DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 1989, Japan. Starring Yasunori Matsumoto, Koichi Yamadera, Yoko Asagami, Daisuke Gori, Tomohiro Nishimura, Maya Okamoto, Hirotaka Suzuoki, Yumi Takada, Norio Wakamoto. Directed by Hideki Takayama. Written by Sho Aikawa.

I was having a hard time starting this review, and I'm not sure why. I don't mean that I was caught in some moral dilemma, wondering if I should dare discuss such a filthy, irredeemable piece of trash -- I think we all know how such a moral dilemma would hash out if I'm involved. I guess it was just a case of writer's block, or exhaustion. Or maybe it was the fact that there were just so many things to say, so many approaches that could be taken in discussing the source material, that I was overwhelmed. Perhaps even spoiled for choice. And under a bit of pressure. An epic as vast and sprawling and serious as this demands an appropriately grave and serious demeanor. Would I do the subject justice? Would my review be deserving of such a monumental work of art? In the end, I simply had to accept that sometimes words don't come easy, even to a rambling windbag like me, but like the titular character of the Overfiend, while words may not come easily, they must come never the less.

Which brings me to the disagreeable preface that must be applied to a review of a film of this nature. As regular readers know, I pride myself in ardently defending the standards and decency of the community. Luckily, since the community to which I refer is the Internet, which means pretty much anything short of Hitler jerking off on Jesus while the Savior makes sweet love to a little boy can be considered decent and acceptable. Still, even with the community standards of the Internet thus established, I feel like I should warn some of our less seasoned and no doubt happier readers that the movie about which we're going to talk today is a work of questionable morality and ill repute.


At this point in my career, I don't think any recreated act on film or video could manage to shock or offend me. Amuse, perhaps. Disappoint, sure. But when you've been at this for as long as I have, the disconnect between make-believe and reality becomes crystal clear, and once you've managed that, there's not much point in getting offended by goofy make-believe sleaze. But I understand that not all of you share this particular immunity toward offense, for a variety of valid personal reasons, so allow me to warn you now: Legend of the Overfiend is utter and absolute filth. Unless, like me, what was human in you died a long time ago, you will find this series inexcusably tasteless, offensive, and perhaps even upsetting. In a couple weeks, I'll be reviewing the ridiculously fun and enjoyable Bollywood caper Shaan, and I suggest that if you have heart or soul left in your being, you simply rejoin us then and give this whole horrible Legend of the Overfiend thing a miss.

On the other hand, if you find cartoon tentacle porn more absurd than upsetting, and if you want to slog through a film that is indeed filthy and wretched, but also one of the single most important titles in the history of anime in the United States, then steel yourself, make sure your boss isn't working (I'm writing this at work -- I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be reading it there), and prepare to submerge yourself in a series that is impressive both for how callously offensive and perverse it strives to be while also striving to be colossally epic and vast in scale -- sort of like the Old Testament.


When, during the summer of 2006, Teleport City decided to dig about in the waters of anime from the 1980s, we mentioned on more than one occasion that the eighties were probably the most glorious decade of unfettered excess and decadence in the anime world. The giant robots and melancholy space pirates of the 1970s gave way to hot chicks in battle armor, exploding heads, and the now infamous birth of tentacle porn, among other things. While today's anime market may be choked with cheap hentai titles full of tentacle rape and nurses pooping on each other, it's neither as shocking nor as notable today as it was in the eighties, for two main reasons. First, the eighties did it first, and just about everything that happens today is derivative of the sleazy pioneers of the 1980s. Modern sleazeball anime may have plumbed further into the depths of human perversions and replaced magical demon bodily fluids with actual human bodily fluids, but given how mainstreamed porn and sexual deviance has become (and God bless it!), even the most shockingly sick and twisted modern hentai lacks the punch of its forefathers, if for no other reason than we've seen it all before. I don't know what it says about me or society that a title like Cool Devices can come out, and my reaction is a decadent sigh of boredom and, "Oh, ho hum. He's peeing on his sister."

Second, modern hentai (for you people who don't take time to acquaint yourself with esoteric terms, "hentai" is what people call porn anime so they don't have to call it porn anime) exists largely and almost exclusively within the confines of the porn ghetto. There is very little, if any, cross-over between hentai and the more mainstream world of shrieking blonde ninjas in orange jumpsuits telling me to "believe it!" Of course, I speak only of official production anime; if one needs to find the crossover between porn and mainstream anime, one need only turn to our dear old friend, the Internet, which will allow you to access a whole world of fanfic in which the characters of Naruto lick each others buttholes while fending off an endless attack of bad grammar and spelling mistakes. But that's fanfic, and it's a ghetto all its own. Only Dragonball filk is lower.


There was plenty of underground hentai in the 80s, of course, but there were also several titles which crossed the line (in more ways than one) and either flirted with or achieved legitimate mainstream crossover success. Here in the United States, when anime broke in the latter half of the Reagan era, it was defined primarily by three titles, though only two are ever really acknowledged as having reigned supreme, while the third is filed away as sort of this guilty curiosity that no one really saw, but don't let that sort of anime history revisionism fool you. There were three king hell titles: Akira was the obvious top of the heap, followed by the OVA Bubblegum Crisis, which dominated the home video market for reasons I still cannot fathom to this day. I guess it was all we had at the time, and it was better than watching MD Geist.

The third title comes to us courtesy of one of the creators of the classic anime series Yamato, aka Starblazers in the United States, and even though Akira is named time and again as the defining moment in 80s anime and one of the landmark accomplishments in the history of anime as a whole, it was the bastard son of a writer-director-producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki -- The Nish, as he has become known lately -- that really defined anime in the mainstream press. In between creating Starblazers, delighting generations with Odin: Photon Space Sailer Starlight, and shooting cannons off on his private yacht, Nishizaki found time to serve as producer for a new series which, unlike all his previous ideas, wasn't just a rehash of Yamato. Following the lead of Lovecraft-inspired horror that flirted with graphic sex presented to us in Wicked City, Nishizaki decided that the one thing wrong with that movie was that it only featured some sex thrown in with its violence, and never had the guts to show full-on penetration of a woman by a gigantic demon penis.


And so, as the 90s came to a close and the window for getting a high-profile work of such decadence and depravity was closing, Nishizaki collected together a crew that included director Hideki Takayama (still brand new to the game in 1989, but he's since gone on to direct all sorts of screwed-up demon rape porn, and for some reason, Sakura Wars) and writer Sho Aikawa (who was fresh off the popular title Vampire Princess Miyu and would go on to write for Fullmetal Alchemist), and together, they made a little OVA series called Urotsukidoji, more popularly known as Legend of the Overfiend.

This is a pretty dubious assembly of talent, and one sort of has to stretch the meaning of the word talent to really fit them all in. After all, Nishizaki hadn't really come up with anything memorable since Starblazers, and he seemed to be batshit insane in addition. Sho Aikawa -- who I'd like to think is the same Sho Aikawa who would go on to acting fame in Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive trilogy, but I'm pretty sure it isn't -- may have achieved some degree of respectability with Vampire Princess Miyu, but that was flirtation with respectability, at best, and you have to do much better work if you want to make people forget about you also having written Dog Soldier and Angel Cop. And director Hideki Takayama? Other than becoming the go-to guy for Overfiend sequels and rip-offs, he doesn't have much to offer. But the fact remains that while they may not have been impressive names, they were still names, and they had some legitimate work under the belt. And The Nish, crazy or not, still had Yamato era clout that helped make his own private exploration of ridiculously grotesque and pornographic extremes more of a high profile release than the average piece of hentai naughtiness.


But whatever respectability the Overfiend saga -- and porn aside, it is a saga, complete with a vast and ambitious personal mythology and epic scope -- may have squeezed out in Japan is nothing compared to what happened to the thing when it hit the United States. It became a cult phenom that, for a brief time, very nearly rivaled the status of Akira, albeit with a decidedly different tone in those who talked about it. I remember seeing it for the first time in 1990, when a friend who was heavy into trading VHS tapes to get obscure horror films, ended up with a copy on a tape where it shared space with some Japanese porn movie about a woman pursued by a garbage bag containing her murdered husband, and an underground video of some chick performing "hanadensha," or "pussy arts," such as blowing up balloons, shooting a dart gun, smoking a cigarette, and, umm, filling herself up with squirming, live eels. Yeah, I really don't have any excuse whatsoever, other than it was pretty late, and we sure did laugh a lot.

It was just the first episode of Overfiend, fuzzy and with no translation, so all we really knew was that there was a spectacle on the screen the likes of which we'd never really seen, not even in Wicked City. And we weren't the only ones. Bootleg copies of this "ridiculously screwed up thing from Japan" were circulating like wild fire throughout the cult film underworld, and while many looked on with awe-inspired disgust, that doesn't change the fact that many looked on, always corrupted by a friend waving a VHS tape and saying, "Dude, you have got to see this!" So many saw it, in fact, that the Overfiend eventually crept into mainstream consciousness and became the poster boy for how hideous and corrupt anime was. Not just porn anime, but all anime. It didn't matter if it was the gender bending shenanigans of Ranma 1/2, the turgid teen romance of Kigamure Orange Road, or the epic science fiction of Akira. Overfiend, as far as the local newscaster was concerned, embodied them all, and all anime looked like and was as perverse as Urotsukidoji. If only. I might have finished Kigamure Orange Road if that had been the case.


Of course, it's not like anime was totally innocent of the charges. The 80s were, as we've said, pretty packed to the gills with messed up stuff. If anything, The Overfiend was simply the trends of the 1980s taken to their most logical extreme, or as logical as Nishizaki was ever capable of being, and exploding in the final year of that decade with all the gruesome force of the Overfiend's orgasm blowing some chick's head off in a messy splash of blood, brains, and semen. It was the last gasp of the twisted, free-for-all of the 1980s. After that, anime settled down, and the porn settled to the bottom of the barrel. In time, when old timers would go back and talk about the seminal movies of the 1980s, they would neglect to mention the most "seminal" of them all. If Urotuskidoji was mentioned, it was usually as an offhanded aside, or a sneering condemnation of how this tasteless abomination ruined anime and made everyone thing anime fans were all a bunch of murderous pervs. Rarely will they mention that, for better or for worse, damn near everyone who watched anime in those days saw it. Rarely will they mention that it was, again for better or for worse, a defining title of the era, and that among other dubious claims to fame, it was the first anime feature (when the OVA episodes were edited together to create a feature film) to be released in both dubbed and subtitled format not just to U.S. home video -- but to U.S. movie theaters as well.


The Overfiend gets no respect, and frankly, it doesn't deserve much. The animation is sometimes hit or miss, occasionally nicely realized, and in some cases bordering on great; the story is scatter-brained; and yes, it's packed full of misogynistic violence toward women, underaged sex (though the warning at the front of the film swears the high school characters are all over the age of nineteen), and rape that culminates in exploding heads. It's just not very good. But it does have its moments, and good or not, it played a huge role in defining the formative years of anime, and deserves, if nothing else, to be recognized for its contributions (be there good or ill) and its rightful place in the history of anime. So it was that I decided that, while I wasn't going to champion the series (I save my Nishizaki championing for Odin), I would at least try to put it in it's proper context, and I would do so with the help, should they chose to offer it, of the great and mighty torchbearers of celebrating "old school" anime, the Anime World Order podcast. Of course, they're a podcast, and I'm a written review website, so I don't know exactly how this collaboration will work out, but that's all part of the fun.


Of course, as soon as Gerald from the AWO took me up on the offer, I had to figure out exactly how I was going to deal with such a notorious and admittedly irredeemable piece of filth. The Overfiend, I mean, not Gerald. In my younger years, I would have simply indulged in it with reckless abandon, celebrating the filth and the fury with slimy screencaps and interminable gusto. I am older now, and not so prone to adolescent fits of petty offensiveness, but I'm also still not offended by things that are saucy or stupid, or in the case of Urotsukidoji, both saucy and stupid. And in the end, Urotsukidoji is definitely stupider than it is offensive. In fact, I find the whole thing so absurd, so totally ludicrous as to be inoffensive, because seriously, man, how can anyone take this crap seriously? There are much scarier things in the world and much scarier things in the world of anime, and they are called moe and harem shows, but we'll come to those later.

So in deference to my more sensitive readers who do not share my callous disregard for what you humans call morality, I'll do my best to exercise some degree of restraint, which may be an odd thing to do in the case of Urotsukidoji -- but only just barely, because while I may claim that the purpose of this review is to put this much maligned piece of trash in its rightful place in the pantheon of anime, my real motivation is simply to have a good laugh, which ultimately, is about all you should get from something as completely goofy as the Overfiend.


Our story begins with narration courtesy of a guy who seems to be competing with Tomisaburo Wakiyama as Ogami Ito for the deepest voice in the world. He lays out the basics for us -- demon world and human world, one intruding on the other -- the usual. And there's a chosen one who will rise up and cleanse the world and unite us all while demons with six breasts do it doggy style to clue parents in to the fact that they shouldn't have rented this movie for their kids, even though the kids themselves are no doubt appreciative. Right away Nishizaki clues us in to the fact that there's not going to be much in the way of originality on display in this story. We then meet the nominal hero of our story, a goofy peeping tom named Nagumo, who alternates his days between peeking in the girls' locker room and being licked on the cheek by the number one ace hero of the basketball court during some weird Japanese high school sport in which basketball games are accompanied by a girls' gymnastics routine. Watching everything from up in the rafters is Amano, the new kid at school who no one seems to notice has catlike whiskers. Amano is searching for the titular Overfiend, the super-being foretold by prophecy to be the savior of the world. Amano is pretty convinced that it's that cheek-licking basketball guy, but Amano's sexy sister Megumi is convinced that it's someone else, possibly nerdy perv Nagumo. Either way, once again we see that ancient beings relying on a "chosen one" is always a stupid idea, because the chosen one is always some kind of a chump. Here we get a face-licking basketball star or a masturbating nerd. Nice going, prophecy of old.

When next we meet the brave and noble Nagumo, he is slinking into the school to peep on Ameki, the sweet girl next door on whom he has a crush, and one of the female teachers. When it turns out that the teacher intends to sex up the young student, Nagumo assumes his standard position of peeking in. But when it's further revealed that the teacher is, in fact, a hideous demonic monster that is going to rape Akemi via a twitching tangle of giant tentacle penises that spurt glowing neon goo, well, Nagumo still just sort of squats there peeping through the crack in the doorway. It's not until Amano shows up that the sexual assault is halted thanks to some good ol' magical intervention that results in exploding heads.


The good thing about Legend of the Overfiend is that it doesn't try to trick you into thinking it's something it's not. If you are going to be offended and disgusted by the movie, it makes sure you know that from the very first few minutes. That way, at least you haven't wasted your time. Pretty much everything that will jam pack the rest of the series running time is put up front for your consideration in this opening scene, so you can't say Nishizaki didn't warn you. Personally, as I said before, the whole scenario is so utterly silly and juvenile and presented in such an over-the-top manner that it's really hard for me to feel offended in any way. I would have loved to have been sitting in on The Nish and his crew when they were writing the story for this absurd exercise in the extreme. Although the story itself is presented in a serious fashion, I can't imagine anyone taking it the least bit seriously when they were writing it.

But then again, Nishizaki is batshit insane, so who knows? Whatever sexual and psychological hang-ups he and the society in which he lived might have had are certainly laid bare in The Overfiend. There is an obvious fear and lack of understanding in regards to women. Lesbians are all secretly drooling demons who have hidden their giant penises behind a veneer of femininity. And even as they paint a terrified phobia of homosexuality, they fetishize the penis to a degree that would even make Tom of Finland blush. If you are the type to analyze such things, it's worth noting that The Nish made his millions working on the Yamato series. The original battleship Yamato was a massive World War II ship that was supposed to be the pride and joy of the Japanese people and a symbol of their might. Its construction bankrupted the Japanese military, and during it's first major combat operation, it was sunk by American airplanes. Still, however, the Yamato is held up by many -- mostly men -- as a great symbol of pride despite it being a catastrophic failure. More than a few people have said that the Yamato was nothing more than the "big dick" syndrome. Theirs was the biggest and that made them the baddest. Never mind that the thing turned out to be impotent.


So decades later, Nishizaki resurrects the myth of Yamato's grandeur by creating a cartoon series in which the original ship is recovered from its watery grave and turned into a spaceship that will save humanity. If The Nish had his history straight, then there would have been tremendous fanfare and pomp as the space battle cruiser Yamato was launched. Then it would have been shot down by aliens a few minutes later. But that would have been a pretty lame television series, and since Yamato is one of my favorites, I'm glad Nishizaki didn't go that route. And ultimately, I reckon championing the old Yamato battleship is no different than any other country championing their lost causes.

Anyway, after Yamato, Nishizaki made a show about a submarine that's turned into a spaceship -- completely different from the Yamato series, right? Anyway, you may notice that Nishizaki -- who also happens to be a gun and cannon nut, as well as sporting a fondness for speed boats and big yachts -- seems to have a preoccupation with things that are long and cylindrical in shape. And then comes The Overfiend...I've never seen Nishizaki naked, and likely never will, so I can't say what he's compensating for. However, it's pretty obvious that the man has built an entire career around his obsession with his own penis. Overfiend is just the most overt example.


Anyway, having established that this movie is going to be an affront to all that is decent and tasteful in the world, Overfiend then goes on to lay out the rest of its plot, which has got to be one of the most complex and sprawling mythologies ever grafted on to cheap animation and porn. Nishizaki may be obsessed with dicks, he may fear and/or hate women, he may be ripping off Wicked City, but no one can say that the man didn't have vision or put work into the back story of his infamous masterpiece of the grotesque. Spread over the first few episodes of Legend of the Overfiend, we get a story that spans thousands of years and involves everything from depraved captains of industry to Nazi madmen, to peeping tom high school students. As Amano and Megumi continue to try and ferret out the Overfiend -- or Chojin -- other forces from the demon realm seek to do the same. This includes such demon assassin hits as messing with that basketball guy during his orgy, offering up a giant possessed demon penis that will make the school's resident nerd ultra-potent and powerful if he chops off his own useless little member and replaces it, and finally sending a wizardy uber-being out to kill Amano. Just when you think Overfiend can't possibly get any sillier, it finds a way.


Eventually, Nagumo realizes his destiny, but to the horror of Megumi and Amano, it's not the destiny they expected -- and for all that is ridiculous about Overfiend, the final revelation that basically, the people who believed in the prophecy just got it all wrong, is a pretty nice writing touch. The series ends on a cliffhanger of sorts -- with Amano shedding his human disguise and attempting to take on the Overfiend himself while vowing to survive the carnage that comes from the inevitable destruction of the world. Unfortunately, the series is never fully resolved. The final two episodes of the OVA end up being post-apocalyptic side stories that don't really go anywhere, and subsequent sequel series' were equally pointless. Eventually, the final Urotsukidoji series was just a remake of the first series. If you've seen Odin and suffered through its non-ending, then you might pick up that this is sort of a thing for Nishizaki. Unfortunately, Overfiend does not end by randomly cutting to a Loudness music video.


Not all the blame (or credit -- whatever) for Urotsukidoji can be laid at the feet of Nishizaki. Urotsukidoji was actually created by manga artist Toshio Maeda in 1986. Maeda was working as a porn manga artist and had gotten bored, he says, with drawing the same mundane crap over and over. He decided that what erotic manga needed was a dash of grotesque fantasy. Blending his erotic manga with a Lovecraft-esque sense of the horrific, Maeda more or less invented the tentacle porn genre -- yes, it's a genre now -- with tentacles and nightmarish abstractions of the penis standing in for actual sexual organs as a way to skirt Japanese censorship laws. When Nishizaki seized upon Urotsukidoji as the source for his next masterpiece of anime, Maeda's position as the father of sick and twisted cartoon porn was cemented. Maeda went on to create several more of the more infamous high-profile hentai titles of the early 1990s, including the terrible Adventure Kid, Demon Beast Invasion, and La Blue Girl. Maeda is infinitely proud of his legacy and has reportedly even said that he wants "Tentacle Master" inscribed on his tombstone. Urotsukidoji remain his defining "masterpiece."


You know, Urotsukidoji is an absolute mess. Although the high concept is interesting and intricate, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. And it's still largely just a pornographic rip-off of Wicked City with a bit of Akira thrown in (the scene in which the Overfiend comes full into power and decides to destroy the world is very reminiscent of the finale of Akira). It draws from the same Lovecraftian/H.R. Giger vision of horror as Wicked City. The characters are ridiculous -- after being raped in every orifice by a teacher who turns into a slobbering monster, Akemi shows up for school the next day and is basically no more freaked out than, "Boy, that sure was weird." Nagumo is completely impossible to like as a character. I guess the story is ultimately about Amano and, to a lesser degree, Megumi, which is OK since Amano is the only halfways decently developed character in the whole thing. The animation is often incredibly cheap, with limited motion in most scenes. Effort seems to have been put into the big battles and the demon rape, but that's about it.

But for someone as awful as me, there's a perverse enjoyment to be extracted from the nonsense. For one, I admire the ambition of the story. Most of the tentacle porn that would follow in the footsteps of Urotsukidoji was incredibly weak -- basically, they would say, "There's a demon world, and they rape humans and some people fight them," and leave it at that, knowing that the ultimate goal of their little film is to get some lonely perv off, and he's probably not even going to listen to the plot. That wasn't good enough for Nishizaki. The man had created an expansive universe for Yamato, and even for Odin, and he saw no reason that Urotsukidoji shouldn't enjoy the same epic mythology. Never mind that it was an endless parade of filthy porn and callous rape; he was still going to weave a monstrously complex tapestry to serve as the backdrop Also, as cheap as the animation is in most scenes, one does have to admire the imagination that went into the monster design. There are, after all, a lot of monsters in Urotsukidoji, and no two of them look alike. From hulking wolfman-like monsters to grotesque toadmen that dress like Humphrey Bogart, the sheer number of drooling ghouls the art team dreamed up is fascinating. Of course, at the end of the day, it's all about the giant screaming (sometimes literally) cock, but still, points for wickedly sick imagination.


Finally, there's the finale. Although it leaves almost all of the plot threads dangling and is a weak resolution to the story as a whole, the scenes of mass destruction and carnage as the fury of the Chojin and the whole demon world is unleashed on earth are pretty impressive. They obviously cut costs on the rest of the series so they could deliver on the finale, and at least in that respect, Urotsukidoji doesn't disappoint.

But it's still pretty foul. I wouldn't really recommend it, although I was just as enthusiastic in the old days about convincing unsuspecting friends that they should watch it. But there is something grotesquely fascinating about the whole artistic abomination. The incredible insanity and over-the-top spectacle of it all trumps the nasty misogynistic edge and juvenile penis-obsession and really transforms Urotsukidoji into a sleazy carnival sideshow. You hate yourself for looking, but you can't turn away. It's that car wreck everyone slows down to gawk at. As wretched as it may be, it has a strangely hypnotic power that can draw even decent people into its world of laughing demons and spurting bodily fluids.


It might be worth watching just so you can see the cast list for the English dub. Apparently, whoever worked on it was a little embarrassed, so the English cast list includes names like Chris Courage, Rebel Joy, Rosie Palmer, and my two personal favorites, Lucy Morales and Jurgen Offen. I would assume that the use of such names is perfectly in tune with Nishizaki's high school locker room level of discourse. The dubbing was done primarily for the theatrical cut of the film, which combined the first few OVA episodes into one film and cut out all the scenes of actual penetration. The Japanese cast (most of whom elected to have their names left out of the credits) actually includes a lot of experienced actors, including a lot of people The Nish roped in off the Yamato series and other Leiji Masumoto works. Tomohiro Nishimura, who voices Amano, even worked on My Neighbor Totoro! It's sort of reminds me of all the respectable actors who showed up in Caligula.

If you are interested in the history and evolution of anime, you can't help but pay attention to it. The dang thing played in American movie theaters, for criminey's sake! Newspaper and TV reporters held it up as the sole defining example of "anime," resulting in crusades to have anime banned and all anime fans branded as slobbering perverts, while at the same time, apologists tied themselves in knots trying to write pieces that deconstructed and analyzed the film and trumpeted its artistic merits (it's a cautionary tale about teenage pregnancy or a cautionary tale against blind faith, depending on who's writing the analysis). It was an absolute fiasco, and if nothing else, I always enjoy a good fiasco. As alarmist and shocked as the reaction in the U.S. was, it was even more sensational in England. In the U.K., things were a little more serious. Urotsukidoji practically destroyed the anime market in England, which was only just coming off the high of its infamous Video Nasties years. It took a long time before anime fandom in the U.K. could rebuild itself. Like its titular character, Urotsukidoji destroyed the world so it could rebuild a new and better one in its place. But the fact that it gutted the industry and made anime so incredibly difficult to obtain for many people might be the main reason, far more so than the actual pervy content of the series, so many people harbor a lingering distaste for this anime atrocity.

For me, personally, it didn't make much of a difference. I didn't suffer any of the "anime is all porn and anime fans are all perverts" stigma because, frankly, no one at my high school even know what anime was or was in any position to even hear about Overfiend or anime. everyone in Buckner, Kentucky, was too committed to the new Bocephus album at the time. So I have a much better sense of humor about this series than many other people who did get branded as freaks on account of it may have -- even if they were Miyazaki fans and had never seen Overfiend. I mean, hell, as far as anyone I knew was concerned, if you were watching cartoons, period, you were just a nerd.


At the end of the day, Urotsukidoji is all those things and more -- and less. It is filth. It is irredeemable. It does have artistic merit. It lacks artistic merit. It is shameless and offensive. It is ridiculous and harmless. It was the logical illogical extreme and the culmination of the increasingly outrageous nature of anime in the 1980s. You should avoid it like the plague. You should absolutely see it.

There's really no way to make sense of the controversy and jungle of opinions surrounding the series. At the end of the day, you really just have to see for yourself. Me, I think it's mildly entertaining in spots and ultimately harmless. In fact, as outrageous as the porn aspects of Urotsukidoji may be, when held up against certain aspects of the modern anime landscape, it seems to be little more than goofy doodling -- quaint, almost, perhaps even innocent. And that's because everything is presents is so preposterous that it can't be taken seriously or really looked at as a corrupting agent. No one is going to go out and mimic the Chojin, after all. Compare that to something like the modern moe or harem show -- things that may not feature a giant demon raping a woman and making her body explode with his semen, but instead paint a world where an unlikable loser with no redeeming qualities never the less finds himself in control of a group of slavishly devoted women who worship him like a god. Or moe, in which female characters are so overly precious and innocent and doe-eyed and pre-pubescent that the whole thing reeks of child pornography. These types of shows are far more insidious and perverse than the flashy, over-the-top idiocy of Urotsukidoji. They often appeal to a segment of the population that really does relate in some way to the lead male character and really does let the portrayal of women and little girls affect their opinions of the real world. I don't see Urotsukidoji operating in quite the same fashion.

So yeah. Whatever man. Urotsukidoji is the tawdry piece of pornographic trash you've heard it is; it's also not all that fiendish or corrupting. It's just silly. But it is a major milestone in the history of anime, so if you are the type who needs or wants to understand the evolution of anime, then you pretty much have to deal with Urotsukidoji. It's really not as painful as you think it might be. I mean, I wouldn't watch it with my parents or invite a date over to watch it, but come on: it's so loopy, so genuinely cracked in the head, and so unabashedly over-the-top, and so epic and ambitious that it really stops being offensive porn and starts being nothing more than a laughable freak show. And it does try to be something more than cheap porn. It tries to be really lavish, complex porn. earlier, I made a passing reference to Caligula. Overfiend is definitely the Caligula of anime -- fitting, even, since both films were funded with Penthouse money. They both contain about the same degree of perversion an twisted grotesquery (I'm pretty sure that's not a word -- but it is now!).

Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Sexploitation, Year: 1989