The trailer shows a cool\looking rampaging monster and a woman in futuristic battle armor fighting it. Like The Killer, it's an asian action film of some sort, and there was something kind of charming about the trailer; cool music, lots of explosions, and a woman who kicked butt. I've seen that trailer about twelve to fifteen times and every time I think, "I should see that movie."
So finally the other night, I saw it in front of my face in the video store and said, "Oh." I rented it and the roommates and I watched it. The great thing about watching a movie with my roommates is that they have an appreciation for odd movies. About fifteen minutes into it, Julian turned to me and said, "This is great. It's like Power Rangers Meet Eraserhead."
To be honest, it's more like "Abbot and Costello Meet Eraserhead in the House of Power Rangers." Shot with moments of incredible flair, Zeram has a very simple story. Unstoppable monster escapes from intergalactic prison and lands on earth. Before it does, however, a cool chick bounty hunter and her partner, an artificially intelligent computer, land before and set a trap for it; a temporary alternate dimension that is a duplicate of the earth neighborhood it lands in. Unfortunately, two goofy electric company repairmen get sucked into the alternate dimension with the monster, the woman, and everyone's plans go awry.
What works in the director's favor with this story is that the monster, Zeram, seems to have been inspired as much by Noh Theater as by Giger's Alien. For example, it sports a small pale face on the top of its mushroom shaped head that can shoot out like a Freudian's nightmare. Whipping around and hissing, it can take bites out of people and then use the flesh to create icky E.T.-like creatures to do its bidding.
Sadly, there's too much of Abbott and Costello and not enough of the female power ranger who is a very cool character. The plot loses any pretensions toward coherency pretty early but my roommates didn't really notice and I didn't really care; everyone was too busy trying to figure out where the plot was going to go next. Horror? Comedy? Action? In a perfect world, every dumb low budget movie would be as satisfying to the senses as Zeram.
All material on these pages is © 1997 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.