Anecdotes #6: A Bad TV Movie

April 25, 2008

Night 3: Saturday, March 22nd
Kyoto

We were flipping through channels, bored, when we stumbled upon a weird little show. The first image I clearly remember is a bunch of cute, furry puppets, vaguely resembling hamsters, running along. Suddenly some demon machine thing comes out and snatches them up in its jaws. One hamster gets away. But a woman wearing a white dominatrix outfit with a white beehive hairdo whips it.

Jenny, Hedy, and I looked at each other. What the heck…?

It turned out the white lady and her boss, a strict-looking man in a suit, were melding Japanese spirit-creatures with machines, to make demon transformers. In the meantime, the little boy befriends the lone hamster-thing. At some point he wanders into the woods and meets all these creatures from Japanese mythology. Their meeting is not happy and pleasant. He sees a woman without a face and a woman whose head falls to the floor and whose neck stretches like a boa constrictor. Jenny was actually frightened during this part, despite the bad special effects.

The boy eventually finds out these are the good people who are fighting the white lady and her boss. They take the boy to meet a powerful spirit. The spirit gives the boy a sword, but the white lady abducts the spirit and the hamster as well.

The hamster almost escapes. It escapes in a hilarious way. The machine-monster thing squeezes it and the hamster is so frighten that it pees. The pee short-circuits the machine. Unfortunately, the white lady recaptures it and tosses it into the furnace, where Machine-monsters are made.

“Oh no,” Jenny said. “What will happen to it?”

At this point we had to see the rest of the show.

The boy gets a change of clothes. He rallies the spirits to attack the bad guy’s fort. He uses his magical sword to kill the transformer demons.

“I bet they’ve turned his hamster into a monster and he’s going to have to fight it.”

“No,” Jenny said.

But I was right.

It cut to the bad guys. It was obvious to me the white girl was in love with her boss.

“He’s going to kill her,” I said.

“Why would he do that?” Jenny said.

But I was right again. Do I know Japanese drama or what?

The big evil boss, after running the white-haired girl through with a sword, stands on the brink of the crucible, preparing to meld himself with a machine. He jumps in. But then a comic relief character bumps into a guy collecting beans (???) and instead of a machine, the guy gets melded with a bean.

“What kind of stupid way to die is that?” I said. “I mean, at least the white-haired girl died with dignity. But that was just…laughable.”

At the very end, the hamster-thing was shown alive. But then, the big bad guy reappeared and he had red beans where his pupils should be.

“That’s the end?” Jenny said. “We watched it for that?”

It was a bad, bad movie. We couldn’t even be sure if it was comedy, horror, or a children’s action movie. But somehow it entranced us. That night we stayed up until 11:30. That was, by far, the latest we would ever stay up in Kyoto.