The Story
Evil genius Dr. Butler creates a brand new energy thing and uses it to cause havoc by tapping into the world's computers. Planes crash, trains crash, nuclear missiles get fired, and traffic jams get really bad. All of which causes the authorities to call in non-evil genius Dr. Kim and his assistants: ice queen Sheila and hapless loser Keith. Dr. Butler takes exception to their interference so all three are sucked into the computer world where Kim and sheila are put to work on some evil project or another and Keith is forced to play computer games...
To The Death!
Can Keith escape? Can our heroes stop the evil Dr. Butler? Why is there a tiny robot girl with no nose? Why is her sister a sexy pirate chick? What the bloody hell is going on anyway?
I can remember seeing this one on the "Anime" shelf back when the whole Japanimation was starting to get attention in the UK and even then recognised it for what it was: An old anime film repackaged for the kiddie market and subsequently reshelved in the hopes that anime fans might go "Ooh. that looks Japanese. Me buy"
Except it isn't Japanese.
This is a Korean film called Computer Haekjeonham Pokpa Daejakjeon which is a lot of words to say "Blatant Tron Ripoff" There's even a frisbee fight FFS.
Lack of originality isn't the only problem. Even compared to other work from 1983 the animation is nowt special and if I didn't know better I'd be convinced that this was stitched together from a TV series as that's the artwork standard. Then there's the story which drags like hell. A sequence where hapless gamers are dropped into arcade games to see how they like being blasted is stretched out for too long and a car-chase suddenly judders to a halt when Keith becomes playmate to the aforementioned robot girl.
Why anybody thought that was necessary to the plot puzzles me. You couldn't have given the sexy piratess more screen time? She's more fun than Sheila who is about as much fun as televised furniture-polishing.
By the time the climax arrives, I didn't care any more.
The big, bigger, biggest problem, however, is the dubbing because holy crap it is terrible.
Saviour Of The Earth is appallingly bad. Flat, robotic voices, dodgy accents, stilted dialogue...all the hallmarks of disinterested, low-budget voice-dubbers are present and correct. There is literally not a single person who manages to give their performance any kind of sparkle or effort. Were there even professionals involved or did the dubbing director just round up some of his cleaners and stick a mic in their faces?
To sum up: Do not watch this movie. I did and I regret it.
I would post screen shots but I don't want to take up even more of my time on this movie. So let's have a couple of Pirate Captain Ann - who deserved a much better film.
These two are sisters. Don't ask me how.
A shot the animators liked so much they used it twice.
That's all folks.
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