There’s a lot to like about Genocyber. It’s edgy, it’s violent, and it has a great atmosphere. But like so many OVAs, the weight is all in the packaging. Any dissection or analysis of this anime reveals there’s really not a lot at its center.

The plot looks deep and engaging at first, but almost immediately you realise it’s a ripoff of a ripoff of a ripoff. Blah blah siblings with a psychic link blah blah huge robot mechas blah blah shadowy government agents blah blah climactic transformation scene blah blah city blows up the end. The characters are mostly just stock, including the usual assortment of evil scientists and masked henchmen and a gang of street thugs lifted right out of Akira.

If you don’t care much about story, Genocyber works. It evokes a nasty and brutal atmosphere, and the thematic confusion could be interpreted as acute psychological depth. It worked for Neon Genesis Evangelion, after all. The animation is punchy and colourful, with a few CGI moments mixed in here and there. On the whole it’s hard not to be impressed by Genocyber‘s aesthetics and style, even if the content side of the anime comes up short. As with Ohata Koichi’s previous work MD Geist, the gore factor is comically high. One scene in the middle gets so outrageous and excessive that it borders on being comedic. The final battle ends with all of Hong Kong destroyed.

Things get hard to follow. Genocyber is confusing, bombastic, and over-the-top. In a way, it’s almost like its own characters, in that it’s cataclysmically fucked in the head and deserves to be in a room with padded walls. This is a definitive example of 90s anime, both the good and bad. The English dubbing sucks ass, by the way.

Ishiro Honda’s 1954 monster movie Godzilla isn’t scary now. Maybe it wasn’t scary then.  It possesses a certain eerie power, though, because of what’s outside the frame: its context. You’re watching two of Japan’s deep cultural fears (the deep ocean, and nuclear weapons) collide on the screen, in the form of a huge mutated creature rising from the sea, destroying city.

Forty years later Roland Emmerich resurrected the franchise and shot it full of steroids.

The good part is that there’s no phoned in “humans are the REAL monsters!” subtext, a’la every other monster movie from the period.

The bad parts can be generally defined as “the rest of the film”. The CGI Godzilla is never even slightly believable. There’s never the sense that it’s a skyscraper-sized colossus that weighs a hundred thousand tons. It dives into the sea and makes a tiny splash. It sneaks around New York as inaudibly as Solid Snake.

The film’s best moments are the ones where the monster is outside the shot, or barely seen. This is an effective touch. It gives the impression that we’re looking at a beast of uncontainable size, a beast too big to film. But that’s also an indictment of how shitty Godzilla looks in this. His every appearance does to our faith in the film what the monster does to buildings.

The movie is badly cast and written. About half the cast is from the Simpsons, and there’s comedic moments (such as the Roger Ebert mayor) that ruin the tension and aren’t even theoretically funny. The characters are extremely stupid – deciding to lure the monster to one of the world’s most densely populated urban metropolises, where mass civilian casualties are almost guaranteed. It’s also one of those movies full of shots of marines firing magazine after magazine at a monster that we’ve long-since established isn’t hurt by gunfire.

I was into kaiju shit when this movie came out. Godzilla caused me to go out of it again.

This was the film covering Arnold’s surprise comeback (and surprise victory) at the 1980 Mr Olympia bodybuilding contest after five years in the abyss. Stories abound about The Oak’s final appearance. He broke the rules by entering, nearly started a fist-fight backstage, and caused the retirement of Mike Mentzer, who was convinced the contest was a fix.

This video covers none of that. In fact, it doesn’t cover anything much. We have some gym footage, some contest footage, and some interviews with Arnold and his compatriots, in no particular arrangement or order.

Let’s get it out of the way that if you’re expecting a riveting clash of titans like in Pumping Iron, this isn’t for you. This isn’t about a story. You should watch Total Rebuild because it’s a slice of Arnold’s life. It seems like a more honest and “real” documentary than Pumping Iron, although maybe that’s because they didn’t have time to edit it properly. Apparently, Total Rebuild was filmed by an Australian promoter, using equipment borrowed from some friends, and as a result it has a gritty indy quality. Unfortunately, the contest footage here is the best we have of the 1980 Mr Olympia (I’ve heard that CBS filmed the entire contest at great expense, and then threw the footage away because like Mentzer, they felt the contest was clearly rigged in Arnold’s favor).

The interviews with celebrities such as Bill Pearl and Tom Platz are fascinating. Tom hero worships Arnold, while Bill gently tries to cut him down to size. Arnold is his usual Alpha Male self. This guy could start a successful cult. He injects some humor into the proceedings, too, such as when he sees a bodybuilder put a 10 pound plate on a barbell without making enough noise. “We’re on camera! You have to make it sound like a thousand pounds!”

The training scenes are lackluster. I’ve heard that Arnold suffered a shoulder injury, which restricted his training poundages. He does some smith squats and cable rows. There’s nothing as awe-inspiring or intense as Pumping Iron’s training sequences here (in the order they appear in my mind: Ed Corney’s squats, Lou Ferrigno’s military presses, Arnold’s dumbbell flys, etc).

So…was the 1980 Mr Olympia rigged? There’s no question, Arnold wasn’t as good as his previous contest appearances. But in my opinion, he still took down the other guys with his trademark Arnold body parts: big arms, big calves, huge chest. His weak points (such as quads) were his weak points in previous contests, too. It might be true that Arnold at 90% power is better than anyone else from his time period at 100% shape, weak legs and weak shoulders be damned.

So, this is very different to Pumping Iron, and mostly the bad sort of different, but it’s still well worth looking for. This is an important part of old-school bodybuilding, just like the guy who stars in it.