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#173- Armicron in Outlaw Power (aka Power King) (Hyung-rae Shim, Coleman DeKay; 1996)

by Tim May

Let’s begin our look at the American/Korean hybrid Armicron in Outlaw Power with a close reading of its opening crawl.

“It is a dark time for the galaxy.”

Only the first of many Star Wars “homages.”

“Ankar, sinister overlord of the Morgoth Ulaan Star System continues to cut his murderous swath through the heavens, laying waste to one planet after another.

His next stop—Earth.”

Here is where the makers of so many low-rent sci-fi films make their first mistake—the characters’ names. Ankar is bad enough, but he comes from Morgoth Ulaan? There are more pronounceable names with more apostrophes in most Star Wars novels.

“As Ankar prepares his assault, he is confident that his devastation will be swift and total. His one true nemesis, an ancient celestial warrior named Armicron, was savagely destroyed in the Battle of Altair IV. Unless Armicron can be regenerated, the fate of the unsuspecting planet will be all but sealed.

Earth needs a hero.”

The film’s protagonist is (of course) a dork named Barry Lando (again with the Star Wars?) who begins the movie by giving an embarrassing presentation to his class about his heroes, two fictional princesses from some video game.

A bunch of asshole students who seem to pick on Barry a lot invite him to go camping so they can use his car. Barry agrees because he’s an idiot and he is unsurprisingly sent to gather firewood as soon as they arrive at the camp site.

While looking for wood, Barry sees a UFO, which turns out to be a speeder bike ridden by two helmeted individuals who are being chased by some Cobra Commander looking bad guy. This, along with a later forest based action setpiece (as seen below), makes me think the people behind Armicron really wanted their movie to be a vaguely sleazy teen version of Return of the Jedi. The minions are even called stormtroopers!

After the mysterious bikers lose their pursuer, they take off their helmets and reveal themselves to be the princess’s from Barry’s video game. At first he thinks it’s a prank from his new “buddies,” but after they explain everything that was in the opening crawl to him, he believes them. They also explain that their deity-like grandfather had been kidnapped by Ankar and they had sent some canister of ooze to Earth to build an army or something.

Once they’ve explained Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze to Barry, the princesses see that he has an amulet which, when combined with an amulet of their own, will allow him to become the reincarnated Armicron, the hero of legend who is destined to defeat Ankar. So, they combine the amulets, and Barry transforms into Armicron, an odd looking lab experiment between Ultraman and Kamen Rider.

With Barry’s transformation into Armicron, Armicron, the film, abandons even the remote sense of narrative cohesion it had up until that point, and devolves into a series of dull, poorly staged action sequences. Along with the Armicron powers, Barry has apparently also gained bravery, intelligence, and full confidence with his female cohorts.

The Armicron powers helped him so much, in fact, that when he returns to school at the end of the film, Barry is now a “cool guy,” complete with sunglasses and an inexplicable chemistry with beautiful women, as illustrated by the film’s brilliant final shot.

Armicron is made up of stock footage from a 1995 Korean film called Power King and original American footage shot in 1996. Unlike Power Rangers, Armicron director Coleman DeKay chose, in many cases, to shoot around the action sequences he was appropriating for his film by shooting one half of the action and cutting between his footage of Armicron and the Korean footage of one of the villains. There are many scenes in which the two people involved in a fight or a chase never appear in the same shot!

The tape was put out in 2000 by a late period distributer called Raven Releasing, who also released forgotten crap like New Genesis: Twilight of the Dogs. Extraordinarily terrible cover design aside, the Armicron tape also claims that the film’s star, Michael Bunata, had been in Power Rangers. As something of a Power Rangers scholar, I was surprised I didn’t know who Michael Bunata was. But then I remembered! He replaced Billy as the blue ranger during the big cast change up during the show’s third season.

Films like Armicron are typically right up my ass, but I found it more entertaining when it was trying to be a teen comedy than any of its far from impressive tokusatsu antics. I expected more from the one and only Michael Bunata.

#Armicron in Outlaw Power #Power King #tokusatsu #Hyung-rae Shim #Coleman DeKay #1996 #90s #VHS #Raven Releasing #VHShitfest #Tim May #review