{"id":7262,"date":"2012-01-29T16:25:34","date_gmt":"2012-01-29T21:25:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=7262"},"modified":"2015-10-02T11:54:06","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T16:54:06","slug":"zebraman-2-attack-on-zebra-city-2010-takashi-miike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/7262","title":{"rendered":"Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City (2010, Takashi Miike)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the original Zebraman<\/a><\/em>, made in 2005, family man Sho Aikawa is obsessed with an old TV series that’s set in 2010, the year the film takes place. This one jumps ahead to 2025. The only recurring character is Asano, the young student who shared Sho’s love for the Zebraman series, who now provides care for refugees from Tokyo. Sho wakes up, can’t remember the last 15 years (his family is never mentioned), so Asano fills him in.<\/p>\n

Oh, where to begin? The Governor of Tokyo (Guadalcanal Taka of Beat Takeshi’s Boiling Point<\/em> and Zatoichi<\/em>) has renamed it Zebra City and instituted the “Zebra Time” policy, by which for ten minutes a day, nothing is illegal (cue amusing montage of violence), and the Zebra Police walk the streets in poor neighborhoods killing everyone they see.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Where has Zebraman been all this time? He was in a centrifuge run by the governor’s mad midget doctor. After years of spinning, they succeed in separating black from white. So he is mostly white, and his dark side became the governor’s “daughter,” the Zebra Queen (Riisa Naka), who is also incidentally a pop star.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And what of the alien infestation from the first film? Well, the only remaining alien presence is inside a ten-year-old girl – actually she’s twenty-five, but the force required to imprison the alien has kept her from growing. Eventually she’s sent to the centrifuge and the alien is released to terrorize Tokyo again – part of the Zebra Queen’s plan to displace Zebraman as the legendary hero by saving the city.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Where does Asano fit in? Asano (Masahiro Inoue, star of a series called Kamen Rider<\/em>) and his buddy Ichiba (Naoki Tanaka) help out victims of Zebra Time, are accumulating an army of the injured to overthrow the governor. Ichiba is a Zebraman obsessive (not Asano, strangely) and once played the title character in a revival of the show. Also there’s a dark fellow with bad-boy bangs named Nimi (Tsuyoshi Abe of Initial D<\/em>) who’s in love with the Zebra Queen.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Action! The Z Queen kills her rival in the pop charts and her “father” during successive Zebra Times, but can’t defeat the giant alien. She also sort of kills Nimi, and he finishes himself off. Zebraman isn’t sure what to do about the giant alien, but Ichiba remembers the final episode of the rebooted series, instructs Z to eat the alien – which he does before floating balloon-like into space.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Weird movie, then. More nutso fun than the first one, with all subtlety out the window. We get a couple Zebra Queen music videos, clips from fake TV episodes, and a “Stop AIDS” advertisement.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There was a forty-minute direct-to-video spin-off called Vengeful Zebra Miniskirt Police<\/em> – why oh why wasn’t it included on the blu-ray?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the original Zebraman, made in 2005, family man Sho Aikawa is obsessed with an old TV series that’s set in 2010, the year the film takes place. This one jumps ahead to 2025. The only recurring character is Asano, the young student who shared Sho’s love for the Zebraman series, who now provides care […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1049,712,139,36,181,104],"class_list":["post-7262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2010s","tag-aliens","tag-comics","tag-japan","tag-sequel","tag-takashi-miike"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7262"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10244,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7262\/revisions\/10244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}