already won over or you stopped listening.
Speaker 2: I was looking at some of the liner notes on
Speaker 2: this album and I noticed that they are dubbed. In
Speaker 2: the liner notes, the band is dubbed as Japan's water Children,
Speaker 2: I guess owing back to the Kappa theme on Oh.
Speaker 3: Oh Like the Cop. But the monster, the water monster
Speaker 3: we've talked about that reaches up what was it? It
Speaker 3: reaches up through your anus and removes your liver.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and causes the body to bloat in all you know,
Speaker 2: a spirit a monster of drowning, a rural folk belief
Speaker 2: in Japan. And there's actually the cover art for this
Speaker 2: album is a representation of that monster.
Speaker 3: So I will say one of my main complaints about
Speaker 3: this movie is that the rest of the cast does
Speaker 3: not survive longer to sort of fill it out with
Speaker 3: their with their different personalities, because very quickly this movie
Speaker 3: kind of narrows it down to a to a small
Speaker 3: core of characters who survived to the end. I kind
Speaker 3: of wish we got to see more of the salvage
Speaker 3: slash heist crew. Some of these characters only have a
Speaker 3: couple of lines before they get iced.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean Captain Bancho seems great. I mean he's
Speaker 2: he's got all this charisma. He's such a weird cat.
Speaker 2: I want to see more of him. But yeah, he doesn't.
Speaker 2: He doesn't last too long. It's like if if you
Speaker 2: had that whole rag tag bunch in I don't know,
Speaker 2: a film like like Aliens, you know, and you just
Speaker 2: wiped them all out within a few minutes. And then
Speaker 2: you know, Aliens does wipe them all out, but it
Speaker 2: takes its time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it gives you a taste of them first. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and then by the time there is a massive attack
Speaker 3: and many of them are killed, like you really have
Speaker 3: started to cherish the characters who do survive, and so,
Speaker 3: like you know Vasquez by that point, you know Hudson
Speaker 3: by that point.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But in this one, like there's scenes later where Brooklyn
Speaker 2: is talking about like he's reminiscing about banshow and we're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: ban Show. He seemed interesting. Too bad he died like
Speaker 2: five minutes into the film.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So about the other characters in this crew. There
Speaker 3: is one who is played by an actress named Aya
Speaker 3: in Joji, who is depending on It sounded like there
Speaker 3: were different parts where she was either being called Babe
Speaker 3: or Babe in the English translation. I feel like I
Speaker 3: heard both, but they anyway, I should explain, all of
Speaker 3: the thieves have like cute nicknames that start with B.
Speaker 3: So it's like band show Brooklyn, Baybay, Boxer, Boomerang, Bombay.
Speaker 3: But I think Bombay is not like the city Bombay.
Speaker 3: It is like bomb Bay as in on an airplane.
Speaker 4: M Okay.
Speaker 3: That's all in the English version. I'm not sure how
Speaker 3: that'll translates in the Japanese. But anyway. Bebe, one of
Speaker 3: the main thieves, is played by Aya en Joji, who
Speaker 3: is a Japanese film and TV actress. She was born
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty. I don't recognize a lot from her filmography,
Speaker 3: but she's still working as of recent years. She's done
Speaker 3: a lot of stuff in this She plays this character Bebe,
Speaker 3: who's kind of a no nonsense cyber thief with like
Speaker 3: an implant. She's got sort of a cyber eye, and
Speaker 3: it seems like she is in a leadership role in
Speaker 3: this gang. She might be like second in command under
Speaker 3: Captain Banshow I.
Speaker 4: Think, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but anyway, looking around through her filmography, it looks
Speaker 3: like another one of the big things that n Joji
Speaker 3: did was a TV series in the nineties called gto
Speaker 3: col and Great Teacher Onie Zuka. Uh And I just
Speaker 3: want to read the description quote. One Zuka, a former delinquent,
Speaker 3: finds himself in the role of a high school teacher,
Speaker 3: facing students who behave just as he used to. Using
Speaker 3: unusual methods, he manages to reach through to his students
Speaker 3: and help them with their problems.
Speaker 4: Delightful.
Speaker 3: I know I've seen an exact version of the story before,
Speaker 3: but I can't remember what it was. Is that what
Speaker 3: happens in the principal?
Speaker 4: Oh? Wait?
Speaker 2: Is that the principle is that the one with what's
Speaker 2: his name? Tom? Not Tom? He's got a Bearringer in it,
Speaker 2: Tom Berenger.
Speaker 3: Bearringer could be Tom Behringer. He was like, I was
Speaker 3: a sniper.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like it's that kind of Maybe I'm thinking of
Speaker 2: a different film then that one. It's like he's like
Speaker 2: a former Special Forces guy who comes in and like
Speaker 2: fights back against the punk kids, you know. It's kind
Speaker 2: of a Hell City Hell School film from I guess
Speaker 2: probably the nineties or the early two thousands.
Speaker 3: Okay, I guess I've never seen it. I think maybe
Speaker 3: I saw commercials for it on TV when they were
Speaker 3: going to like play it on TNT or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but no, the idea of like the former troubled
Speaker 2: student becoming the teacher who reaches out the troubled kids,
Speaker 2: I feel like that's a common enough trope, but it's
Speaker 2: in the sort of film that I either don't see
Speaker 2: or certainly don't remember.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you could look at that kind of like
Speaker 3: the role of the gun Head Machine itself in this story.
Speaker 3: You know, he's got experience from the past where he
Speaker 3: didn't do so well, and then the Gunhead Machine sort
Speaker 3: of shepherds the humans through their final conflict with the
Speaker 3: Chiron five.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 3: I'm reaching here. Okay. I was just looking at a
Speaker 3: couple more of the actors from the main crew. You've
Speaker 3: got a guy named James Brewster Thompson who plays a
Speaker 3: character named Barabbas also gets killed very quickly in the movie.
Speaker 3: But this guy was an actor and a competitive judo practitioner.
Speaker 3: It looks like He was also in the movie Lion
Speaker 3: Heart with Jean Claude Van dam Okay, and then I'll
Speaker 3: give a shout out to Jay Kabira who plays Bombay.
Speaker 3: Kabira was also so Japanese actor, born in nineteen sixty
Speaker 3: two in Okinawa. Looks like Gunhead was his first movie.
Speaker 3: He's still acting. Don't recognize anything from his IMDb, but
Speaker 3: he provides some nice levity in the first third of
Speaker 3: this movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember him being kind of a fun care
Speaker 2: another fun character that died too soon. Yeah, all right, well,
Speaker 2: let's get into the plot of this film. It begins
Speaker 2: with that beautiful toe hoo title screen, which, like we
Speaker 2: said already, just is beautiful and invites you in. It
Speaker 2: gleams like the sun.
Speaker 3: It's gorgeous. I'm salivating, My brain is salivating. But anyway,
Speaker 3: that is a short prelude to what in this film
Speaker 3: is a I'm just going to say, a ridiculous amount
Speaker 3: of opening exposition and backstory. You get opening text, you
Speaker 3: get voiceover, narration, you get all kinds of stuff. But
Speaker 3: I think we should actually go over the open texts
Speaker 3: because that will set the scene for the world in
Speaker 3: which this movie takes place and we can comment as
Speaker 3: we go on. But the first thing you see is
Speaker 3: you know, you're getting I think the first thing is
Speaker 3: just on a black screen and you see text that says.
Speaker 3: In the early twenty thirties, Mankind discovered a new substance,
Speaker 3: text Mexium, which enabled the entire world to be controlled
Speaker 3: by a new generation of supercomputers. Now, this text mexium
Speaker 3: is a major plot point, and I love it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love a good fake element in a sci
Speaker 2: fi picture. I mean, whether you're talking about unobtainium or
Speaker 2: what have you. But but text mexium has to be
Speaker 2: the absolute best I have ever heard. I mean, maybe
Speaker 2: the creators of this were not as familiar with text mes,
Speaker 2: you know, the American slash Mexican culinary tradition. But it
Speaker 2: also seems impossible because text mes has itself kind of
Speaker 2: spread around the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we were trying kind to make sense of this name.
Speaker 3: Why is it called tex Mexium? Now we know there
Speaker 3: are some plot elements in the movie that involve Texas,
Speaker 3: maybe as like its own country, And there are also
Speaker 3: mechs as in mechs, which I guess you could shorten
Speaker 3: to ex So is that I don't know, is that
Speaker 3: how it's coming together here?
Speaker 4: I guess I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think maybe it's just an ultimately an example of
Speaker 2: something that has more appeal to like non Americans or
Speaker 2: even non English speakers, Like it's I mean, and this
Speaker 2: goes both ways. You see this, of course plenty of
Speaker 2: times with where American creators or English speaking creators take
Speaker 2: something that they think sounds cool in another language and
Speaker 2: applies it to their fantastic visions. So you know, it
Speaker 2: goes both ways. Ye, but yeah, Text Mexium initially made
Speaker 2: me laugh, though after a while I kind of got
Speaker 2: over the humor of it and kind of like bought
Speaker 2: into it. It's like, okay, it's text mexium, it's important stuff.
Speaker 3: Well I never got over the humor, but I love
Speaker 3: it anyway.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but okay.
Speaker 3: The opening text goes on. It says, because of the
Speaker 3: danger for its misuse, supplies of tex mexium were kept
Speaker 3: under heavy guard at the hyper nuclear facilities that power
Speaker 3: every major city. At the same time, Mankind's continued depletion
Speaker 3: of Earth's natural resources has resulted in a scarcity of
Speaker 3: the materials necessary to build the all powerful computers. Conductive
Speaker 3: plastics and computer chips are more valuable than gold, and
Speaker 3: a new breed of treasure hunter has evolved to fill
Speaker 3: the demand, seeking machine parts lost or discarded by earlier generations.
Speaker 3: These soldiers of fortune will brave any danger in their
Speaker 3: quest for chips, even the forbidden zones.
Speaker 2: And that already is awesome. Like, I was instantly interested
Speaker 2: after absorbing this opening text, and ultimately I think this
Speaker 2: is one of the things that this movie does really well,
Speaker 2: Like it establishes an interesting sci fi world.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, these renegade thieves rummaging through the trash of
Speaker 3: the wars of ages past to find computer parts that
Speaker 3: can be repurposed into the technology that we now need
Speaker 3: to run places like I guess Japan and Texas. Okay,
Speaker 3: so you think after all that you're done with the
Speaker 3: opening exposition, but nope. After that you get voiceover narration
Speaker 3: as we pan overshots of a flaming battlefield full of
Speaker 3: machine wreckage and dead bodies in power armor, and the
Speaker 3: narration goes in the year two thousand and five on
Speaker 3: a tiny volcanic island designated simply eight Jo. It's the
Speaker 3: number eight Jo, located one thousand miles from the Asian coast,
Speaker 3: the Cybor Tech Corporation. That's Cybor with an oar. The
Speaker 3: Cybor Tech Corporation built the world's first fully self contained
Speaker 3: industrial complex. Its purpose to manufacture the most advanced robots
Speaker 3: ever known. At the heart of this complex a computer
Speaker 3: more advanced, more powerful than any other that came before,
Speaker 3: the Chirn five. Chiron five controlled every aspect of its world.
Speaker 3: For twenty years, everything appeared to run smoothly. A handful
Speaker 3: of technicians and their families were stationed on the island
Speaker 3: as custodians, but the cruel fact was human beings were unnecessary.
Speaker 3: On July fourth, in the year twenty twenty five, Chiron
Speaker 3: five declared war on the world. The Allies dispatched a
Speaker 3: gun head battalion to eight Jo The Great Robot War began.
Speaker 3: Level three eight nine, Chiron's last line of defense air robot.
Speaker 3: I think I got all that as a direct quote. Now,
Speaker 3: we have not been told anything about gun heads before this.
Speaker 3: This is like the opening narration. But the gun head
Speaker 3: battalion is there. And then we get some more texts
Speaker 3: that tells us where at this three hundred and seventy
Speaker 3: third day of battle, and we see this giant cyber
Speaker 3: tank crashed through some facility wall, and you've got heavily
Speaker 3: armed ground troops apparently human, marching in all around it.
Speaker 3: The tank, I believe is one of the gun head units,
Speaker 3: and the text on the screen tells us that on
Speaker 3: this day, the beleaguered gunhead battalion pushed ahead for one
Speaker 3: final attack, and we see how it all went down.
Speaker 3: It's mech versus mech. So you've got these different types
Speaker 3: of giant armored tank type vehicles advancing on each other,
Speaker 3: exchanging fire. So it's the human allied gun head tanks,
Speaker 3: which look kind of like the giant Skynet kill tanks,
Speaker 3: like the Hunter Killer models from the future and Terminator,
Speaker 3: but they're more complicated than that. They've got this combination
Speaker 3: of legs and wheels and a bunch of different guns
Speaker 3: pointing off of them in all different directions. And those
Speaker 3: are the gun heads. Those are the good guys, and
Speaker 3: they're against the aerobot, which I was trying to think
Speaker 3: of how to describe. It has a characteristic front facing
Speaker 3: triangle orientation of three glowing eye spots that shoot energy beams,
Speaker 3: and then on top of that it has these arching
Speaker 3: claw arms that hang down in front of the vehicle,
Speaker 3: sort of like a drooping sauropod neck. So imagine a
Speaker 3: metal brachiosaurus with multiple necks and heads that has this
Speaker 3: triangle of blaster eyes.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: These for anyone out there who is who follows like
Speaker 2: mech fiction and Japanese science fiction, these this sort of
Speaker 2: design will look familiar because you've seen variations on this
Speaker 2: theme plenty of times. You know, they're beautiful looking, though,
Speaker 2: especially Gunhead, Like Gunhead is just this really well designed,
Speaker 2: cool looking sci fi tank, and arrow Bot is this
Speaker 2: other sci fi tank. It's maybe less interesting looking, but
Speaker 2: different looking, so we can tell them apart in battle,
Speaker 2: and you know, and also kind of cool good.
Speaker 3: Joyce with the three eyes in the triangle, it helps
Speaker 3: you to distinguish which one is which when you know
Speaker 3: you're seeing the models clash at each other.
Speaker 4: And boy did they clash. Oh yeah, they clash a lot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they're shooting at each other. One of the
Speaker 3: gun heads sort of looks like it has a gun
Speaker 3: that's blasting highly focused jets of steam. I don't know
Speaker 3: if that's what it was supposed to be, but if so,
Speaker 3: that's that's a cool idea. And things are not looking
Speaker 3: so hot for the gun Heads in this battle. The
Speaker 3: aerobot is a tough cookie, and in the end it
Speaker 3: seems like the aerobot smashes the Gunhead battalion and the
Speaker 3: human allied forces. And then finally you get your title
Speaker 3: screen just says gun Head in the in the Van
Speaker 3: halenesque kind of font.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So ultimately this is all still set up. We haven't
Speaker 2: even really gotten in proper movie yet. This film spends
Speaker 2: a lot of time prefacing the core plot. But like
Speaker 2: I say, the world creation in this film is one
Speaker 2: of its best attributes. It's really it's, in my opinion,
Speaker 2: really wonderful. It takes a bit to set up. They
Speaker 2: use all these different gimmicks to do it, but the
Speaker 2: result is a perfectly grimy cyberpunk future set in the
Speaker 2: aftermath of a supercomputer seemingly failed rebellion against the human race.
Speaker 2: And I guess, to a certain extent, the human race
Speaker 2: is sort of ambiguous victory over the computer threat. You know,
Speaker 2: it's kind of a it's kind of a rough, inconclusive
Speaker 2: ending to a terrible conflict. Now, when I say cyberpunk,
Speaker 2: I should stress that this is cyberpunk in the Japanese sense,
Speaker 2: which certainly has a lot in common with the Western
Speaker 2: concept of cyberpunk, shares many of the same elements. You
Speaker 2: see a lot of interplay between the two. Likenk American
Speaker 2: and Western cyberpunk may in many cases be inspired partially
Speaker 2: by Japanese models. Likewise, Japanese cyberpunk will draw inspiration from
Speaker 2: from key pieces of Western cyberpunk sci fi. But Japanese
Speaker 2: cyberpunk is sort of in general more hard industrial and
Speaker 2: often features a more disturbing and even nightmare interpretation of
Speaker 2: human machine synthesis.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to oversimplify, I might say that where American cyberpunk
Speaker 3: is more likely to have laptop bikers, latex bodysuits, and
Speaker 3: glossy dusters, perfect emo hair, Japanese cyberpunk is more likely
Speaker 3: to be choking on eruptions of metallic robot tumors.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It can definitely lean more into body horror and kind
Speaker 2: of a surreal nature. So some of the key examples
Speaker 2: of Japanese cyberpunk include nineteen eighty nine's Tetsuo the Iron Man,
Speaker 2: which is a very kind of Lynchian Cronenburger kind of a.
Speaker 3: Film, very metal tumors.
Speaker 2: Again, Yeah, Akira the anime from nineteen eighty eight, and
Speaker 2: then another name that often comes up is chosen Fukuoi's films,
Speaker 2: particularly nine sixty four Pinocchio from nineteen ninety one. That's
Speaker 2: one I've seen, that one. That one is also wild,
Speaker 2: very very similar in tone to Tetsuo the Iron Man.
Speaker 2: But other films that are also noted that I haven't
Speaker 2: seen include nineteen eighty six Death Powder in nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: two's Burst City. I wanted to mention those because those,
Speaker 2: of course, are two examples that pre date Gunhead, whereas
Speaker 2: we have this weird situation where we can't say that
Speaker 2: the Gunhead was inspired by Tetsuo the Iron Man because
Speaker 2: it came out the same year and it only comes
Speaker 2: out a year after a Kira. So it seems to
Speaker 2: be a film that was very much a part of
Speaker 2: this this sci fi esthetic movement in Japanese media at
Speaker 2: the time, a.
Speaker 3: Very nineteen eighty eight eighty nine cyberpunk zeitgeist.
Speaker 2: You might say, yeah, so there's strong elements of Japanese
Speaker 2: cyberpunk in gun Head's visual universe, as well as elements
Speaker 2: of the plot. It's difficult to really sum up Japanese
Speaker 2: cyberpunk as a whole, because of course it's not a
Speaker 2: whole thing composed of individual films and individual works by
Speaker 2: individual creators and media companies and toy companies, et cetera.
Speaker 2: But you can suffice to say it has its own
Speaker 2: elements and themes that stand apart from Western cyberpunk.
Speaker 3: Right of course, with all the continuous back and forth
Speaker 3: cross fertilization. Yeah, So to get back to the movie,
Speaker 3: picking up after the title screen, you might think we're
Speaker 3: done with narration, but nope. At this point I was
Speaker 3: literally laughing out loud because there was more voiceover narration.
Speaker 3: So we get like the camera sailing over some clouds
Speaker 3: and we're watching lightning flash out of the fog, and
Speaker 3: then we hear for thirteen years, a deep silence has
Speaker 3: surrounded the island. It has existed under a veil of mystery,
Speaker 3: almost forgotten by the world until now. So now I
Speaker 3: think we're finally into the plot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and ultimately watching this, you know, if you're watching
Speaker 2: this for the first time, you might be relieved that
Speaker 2: the narration ends. But looking back on it, I kind
Speaker 2: of wish it had universal narration throughout. I missed the
Speaker 2: narrator telling me what was happening.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, we're with this futuristic airplane that is soaring
Speaker 3: through the Gauntlet of thunder, and we see that the
Speaker 3: plane is called the Mary Ann and then we're inside
Speaker 3: meeting the crew. They try to do some intros. Honestly, again,
Speaker 3: most of these characters get killed pretty fast, so you
Speaker 3: don't have a lot of time to get to know them.
Speaker 3: Some of them I really can't identify much about them,
Speaker 3: but some I can. So you got Captain Banchow, that's
Speaker 3: the guy we mentioned. Mickey Curtis, who is He's great.
Speaker 3: He's a rowdy rock and roll air wizard wearing a
Speaker 3: leather bomber hat with it with a light seasoning of
Speaker 3: George Carlin.
Speaker 4: Sauce I would say, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And then you've got Brooklyn. He's gonna end up being
Speaker 3: one of the main heroes of the movie. I guess
Speaker 3: in the end the main heroes are Brooklyn and Sergeant
Speaker 3: Nim But Brooklyn again is played by Masa hero Takashima,
Speaker 3: and they identify Brooklyn immediately as a mechanic. When we
Speaker 3: first meet him, he is flying the plane because Captain
Speaker 3: Banshow has apparently bullied him into flying the plane. But
Speaker 3: it's clear that Brooklyn is not supposed to be piloting
Speaker 3: the plane and does not feel good about it. He's
Speaker 3: having some kind of severe anxiety about piloting, and this
Speaker 3: will go on to be a major plot point throughout,
Speaker 3: and Bancho is sort of gently harassing him. I think
Speaker 3: he's joking that, like, hey, if you get air sick
Speaker 3: and throw up on my plane, I will make you
Speaker 3: eat your vomit, which is cute. But Brooklyn is kind
Speaker 3: of a spiky haired, initially taciturn young man in sunglasses
Speaker 3: with a scarf over his face, and he is holding
Speaker 3: a carrot in his mouth like a cigar.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, which I get kind of maybe this is
Speaker 2: a bugs bunny kind of thing. I don't know, but yes,
Speaker 2: it becomes clear that Brooklyn loves carrots. He is perhaps
Speaker 2: growing carrots on the airplane. I'm not certain on that.
Speaker 3: There's one part where we see a giant colander full
Speaker 3: of enormous carrots.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they brought him at any rate, Like carrots
Speaker 2: are important. I mean, if you have carrots in the
Speaker 2: post apocalyptic or semi post apocalyptic cyberpunk world, him eat them.
Speaker 2: You know, they're good for you yeah.
Speaker 3: Oh, and Brooklyn keeps playing with a revolver underneath his coat.
Speaker 3: It's like when you know, you know those guys who
Speaker 3: like they play with a knife. They've got a pocket
Speaker 3: knife and they just fiddle with it a lot and
Speaker 3: open it and close it and stuff. But he does
Speaker 3: that but with a gun.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Bancho is quick to remind him that this is bad luck.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like that that's the problem. It's bad luck. And
Speaker 3: then of course, also we meet Babe played by Aya
Speaker 3: and Joji, who is in some she's some kind of
Speaker 3: leadership role. She's like the lieutenant. I think she does
Speaker 3: not tolerate any horsing around. She might be the most
Speaker 3: like just straight to business character. And then you meet
Speaker 3: Barabas that's played by James Brewster Thompson, the judo guy.
Speaker 3: He seems to be like the tough guy, the heavy
Speaker 3: gun hero of the crew. You meet Bombay, who is Jacobira.
Speaker 3: He is I would call him the goober of the bunch.
Speaker 3: Like he's dressed in a funny way. He's covered in
Speaker 3: peace is of flare, like he's got a hat that
Speaker 3: studded with all kinds of little pins. There was one
Speaker 3: part where I paused it to try to see if
Speaker 3: I could recognize what any of the pins are. But
Speaker 3: they're I don't know, you know, like pins you would
Speaker 3: wear on your lapel. But he's got tons of them
Speaker 3: all over his hat. And then he's wearing a duster coat,
Speaker 3: and inside the coat there are like a thousand spoons
Speaker 3: or if I don't know what they were, some little
Speaker 3: metallic objects just dangling inside his coat flaps. But anyway,
Speaker 3: I was wondering, what do you call this character type?
Speaker 3: It seems like something that's an archetype that's common enough
Speaker 3: you need a word for it. It is the character
Speaker 3: who is the funny, cowardly but somehow still lovable complainer,
Speaker 3: very much like Bill Paxton and Aliens.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, or to a even more comedic extreme. You
Speaker 2: had the sidekick of El Santo in the Dracula movie.
Speaker 2: We discussed in a recent episode.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, what was his name, Cabayo or something.
Speaker 2: It was, I know it was parakeet in Spanish?
Speaker 3: What was it periico? Yes, yeah, And then there were
Speaker 3: some other ones. There is Boomerang, who I think she
Speaker 3: does like radar and tracking stuff. And then there's a guy. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there's a guy named Boxer, who we don't really get
Speaker 3: to know very well at all. I think maybe he's
Speaker 3: I can't remember if he's the same guy who you
Speaker 3: see with a bunch of grenades on him. But there's
Speaker 3: one thing I noticed on the Marianne. The've almost got
Speaker 3: like a mess hall on the plane in the Marianne,
Speaker 3: and they've got a refrigerator full of guns, just like
Speaker 3: in split second.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I noticed that's that's an interesting touch. I don't
Speaker 2: know why that is. It just seems like you're dealing
Speaker 2: with a bunch of props, especially in kind of a
Speaker 2: cyberpunk or dystopian future scenario, why not just use that
Speaker 2: old refrigerator for gun storage.
Speaker 3: So the Marianne is closing in on this island eight Jo,
Speaker 3: and we know the thieves are there to recover those
Speaker 3: conductive plastics and computer chips that we read about in
Speaker 3: the opening text, and the plain spots giant complex with
Speaker 3: the landing pad on top of this three hundred story
Speaker 3: central tower, and they go into land on top of
Speaker 3: the tower. And where I noticed that the Marianne is
Speaker 3: a fixed wing VTOL aircraft because it doesn't have to
Speaker 3: do a horizontal runway landing. It just kind of jets
Speaker 3: down like a helicopter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, ultimately it benefits from being a model airplane. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they could despite how it looks, they can just make
Speaker 2: it land however they need it to land. I mean,
Speaker 2: but it's an impressive model. The models look good in
Speaker 2: this film.
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess you got the Harrier jets and stuff,
Speaker 3: so maybe this is a descendant of that sort of thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean it's a specialized technology that it's quite complicated.
Speaker 2: But yeah, this film, I mean, this particular airplane does
Speaker 2: not really look like a Harrier jet or an ospray
Speaker 2: or anything like that.
Speaker 4: So I don't know.
Speaker 2: It's kind of a mystery how it's achieving this. But yeah,
Speaker 2: sci fi, you let it go.
Speaker 3: Right. So they're doing all their initial scanning and assessment,
Speaker 3: they pop out of the belly of the plane, like
Speaker 3: coming down through a hatch. They don't even have a
Speaker 3: ladder or stairs or anything. Why is that, Like, how
Speaker 3: do they get back into the plane? They just drop
Speaker 3: out through this hatch in the bottom of the plane.
Speaker 3: And they already know, of course about the computer and
Speaker 3: everything on the island. They know there's a Chiron five.
Speaker 3: They're talking about it, so they're not in the dark here.
Speaker 3: I think they know what they're getting into. And while
Speaker 3: they're scoping the place out, they see a crashed helicopter
Speaker 3: on fire. They look at it through binoculars and see
Speaker 3: that it is a helicopter of the Texas Air Rangers.
Speaker 3: So I suppose their jurisdiction includes the Pacific Ocean, and
Speaker 3: they don't quite know what to make of this, but
Speaker 3: they're like, oh okay, now. Bombay, in his role as
Speaker 3: the Hudson of the movie, the Bill Paxton of the movie,
Speaker 3: is of course afraid. Once he sees the crashed helicopter,
Speaker 3: He's like, let's go to Borneo. I got a great
Speaker 3: tip on a club medsite plastic he wouldn't believe. But anyway,
Speaker 3: A portion of the crew breaks off to head inside,
Speaker 3: while I believe Boomerang and Boxer stay up by the aircraft,
Speaker 3: and pretty much as soon as they are left alone,
Speaker 3: they're like immediately killed unceremoniously. The defenses of the Chiron
Speaker 3: five just slaughter them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because even though the supercomputer here was seemingly defeated
Speaker 2: or there was enough of a stalemate where it's no
Speaker 2: longer a threat, it still has a threat to the
Speaker 2: outside world anyway. It still has these very active self
Speaker 2: defense mechanisms that are quite lethal.
Speaker 3: Right. So, the breakoff part of the crew is wandering
Speaker 3: around inside the facility. They're trying to figure out how
Speaker 3: to get to the chips they're looking for, and Captain
Speaker 3: Banchow is musing about whiskey. He says, it sure would
Speaker 3: be nice to have some of that two thousand and
Speaker 3: one whiskey right now. I hear it was shipped here
Speaker 3: a long time ago, used to make the robots dance.
Speaker 3: So he claims he's going to find some. But I
Speaker 3: wonder if that will come back later in the plot.
Speaker 4: Oh, you know, just my.
Speaker 3: So the infiltration continues. While they're wandering around in the facility,
Speaker 3: there is a wonderful Pepsi machine jump scare, and I
Speaker 3: will say this is a huge improvement on the standard
Speaker 3: cat in a closet jump scare, Bombay gets freaked out
Speaker 3: when a Pepsi machine lunges out of him, lunges at
Speaker 3: him out of the dark, and they start talking about this.
Speaker 3: They're like, wow, robo Cola, and Brooklyn says, robo cola
Speaker 3: Pepsi type. It was produced in twenty twenty three on
Speaker 3: Island eight jo it's precious, and the reference to it
Speaker 3: is precious. It actually reminds me of a very poignant
Speaker 3: scene in Cormick McCarthy's The Road where they drink a
Speaker 3: scavenged Coca cola and they talk about how good it does.
Speaker 2: I think about that every time I think about having
Speaker 2: a coca cola. Yeah, or I guess in this case
Speaker 2: of pepsi, well, you.
Speaker 3: Think how much better it would be if if there
Speaker 3: were there were nothing this sweet in the world anymore?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, if you haven't had one in a while,
Speaker 2: there's nothing that sweet in the world, yeah, anymore? Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: so yeah, imagine that the sweetest thing you've had is
Speaker 2: a carrot, and then you're going from that to robocola
Speaker 2: pepsi type. I also love that this eyes or maybe
Speaker 2: more than imply, it's explicitly states that pepsi in the
Speaker 2: future is made in the same facility.
Speaker 4: As the robots mex kill people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, robots to kill people, but also this extremely
Speaker 2: volatile you know, super element tex Mexia or mex.
Speaker 4: Texia, tex mex mexium, tex mexium.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's a good point, but I was also like,
Speaker 3: does this robo cola. Does this mean it's for the
Speaker 3: robots to drink or is it just robo cola like
Speaker 3: the monoail cafe in North Haverbrook, you know, is it
Speaker 3: just like everybody's got robot fever? So you know when
Speaker 3: you go into the store, everything is called that, it's
Speaker 3: you know, robo glue, and I don't know what people
Speaker 3: buy in the future.
Speaker 4: Robo chips.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just took it to be the The cola
Speaker 2: delivery system is robo cola, and this one has pepsi,
Speaker 2: so it's pepsi type. It feels good looking back. I
Speaker 2: think I'm correct here, Joe, And this may be the
Speaker 2: last element of the film that I've fully understood. Of course, yes,
Speaker 2: kept rolling on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: So the team starts going down an elevator and Brooklyn
Speaker 3: suggests because he realizes that part of the robot war
Speaker 3: took place here, He's like, hey, what if we were
Speaker 3: to harvest gun head parts here instead of chiron chips?
Speaker 3: He says gun heads are very valuable, but a Captain
Speaker 3: Banchow says, no, we are here for the chips. We're
Speaker 3: here for the conductive plastic. We do not want gun
Speaker 3: head parts.
Speaker 4: Very sensible.
Speaker 3: Yes, Brooklyn and Bancho have a face off here where
Speaker 3: Banchow he it's kind of like the part in Jaws
Speaker 3: where Quinn crushes his narragantic can and then Hooper crushes
Speaker 3: his styrofoam cup. But instead it's that Banchow pops open
Speaker 3: his cool ancient cigarillo case and then Brooklyn opens up
Speaker 3: his cigarette case, except it's full of carrot sticks.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But then right after this light moment, there is a
Speaker 3: disaster because something attacks them in the elevator. I think
Speaker 3: it's the defenses of the Chiron five ban show. Captain
Speaker 3: Banchow are our lovely rock and roll fly boy. He
Speaker 3: is killed, Barabbas is killed. When Barabbas gets like a
Speaker 3: pipe shoved through his guts, Bancho just gets dropped down
Speaker 3: a three hundred story shaft. And now the original team
Speaker 3: is down to just Brooklyn, Babe and Bombay. And after
Speaker 3: the attack, they immediately pretty much meet Brenda Baki, the
Speaker 3: Texas Air Ranger Sergeant Nim and Babe immediately realizes who
Speaker 3: she is. She you know, knows, okay, this is a
Speaker 3: ranger from the crashed helicopter, and Brenda Baki plays her
Speaker 3: like she's just you know, too cool for school. She's
Speaker 3: sitting there with a major injury. I think she has
Speaker 3: also been attacked by Chiron five's defense programs. But she's
Speaker 3: just sitting there, like bleeding, lying against a wall, and
Speaker 3: she's got a cigarette in her mouth and she's like
Speaker 3: got a light. So it's that kind of thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she's a cool, cool cucumber.
Speaker 3: One thing I noted that I thought was interesting she
Speaker 3: has some kind of medical spray. So there's a wound
Speaker 3: on her body, and after Brooklyn he helps her like
Speaker 3: I think, unstick herself from some kind of thing she's
Speaker 3: like stabbed into on the wall. She just heals herself
Speaker 3: by spraying something out of a wd foty type can
Speaker 3: all over her wound, and then she seems fine. And
Speaker 3: isn't there I think there is first aid spray in
Speaker 3: the Resident Evil games? Isn't that the medical thing you
Speaker 3: get in there?
Speaker 2: I haven't played a lot of those, but I know
Speaker 2: I've encountered this sort of thing in other pieces of
Speaker 2: futuristic media, the idea that there's some sort of spray
Speaker 2: or goo that can just be applied to the wound
Speaker 2: that does some sort of advanced healing.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So anyway, Nim reveals her backstory. She is there
Speaker 3: on the island chasing a biodroid that went berserk in
Speaker 3: Texas and killed its colleagues at a hyper nuclear facility.
Speaker 3: And she has tracked the droid here to eight to
Speaker 3: Island eight Jo, but kyn five crashed her helicopter, killed her,
Speaker 3: her partner or her partners, her colleagues, and now she's
Speaker 3: all on her own. But she still determined to catch
Speaker 3: that droid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and unfortunately narration guy is not here to tell
Speaker 2: us exactly what a biodroid is. But when we finally
Speaker 2: get better, looks at it like there's no question, like
Speaker 2: this is a this is a very Japanese cyberpunk creature.
Speaker 2: It's you know, this kind of like bioorganic mass of
Speaker 2: what might be flesh, what might be mushroom, what might
Speaker 2: be mechanical parts, So you know, you get this this
Speaker 2: biomechanical confusion from it. That is I don't know, you
Speaker 2: could compare it to geeker, but not very gegery, very
Speaker 2: like there's a very based in Japanese cyberpunk. And it
Speaker 2: looks good, it looks creepy.
Speaker 3: I love the biodroid. I mean the biodroid is a
Speaker 3: is a humanoid shaped engine oil coated nightmare with binoculars
Speaker 3: for a head.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it is.
Speaker 2: It is at the heart of Japanese cyberpunk because it's
Speaker 2: not just like the Western idea of becoming a machine,
Speaker 2: you know, will damage your soul. It's more becoming a machine. Well, yeah,
Speaker 2: it'll damage your soul, but it'll also just make you
Speaker 2: really gross. We'll do gross things to your body.
Speaker 3: Right, Like I could imagine the biodroids human friends might
Speaker 3: be like, hey, you know you smell bad and you
Speaker 3: are covered in engine grease? Could you take a shower
Speaker 3: before you hang out with us? And it would say,
Speaker 3: why would I need to do that? I am perfectly
Speaker 3: lubricated for maximum optimized efficiency.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So on paper, at this point, the plot's rolling pretty well.
Speaker 2: You know, we have this fabulous setting, we have this
Speaker 2: we have outside an outside force here, we have this
Speaker 2: outside enemy. So we have multiple pieces on the table.
Speaker 3: Right now, they continue their journey. Nim is looking for
Speaker 3: the biodroid and the three remaining thieves are looking for
Speaker 3: the computer chips. But then there is a there are
Speaker 3: a number of attacks. There is an attack by sound
Speaker 3: activated minds that are part of the Chiron five's defense system,
Speaker 3: and they get attacked by the biodroid, and Bombay is
Speaker 3: killed by the Biodroid when he is knocked onto a
Speaker 3: hook dangling from a chain in the room of the
Speaker 3: Lament Configuration, which is in the Chiron five facility for
Speaker 3: some reason. But eventually Brooklyn, Babe and Nim make their
Speaker 3: way into the heart of the Chiron five level three p.
Speaker 3: Ninety the Chiron Dome, and I loved this set. So
Speaker 3: there was like a control room full of computer monitors
Speaker 3: with just skeletons sitting at them. I guess these are
Speaker 3: the former custodians of the facility who have been killed,
Speaker 3: but their bodies are still sitting there at their workstations.
Speaker 3: And then inside the core itself there is a lime
Speaker 3: green lake and there's a vial of text mexium, this
Speaker 3: precious substance at the Chiron Core. I believe the Biodroid
Speaker 3: brought it here. This maybe something I'm misunderstanding, but I
Speaker 3: was trying really hard to follow. I think the Biodroid
Speaker 3: stole the text mexium from the hyper nuclear facility in
Speaker 3: Texas and for some reason brought it here to Island eight.
Speaker 3: Jo to put into the core of the Chiron five.
Speaker 3: Maybe because the Chiron five needed text mexium for some reason.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I guess it's the power source or something, right,
Speaker 2: like it needs it to fully activate itself again, right.
Speaker 3: And then while they're in there in the room, I
Speaker 3: think the biodroid is like swimming around in the like
Speaker 3: it's swimming in the lime green liquid and jumping out
Speaker 3: at them like killer croc. And it ends up knocking
Speaker 3: Babe into the Limeurita lake and that that of course
Speaker 3: is not good for her because obviously no human can
Speaker 3: survive this liquid. But who knows what could come of
Speaker 3: this submergement. And then only Brooklyn and Nim are left.
Speaker 3: It's just down to these two and they start fighting
Speaker 3: over the vial of text mexium. They end up falling
Speaker 3: through a shoot down into some warehouse are There are
Speaker 3: multiple shoot surfing scenes in this movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of shoots, a lot of elevators. Like
Speaker 2: ultimately they again, they do a great job of creating
Speaker 2: this this enormous industrial environment. There's just this other worldly
Speaker 2: world that is the result of supercomputer and its robots
Speaker 2: just doing its own thing without really much concern at all.
Speaker 2: For humans for decades.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Now, at some point in here they get attacked
Speaker 3: by the dreaded aerobot with the triangle of three eyes
Speaker 3: and it's coming after them, and I think they escape
Speaker 3: it by going down yet another tube, so tube surfing
Speaker 3: yet again, and at some point when they get to
Speaker 3: the bottom, they are rescued by children. So finally we
Speaker 3: have a couple more human characters. Again, there are two kids.
Speaker 3: They are the only surviving kids of the original humans
Speaker 3: who took care of the Chiron five. So I guess
Speaker 3: maybe their parents or grandparents or whatever were the people
Speaker 3: sitting at those consoles at the heart of the Chiron five.
Speaker 3: And the two kids are named seven and eleven. Seven
Speaker 3: is the younger brother and eleven is the older sister. Now,
Speaker 3: when we first meet them, the kids are could you tell,
Speaker 3: are they supposed to be dressed as robots like they're
Speaker 3: trying to blend in in the facility, or are they
Speaker 3: just wearing some kind of protective suit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wouldn't shure on that either, if it was
Speaker 2: environmental gear or what.
Speaker 3: But anyway, Brooklyn and Sergeant Nim get to know these
Speaker 3: two kids, seven and eleven, and they talk about ways
Speaker 3: to escape the island, and they conclude the only way
Speaker 3: to get through the island's defenses is to go through Chiron,
Speaker 3: And so they start salvaging parts from the robot war
Speaker 3: gun head parts because they decide that they need a
Speaker 3: fully functioning gun head in order to defeat the aerobot
Speaker 3: so that they can get through Chiron five to get
Speaker 3: back to their airplane and escape. And Brooklyn thinks that
Speaker 3: he can repair a gun head, but he's very clear
Speaker 3: he needs someone else who can pilot it, because I
Speaker 3: think the implication is that he is still afraid of
Speaker 3: piloting vehicles and maybe one of the kids would have
Speaker 3: to drive it or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's not going to work. Clearly, he has
Speaker 2: to he has to summon all of his courage. He
Speaker 2: has to find a way to not only fix the
Speaker 2: gun head but pilot it feet the aerobot with the
Speaker 2: gun head so that they can escape.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And meanwhile, back at the Chiron Core strange things or
Speaker 3: afoot we see some kind of like weird creature busting
Speaker 3: out of the lime green pool and there's a computer
Speaker 3: screen which presumably has just been showing this cybor tech
Speaker 3: screensaver for seven years or however long it's been. Suddenly
Speaker 3: it changes and it says irregular vibration detected, which is
Speaker 3: my favorite Beach Boys song. I'm picking up irregular vibrations,
Speaker 3: and of course that's because it's the biodroid. Mock two,
Speaker 3: we get the new Biodroid reveal, because I think what
Speaker 3: has happened is that the Biodroid somehow absorbed or merged
Speaker 3: with Babe.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And this again, this is very Japanese cyberpunk. The idea
Speaker 2: that you could just sort of slip and fall into
Speaker 2: a puddle of cyberpunk and become cyberpunk very good.
Speaker 3: So they end up getting the human characters end up
Speaker 3: getting some plot exposition from a computer screen, and I
Speaker 3: think the computer screen is supposed to be the central
Speaker 3: computer of a reactivated gun head. But we learned that
Speaker 3: the Chiron five went dormant after the Robot War in
Speaker 3: order to give humanity the time to develop what it
Speaker 3: would need in order to conquer the entire world, and
Speaker 3: what it needed was text mexium. So I think the
Speaker 3: idea is like, it's like, Okay, I can't win right now.
Speaker 3: I'm just going to settle down and stop fighting, and
Speaker 3: I wait for I don't know this hypernuclear facility in
Speaker 3: Texas or whever to get enough text mexium that I
Speaker 3: can have it stolen and brought to me and then
Speaker 3: I'll take over the world.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean we kind of discussed this in recent episodes
Speaker 2: of Stuff to Blow your Mind this week about AI, Like,
Speaker 2: if you're any mortal AI, time doesn't matter, you could
Speaker 2: do things like this and be like, well, let's just
Speaker 2: push pause on this war, and once technology is improved,
Speaker 2: I'll steal it and then I will be in a
Speaker 2: better position to win.
Speaker 3: Now, eventually, the Humans part Ways is again. I was
Speaker 3: finding it hard to follow exactly what's going on here,
Speaker 3: but I think Nim and eleven, the older sister, they
Speaker 3: go off on one mission to do something with the
Speaker 3: Chiron core, and then Brooklyn and seven are there trying
Speaker 3: to build, trying to restore the gun head and get
Speaker 3: it working. And of course this movie is, you know,
Speaker 3: like any good movie of this type, it's a good
Speaker 3: scrap fest, so great sets, full of compelling, shattered garbage.
Speaker 3: The characters are crawling over and picking through.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I no matter what was going on with the dialogue
Speaker 2: or the plot, I always bought the setting and the
Speaker 2: props and the various robots and robot effects. As Gunhead
Speaker 2: eventually becomes able to talk and have long conversations with
Speaker 2: our hero. There's like one scene where Gunhead is represented
Speaker 2: by just like one of these arms or tentacles of
Speaker 2: Gunhead and he's having a conversation with it, and it
Speaker 2: was a pretty fun scene.
Speaker 4: I love the practical effects.
Speaker 3: I love what a standup guy Gunhead is. Once he
Speaker 3: finally starts talking and we get to know him, Gunhead
Speaker 3: is so positive. He's such a good friend. I mean
Speaker 3: it's heartwarming.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I also like, while they're doing the Gunhead assembly, Brooklyn
Speaker 3: is still eating carrots, and I'm thinking, how does he
Speaker 3: still have carrots? After all he's been through. Where are
Speaker 3: these carrots coming from?
Speaker 2: I mean, how would he survived this long without carrots?
Speaker 2: I mean he must just have him secreted on his person.
Speaker 2: He's got him like duct taped to his leg and
Speaker 2: stuff underneath his clothing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess Brooklyn has all kinds of means for
Speaker 3: getting carrots through customs.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But like I said, once the Gunhead is rebuilt, it
Speaker 3: starts talking to Brooklyn and seven and it's this very
Speaker 3: positive presence in the movie, it's just so affirming. It
Speaker 3: really gives you, it really gives them confidence, and it's
Speaker 3: a great friend. But of course this comes down to
Speaker 3: I think one of the character conflicts in the movie,
Speaker 3: which is that Brooklyn is afraid of piloting things, but
Speaker 3: he must face his fears and pilot the gun head.
Speaker 3: Now when that happens, he starts piloting it. And I
Speaker 3: don't even know how to describe all the different ways
Speaker 3: that the gun head moves. Like, the design of these
Speaker 3: robots is beautiful, practical effects work, all the models they
Speaker 3: must have built, I don't know exactly what scale they
Speaker 3: were working, But the movie in a way is kind
Speaker 3: of murky. I mean, like it doesn't give you really
Speaker 3: like clean clear looks at everything, but as much as
Speaker 3: you can see, it looks really good. The models are awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the models were great. I think the problem, and
Speaker 2: of the reasons that I wasn't very invested in the
Speaker 2: big battles that take place is that, for one thing,
Speaker 2: it's kind of just like two robot tanks exploding at
Speaker 2: each other and running into each other for what seems
Speaker 2: like forever. But then also the environment of the very
Speaker 2: environment here is just unreal. It's like, how do I
Speaker 2: relate to this as a human being? A world where
Speaker 2: tanks are moving up like vertically yea for stories and
Speaker 2: stories and then battling each other in long haulways and
Speaker 2: like just industrial cathedral spaces.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So at this point in the movie, tank time
Speaker 3: has come, and a lot of what happens from here
Speaker 3: on out is just tank play, you know, there is
Speaker 3: it's tank versus tank, mech versus mech, and we're seeing
Speaker 3: the different types of like you know, gun head weapons
Speaker 3: or defenses versus Chiron five weapons or defenses.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it basically becomes tank'sploitation yea in the latter stages
Speaker 2: of this film.
Speaker 3: Though, I mean just several A lot of the things
Speaker 3: about the gun head are great, Like I love how
Speaker 3: it doesn't it's not purely wheel powered or leg powered.
Speaker 3: It has sort of a combination of legs and wheels,
Speaker 3: kind of like rolling track legs. Sometimes it sort of
Speaker 3: walks like an enormous metal turkey with guns all over it.
Speaker 3: Other times it has tracks and rolls like a tank.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it has different modes I guess to deal
Speaker 2: with different terrain types.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's interesting. So I know, big thumbs up to
Speaker 3: the gun Head. I like the gun Head, But anyway,
Speaker 3: what's going on with the humans at this point? I
Speaker 3: think there's I don't know. Again, it's it's not exactly
Speaker 3: the easiest to follow right here, but the biodroid, I think,
Speaker 3: is supposed to be returning the text mexium to the
Speaker 3: Chiron core, but is also just injecting itself with text
Speaker 3: mexium along the way, like it's using heroin. So it's
Speaker 3: taken it up to the core, but then like it
Speaker 3: stops to have a little taste.
Speaker 4: It earned it. It earned it. There's also a.
Speaker 3: Lot of cute stuff with Brooklyn and Seven bonding during
Speaker 3: their gun Head quest throughout the facility at this point, Like, well,
Speaker 3: there are some things where like Seven is trying to
Speaker 3: help and he's playing around underneath Gunhead's feet and I'm like, Seven,
Speaker 3: stop doing that. That is very dangerous. But other times
Speaker 3: there's like one part where it's Seven points a gun
Speaker 3: at Brooklyn, a real gun and he makes it, you know,
Speaker 3: pewpw shooting sound, and Brooklyn warns him not to do
Speaker 3: this because in a callback it is bad lucky. I'm
Speaker 3: not sure that's the main problem with it. But I
Speaker 3: don't know, maybe there's like a dubbing translation issue. I mean,
Speaker 3: I could imagine like bad luck being another way to
Speaker 3: say that it's dangerous or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not sure. I think that the scenes with
Speaker 2: the kids tended to be the scenes where I was
Speaker 2: cross checking on Wikipedia to see what the plot was
Speaker 2: doing at that point.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, I agree, those were some of the hardest
Speaker 3: to understand.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, now I've talked about how Gunhead is like really
Speaker 3: really motivating and really confident and positive. There's a great
Speaker 3: part where Gunheads starts doing this extended baseball metaphor to Brooklyn, Yes,
Speaker 3: about the Brooklyn Dodgers. He's talking about some baseball game
Speaker 3: where they were behind but then they they fought through it,
Speaker 3: And I thought that was really funny. There's a part
Speaker 3: where the Gunhead has to be refueled using we find
Speaker 3: out that he can refuel with any ethanol based something.
Speaker 3: You know, basically alcohol can refuel him. And what do
Speaker 3: you know, here's that salvage whiskey that Captain Banchow was
Speaker 3: talking about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you look at the images of that Gunhead
Speaker 2: model kit that I referenced earlier, there is a whiskey
Speaker 2: cask attached to its leg.
Speaker 3: Beautiful. Now there's another thing that I didn't fully understand,
Speaker 3: but I enjoyed at least visually. There's some kind of
Speaker 3: double cross with the older sister with Eleven. At some point,
Speaker 3: light starts coming out of her mouth. I like this effect.
Speaker 3: But then she like locks up Sergeant Nim and her
Speaker 3: brother and she's going to initiate control for the Chiron five.
Speaker 3: I think she has some kind of computer implant controlling
Speaker 3: her behavior, like she's a double a sleeper agent for
Speaker 3: the AI. Yes, and then we get this a big
Speaker 3: gun Head versus Aerobot showdown. Aerobot is overpowered, but Gunhead
Speaker 3: has a strategy, and his strategy is to take out
Speaker 3: Errobot's three triangle eyes, and eventually Brooklyn and the Gunhead
Speaker 3: are victorious. They destroy the aerobot. Meanwhile, somehow Sergeant Nim
Speaker 3: stops Eleven from doing something with the text Mexium vile.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure what it was, but she was trying
Speaker 3: to do something bad in the Chiron five qu and
Speaker 3: Nim she gets in there and stops it from happening.
Speaker 3: And then the Biodroid is in the mix here, and
Speaker 3: I couldn't exactly follow what's going on. But at some
Speaker 3: point the biodroid like vaporizes itself. I don't know if
Speaker 3: she has a It's like the babe part of the
Speaker 3: babe part that is now absorbed into the biodroid has
Speaker 3: a crisis of conscience when it sees Brooklyn and the
Speaker 3: kids there and Sergeant Nim and it's like, no, what
Speaker 3: have I become? And then just like turns to light.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, something that it probably could have used more
Speaker 2: fleshing out the really buy it. It kind of comes
Speaker 2: out of left field here, but yeah, but fair enough.
Speaker 3: But anyway, you get a standard escape sequence. Elevin is
Speaker 3: somehow cured of her chiron glowing mouth. I don't know
Speaker 3: what happens to fix that, but now it seems like
Speaker 3: she's okay, and the four humans all scramble to escape
Speaker 3: to the Marianne and they fly away. Oh and then
Speaker 3: the best thing of all with the ending is as
Speaker 3: they're flying away, they get a message on the computer
Speaker 3: screen in the plane. They say Gunhead has sent a
Speaker 3: message to us. In fact, they thought he was destroyed,
Speaker 3: but he's alive back on the island, and he says
Speaker 3: the Gunhead Battalion has completed its mission, and then we
Speaker 3: get a very charming carrot chomp from Brooklyn right at
Speaker 3: the end.
Speaker 2: And that is Gunhead. It's, like I say, I think
Speaker 2: a great film to put on in the background, given
Speaker 2: how wonderful the visuals are. It was not that surprising
Speaker 2: to learn that Canadian electro industrial band Frontline Assembly used
Speaker 2: with permission, Gunhead footage as the basis for their nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety two music video mind Phaser. And they didn't just
Speaker 2: use the film's excellent footage. They actually shot themselves in
Speaker 2: costumes that looked like they belonged in Gunhead and inserted
Speaker 2: themselves into the world. So look that up mind Phaser
Speaker 2: if you want to see just flashes of this film.
Speaker 3: Oh interesting. I hope one of them became a biodroid.
Speaker 2: I think they all be come biodroids. It's kind of
Speaker 2: the electro industrial dream, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I love the biodroid. I love it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the biodroid is good. And I think the biodroid
Speaker 2: is ultimately more relatable because it is humanoid that the tank.
Speaker 4: I mean.
Speaker 2: I love sci fi tanks, you know, I love movies
Speaker 2: with sci fi tanks in them. I build sci fi
Speaker 2: tanks sometimes but it was just I was kind of
Speaker 2: hard to get behind these admittedly cool sci fi tanks
Speaker 2: in this film. And I was thinking about this, I
Speaker 2: was trying to think, well, why is that? And then
Speaker 2: I had to ask myself, well, what tank movies do
Speaker 2: I actually like? And I think, for me, the best
Speaker 2: tank heavy movie I can think of is Kelly's Heroes.
Speaker 3: I've never seen it.
Speaker 2: Oh it's good. It's you know, World War two kind
Speaker 2: of a heisty situation. You know, rogue characters, heavily involves tanks.
Speaker 2: The tanks are important to the plot, but not more
Speaker 2: important than the people, you know, And I guess it
Speaker 2: kind of comes down to sort of the reality of
Speaker 2: tank war fair too. Like tanks cannot exist on their own,
Speaker 2: tanks need uh support from from from human beings as well,
Speaker 2: both inside and out. And that can be said for
Speaker 2: the plot of a film as well. Because when I
Speaker 2: started looking at lists of tank movies, granted there were
Speaker 2: many that I had not seen, but there were others
Speaker 2: where I'm like, oh, that that was no good.
Speaker 4: I did not like that.
Speaker 2: You have had a sci fi tank, but it wasn't
Speaker 2: that good. The sci fi tanks are best, in my opinion,
Speaker 2: when they're they're utilized within the film, like they show
Speaker 2: up in a couple of scenes, but they're not the
Speaker 2: whole deal.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I like the I like the digital tanks in Tron.
Speaker 2: Those were good tanks. Yeah. I think another thing about
Speaker 2: like mech combat and in this case mech tank combat,
Speaker 2: is that, like I said, when they were battling each other,
Speaker 2: it were just kind of exploding at each other.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Robot Jocks, which granted, is more about more humanoid robots
Speaker 2: in those battles, like everything they did mattered, like they
Speaker 2: were setting up particular moves as being important and there
Speaker 2: was discussion about what they were. Uh, so we saw
Speaker 2: less of that in this for sure.
Speaker 3: I'd say the color palettes of robot Jocks versus Gunhead
Speaker 3: are entirely opposite. Yeah, Robot Jocks is dominated by bright
Speaker 3: light colors and takes place in broad daylight where you
Speaker 3: get a very clear picture of exactly what you're looking
Speaker 3: at to an almost comical extent, whereas Gunhead is very
Speaker 3: it's more, you know, the dark, gritty, cyberpunk thing where
Speaker 3: everything in the movie looks kind of like muddy and
Speaker 3: grimy and dimly lit, so you never get a really
Speaker 3: clear look at anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's still it's beautiful in its own way.
Speaker 2: I absolutely love the look of the film. All Right,
Speaker 2: you're probably wondering, well, where can I see Gunhead? Well,
Speaker 2: it looks like it has streamed recently on Prime, but
Speaker 2: it's not currently available to us anyway at this point
Speaker 2: on Prime. There's a DVD that is available from Section
Speaker 2: twenty three Films in the United States, and that's how
Speaker 2: we watched it. We actually rented it from Video Drome
Speaker 2: are Video store in Atlanta Videodrome dot TV, so that's
Speaker 2: how we got to see it. But I believe there's
Speaker 2: also a copy of this on archive dot org as well.
Speaker 3: For future historians to refer to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but of course stuff comes and goes on streaming platforms.
Speaker 2: For instance, when we reviewed Robot Jocks, it was not
Speaker 2: available on Amazon Prime. Now it's on Amazon Prime as
Speaker 2: of this recording, so you know, just be patient. Sometimes
Speaker 2: in these films pop back up.
Speaker 3: We were told when we reviewed Robot Jocks by several
Speaker 3: listeners that it was quite coincidentally available on a platform.
Speaker 4: Called to B to B Yes tub I Yes.
Speaker 3: If you haven't listened to our Robot Jocks episode, go
Speaker 3: listen to that, you'll understand the joke.
Speaker 2: All right, We're going to go ahead and close it
Speaker 2: out here. But obviously we'd love to hear from everybody
Speaker 2: out there, people who saw this film back in the day,
Speaker 2: people who saw it because we mentioned it on the show.
Speaker 2: We'd love to hear from anyone out there who's more
Speaker 2: versed in, say, Japanese cyberpunk, Japanese science fiction in general.
Speaker 2: What are your thoughts on this film and it's in
Speaker 2: Japanese cinema. What are your thoughts on tank movies? Do
Speaker 2: you have a favorite example of tank exploitation? If so,
Speaker 2: let us know.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 3: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 3: with us with feedback on this episode or any other
Speaker 3: to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.
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