K12-Fugitive Alien

Film Year:  1987 (compiled from a 1978 TV series)
Genre:  Science Fiction, Adventure
Director:  Kiyosumi Kukazawa, Minoru Kanaya
Starring:  Jou Shishido, Tatsuya Azuma, Miyuki Tanigawa, Choei Takahashi, Tsutomu Yukawa, Hiro Tateyama
MST Season:  KTMA

The Movie

Fugitive Alien is actually a cobbled together movie from episodes of a Japanese television series called Star Wolf.  Interestingly enough, the series is actually based on a trio of American novels from the 1960’s:  The Weapon from Beyond, The Closed Worlds, and World of the Starwolves.  I’m not sure how faithful this series is and would be curious to know just what was taken from these books.

The series was created by Eiji Tsuburaya, the man responsible for the special effects in the original Godzilla films as well as the Ultraman franchise (he was also responsible for the series that was turned into Time of the Apes and Mighty Jack).  As a film, Fugitive Alien is jumbled up and all over the place.  The primary storyline is of Ken, an alien raider called a Star Wolf who refuses to kill a child during an invasion of Earth and is deemed a traitor.  Ken takes refuge on a spaceship commanded by Earthling Captain Joe and his crew, consisting of pilot Rocky and professional love interest Tammy.  The crew begins to suspect Ken’s true nature but slowly learn to trust each other.  And all of this is told in random episodic form.

Considering how incoherent Time of the Apes and Mighty Jack become in this edited for direct to video form, I think Fugitive Alien comes off pretty well.  There is at the very least an arc through the episodes that can be followed and makes a tiny bit of sense.  Whether or not you can make heads or tails of the mythology of Star Wolf is probably the deciding factor on whether or not you enjoy this movie, but to me it’s no more silly than the likes of Battlestar Galactica so I don’t mind it (and I assure you that I like Galactica).

For me the Japanese special effects, while done on time constraints and low budget, always add charm to projects like this.  Fugitive Alien’s do admittedly look fake for the most part, but I really dig the aesthetic style Japanese genre program in offers.  Whether that makes me impartial enough to judge Fugitive Alien is anybody’s guess, but I dig it.

The Episode

Following absences in Invaders from the Deep, Gamera, and Gamera vs. Gaos, we have yet another episode without Trace in this KTMA season of our beloved series.  This episode comes up with a fairly amusing idea for Crow's departure as Servo and Gypsy have dismantled the poor bot in an attempt to install a popcorn maker inside of him.  The curious way this plays out during the episode keeps things fun, as Joel inquires about Crow's absence in the first theater segment causing Servo to evade the question leading up to the conclusion in the following host segment.  Meanwhile Dr. Forrester is also absent, attending a Mad Scientist Convention.

The one note I have about the riffing during this KTMA take on the original Fugitive Alien is that Joel and Josh are very chatty.  They seem to have no qualms in talking over the movie at every instance, even when the movie is trying to give it's own exposition.  Truth be told it becomes chaotic and hard to follow one or the other.  However as I note above I have quite the fondness for this movie, which makes the theater segments enjoyable nevertheless.

While I can't think of any riffs that actually made me laugh out loud, and other than the dismantling of Crow the host segments fail to generate much enthusiasm, I do feel like I need to critique on something of a grading curve when it comes to KTMA episodes.  With Fugitive Alien I was constantly amused, even if I didn't laugh very much.  I enjoyed the movie and the riffing at the very least tries out volume, so you can't say it shortchanged you.  The one issue is that the third season riff of Fugitive Alien makes this effort look shabby by comparison, but I don't feel I should shame it for not being the standard three years later.

Good