Zeiram
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Japanese film poster
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| Directed by | Keita Amemiya |
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| Cinematography | Hiroshi Kidokoro |
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Running time
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96 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
Zeiram (ゼイラム Zeiramu?) is a 1991 Japanese film in which an alien bounty hunter named Iria (Yūko Moriyama) comes to Earth to do battle with Zeiram, an immortal alien creature with a strangely shaped head which resembles a wide-brimmed hat. Along with two ordinary Japanese electricians, she and Zeiram become trapped in an artificial dimension called the Zone, and have only a limited amount of time to finish their battle.
Zeiram (Mizuho Yoshida) is an alien of unknown origin. It appears to be a very large, imposing humanoid wearing a wide, circular hat and a ragged cloak, and its appearance is usually accompanied (at least on the film's soundtrack) by an eerie chant. However, its true form is actually the small Noh-like face on its hat. This face is its only weak point; the rest of the body is almost indestructible and regenerates quickly as long as Zeiram is able to feed, which it does by extending the little face on the end of a fleshy tentacle to take bites out of people. By doing this, it also absorbs the genetic material of its victims, which it uses to generate smaller, weaker monsters to do its bidding. These monsters seem to be partial clones of whatever creature's genetic material was used in their creation (in Zeiram 2, a dog is killed by Zeiram and the resulting monster looks vaguely canine). Zeiram itself is able to change its own form to a large degree, and appears in many different forms throughout the series. It can produce many different weapons such as guns and swords from its body, although these are probably weapons taken from its victims and stored inside itself. In addition to consuming organic tissue through its core, if it sustains enough damage, Zeiram is able to ingest a victim's entire body, keeping that person alive for some time inside itself while it digests them, regenerating itself and drawing on their genetic material and even their memories to create more advanced clones.
Although the core face is Zeiram's only weak point, even that may be impossible to permanently destroy. In Zeiram 2, the creature's core, which was presumed dead, is recovered by a shadowy organisation which installs it as the organic core of a robotic supersoldier. This new cyborg Zeiram starts out bearing a mild resemblance to its precursor, before it lost the hat and cloak in favour of an appearance patterned after a classic Japanese fox-spirit, or kitsune. The actual core of Zeiram is visible on the robot's stomach. Naturally, even in an artificial body Zeiram cannot be controlled, and it goes on a killing spree. It is possible that Zeiram itself is partly biomechanical, since even in IRIA it is shown to be able to infect and control computers.
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Wikipedia