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OK. We've had a lot of fun with our mainstream American action movies from the past and present, but if we're really going to have anything really mind-blasting and not just baffling, it's time to go back to Japan. Here's something called Zebraman! I'm going to assume it has absolutely no connection at all with Zebra Girl... not that anyone has heard of Zebra Girl. Let's see... we've got a zebra randomly walking by, then a news report about a giant seal migration, two people sitting around a bathhouse talking about having crabs, and now some military guys talking about investigating a UFO. Will all of these things tie in to the plot? I... kinda hope not. Now we're cutting once more to someone so pathetic looking he must be the main character getting too distracted by the lame sentai show on TV that he screws up his sewing, and... oh my. A few thousand little alien dudes who have the proportions of Pacman on those occasions he deigns to have limbs... or Gurren Lagann mecha if you prefer. Then finally the title screen.
Somewhere in that ADD-riddled pre-title randomness, a caption popped up to inform us that this is set in the distant year of 2010, which would be funnier if it weren't made in 2005, but hey. Anyway, our main character appears to be a father of two kids and an elementary school teacher. And a loser, but we covered that. If you guessed that one of his kids is a highly opinionated girl in high school, and the other is a dorky boy in elementary school, you have at least some familiarity with any given piece of fiction from Japan.
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As soon as his family is all in bed or out for the night, we see what he was sewing earlier. His homemade, goofy, arbitrarily zebra-themed, superhero suit. He puts it on, attempts to do some cool air boxing, and manages to smack his head on the door frame and rip a bunch of seams. Now here's a kid whose legs don't work! Smooth transitions? Pacing? You know... I'm actually having a hard time recalling the last time I watched ANY movie that had smooth transitions or proper pacing. Well, that I gave the CS treatment to anyway. Now here's an Elvis looking dude who just finished sleeping with the main character's daughter and talking to her. This scene isn't creepy at all... oh, we're moving on? Thanks movie. Anyway, Sleazy Elvis apparently dresses up in a ridiculous lobster man as part of his job in "showbusiness" to judge by the contents of his overnight bag. Meanwhile, here's our hero, sorta, taking that big risk of wearing his costume in public by going across the street to get a soda from one of Japan's ubiquitous vending machines.
And hello weirdness! OK, little paraplegic kid is drawing Zebraman on his desk. Apparently this was a sentai show from the late 70s which was cancelled pretty dang quick. The main character is officially a sad cosplayer now, and the kid is just the sort of total nerd who watches obscure weird garbage he finds out about on the internet. You're hitting a little close to home here movie! Oh, and apparently, TV Zebraman's day job was being a teacher, and yon show WAS set in the far flung future year of 2010. So... yeah. Our premise here is not unlike having someone run out there, find a small town in California, open a diner called the Cafe 80's, and make sure it's annoyingly cheesy enough that everyone gets sick of it by 2015 so Back to the Future 2 can be sufficiently prophetic.
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Now we've got our main character talking to some tough friend of his, who's talking about catching and beating up some creepy weirdo who he found walking around in a girl's school uniform. Our hero is somewhat disturbed at his friend's apparent penchant for beating up cosplayers. By the way, not to be rude movie, but you're free to have some sort of actual plot develop any time you're ready here. I'm not saying I don't like watching a neurotic weirdo trying to balance his desire not to be treated like a total freak with his desire to run around in a stupid and embarrassing costume. I mean, that's totally a workable movie premise. It's just not what I was expecting. Oh hey, here we go!
So he hears some girl screaming, goes to investigate, and finds her being accosted by some weirdo with a ridiculous crab mask and two pairs of scissors. Suddenly an elaborate acrobatic fight scene breaks out, much to the surprise of our hero, since it's been established that he totally can't actually come close to pulling this sort of thing off normally. Oh, and it appears that crab face is also Elvis, also that there was a crab face villain on yon old TV show (presumably played by Elvis), and when the army guys looking for aliens arrive on the scene after the fight, crab face, mask removed, appears to have his face caved in and filled with weird green alien slime. The first bit from the punch, he was already clearly possessed, glowing eyes and such.
Here's someone else with glowing eyes! Uh.. yeah, we've officially just spontaneously turned into a cheesy superhero thing with fights against weirdos in back alleys at night here. Kinda jarring to skip over the next day and go straight on through to the next such encounter like that though. Defeated bad guy corpse #2 here is really cartoonishly disfigured, and has a large horseshoe print on it's face after his "Zebra back kick!" NOW we're moving on to the proper "the next day..." sort of scene. By the way, it was established that the old Zebraman show was taken off the air primarily because the main character's costume just wasn't gaudy enough. Anyway, Our hero is talking to Paraplegic Lad's mom about how apparently his legs not working is a psychosomatic thing after seeing his father commit suicide, and also mentioning that she's a nurse. Suddenly, it appears that the real properly goofy (as opposed to just wearing a weird mask) King Crab Man and suddenly things kick into full on 100% cheesy old sentai show mode for a while, with kid's mom eventually showing up as Zebra Nurse to give him an injection to regrow his arm when it gets torn off, and she has a ridiculous theme song going on. Eventually it's established that somewhere in here this was classified as being a dream sequence, but apparently the crab monster watching them talk in the kitchen was really happening?
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Reality is only slightly less surreal, as we now have him running around fighting possessed people to the tune of the super cheesy 70's-tastic Zebraman theme song. And... there's a non-sequitur scene with the government folks apparently analyzing a green alien slime sample in what appears to be a secret lab but is apparently just some public bathhouse. Back to the plot, reality has apparently become so contaminated by sentai show reality that when danger rears, our main character spontaneously develops a crazy mohawk as a sign that it's time to act. But oh, what's this? A horde of possessed baseball bat wielding grade schoolers is assaulting a fruit stand! This looks like a job for... uh... actually no, this doesn't look so much like a job for Zebraman, since he doesn't really have any magic powers to free people from possession, he just kinda punches and kicks dudes. So he grabs his kid, who's part of the horde, and runs off to think of what to do next. Yeah, the alien slime monsters seem to be in full gear now, impregnating people possessing huge crowds, puking themselves out of bodies when compromised as big ol' flubber balls, and uh... basically just filling a school with a meter and a half deep pool of green slime.
Then, suddenly, we've kinda got a long awkward pause in the narrative flow. Seriously, there's a really good movie buried in here, but the pacing keeps jarring you out of it. Eventually though, the main character stumbles onto the script. I mean, literally. He finds a bunch of scripts sitting on a shelf somewhere, describing the plot of the movie to this point. Ah. OK. These are the scripts to the original Zebraman show, which were written as prophecy by the school's vice principle, who was an alien trying to bring his race of evil invading aliens down. His... ASTOUNDINGLY GOOFY LOOKING race of little slime dudes that is. Yeah, that uh.. doesn't really hold up too well if you think about it, so let's just run with they found the scripts to the movie they're in and looked up what comes next.
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Now we have another one of those odd lulls where it would make sense to have a climax. According to the script, Zebraman is supposed to be flying around towards the end, and is now trying to figure out how to do that. This is a really bad place to put a lull like this though, because now I can observe that wait, if the reason we have a script here is that alien prophet dude was encoding a warning to humanity in the scripts to his show as has been established, why the heck does the main character have wacky sentai powers? It's not like he was exposed to any magic power source or special costume or anything so... why does he have wacky super powers exactly?
So uh... any time you want to get back to things happening is fine movie. This is a really weirdly long stretch of nothing happening. Oh, well there's Kid seeing the last episode's script being called Zebraman dies! Earth is doomed! but still. Oh, now HERE we go. The big climactic battle is the main character running into a room full of aliens to rescue the kid. Aliens who aren't possessing anyone, and are in their native totally pathetic state. Much kicking of slimes into the walls occurs. Apparently though, this was actually their secret plan all along, as they splatter and reform as a big tough one and smack him around some. So then Zebraman believes in the power of heart or some such and transforms into a version of his costume that looks like it belongs in a movie... thus making it actually decidedly MORE embarrassing looking than the home made version, really. Then there's... what was clearly the place where we should have had a big impressive fight, but it was pretty darn bla looking. Basically though, they race up towards the roof of the school, I'm guessing to fly to safety, while all the aliens form up into one big huge one which is going to burst through the roof right about... now. Yup, there it goes. Oh, I was slightly off, it just kinda rises up from behind the school. And uses forehead lightning to summon a meteor. Which Zebraman blocks with his cape.
Then Paraplegic Lad gives Zebraman the confidence to fly up and punch the giant alien in the head by standing and walking... before getting picked up and dropped off the building. But Zebraman catches him, because, you know, it's that sort of movie. We're totally playing it straight by this point. So he flies up for a big final attack, gets zapped by lasers and... magically transforms into a zebra with wings that fires laser breath to carve a big Z on the alien's forehead, causing it to explode. OK. Credit where it's due, I was not expecting that. Post explosion he's back to normal and posing heroically in front of the moon. Cut to the next day when he's being arrested for destruction of public property, what with the exploding school and all. Oh fine. That turns out to just be a prank to surprise him with a big cheering crowd... and that's the end. Well, after a bit of cheering and posing and oh yeah he has a wife and kids that have no impact on or place in the plot doesn't he. Anyway, that actually could have been a really enjoyable movie if had been edited better. As is, it definitely had it's moments ("ZEBRA NURSE!") but... weirdly large amounts of dead air and incoherency spacing them out. And not even the good kind of incoherency.
