Zebraman

Venice (Out of Competition) - Squirrel Girl, look out! Famed for the hyper-violent Ichi the Killer and Audition, this altogether softer offering from director Takashi Miike is granted a Venice showcase, with Paul Martin being on hand to check out the tale of a schoolteacher seeking to earn his stripes and save the world from alien invasion.

Pals with Quentin Tarantino, our ten-gallon hat-wearing jury president, the prolific Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike has three movies screening at Venice over the course of this week. The real biggie is 13 Assassins, which looks like being something akin to a samurai take on The Dirty Dozen (ooh, yes please) and is playing as part of the official selection. However appropriately enough for a director who produces new features as frequently as most normal folks produce gassy bottom emissions, it is not enough for Miike to debut one film at Venice - oh no, he's got to get a second one in also.

That second fresh feature is Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City, showing out of competition after midnight on Thursday. However to ready the stage for that superpowered sequel, this morning the freezing cold oubliette that is the Sala Pasinetti, situated deep within the bowels of the Palazzo del Cinema, played host to that movie's predecessor, first released in 2004 and simply entitled Zebraman.

Set, presciently enough, in 2010, Zebraman plays like a tribute to the live-action Japanese sci-fi/action TV shows of the '60s and '70s, of which Ultraman is probably the most famous example for English-language viewers. And as it happens, a fictitious such tokusatsu (special filming or special effects) programme serves a critical role in Miike's movie, with the character of Zebraman having originally appeared on television for a short run of seven episodes, before being unceremoniously cancelled due to wretched ratings. But while the monochrome masked avenger might be long gone from the small screen, he has not been forgotten by schoolteacher/zebra-head Ichikawa (Shô Aikawa), who in best Dave Lizewski fashion has been working on his own black-and-white striped body armour, in the name of performing some real-life heroics.

Drawing assistance from wheelchair-bound new kid, Asano (Naoki Yasukochi), the educator is soon suited up as his boyhood idol and springing into action, with his initially hapless imitations of the feats he saw performed on TV as a youth developing into apparently genuine superhuman abilities. Which is just as well, as danger abounds in the town where Ichikawa lives with his unfaithful wife, wilful teenage daughter and morose, bullied son. A serial attacker is at work in the locality, scissors his weapons of choice, a crab mask his chosen disguise; this latter bit of costuming mirroring the arch-nemesis from the old Zebraman telly show. If that wasn't enough to be fretting about, a far more heinous threat lurks beneath the stage in the main assembly hall of the school where Ichikawa is employed, in the shape of an army of diminutive blobby green aliens – an invading force also linked to the television programme of yore.

That element of the tokusatsu serial is one of the best things about Miike's movie, permitting the director to serve up some excellent, well-observed homage scenes that regurgitate the tropes of those productions. It also facilitates one of the most imaginative, if improbable, story strands in Kankurô Kudô's screenplay, when it emerges that Zebraman heralded the looming extraterrestrial menace – only for this warning to go unnoticed when the show sank without a trace.

As much as Zebraman is primarily a colourful action film, there is still opportunity for Miike to insert some humour in a spoofing vein akin to that plumbed by Anchorman. One scene finds Zebraman arriving at a crime scene, seemingly ready for action, only to spend far too long melodramatically glancing from side to side at the expectant faces around him, before finally entering the fray. Another sequence sees a group of government scientists, all hermetically sealed within their safety suits, making careful inspection of a blob of the alien goo, this sample floating in some kind of chemical bath. Suddenly a colleague strides in, naked aside from the towel wrapped round his waist. Bidding everyone a cheery hello, he proceeds to drop his towel and, ignoring the experiment in progress, use the contents of the bath to wash his dangly bits.

The emerald brain-shaped foes of Zebraman resemble miniature versions of the Leader, the brainiac opponent of the Hulk, and a character Tim Blake Nelson would surely have portrayed in a third Hulk movie had the Ed Norton-starring instalment made a bigger splash at the box office. And speaking of those two Hulk flicks, conjuring up as they do the unholy spectre of over-reliance on unconvincing CGI, it is hard to escape the feeling that Zebraman is compromised by the too-frequent deployment of digital imagery, particularly in the weaker, sluggishly-paced second half of the film.

While the realisation of Akira Emoto's Crabman is a retro joy, a love letter to the shows which inspired this movie, the finale just degenerates into a disheartening, oversized CG shoot-em-up. Betraying the parsimonious budget of Zebraman compared to Hollywood productions of similar type, you are left wishing that Miike had had the courage to fully embrace the ramshackle, indie look for his special effects. But with the theory being that superhero sequels are superior to first episodes (X2, Spider-Man 2, The Dark Knight, Superman II), perhaps Zebraman 2 can yet save the day.

Rating on a scale of 5 crossed zebras: 2.5

Release date: US = available on DVD; UK = TBC
Directed by: Takashi Miike
Screenplay by: Kankurô Kudô
Cast: Shô Aikawa, Kyoka Suzuki, Naoki Yasukochi, Koen Kondo
Cert: US = N/A; UK = TBC
Running Time: 114 minutes

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