Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob Lamba.
Speaker 1: Today we have one for you that originally published four
Speaker 1: to twenty twenty one. We're going to be talking about
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighty nine Japanese sci fi film Gunhead. This's
Speaker 1: a lot of fun. You get into some nice cyberpunk
Speaker 1: territory with this one. So let's dive right in.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I'm Joe McCormick and it's Mech Day on Weird
Speaker 3: House Cinema. Rob. Is this our first No, wait what
Speaker 3: am I asking? I was gonna say, is this our
Speaker 3: first full on mech movie? But we did Robot Jocks
Speaker 3: that's like an all time fave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this is coming. This would be our second
Speaker 1: mech film. It's going to be what our second Japanese film,
Speaker 1: And in a very broad sense, I guess it's like
Speaker 1: 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 right?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 3: It is spelled with an hed instead of an hga
Speaker 3: D like that. Isn't there a band that's called like
Speaker 3: head p or something. I don't know anything about that band.
Speaker 3: I remember them from when I was in high school
Speaker 3: and they also spell it AGD. No comment, There nothing
Speaker 3: interesting about that.
Speaker 1: I have nothing to add on that. I don't know
Speaker 1: anything about p head though Gunhead with the AGD spelling
Speaker 1: 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 fall looks like
Speaker 3: a band logo. It looks like the Van Halen logo
Speaker 3: or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, some of you might be wondering, especially if
Speaker 1: you're going to this episode's sight unseen? Is this about
Speaker 1: a This is a Japanese cyberpunk film about a guy
Speaker 1: with a gun for a head. No, even though that
Speaker 1: would be a perfect perfect plot device for a Japanese
Speaker 1: cyberpunk film.
Speaker 3: Sure, like a guy who gets some kind of virus
Speaker 3: inside him that causes his head to fuse with a gun,
Speaker 3: and it's all about like his identity changing as his
Speaker 3: mind is taken over by the gun mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that would that would be totally an expected plot device.
Speaker 1: In fact, 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 1: Yeah. It's one of one of those kind of cheap
Speaker 1: acronyms where they they get two letters from the second word,
Speaker 1: So if we were being really strict about it, it
Speaker 1: would be goohead instead of gunhead. But you know, gunhead
Speaker 1: 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 1: So again, this is a nineteen eighty nine film, And
Speaker 1: for those of you out there who you know follow
Speaker 1: like Japanese media, maybe a little bit enough to just
Speaker 1: know to have picked up on the title at times.
Speaker 1: You may have noticed that there is a manga. There
Speaker 1: are two different video games, nineteen eighty nine's gun Head
Speaker 1: for PC and Gunhead The New Battle for NES. It
Speaker 1: might make you wonder, like what came first? Is this
Speaker 1: a movie based on a video game? Is it a
Speaker 1: movie based on a manga, which is certainly something you
Speaker 1: see a lot of these days. But no, this film
Speaker 1: is original IP and these are all things that were
Speaker 1: adapted from it.
Speaker 3: God, I love a sci fi movie that's original IP.
Speaker 3: It's a beautiful unicorn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean is this yeah? Especially today? But yeah,
Speaker 1: this was this was This was an original IP and Joe.
Speaker 1: 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 I believe
Speaker 3: the Japanese equivalent of The Nees.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's my rough understanding. I'm not really an expert
Speaker 1: on that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: But at least the version I found is a Famicom
Speaker 3: game called Gunhead. I guess this was Gunhead the New
Speaker 3: Battle or something, but it looks like it is a
Speaker 3: combination of like a real time or turn based strategy
Speaker 3: game where you would be like managing Gunhead units, which
Speaker 3: are these big battle robots as they move around into
Speaker 3: positions on an island. So you know, it'd be like
Speaker 3: Warcraft or StarCraft or something. There's a map in you're
Speaker 3: managing units, and then I think when the unit it's meat,
Speaker 3: it goes into a different type of gameplay where it's
Speaker 3: like a side view real time battle where you're shooting
Speaker 3: at each other and stuff.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: Though I also read on the internet that the Gunhead
Speaker 3: I don't know that this is true because I really
Speaker 3: don't see much resemblance here, but I at least read
Speaker 3: the claim that there is a turbographic sixteen game called
Speaker 3: Blazing Lasers that was also inspired by Gunhead. I looked
Speaker 3: it up. It's one of these vertical scrolling space shoot
Speaker 3: them up games. I guess, kind of like Space Invaders,
Speaker 3: but where you're like moving quickly down across a background.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm glancing at footage from it now, and yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't see a lot of shared DNA, but maybe
Speaker 1: that's just.
Speaker 3: I never had this game, but I did have a
Speaker 3: Turbographic 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 1: So this is a system that didn't have Mario, didn't
Speaker 1: have Sonic, but it had Bonk the Baby Caveman.
Speaker 3: It had Bonk and perhaps dubious gunhead ripoff ip.
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, yeah, this, I have to add the caveat here.
Speaker 1: So first of all, I'm not the initial intended audience
Speaker 1: for this. You know, this was released largely in Japan
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty nine, and the version I watched, obviously
Speaker 1: I'm watching it for the first time, you know, sometime later,
Speaker 1: decades later, I'm watching it dubbed. And of course anytime
Speaker 1: something has been dubbed, there are some great dubs out there,
Speaker 1: there are some not so great dubs out there. So
Speaker 1: it's possible that that contributed to me maybe not understanding
Speaker 1: what was going on in the film most of the time.
Speaker 1: So I found myself watching the film while also checking
Speaker 1: regularly checking in on the Wikipedia plot summary for the film,
Speaker 1: which didn't really This didn't make the film like a
Speaker 1: poor movie vig going experience. It just kind of made
Speaker 1: it more It's like reading reading a historical text, where
Speaker 1: you need to keep checking in to see what's being discussed, like,
Speaker 1: all right, what are they talking about here? What's supposed
Speaker 1: to be going on here? Because if I just had
Speaker 1: to go on the movie itself, I would have been
Speaker 1: 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: understood a lot of what was happening on screen, and
Speaker 3: I would have loved the experience. Nevertheless, this is a goot.
Speaker 1: Like, in terms of just recommending this movie, I highly
Speaker 1: recommend this movie to play in the background with other
Speaker 1: music on top of it. Like, as we'll get into,
Speaker 1: the visuals in this are wonderful. The visual world of
Speaker 1: this movie is very rich. But yeah, if you're watching
Speaker 1: it for a podcast intending to speak coherently about what
Speaker 1: happened 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 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, let's hit some trailer audio.
Speaker 1: My god, look at this junk. Give it up, Brooklyn.
Speaker 1: All the ten seconds to contact.
Speaker 3: Of the two Marcus cross fire.
Speaker 1: 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 newcom voiceover saying
Speaker 3: things like totally delivers the goods.
Speaker 1: Yeah, though I have to say it did sound like
Speaker 1: like a third rate in a world narrator, you know,
Speaker 1: like it's not the narrator who does the big cinematic trailers.
Speaker 1: This is the narrator type of narrator that does trailers
Speaker 1: that you watch on other DVDs that come out in
Speaker 1: the mid nineties.
Speaker 3: Right, yes, yes, well, actually no, I stand by my
Speaker 3: original comparison. He sounds like Duke Nukem. I don't know
Speaker 3: who did that voice, but that was very close for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, let's start where we normally start. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about the people of note the connections here. The first
Speaker 1: connection to make here though, is not really you know,
Speaker 1: individual human specific. It has to do with the production
Speaker 1: company because this was a co production between Nippon Sunrise
Speaker 1: as well as a number of a number of other
Speaker 1: companies like Bandai, the toy company was involved.
Speaker 3: There were like seven companies listed yeah on the.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but the big one, the one that instantly gets
Speaker 1: our attention, is of course Toho. The best yeah, legendary
Speaker 1: film studio, most famous, I guess for many listeners for Godzilla,
Speaker 1: but also for various other films, such as especially the
Speaker 1: early films of Kira Kurosawa. But it was founded in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty two as the Tokyo Takarzuka Theater Company. It
Speaker 1: controlled traditional theaters throughout Tokyo, and as films began coming
Speaker 1: in 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 1: Yeah. Yeah, if you're not like a regular consumer of
Speaker 1: Japanese cinema, then you've seen a Toho film. It's probably
Speaker 1: a Godzilla film or a Kurosawa film, and in different
Speaker 1: ways the great results. So anyway, like I was saying,
Speaker 1: they started out as being just a theater company, but
Speaker 1: then they got in to producing films as well. Their
Speaker 1: first film was nineteen thirty five's Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts.
Speaker 1: This was a drama, and apparently drama and historical pictures
Speaker 1: pretty much defined the first couple of decades of Toho films,
Speaker 1: which included the early films of legendary director at Kira Krrosawa. Now,
Speaker 1: during the post war period, specifically in nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: things got really interesting, so the company nearly bankrupt itself,
Speaker 1: putting out first Karisawa's latest historical film and a giant
Speaker 1: monster movie. These were, respectively, the Seven Samurai and Godzilla
Speaker 1: films that would become major box office successes and lead
Speaker 1: to a string of hits from both Karrosawa and The
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, and they were taking a risk doing it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Godzilla was to Ho's first sci fi or horror film,
Speaker 1: depending on how you look at it. We were discussing
Speaker 1: this off mic beforehand about just how dark that first
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, but it was a monster movie. It was a success.
Speaker 1: So after this, Toho continued to bust out stuff. In fact,
Speaker 1: that very same year they busted out Invisible Man in
Speaker 1: fifty four, and then Godzilla was back in fifty five
Speaker 1: for the first of just endless sequels. Like even as
Speaker 1: we're recording this, Godzilla is debuting in a new motion picture,
Speaker 1: so he absolutely cannot be stopped, and he gets bigger
Speaker 1: 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 like, the American partnership or the
Speaker 3: international Godzilla pictures that have lots of American actors and
Speaker 3: stuff in them. This was a Japanese production. I think
Speaker 3: it came out in like twenty fifteen or sixteen something
Speaker 3: like that. Does that sound right? Yeah, it just just magical.
Speaker 3: It's a movie that is surprisingly focused on government bureaucracy
Speaker 3: in a strangely compelling way. And it's got great music,
Speaker 3: great monster effects. I just love it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so absorbing. I remember I watched it in
Speaker 1: its entirety in mute with subtitles on an airplane once.
Speaker 1: It was one of those where I was listening to
Speaker 1: music and I was like, Ah, another Godzilla movie. Let
Speaker 1: me give it a preview. I'm just curious. And then
Speaker 1: I started watching it and just watched the whole thing
Speaker 1: just sucks you in.
Speaker 3: Have you still not seen it with the original soundtrack?
Speaker 1: 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 hidiaki
Speaker 3: On and Shinji Higuchi, cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I need to come back to it for sure,
Speaker 1: real quick. About some other Toho films of note, One
Speaker 1: of my favorites that we may have to come back
Speaker 1: to in weird El Cinema is nineteen sixty three's Matango,
Speaker 1: which is about a haunted island of mushroom people. It's
Speaker 1: really kind of grizzly with people being infected by spores
Speaker 1: and slowly mutating in the mushroom people. It's pretty horrific stuff.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's definitely on the list.
Speaker 1: And then of course one that I know has we
Speaker 1: have on the list already and we've actually heard from
Speaker 1: some listeners about Toho also put out the nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: seven Film House.
Speaker 3: Best Haunted House film of all time.
Speaker 1: Now, speaking of Bandai, yes, there have been and our
Speaker 1: models and toys of Gunhead, which is the central robot
Speaker 1: Slash Max Slash tank in this film. And you know,
Speaker 1: I'm assuming they must have put some I'm really assuming
Speaker 1: they put some sort of toy out back in the day.
Speaker 1: I couldn't find evidence of it, but I was looking around,
Speaker 1: and you can still get a high quality model kit
Speaker 1: of gun Head. There's a one thirty fifth scale model
Speaker 1: that was released in twenty twelve from Codo Bokeya and
Speaker 1: it is a pricey kit, especially imported and out of production,
Speaker 1: but it's said to be really fun. It's a three
Speaker 1: hundred part kit to build and it looks at Japan
Speaker 1: has long had a very strong scale model culture, and
Speaker 1: I've never built a kit from this company, but I
Speaker 1: understand that they specialize in both traditional kits and also
Speaker 1: pre painted collectible so stuff that includes major brands like
Speaker 1: Star Wars and even things like Texas Chainsaw, 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, this was also the era
Speaker 3: of Transformers, right, which was a very much a toy
Speaker 3: driven media property, and there were others like it.
Speaker 1: So I can only assume a film like this a
Speaker 1: major production, you would have had Gunhead toys back in
Speaker 1: the day. I mean, they made video game I'm a
Speaker 1: video game of it for crying out loud, so there
Speaker 1: 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'd
Speaker 3: be pretty good. You say, you say go east, and
Speaker 3: then it says you were absorbed by a biodroid.
Speaker 1: All right, let's talk about some of the actual humans
Speaker 1: involved in this baby. First of all, let's talk about director,
Speaker 1: co writer Masato Herada born in nineteen forty nine. As
Speaker 1: a director, it looks like most of his directorial credits
Speaker 1: are for the sort of non genre drama film that
Speaker 1: tends to be far more successful domestically in Japan, as
Speaker 1: well as some award winning historical dramas. As an actor,
Speaker 1: though this is fascinating. He only has two credits on IMDb,
Speaker 1: but they're both West films that Western viewers are likely
Speaker 1: to be familiar with, So he had a villain role
Speaker 1: in both two thousand and threes The Last Samurai starring
Speaker 1: Tom Cruise and two thousand and six is Fearless starring
Speaker 1: 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 it, Remember he plays a really creepy serial
Speaker 3: killer in that movie Night Breed, and he's had some
Speaker 3: other acting roles. Of course, Werner hertzog right, for some reason,
Speaker 3: later in his career, I was like, yeah, I'll play
Speaker 3: some villains.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, like with Cronenberg for example, and Grant.
Speaker 1: He's a much older director at this stage. He's been
Speaker 1: far more active as an actor recently than a director.
Speaker 1: He's even shown up on one of the new Star
Speaker 1: 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 1: I do not. Of course, that tends to mean that
Speaker 1: there was something 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 remove. I mean, I guess it
Speaker 3: indicates some kind of dissatisfaction or dispute.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know. Maybe at least it didn't say
Speaker 1: directed by Chiron five and you know, something went really bad, right,
Speaker 1: But yeah, I don't know the full story on that. Now.
Speaker 1: Another interesting thing about this film that pops up is
Speaker 1: when you look at the at the writing credits. Again,
Speaker 1: Herata also has a co writing credit, But then there's
Speaker 1: this guy James Bannon on there credited as co writer
Speaker 1: and he's written a couple of other things. But when
Speaker 1: you look him up on IMDb, you see that he's
Speaker 1: he's mostly involved in the industry for his work as
Speaker 1: part of an ad R loop group.
Speaker 3: Now, that led me to suspect that his writing credit
Speaker 3: could have had something to do with writing English lines
Speaker 3: or possibly writing for the English dub.
Speaker 1: That. Yeah, and that's what I thought, Well, that sounds
Speaker 1: sounds pretty reasonable. But then I started looking around on
Speaker 1: IMDb more and the truth seems to be that he
Speaker 1: won a Godzilla screenplay contest hosted by Toho, and in
Speaker 1: this original screenplay, Godzilla would fight a giant robot, and
Speaker 1: this ended up not being used, but various elements of
Speaker 1: his work eventually became Gunhead.
Speaker 3: Now, I guess this would post date Godzilla versus Mecha Godzilla.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, yeah, so Godzilla.
Speaker 3: Has already fought a giant robot at this point, but
Speaker 3: I guess you can have different kinds of giant robots.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, Godzilla has done everything at this point,
Speaker 1: so it's just coming up with new ways to have
Speaker 1: 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 1: All right, let's talk about the cast. Masahiro Takashima plays
Speaker 1: the character Brooklyn. He was born in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 1: This was only his fourth acting credit, but he's had
Speaker 1: a long career on Japanese TV and in Japanese film,
Speaker 1: including an appearance in Godzilla Versus Destroyer in nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 1: We'll talk more about Brooklyn as we go here, but
Speaker 1: you know, Takashima is perfectly acceptable in this role as
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, all right, and then we have another major character,
Speaker 1: and this is Texas Air ranger Sergeant nim so she
Speaker 1: is an American or at least a Texan character. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know if if Texas is still
Speaker 1: part of America in this future you get into. You
Speaker 1: often get into sort of weird like splintering of the
Speaker 1: United States and 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 my head that have like a Texas like that.
Speaker 1: There's a post apocalyptic board game that I enjoy called
Speaker 1: Niroshima Hex and it's also I think an RPG brand
Speaker 1: as well. They've kind of fleshed out the world. But
Speaker 1: it's a Polish company if I remember correctly, But it
Speaker 1: involves like, you know, I can't remember if Texas has
Speaker 1: its own army, but Mississippi has its own army. New
Speaker 1: York has its own army. So it's it's stuff like
Speaker 1: that that, you know, maybe it's a little more giggle
Speaker 1: inducing to American audiences, and maybe, you know, works a
Speaker 1: little more seriously in the Polish context. Or I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe the you know, it's Polish inventors are also
Speaker 1: having a laugh. I don't know that there's a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of satire in works of this nature,
Speaker 1: for sure.
Speaker 3: I will say that the atmosphere in Gunhead looks sufficiently
Speaker 3: polluted to be set in a world where Texas is
Speaker 3: a major international player.
Speaker 1: All right, so the character is Texas Air Rangers Sergeant Nam,
Speaker 1: played by Brenda Baki. If she sounds familiar, that's because
Speaker 1: she was in Tails from the Crypt Demon Knight, which
Speaker 1: we previously discussed, though we didn't really discuss Baki enough.
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, those perfectly fine. In that she played Cordelia. If
Speaker 1: you remember, she's one of the regulars there at the
Speaker 1: down and out hotel that used to be a church,
Speaker 1: and she's kind of a mid film victim of Billy
Speaker 1: Zane's demon crew.
Speaker 3: I believe she's the one who sets Thomas Hayden Church's
Speaker 3: nipples on fire.
Speaker 1: Yes, with the electrodes. Yes. So yeah, yeah, she's good
Speaker 1: in that. And I remember watching some of the behind
Speaker 1: the scenes features where various cast members were talking about
Speaker 1: how she was just super nice and a pleasure to
Speaker 1: work with. But yes, in this she plays badass Texas
Speaker 1: Air Ranger Sergeant nim Now. Other than these two films,
Speaker 1: I guess her biggest screen roles were in La Confidential,
Speaker 1: where she played Lanta Turner, Hot Shots Part Due and
Speaker 1: also Under Siege two Dark Territory, which we've also mentioned
Speaker 1: on the show before.
Speaker 3: Not because we watched it. It seems there's a lot
Speaker 3: of intersection there. We keep coming up against actors and
Speaker 3: directors who worked on that film.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Baki's worked a lot in TV and film,
Speaker 1: but we should probably highlight her work in Death Spot
Speaker 1: from nineteen eighty nine, And interestingly enough, her first screen
Speaker 1: credit was a nineteen eighty six comedy that I've not
Speaker 1: seen called Last Resort, which also featured Charles Grodin, Megan Malay,
Speaker 1: John Lovett's Garrett Graham. Gary Graham, Yeah, who pops up
Speaker 1: in a lot of B films. He was in Chopping Mall.
Speaker 3: But he was also Beef in Fan of the Paradise.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Mario van Peebles whoa and Phil Hartman whoa. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so interesting. I don't know anything about that film, but
Speaker 1: that's quite quite a cast to kick off with. And
Speaker 1: I don't think it was a bit part for I
Speaker 1: think it was a fairly decent part 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 1: Yeah, she's There's not really much I guess you'd say
Speaker 1: t exploitation going on with this character. She's not even
Speaker 1: wearing a cowboy hat.
Speaker 3: She doesn't even have an accent. No, no, I mean
Speaker 3: it's not a Texas accent. She might have right, more
Speaker 3: kind of West Coast sounding.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's a you know, she she's good. I guess
Speaker 1: she's kind of Ripley esque without you know, being that
Speaker 1: like strong a screen presence at all. But you know,
Speaker 1: she does a good job. She's a kind of a
Speaker 1: fun character as much as any human in this film
Speaker 1: as a fun character, but as far as other characters
Speaker 1: in the film. So there's a there's a whole crew.
Speaker 1: We'll discuss this as we go. There's a there's an
Speaker 1: initial crew in the film that gets weeded out pretty quickly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there are some some fun actors in it, at
Speaker 1: least initially, and one of them is this guy, Micky Curtis.
Speaker 1: Sometimes that's spelled mickey, like Mickey Mouse in English. Other
Speaker 1: times you see it spelled with more with I guess
Speaker 1: kind of a Japanese kind of spelling in English vonts miki.
Speaker 1: But this was one of those guys that I had
Speaker 1: no clue about this guy previously, but watching this film
Speaker 1: force me to look him up. And he's a super
Speaker 1: interesting character in this he plays the weird pilot Captain
Speaker 1: Banshow But in reality he's a Japanese actor, singer, and
Speaker 1: media personality born in Japan to English Japanese parents, and
Speaker 1: he's been in a lot of things over the years
Speaker 1: and it's still active to this day. Born in thirty eight,
Speaker 1: but still acting in things. Seems like He's one of
Speaker 1: these guys who's kind of just continually recreated himself and
Speaker 1: tried different things, like I think he's done country music
Speaker 1: more recently. But he apparently rose to fame initially, at
Speaker 1: least in part, as a member of the avant garde
Speaker 1: rock band Mickey Curtis and the Samurai in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties. They started out as rockabilly, but then they
Speaker 1: switched to more of a prog rock kind of sound,
Speaker 1: and their nineteen seventy one album Kappa said to be
Speaker 1: a masterpiece of heavy progressive rock in Japan, at least
Speaker 1: according to prog archives dot com.
Speaker 3: According to the Progtologist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now, I'm no prog rock expert or anything, especially
Speaker 1: within the context of the Japanese music scene, but I
Speaker 1: look this up. I wasn't able to find it on Spotify.
Speaker 1: It's listed on discogs, It's certainly listed on progarchives dot com.
Speaker 1: I was able to find the full album on YouTube.
Speaker 1: I was streaming it there. I'll include it on the
Speaker 1: post for this episode at Simmutamusic dot com. But it
Speaker 1: 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 like it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The last track on the album, though, is a
Speaker 1: twenty minute percussion instrumental piece. Just be ready for that.
Speaker 1: But you know that's the last track on the album.
Speaker 1: By the end, you're already won over or you stopped listening.
Speaker 1: I was looking at some of the liner notes on
Speaker 1: this album and I noticed that they are dubbed. In
Speaker 1: the liner notes, the band is dubbed as Japan's water Children,
Speaker 1: I guess owing back to the Koppa theme on Oh.
Speaker 3: Oh I See like the Kappa. The monster, the water
Speaker 3: monster we've talked about that reaches up what was it?
Speaker 3: It reaches up through your anus and removes your liver.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it causes the body to bloat in all
Speaker 1: you know, a spirit a monster of drowning, a rural
Speaker 1: folk belief in Japan. And there's actually the cover art
Speaker 1: for this 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 different personalities, because very quickly this movie kind of
Speaker 3: narrows it down to a small core of characters who
Speaker 3: survived to the end. I kind of wish we got
Speaker 3: to see more of the salvage slash heist crew. Some
Speaker 3: of these characters only have a couple of lines before
Speaker 3: they get iced.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean Captain Banchow seems great. I mean, he's
Speaker 1: got all this charisma. He's such a weird cat. I
Speaker 1: want to see more of him. But yeah, it doesn't
Speaker 1: last too long. It's like if if you had that
Speaker 1: whole ragtag bunch in I don't know, a film like
Speaker 1: like Aliens, you know, and you just wipe them all
Speaker 1: out within a few minutes. And then you know, Aliens
Speaker 1: does wipe them all out, but it 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 Vesquez by that point, you know, Hudson
Speaker 3: by that point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but in this one, like there's scenes later where
Speaker 1: Brooklyn is talking about like he's reminiscing about ban Show
Speaker 1: and we're like, oh, yeah, Banchow. He seemed to interesting.
Speaker 1: Too bad he died like 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, and I feel like
Speaker 3: I heard both, but they anyway, I should explain, all
Speaker 3: of the thieves have like cute nicknames that start with B.
Speaker 3: So it's like band Show Brooklyn, Beabey, 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 3: m okay. That's all in the English version. I'm not
Speaker 3: sure how that all translates in the Japanese. But anyway, Bebe,
Speaker 3: one of the main thieves, is played by Aya and Joji,
Speaker 3: who is a Japanese film and TV actress. She was
Speaker 3: born in nineteen sixty. I don't recognize a lot from
Speaker 3: her filmography, but she's still working as of recent years.
Speaker 3: She's done a lot of stuff. In this she plays
Speaker 3: this character Bebe, who's kind of a no nonsense cyber
Speaker 3: thief with like an implant. She's got sort of a
Speaker 3: cyber eye, and it seems like she is in a
Speaker 3: leadership role in this gang. She might be like second
Speaker 3: in command under Captain Banshow I think.
Speaker 1: 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 Njoji did
Speaker 3: was a TV series in the nineties called gto Colin
Speaker 3: Great Teacher onie Zuka, And I just want to read
Speaker 3: the description quote onie Zuka, a former delinquent finds himself
Speaker 3: in the role of a high school teacher, facing students
Speaker 3: who behave just as he used to. Using unusual methods,
Speaker 3: he manages to reach through to his students and help
Speaker 3: them with their problems.
Speaker 1: 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 principle?
Speaker 1: Oh wait, is that the principle is that the one
Speaker 1: with what's his name Tom? Not Tom? He's got Bearringer
Speaker 1: in it Tom Beringer.
Speaker 3: Barringer could be Tom Behringer. He was like I was
Speaker 3: a sniper when.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like it's that kind of maybe I'm thinking of
Speaker 1: a different film then that one. It's like he's like
Speaker 1: a former Special Forces guy who comes in and like
Speaker 1: fights back against the punk kids. You know. It's kind
Speaker 1: of a Hell City Hell School film from I guess
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, but No, the idea of like the former troubled
Speaker 1: student becoming the teacher who reaches out to troubled kids,
Speaker 1: I feel like that's a common enough trope, but it's
Speaker 1: in the sort of film that I either don't see
Speaker 1: 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 sort of shepherds the humans through their their final
Speaker 3: conflict with the Chiron five.
Speaker 1: 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 a 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 1: Yeah, I remember him being kind of a fun care
Speaker 1: another fun character that died too soon. Yeah, all right, well,
Speaker 1: let's get into the plot of this film. It begins
Speaker 1: with that beautiful toe hoo title screen, which, like we
Speaker 1: said already, just is beautiful and invites you in. It
Speaker 1: 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 I'm just going to say, a ridiculous amount of
Speaker 3: opening exposition and backstory. You get opening text, you get voiceover, narration,
Speaker 3: you get all kinds of stuff. But I think we
Speaker 3: should actually go over the opening text because that will
Speaker 3: set the scene for the world in which this movie
Speaker 3: takes place, and we can comment as we go on.
Speaker 3: But the first thing you see is you're getting I
Speaker 3: think the first thing is just on a black screen
Speaker 3: and you see text that says. In the early twenty thirties,
Speaker 3: Mankind discovered a new substance, text mexium, which enabled the
Speaker 3: entire world to be controlled by a new generation of supercomputers. Now,
Speaker 3: this text mexium is a major plot point, and I
Speaker 3: love it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love a good fake element in a sci
Speaker 1: fi picture. I mean, whether you're talking about unobtainium or
Speaker 1: what have you. But but text mexium has to be
Speaker 1: the absolute best I have ever heard it. I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe the creators of this were not as familiar with
Speaker 1: text mechs, the you know, the the American slash Mexican
Speaker 1: culinary tradition. But it also seems impossible because text mechs
Speaker 1: has itself kind of spread around the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we were trying 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 1: I guess I don't know. I think maybe it's just
Speaker 1: an ultimately an example of something that has more appeal
Speaker 1: to like non Americans or even non English speakers, like
Speaker 1: it's I mean, and this goes both ways. You see this,
Speaker 1: of course many of times with where American creators or
Speaker 1: English speaking creators take something that they think sounds cool
Speaker 1: in another language and applies it to their fantastic visions.
Speaker 1: So you know, it goes both ways. Yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: tex Mexium initially made me laugh, though after a while
Speaker 1: I kind of got over the humor of it and
Speaker 1: kind of like bought into it. It's like, Okay, it's
Speaker 1: tex Mexium, it's important stuff.
Speaker 3: Well I never got over the humor, but I love
Speaker 3: it anyway. Yeah, but okay. The opening text goes on
Speaker 3: it says, because of the danger for its misuse. Supplies
Speaker 3: of text mexium were kept under heavy guard at the
Speaker 3: hyper nuclear facilities that power every major city. At the
Speaker 3: same time, mankind's continued depletion of Earth's natural resources has
Speaker 3: resulted in a scarcity of the materials necessary to build
Speaker 3: the all powerful computers. Conductive plastics and computer chips are
Speaker 3: more valuable than gold, and a new breed of treasure
Speaker 3: hunter has evolved to fill the demand, seeking machine parts
Speaker 3: lost or discarded by earlier generations. These soldiers of fortune
Speaker 3: will brave any danger in their quest for chips, even
Speaker 3: the forbidden zones.
Speaker 1: And that already is awesome. Like, I was instantly interested
Speaker 1: after absorbing this opening text, and ultimately I think this
Speaker 1: is one of the things that this movie does really well,
Speaker 1: 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 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, but Italian to eight Jo. The Great Robot
Speaker 3: War began. Level three eight nine, Chiron's last line of defense,
Speaker 3: air robot. I think I got all that as a
Speaker 3: direct quote. Now, we have not been told anything about
Speaker 3: gun heads before this. This is like the opening narration,
Speaker 3: but the Gunhead Battalion is there. And then we get
Speaker 3: some more texts that tells us we're at this three
Speaker 3: hundred and seventy third day of battle, and we see
Speaker 3: this giant cyber tank crash through some facility wall and
Speaker 3: you've got heavily armed ground troops apparently human, marching in
Speaker 3: all around it. The tank, I believe is one of
Speaker 3: the gun head units, and the text on the screen
Speaker 3: tells us that on this day, the beleaguered Gunhead Battalion
Speaker 3: pushed ahead for one final attack, and we see how
Speaker 3: it all went down. It's mech versus mech. So you've
Speaker 3: got these different types of giant armored tank type vehicles
Speaker 3: advancing on each other, exchanging fire. So it's the human
Speaker 3: allied gun head tanks, which look kind of like the
Speaker 3: giant Skynet kill tanks, like the Hunter Killer models from
Speaker 3: the future and Terminator, but they're more complicated than that.
Speaker 3: They've got this combination of legs and wheels and a
Speaker 3: bunch of different guns pointing off of them in all
Speaker 3: different directions, and those are the gun Heads. Those are
Speaker 3: the good guys, and they're against the Aerobot, which I
Speaker 3: was trying to think of how to describe. It has
Speaker 3: a characteristic front facing triangle orientation of three glowing eye
Speaker 3: spots that shoot energy beams. And then on top of
Speaker 3: that it has these arching claw arms that hang down
Speaker 3: in front of the vehicle, sort of like a drooping
Speaker 3: sauropod neck. So imagine a metal brachiosaurus with multiple necks
Speaker 3: and heads that has this triangle of blaster eyes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for anyone out there who is who follows like
Speaker 1: mac fiction and Japanese science fiction, these this sort of
Speaker 1: design will look familiar because you've seen variations on this
Speaker 1: theme plenty of times. You know. They're beautiful looking, though,
Speaker 1: especially Gunhead, Like Gunhead is just this really well designed,
Speaker 1: cool looking sci fi tank, and arrow Bot is this
Speaker 1: other sci fi tank. It's maybe less interesting looking, but
Speaker 1: different looking, so we can tell them apart in battle,
Speaker 1: and you know, and also kind of cool.
Speaker 3: Good joyce with the three eyes in the triangle, it
Speaker 3: helps you distinguish which one is which when you know
Speaker 3: you're seeing the models clash at each other.
Speaker 1: 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: Gunheads sort of looks like it has a gun that's
Speaker 3: blasting highly focused jets of steam. I don't know if
Speaker 3: that's what it was supposed to be, but if so,
Speaker 3: that's a cool idea. And things are not looking so
Speaker 3: hot for the gun Heads in this battle. The Aerobot
Speaker 3: is a tough cookie, and in the end it seems
Speaker 3: like the Aerobot smashes the Gunhead battalion and the human
Speaker 3: allied forces. And then finally you get your title screen
Speaker 3: just say as gun Head in the Van Halen esque
Speaker 3: kind of font.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, ultimately this is all still set up. We
Speaker 1: haven't even really gotten a proper movie yet. This film
Speaker 1: spends a lot of time prefacing the core plot. But
Speaker 1: like I say, the world creation in this film is
Speaker 1: one of its best attributes. It's really it's in my opinion,
Speaker 1: really wonderful. And it takes a bit to set up.
Speaker 1: They use all these different gimmicks to do it, but
Speaker 1: the result is a perfectly grimy cyberpunk future set in
Speaker 1: the aftermath of a supercomputer seemingly failed rebellion against the
Speaker 1: human race. And and I guess to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: the human race is sort of ambiguous victory over the
Speaker 1: computer threat. You know, it's kind of a it's kind
Speaker 1: of a rough, inconclusive ending to a terrible conflict.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, when I say cyberpunk, I should stress that this
Speaker 1: is cyberpunk in the Japanese sense, which certainly has a
Speaker 1: lot in common with the Western concept of cyberpunk, shares
Speaker 1: many of the same elements. You see a lot of
Speaker 1: interplay between the two. Like American and Western cyberpunk may
Speaker 1: in many cases be inspired partially by Japanese models. Likewise,
Speaker 1: Japanese cyberpunk will draw inspiration from key pieces of Western
Speaker 1: cyberpunk sci fi, But Japanese cyberpunk is sort of in
Speaker 1: general more hard industrial and often features a more disturbing
Speaker 1: and even nightmare interpretation of 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 1: Yeah, it can definitely lean more into body horror. And
Speaker 1: kind of a surreal nature. So some of the key
Speaker 1: examples of Japanese cyberpunk include nineteen eighty nine's Tetsuo the
Speaker 1: Iron Man, which is a very kind of Lynchian, cronen
Speaker 1: Burger kind of a film.
Speaker 3: Yeah, very metal tumors again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Akira the anime from nineteen eighty eight. And then
Speaker 1: another name that often comes up is Chosen Fukuoi's films,
Speaker 1: particularly nine sixty four Pinocchio from nineteen ninety one. That's
Speaker 1: one I've seen that one. That one is also wild,
Speaker 1: very very similar in tone to Tetsuo the Iron Man.
Speaker 1: But other films that are also noted that I haven't
Speaker 1: seen include nineteen eighty six Death Powder in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: two's Burst City. I wanted to mention those because those,
Speaker 1: of course, are two examples that pre date Gunhead, whereas
Speaker 1: we have this weird situation where we can't say that
Speaker 1: The Gunhead was inspired by Tetsuo the Iron Man because
Speaker 1: it came out the same year, and it only comes
Speaker 1: out a year after Akira, So it seems to be
Speaker 1: a film that was very much a part all of
Speaker 1: this this sci fi aesthetic movement in Japanese media. At
Speaker 1: the time, a.
Speaker 3: Very nineteen eighty eight eighty nine cyberpunk zeitgeist.
Speaker 1: You might say, yeah, so there's strong elements of Japanese
Speaker 1: cyberpunk in gun Heads visual universe, as well as elements
Speaker 1: of the plot. It's difficult to really sum up Japanese
Speaker 1: cyberpunk as a whole, because, of course it's not a
Speaker 1: whole thing. It's composed of individual films and individual works
Speaker 1: by individual creators and media companies and toy companies, et cetera.
Speaker 1: But you can suffice to say it has its own
Speaker 1: elements and themes that stand apart from Western cyberpunk.
Speaker 3: Right of course, with all of the continuous back and
Speaker 3: forth cross fertilization.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So to get back.
Speaker 3: To the movie, picking up after the title screen, you
Speaker 3: might think we're done with narration, but nope. At this
Speaker 3: point I was literally laughing out loud because there was
Speaker 3: more voiceover narration. So we get like the camera sailing
Speaker 3: over some clouds and we're watching lightning flash out the fog,
Speaker 3: and then we hear for thirteen years, a deep silence
Speaker 3: has surrounded the island. It has existed under a veil
Speaker 3: of mystery, almost forgotten by the world until now. So
Speaker 3: now I think we're finally into the plot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and ultimately watching this, you know, if you're watching
Speaker 1: this through the first time, you might be relieved that
Speaker 1: the narration ends. But looking back on it, I kind
Speaker 1: of wish it had universal narration throughout. I missed the
Speaker 1: narrator voice 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 Merry 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 Bancho, 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 it with a light seasoning of George Carlin
Speaker 3: Sauce I would say, yeah, yeah. And then you've got Brooklyn.
Speaker 3: He's gonna end up being one of the main heroes
Speaker 3: of the movie. I guess in the end, the main
Speaker 3: heroes are Brooklyn and Sergeant Nim but Brooklyn again is
Speaker 3: played by Masa hero Takashima, and they identify Brooklyn immediately
Speaker 3: as a mechanic. When we first meet him, he is
Speaker 3: flying the plane because Captain Banshow has apparently bullied him
Speaker 3: into flying the plane. But it's clear that Brooklyn is
Speaker 3: not supposed to be piloting the plane and does not
Speaker 3: feel good about it. He's having some kind of severe
Speaker 3: anxiety about piloting and this will go on to be
Speaker 3: a major plot point throughout, and ban Show is sort
Speaker 3: of gently harassing him. I think he's joking that, like, hey,
Speaker 3: if you get air sick and throw up on my plane,
Speaker 3: I will make you eat your vomit, which is cute.
Speaker 3: But Brooklyn is kind of a spiky haired, initially taciturn
Speaker 3: young man in sunglasses with a scarf over his face,
Speaker 3: and he is holding a carrot in his mouth like
Speaker 3: a cigar.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, which I get it. Kind of maybe this
Speaker 1: is a bugs bunny kind of thing. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but yes, it becomes clear that Brooklyn loves carrots. He
Speaker 1: is perhaps growing carrots on the airplane. I'm not certain
Speaker 1: on that.
Speaker 3: There's one part where we see a giant colander full
Speaker 3: of enormous carrots.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they they brought them at any rate, Like
Speaker 1: carrots are important. I mean, if you have carrots in
Speaker 1: the post apocalyptic or semi post apocalyptic cyberpunk world, eat them.
Speaker 1: You know they're good for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh, and Brooklyn keeps playing with a revolver underneath
Speaker 3: his coat. It's like when you know, you know those
Speaker 3: guys who like they play with a knife. They've got
Speaker 3: a pocket knife and they just fiddle with it a
Speaker 3: lot that open it and close it and stuff. But
Speaker 3: he does that but with a gun.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Bancho is quick to remind him that this is bad.
Speaker 3: Luck, like that that's the problem. It's bad luck. And then,
Speaker 3: of course, also we meet Babe played by Aya and Joji,
Speaker 3: who is in some she's some kind of leadership role.
Speaker 3: She's like the lute. I think she does not tolerate
Speaker 3: any horsing around. She might be the most like just
Speaker 3: straight to business character. And then you meet barabas Thus
Speaker 3: played by James Brewster Thompson, the judo guy. He seems
Speaker 3: to be like the tough guy, the heavy gun hero
Speaker 3: of the crew. You meet Bombay, who is Jacobira. He
Speaker 3: 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: pieces of flare, like he's got a hat that's studded
Speaker 3: with all kinds of little pins. There was one part
Speaker 3: where I paused it to try to see if I
Speaker 3: could recognize what any of the pins are. But they're
Speaker 3: I don't know, you know, like pins you would wear
Speaker 3: on your lapel. But he's got tons of them all
Speaker 3: 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 1: Yeah yeah, or to a even more comedic extreme. You
Speaker 1: had the sidekick of El Santo in the Dracula movie.
Speaker 1: We discussed in a recent episode. Oh yeah, what was
Speaker 1: his name? Abio or something it was. I know it
Speaker 1: 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. They've almost got
Speaker 3: like a mess haul 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 1: Yeah, I noticed that. That's an interesting touch. I don't
Speaker 1: know why that is. It just seems like you're dealing
Speaker 1: with a bunch of props, especially in kind of a
Speaker 1: cyberpunk or dystopian future scenario, why not just use that
Speaker 1: 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 plane spots a giant complex
Speaker 3: with the landing pad on top of this three hundred
Speaker 3: story central tower, and they go into land on top
Speaker 3: of the tower, and where I noticed that the Marianne
Speaker 3: is a fixed wing VTOL aircraft because it doesn't have
Speaker 3: to do a horizontal runway landing. It just kind of
Speaker 3: jets down like a helicopter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, ultimately it benefits from being a model airplane. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they could despite how it looks, they can just make
Speaker 1: it land however they need it to land. I mean,
Speaker 1: but it's an impressive model. The models look good in
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, I mean it's a specialized technology that it's quite complicated.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this film, I mean, this particular airplane does
Speaker 1: not really look like a Harrier jet or an ospray
Speaker 1: or anything like that. So I don't know, it's kind
Speaker 1: of a mystery how it's achieving this. But yeah, sci Fi,
Speaker 1: you let it.
Speaker 3: Go, 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. But they just
Speaker 3: drop 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. Then 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 the Hudson of the movie, the Bill Paxton of
Speaker 3: the movie, is of course afraid. Once he sees the
Speaker 3: crash helicopter, He's like, let's go to Borneo. I got
Speaker 3: a great tip on a club medsite plastic. He wouldn't believe,
Speaker 3: but anyway, a portion of the crew breaks off to
Speaker 3: head inside, while I believe Boomerang and Boxer stay up
Speaker 3: by the aircraft and pretty much as soon as they
Speaker 3: are left alone, they're like immediately killed unceremoniously. The defenses
Speaker 3: of the Chiron five just slaughter them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because even though the supercomputer here was seemingly defeated
Speaker 1: or there was enough of a stalemate where it's no
Speaker 1: longer a threat, it still has a threat to the
Speaker 1: outside world anyway. It still has these very active self
Speaker 1: 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 ship 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 1: Oh, you know, it just might.
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 is.
Speaker 1: I think about that every time I think about having
Speaker 1: a Coca cola, or I guess in this case of pepsi.
Speaker 3: Well, you think how much better it would be if
Speaker 3: if there were there were nothing this sweet in the
Speaker 3: world anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, if you haven't had one in a while,
Speaker 1: there's nothing that sweet in the world anymore, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So yeah, imagine that the sweetest thing you've had is
Speaker 1: a carrot, and then you're going from that to robocola
Speaker 1: pepsi type. I also love that this implies, or maybe
Speaker 1: more than imply, it's explicitly states that pepsi in the
Speaker 1: future is made in the same facility.
Speaker 3: As the robots mex kill people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well robots to kill people, but also this extremely
Speaker 1: volatile h you know, super element text Mexia or mex Texia.
Speaker 3: Tex mex Mexium tex Mexium. Yes, that's a good point.
Speaker 3: But I was also like, does this robocola? Does this
Speaker 3: mean it's for the robots to drink or is it
Speaker 3: just roboc like the monoail cafe in North Haverbrook, you know,
Speaker 3: is it just like everybody's got robot fever? So you
Speaker 3: know when you go into the store, everything's called that,
Speaker 3: it's you know, robo glue, and I don't know what
Speaker 3: people buy in the future, robo chips.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I just took it to be the The cola
Speaker 1: delivery system is robocola, and this one has pepsi, so
Speaker 1: it's pepsi type. It feels good looking back. I think
Speaker 1: I'm correct here, Joe, And this may be the last
Speaker 1: element of the film that I fully understood. Of course, yes,
Speaker 1: it's kept rolling on. 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 1: Very sensible.
Speaker 3: Yes, Brooklyn and Bancho have a face off here where
Speaker 3: banshow he it's kind of like the part in Jaws
Speaker 3: where Quinn crushes his organic can and then Hooper crushes
Speaker 3: his styrofoam cup, but instead it's that Ban show pops
Speaker 3: open his cool ancient cigurio case and then Brooklyn opens
Speaker 3: up his cigarette case, except it's full of carrot sticks.
Speaker 1: 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 our lovely rock and roll fly boy. He is killed,
Speaker 3: Barabbas is killed. When Barabbas gets like a pipe shoved
Speaker 3: through his guts, Bancho just gets dropped down a three
Speaker 3: hundred story shaft. And now the original team is down
Speaker 3: to just Brooklyn, Babe and Bombay. And after the attack,
Speaker 3: they immediately pretty much meet Brenda Baki, the Texas Air
Speaker 3: Ranger Sergeant Nim and Babe immediately realizes who she is.
Speaker 3: She you know, knows, okay, this is a ranger from
Speaker 3: the crashed helicopter, and Brenda Baki plays her like she's
Speaker 3: you know, too cool for school. She's sitting there with
Speaker 3: a major injury. I think she has also been attacked
Speaker 3: by Chiron five's defense programs. But she's just sitting there,
Speaker 3: like bleeding, lying against a wall, and she's got a
Speaker 3: cigarette in her mouth and she's like got a light.
Speaker 3: So it's that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: 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 helps her, like I think,
Speaker 3: unstick herself from some kind of thing she's like stabbed
Speaker 3: into on the wall, she just heals herself by spraying
Speaker 3: something out of a WD FOURT y type can all
Speaker 3: over her wound and then she seems fine And isn't
Speaker 3: there I think there is first aid spray in the
Speaker 3: Resident Evil games. Isn't that the medical thing you get
Speaker 3: in there?
Speaker 1: I haven't played a lot of those, but I know,
Speaker 1: I've encountered this sort of thing in other pieces of
Speaker 1: futuristic media, the idea that there's some sort of spray
Speaker 1: or goo that can just be applied to the wound
Speaker 1: it 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 Chiron 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's still determined to catch
Speaker 3: that droid.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and unfortunately Narration guy is not here to tell
Speaker 1: us exactly what a biodroid is. But when we finally
Speaker 1: get better, looks at it like there's no question, like
Speaker 1: this is a this is a very Japanese cyberpunk creature.
Speaker 1: It's you know, this kind of like bioorganic mass of
Speaker 1: what might be flesh, what might be mushroom, what might
Speaker 1: be mechanical parts, So you know, you get this this
Speaker 1: biomechanical confusion from it. That is Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: You could compare it to get but not very geagory,
Speaker 1: very like, there's a very based in Japanese cyberpunk, and
Speaker 1: it 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 1: Yeah, and it is. It is at the heart of
Speaker 1: Japanese cyberpunk because it's not just like the Western idea
Speaker 1: of becoming a machine, you know, will damage your soul.
Speaker 1: It's more becoming a machine well, yeah, it'll damage your soul,
Speaker 1: but it'll also just make you really gross. We'll do
Speaker 1: gross things to your.
Speaker 3: Body, right, Like, I could imagine the biodroids human friends
Speaker 3: might be like, hey, you know you smell bad and
Speaker 3: you are covered in engine grease? Could you take a
Speaker 3: shower 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 1: Yeah. So on paper, at this point, the plot's rolling
Speaker 1: pretty well. You know, we have this fabulous setting, we
Speaker 1: have this we have outside an outside four C. We
Speaker 1: have this outside enemy. So we have multiple pieces on.
Speaker 3: The table, right, now they continue their journey. Nim is
Speaker 3: looking for the Biodroid and the three remaining thieves are
Speaker 3: looking for the computer chips. But then there is a
Speaker 3: There are a number of attacks. There is an attack
Speaker 3: by sound activated mines that are part of the Chiron
Speaker 3: five's defense system, and they get attacked by the Biodroid,
Speaker 3: and Bombay is killed by the Biodroid when he is
Speaker 3: knocked onto a hook dangling from a chain in the
Speaker 3: room of the Lament Configuration, which is in the Chiron
Speaker 3: five facility for some reason. But eventually Brooklyn, Babe and
Speaker 3: Nim make their way into the heart of the Chiron
Speaker 3: five Level three, p. Ninety the Chiron Dome and I
Speaker 3: loved this set. So there was like a control room
Speaker 3: full of computer monitors with just skeletons sitting at them.
Speaker 3: I guess these are the former custodians of the facility
Speaker 3: who have been killed, but their bodies are still sitting
Speaker 3: there at their workstations. And then inside the core itself
Speaker 3: there is a line green lake and there's a vial
Speaker 3: of text mexium, this precious substance at the Chiron Core.
Speaker 3: I believe the Biodroid brought it here. This may be
Speaker 3: something I'm misunderstanding, but I was trying really hard to follow.
Speaker 3: I think the biodroid stole the text mexium from the
Speaker 3: hyper nuclear facility in Texas and for some reason brought
Speaker 3: it here to Island eight Jo to put into the
Speaker 3: core of the Chiron five. Maybe because the Chiron five
Speaker 3: needed needed text mexium for some reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I guess it's the power source or something, right,
Speaker 1: like it needs it to fully activate itself again.
Speaker 3: Right. And then while they're in there in the room,
Speaker 3: I think the biodroid is like swimming around in the
Speaker 3: like it's swimming in the lime green liquid and jumping
Speaker 3: out at them like killer croc. And it ends up
Speaker 3: knocking Babe into the Limrida lake and that that of
Speaker 3: course is not good for her because obviously no human
Speaker 3: can survive this liquid. But who knows what could come
Speaker 3: of this submerge. 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 tex 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 1: Yeah, a lot of shoots, a lot of elevators like
Speaker 1: ultimately they again, they do a great job of creating
Speaker 1: this enormous industrial environment. There's just this other worldly world
Speaker 1: that is the result of supercomputer and its robots just
Speaker 1: doing its own thing without really much concern at all
Speaker 1: 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 Chiro. So I guess maybe
Speaker 3: their parents or grandparents or whatever were the people sitting
Speaker 3: 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 are they
Speaker 3: could you tell? Are they supposed to be dressed as
Speaker 3: robots like they're trying to blend in in the facility,
Speaker 3: or are they just wearing some kind of protective suit.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I wouldn't show on that either if it was
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 3: chirn And so they start salvaging parts from the robot
Speaker 3: war gun head parts because they decide that they need
Speaker 3: a fully functioning gun head in order to defeat the
Speaker 3: aerobot so that they can get through Chiron five to
Speaker 3: get back to their airplane and escape. And Brooklyn thinks
Speaker 3: that he can repair a gunhead, 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 1: Yeah, but that's not going to work. Clearly has to
Speaker 1: he has to summon all of his courage. He has
Speaker 1: to find a way to not only fix the gun
Speaker 1: head but pilot it, defeat the aerobot with the gun
Speaker 1: head so that they can escape. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And meanwhile, back at the Chiron Core. Strange things are afoot.
Speaker 3: We see some kind of like weird creature busting out
Speaker 3: of the lime green pool, and there's a computer screen
Speaker 3: which presumably has just been showing this cybor tech screensaver
Speaker 3: for seven years or however long it's been. Suddenly it
Speaker 3: changes and it says irregular vibration detected, which is my
Speaker 3: favorite Beach Boys song. I'm picking up irregular vibrations, And
Speaker 3: of course that's because it's the biodid mock. Tw We
Speaker 3: get the new Biodroid reveal, because I think what has
Speaker 3: happened is that the Biodroid somehow absorbed or merged with Babe.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And this again, this is very Japanese cyberpunk. The
Speaker 1: idea that you could just sort of slip and fall
Speaker 1: into 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 tex 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 hyper nuclear facility
Speaker 3: in Texas or whatever to get enough text Mexium that
Speaker 3: I can have it stolen and brought to me and
Speaker 3: then I'll take over the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean we kind of discussed this in recent
Speaker 1: episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind this week about AI, Like,
Speaker 1: if you're any mortal AI, time doesn't matter, you could
Speaker 1: do things like this and be like, well, let's just
Speaker 1: push pause on this war, and once technology is improved,
Speaker 1: I'll steal it and then I will be in a
Speaker 1: better position to win.
Speaker 3: Now, eventually the humans part ways, because 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 1: Yeah. I no matter what was going on with the
Speaker 1: dialogue or the plot, I always bought the setting and
Speaker 1: the props and the various robots and robot effects. As
Speaker 1: Gunhead eventually becomes able to talk and have long conversations
Speaker 1: with our hero, there's like one scene where Gunhead is
Speaker 1: represented by just like one of these arms or tentacles
Speaker 1: of Gunhead, and he's having a conversation with it, and
Speaker 1: it was a pretty fun scene. I love the practical effects.
Speaker 3: I love what a stand up guy Gunhead is. Once
Speaker 3: he finally starts talking and we get to know him,
Speaker 3: Gunhead is so positive, he's such a good friend. I
Speaker 3: mean it's heartwarming.
Speaker 1: 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 these
Speaker 3: carrots coming from?
Speaker 1: I mean, how would he survived this long without carrots?
Speaker 1: I mean he must just have him secreted on his person.
Speaker 1: He's got him like duct taped to his leg and
Speaker 1: stuff underneath his clothing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess Brooklyn has all kinds of means for
Speaker 3: getting carrots through customs. Yeah, but like I said, once
Speaker 3: the Gunhead was rebuilt, it starts talking to Brooklyn and seven,
Speaker 3: and it's this very positive presence in the movie. It's
Speaker 3: just so affirming. It really gives you, it really gives
Speaker 3: them confidence, and it's a great friend. But of course
Speaker 3: this comes down to I think one of the character
Speaker 3: conflicts in the movie, which is that Brooklyn is afraid
Speaker 3: of piloting things, but he must face his fears and
Speaker 3: pilot the gun Head. Now, when that happens, he starts
Speaker 3: piloting it. And I don't even know how to describe
Speaker 3: all the different ways that the gun Head moves. Like,
Speaker 3: the design of these robots is beautiful, practical effects work,
Speaker 3: all the models they must have built. I don't know
Speaker 3: exactly what scale they were working. But the movie in
Speaker 3: a way is kind of murky. I mean, like it
Speaker 3: doesn't give you really like clean clear looks at everything.
Speaker 3: But as much as you can see, it looks really good.
Speaker 3: The models are awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the models are great. I think the problem and
Speaker 1: the reasons that I wasn't very invested in the big
Speaker 1: battles that tape place is that for one thing, it's
Speaker 1: kind of just like two robot tanks exploding at each
Speaker 1: other and running into each other for what seems like forever.
Speaker 1: But then also the environment of the very environment here
Speaker 1: is just unreal. It's like, like, how do I how
Speaker 1: do I relate to this as a human being? A
Speaker 1: world where tanks are moving up like vertically, yeah, for
Speaker 1: stories and stories and then battling each other in long
Speaker 1: haulways and 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 1: Yeah, it basically becomes tank'sploitation in the latter stages of
Speaker 1: 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 1: Yeah, so it has different modes I guess to deal
Speaker 1: 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 heroins. So it's
Speaker 3: taken it up to the core, but then like it
Speaker 3: stops to have a little taste.
Speaker 1: It earned it. It earned it.
Speaker 3: There's also a lot of cute stuff with Brooklyn and
Speaker 3: Seven bonding during their gun Head quest throughout the facility
Speaker 3: at this point, Like, well, there are some things where
Speaker 3: like Seven is trying to help and he's playing around
Speaker 3: underneath Gunhead feet and I'm like, Seven, stop doing that.
Speaker 3: That is very dangerous. But other times there's like one
Speaker 3: part where it's seven points a gun at Brooklyn a
Speaker 3: real gun and he makes it, you know, pewpw shooting
Speaker 3: sound in Brooklyn warns him not to do this because
Speaker 3: in a callback, it is bad luck. I'm not sure
Speaker 3: that's the main problem with it, but I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe there's like a dubbing translation issue. I mean, I
Speaker 3: could imagine like bad luck being another way to say
Speaker 3: that it's dangerous or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not sure. I think that the scenes with
Speaker 1: the kids tended to be the scenes where I was
Speaker 1: cross checking on Wikipedia to see what the plot was
Speaker 1: was doing at that point.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, I agree, those were some of the hardest
Speaker 3: to understand.
Speaker 1: 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 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 Banchot was
Speaker 3: talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you look at the images of that gun
Speaker 1: Head model kit that I referenced earlier, there is a
Speaker 1: whiskey 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 she's a double a sleeper agent
Speaker 3: for the AI. Yes, and then we get this a
Speaker 3: big gun Head versus Aerobot showdown. Aerobot is overpowered, but
Speaker 3: Gunhead has a strategy, and his strategy is to take
Speaker 3: out Aerobot's three triangle eyes. And eventually Brooklyn and the
Speaker 3: gun Head are victorious. They destroy the Aerobot. Meanwhile, somehow
Speaker 3: Sergeant Nim stops Eleven from doing something with the text
Speaker 3: Mexium vile. I'm not sure what it was, but she
Speaker 3: was trying to do something bad in the Chiron five core,
Speaker 3: and 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. It's like the babe part of the Babe
Speaker 3: part that is now absorbed into the biodroid, has a
Speaker 3: crisis of conscience when it sees Brooklyn and the kids
Speaker 3: there and Sergeant Nim, and it's like, no, what have
Speaker 3: I become? And then just like turns to light.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, one thing that it probably could have used
Speaker 1: more fleshing out if we were to really buy it.
Speaker 1: It kind of comes out of left field here, but yeah,
Speaker 1: 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 we get a very charming carrot chomp from Brooklyn
Speaker 3: right at the end.
Speaker 1: And that is Gunhead. It's a like, I say, I think,
Speaker 1: a great film to put on in the background, given
Speaker 1: how wonderful the visuals are. It's it was not that
Speaker 1: surprising to learn that Canadian electro industrial band Frontline Assembly
Speaker 1: used with permission, gun Head footage as the basis for
Speaker 1: their nineteen ninety two music video Mind Phaser. And they
Speaker 1: didn't just use the film's excellent footage. They actually shot
Speaker 1: themselves in costumes that looked like they belonged in gun
Speaker 1: Head and inserted themselves into the world. So look that
Speaker 1: up Mind Phaser if you want to see just flashes
Speaker 1: of this film.
Speaker 3: Oh interesting, I hope one of them became a biodroid.
Speaker 1: I think they all become biodroids. It's kind of the
Speaker 1: electro industrial dream, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: I love the biodroid. I love it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the biodroid is good, and I think the
Speaker 1: biodroid is ultimately more relatable because it is humanoid. The tank.
Speaker 1: I mean, I love sci fi tanks. I love movies
Speaker 1: with sci fi tanks in them. I build sci fi
Speaker 1: tanks sometimes. But it was just I was kind of
Speaker 1: hard to get behind these admittedly cool sci fi tanks
Speaker 1: in this film, and I was thinking about this. I
Speaker 1: was trying to think, well, why is that? And then
Speaker 1: I had to ask myself, well, what tank movies do
Speaker 1: I actually like? And I think the for me, the
Speaker 1: best tank heavy movie I can think of is Kelly's Heroes.
Speaker 3: I've never seen it.
Speaker 1: Oh it's good. It's you know, World War two kind
Speaker 1: of a heisty situation, uh, you know, rogue characters, heavily
Speaker 1: involves tanks. The tanks are important to the plot, but
Speaker 1: not more important than the people, you know, And I
Speaker 1: guess it kind of comes down to sort of the
Speaker 1: reality of tank warfare too. Like tanks cannot exist on
Speaker 1: their own. Tanks need uh support from from from human
Speaker 1: beings as well, both inside and out. And that can
Speaker 1: be said for the plot of a film as well.
Speaker 1: Because when I started looking at lists of tank movies.
Speaker 1: Granted there were many that I had not seen, but
Speaker 1: there were others where I'm like, oh, that that was
Speaker 1: no good. I did not like that. You have had
Speaker 1: a sci fi tank, but it wasn't that good. The
Speaker 1: sci fi tanks are best in my opinion, when they're
Speaker 1: they're utilized within the film, like they show up in
Speaker 1: a couple of scenes, but they're not the whole deal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I like the I like the digital tanks in
Speaker 3: trent On.
Speaker 1: Those were good tanks. Yeah. I think another thing about
Speaker 1: like mech combat, and in this case mech tank combat
Speaker 1: is that, like I said, when they were battling each other,
Speaker 1: it were just kind of exploding at each other.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Robot Jocks, which granted is more about more humanoid robots
Speaker 1: in those battles, like everything they did mattered, like they
Speaker 1: were setting up particular moves as being important and there
Speaker 1: was discussion about what they were. So we saw less
Speaker 1: of that in this for sure.
Speaker 3: I'd say the color palettes of robot Jocks versus gunheader
Speaker 3: entirely opposite. Yeah, Robot Jocks is dominated by bright light
Speaker 3: colors and takes place in broad daylight where you get
Speaker 3: a very clear picture of exactly what you're looking at
Speaker 3: to an almost comical extent, whereas Gunhead is very it's more,
Speaker 3: you know, the dark, gritty, cyberpunk thing where everything in
Speaker 3: the movie looks kind of like muddy and grimy and
Speaker 3: dimly lit, so you never get a really clear look
Speaker 3: at anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's still well, it's beautiful in its own way. Like,
Speaker 1: I absolutely love the look of the film. All Right,
Speaker 1: you're probably wondering, well, where can I see Gunhead? Well,
Speaker 1: it looks like it has streamed recently on Prime, but
Speaker 1: it's not currently available to us anyway at this point
Speaker 1: on Prime. There's a DVD that is available from Section
Speaker 1: twenty three Films in the United States, and that's how
Speaker 1: we watched it. We actually rented it from Videodrome, our
Speaker 1: local video store in Atlanta, Videodrome dot TV, so that's
Speaker 1: how we got to see it. But I believe there's
Speaker 1: also a copy of this on archive dot org as well.
Speaker 3: For future historians to refer to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but of course stuff comes and goes on streaming platforms.
Speaker 1: For instance, when we reviewed Robot Jocks, it was not
Speaker 1: available on Amazon Prime. Now it's on Amazon Prime as
Speaker 1: of this recording. So you know, just be patient. Sometimes
Speaker 1: 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 3: called too b Yes, tub I Yes. If you haven't
Speaker 3: listened to our Robot Jacks episode, go listen to that.
Speaker 3: You'll understand the joke.
Speaker 1: All right, We're gonna go ahead and close it out here,
Speaker 1: But obviously we'd love to hear from everybody out there,
Speaker 1: people who saw this film back in the day, people
Speaker 1: who saw it because we mentioned it on the show.
Speaker 1: We'd love to hear from anyone out there who's more
Speaker 1: versed in, say Japanese cyberpunk, Japanese science fiction in general.
Speaker 1: What are your thoughts on this film and its place
Speaker 1: in Japanese cinema. What are your thoughts on tank movies?
Speaker 1: Do you have a favorite example of tank exploitation? If so,
Speaker 1: 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 a 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.
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