Spoiler Warning if you somehow managed to travel through time from January 1973 and this is all brand new to you.
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Kamen Rider V3 episode #5 "The Snake-Human with a Machine Gun!"
Pretty much says it all in the title, doesn't it? The third actual story of the series uses the "Two Kaijin, Two Episodes" format of the previous adventure (and the one before that, in a sense), but keeps it fresh by shaking things up a bit. Rather than two monsters featuring heavily in the same episode, most of #5 is dominated by the titular machine gun-wielding snake-human, who is named, aptly enough, Machine Gun Snake.
He has his 22-ish minutes of fame, and then, in one of the best surprise twists in the series so far, Hammer-Kurage comes roaring up from under the ground just in time for the cliffhanger. We'll get back to him next episode.
But as for Machine Gun Snake: WOW. Even among the Destron Kaijin, who, even among all the 70's Rider Kaijin, are really, really good, MGS is an absolute standout design. The colors, the little details like the bullet racks on his chest and the snake wrapped around his leg/torso. I mean look at him! He's really, really cool, and what's more, I have no idea where the stunt guy sees out of the costume. I assume the mouth, but you can't tell at all, and there's no visible eye holes or anything. It's quite convincing, and would look at home in a lot of the current series.
And what a sadistic bastard! Even the Destron Leader has to vocally step in at one point and tell him not to kill Mrs. Nishizaki yet, he's having so much fun. He's got some great powers: transforming into snakes (and yes, those are real live snakes they're using), that huge cobra-shaped claw he has which morphs into the tri-barrel machine gun. It's doing the nano-tech change weapons from THE NEXT before nano-tech change weapons were even a concept!
And with the great Tsujimura Mahito doing the vocals, he's got a great slimey voice just seething with contempt. A true classic monster, in a show which has so far has featured four guys who individually are more popular than all the monsters from whole other series combined!
Professor Murayama joins the long line of ill-fated scientists, doctors, researchers and scholars who are targetted by the bad guys for malevolent purposes. Contrary to popular belief, that is not the plot of every episode of the older Kamen Riders, just a good chunk of them.
But they always find some way of mixing it around; I can cite several episodes in the original series that use the basic "Villains kidnap scientist's relatives in order to force him to make them some evil weapon/thing" plot, and all of them are completely different apart from the never-changing constant fact that eventually, Kamen Rider 1 or 2 will show up and kick ass. Well okay, and Taki will face certain death and miraculously survive, but I digress.
In this case, the real crux of the story is Nishizaki, the good professor's assistant who's got a tale of her own. Moriyama is just there to give the bad guys something to go after; he gets iced before this episode is done, and in a most unpleasant manner.
His assistant (whom he no doubt wished had been a couple decades younger) on the other hand, now she's what the story follows. Or rather her son, who is witness to Destron's no-so-subtle kidnap attempt: they just bust into their apartment and take her! Keep an eye out for the photo of her deceased husband (seen below in case you're lazy), that's producer Hirayama Tôru! How cool is that?
Nishizaki's kid and the requisite friendly neighborhood next-door-neighbor/paperboy whom he pals around with give us one of the most important conversations in this episode, when they discuss the existence of not of Kamen Rider (following the confirmation that snake-humans do in fact really exist.) This is a nice bit of universe-building because it restablishes the "urban legend" factor of the Riders.
To a large degree, I think this is something that has remained fairly consistent with every series. Whilst some have the Riders being more well-known in the public eye than others, it's always very understated, and only at certain times (like the end of Kabuto) does it transcend that to a more wide state of knowledge. Or, I'm just rambling again. Moving on...
Let's cover the regulars. Kazami Shirô is still as ticked-off at Destron as ever; check out the scowl he gives that average, everyday snake before it turns into a not-so-average human-sized snake with a machine gun. He gets a great little moment when he helps Tachibana out by lifting up a 100-kg weight, which leads into a requisite "no longer what I used to be" moment. He's also very standoffish around Junko this time, understandably so because he fears for her safety. He has good reason to: this episode marks the beginning of the "interrupt-the-Henshin" trend.
True, it happened on occassion in the original series. Or more often, our heroes simply had everything and the kitchen sink thrown at them before they could jump out of the way and transform. But when you get down to it, it basically took 97 episodes for the villains to figure out that the best way to stop a Rider dead is to keep them from ever transforming in the first place.
With V3 though, it becomes an ongoing habit of our main man Kazami to get cut off mid "Hens-" as the weekly adversary shoots, stabs, chops, etc. at 'em. It reaches almost ridiculous proportions in the immortal episode #30, but I'll save that for when I get to it. In any case, Kazami is briefly stopped from transforming by MGS's trigger-happy antics, and even takes a bullet in the leg before successfully transforming, although the fight doesn't go well for V3 considering he's got a bum leg.
This leads to probably the best scene in the episode. If you've watched the series so far and still aren't convinced that Kazami is 100% bad-to-the-ass, check out the wickedly-lit part where he's fully prepared to take the bullet out of his leg himself, armed with nothing more than a hot knife.
As if that isn't cool enough, Tachibana then shows up and convinces our hero to let him help. Junko arrives not long after, and despite reservations from Kazami, our favorite Oyassan gets her involved in assisting with a little good old-fashioned BSing.
What we learn from this scene is that Tachibana 1) is totally hardcore and 2) is shipping Shirô/Junko almost as much as I am. God, I love this show.
There's a spectacular final battle on a bridge and another V3 Secret Unleashed: the Special Hardened Muscles, which make him bulletproof to even Machine Gun Snake's weapon (which fires high-impact bullets. Or something like that, clearly, since we know regular small arms fire did nothing to Rider 1, and Rider 2 could take a tank shell head on, so our snakey friend had to have something special to even dent V3!)
And then there's that cliffhanger, with V3 cornered by a brand-new monster and paperboy dude in need of desperate medical attention (he took a stray bullet to the shoulder.) What's going to happen now!?
"Toh!"
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Rider Screencaps!
Next Time: This adventure wraps up as V3 faces off against Hammer-Kurage, and I make as many bad puns involving hammers as I possibly can.
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Coolest costume! Weakest kaijin ever! If you've been to youtube though check out the size of that smoke explosion and how he guns down that poor paper boy.
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