Writers: Keita Amemiya, Itaru Era Music: Shunji Inoue
Cast: Ryosei Konishi, Mary Matsuyama, Saori Hara, Yosuke Saito, Masahiro Kuranuki, Kanji Tsuda
Makai Knight Kouga (Ryosei Konishi) is still protecting his part of Japan from the incursions of extra-dimensional evil beings known as Horrors. This time around, our hero has left his home city for some other unnamed Japanese city to hunt the particularly loathsome “Lord” (who just happens to quite clearly be a Lady) Karma (Saori Hara voiced by Kouga’s TV show love interest Mika Hijii, for some reason). Karma resides inside of a mirror that can only be entered by others under very specific circumstances, and uses her victims’ hidden desires (and a couple of freakish henchpeople owning a goth club) to lure them in.
The city Kouga looks for Karma in has its own protectors already: the experienced Makai Priest Akaza (Yosuke Saito) and his assistant Shiguto (Masahiro Kuranuki). For once, both residents seem pretty okay with letting Kouga do his heroic loner thing. That’s not the reaction of another Makai Priest, Rekka (Mary Matsuyama), who arrives just when Kouga does, with a chip on her shoulder and obvious hatred towards Karma in her heart. Rekka wants to kill Karma herself, the fact that she isn’t bonded to a magical armour (it’s not allowed for girls, you know, I suspect because of girl cooties) notwithstanding, and really, given that we’ll later learn that Karma ate Rekka’s father, it’s a reasonable wish.
Obviously, Kouga and Rekka will come to blows, and it will take a series of cheesy speeches to convince the priestess that it’s the job of all female characters in tokusatsu to cast spells (or – as in this case – play magic flute) at the main baddie from the side-lines while a rude, arrogant man with a very large sword does the main fighting, even when she has been shown to be quite good – though not so good as to embarrass the main character – at kicking peoples’ asses.
Anyway, Karma is powerful enough for Kouga to actually need the magical help, so it is a good thing that he’s upgraded his interpersonal skills from “insufferable” to “just not a people person”.
Despite my problems with its use of its female lead character, the (3D, but who cares?) theatrical feature following the “mature” (and pretty damn great) tokusatsu show Garo is an at times very entertaining piece of work, at least if you’re willing to go with it.
Now, when you hear “theatrical feature”, don’t imagine the film’s budget to be visibly higher than that of the TV show. The rather humble number of locations, the shooting style and the quality of the special effects should make the low budget nature of the endeavour quite obvious.
Fortunately, Red Requiem is still as much Keita Amemiya’s baby as the original show was, and Amemiya is a director and creature designer with a great talent for milking low budgets for all the spectacle they are worth. After all, he’s the guy who once used re-jigged cuckoo clocks as gigantic war machines in a movie, and it kinda-sorta worked.
Whether you think the quality of the CG effects helps or hinders Amemiya in his creative efforts will depend on your tolerance for extremely cheap looking CG.
I have made my peace with unnatural looking CG effects by now, as long as I like the concepts and ideas that are being put on screen with their help. Given my predilections, it would be pretty difficult for me to dislike the aesthetic the digital tech is trying to bring to life in Red Requiem‘s case. It’s a strange, sometimes silly, sometimes cheesy, always very Japanese visual world, where classically Japanese style meets Western kitsch, mock-Gothic trappings, hack and slash videogame choreography and the free-form bizarre, until it becomes pretty difficult to decide on the appropriate reaction to it all. One could of course be an art snob and snort derisively, but it’s just as fair a reaction to be charmed by the combination of the childlike naive, the exploitative and the imaginative on display. (And yeah, there are some of Amemiya’s trademark mime-alike monsters and someone with white wings, too).
Most of the not-so-digital action and the wire fu is quite good too. Konishi and Matsuyama are convincing at striking the appropriate poses, and Amemiya is still a friend of staging action sequences so that the audience is actually able to see what’s going on. There are two or three moments of too obvious stuntman substitution, but I take a scene that’s so clearly staged I can identify someone as a stuntman over one where I don’t see what’s supposed to go on at all any time.
The acting’s about how you would expect from a project like this. Konishi still doesn’t move a facial muscle to do anything but scowl, but he ispretty fantastic at scowling, and everybody else plays his or her role a bit broader than contemporary Western tastes in acting styles would suggest. However, the characters the actors are playing are pretty broad archetypes too, so I can’t help but find these performances fitting. Certain characters are not meant to be portrayed naturalistically.
On the writing side, Red Requiem is clearly a step back from the comparative thematic richness of the show that spawned it, back into the safer territories of overlong speeches about heroics that take turns with emotional cheese. Still, I can’t say I found myself getting to annoyed by it all, because there’s nothing cynical about this aspect of the film, never a feeling that the film is going through the motions when it sprouts its not very clever philosophy. It’s all honest heart-on-its-sleeve goodliness that takes itself terribly seriously, and while it seems proper to giggle about that, I won’t blame it for being good-natured, silly and a bit dumb. See also, “(What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding”.
So, while I would have loved to watch a Garo movie that kept closer to the clever (or the exceedingly strange) parts of the show it came from, I had my fun with what Red Requiem has to offer, especially in its final third, when Amemiya seems to pull out all the stops and begins to bring anything on screen he could imagine and somehow squeeze in.
