MOVIE REVIEW: Armicron in “Outlaw Power”, aka Power King (1995)

I was watching a YouTube video by Canadian movie reviewer Brandon Tenold as he spoke about Tyranno’s Claw, a South Korean movie created in the wake of the success of Jurassic Park in 1993. It was less about a dinosaur theme park and more about caveman drama with dinosaurs added; Quest for Fire it was not. The film’s director Shim Hyung-rae would go on to make another movie Mr. Tenold wanted to review: Armicron in Outlaw Power…but he was still looking for a copy to purchase. I heard that and decided to look for myself to see if I could help.
Would you believe this movie is on the Internet Archive — the same place I found Time Trackers — pulled from the Japanese DVD release? I fired it up and in moments I was taken back to the 1990s for a sci-fi adventure with a tokusatsu twist. I had high hopes of being entertained, as the Japanese special-effects film style has rarely lets me down.

The villain’s robot super-weapon, the Cerberus. This is about how much it actually moves.

First time for everything, I suppose.

If you’ve watched movies from the late 20th Century, you know a Star Wars homage when you see one: narration crawl, star fields, and all that. What started out as predictable became interesting when we moved to a high-school classroom. Men and women far too old to be high school students were showing me how far we had come socially, as the jocks celebrated Gen. Schwartzkopf’s successes during the Gulf War with Dawg Pound hoots (a reference to FOX’s late-night TV program “The Arsenio Hall Show”) for a class presentation project on personal heroes. Here we meet our protagonist Barry Lando (Michael Bunata, Deadly Diversions [1994], Black Sea Raid [2000]), a young man who is constantly called the N-word because of things he likes, how he behaves, and how he talks. With a nasally voice and from behind pushed-up glasses, Barry uses the two sci-fi heroines from his favorite anime-style video game as subjects for his personal hero report: twin princesses Katrina and Li Chin. His positive energy about these two characters comes through in his presentation, and the teacher gives him a good grade…which makes the jocks hate Barry even more.

If you haven’t figured it out, dear reader, Barry Lando is a NERD.

The jocks want to punish him for being a nerd and invite him on a camping trip: Barry wants to belong to the group and be a cool guy, so he accepts and does the driving when the jocks command it. When they’re out there, the jocks shout at him to get firewood while they get drunk on beer. Picking up firewood in the cold was not what Barry wanted to do, but at least he has a great view of stars between the tree branches AND he found a cool necklace to boot. Soon the silent night is disturbed by a fairly competent homage to the Endor forest speeder bike chase from Return of the Jedi. When the chase ends, we meet the surviving participants — Katrina (Jodee Anderson, “The Watcher” [TV-UPN]) and Li Chen (Helen Miya, Detonator [1993], “Swamp Thing” [TV-USA Network])!

Our hero Armicron captured by the paparazzi with his space-babe sidekicks, Li Chen (L) and Katrina (R).

The twin heroines from Barry’s video game are real and have quite the story to tell involving the alien overlord Ankar, the destruction and conquest of Altair IV, and a hero that can save them all: Armicron. Because the necklace fell to Barry, he is “the Chosen One” ™ and transforms into Armicron, a hero that looks like a cross between the Guyver and every Red Ranger from the Power Rangers franchise. While he can fight off enemy soldiers and alien cyborg bounty hunters with his newly-acquired martial arts skills, he still needs help from Katrina and Li Chen to charge up to full power to defeat Ankar. While one would think Ankar was the more serious threat, it’s actually the US military complex — who had already been contacted by Ankar and sold Earth out to do the warlord’s bidding. Though there are some holdouts in the US military ranks with command powers, even their stock footage of bombing jets and anti-aircraft Gatling gun emplacements were not enough to stem the tide of Ankar’s cyborg ground forces and secret gigantic mecha-weapon, the Cerberus. It was a fully-charged Armicron who saved the day AND the planet, and stopped the US military from stealing Ankar’s knowledge chip from his burning corpse. With Katrina and Li Chen remaining on Earth as his sexy sidekicks who attend high school as exchange students, Barry smiles in cool shades at school — because he’s no longer a NERD…he’s the cool guy now.

“Dear Penthouse Forum…”

This movie is pretty bad. How bad? So bad it’s good — this would have been a 50’s drive-in movie 40 years prior and eventually shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000. If anything this movie needs a re-release on Blu-Ray, as the majority of screenshots available online come from camera pictures of CRT screens playing VHS copies. These images are screen-shots from the Internet Archive copy — an example of its image quality. Perhaps this might be better suited for a re-imagining or even a sequel; get some actual animation on that Cerberus mech and it might do very well!

CHOICE CUTS <<SPOILERS AHEAD>>:

• This movie went out of its way to pull a Raymond Burr’s Godzilla (i.e., to edit an Asian-made movie to include European actors and supporting storylines). It’s why different actresses for Li Chen show up in the same scene: one works with the earlier Korean footage, while another that speaks English works with the American actor in the added footage. The idea is pretty racist when you realize the filmmakers thought we would not notice.
• It was the 90’s, so either the music was synths for the baddies or butt-rock for the hero. I don’t make the rules on this.
• We never did find out what happened to the alien bounty hunters, as they were never defeated.
• The costumes were barely above homemade quality, but they worked for the late-80’s TV video production values (NOTE: this movie was made in 1995). I found the twin princesses’ oversized and useless gorgets to be hilarious. The facial appliances and the bootleg Jin-Roh stormtrooper uniforms, however, were of TV program quality at the time.

The make-up made these alien bounty hunters look like a cross between Klingons, Nausicaans, and some other “alien-species-of-the-week” from the Star Trek universe.

• MOVIE REFERENCE: The Cerberus looks a LOT like the ED-209 robot from 1986’s Robocop but with barely any animation. Y’know what — it’s NOT animation, just a guy off-screen moving the model jerkily to simulate movement because the model’s legs don’t move.
• MOVIE REFERENCE: Is that a clip of the end sequence in 1990’s Total Recall I see in the flashback narration?
• There’s so much footage from other movies running throughout, as this movie is simply re-edited from the South Korean original mixed with new American footage. It’s all noticeable since the editing is REALLY bad.
• I am reminded of Emperor Zarkon from the original Voltron anime when I look at Ankar; his makeup’s nearly a match.

ANKAR THE ALIEN WARLORD: He does look like Emperor Zarkon (right) from the Beast King GoLion/Voltron anime, and now I can’t UN-see it.

• Speaking about the twin princesses, I love how we totally gloss over the differences between Katrina (blond, European, spiritually-minded) and Li Chen (brunette, Asian, martially-inclined). They must be fraternal twins.
• SEX SELLS: Almost all the Asian marketing show Armicron in his combat armor as the focal point. Almost all the non-Asian marketing collateral focuses on Katrina and Li Chen as sexy space babes, some omitting Armicron completely.
• The princess’ costumes reminded me of live-action anime girl Apollo Smile. If you know who THAT is, remember to take your medicine.
• Shoutout to Space Emperor Grandpa for holding it together while trapped inside of an oak tree. His dubbing was so bad I thought I was watching SpikeTV’s “Most Extreme Elimination Challenge” (known commonly as “MXC”).

The dubbing on Space Emperor Grandpa was so bad, I almost laughed out loud.

• The part where Armicron and the twin princesses are captured by the US military, only for the soldiers to leave them their armor and weapons was painful to watch. Li Chen shoots their captors in their faces with a memory-eraser beam and the three heroes walked out without meeting ANY resistance.
• MOVIE REFERENCE: Katrina says “jigawatt”, pronounced that way in the Back to the Future franchise and nowhere else.
• Did you know that rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot starred in an anthology series called “The Watcher” on UPN? It was buried so deeply in my memories and I had only watched the show once, because it was very forgettable.
• Actor Michael Bunata has since left acting and moved on to a more important job: Medicare insurance salesperson. This way he can save more lives by getting them the healthcare they need at a cost they can afford!