Zebraman (2004) — a superhero movie
June 16th, 2008 by Martin
Zebraman starts off as an average joe, a schoolteacher who can barely pay attention at staff meetings, and whose children don’t care for him, and whose wife is almost certainly cheating on him. He sews his costume at night, ripping it the first time he tries it on, and daring himself to go across the street for a can of soda. It’s not even an original costume — Zebraman was a failed tv show from decades before.
We watched this Japanese import with english overdub (I didn’t bother trying to figure out whether the disk had english subtitles, and it seemed like it was going to be the kind of movie where it doesn’t mater anyway).
Turns out it’s the schoolteacher’s destiny to be Zebraman. There is an army of little green aliens living in the school gymnasium (I always thought this was true at my school too), and even some secret government agents have taken notice.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this movie was that the computer graphics didn’t suck terribly to go along with everything else that sucked terribly. I guess the director was someone pretty famous, but I don’t honestly know how this movie got made. (Although I suppose mighty morphin’ power rangers also got (gets?) made, so there you go.) The best part of the movie was the first fight scene, with a man wearing a giant crab costume and whose weapons were a pair of scissors in both hands. Also fairly amusing was a dream sequence involving the “Zebra Nurse“.
Oh yeah, and the tagline of the movie: Black and White Ecstasy! Seriously. Avoid at all costs… unless, you just want a movie to laugh along with, in which case, this is pretty amusing.
