Kamen Rider - Bloodsucking Monster, GebaCondor

Another week, another Kamen Rider episode! This is episode 11 of the 1971 series and it's a rather dark episode as well. Hiroshi Fujioka, the actor who portrays Takeshi Hongo/Kamen Rider was injured in a motor cycle accident so this episode is the first to not feature any new footage of the guy at all. And amazingly enough, using only recycled footage of the actor they still made the episode work! I'd dare say it was even a great one.

Yep, she's dead.

This episode starts off on a rather sinister note. The evil terrorist organization Shocker is learning from their past mistakes, as they taken all the elements of past enemies and combined it into one monster cyborg: GebaCondor! Unlike the other monsters, GebaCondor needs to feed on the blood of young women to sustain himself. Yes, shocker went from the blood of puppies/kitten to the blood of pretty girls now. So Shocker sets up a catholic church only lure soon-to-be married couples in and murder them in cold blood as soon as they finish reciting their vows. It's times like this that remind you that despite the cheese factor, Shocker is still a very evil group which makes Kamen Rider's quest to destroy Shocker once and for all a very important task in which watchers would become personally invested in.

Hongo/Kamen Rider barely appear in this episode save for the crucial fights (which was just a stuntman in a suit and not Fujioka) so this episode is mainly carried out by Kamen Rider's mentor, Tachibana and Kazuya Taki, a man out for revenge of his fiance who became hospitalized after a GebaCondor attack. These two characters actually engage in quite a bit of hand to hand combat with shocker minions making them just as important as Kamen Rider in this episode.

For what little of Hongo they had to work with, they made the most out of it for this episode. Most people wouldn't even notice that he was barely even there because the plot of this episode actually stands out on it's own as one of the stronger ones so far! Again, if you wish to check out Kamen Rider then I urge you to head on over to KITsubs. Until next week's episode, I wish you a good day.