Tuesday, 18 August 2009

Wicked City: Film Review

Title: Wicked City (aka 妖獣都市 - Yōjū Toshi)

Director: Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Year: 1987

Based on the novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi.


When I first heard of this film, someone claimed that the only reason it wasn’t classified as hentai is because it is too disgusting for anyone to get kicks out of. For the uninitiated, ‘hentai’ is the term for animated pornography. For me, this echoes a Mary Whitehouse-style sentiment first brought to my attention by someone ignorantly describing all anime as 'demon porn'. That is like saying that because the Nazi party existed in Germany, all Germans are Nazis. So, clearly, if you denounce anime as demon porn, clearly you are a racist, clearly. Being an adventurous and valiant anti-prissy type, I plunged headfirst into the viewing of this ‘horror neo-noir’ film.

The story centres around Renzaburo Taki, by day: a salesman for an electronics company, by night: an agent for the Black Guard, an organisation seeking to preserve the peace between the human and the demon worlds. Every few centuries the truce must be renewed, which requires special emissaries to seal the deal. The human world’s representative this time around is grey freak and ancient runt Giuseppi Mayart, who is entrusted to the care of Taki. Mayart is of vital importance, as he is necessary to sign the contract.

Taki is therefore allotted a compulsory sexy partner, named Makie, who, despite her sexiness, and her membership of the Black Guard, is a demon. Taki is then warned: “we are giving you a new sexy female partner, don’t get any funny ideas”, in a sequence that could be replaced by a sign saying “He is going to get funny ideas”.

On his way to the airport to 1) meet his sexy partner and 2) pick up Mayart, we are treated to artistic shots of Taki, decked out in his businessman’s suit, in which he looks like a cross between James Bond and Bruce Lee. Renzaburo Taki wouldn’t be out of place in a smithy, probably being put to use as an anvil, or perhaps outside, serving as a brick shithouse. Cue the first demon ambush, which begins a trend that runs throughout the film. A terrorist demon group wishes to stop the re-signing of the treaty, and wish to kill as many of the main characters as possible.

Fights in anime can often be tedious affairs, like the repetitive arm-flailing and screaming of Dragonball Z, but the fight sequences in Wicked City are slick and incisive, never overstaying their welcome. Early in the film the battles are realistically brutal, with the fighting including scrapping and strangling, and one particularly cruel struggle ends with Makie being kneed in the spine. As the film progresses, the battles become more supernatural, though it doesn’t fall into the trap of merely declaring characters more powerful and then running through the same techniques, instead opting to introduce new and unique twists and abilities.

The horror aspect of the film comes through most powerfully in the characterisation of the demon terrorists, who often have insidious and sinister powers. This sort of creeping horror is where, for me, Japanese horror wins out over the Western 'jumping out and shouting “rargh”' strategy. This is where I take issue with the individual who posted that the film should be hentai. There is a difference between a sex film and a film with sex in it. Sex certainly features heavily in this story, but it is used as a stylistic technique in order to propagate the horror. The sex scenes are hugely romanticised and overly sensual; they lure the viewer into a false sense of security which makes the horror all the more, well, horrifying as it creeps its way into the scenes.

The design of the demons is shudder-inducingly grotesque, including a disembodied head with tentacles whose eyes pop out on stalks and then open up into a small fanged mouth, as well as a man with ribs that burst out of his chest to bear-hug people (to death, obviously). And they are merely the grunts, with more important antagonists including a woman whose arms and legs stretch out into double-jointed spiders legs, who is able to spin webbing from her befanged vagina. I was shocked as well. Not content with only one demonic undercarriage, another demon-lady’s power is to have her torso open up into a huge hypnotising love-canal, which mesmerises people and lures them inside (to their deaths, obviously). The demon-lady claims that “No man can resist this”, which I protest against vehemently, as does the main character, although he protests with the business end of his oversized pistol (not a euphemism).

Despite this, the fighting is annoyingly inconsistent, often with characters flipping from useless weaklings into all-powerful fonts of apocalypse in an instant. There’s no point introducing a character as a kickass if they are going to spend half the film captive and meekly awaiting rescue. Also, it rings slightly hollow when the main character is called a weakling and then walks into a room, shoots everything that moves and then punches the only survivor in the face so hard that his eyes literally fall out, in a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in Barefoot Gen. The difference between the respective eye-popping sequences in the two films is that in Wicked City someone is being punched in the face, and in Barefoot Gen an atomic bomb is being dropped.

Another problem with the film is its eagerness to use seizure inducing background flashing. It is an old film, and therefore it likely came out before the animation world at large decided to be more epileptic-friendly, but even for non-sufferers, it is very difficult to watch those sequences. Even if they are merely highlighting that someone has been punched so hard their eyes fall out.

It is enjoyable to see characters decked out in fashions which haven’t stood the test of time, and were likely gaudily out of style even in the late 80s. At one juncture a demon leaps out of the floor kitted out in a white rolled-sleeved vest and heavy black sunglasses, looking like a steroid-infused re-animated Michael Jackson. The big baddie of the piece also makes his first appearance clad in a red pinstripe monstrosity of a suit, topped off with a dashing white tie.

For me, the icing on the filthy cake is the soundtrack. Bad music can hamstring any story, but coming straight out of '87 we have a track that is as retro as dancing sunflowers, yo. There’s nothing quite like it. Cheesy synth and drum machines as they were meant to be used, before suffering the abuses that they now do in the pop charts. Tracks conjured by one man, his tortoiseshell glasses, a keyboard, a computer and a sense of occasion. Real effort went into the soundtrack, even creating an English language pop ballad tearjerker, as only the 80s could deliver.

My main gripe centres around the sometimes hairy justifications for the progression of the story, the biggest being the line: “the laboratory concluded that in order to conceive the couple had to have a spiritual bond of love”. Laboratories, places of science, should not be factoring in elements such as ‘spirituality’ and ‘love’, but in a story centred around demons, maybe I am being slightly too pedantic.

The design in Wicked City is cited by Todd McFarlane as having been an inspiration, and fans of his work will certainly find Wicked City a worthwhile watch. As someone who first became acquainted with anime through late night recordings of the films they used to show on Sci-Fi, Wicked City struck a nostalgic chord with me, though I am glad I didn’t experience it as a child.

Wicked City is warped, eerie and grotesque, and is definitely worth a viewing if you are a fan of horror which doesn’t make you jump, but will ensure you have trouble getting to sleep.

Similar Oldies

Sex and Demons: Urotsukidoji

Sex and Violence: Violence Jack

Sex and Suit-Wearing Agent of Death: Golgo 13.

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