AD Police: DVD Review

Title: AD Police Files
Writer: Toshimichi Suzuki
Director(s): Takemasa Ikegami, Hidehito Ueda, Akira Nishimori
Year: 1990

I should like AD Police, but I don’t.  Not that I dislike it, it’s just… not quite right.  Looking, sounding, smelling, feeling right at home amongst other sci-fi anime of my youth, very dark, bleak and gratuitously sexual.

The DVD is a collection of 3 OVAs which, from what I gather, prequels to A.D. Police: Dead End City and Bubblegum Crisis.

The series takes place in Mega Tokyo, which is the same setting as Bubblegum Crisis.  I am not familiar with Bubblegum Crisis, but I gather that it has a narrative focusing on a group of all-female vigilantes, while AD Police is a series of one-off stories connected loosely by the fact they involve the AD Police.  The AD Police are the elite-force that deal with runaway Voomers (also called Boomers), which are essentially female robots which have gone mad for whatever reason.  This manifests itself in grade A crazy shit, generally killing people, causing mayhem, and being sexually provocative.  Mega Tokyo seems to be the classic sci-fi dystopian cyber-metropolis, filled with cyborgs, psychos, bastards and bitches.  The city is absolutely teeming with them, and so is the series.

Therein lies the problem.  There are no likable characters.  There is nothing to grab onto.  The very layout of the series is disconnected, and this just adds to the chaotic, frenetic pace of the stories.  The AD Police themselves are made up of dick-swinging yahoos (male and female), and even the new recruit who is introduced in the first episode quickly falls into step and starts swinging away.  Every woman in the series, excluding one wide-eyed and naïve officer in episode 2, is a bombshell and violent.

The first episode shows an AD Police group trying to take down a rogue voomer.  One officer fires a couple of shots at her, which clearly has no effect.  He declares:

“Bullets won’t stop her!”

And receives the reply:

“We’ll see, take this, bitch!” and then the officer, a beefcake, tries to strangle the robot.  By the end of the scene he is dead.  They are an elite force, you see.  Also, it has nothing to do with the point I was making, but the owner of this first voomer is a very racist representation of Chinese guy, which isn’t allowed.  Sorry, ishant arrawwed.

The first thing you see of the AD Police is their tank roaring down a packed street gratuitously wiping out civilian cars.  This wasn’t played for laughs, nor was it meant as a satire of police brutality, I’m fairly certain you’re meant to empathise and root for the AD Police.  It is quite difficult when their banter includes such witticisms as:

“You okay rookie, you’re not gonna shit yourself?” which could work in the mouth of a particularly gung-ho character, but in the mouth of a dick-swinging yahoo it is just a dick-swingingly yahooish thing to say.

While English-voice acting of anime and games has improved in recent years, the low-budgets of past dubbing has given rise to some poor work, and I would put AD Police into that bracket.  It isn’t so spectacularly bad to make it enjoyable, it is just misjudged.  For instance, by the end of the episode, the rogue voomer is begging for death, which she does by whining “kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiill meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” in a feeble guff of breath.

The episode also dabbles in grim koolwank, where Gina, the female officer we are meant to care about gets angry and literally rips one of the voomer’s tits off.  Literally, with her hand.  Just reaches on up there and rips it off.  As a wise man once said, sometimes the women are worse than the men.

The second episode opens with a 16 year old female prostitute being killed by a knife-wielding visor-wearing bitch.  This series is dark and grim, by the way, just in case you hadn’t caught on.

It follows a plot which examines what drove the knife-killer to do knife-killings, which is, spoiler, because she’s been slowly trading her guts for robotic guts, and now she doesn’t feel like a woman anymore.  So kill prostitutes, obviously.  It is an interesting premise, but the shortness of the episode means it is rushed, and cheapened.

A police (regular not AD) officer is introduced in this episode, a young, naïve female police officer with a short bob and severe fringe, a cute, bright, cheerful idealist.  I’m not saying the police force isn’t a safe haven for innocent, naïve idealists, I’m not well versed in law-enforcement.  I’m just saying it seems a misfit, especially in Mega Tokyo, where half the city is destroyed on a daily basis by reckless police and psychotic robots.

The naïve police officer trails the crazy knife lady down an underground corridor, splashing through sewage ankle deep, the wide eyed young police woman declares:

"I wonder where I'm going, where will this tunnel lead me?"

and then she gets grabbed and a knife put to her throat.  The last person who said “I wonder where I’m going” was no one, it didn’t happen.  Lies.

When the knife-killer runs away, the policewoman faints.  Because she is a girl.  Her presence in the series is misjudged.

By the end of the episode, the knife killer is begging for death.  See the pattern?

The third episode focuses on an ex-boxer turned AD Police turned dead, who is then turned into an experimental police cyborg with the sole purpose of killing the life out of crazy voomers.  What could possibly go wrong?

At one point in this episode, an officer shows his surprise by declaring “Fuck me!”, which, while unrelated to my review, I enjoyed and thought should be mentioned.

The cyborg experiment goes well initially, Billy, the cyborg’s name, is really good at killings voomers.  The problem is that he can no longer really experience anything.  His nerve endings have been dulled, his skin removed to make way for his exoskeleton.  He is left only with his tongue, which he bites in order to feel anything.  This leads to very striking imagery of a psychotic tongue-lolling cyborg ripping up voomers.  Powerful imagery, points scored.

Unfortunately they lose points by making the professor who developed Billy a Sexy-Ass Professor, which I believe is an important breakthrough area of science that was being developed in the 90s.

Billy becomes stricken with ennui, because he can’t feel, and starts getting drugged up by shooting drugs into his tongue.  The professor tries to engage with him using other methods.  To quote from my notes:

‘The gratuitously sexy-ass professor who made him tries to engage his senses by dressing in kinky lingerie and grinding all over his robot body, pressing her tits into his robot face.’

It ultimately doesn’t work, but I’m imagining that the scene gave a lot of teenagers some very confusing imagery to deal with.  She was wearing kinky stockings and the rest of it underneath her lab coat, which I believe was very prescient, and is now standard uniform in all labs.

Billy eventually loses his shit spectacularly, crushing the professor’s head as she is grinding up on him, which is very bad form indeed.  Gina, the AD Police officer who’s been recycled from episode 1, and apparently knew Billy when he was human, comes to investigate why he is acting so strange now he’s a robot.  Again, from my notes:

‘Gina rushes in to find the sexy professor sitting in Billy's cyborg chair, head crushed and mouth-open The Ring-style, and declares:

"it had to end like this”.’  Which, of course, it didn’t.

She hunts Billy down, and even though he has murdered everyone in sight, she manages to kill him, even though he is a man-shaped tank.  She succeeds because, here’s the pattern, he also wants to die, realising that being a tin-man is no way to live.  He declares:

“Yes Gina, kill me, shoot me in the brain”.

Which is an unintentionally hilarious thing to say.  Because of that third episode we are now all aware of the danger of building an indestructible drug-fueled killing machine.

Unfortunately, I started this review with the conclusion, which is quite bad form, so I will re-iterate as though that was my plan all along.  It is so hard to empathise with any of the characters, they are so heartless and unforgiving, as is the location and the scenarios, it is very difficult to engage with.

The first episode ends with a monologue from the rookie, who describes Mega Tokyo as a “savage, soulless city”, and when that is the case you end up with a largely savage, soulless story.

Kagemusha: Film Review

Title: Kagemusha

Director: Akira Kurosawa & Ishiro Honda

Writer: Akira Kurosawa & Masato Ide

Year: 1980

From the explanatory text which opens Kagemusha, to the lengthy single-shot first scene, the pace of this film is decidedly measured.  For those who equate samurai films with supershiny-superfast coolwank, this one probably isn’t for you.  This film is long, slow and marvellous.

A ‘kagemusha’ is an impersonator, a body-double presented instead of a person of influence and importance, in order to protect them.  The titular kagemusha is a thief with a striking resemblance to Shingen Takeda, the daimyo of Kai Province.  He is discovered and saved from crucifixion by Nobukado, Shingen’s brother and erstwhile occasional kagemusha.  It is decided that the thief is to be trained in the ways of kagemushery, and the film follows the difficulties that arise in making this a reality.

Japanese acting is often a tumultuous beast, with subtle understatement sitting alongside some pretty huge performances.  Kagemusha is no exception, but does avoid the grotesques of gurning and mugging which is in abundant use in Japanese humour, which is often used to brilliant effect, but would be out of place here.  The understated/overstated contrast is key to this film, as Tatsuya Nakadai puts in a masterfully schizophrenic performance as both Shingen Takeda and the Kagemusha.  The differences between the two characters, and the subtle advances of the Kagemusha as he learns his imitative art is the backbone of this film, and it is a truly impressive achievement.  The crux of one scene, which is perhaps the most impactful of the film, rests entirely on the Kagemusha changing his posture and expression, and the huge effects these tiny alterations have on those surrounding him.

 There is a less subtle piece of acting which makes the film for me, personally, but I’ll discuss that fully later.

I’ve referred to the music in the notes I made as ‘Zelda music’, but it is perhaps more notable for how very sparsely it is used.  It is a largely orchestral score, but used tastefully, with little in the way of relentless pomp to drown quieter scenes.  At one juncture, a death scene; piercing, shrill flute squeals accompany the action, creating a discomforting, pained experience.  ‘Zelda music’ flags up that I am perhaps not best suited to fully critique the film’s score.

Some very beautiful and striking imagery is on show throughout the film, with one particular sequence focusing on the setting sun, as a seemingly endless line of soldier march past it in silhouette atop a hill, whilst in the foreground, in shadow, officers discuss the campaign.  Oddly for a film which has pitched battles as it’s backdrop, very little, if any, clear ‘fighting’ is shown.  When the Kagemusha finds himself actually on a battlefield, the fighting is portrayed by shouting and clamouring off-camera, with the shot focusing on the Kagemusha himself and those surrounding him.  His confusion, helplessness and terror, as well as that of his vassals, is in the foreground, with the grotty business of actual conflict taking a backseat to the human drama.  These sequences make for difficult viewing, as portrayal of the Kagemusha’s lack of understanding as the battle rages around him translates into the viewer also not understanding the ebb and flow of the, largely unseen, battle.

A wonderful piece of, very understated, repetition occurs, almost bookending the film, in the form of location.  By setting two key scenes in the same setting at the beginning and towards the end of the film, it throws the changes that have been wrought over the course of the piece in sharp relief.  That it is hardly flagged up at all, and I only noticed after multiple viewings, made it a much more rewarding and impactful realisation.

There are a couple of sequences which had less impact on me, and I’m uncertain as to whether this is simply because I lack foreknowledge of the story (which is set in the Warring States period, and uses real historical figures for it’s characters) or of Japanese traditions.  In one scene a soldier is shown at great length filling in a primitive musket and replicating a shot he took the night before.  This is done to prove the veracity of his claim to have shot someone, but the length at which the scene plays out suggests significance which I didn’t grasp.  A burst of Noh theatre and a scene where Nobunaga Oda sings in a throaty chant only succeeded in boggling me, though a surreal / expressionistic dream / nightmare sequence stood out as being markedly, but assuredly, odd.

My favourite performance of the film comes from Hideji Otaki, who portrays Masekage Yamagata, the Fire Battalion Leader / Red Fire Unit Leader.  The character is an influential General in Shingen’s army, and a close friend.  He stands out for his furious telling-off of his leader:

“You are a mountain monkey.  You should be out gathering nuts in the mountains of Kai!”

Otaki was possibly selected for the role due to his ability to release pointed tirades, grand explosions of shouting, and then quickly settle back into restrained dignity.  That, and his inhuman ability to turn a shocking shade of crimson.  He is, after all, the Red Fire Unit Leader.  In council scenes, Masekage takes the floor, addresses his peers in a restrained manner, before building up Cleesian volume, often ending his outbursts with barked, powerful laughter.  Of an enemy officer he declares:

“He scares me.”

Before sidling back to his cushion, throwing his head back 90 degrees and commanding all to laugh by turning himself a deep red with forceful laughter.  Frightening and wonderful.

The film also features palanquins, which is always a good thing.  Say it out loud “palanquin”.  Savour the word.  Palanquin.

The overarching plot of the film is Shingen’s forces fighting the combined threat of Ieyasu Tokagawa and Nobunaga Oda, but it is really a study of a man who is forced into a situation far beyond his knowledge, where he is forced to develop responsibility, and dignity.  A fraught film that needs to be properly engaged with to be really appreciated, but which rewards your engagement fully.