Movies For Metalheads: Big Man Japan, The Inglorious Bastards, Torso, Combat Shock

You know how in the 'Spiderman' movies when the web-slinging and fist-flinging abates for a few minutes, and Tobey Maguire removes his mask and reveals how anguished and vulnerable he is? Well, that condition of frustration, loneliness and angst provides much of the substance for the superhero satire 'Big Man Japan' (Magnolia), one of the strangest and funniest Asian flicks we've seen since Takashi Miike's musical 'The Happiness of the Katakuris.'

In 'Big Man Japan,' a videographer is making a film about the titular character, a giant superhero who battles huge monsters in the streets of Japan. The fights are filmed and broadcast on a reality show delegated to a late night timeslot because of poor ratings. In order to promote the show, Big Man Japan must wear humiliating billboards from the program's sponsors. Unlike, say, Godzilla, BMJ is not exactly a national treasure. He's not paid terribly well (unlike his agent), he's mocked by nearly everyone. and he's an embarrassment to his own wife and daughter.

Not only is Big Man Japan relatively unpopular, most of the time he's not so big and lives in a modest apartment filled with stray cats. In order to become supersized, he has to hook his nipples up to a generator, which blasts huge amounts of electricity through his body. Then, when he's done fighting, he hides away in the back of a room until he shrinks back to normal size. During the mockumentary, BJM (played brilliantly by Hitoshi Matsumoto) explains how he comes from a long line of superheroes and discusses his painful childhood, which included an episode in which his overbearing father tried to electrocute the boy to make him big, but only succeeded in making his nipples disproportionately large. His dad later died from overjuicing himself, and the boy was raised by his once-famous grandfather, who's now senile.

While the dialogue in 'Big Man Japan' is consistently satirical, the funniest parts of the movie are the fight scenes. The monsters are large, but few are particularly dangerous and their greatest love is to destroy buildings. One has a giant cord attached to his arms, which he wraps around skyscrapers to uproot them. Another is just a giant eye attached to a hopping bird leg. The weirdest is a creature who throws his detachable eye at anything he wants to attack and immediately falls asleep when it's dark. When BMJ finally encounters a beast that's actually menacing, he flees like child and is nearly laughed out of Tokyo. He's even shown up by his granddad, who occasionally enlarges himself to relive his past glories.

'Big Man Japan' isn't just a mindless action/comedy. There's an undercurrent of empathy throughout the movie, and genuine messages about exploitation, greed, consumerism and depression. But while we certainly feel for the main character through all his misfortunes and missteps, we have to admit our sentimentality is overpowered by our laughter.

'The Inglorious Basterds' (Severin) – Aside from the bastardized title, the next-big screen presentation from Quentin Tarantino, 'Inglourious Basterds,' has little in common with this 1978 Enzo G. Castellari cult film. We can't say whether that bodes well for Tarantino, but we can wholeheartedly endorse Castellari's spaghetti-war flick, a furious, fast-paced twist on Robert Aldrich's 'Dirty Dozen.' In 'The Inglorious Bastards,' a group of U.S. war criminals are on their way to detention camp when they are attacked by a German plane. Five of the convicts escape both the military brass and the Germans, and decide the only choice they've got is to flee across the border to Switzerland. However, their plans are thwarted when they accidentally shoot and kill a group of U.S. Special Forces disguised as Nazis. Before they realize their error, they are mistaken for the military marvels they killed, and to avoid being court-martialed – or worse – they take on the foolhardy mission of the highly trained soldiers, which involves breaking onto a heavily guarded German train and stealing a piece of high-tech equipment. The leaders of the furious five are Bo Swenson and blaxploitation star Fred 'The Hammer' Williamson, and while their performances are far from Oscar-worthy, they're solid enough to keep the plot moving through the dozens of bad-ass fight sequences.

'Torso' (Blue Underground) – You gotta hand it to the Italian movie industry. In the early '70s, while U.S. screenwriters were still trying to figure out how to outwit Hitchcock, directors like Sergio Martino already knew that liberal doses of T 'n' A and a handful of co-ed killings were all it took to keep an audience entertained for 90 minutes. And this was a good seven years before the release of 'Friday the 13th.' In Martino's 'Torso,' a group of smokin' hot American students in Rome fall prey to a masked killer with a tortured past, who throttles them with silk scarf before slicing 'em up. The flick features abundant nudity, includes a lesbian scene, and while the killings aren't explicit due to the lack of technology of the era, they're effective enough. And the simplistic plot – which features some red herrings but doesn't baffle viewers with implausible scenarios the way some giallos do – allows the frequently topless actresses to bounce seamlessly from one scene to the next.

'Combat Shock' (Troma) – Director Buddy Giovinazzo based this 1986 film on the Suicide song 'Frankie Teardrop,' about a desperate 20-year-old who works in a factory but can't make enough money to feed his wife and child. Only, in 'Combat Shock,' Frank is an unemployed Vietnam veteran scarred by horrific experiences he can no longer remember. During the day, he roams the street and crosses paths with junkie friends, underage prostitutes and thugs he owes money to. At night he comes back to his nagging wife and their deformed, crying baby, who's clearly modeled after the haunting infant in David Lynch's 'Eraserhead.' Like that film, 'Combat Shock' is nightmarish and brutal. But while 'Eraserhead' is surreal and sometimes whimsical, 'Combat Shock' is mostly a grim, grueling portrayal of urban decay and suicidal despair. The special effects are gory and shockingly realistic; only the sub-par acting prevents the movie from being too unsettling to watch.