Demon City Shinjuku (1988)

The evil-looking Rebi Ra (Kiyoshi Kobayashi) proves that you can judge a book by its cover when he fights the heavily bearded Genichiro (Banjo Ginga) atop a building in the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo.  Genichiro’s Nenpo (which I assume is not to be confused with Ninpo, the martial art of the Ninja, as Nenpo deals with controlling and channeling one’s chi) and his wooden sword are no match for Rebi Ra’s demon sword and magical powers (one of which includes regeneration, which Genichiro also fails at as two of his limbs are hacked off), and the bad guy causes an earthquake which rends Shinjuku in half and unleashes demons into the sector.  Ten years on, Genichiro’s son Kiyoya (Hideyuki Hori) is conscripted into the struggle between good and evil when Sayaka (Hiromi Tsuru), the daughter of the Federation President who has been attacked by Rebi Ra’s forces, approaches Kiyoya, and he falls in love, or lust, or something.

Yoshiaki Kowajiri’s Demon City Shinjuku (aka Makaitoshi Shinjuku aka Hell City Shinjuku aka Monster City) is an anime loaded with monsters, shit-talking characters, virginally innocent victim women, mystical powers, and lots of action.  So, basically, an anime from the late Eighties.  There is all manner of gruesome creatures, but the key difference between this and something like Kawajiri’s Wicked City is that the monsters here are external.  No human characters explode from some vile beastie escaping its human meat cage.  Also, it moves along at a nice clip, and it is focused on its main narrative (in other words, you can pretty much make sense of it from beginning to end as a single piece).  

One of the points of the film is the old saw about absolute power corrupting absolutely.  Rebi Ra is given power, and it not only corrupts him to the core but it also corrupts Shinjuku.  Rebi Ra’s consolidation of power leaves the area in ruins (why monsters wouldn’t want to live in a nice house is beyond me), like a nuclear bomb producing a postapocalyptic wasteland, just without the bomb.  This corruption attracts, of course, the worst elements of humanity.  The people who walk the streets are vile, manic punks (and again, why they would want to live here instead of leaving via the extremely convenient and unguarded bridge is half-mysterious; in this Shinjuku, there is no law to stop them doing whatever they wish).  When Sayaka approaches a man to lead her to Rebi Ra (in what is one of the clearest indications of both her naivete and the writer’s [Kaori Okamura, based on the book[s] by Hideyuki Kikuchi] desire to get the viewer’s blood pumping with some threats/dress tearing), he and his hysterically cackling cohorts corner her in an alley.  No locals are around to help her, and we know none would, anyway.  The park at the initial quake’s epicenter has been transformed into a purgatory for orphaned kids who have been turned into fire demons.  Below the streets, Chibi (Kyoko Tongu), the rollerskating, opportunistic youngster hides, doing what he needs to survive.  He’s a friend to Kiyoya and Sayaka in as much as they’re human and won’t kill him, and he gets monetary recompense for his troubles.  Chibi knows the new Shinjuku, but he doesn’t participate directly with it, so he’s not totally corrupted by it. 

In this same way, there is a less developed (but still visible) theme about technology and its effects on people in opposition to “the old ways.”  All I know about the actual Shinjuku is that it’s a big commercial area where a lot of businesses are headquartered, so I can’t say if the decision to set the demon city there has to do with the idea of big business being bad, the technology prevalent there being bad, or Kikuchi just wanted to set it there for some random reason and/or wanted to see it destroyed (or a combination of all three).  At any rate, there is a delineation between the forces of good and evil drawn along technological lines.  Kiyoya and the good guys practice Nenpo using thin wooden swords.  Their focus is on empowering and developing the inner spirit (think: The Force in the Star Wars movies before they fucked up its ancient mystical aspects with that Midichlorian bullshit).  They are simple, peaceful people, though still human.  Contrast this to the characters in the demon city.  Rebi Ra’s sword (the clearest distinguishing aspect between he and Kiyoya/Genichiro) is large and wide and steel (a double metaphor for the phallus and the uncaring hardness of the villains), though it also channels power (just externally from the demons through Rebi Ra, not internally from Rebi Ra’s chi).  The guy who accosts Sayaka in the alley has an arm that’s either robotic or heavily armored (we’re never told explicitly which).  Chibi’s two-headed dog was created by humans using science and technology (he’s menacing but a good guy, most likely because, as we all know, animals intuitively sense goodness in people, and it doesn’t hurt that Chibi raised him from a pup).  The hag who owns the music store is represented as images in a bank of television monitors.  She, naturally, is as avaricious as anyone else, though without the barrier of technology to protect her, she’s much more forthcoming.  Sayaka even gives up her laser ring gizmo.  A simple, low technology life frees one from the spiritual clutter that blocks the channeling of chi in this world.  It’s how you beat the bad guys.

As an anime, and as a story, Demon City Shinjuku is satisfying.  It doesn’t bog itself down with subplots taken from the books that it can never develop in its runtime.  The obstacles/battles are interesting in their variety and character designs, and they all move the plot a little bit closer to its finale.  Sure, the dialogue is dumb, but it would be more egregious in a poorly-paced or a more schizophrenic narrative.  While it doesn’t top (for me, at any rate) Kowajiri’s Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust or Ninja Scroll, it would certainly make a nice B feature to either one of them for an evening of anime fun.

MVT:  The designs and the animation are smooth and visually striking.

Make or Break:  The opening sets the stage well in terms of world building, violence level, and basic storyline.

Score:  6.75/10

Darkside Blues (1994)

Let me see if I can get this right.  The Hazuki family run a corporation called Persona Century that basically owns most of the world.  A group of resistance fighters (the Anti-Personas) struggle against them and their Enhanced Human assassins.  Mai (Kotono Mitsuishi) and Kenzo (Akio Otsuka) are a couple of mercenaries (?) who call themselves Messiah, and they are hired by a wounded revolutionary named Tatsuya to protect him.  Meanwhile, the nebulous Darkside (Akira Natsuki) comes on the scene in his intergalactic carriage, and there’s a young boy named Katari (Nozomu Sasaki) who may be more than he seems (but what does he seem to be?).

If ever a nation embraced the whole Goth thing (and embraced it early), I would suggest from an outsider’s perspective that it was the Japanese.  At least partially inspired by the punk movement, Goths love their eyeliner, puffy shirts, and late Eighteenth/early Nineteenth Century outerwear.  While, Noboyasu and Yoshimichi Furukawa’s Darkside Blues showcases at least two out of three of these things, it also combines them with the other thing the Japanese seem to love: science fiction.  Perhaps the best example of this melding of aesthetics is the Vampire Hunter D franchise, but unfortunately, we’re not discussing those.  So, for example, the Hazukis live on an asteroid that orbits the Earth.  The aforementioned Enhanced Humans are basically psychotic cyborgs.  There is a machine that turns people into gold statues.  Mai has a wrist blaster.  On the Goth side, the Hazuki manse is baroque and grotesque like Dracula’s castle is typically portrayed.  The first shot of the film is a clock with thirteen hours on it.  A gross-looking spider swings off it and drapes it in red webbing.  Darkside dresses like Baron Frankenstein (though I would contend the biggest influence on the character is likely Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, another Goth icon), and his horse-drawn carriage moves through time and space (he enters the film via a ripple in the fourth dimension, which I always thought was Time, but what do I know?) like the Silver Surfer’s surfboard or The Doctor’s TARDIS.  Like everything else in the film, however, the two artistic tastes just kind of float around in each other’s proximity.  They don’t combine with each other, they don’t really define anything in the film, and there’s so much left unsaid about almost everything having anything to do with them, it’s confusing as hell.

Add to this the fact that Darkside is also a drifter cowboy figure (he does wear boots and spurs) in the tradition of Yojimbo, High Plains Drifter, A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing, et al (and please note, I’m fully aware that two of these are remakes of another of them).  He appears in a town that needs him, does something to save them (this is extremely arguable in this case), and then kind of fades away.  He stays at the local small time hotel with the “colorful” proprietor (here an old woman and her cat).  Mai naively falls in love with him, even though this love can never be requited (he’s a loner, Mai; a rebel).  What Darkside doesn’t have like a cowboy is a six-shooter.  Instead, he does this thing where he transports whomever he’s with into another dimension.  There, they can battle, relive past traumas, and so forth.  Darkside refers to what he does as “Renewal,” like he’s an amalgamation of a shrink and some New Age bullshit guru.  Instead of dueling in the streets, Darkside forces people to face the truth about themselves.  That said, he’s not above actually fighting and/or killing people in this dreamtime realm of his; it’s just not his go-to maneuver.  

Doorways play a large part in the film.  Everything from windows to mirrors to, yes, doorways are employed, and they relate to the idea of portals.  Katari carries around a small glass globe, and he uses it to open doorways to (I’m assuming here) the Fourth Dimension.  This same portal manifests in the gigantic mirror in the Hazuki compound.  It also appears in the entrance to Tamaki Hazuki’s personal torture chamber.  Darkside makes his arrival through all of these simultaneously.  The doors to the Mirage Hotel where our protagonist stays are focused on at great length, and the lobby itself is a portal to the individual rooms, which I would imagine is really convenient if you’re a lodger there (or a bellboy).  I believe all of these in some way or another involve the concept of Renewal that Darkside keeps hitting on, because they all deal, diametrically or obliquely, with time, mistakes of the past, and the opportunity to change oneself.  The darkness in which Darkside envelops his “patients” and/or enemies is Truth.  Some will be transformed by it, others will be destroyed by it.

Nonetheless, for all that I think the film is trying to do, it fails fairly miserably.  The primary reason for this is because the film is so hellbent on the bigger picture that the details which should support it are indistinct, undeveloped, and, in many cases, unresolved.  The world the movie tries to set up is hinted at just enough to give us a rough idea and nothing more.  There is no resolution to the Mai/Darkside relationship.  There is no resolution to the conflict between the revolutionaries and the Hazukis.  We never even see the patriarch of the family, and there is a sister who is shown very briefly in the beginning and then totally written off with a throwaway line.  Brother Enji Hazuki shows up but never interacts with the rest of his family.  Darkside is likely one of the most passive characters in the history of storytelling, despite the importance implied by his appearance in it.  Katari is introduced as a character who will be integral to the story.  He isn’t.  At all.  The film only settles one storyline, and even there, we’re left hanging with where this is going.  In fact, the film doesn’t really end at all.  It just stops.  Was there supposed to be a sequel?  Is there a series?  Is this based on a manga that explains any of this crap better than this film does?  If you care about the answers to any of these questions, I really can’t help you, because I found myself not giving the slightest of shits (okay, I did do some digging just for the sake of curiosity, and the manga this is based on was created by Hideyuki Kikuchi, who also created Vampire Hunter D, so there’s one mystery solved).  Darkside Blues is so sketchy it should have been animated in pencils only.

MVT:  The film has all the elements for a fun, interesting tale.

Make or Break:  If you can make it through the first five minutes of this movie, and you like what you see, you’ll be fine.  If all you’re doing by the end of that time is squinting at the screen and scratching your head, you’ll be better off tuning out.

Score: 4/10    

Wicked City (1987)

Taki (voiced in the American dub by Gregory Snegoff) is hipped to the transience of our world’s tenuous treaty with the Black World (a parallel dimension [?] populated by grotesque monsters) after a near death experience with not-so-hot bar pickup Kanako (Edie Mirman).  A member of the secretive Black Guard who defend humanity from the Black Worlders, he is assigned to protect Giuseppe Mayart (Mike Reynolds), an ancient, pervy old man who is the key to renewing the accord for another five hundred years.  The beauteous Makie (Gaye Kruger), Taki’s opposite number in the Black World, is forced upon our hapless human hero (apologies to Stan Lee), but will tensions flare between this mismatched pair, or will love blossom?  If you guessed neither, you’re not far off.

With some tweaks to the details of the story, one could believe this anime sprang from the mind of someone like David Cronenberg or Clive Barker, but it actually crawled forth from the pen of Hideyuki Kikuchi who created the Wicked City property in 1985 with the first book, Wicked City: Black Guard.  I’m uncertain if the franchise spawned a manga or not, but the anime, directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, is one of two adaptations of it for motion pictures (though I think this was an OVA [Original Video Animation, i.e. it was produced for and released directly to the home video market], so it never saw theatrical play).  The other was Tai Kit Mak’s 1992 live action take (produced by Tsui Hark), and the only thing I can distinctly remember about that one is that it was an indecipherable mess, visually and narratively.  The anime, while slightly easier to understand, is, in my opinion, just as much of a mess.  The characters are cardboard cutouts without personality (what personality is there is patently unlikable and uninteresting), and their relationships completely fizzle, in part because every line is delivered as if pronounced by somnambulists.  The story is paper thin and been done to death for decades.  That would be all well and good, if there was something else to bolster the retreading, and there is (sex and violence), but, somehow, here it’s just not good enough, even though brief moments do shine quite brightly, which makes it all the more disappointing (and if you want to see an actually good collaboration between Kikuchi and Kawajiri, I would suggest checking out the ultra-fun Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust).  I honestly can’t say I’ve been more bored by something as over the top as Wicked City in a long, long time.   

There has been some debate over whether or not this cartoon should be considered hentai (for the sake of simplicity and expediency, think “tentacle porn”), and even though I’m not anime guru enough to fully debate the issue, pro or con, I can say definitively that there is some explicit stuff going on here.  There is a vagina dentata (of a sort) on display.  There is a woman’s body that opens up like a giant, diseased vagina (shades of Videodrome).  There is a woman being involuntarily fingered by a former friend/lover.  There is a penis-snake-like monster that fucks a woman’s mouth.  There is a gang rape.  Sex in the world of Wicked City is dangerous, whether you want to have it or not.  It should be noted that a lot of this sexual violation and violence happens to the same woman, so it’s difficult to believe that there isn’t some kind of dislike for her going on under the surface (okay, it’s right there in front of your face; there’s nothing subtle about it).  

Compare that to the men in the film.   They are consummate womanizers.  Giuseppe lusts after Makie and blatantly grabs her ass as well as rubs her legs while she tries to ignore him.  Taki wins a bet with his bartender pal when he scores with Kanako.  Giuseppe loves his porn (he even tries to get Makie to watch some with him; what woman could resist?) and is simply dying to get his rocks off with a prostitute.  Bearing this in mind, the men get to have voluntary, pleasant enough sex with women before being attacked by whatever monster into which the woman will transform (and this setup where all of the women that the human men have sex with are literally horrors is telling; women clearly can’t be trusted in the slightest, and the men are dolts for not being able to choose their lays better).  Further, the monster women seem intent on eating the men (or some vital aspect of them), and not in the foreplay sense of the word.  The males are violently consumed by the females, the females are violently penetrated by the males.  Naturally, neither turn of events is especially desirable, but the latter has an innate sense of sleazy misogyny to it that’s rough going.  However, it’s the choice the characters get to make before the violence that makes the difference, and the women don’t really get a choice at all.  Although it doesn’t particularly bother me in the context of the film and its universe, the sexual politics of the anime will turn some people off, just as it will turn others on, so you’re aware.

 Like so very, very many mismatched action partners (Riggs and Murtaugh from the Lethal Weapon films, Sykes and Francisco from Alien Nation, Gallagher and Beck from The Hidden, ad infinitum), Wicked City has a duo that is diametrically opposed but is forced to work together.  Well, that’s something of an overstatement, actually.  Makie and Taki don’t really have anything against each other beside their dislike and distrust for the other’s “country” of origin.  They don’t bicker and argue, they don’t have any physical altercations with each other (that I can recall), and there is no begrudging respect that builds between the two.  The instant they meet, Taki refers to Makie as “disgustingly perfect” (what a honeydripper!), and you know it’s basically a waiting game until the two are in bed together (and it’s not a very exciting waiting game at that).  Sparks do not fly, because none of the emotion the filmmakers are trying to convey is earned, and even if they did earn it (which, I maintain, they didn’t), it feels hollow and false, because these characters are merely sacks of meat going through the motions with other sacks of meat.  The anime is loaded from stem to stern with bodies displayed inside and out, but none of them is filled with anything I would call a heart.

MVT:  Sex and violence is the name of the game, and the film delivers the goods in these regards.  It just doesn’t deliver anything else that’s all that interesting or involving.

Make or Break:  The opening scene (you’ve likely seen a fairly famous still from it if you’ve ever searched for this movie on the internet) sets up the world and the type of characters who inhabit it handily.  It also forewarns of the film’s problems early on, so if you’re not all in by the end of this scene, you never will be.

Score:  5/10