Kamen Rider Amazons (2016) Season 1, Episode 1 “Amazonz”
A strange re-imagining of Kamen Rider Amazon, which was one of my favorites of the Showa period, Kamen Rider Amazons was a web-exclusive series made with a much more mature tone—this show was not made for the kiddies. It also doesn’t feel as if it was really taking many ideas from the original Amazon, which I adored for being so wacky and for featuring a Japanese Tarzan biting the legs off of a monster bug. Given that this show follows the long tradition of no subtitles (not even in Japanese) that plagues so much of Japan online programming, I felt a little lost while watching, but I will give my rough thoughts below.
The show features an anti-monster squad in military getup and guns and electric shock add-ons (to their clothes?). The group hunts down people who are turning into monsters, and following the Rider formula, the first two monsters that show up are a spider man and a bat man—actually several spider men. The monster encounters are played out like a straight-up horror action film, with torn-up corpses, gross-out transformations, and gruesome kills and sound effects. One of the members of the anti-monster crew can tear off his clothes and change into this armored knight-like thing, who pops off several legs from the first spider man encountered (perhaps a shout-out to the original). Separate from the action, a young man named Haruka is suffering from an unspecified disease, and his mom treats him dispassionately but doesn’t do a good job of looking after the guy since soon he fails to take his meds and stumbles off into the woods. At the same time, the anti-monster group is there, too, fighting another spider, and the bat guy, and then this other dude shows up snarfing raw eggs. Raw-Egg Man has a Rider belt and transforms and starts saving the day, maybe, and then Haruka transforms into some other Rider-esque thingee, and the end.
Apparently Haruka is the main hero, so I kind of feel gypped after watching the first 40-minute-plus narrative and barely getting a glimpse at his hero form. Raw-Egg Man cuts a fashionable posture with his red Rider armor and big, bulging eyes. The idea of this show seems to be that the monsters and the Riders both are transformed via genetic manipulation like in Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue, a straight-to-video biopunk reimagining of Kamen Rider made in 1992—but the monsters all look like they are still wearing human-constructed armor, helmets, boots, gloves and the like. In the 1992 film, the movie leans into its biological design ethos, with the Rider looking like a proper animal-man. Having the biopunk theme, and still clinging to chunky armor and flashy lights for transformations feels poorly realized. Everything also has a suffocatingly heavy tone, which caused me some severe whiplash after watching so many deliberately wacky Rider shows. Still, the actual filming of the series is mounted with care and precision, and the gore and violence may attract some fans.
Despite this series being an Amazon exclusive, the show was still stuck behind a paywall, regardless of the fact that I have Amazon Prime in Japan (I can watch the re-edited version, where they take the whole series and shorten it into a movie—but who wants to do that?). This ridiculous paywall may have caused my discomfiture more than the actual show, as it just frustrated me.
Kamen Rider Amazons Season 2, episode 1 “Neo”
Because the second season has a new Rider star, and that Rider is directly based on the Japanese Tarzan character from the original Kamen Rider Amazon (which still might be my favorite of all the Rider shows I have seen thus far), I decided to take a watch even though I didn’t really like the first episode of Amazons. This time around, Chihiro (why do the two male heroes both have typically feminine names?), some kid raised in the Amazon, is brought back to civilization, and he keeps biting people and there’s lots of blood. Later he is living on the streets and working with a biker gang to track down and kill Amazons—the monsters in this series. The biker punks attack and provoke a policeman into transforming into a monster, and then Chihiro comes out and rips the creature apart and guts it. Like in the first season, there is a military-esque monster-hunting squad, and we see them blowing up a car early on. We soon learn that Chihiro lives in tension with the bikers, who like to cast aspersions on him. Pretty soon we see a wedding unfolding on screen, but the bride transforms into a monster and starts killing and eating everyone. Chihiro arrives to fight the monster, but in the middle of combat the monster-hunting squad arrives with an emotionless young female that transforms into a feral bird-themed Rider, and they both fight together in increasingly bloody fashion.
The second season has a similar vibe to the first, with washed out lighting, darkness and shadows everywhere, angst, and a severe seriousness. Everybody seems hyper-cool, uber-anxious and combative, or completely emotionless. Iyu Hoshino, the no-feeling female Rider, struck me as a possible proto Ruriko from Shin Kamen Rider, who has a similar extreme cool. As with the first season, the monsters and Riders are supposed to be organic, but they still look like armored fighters, and the whole atmosphere is dripping with seedy, nasty grime and gross. I like horror, but this show feels detached and filthy, with a set of unlikable characters crawling through a mucky, concrete hell-hole. Give me back my fun-loving Riders!
Itís nearly impossible to find well-informed people for this topic, but you seem like you know what youíre talking about! Thanks
Hi! Thanks for the comment! I don’t know so much, as I was just going through and giving my impressions on the first few episodes of each Kamen Rider series, but I really like them–I wish I had time to watch all the full shows, but man… it’s hard to find the time to do even half the things I want to do. I really appreciate you reading!