Written, Produced, and Directed by Shigeru Izumiya
Music by Kiyoshiro Imawano
Cinematography by Kazuo Komizu
Special Make Up Effects by Yuichi Matsui
Starring
Shigeru Izumiya as Harima (thief)
Takichi Inukai as Kiyoshi (bounty hunter)
Rikako Murakami as Noris (bounty hunter)
Mari Natsuki as Guernica (android/replicant)
Tomoko Ohtsu as Guernica 2 (android/replicant)
Kiyoshiro Imawano as Dr. Loo (mad scientist)
Tamio Kageyama as Mr. Hacker (Scar People boss)
. . .
DR. LOO MADE ME
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
From the depths of Japan's Bubble Economy comes a future mish-mash of Blade Runner, the gooey monster transformations of John Carpenter's The Thing, science fiction narco-gangsterism, and a dash of TV tokusatsu gadget warriors vs monster of the week style action. All of this is presented in terms of lo-fi Video Toaster visuals of bombed-out warehouses intercut with music videos and a still picture slideshow.
The plot concerns a pair of bounty hunters who are tasked by a gang known as the Scar People to track down a stolen female android called Guernica. Guernica is an artificial person designed as a new style of robot to serve the whims of humanity. The word Replicant is used, thereby implying that Guernica is a vatgrown slave much like the doomed artificial beings in Blade Runner, complete with false memories and a four year lifespan. The one key difference between the Replicants of Blade Runner and Death Powder is that as Guernica approaches death her body produces a strange powder that causes people to uncontrollably mutate. The titular powder carries Guernica's memories along with it, thereby facilitating a strange new reproductive cycle based around bodily transformation and being-to-being memory transfer. This is all presented in gooey body horror terms, but we also see the corruption and avarice of a cyberpunky status quo in which everyone is either a heavily armed mercenary free agent or a blindly loyal gangster with a procedurally scarred face to signal one's fealty to a big boss. The Death Powder, in this scheme, becomes a kind of arms race commodity that armed factions battle to monopolize.
Death Powder is comical in the sense that the conflict seems to be about who gets to become an oozing, avaricious monster first and fastest. It's a sort of inversion of the values of tokusatsu action shows like Kamen Rider in which a transforming cyborg superhero lethally polices more grotesque mutating monster villains. In Death Powder everyone is either a villain or a pawn of a villain operating within a cutthroat brakes off capitalist economy.
The best scene comes near the very end, when a trash out crew shows up to clear a condemned building of debris and squatters only to find themselves disappeared by a video meats door. The implication is that the Death Powder is beginning to mutate not just people but the very material basis-private property-of capitalism into a wild, untameable monster. Now, your stuff doesn't just own your ass-you're its food! You'll just have to see it for yourself.
Mostly, though, Death Powder is about the atmosphere, the style, the ratty nth generation VHS dub vibes. Good luck finding a version with both legible subtitles and all of the scenes intact. Even so, Death Powder is that rare work that increases in creativity even as it has been damaged by neglect and lack of digital remastering. It's a dystopian science fiction horror flick dealing with themes of capitalist aggression, mutation, and contingency that has been mutilated and mutated into a bizarre cult object by time and tide. I usually don't go for throwback videotape aesthetics but Death Powder is just too perfect in how it merges form and substance.
