Gan and Ai (who together are Yatterman) battle Mistress Donjuro and her fiendish assistants Tonzra and Boyacki for pieces of an ancient skull.
In the hands of someone other than Takashi Miike this would be a conventional adventure thriller with car chases,snappy one-liners, explosions and a love interest.
However this is Takashi Miike. He pokes a finger in the eye of your pre-conceived ideas, flicks v-signs at the standard film conventions while dancing on the seat of a unicycle.
Naked.
On Fire.
And upside-down.
If Luis Bunel and Dali dropped acid and spent the weekend drinking Absinthe and eating crayons this is the kind of madness that would ensue.
This is huge spoiler for the opening, just to give you a flavour for what the film is like:
***Spoiler***
We open to a scene of devastation, a huge teddy-bear robot is rampaging though Tokoyoko armed with a frying pan and cleaver. They are confronted by Yattaman and a fight ensues, which has people climbing out of what appears to be deep-fat fryers, fighting with giant spoons and forks versus someone armed with a a ball and cup, throwing cars at each other, kung-fu moves, more robots, a cute Japanese woman dressed as a leather- clad dominatrix, electrocutions, slapstick, a soundtrack that sounds like a mixture of bad 80s pop and German power metal guitar, then followed by a battle between a robo-dog and the original teddy-bear kitchen utensils robot, the losers make their escape on a bicycle that talks to them and throws them off by exploding the saddles as punishment... and that is just the the first 10 minutes.
I've no idea if this is true to the original cartoon series and to be honest I don't care - it is well done, funny, appeals to both the adult and 5-year-old in me and very entertaining.
In the hands of someone other than Takashi Miike this would be a conventional adventure thriller with car chases,snappy one-liners, explosions and a love interest.
However this is Takashi Miike. He pokes a finger in the eye of your pre-conceived ideas, flicks v-signs at the standard film conventions while dancing on the seat of a unicycle.
Naked.
On Fire.
And upside-down.
If Luis Bunel and Dali dropped acid and spent the weekend drinking Absinthe and eating crayons this is the kind of madness that would ensue.
This is huge spoiler for the opening, just to give you a flavour for what the film is like:
***Spoiler***
We open to a scene of devastation, a huge teddy-bear robot is rampaging though Tokoyoko armed with a frying pan and cleaver. They are confronted by Yattaman and a fight ensues, which has people climbing out of what appears to be deep-fat fryers, fighting with giant spoons and forks versus someone armed with a a ball and cup, throwing cars at each other, kung-fu moves, more robots, a cute Japanese woman dressed as a leather- clad dominatrix, electrocutions, slapstick, a soundtrack that sounds like a mixture of bad 80s pop and German power metal guitar, then followed by a battle between a robo-dog and the original teddy-bear kitchen utensils robot, the losers make their escape on a bicycle that talks to them and throws them off by exploding the saddles as punishment... and that is just the the first 10 minutes.
I've no idea if this is true to the original cartoon series and to be honest I don't care - it is well done, funny, appeals to both the adult and 5-year-old in me and very entertaining.