Mushrambo The Movie – 1 Review – 15/100

Note: this is a rant, and a pretty big one. Mushrambo, or Shinzo as it’s also been called, is one of the guilty pleasures that I watched when I was still in my early teens, back when Dutch children’s television had yet to descend into utter crap. My taste was pretty bad at the time, but I loved catching the latest episode on television despite the series’ very obvious flaws (the two biggest fights took up 6 and 10 (!) episodes respectively and the plot suffered from some pretty bad inconsistencies (what can I say, my taste was pretty bad at the time; I was fourteen…)). So when I learned about a remake of this series on movie, by none other than the director of Mononoke, I obviously got excited to relive my teenage memories.

Well, I’d like to thank this series for completely destroying them. The movie became nothing but a freaking recap. And a very bad one as well. It’s clear that there went absolutely no budget whatsoever in this thing, and I have no idea what the director of Mononoke was thinking here.

The problem with recap movies like this one is that they take series that have a slow pacing which they use to build up their characters for A REASON. Ultimately we now have a cut-and-paste job of the best scenes of the series that move way too bloody fast to prove any sort of credibility. It’s here where a capable writer manages to condense the story so that it can create a proper story within ninety minutes, but either the director had a really bad day when he wrote this series, or the producers were sleeping through the production process and only realized that nothing had been done a day before the deadline (because really, this is the kind of movie that you can easily make within a day, and I’m really not exaggerating here).

Nothing is explained whatsoever for the ones who are new to the premise. In fact, at one point it’s so bad that the characters look back at events that NEVER EVEN HAPPENED IN THE MOVIE. At one point in the series, for example, the lead characters get an upgrade in power. This upgrade is completely skipped in the movie, and yet the characters costumes magically changed themselves.

One of the things I hoped for in this movie is an number of very sweet graphics (because despite the clichés, I remember how a lot of very nice ideas were put into the setting and it would be awesome to see what they’d look like with a movie budget), but to my despair, the graphics look even more horrible than I remembered them. It’s one thing for a movie to simply look the same, but this movie actually looks and sounds WORSE than the TV-series. WHAT!?

If I had to mention the worst part of this movie, then it’d be the voice acting. If there’s anything that comes close to downright abysmal, then it’s the voice actors of the lead characters. These guys did the impossible: they made Dutch voice-actors sound awesome. I never knew that depths like these existed.

Overall, I watched this for the sake of nostalgia. There’s no possible reason why you should torture yourself with an hour and a half of this thing. I can’t believe that Toei put Mononoke’s director on such a large piece of crap when there’s so much potential left in the guy. I know that the original series wasn’t exactly good, but it was still pretty successful in terms of its entertainment value and it had some really neat ideas for a shounen series; it was nowhere near the levels of crap that the movie explores. I’d almost say that this is some kind of rickroll, but why would someone go through the trouble for such an unknown series, let alone find its raws?