Movies: Mikadroid: Robokill Beneath Discoclub Layla

Fast-forward to the bubble-economy 1980s, where the night life lasts all night and the lights never go out. That means nonstop work for people like the disgruntled electrical repair technician, who gets summoned out to repair a malfunctioning generator at a sub-basement disco club. Little does he know that the building it’s in was constructed directly over the old war laboratory — and that the electrical malfunction in the disco has set Mikadroid free to kill. And kill it does: it guns down a bunch of kids making out in the parking garage — oh, eternal horror movie clichés, how we love thee! — blows away a skateboarder, and slashes another girl to ribbons with its sword. (This last kill actually gets turned into a visual gag, believe it or not, but I wouldn’t dream of giving away the joke.)

All is not lost, however. A pair of jut-jawed robot hunters packing a portable arsenal show up at the garage and blow all hell out of Mikadroid with their guns, although that only seems to alternately slow it down or piss it off. The repairman takes a bullet wound to his shoulder, and he and a freaked-out clubgoer named Saeko hide out in what’s left of the underground lab. The gunmen join them, and there amidst the crumbling plaster and dust-covered machinery they make a last stand against the killer robot with whatever they can muster. And then there are a couple of additional twists that I wasn’t expecting, but the less said about those the better.

Haraguchi may have been working on a relatively small budget, but we should know by now that it’s not the budget but how it’s used. Most of the opening sequences, for instance, are constructed out of stills, stock footage, sound effects and carefully-used inserts — but it’s atmospheric and even a bit creepy instead of cheap. In fact, most of the film is geared more towards being atmospheric instead of breakneck action, and uses its dark underground locations to really good effect; there’s a really wonderful scene where the gunmen quietly tell the others about what happened, as the camera wanders through the laboratory to alight on things that illuminate the monologue. Sometimes the movie’s pacing and blocking is a little too static, though: when the gunners show up and start blasting at Mikadroid, they just stand there, where logic tells us they should be ducking behind cars and sniping for the eyes.

The story behind the film is as quirky as the end result. Mikadroid was originally going to be Mikado Zombie, a horror flick about an undead WWII soldier who rises from his grave to continue fighting — possibly an oblique metaphor for the Japanese soldiers stranded on Pacific islands who were found decades later but believed the war to still be raging on. The movie was almost scrapped when horror films came under fire no thanks to the arrest of a serial killer with a massive horror-movie collection (some thousands of video tapes), but instead of being killed outright the film was reworked as dark SF, with the “zombie” becoming an android war machine. It was made as part of a line of low-budget (sub-$500,000) Toho movies that were shot on 16mm film but released directly to video — right when “V Cinema”, as it was called, was really taking off in Japan, a scene that would eventually spawn the likes of Takashi Miike.

Japanese movie buffs ought to have fun with this one just because of the people involved. Look fast for Makoto Tezuka — yes, Osamu Tezuka’s son! — in one role, and I also spotted director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose movie The Guard from Underground might owe a debt to this one (or is it the other way ‘round?). Plus, I’m tempted to read a metaphor into all of this: under the surface of modern-day society, where we drink and dance the night away, horrible things created by our own technology and science lie dormant. There’s more than a couple of oblique references to the horrors of the atomic bomb, too — an image of a smashed pocket watch, or a silhouette on a wall. More than anything else, though, the movie’s a nifty example of Japanese low-budget pulp fantasy done well.