Dragon Ball Z: Dead Zone (1989)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Purely Joyful Movie!

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is the first Dragon Ball movie and it is probably also the shortest at only 41 minutes. The main antagonist in this film from over 25 years ago is Garlic Jr., the son of another antagonist that got killed by Goku before this film in the series I assume. I am not familiar with the series, so I cannot comment any further in detail about that reference, but I can say that I was fairly underwhelmed by this movie here. Then again I may be a bit biased because anime was never a preferred choice of mine and I actually prefer very old cartoons or animation Pixar style. So yeah, with that in mind "Dead Zone" didn't do too much for me really. It's still not an entirely bad film by any means, but I felt the story was just stretched for way too long given that they already fight the antagonist halfway into the movie and it's pretty generic too. As always, it looks like they have no chance and then in the end they manage to win anyway. Oh yeah, the mission here is to get Goku's son back who was abducted by the vengeful other son I mentioned earlier. To make this somewhat funny they included scenes of where Goku's son is a nuisance to his kidnapper. Still, it wasn't exactly comedy gold I have to say. All in all, I cannot recommend this.

A pretty good prequel to the Dragon Ball Z Series overall. The major downfall of this film is the scripts for the voice actors. Everything they say seems rushed to make sure it fills in with the mouth movements of the characters. The voices are also fairly emotionless, "Just another day on the job" kinda deal.The fighting sequences are what you can expect from Dragon Ball, fast paced and entertaining, but ultimately end anti-climactic and rather quickly. The ending of this fight also doesn't fit very well with the show's timline, the example I can think of off the top of my head being the fact that Gohan's burst of power that pushes Garlic Jr. into the Dead Zone is never mentioned during the Vegeta Saga of the show where none of the shows characters appear to know how strong Gohan really is.The film does have some good points though, the main one being that it is entertaining enough to watch for 40 minutes or so without getting bored.

Some of the Dragon Ball Z movies were great but confusing. The movies are only mentioned once in the series, otherwise, they never happened in the show. This is one that happened. Garlic Jr. The second worse villain in DBZ history next to Android 17. The movie was pretty good but with a different villain and not this stupid Dead Zone thing, it might of been a pretty good retelling of Gohan's first burst of power. Honestly I'm not a big fan of the early films because I don't like the voices and the villains don't reflect with anything from the TV series. One, two, and three all have their own, new but sad villains. Meanwhile the rest have some villain that have something to do with the show like Frieza's brother Cooler.

Hands down, Dead Zone is superior to Tree of Might and World's Strongest. The translation from Japanese to English is not too bad, way better than other anime series on today. Like the other Dragon Ball Z movies, the story is fast paced and exiting. The fight scenes are awesome and, as always, the best above all else. This is a must see, especially if you have already seen The Garlic Jr. Saga on the television series.