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