Tokyo: The Last War (1989)

Original title: Teito taisen

1945, before the H-bombs are dropped on Japan. Despite loud scepticism from the military leadership, spiritual leader of Japan – so says the voice from the off and who am I to disagree – Kanami Koho (Tetsuro Tanba, of course) plans to send out a wave of bad spiritual energy through radio waves to kill the Allied leadership. Instead of doing that, he awakens Yasunori Kato (Kysusaku Shimada), apparently actually the embodiment of Tokyo’s masses of angry dead from the last thousand years.

Kato’s thing is still destroying Tokyo, and he’s still ridiculously powerful. The last surviving member of the Tatsumiya family, Yukiko (Kaho Minami), isn’t really prepared to fight her ancestral enemy, but she at least slips into the role of protecting a little blind orphan girl Kato shows quite some interest in.

There must have been several novels taking place between those that made up the material for Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis and the eleventh entry in Hiroshi Aramata’s clearly insanely ambitious Teito monogatari series, so there are no returning characters here apart from Kato, and there’s no time spent on getting us up to date on anything that happened in between the movies.

Having said that, The Last War is actually a much less sprawling thing than its epic predecessor, and where that movie simply had no air to stop and breath, this one appears to thinly stretch out too little plot for nearly two hours.

There’s a ponderous quality to the film that is a bad follow-up to the merry insanity of the first one, and where Last Megalopolis was a wellspring of crazy special effects, much of what happens here is people making constipated faces to suggest they are using their psychic powers, until some mild explosion occurs. This gets a little better in the film’s last third when at least a mild sense of the grotesque settles over proceedings, but for a film whose conceptual design is credited to H.R. Giger, whose effects are by Screaming Mad George, whose – possibly not so – assistant director is Hongkong’s prince of the batshit insane Ngai Choi Lam, and whose action is directed by Philip Kwok, it’s all pretty harmless.

The film as a whole feels as if were trying to replace Jissoji’s extremely personal, strange yet maximalist sense of aesthetics, but doesn’t appear to know with what, until all that’s left is the sort of bland professionalism that doesn’t make for a bad movie, but a woefully uninteresting one.

Director Takashige Ichise never directed a feature film before or after Tokyo: The Last One, and concentrated on a successful career as a producer – first as Toho’s man for international co-productions, then as one of the architects of the J-horror boom – and really, this too often feels like the film a producer would make rather than that of a director.