How weird was it when The Guyver just randomly showed up in my local video store, unannounced, bringing Japan weirdness into my 19-year-old movie rental obsession life?

When Dr. Tetsu Segawa steals the Guyver unit from the villainous company he’s been working for, his daughter’s boyfriend Sean accidentally finds it, puts it in his backpack and has it fuse with his body after he’s attacked by a street gang. That makes him a marked man by Fulton Balcus (David Gale) and his gang of Zoanoid mutants, which includes Lisker (Michael Berryman), M.C. Striker (Jimmie Walker) and Weber (Spice Williams-Crosby).

Directed by Screaming Mad George and Steve Wang, this movie has some of the wildest effects I’ve ever seen, full body suits that still look great thirty years after I first watched this. I’m also still surprised that Mark Hamill is in this, while not as surprised that Jeffrey Combs and Linnea Quigley are in this.

Based loosely on the Yoshiki Takaya manga, this takes a lot of liberties with its inspiration, but for someone in the very landlocked small Western Pennsylvania town that I grew up in, finding this on the shelves of Prime Time Video was like some kind of magic, bringing something I thought I would never see to a place that I thought I would never get out of.

Mayumi Takahashi attends Sparta Academy, a boarding school run by maniacs led by the masked Toenail of Satan who are looking for ways to torture or humiliate the students. The students’ only protection is from the nude superheroine, Kekko Kamen, who wears no clothes and uses her, well, lady parts to stun men into submission. Well, she does wear some clothes — red boots, gloves, scarf and a mask with long bunny-like ears — and her finishing move that she uses to defeat villains is  Her a flying headscissors takedown which presses her groin into the victim’s face called the Oppiroge Jump.

Look, it was 54 minutes of my time and allows to talk to you about just how strange Shōnen Jump is, a Japanse manga comic that has introduced everything from My Hero Academia, One Piece, Naruto and Dragon Ball to Kinnkuman, Fist of the North Star and, well, Kekko Kamen, which was introduced in the monthly version of the magazine. It was created by Go Nagai, who created Mazinger Z, Devilman, Violence Jack and Cutie Honey. The influence of these comics, created in Japan, made their way all over the world.

So yes, the same man who created a Shogun Warrior also invented a totally nude superheroine who uses her body to stop men from mistreating women by subverting their male gaze while also being part of manga, anime and movies that completely reward the male gaze, yet has a heroine that uses the forbidden in Japan power of the female pubic hair and its mystery to end evil.

Forever stay weird Japan.

Elise (Linda Carol, Reform School Girls) might look like a gorgeous woman to any other man — and many women — but not to her husband, so is it any wonder that she falls for Renny (Martin Hewitt), a photographer who encourages her to live her fantasies while also having some fantasy sex of his own with Julie Strain in a sushi bar? If he’s really a murderer, are we surprised?

This was Gregory Dark’s first erotic thriller — he’d make New Wave Hookers 2 the same year, so he was still working in the adult world — and it’s still amazing to me that of all the directors in X, he was the one that crossed over into the mainstream. There was no one in any type of film making the surreal insanity that he was at the time, movies where the sex wasn’t even remotely arousing and it was all about pushing boundaries and capturing something shocking.

In other words, you know, art.

Bonus points for not only getting Danny Trejo in this, but Doug Jones out of any form of makeup.

The Last Frankenstein is a Japanese take on the Frankenstein legend, with Professor Sarusawa trying to make a super Adam and Eve who cannot be controlled by their emotions. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has a disease that causes them to commit suicide. Or maybe it’s just a death cult not unlike Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult and terrorist organization that unleashed sarin gas on the Tokyo subway a few years after this movie was made.

The key to all of this is the one-eyed Dr. Aryo, who has two bodies that he wants to bring to life.

Directed and written by Takeshi Kawamura, who originally had this as a stage play and continues to work in that milieu, this movie also has a psychic daughter, a family of abnormal humans, a hunchback who drives around collecting nude women, a beach vacation and, well, look — it’s absolutely as strange as it gets.

I love Japan because Frankenstein’s Monster can be a Toho monster like Frankenstein vs. Baragon and War of the Gargantuas. Or it can be an art movie like this one, one that straddles the line between Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein and the gore-drenched excesses of modern Japanese gore films.

Also: the one-eyed scientist can only relate to the aborted pickled punks he keeps in his lab, hugging them when he gets sad.

James Glickenhaus — Suicide Cult, The Exterminator, The Soldier, The Protector — brings us this story of Bobby McBain, a soldier who brings together his old buddies to battle a Colombia dictator.

Christopher Walken plays McBain, which has nothing to do with The Simpsons except that this movie and that show got into legal wrangling which led to the cartoon to calling McBain his real name, Rainier Wolfcastle.

Besides a role for a young Luis Guzmán and an appearance by MTV VJ Karen “Duff” Duffy in a crack den, this movie also has Michael Ironsides, Steve James from The Delta Force and María Conchita Alonso.

It’s kind of mindblowing to see a star the level of Walken in a movie with Ironsides and James. It kind of also makes me deliriously happy.

Directed by Christian Duguay and written by B.J. Nelson — the same team that did Scanners 2, as well as some of the same actors — this film is not related at all to that movie.

It’s also way better than that movie.

Helena Monet (Liliana Komorowska, Screamers) is a scanner who constantly deals with the horrifying side effects of those powers until her adoptive father’s experimental Eph-3 drug drowns out the voices, but also causes her to lose all of her morals. She kills that father figure, takes over his drug company and also starts to take over all of the world’s entertainment.

Meanwhile, her adopted brother and fellow scanner Alex has been raised in a monastery where he’d have no outside voices bothering him, but now he must come back to a world he doesn’t know to stop his sister.

So yeah — amazingly, the third Scanners film is not all that bad. Even more incredibly, Scanner Cop blows this away.

You can watch this on Tubi. You can also get this movie and Scanners 2 from Shout! Factory.

Media Home Entertainment knew what was up. We wanted more Scanners and we didn’t care where we got it. Christian Duguay, who would direct the third film in this series and Screamers, took over for David Cronenberg and suddenly, we had a whole new story to watch.

David Hewlett plays David Kellum, a veterinary student that gains the power to hear thoughts. Soon, this becomes overwhelming. Yet when he stops a robbery by exploding the head of a criminal, police chief John Forrester offers him a job tracking down criminals, like a man who is putting strychnine in milk containers, making this movie in the poisoned milk genre along with The Cat O’Nine Tails, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, Impulse, The Woods, Confessions, Edge of Darkness and Revenge of the Living Dead Girls.

Of course, Forrester just wants to take over the city and is using another Scanner named Drak to murder the mayor and to kill our hero’s parents. Well, adoptive parents, as his real mom and dad are Cameron Vale and Kim Obrist from the first movie. He has a sister who leads him to a secret place filled with captive Scanners and a final battle with Drak.

This movie is so Canadian that Aldo Nova plays over the final credits.

You can watch this on Tubi.

One of the intriguing things about Joe D’Amato is how often the women in his movies turn the tables on the men, whether through supernatural, emotional or sexual (or some combination of them all) ways. Emanuelle and Francoise is a great example, as even though things don’t necessarily work out all that well for the lead, she does get her revenge — twice — on George Eastman’s character and ultimately is the winner of their battle of wills.

Filmed in New Orleans, Dangerous Obsession is the story of Tony, who has lost $10,000 in a poker game and has just 24 hours to pay back his debt. To do so, he agrees to steal a sports car and kidnap Liza (Carmen Di Pietro, War Baby), a television host. Of course things work out as they do in a D’Amato movie and they’re attracted to one another, so they end up baking the potato, as they say, but this also works out like a D’Amato movie as she drugs Tony, handcuffs him to ger bed and makes him her sex toy effectively turning the tables on the expectations of the viewer.

Even when Tony is released, he’s still in love with her. Her mental state is obviously deranged, but Tony knows — that’s pretty much the kind of drugs you can’t get anywhere else.

The really strange thing about 90s D’Amato is you never know if you’re going to get a movie where he just knocks out a paycheck or one that has interesting camera angles and feels like an effort. This would happily fit into the latter and is on the level of the first Eleven Days, Eleven Nights movies.