obaachan said this: so much gay it may have been made out of rainbows
How on earth do I go about trying to review this mental series. I watched most of it on the train on the way to uni as I was kind of desperate to finish it off when it started getting really exiting. Yes it does, you’ll have to take my word for it, from the outset it doesn’t look like it will be that great but it really pulls together about half way through. This was the series right before den-o.
What a great cast though. That is one of the things that kept surprising me. People would turn up left right and center that I knew from other stuff and it was great to see them in a stupid show like kamen rider. These series’ are getting better and better as time goes on. You can see that by how much better Den-o was than any that have preceded it. But Kabuto was such fun it holds its own place in the grand scheme of all things kamen rider.
This time we are fighting alien shape shifter type beasties called worms. They kill a person then take their form and stomp around all wormy being mean and bad and mean. There are a hundred million riders in this one, well maybe not quite that many but sometimes too many to keep track of. Not a bad thing though because as you expect, at a few points during the series their powers combine and they go all kinds of kamen rider ape sh*t on everything that moves. There is a bit of governmental nasties, goodies who were really badies, badies who turn good, then sorta bad again, and even a bit of weird timeline bizarre bending nonsense thrown in to get you ready for den-o.
Cast:
Satonaka Yui – Hiyori
Sato Yuki – Kagami / Gatack
Mizushima Hiro – Tendo / kabuto
Okumura Natsumi – jyuka
Teshima Yuka – Renge
Yamaguchi Yoshiyuki – tadokoro
Nagata Anna – Misaki
Tokuyama Hidenori – Yagurama / Hopper / the bee
Uchiyama Masato – Kageyama / Hopper / the bee
Kato Kazuki – Kazama / drake
Kanzaki Airu – Gon
Miwa Hitomi – Mamiya Rena
Yamamoto Yusuke – Kamishiro / sasword
Umeno Yasukiyo – jiya
Man this cast list is huge.
Satonaka Yui is just so beautiful. I really like how her Hiyori uses boku instead of watashi, she is so quiet and understated and genderless that it works somehow that the actress playing her is so stunningly flawless. My main overriding memories of this series come from towards the end as usually happens with long series’ like these. So I won’t go into much detail and ruin it all.
There are some great changes that happen to many of the characters throughout and a real growth and progression evolves so it is kind of hard to review. I can barely remember how it all started but I do seem to remember gatack being utterly useless for a good long while before becoming all kinds of crazy cool and mega serious. He stays a total doofus for like half the show. We like him.
Be aware that this series needs an almighty boy love alert, my god, watching this along side ningen bem was like a storm of gayness raining down on my computer. If the friendship between kabuto and gatack wasn’t enough, the fallen bees all gothed up taking refuge in each other was the absolute gayest thing id seen until holyland. Brilliantly funny. Staring off into the sunset arm in arm talking about how they only had each other and nothing else forever. How they did all that with a straight face is beyond me.
But besides all the gay, it has all the standard kamen rider stuff you come to expect. Rubber suity bad guys, fights with bizarre sword / gun / insect like weapons that make no sense in our physics, no real solid explanation about what kamen rider really is or how they originally came to be, or how the general public aren’t that shocked by seeing a kamen rider crew busting down the street to save someone from some sort of alien youma bug issue – I would’ve thought it would cause mass panic but I think the general backdrop to most kamen rider films and series’ is that weird stuff exists in the world and people know that.
They do explain (eventually) how these particular riders were ... maybe not formed, but maybe, inlisted...? but that is about all the info we get. As per the norm, we must suspend all current knowledge which contributes to our understanding of things in order to follow kamen rider in its plight to entertain with high kicks and stupid phrases. *rider shooting!* in an inappropriate American accent. Love it. *one, two, three!* so imaginative right there. My god. Still, mizushima camply *henshin*’s like no other.
Mizushima is gracefully funny – killed me almost every episode. The same with Sato yuki. Their boy love will they wont they friendship was rediculous at best. Tokuyama Hidenori sex voice man was great as ever. And the overall story was worth getting invested in. Not as complex as Den-o but great all the same. There is certainly one thing in kabuto that isn’t in any other kamen rider I have seen so far...
...The unashamed homage to sailor moon. I actually nearly died it was so funny. I’ll just say this; Matsumoto Hiroyuki who played Nephrite even turns up to do a make up battle with drake and they even use the make up! henshin cry – and it was very funny to see both Matsu-Hiro and Kato in glorious make up, and being as camp as usagi-chan herself. Drake does it a few times and it was amusingly stupidly flamboyant for a masked rider fighty dude, but when nephrite turned up I nearly lost it completely.
Between that and the goth boy love issue with the two za bee boiz, the stupidity reigns on high. But the three leading characters are strong enough to carry the show, I just havn’t spoken about them much because all the other stuff was so funny.After watching kamen rider kabuto I ended up watching Tokyo Tokyo
I love how these brilliant actors can have such righteously different characters and gloriously unrecognisable ages where their real identity is so completely lost to the new character I can barely remember who the hell is ever what when and how. Who are you again? Who am i? ...what? I’m forever on drama wiki chasing up a face I can’t place even though I have JUST seen them in a movie or drama, these guys (genderless intention of the use of this word) are amazing.
oh yeah and I have no idea where the kabuto film comes in to the series by the way. I missed it. At some point in the middle somewhere.
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