#and now i’m expected to make a stupid little 60 second reel opening up to a bunch of strangers who probably won’t even come to see me? gross

[sshirakumo]

why do potential clients on IG wanna see shit about their hairstylist’s life and personal growth and journey or whatever now like wtf

[mst3kproject]

Atomic Rulers

 So 2020 fucking blows.  We’ve got Death and Pestilence all over the place, War is waiting in the wings licking her chops, and I’m sure Famine is only a matter of time.  You know what we need?  A hero. Operator, put me through to the Emerald Planet!  After fifty-five years, the Earth must once again call upon Star Man.

(I apologize for the poor quality screencaps in this review.  The WiFi at sea is not great, so I’m watching movies on YouTube in decidedly low definition. I’ll replace them with better ones if I ever get out of here.)

Atomic Rulers, also sometimes known as Atomic Rulers of the World, is actually the first Star Man movie.  Does that mean we get an origin story for our brave hero?  Of course not.  Instead, we learn that the evil nation of… uh… a sign in the movie says Merapolia but the dubbing sounds like Magolia... whatever. Their nuclear testing is starting to contaminate Outer Space and the Emerald Men don’t like that – they send Star Man to Earth to do something about it.

This movie gives us two things none of the other Star Man movies do.  First of all, there’s an actual purpose to that ‘globemeter’ watch thingy he wears. The opening of every movie explains that the globemeter allows Star Man to do three things: travel through outer space, speak and understand any language, and detect sources of radioactivity. The first two functions have proven to be very useful, but neither the Salamander Men nor Ballazar’s Brain were radioactive, so the third just sat there like the stocks app on an iPhone.  Now, with the threat of concealed Magolian nuclear weapons, he finally uses it!

The second is, holy shit, a plot.  The Magolians want to rule the world, and aliens from a dozen different Godzilla movies have assured them that when conquering the Earth, you have to start with Japan.  To that end, their agents are sneaking atomic weapons into the country. Star-Man tries to confiscate these, and in the midst of the lame-ass fight scene that follows, the Magolian Bag-O-Nukes is carried off by a bunch of annoying little kids!  The Magolians kidnap one of the kids and try to force him to tell them where their bomb is.  Star-Man rescues the boy, but it’s too late – they’ve already retrieved the bomb.  There’s just a few hours left before Japan must surrender, or be blown to bits as an example to the rest of the world!

There’s actually even more to the plot than that. It’s full of wild twists and turns, with Star Man and the Magolians taking turns looking like they’re about to win the day.  Yet at the same time, unlike the other Star Man films, the story is not obviously bifurcated!  You can tell where Movie One ends and Movie Two begins (with the rescue of the kidnapped kid), but the same characters are involved throughout rather than changing from reel to reel.  Even the gaggle of nameless kids in short-shorts kind of play a role in the plot, helping Star Man and giving information to the police whenever they can. The plot unspools in a single main storyline from beginning to end, and events usually make enough sense that you can figure out where they fit.

Even more shockingly, Star Man himself actually has some personality in this film, even a bit of a character arc.  In the other movies he just ran around punching aliens and smiling at children, but here we see him as a bit of an arrogant dick, confident in his ability to beat the mere humans who represent the threat to the universe.  When he is nearly beaten instead, he is forced to learn a little humility, and nearly sacrifices his life to save a hostage.

By leaps and bounds, then, this is the best Star Man movie I’ve seen.  There’s a couple more out there, but they’d have to work hard to be better than Atomic Rulers.  At the same time, as praise goes ‘the best Star Man movie’ is almost as faint as ‘the best Coleman Francis movie’.  It still sucks big-time, and Mike and the bots would have had riff material to spare.

I mean, this is a movie where the bad guys have a giant cartoon demon face on the wall of their lair for some reason, and when they’re not disguised in blazers and ties they wear coronavirus suits with the same face on the chest.  There’s a bit where Star Man swordfights with a bunch of them, using fencing foils that were just lying around in the room for some reason.  Other fight scenes are mostly things like Magolians frantically shooting at Star Man while he just stands there looking smug. The ‘atomic core’ MacGuffin is just a plastic tube full of glitter.  The back-projected ‘flying’ effects are dire.  There’s a bomb that has a literal clock on the side ticking down the minutes like in an old cartoon.  There’s a pretty girl strapped into a death trap that I can only describe as the world’s slowest guillotine.

There’s a fairly extended sequence in which we see the Magolians’ car driving down a road, then cut to Star-Man flying, then back to the car, then back to Star Man, then back to the car, and on and on until I could almost hear Crow shouting “he’s following them!  We get it!”

The Magolians themselves confuse me a bit. People refer to their embassy and their ambassadors, and there’s a flag on their car and so forth, so I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to be from a country on Earth… and yet they behave exactly like the villains of a Japanese alien invasion movie.  They have dumb costumes, they call the guy in charge ‘supreme leader’, and most distracting of all, they refer to conquering ‘the Earth’.  Maybe this is just an artifact of the translation, but I would expect humans to talk about ruling ‘the world’ rather than ‘the Earth’.  It left me expecting a big reveal at the end, and when there wasn’t one, I had to go back to the beginning to see if they’d been established as aliens and I’d missed it.

Speaking of possible artifacts of translation, there’s another thing here I’m not sure about.  A lot of Japanese ‘no nukes’ movies have American antagonists, or at least, white guys who are clearly a stand-in for Americans.  My favourite example is the belligerent country of Rolisica in Mothra, which is an absolutely hilarious summary of what 60’s Japan thought the West was like.  Magolia, on the other hand, appears to be a stand-in for the USSR.  The actors playing the Magolians are mostly white, and we only ever hear two of their names: the supreme leader has a nonsense name, but the ambassador is called Boris Zedenko.  I wonder if this is original to the script, or whether it was changed when the movie was dubbed for American release.

The thing I find most interesting about Atomic Rulers is that while Star Man does save the Earth, that’s not really his goal.  The Emerald Men sent him here to prevent a war because Earth’s radioactivity was leaking into outer space, threatening other planets.  Star Man isn’t here to save humanity, he’s here to save the rest of the universe from us; saving us from ourselves is merely a side-effect.

This makes Star-Man a little different from his imitators, Space Chief and Prince of Space.  Despite their space-themed code-names, they are humans from Earth, with a specific interest in protecting this planet.  Star-Man seems to have the broader responsibility of protecting the civilized galaxy in general, and this is reflected in the premises of his movies. In Evil Brain from Outer Space, Ballazar’s Brain is using Earth as a place to launch a general takeover of the universe. Invasion from Space was a little less clear about it, but I’m pretty sure there was something about the Earth being ‘the richest planet in the galaxy’ and the Salamander Men would presumably use that loot for nefarious purposes.

A side implication here is that Star-Man probably has other adventures, too – we’re only seeing the ones that happen to bring him to our particular planet.  Considering how strange Star-Man movies can be anyway, and how trippy the brief shot of the Emerald Planet, with its crystal-headed creatures and robots and even a couple of what appear to be the Pairans from Warning from Space, one has to wonder about these potential non-Earth storylines.  How fucking weird would those be?  I’m imagining something like an entire movie about Krankor’s pet giant.

Another thing that distinguishes Star Man from the other space dinks is that he has actual superpowers.  Space Chief and Prince of Space are basically just normal guys in stupid outfits.  Prince of Space claims that Krankor’s ray guns have no effect on him, but really we see he’s using his wand-thing to deflect them.  Star Man, who is from another planet, can fly and has super-strength. This kind of makes me wonder if he was intended as a Superman imitator… but that would make Space Chief and Prince of Space the equivalent of Batman, and I just can’t insult Batman like that.

I am developing an honest affection for Star Man movies.  Their desperate cheapness is more than made up for by their over-the-top absurdity, and the result is not at all ‘good’ by any reasonable measure and yet is always entertaining.  Camp like that is all too rare to find, and even rarer to find a franchise like Gamera or Star Man that can do it dependably.  I don’t know why the Japanese are apparently so good at this, but I’m glad somebody is.