Kamen Rider Amazons Season 1 Review

Hey I am actually talking about current Toku and in its entirety! Only because this was like thirteen episodes long and I had a blast with it (not the way you are expecting though). I watched this with my friend and fellow reviewer over at Toku Warriors and you can go see his review on the show (http://tokuwarriors.blogspot.com/2016/07/kamen-rider-amazons-season-one-review.html). Now my friend and I had similar responses to the show, some different, and many jokes (mine being better). I will say a quick way to say my opinions on this show is how I describe my reaction for Shadow the Hedgehog, EDGE LORD!

Now I am fine with edgy shows or premises here. Recently I just finished Zero Time Dilemma and that game is full of death, betrayal, misery, and chaos. Amazons clearly has all of those things, but how it presents it is boring and uninteresting. The color scheme of the show needs to not take pages from director Zack Snyder and actually have more color! I hate it when a show or movie just goes with the terrible grey filters. There is nothing wrong with having color in these types of shows. Personally color can actually make things more savage, like the color red which the show mostly uses it only for Amazon Alpha (because his suit is red, got it... moving on). Anyways the use of the grey filter is done horribly because the show can literally forget when to use it. I remember in the final episode that the filter jumped on and off the screen and it is obvious because things looked brighter all of a sudden. Now one can say it was meant to do that, but if the filter leaves for a second and then just pops back on, something tells me that was not supposed to happen. Then there was the funny addition of giving Omega's bike the lion’s roar sound effect. I remember yelling at the bike to shut up because the roaring would not stop. It just kept playing the sound effect every time the bike would show up on screen!

Then for the gore of the show... it is weak. This is a big reason why I call this show an edge lord because it is trying so hard to be edgy. Yet for some reason the gore in this show is low. Most of the blood in the show is Amazon blood and that just looks like black tar or green goo, something that video games had to do to get around certain video game ratings. I guess now these days gore is just gore no matter what the color is. To me the real gore is red blood and the show does have it sometimes, but when it does they get rid of it right away. Like when there was a pool of blood on the floor and when it starts to spread out, it is black... what? It is even worse when the camera focuses on the open wound for a brief moment and you can tell that the actor is simply wearing a black shirt to make it seem like it is an open wound. I know this show is lower budget, but this is where camera work can be used to avoid little flubs like that.

The original Amazon was not afraid of the gore

 

Before getting to the plot of the show then there is like two more things I need to cover with the ascetics of the show. First off, many of the designs are bad to okay and with only one great design in my opinion. I agree with my fellow reviewer and pretty much everyone else that Amazon Alpha has the best suit design of the show. Hell I might say he is one of the better rider designs for the franchise in past five or six years. Now for Omega... he is the reason why most of modern rider designs are horrible. To me he just looks like he is made of plastic and trying a bit too robotic which for Amazon should not happen! The monster designs are just boring overall, I will say though the caterpillar Amazon took my interest because it actually worked with a cocoon design. Then as I said before the other designs are just forgettable at best and sometimes I had to wonder what creatures some were, oh and one had nipples for some reason.

The final ascetic would have to be the action of the show and yea... it sucks. In the whole show there was barely any fight that impressed me. A part of that has to do with the lack of gore for the most part. Still many fights will just end with no big payoff. A big example would be how a fight was escalating and then Omega just hits it with his bike and boom! The direction for it was terrible since Omega was barely even going that fast. I will say the fight that was at least something was where they were surrounded by Ant Amazons and Omega just went all out because he was showing off his arsenal and killing off foes by tearing and splitting others in half like the true Kamen Rider Amazon. Now what slightly ruins that and some other scenes in the overall show is how the bodies move. I swear a Photoshop master would love cropping images from this show since it is funny how the bodies are placed in the action shot. Now there is the execution team which I will bring them up again later on, but their fights go the same way for the most part, just shoot, shoot, oh and have the girl just stab the monster a bit with the knife. I will say I did like how they were implemented with Amazons like Omega and Mole, but still their style is the same and sometimes they barely do anything that is impressive.

Now for the plot of the show, the whole story of the show is simply unoriginal. Include the aspect that it is trying to be edgy you got a cliché show with both concept and execution. The reason why the Amazons are even a thing is because of science! Yup a bunch of scientists let the Amazons cells go out to too many people and now we got an infestation. There is even a scientist who used it on himself which is Alpha and he is out to kill all Amazons because he feels that it is his responsibility. For Omega he is a caged bird, wait a fish stuck in an aquarium (don't want to confuse the two) and just finds his Amazon to finally wake up. If you thinking this sound familiar, then high chance you have played Resident Evil. Things even get worse as there are conflicts for no reason, philosophy is going back and forth between characters, then top it off with (SPOILERS!!!!) scientists trying to achieve the next step of humanity. So this is a blended mess of Resident Evil, Kamen Rider Ryuki, and with a bit of Gaim mixed in. None of this was even a surprise because of how the company was acting towards the situation and it seemed like they were letting things be and that is pretty much what is happening. Even the identity of Omega Amazon is straight up predictable because of how his mother treats him.

Then reminding me of the characters I can say I only like a handful of characters by the end of this season. At first I liked Jin (Amazon Alpha) because he had a sense of humor with this terrible situation and was actually doing things for the most part. Jin never walked around with his philosophy, he knew what he wanted to do and he would die for that. Sadly by the end the show just paints him as the villain even if he is fighting for humanity, but he is crazy so that makes him the bad guy. Meanwhile Omega is just this confused child, at first he wants to kill off the Amazons, but then he finds out they are people too and will only kill the bad Amazons. Even though for most of these Amazons their awakenings are sort of out of their control and some try to find ways around it so they do not cause chaos. Even when one of the main Amazons eat someone, Omega simply goes "It is okay to eat people, it is kill or be killed, but maybe we can find a new way," way to jump around there boy. Then for the execution team, I like them. They are simple characters as most of their back stories are surprisingly a bit subtle. I like how unknown these people are like the captain who does have some family issues, the sniper who is trying to help his mother, a young girl that simply helps at a daycare, a con man with his luck turned around and people taking his money, and then the Mole guy. The Mole Amazon was actually a nice character and I can say looking back he had a tough path of him trying to stay away from being awakened. Mole loved being with the team as he found new friends within that and so did the others by the end of the show.

Overall Kamen Rider Amazons is a show that goes back and forth too many times which cripples the pacing of the show. You know it is bad when the show ends without anything finished, but hey there is second season coming up so let us just end season one with nothing. Add on the fact the show will actually shy around the gore and will have bad effects for most of them anyways. The only thing that can actually brighten up the show are the few amount of the characters since the main character is just confused, many of the scientists are just cliché scientists, Jin just goes crazy, but the execution team is what dragged the show to at least not be a complete failure. Still this is not a good show in my opinion as I give it a D. There are few good things here and maybe for the next season they can focus on those more and then fix some major issues with the effects. Still I had fun laughing at this show for being edgy which kept me watching it so you can say I also got some guilty pleasures with it. The final thing I can say is that at least the theme song is awesome.