In short: Ninja Scroll (1993)

Original title: Jubei Ninpucho

A group of freakish, evil ninja known as the Eight Demons of Kimon wipes out a village, letting the deaths look as if they were caused by the plague. When the local potentate of the minor Michuzaki clan sends a group of Kouga clan ninja to investigate, the Demons slaughter them all quite easily - or rather, nearly all of them. Ninja poison tester Kagerou survives, but makes a rather too close acquaintance with the rock-skinned Demon Tessai. Just when Tessai's about to rape Kagerou (which, as we later learn, wouldn't have turned out too well for him), the honourable wandering sword for hire Jubei appears and saves her with his superior fighting skills.

Afterwards, Kagerou disappears from Jubei's life what should be for forever, but the paths of the two will cross again soon enough, for the elderly shogunate agent Dakuan decides to use them both as pawns in his own investigation of what really happened to the village, and why. As sure as Kagerou's open dislike for Jubei will turn out to be…LOVE, Jubei will have to face an enemy from his past.

Brothers and sisters, let us now again praise the utter awesomeness bundled in the body and mind of anime director and writer Yoshiaki Kawajiri.

While the Ninja Scroll movie isn't my absolute favourite of the man's glorious output, it still features everything loveable about his work. So there's a design sense at play that knows that there's no difference between the freakish and the awesome, and so fills the movie with a freaks-per-second rate that's overwhelming, in the process providing us with - among many other things - another one of Kawajiri's beloved vagina dentata variations (this time it's the snake oriented female ninja who doesn't just control snakes, and her snake tattoos, and sheds her skin like a snake, but also carries a snake in her vagina - Freudian film theory would have a field day with Kawajiri), a guy who can become one with the shadows and can control peoples' bodies as if they were marionettes, another guy whose hunchback moonlights as a wasp hive, and the main bad guy whose fighting technique is "reincarnation", which in practice means he can put his dead body back together again even if it's been hacked to pieces.

All this beautiful weirdness takes place in between classic exploitation and men's adventure tropes, buckets of geysering blood, a bit of nudity, and gender politics of the rather dubious sort (though they are nothing compared to the sort of thing Kazuo Koike would have been up to given the same basic story). All this is held together really well by Kawajiri's relentless sense of pacing and even a bit of actual humanity, possibly even humanism, for even though the director loves his exploitation, Ninja Scroll, like most of his other projects, also has a heart and the sort of ethics you don't always get with your breasts and blood fantasy action adventures.

 

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Three Films Make A Post: So Daring We Recommend A Babysitter!!

Fear in the Night (1972): One of only three movies directed by Hammer's veteran writer, the late great Jimmy Sangster. It's a variation on the old "driving the wife insane" number, enhanced by some clever, low-key twists, a bit of Peter Cushing being eccentric, Joan Collins being not very nice, and some fine shots of autumn countryside.

If there's a real problem with the film it is perhaps that it does not make as much use of the inherent strangeness and creepiness of parts of its backstory as it could have.

Highlander: The Search For Vengeance (2007): Regular visitors to this blog will know of my unhealthy love for the work of anime director Yoshiaki Kawajiri, but as much as it pains me to say it, his untimely addition to the Highlander universe is not a very good film, nor is it a very entertaining film. Part of the film's problem surely is that it was made for the US market first and Japan second, leading to Kawajiri having to scale down his usual excesses of violence, sex, weirdness and women with vaginae dentatae. There's still a bit of his strangeness hidden away in the mess, and what the film presents of sexual subtexts sure ain't healthy, but it's all a bit timid compared to Kawajiri's usual style.

Then there's a script that suffers from a boring and unsympathetic hero, and pacing that's again and again dragged down by unnecessary flashbacks that just don't add much to the film as a whole except running time.

It's all a bit naff, really.

Elevated (1997): Vincenzo Natali really likes films about a handful of people (rather inevitably including David Hewlett) trapped in some sort of enclosed space, surrounded by unexplained danger. Case in point is this short film about a handful of people (including David Hewlett) trapped in an elevator and slowly losing their grip on reality while unseen monsters just might threaten their lives.

It's a pretty neat little film, short, to the point, pleasantly acted, and gifted with a very fine ending.

 

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In short: Birdy The Mighty (1996)

Original title: Tetsuwan Birdy

(We continue our accidental series of Yoshiaki Kawajiri write-ups. Well, no anime tomorrow, I promise.)

While trying to apprehend an intergalactic criminal, Federal Space Officer Birdy accidentally electrocutes hapless Japanese high school kid Tsutomu. That sort of thing just isn't done in her line of business, so her superiors use awesome space science to put things right. Well, sort of: from now on Birdy and Tsutomu have to share one body - though their body conveniently changes form and ability depending on who is the body's main controller at any given time. Birdy still has a job to do, too. Her arch enemy Christella Revi plans something unpleasant for Earth and her denizens and supports the mad experiments of a Japanese war criminal mad scientist to achieve it. Because Christella doesn't like our heroine much, and even less so her usually successful attempts at disrupting her plans, she sends various freaky assassins after her and Tsutomu. Fortunately, Birdy's pretty great at punching people and things, and Tsutomu's a more useful partner for her than anyone could have expected.

As if being dead and doing body time-sharing with a superheroine from outer space weren't troubling enough for a teenage boy, Tsutomu also has to cope with his crush on his classmate Natsumi and his own lack of self-confidence.

If you go into the 4-part-OVA Birdy (based on a manga by Patlabor creator Yuki Masami) expecting the sprightly mix of naked flesh and the old ultra-violence Yoshiaki Kawajiri's name as a director promises, you might be a mite disappointed. There's a spattering of blood and unidentifiable alien goo, but it's really pretty harmless for what one is used to from the director's more typical anime; the OVA also resists nearly all opportunities for nudity or making smutty jokes about the whole "young man and young woman sharing one body" business in a nearly disconcerting display of reserve.

However, one shouldn't let one's disappointment about the OVA's lack of exploitational values bar the view on the fact that Birdy really is pretty awesome in its own, slightly unexpected way. Kawajiri still is a master of staging dynamic action sequences, a fact the series' milder amounts of blood and gore doesn't change at all, and while there's no freaky body horror, there's still one silly-awesome idea following the other.

There's something very good-natured about the film's humour. It may make fun of Tsutomu's awkwardness, of his family and of Birdy's hot-headedness, but it does so (and that's really very typical of what I know of Yuki's manga) in such a loving way that even the thought of actual mean-spiritedness - the bane of a lot of comedy if you ask me - seems to be completely beyond it. Like the action, it's all in good fun.

Birdy as a character reminds me as much of Western superheroes as anything I've seen coming from Japan (the whole set-up with her and Tsutomu has a Rick Jones/Captain Marvel vibe, by the way - alas, I don't have a clue if that's coincidence or Yuki's a closeted Marvel fan). It's not the grim and gritty version of superheroes, though, but the more lighter, swashbuckling style you don't actually see all that often around these parts anymore, with a heroine who's confident and decidedly un-jerky (even though she has the obligatory tragic past), and just very fun to watch at work. I think it's scientifically proven that Birdy (the character) is pretty darn awesome.

"Pretty darn awesome" is in fact also a good description of the whole OVA. Fun action with fun ideas, featuring fun characters doing fun things - surprise! - makes for an exceedingly fun series, and another feather in Kawajiri's hat.

 

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Biohunter (1995)

aka Bio Hunter

In their copious free time, scientists Komada and Kamagaya are working as self-styled bio hunters, hunting (and sometimes curing, it seems, though the film also calls the state incurable) people infected with the so-called Demon Virus. The virus plays bowling with its victims' genes, leading to charming, often mouth- and tentacle-based transformations and an unnatural hunger for human flesh. Komada himself is infected with the virus, and is able to smell out things and situations standing in connection with the virus. In emergencies, he also transforms into a cross between the wolfman and a classical Japanese demon that is quite different from the forms the other infected the film shows take. Until now, and with Kamagaya's help, he has been able to control and guide his transformations, but both men think that it's only a question of time until Komada will loose his humanity.

By chance, Komada one night stumbles upon a woman chased by three yakuza thugs. He protects Sayaka, as she is called, and because his Virus Sense tingles (practically, he starts to cry whenever virus-related stuff happens), offers her his and Kamagaya's help in her troubles.

Sayaka is the daughter of a famous fortune teller, who seems to have foretold something an influential client wasn't too happy about.

Sayaka's dad is hiding out somewhere in the countryside, so the scientists and the woman make their way to find him and protect him from his enemies. Our heroes will learn soon enough that the dangerous prophecy had something to do with the Devil Virus, a prospective prime minister, and a series of murders that is shaking Tokyo right now.

When I tell you that Biohunter begins with a sex scene in which a woman's breast grows a mouth and munches off her partner's hand, you'll probably not be too surprised to hear that Yoshiaki Kawajiri was involved in the OVA's production. This time around, Kawajiri may have only been responsible for the script, but his DNA is still all over the anime. The directorial credits go to Yuzo Sato, but a look at his filmography - this being his first job as a director with the next one coming seven years later with a lot of work mostly on the animation side, and in part in other Kawajiri projects, in between - suggests to me he wasn't exactly the leading light here, so I'm going with my gut feeling that this is very much a Kawajiri anime. On a technical level, Biohunter looks and feels as you'd expect from this sort of anime - the animation is solid, the human character design more solid than inspired, the pacing fine, and the voice actors are convincing enough.

Nearly a decade after Wicked City, Kawajiri still liked to milk the whole "tentacles plus gore plus breasts plus solid action plotting with slight philosophical bend equals instant fun" formula, and I can't say I blame him for it, given how much it agrees with his sensibilities and my tastes. As is typical for nearly everything by Kawajiri I've seen, there's a sense of actual intelligence surrounding the film that shows itself in clever details like the big difference between the way the deeply human Komada's monster form looks in comparison to the other infected we get to see, emphasising how different from them he is on the inside, too; obviously, Komada's monster form (and his frequent reactions to the moon), is also a large nod in the direction of classical Hollywood werewolf lore.

The script also sets up some interesting comparisons between the (pseudo-)scientific way the scientists explain the Virus, and the metaphysical/superstitious language the fortune teller prefers. In the film's context, it's pretty clear that both are attempts to put into language experiences neither the language of science nor that of mysticism were truly built for; in the end, no-one's interpretation of the Virus is wrong, but nobody's is completely right either. Which really is pretty clever for a gory little monster anime that wouldn't necessarily need to have any thoughts at all to find its audience. It is also more respectful of human endeavour than the usual stuff about the need to put one's feelings before one's rationality to truly understand things, I think.

Perhaps not as clever, but at least pretty amusing is to find the film arguing that a politician makes for an especially mean monster because he's already got no moral compunctions or an ethical backbone even before he turns into a monster. The cynic (or is it the realist?) in me agrees with this assessment.

But all the hidden cleverness and technical solidity wouldn't amount to much without Biohunter's slight detours into weirdness. These detours aren't excessive for anime or Kawajiri's work, but when one is talking about things like the hero's hand getting blown off in an explosion, hitching a ride on a helicopter, and later rescuing the hero's love interest and telling him where to find her, "not excessive" is quite a relative description.

 

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Wicked City (1987)

For centuries, the human world and the world of the demons have held a secret peace based on regularly renewed treaties and regulated by a group of secret cops on both sides of existence known as the Black Guard.

The peace treaty's up for renewal again, and human Black Guard Taki is put in charge of protecting one of the treaty's signatories, one Giuseppi Mayart, from potential harm. Because this is an interspecies operation, Taki's efforts will be assisted by the beautiful demon Black Guard Makie, who looks like a perfect candidate for interspecies romance. Taki will need Makie's help badly, for a terrorist group from the demon side is putting all its power into assassinating Mayart before he can sign the treaty. But the demon terrorists are not the new partners' only problem: their charge turns out to be an insufferable little leech of the highest order whose main ambition seems to be making his protection and their life difficult by running after every pair of breasts available, like Master Yoda on Viagra. Furthermore, not everything about the soon-to-be-lovers' job is as it seems to be.

Wicked City is one of the forerunners of what would soon enough turn into the charming sub-genre of anime and manga loved and feared around the world as tentacle porn, but unlike many of its successors, Wicked City is neither true porn nor only interested in showing big breasted girls with green hair getting raped. The film is also nearly the beginning of the long and fruitful career of classy exploitation anime hero Yoshiaki Kawajiri. Before this, Kawajiri directed an adaptation of E.E. Smith's Lensmen and a segment of an anthology movie, both of which I'll take a look at sooner or later, but Wicked City is the first long-form anime that shows Kawajiri as the kind of guy who's not just making his films to fill a quota of breasts, tentacles and mutilation in his films.

Not that Wicked City doesn't contain all of these required elements  in spades. There's a whole freak show worth of grotesque transformations, fun violence and (often) less fun sex on display that would excite anyone (probably even exploitation anime's patron saint Go Nagai) not completely deaf to the charms of these things even if there were nothing else memorable about Kawajiri's movie. However, this particular director does not share the line of thought many of his colleagues and followers seem to believe in that says just throwing the good (or "good") stuff at one's viewers alone is enough to make for an actual movie, so he put actually coherent world building in the service of a well-paced plot into Wicked City, too. Sure, the world Kawajiri constructs is silly, as is the plot, both however never just feel as excuses for showing the audience nudity and violence. Instead the plot and the exploitation are integrated with each other like in any other film much less interested in showing a woman's whole body turn into a vagina dentata. Truly, it's the best of both worth.

Another advantage Kawajiri's film has compared to a lot (not all, mind you) of his genre companions is the actual brilliance of the film's monster designs. Kawajiri - or probably his art director Kazuo Oga - doesn't use a half-hearted penis-shaped tentacle when he can have penis-shaped tentacles with mouths. He doesn't just use a vagina dentata, but a woman turning into a four-legged spider with a vagina dentata she also uses to spin webs with, and so on, and so forth. As should be obvious, a lot of the film's design work (and some of the backstory about demon women sucking the life energy out of men that reminds of traditional Chinese ideas about fox ghosts) seems designed to let some of the worst nightmares a certain type of men have about women come alive, all in the good old horror and exploitation tradition of playing with the fears of one's audience as much as with their desires. But to me there's also a degree of humour visible in these designs, knowing winks that suggest that, no, nobody involved in the making of this movie actually thinks that women are out to castrate men metaphorically or less metaphorically, which is an effect quite difficult to achieve in a film this full of rape and fearful female sexuality.

Really, what's not to love?

 

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Goku Midnight Eye I & II (1989)

We are in the year 2014 of a cyberpunk-y future of the late 1980s. Detectives of the Special Investigation division of the Tokyo police are trying to keep Hakuryu, the new mad scientist supervillain in town, under surveillance. It's more difficult for them than you'd think, for the department suddenly develops the highest suicide rate outside of moths flying around a campfire.

What the police don't know about Hakuryu is that he owns a sizeable menagerie of bio-technological freaks, one of which is a bare-breasted woman with peacock feathers growing out of her back whose feather eyes can hypnotize just about everyone to death. When the Special Investigation unit is down to their last - and only female - member, private eye and ex-cop Goku (Shigeharu Matsuda) decides to find out what killed his friends before the last of them will die too.

A break-in into Hakuryu's high rise confronts Goku with various parts of the mad scientist's menagerie. Unfortunately, a big strong guy, sleep-inducing robot mosquitoes and a cross between a naked woman, a cat (though the movie talks of her being a dog one time), and a motorcycle who spits laser beams (she's also working as a stripper) are are a bit too much for one shirtless but tie-wearing detective to conquer, and so our hero soon finds himself face to breast and feathers with the peacock woman. It's a meeting Goku only survives by poking out his left eye and jumping into Tokyo Bay.

This would probably be the end of our hero, but a shadowy benefactor saves his life and improves Goku remarkably with a cybernetic new eye that not only carries the 80s version of the Internet right into the lucky guy's brain, but also enables him to control everything computer-controlled from trucks to satellites. But wait, there's more! The Mysterious One also gives the detective a telescopic shock poking stick, all the better to high jump through Tokyo and poke holes in people with. Looks like Goku is well equipped for a rematch with his enemies.

The second Goku movie finds our hero hired by a girl with highly unpleasant family relations and a secret government background to help find her brother before his cybernetically improved body turns him into a mad mass murderer. The case is further complicated by the girl's tendency not to tell Goku the whole truth about anything, ever, and the military's attempts at killing the cyborg before anyone else can get to him.

Well, there's no problem an inter-dimensional rocket shot out of a flying car can't solve, or so I've heard.

The Goku movies are two manga-based OVAs directed by the glorious Yoshiaki Kawajiri (responsible for anime like Wicked City! Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust! and more in that style). Especially the first one holds everything the director's name promises, possibly even more. As is Kawajiri's wont, he bombards his viewers with a highly effective combination of an 80s machismo gone bizarre, the erotically loaded grotesque in its most imaginative form (the cat-motorcycle-lady gets a rider in form of a little person in plate mail in her final appearance to make her incredible mix of weird kinks even weirder) and as much blood, explosions and breasts as any guy's inner twelve year old could ask for, all presented through some great character design and in a rather breathless pace.

What's really fascinating (and not atypical for Japanese exploitation movie culture inside and outside of anime) about Kawajiri's work is that he seldom loses the control over his material. His films may contain a flood of the incredible, the strange and the sleazy, yet he nearly always manages to funnel their waters into something amounting to a parseable plot that often manages to be interesting or exciting enough that I could imagine it to make for an entertaining film even without the utter weirdness surrounding it. Of course, having the solid plotting and the grotesquery is even better.

The first of the two Goku movies is the superior one. That's not to say the second one is bad (it does after all feature a killer cyborg, a flying car, mad military men, incest and the best rocket ever), it's just looking downright conventional in comparison to the stuff the first movie throws at the audience without losing its stride.

It's all good, though, and I'd recommend both Gokus to everyone who thinks it might sound even vaguely interesting.

 

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In short: Cyber City Oedo 808 OVA 1-3 (1990)

Japan in a far, cyberpunk-y future as it could only have been imagined in the early 1990s. Three hardened cyber criminals - the badass, madly pompadour-ed and ponytailed Sengoku, the badass hacker and wearer of Geordie LaForge's old eye visor Gogol/Goggles, and the badass gender bending hair-metal-hair-favouring melee expert and Goth in spirit Benten - are roped into the service of the Cyber Police to hunt other cyber criminals. For every caught ex-colleague, they'll lose a few years of their original sentences of several hundred years in prison.

Which would be an okay deal, if our reluctant heroes wouldn't have to wear some of those darn explosive collars around their necks and wouldn't have to work under the secretive (possibly cyber and badass, too) Hasegawa. Hasegawa for his part seems to like nothing more than to set their collars on random countdowns during which they have to solve their cases.

In a bit of structural cleverness, each of the episodes concentrates on one of the three cyber policemen and relegates the other two to supporting roles.

In the first episode, Sengoku and his colleagues have to deal with a very peculiar hostage situation caused by a hacker (or is it a ghost?) in one of Oedo's space scrapers. Mild carnage, manly behaviour and angry ranting about morality ensues.

The second episode finds Gogol (who is not only a badass cyber whatever, but also a lover of Russian literature; probably "Dead Souls") the victim of a rather complicated (cyber?) conspiracy whose goal it is to use him as the final test object for a new-fangled military police cyborg (made out of mutilated dead bodies and metal) and to let the military replace the Cyber Police. Heavy carnage, manly behaviour and intense badassness ensues.

The third and - alas - final episode concerns Benten's investigation (he's the only one of the three who actually seems to investigate his cases) into what looks like vampire attacks on rogue bio scientists. A very mean old capitalist also makes an appearance. Heavy carnage, manly behaviour and melodramatic gothy vampire stuff ensues.

Although I think that the some of the "Cyber City Oedo 808 is the best cyberpunk anime ever!" talk on the 'net is a bit of an exaggeration (*cough* Mamoru Oshii *cough*), I can't say these three OVAs aren't very entertaining pieces of anime. That doesn't come as a surprise from films directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Wicked City, Ninja Scroll, and so on), a man who seems unable to make boring films, or dumb films that are dumber than strictly necessary.

If you're like me and have come to Kawajiri mostly through his more sleazy output, you'll be shocked to hear that Cyber City does not contain any nudity at all, and can in fact hardly even be called sleazy. The first episode also lacks some of the director's trademark visual grotesquerie (although the nature of the episode's antagonist will turn out to be quite grotesque). Fortunately, his trademark violence is still on board. The second and third episode do a visually much more interesting job at crossing cyberpunk with horror elements; the third even manages a visually impressive take on vampires.

While Kawajiri hits all the required beats of fight movies, he also manages to squeeze some interesting ideas and even a bit of characterization into the anime. The military cyborg and the vampire (and to a lesser degree even Sengoku's enemy) are cool things for the characters to fight, but are also used to reflect their inner lives. It's not really deep stuff, but makes the carnage more interesting because there seems to be something more at stake for the characters than just conquering bad guys.

 

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