Tele-Ninja-Kappa
The movie started out all out stupid, but became silly as I continued to watch. I’m OK with silly so I kept on watching. A young girl befriends the Kappa, sings to it, feeds it and pours water on the indented plate in his head. (It’s a thing with Kappas.)
The insane granddaughter of a dead scientist sets off an atomic bomb that somehow creates a monster called Hangyolas. Hangyolas breaths fire and stomps all over Japan. The Japanese try to kill Hangyolas with the “Gorgon Monster Death Ray”. To the monster the death ray is no more than a pain in the butt.
Apparently the makers of this movie did not think too much of the Japanese armed forces. Not only are they cowards that refuse to fire on the Hangyolas monster, some of them also wear blue shimmer eye shadow.
Enter Kappa to save the day and sumo wrestle with the dreaded Hangyolas. After defeating the monster Kappa then goes on a rampage and starts destroying the parts of Japan that Hangyolas missed. Now it is up to the young girl that Kappa befriended to find a way to stop Kappa.
"Death Kappa" was released in 2010 and was directed by Tomo'o Haraguchi. Once I figured all this out the movie wasn’t too bad. It still has all the usual shortcomings a Japanese “B” movie always has. Bad script, bad acting, bad special effects, bad editing and basically bad everything else. If you are a Kaiju fan and you can get past the stupidness in the beginning you will probably enjoy it. It does have explosions and lots of stomping.
I watched the dubbed version of this movie. I don’t do subtitles. Reason being when I am busy reading the movie I miss the action. OK I’m not a purist. I never said I was. So, in the version I watched the narrator is a white guy speaking in Japanese. Yes, with the dreaded subtitles. The movie characters on the other hand, are Japanese people speaking in English. Strange.
There really is such a thing as a Kappa in Japanese folklore. He looks like a cross between a Frog, a Ninja Turtle and a Teletubby. He is sometimes good and sometimes bad. In order to keep on the good side of a Kappa you need to give it offerings of food. His favorite is the cucumber.