1987, Japan. Drected by Yoshiaki Kawajiri. Written by Kisei Choo, Hideyuki Kikuchi. Purchase from Amazon.com.

A thrilling part of Animeighties Month!

I keep sitting down to write my review of Wicked City, and I keep petering out after a page of rambling incoherence, as opposed to what I normally do, which is peter out after about six pages of random incoherence then post it and call it an update. I don't know why I'm so stymied on this review. Perhaps I've just not been in the proper mindset for writing a review of anything (my book reviews of The Intelligencer, Count Zero, and Doctor No are similarly derailed), what with the sun being out, an adventure trip to Dominica booked, and my kayaking hand itching to get a start on developing the season's calluses. My thoughts are definitely going north and south, which is why I couldn't cut the bottle in half. Although that last oblique reference has given me an idea for a new movie: Jack Knifed: The Adventures of Jack Bauer and Jack Burton.

Well, I think I've managed to marshal my thoughts into a loose confederation of like-minded individuals assembled in a disjointed but somewhat recognizable formation, so I thought I'd give it another go, especially since April is winding down and I've only posted two reviews for Animeighties Month -- you should have seen the overly ambitious list I originally made. But let me offer a word of warning as relates to the coming review, as a courtesy to the number of new readers who have been ensnared by Teleport city's jungle booby trap of placing some old anime titles in the usual fray. For the past several months, the reviews here have been relatively focused -- and I say relative in terms of how they relate to some of our previous reviews. You may think to yourself, "You call that Golgo 13 review focused?" And my reply would be, first, "I know what you are thinking, for I have the power to peer into the minds of men." Having thusly chilled you with powers I acquired in 1984 as a direct result of lying about my Dungeons & Dragons character's sudden blossoming of psyonics, I would then explain to you, either vocally or through the sheer force of mental will at my disposal, that yes, all things considered, the Golgo 13 review was indeed focused, for although it covered a large swath of ground with it's billowing parachute of truth, the vast majority of it was related, in some surprisingly direct way, to the background information needed for a proper and deep understanding of a movie where the hero is implored by a woman to pull her trigger, lovingly and softly.


I say this now as a warning that the past several months of reviews that busy themselves primarily with reviewing a movie may have lulled you into a false sense of security. Many of you may not have been around for the halcyon days of having to read five pages of my biography before getting to the first comment regarding the actual subject of the review. If you were looking for lean, mean, informative film writing, Teleport City really wasn't the place to be. My philosophy when I started this site, and yea even long before the Web, was to write about film in a way that related the watching of such movies to a life in general, to place them in the context of daily existence, rather than treat them as external components to be commented upon without any reflection as to the role they have played in my life. I thought this for two reasons: first, because fans of bad films are often met with a chorus of predictable, "Get a life!" taunting, and I wanted to show off the fact that not only do I have a life, and not only does being a fan of these films, not preclude you from a life, but the life I have lead may actually be a hell of a lot more fun and interesting than that of the person trotting out that hoary old cliche of an insult. And most of the b-movie fans I've met over the years have boasted similarly satisfying lives. Adventures have been mounted, relationships have been built, sweeping romance and epic action all manage to coexist with watching and writing about goofy films no one else would devote a paragraph to.

Secondly, and more importantly, a lot of the films I write positive reviews of are positive solely because of the circumstances that led up to seeing them, or under which I saw them. Understanding why I would write a glowing review of something like Treasure of the Four Crowns or Sword and the Sorcerer requires understanding how I saw those movies, what it was like at the time, what experiences became intertwined and associated with the movie. My approach has never been to review films as a science, with a clinical approach. My approach has always been to put them in their proper personal and social context, to explain how the movie might have become a part of my life, and how everything else that was happening to me at the time may have influenced my opinion of a particular film.

The resulting reviews may seem wildly unfocused. They may seem to wander off on tangents, lose their way as they meander through the muck of my memory and nostalgia, but I've never felt that the information, the silly asides and biographies and recollections, were at all throw-away diversions. They were, within the confines of my potentially crackpot way of writing about movies, vital threads of a greater tapestry in which the film itself is only one of the images formed.

Having thusly warned new readers and old ones who may have forgotten, let me further explain that I issue this warning because my review of Wicked City is going to be prefaced by a story that has very little to do with actually assessing the artistic or entertainment merit of the film itself, but nevertheless reflects something that plays an important role in influencing my overall reaction to the movie. Like all my stories, it involves adventure and romance. If you just want to skip ahead to a history of tentacle porn and a review of the movie, use this handy link to fast forward through time and space.

And with that...

My chest was heaving, and I was doing the best I could to suck in as much of the balmy, flower-scented spring air as I could. Blades of grass probed lightly at my back, and I felt the soft warmth of a hand on my stomach, which at the time had not yet embarked on the long and shockingly successful quest to bulge and hang down over the top of my pants that it enjoys these days. It was 1993, her name was Elisa, and we'd just finished whiling away a perfect north Florida spring day by shooting basketball. She was a hell of a gal, too beautiful to associate with the weak-chinned likes of me. Dark, curly hair; healthy, tan skin; fun, easy-going, athletic, with the slightest vestigial traces of a Puerto Rican accent. She lived in an apartment that shared a parking lot with the duplex I lived in with my friend Rob, and after a couple months of seeing each other from time to time, we graduated from friendly nods of acknowledgement to an actual exchange of words and a few drinks here and there. I was just at the early stages of toying with the idea of emerging from a straight edge punk rock cocoon, so I was a bit on the timid side when it came to imbibing (I would learn some years later, when I decided to embrace the culture of wine and spirits wholeheartedly, that Scotch-Irish blood apparently bestows upon you near godlike powers of tolerance and recuperation, regardless of how little you'd been drinking the past decade).

Dating in Gainesville is tricky, because there were (and still are, from what I could tell during my last visit) so very few places you can take a girl that rank very far above Denny's or El Toro. Lisa was the first non-punk girlfriend I'd had in a long time, and I was going to have to come up with a different game plan if I wanted the relationship to continue. Punk rockers often suffer from an unhealthy, "I shall show her my world!" mentality, as if we inhabit a vast underworld full of mystical danger and darkness when, in fact, the average punk rocker's world consists of sitting on the couch, hanging out in a parking lot, or going to see really horrible bands that you pretend to like so you can make proclamations about "supporting the scene," because you're not old enough or wise enough (and some never are) to realize that some scenes and artistic endeavors really blow and aren't worth supporting. This is especially true of any scene that is comprised of four or five guys with beards, Dickies jackets, and fake trucker hats playing loud amelodic indie rock.

Lucky for me that Elisa was some crazy kind of dream girl and was incredibly easy-going when it came to going along with idiotic schemes, and when it comes to idiotic schemes, I'm a Viking. So despite the lack of world-class places to which a sophisticated young gentleman could take a beautiful young lady for an evening of cocktails and witty conversation, there were still plenty of places a slobbish, lazy punk rocker still clinging to the "I ain't gonna wear no suit and dance for The Man" that people should outgrow a couple months after leaving high school could take a charming young lady who, for reasons one can't possibly comprehend, had decided to take a shine to the aforementioned asshole. So we'd go out for Coronas and all you can eat crawdads by the bucket, or we'd stay in with a bottle of wine and a movie. Or we'd go shoot hoops or kick the soccer ball around, take walks through nearby nature preserves, or we'd just sit in the floor at my place and listen to records, because punk rock guys always seem to have this sick need to make girls listen to godawful pieces of crap that the guy thinks is utter genius. "Yes, you are a smart and cultured woman possessed of a striking beauty that leaves a man breathless. Come! Come sit on my ratty bedroom carpet while I play Boredoms records for you."


Actually, in this regard, I took the sage advice of my friend Jon, and rather than trotting out Zeni Geva and Sun Ra, stuck primarily to The Cocteau Twins.

I was, at the time, also a member of the University of Florida Film Council, and we were in the midst of the first annual (of two, I believe) Asian Film Festival, a program I'd put together primarily because I wanted to see Once Upon a Time in China, Chinese Ghost Story, and Bullet in the Head on the big screen, and this was the only way it was ever going to happen. We also peppered it with a smattering of Japanese cartoons and a few respectable films like Black Rain and Tokyo Story so people who wanted to sit and feel smart about themselves four a couple hours could do that. That day spent shooting hoops happen to fall on the final day of the event. I'd skipped out on Ozu in favor of sunshine and a sparkling smile, but the day was growing short and we were at a loss for what to do with the evening.

"Well," I said as we lay there together on the grass, staring up at the tops of palm trees and listening to the slow rumble of traffic along 13th Street, "It's the last night of film festival. It'd be nice to end it on a better note than last night."

"Last night" would have been our big showing of John Woo's Hong Kong swansong, Hardboiled. We were among the very first theaters in America to screen the film, though you wouldn't know it based on the amount of stars and prestige it brought our way (none). But people drove from as far away as Miami and Atlanta when they heard we were showing the movie, uncut and subtitled. All of the Hong Kong films played to packed houses, but none possessed the buzz that surrounded Hardboiled. This was right in the middle of people started to go batty for Hong Kong action films thanks to things like The Killer showing up on Cinemax. And the screening was a massive success, with a packed house howling and cheering right up until the projector went to switch to the final reel of the film -- the sprawling hospital shoot-out -- and we were suddenly watching the first reel of Aliens.

Someone had screwed up big time before they sent us the film, but what could we do? We had a theater of angry patrons, and because UF runs their box office separate from the theater itself, the box office people had already packed up and went home, so there could be no cash refunds. All we could offer were vouchers for free screenings, which didn't do much to placate the people who drove six hours.

Elisa stretched languorously next to me. "That sounds good," she said. "What's playing tonight?"

I went over the schedule in my head. Immediately I regretted making the suggestion. We should have just gone for burritos at El Toro.

"Umm," I hesitated, "A Japanese anime film."

Her eye slit up slightly. She was a real sport at watching bad movies -- we'd even gone to see one of those screenings of Mystery Science Theater together at her suggestion (I'd never even seen the show up until that point, as Cox Cable did not offer Comedy Central) -- and it wasn't that long ago that we'd watched Akira, which had delighted her to no end.

"Which one?" she asked enthusiastically.

"Umm, it's called Wicked City. It's uh..."

Honestly, I hadn't seen Wicked City at that point, which was the main reason I'd even booked it. It was originally meant to fill an 8 PM timeslot, with the midnight movie finale being another showing of Hardboiled, but with Hardboiled on the ropes, we replayed Zu Warriors and then slid Wicked City into the midnight movie slot, where it would be right at home. About all I knew of the film was what I'd seen in the previews.

"Well, I know there's some monsters, some guys in tuxedos fly, and, well, a woman turns into a spider."

I also knew that her vagina became a giant slobbering toothy maw, but I didn't know if it would be worse to bring that up now or wait until it actually showed up on screen. Thing is, I was really looking forward to all that madness, because I'd heard nothing but good things about the movie. Sure, it was a tad perverse, but beautifully animated and incredibly well-written. OK, I figured, maybe it'd be a decent movie for the two of us. I mean, it wasn't going to be Overfiend, which I'd seen unsubtitled a couple years earlier when the tape started making the rounds among cult film traders.


I don't have the world's most sterling track record when it comes to date movies. It's not that I don't know how to pick a decent date movie, one that both I and my prospective lady companion can enjoy. It's just that I tend to stumble by accident into remarkably bad choices knowing full well how bad they are. Midway through trying to impress a dame a mere couple months before, I'd invited her over for a romantic evening of dinner and a movie, only to have an assembly of friends show up demanding they be allowed to watch Black Devil Doll from Hell. As I had the town's only copy and the only working VCR (I'd bought it the day before at Wal-Mart, with the intention of using it for my romantic movie night, then packing it back up and returning it a day later -- such is college life) among my friends, my romantic evening became an enthusiastic and drunken screening of Black Devil Doll from Hell. Other date movies have included Alien 4, Cliffhanger (only because it was 50 cent Tuesday, meaning that you paid 50 cents, not that 50 Cent was in attendance, at the second run theater and my power had been shut off), and I Like to Hurt People.

So it was that I took a girl out on a date to see Wicked City. She showed up in a jaw-droppingly nice dress and those embroidered cloth Chinese slippers. I was a fucking moron punk rocker, so I think I wore olive drab cargo pants cut off at the knees and an XL-sized Ramones shirt -- XL even though I was 5'7" and weighed 110 pounds. What the hell was this girl thinking?

She took the film pretty well. Laughed at the spider-vagina, winced a bit when the demon tentacles started slithering into the chick character's mouth, but all in all, she seemed to enjoy the movie, though she freely admitted it wasn't something she was likely to rush out to see again. Wicked City wasn't what caused our relationship to peter out. It was me, as is often the case. I was still addicted to pretending like being punk rock was some kind of insane revolutionary lifestyle that she would never understand, and I was better off dating some gaunt, lazy chick in a Black Flag t-shirt and possessed of no real interest in anything other than studded leather bracelets and sitting on the couch.

Needless to say given that lengthy intro I wrote, the circumstances under which I saw Wicked City go a long way to shaping my opinion about the film. Although the night we saw it was wonderful, and we were in at the apex of our youthful romance, Wicked City still represents badly blown opportunities, missed chances, and a commitment to awful decision making. My God, that gal was something. And I was an ass who started blowing her off basically because she wouldn't listen to Minor Threat. Wicked City is a painful reminder of how big an idiot I can be. When I watch it, I get a little misty-eyed and start thinking about the past. I raise my gin and tonic to the stars and say, well, I don't say anything.

Granted, it's a funny movie to turn one toward bittersweet reflection, because it's full of bad-ass dudes with guns blowing the crap out of demons that are prone to probing the nethers of a woman with their slime-dripping tentacles, usually against said woman's will. But then, I took a date to see it, so what the hell (if you used the link above to skip to this point and are wondering what I'm talking about, don't you wish you'd read the whole thing now)?

Given the sheer number of absurdly pointless and idiotic things people are allowed to study for their doctoral thesis, I'm sure someone somewhere has sold some desperate-to-be-hep professor in a tweed jacket and bow tie on the notion that it is academically valuable to become a doctor in the history of Japanese tentacle porn. I did not have the foresight to try and pass this off as a thesis, since like all punk rockers I was trying to pass off writing about punk rock as a thesis-worthy topic. So I am not the world's foremost authority on the social and artistic history of tentacle porn. I shall endeavor to do my best to cover the basics. WWII: America drops two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bunta Sugawara survives and begins his long journey through the criminal underworld in post-war Hiroshima. A slew of restrictions are put on Japanese cinema to make sure nothing come sup that'll get the Japanese all riled up and becoming a handful for MacArthur.

Korean War: we figure at this point that the Japanese are basically pretty cool. But many of the restrictions put in place remain. Most famous among them: a ban on showing, in film or still photo or illustration, human genitalia, sexual penetration, or pubic hair. During the seventies, Japanese filmmakers are forced to become increasingly clever in the way they go about depicting erotic acts of wanton carnality, giving rise to a country with more strategically placed candles and potted plants than anywhere else in the world. Porno films are still made, but the pubic region is blurred by unsightly optical mosaics or fogging.

This ban on pubic hair remains intact clear through the nineties. But enterprising smut makers and a population generally sick of strategically placed candles and intrusive mosaics succeed in punching through reform that allows for on-camera pubic hair, though the actual penis and vagina are still illegal. This ban seems increasingly pointless and more about stubbornness with the advent of the "thin mosaic" technique, but we're straying off topic here.

Looking for a way they could legally depict the dirty, disgusting act of sex and the vile, evil, naughty portions of the human anatomy, Japanese manga and anime artists came up with a brilliant idea. Exactly who first thought it up I don't know, but the thought was that these guys could freely draw penis-shaped tentacles attached to a variety of horrific creatures and get away with it since, technically, they weren't drawing a penis. It was just a penis-shaped tentacle. Plus, this way, you could violate a woman in multiple orifices, providing fun for the whole family. My assumption was that this first showed up in manga somewhere, but as I'm lacking my Doctorate in Tentacle Porn, I don't know. I'm sure someone does though. The most famous appearance of tentacle porn in anime was in the infamous Urotsuki Doji or Legend of the Overfiend, but Wicked City might very well have been the first tentacle film out of the gate -- though you can't really call it porn, and you certainly can't put it in the same class as slimy, hilarious filth like Overfiend.


In fact, like many "firsts," Wicked City is really only tangentially related, at best, to the world of tentacle porn that exploded in a luminescent white glob after the release of Urotsuki Doji. There is a tentacle rape in Wicked City, but it's not presented hardcore. There is additional nudity and sexuality in the movie as well, but once again nothing on the level of porn, and really no different from what was in Golgo 13, except that it involves demons and thus lends itself to a more twisted and surreal artistic sensibility. Considering what gets produced these days, Wicked City is relatively tame -- relative, remember, to films in which multi-tentacled demons slather naked women with otherworldly goo. These days, of course, artists get away pretty frequently with drawing full-on penetration and genitalia. Even Overfiend got away with it in 1989, and since then plenty of other anime titles have skirted the No-Dingalings Law, as it was officially known in the Japanese parliament. Yet there are still tons of cheap, crude tentacle porn releases every year. This would be primarily because it turns out some people prefer watching slimy demon tentacles rather than human parts poking around in bodily openings. I'm really not in the game of making moral calls on stuff like this, so we'll just leave it at, "some people preferred the penis stand-in over the actual penis."

You could really understand Wicked City pretty well without understanding this roughly sketched history of tentacle porn (I didn't even get into animism and the role of the octopus in ancient Japanese art, because that's for whoever is writing their thesis about this crap), but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway because it would be good for a larf. So now, when you are trying to impress the doe-eyed Gothic Lolitas hanging out at Otakon, you can do it by saying, "Actually, tentacle rape can trace its roots back to the early days of Shintoism and the belief that certain animals were types of gods. Plus, the octopus, you know. Have you ever looked at one of those things?" If they ask you where you got all your sick information (they will ask you this as a delaying tactic so they can get to their mace, and rightfully so), you can puff up your chest like a rutting pigeon and proudly proclaim that it was "from the same guy who told to watch a Filipino midget spy film, then ditched a beautiful and charming woman because she didn't want to listen to Youth of Today."

I compared the horrible, perverting, youth-corrupting filth present in Wicked City with the filth in Golgo 13, and if you're going to compare this movie to anything, it compares well to Golgo 13 even though on the surface the two seem pretty dissimilar. Both look to a combination of 40s film noir, 70s grindhouse sleaze, and 80s Miami Vice color schemes to achieve a look that is unique and new yet instantly familiar. Wicked City doesn't look exactly like Golgo 13, but one can definitely see parallels in their approach to artwork -- basically, they develop a different style from the same source material.

Likewise, Wicked City continues the tendency of 80s anime to look to past American pulp writing as another source of inspiration. If Odin is a throwback to the writing of AE van Vogt, and Golgo 13 is a throwback to the gritty crime writing of Chandler, Hammet, and the 60s espionage potboilers that followed Ian Fleming's James Bond template, Wicked City can trace its roots back to the pulp writing of H.P. Lovecraft (yes, he wrote serial pulps) and the Lovecraft-inspired horror-pulp of R.E. Howard (best known for creating the character Conan the Barbarian). Howard and Lovecraft were regular correspondents with one another -- friends as much as two insane pulp writers can be friends with each other. Lovecraft's ever-expanding Cthulu mythos was a major influence on Howard, who wrote stories that dabbled in Lovecraft's universe, but with more of the gung-ho brawn that identifies Howard's writing. Howard's own endearing contribution to the world of horror pulp is the grim wandering Puritan Solomon Kane, who walks the earth forever in combat with ghosts, pirates, cannibals, ancient civilizations, living corpses, and other ghoulish delights.

However, while Howard's sensibilities may have informed some of the more macho elements present in Wicked City (as well as his cruder but more enthusiastic style of writing), it's obvious that this and most of the subsequent demon-oriented anime titles (both hentai and not) are heavily influenced by a combination of Japanese folklore and grotesque H.P. Lovecraft imagery. The plot of the film is, like most anime plots, pretty simple once you strip away the orbiting insanity, much like the plot to any fantastical pulp story: there exist two worlds, our own and a shadowy world of demons. While all humans look basically the same, however, the demons get to have a billion different appearances, which doesn't seem fair. Anyway, for centuries or so, the two worlds have managed to coexist, but lately, a passel of rabble rousers from the demon world have decided to start wreaking havoc in our world. It's up to the mysterious Black Guard -- a security force comprised of members from both worlds, but mostly, it seems, ours -- to keep a lid on the situation until a horny old negotiator from the demon realm can broker a ceasefire. Assigned to protect negotiator Giuseppe Maiyart (irritatingly enough, I can't find any accurate listings for the Japanese voice acting cast) are Black Guard members Taki, from the human world, and Makie, from the demon world.

Taki is a grim-faced young man with a no-nonsense approach to his supernatural job (not unlike the sort of blue collar, daily grind" approach to fantastic events that you find in Hellboy). Makie is the beautiful (as always) otherworldly woman with razor-sharp retractable fingernails (shades of William Gibson's Neuromancer perhaps?). They wrok well together, but trouble arises when Guiseppe's impish nature combines with Taki falling in love with Makie, affording the rogue demons a chance to take her hostage in exchange for getting Taki to abandon his post guarding the diminutive negotiator (who is sort of like Yoda, but if Yoda wore track suits and jacked off a lot -- which maybe he does. Unfortunately, the Star Wars movies never explore that).

Wicked City was famous for a clever script, engaging artwork, and some truly phantasmagorical and imaginative set pieces. It was infamous for some of these same set pieces. As mentioned, for instance, this is the first instance of which I know of the now ubiquitous tentacle rape, though again, it's not a hardcore scene and is pretty mild (as mild as demon rape can be, I suppose) on the grand scale of the perversions anime offers the daring and/or sadly horny viewer. The film opens with it's most famous/infamous scene: Taki meeting a hot broad in a bar, then taking her home for a little lovin', then having her turn into a giant spider beast thing with the head and torso of a woman, but with long stocking-clad spider legs and a roaring, drooling fanged mouth where the vagina usually goes. Far from being sexually explicit, this scene is more grotesquely imaginative and crazy than it is offensive. It certainly sets the mood for what's to come and serves as an easy warning beacon. If you get freaked out by this, it ain't getting any more kid-friendly later in the movie. The body horror sequence is lightened somewhat when, shortly thereafter, Taki's superior says that maybe this experience will teach him to be "a littlre sexually cautious next time." Other notorious sequences involve Giuseppe running off to get a little action from a hooker, only to fall prey to a demon woman whose whole body becomes a malleable putty and Taki being swallowed whole by a cooing demon woman's fanged vagina while trying to rescue Makie.

So yeah, it's all pretty twisted, and if you want a fine example of the gory excesses Japanese anime was willing to explore during the 1980s, you need look no further than Wicked City. It's full of ghoulish beasts, dripping tentacles, spraying blood, and spilling guts. But like much of the best anime to come from that decade of gleeful abandon, what sets Wicked City above the seething sea of horror anime is the fact that, coexisting with the repulsive Lovecraftian nightmares and grindhouse exploitation is a movie that is thoughtfully crafted and beautifully animated. Wicked City plays out as a parable of Japanese society in the 1980s. Recovery from the war was complete. Rather than being a limping wounded man, Japan suddenly found itself a world power once again, but this time without the need of a imperialist military. But with such rapid success comes confusion. Japan's image of itself as a well-ordered and well-behaved society was challenged at every turn by the simple realities of life. Some humans can act as cogs in a well-oiled, polite, bowing machine. But in a society like Japan, for every cog there is going to be a square peg that throws a kink into the works. The more repressive your culture, in other words, the more outrageous and extreme the counter-culture. Which is why Japan gave birth to loony youth fashion cultures, noise music, and Kinji Fukasaku yakuza films. Beneath that well-ordered veneer, Japan was as much a boiling cauldron of lust and perversion as any other country, with the possible exception of Germany.

Wicked City is rife with images of archetypal Japanese salarymen -- Taki and the rest of the Guard where the requisite black suit, black tie ensemble of the salaryman, despite their incredible mission -- and women being ripped asunder by animal desires and passions they've sought endlessly to master and suppress. The demons are the wretched excess that so many Japanese (and other nationalities, for that matter) citizens are torn between denying and embracing. Giving oneself over entirely to them results in, you know, being devoured by toothy vaginas. Denying them entirely results in a similarly nasty fate. Survival, it would seem, involves a merging of these two polar opposite tendencies -- which we see in the relationship that emerges between Taki and Makie.

This sort of intellectual underpinning of the often horrific action on screen is what keeps Wicked City a source of constant debate among people who still remember anime from the 80s. When we screened it as part of the Asian Film Festival, it was both lauded and condemned. It certainly created a host of varied and often conflicting opinions, even among types of people usually united by a common goal. Had the movie been simple smut of the caliber seen in most tentacle porn since then, it wouldn't spark this sort of debate. Well, given the fact that people will debate pretty much anything, I guess it might have. Point is, Wicked City has a lot more going for it than just the grisly imagery.

The Tokyo of Wicked City is realized in a way that augments the thematic currents of the story. It's a fairly recognizable world, and it just so happens that incredibly bizarre things happen. Once again, as I've mentioned in plenty of other reviews (if only I could remember which ones), Wicked City succeeds in being creepy by taking the mundane and familiar and tweaking it in a way that keeps it comforting and familiar but also unsettling alien and inexplicable. It's hardboiled detective noir filtered through the askew vision of a director like David Cronenberg. You know something just ain't quite right, even before spider-women start scurrying down the facades of otherwise dull and unimpressive high rise apartment complexes. Like many films, animated and otherwise, it seems to use Blade Runner as its art design starting point, but rather than aping Blade Runner, it takes the foundation concept -- a future that is equal parts gee whiz sci-fi and nourish antiquity -- and puts its own spin on it. There's never any real doubt that Wicked City is set in the near future, but there's not much on display to actually say it's the future. It's simply the way the film is colored and the tone it sets that places it in the world of scifi-noir.


The artwork is gritty and expertly executed, boasting the warmth and intricacy of hand-drawn art rather than the polish and perfection of more modern computer-assisted drawing. It relies heavily on the blue and red palette, a nod perhaps to the playful yet sinister way in which Italian directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento played with lighting and used it not to reflect reality, but rather to convey a certain mood. Similarly, many of the shots in Wicked City seem to be nods to the old EC Comics horror anthologies, which were probably as much an influence on the tone and style of the film as the old pulp stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The red and blue shaded "shocking scene of unspeakable terror" was a trademark of the EC titles, and Wicked City knows when to pull out homages to those equally pulpy old comic books.

If the plot of Wicked City is nothing overly impressive -- cops guard the witness under siege, basically -- the way in which the film executes the typical set-up is nothing short of staggering in its creativity. The pace is languid without being slow, and the many plot twists stem organically and logically from the story rather than being disjointed zingers thrown in with no reason other than to shock and titilate. Even the film's notorious sexual content is at home and justified by the storytelling. Wicked City is awash with set pieces that manage to be repulsive, beautiful, shocking, and melancholy -- often all at the same time. Often, you can't believe the crazy stuff that's going on, but it totally sucks you in, and it's pulled off so spectacularly in the artwork that you find yourself emotionally involved even when the characters are thinly sketched. It's an atrocity show from which you can't extract yourself. It's also action-packed and rarely lets up long enough to become dull. There's scarcely a pause as the film skips from one eye-popping set-up to the next. The end result is more a series of individual action pieces than it is a full film, but the narrative is just enough to pull the whole thing together into a cohesive and comprehensible feature film that continues to be interesting almost two decades after its initial release. Add to that the fact that the story takes itself completely seriously -- even with the addition of a horny lump-handed old dude in a Sopranos track suit. As with all the best pulp, Wicked City creates a completely outrageous situation and then handles it with such earnest, solemn-faced seriousness that you are willing to buy into the illutsion no matter how crazy it becomes.

Of course, it's hard to sit through a film like Wicked City and not think about the attitude it expresses toward women. OK, maybe it's not that hard, but as a reviewer, I try to do my best to cover as many elements of a story as I can, even if I don't find them especially compelling. It's not debatable that many people see the film as rather strongly anti-female. After all, their sexual organs are often seen as slobbering beasts that can swallow a man whole and destroy him. People often make the mistake of thinking that what a film depicts is an accurate reflection of the attitudes of the film maker, which fails to take into account the fact that someone may be making a statement in reaction to something rather then in opposition of it (not to mention that maybe they were just using their imaginations). Whether director Yoshiaki Kawajiri and writers Kisei Choo and Hideyuki Kikuchi have deep-rooted issues to work out with women I can't say. The way I've always read Wicked City isn't that it's an expression of the creator's fears and hang-ups, but rather an indictment of a society (not just Japanese) that both outlaws and fetishizes female sexuality. Society is endless teasing people when it comes to sexuality, hinting at it, selling it, then telling you you're dirty or evil for wanting it. Look at the porn movie industry -- the world's biggest multi-billion dollar industry that no one has ever seen anything from, or so each individual would have you believe. That sort of twisted entice-and-deny mentality is common everywhere, and ultimately, it creates a destructive mindset that reconciles the fear of the unknown with the desire for that same unknown through acts of violence. In the case of Wicked City, Taki and the other Black Guard are typical men raise din a repressive society. It's no wonder that female genitalia so often manifest themselves as menacing and otherworldly.

But I'll be honest. Although I took plenty of film studies classes that dwell on sexuality and sexual politics in films, it really doesn't interest me. So I'll mention what I think, but it’s not the reason I go to the movies, and it's not the over-arching issue that defines my opinion of Wicked City. I like Wicked City because it's an action-packed pulp horror comic come to life, infused with acid trip imagery that rattles the brain. It's sick, daring, and in my opinion, brilliantly written. The artwork is gorgeous even when it's horrific. It certainly doesn't ever deserve to be thrown onto the hentai rubbish heap, or even blamed for the proliferation of cheaper, sleazier versions of itself that came from knock-off artists who were probably more inspired by Overfiend than by Wicked City anyway.

Yoshiaki Kawajiri began his directing career in 1984 with the feature film Lensman, which was one of the very first anime titles to incorporate CGI into the preceding without it being as noticeably and hilariously pathetic as the CGI helicopters from Golgo 13. Wicked City was his second feature, and he would go on to direct another demon invasion themed movie, Demon City Shinjiku, which is similar to Wicked City in some ways, but very different in others. It lacks the sex and extreme gore, but also lacks the expert creation of dark mood and atmosphere, playing out more like a straight action film than piece of horror pulp. Wicked City made huge waves in America, at least amongst cult film and anime fans, when it made the rounds in the usual format (ie, a dubbed version from Streamline, using the usual Streamline crew of English language voice actors and being of about the same quality as their dub of Golgo 13). Demon City less so, but Kawajiri scored another huge cult fave in 1993 with Ninja Scroll, which retains some of Wicked City's affection for grotesqueries and a Grand Guignol style of film making. Similar, but with more Gothic lace and such, is his recent resurrection of another icon of 80s anime, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. Kawajiri had nothing to do with the original Vampire Hunter D, but it obviously shares a lot of common ground with Wicked City as it indulges in a mind-blowing parade of freakish monsters, so it's not all that odd that Kawajiri would find himself directing a follow-up. Additional success with X and with pieces of The Animatrix insure that Kawajiri continues to be an important and vital contributor to the ever-expanding world of animated filmmaking. Wow, that last sentence sounds like it came from his resume cover letter. Let me rewrite it: Kawajiri continues to be an important and vital contributor to the ever-expanding world of people being ripped in half by demons and having their guts spill out all over the ground.

Writer Kisei Choo had considerably less of a career, as Wicked City is the only credit I could turn up for him. It wouldn't surprise me to one day learn that Kisei Choo is just a pseudonym for some other, more established writer who was afraid of what being involved with a project like Wicked City might do to his career -- as if such things ever seem to have that detrimental an impact. You can write the goriest, nastiest piece of perverted crap Japan has ever seen (and that's saying something), then turn around and write for Hamtaro if you want. That's just the way things seem to happen. Story developer Hideyuki Kikiuchi had better luck. Aside from being a writer for the original Vampire Hunter D as well as Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Demon City Shinjiku, and A Wind Named Amnesia. But he's not a screenwriter. Most of his work is in story outlines or novel writing.


There was a live-action adaption produced in 1992 by Tsui Hark, who likely did more of the directing than credited director Tai Kit Mak. I haven't seen the film since 1995 or so, so I'm not going to pretend like I'm in a position to write a proper review comparing it to the animated source material. It was less saucy, with only a hint of nudity, and focused on the relationship between two male members of the Black Guard: Taki (the always somnabulistic Leon Lai) and his half-demon partner Ken (Jacky Cheung, who gets to turn into a fanged demn and chew scenery the way he so loves to do). Joey Wong Tsu-hsien (Chinese Ghost Story, and that City Hunter movie starring Jackie Chan) was in the mix as well. About all I remember was the film employed a pastel blue and pink color palette similar but softer to the anime's red and blue, the Black Guard combatted demons using psychic powers that can only be invoked by pointing at your own forehead, and the finale was Taki and Ken riding around atop 747 commercial airliners and giving speeches as they tried to destroy and/or save one another. Or maybe it was Roy Cheung who was riding around on top of a 747. Look, at least two guys were riding around atop 747, and that was pretty cool. The movie itself was, as best as I can remember, pleasing to me without being really blow-away impressive. Now I feel like watching it again. Producer/stealth director Tsui Hark, aside from being the father of modern Hong Kong special effects, was also the man behind hooking up with a Japanese production and art crew to make the first really big budget Chinese animated feature, A Chinese Ghost Story: The Animation, which I highly recommend. Before that, Chinese animation was all Bruce Lee and Chinese Gods, which I also highly recommend.

All in all, I really like Wicked City, and feel that it's not all that shameful to admit such a thing. It's a screwed up movie, but not nearly so much as the hype might lead you believe, and certainly nowhere near the sort of trash Overfiend is. Yes, Overfiend looms like a many-tentacled penis demon over all the 80s. That's why it keeps coming up. Plus, it's pretty funny to keep bringing it up, at least to me. I don't really recommend you do what I did and bring a date to see Wicked City, but I still think it's a high water mark (but not the highest) of the seamy 80s anime that invaded America, and well worth checking out once you've steeled yourself against the more tasteless images the film is going to throw at you. Wicked City is really adult-oriented anime done right. Heck, it's not even as gratuitous as Golgo 13. And anyway, like I always say: don't you have something better to do than be offended by twenty-year-old Japanese cartoons? That's like still being offended by The Canterbury Tales.

Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Year: 1987