Basically,
Kyosuke Shikijo is the fetish version of Peter Parker. Yes, he from Japan. Why
do you ask? Like Spiderman’s alter-ego. Shikijo is a sad sack college student
who moons over his goody two-shoes girlfriend. However, his superpowers flow
from used panties rather than radioactive spiders. With great perversion comes
great responsibility in Yuichi Fukuda’s HK2:
The Abnormal Crisis (trailer
here),
which screens during the 2016 New York Asian Film Festival.
In
HK1, Shikijo barely held off the evil
supervillain Tamao Oogane. There was an explosion and Oogane was presumed dead,
but any manga reader ought to know better than that. Flashing forward a few
years, Shikijo and his girlfriend Aiko Himeno are now in college. There have
not been any costumed villain sightings lately, so Himeno insists Shikijo hang
up his panties (technically, they would be her panties). Of course, this leaves
Japan vulnerable when Oogane’s transplanted head lets loose a campaign of
terror, abetted by a vacuum cleaner-man and a giant man-crab mutant.
Shikijo
will try to make do with the panties of his femme fatale biology professor, but
they are just not the same. Things really look grim when Oogane latest
invention starts vacuuming up all of Japan’s previously worn panties. Can this
be the end of the Masked Pervert? Have faith, true believers.
It
is hard to find another franchise as ludicrously tasteless as the HK series. Think of it as American Pie raised to the power of five
thousand, crossed with the Marvel Universe. At times, the humor approaches the
wildly inappropriate. However, it also holds to the endearing belief that true
love and virtue will triumph in the end. You will be similarly hard-pressed to
meet a hero as earnest as Shikijo. He just has his quirks.
