Wicked City

jpn Yoju Toshi, aka Supernatural Beast City. 1987. Movie. 82 min. Science fiction/horror. org Hideyuki Kikuchi (novel). dir Yoshiaki Kawajiri. des Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Kazuo Oga. -bc

Wicked City tells a futuristic tale of human-demon conflict in the style and manner of a dark urban crime thriller. Filled with grotesque creatures, gruesome dismemberment, and scenes of graphic sexual violence, it is nonetheless a stylish thriller with a deeply romantic component and a note of great hope.

Wicked City posits the notion that the human world exists in uneasy cooperation with a parallel world called the Black World, a dimension of demons and monsters. A peace treaty exists between them and is about to be renewed. Taki Renzaburo is a human secret agent of the Black Guard and is assigned to guard the human representative at the Tokyo peace talks, Giuseppe Mayart, an ancient, wizened being who is instrumental in the peace process. Taki’s partner is a tall, elegant woman named Makie, a Black World denizen in human form whose cover job is as a fashion model. Black World radicals make numerous attacks on the three main characters in a variety of places, leading to some pitched battles.

At one point Makie is captured and chained up by a former lover from the Black World and is sexually assaulted for being a traitor to her world. Taki disobeys orders and leaves Mayart to try and rescue Makie. He succeeds, but then the two are grabbed again and imprisoned by the Spider Lady, one of the Black World’s lethal radicals. A mysterious rescue leads to the revelation that all is not what it seems, the mission is not what they thought it, and Mayart is not who he appears to be. It all culminates in a spectacular confrontation in a fog-shrouded church at night.

Wicked City is sci-fi noir, a crime thriller with touches of horror and a backdrop of a parallel universe. It takes place almost entirely in dark urban spaces at night, with long highways, foreboding tunnels, bars, hotel rooms, airports, a red light district, and a massive church. One hardly sees any other people besides the main characters or their associates in any of these places. Dressed in a dark suit and tie and sporting a powerful, specially equipped handgun for blasting demons, the handsome womanizing hero, Taki, looks and behaves like a movie detective and drives a dark sedan. His icily beautiful partner, Makie, who doubles as a fashion model, wears a dark pinstriped suit and tie for much of the film as well and comes across as a sleek noir heroine. Even some of the Black World demons, the radicals opposed to the peace treaty, look more like standard-issue anime gangsters than like otherworldly monsters.

Taki and Makie are very sharply drawn and designed, with bold lines and black glistening hair, and shine lines resembling the kind of linework once so common in American comic books. Makie has narrow eyes and an angular face and doesn’t betray much emotion, even in the midst of grueling torture. The other characters are the usual Kawajiri assortment of eccentrics like the centuries-old Giuseppe Mayart, who’s still an uncontrollable lech at his age, and the Black World operatives who shed their human forms to become monsters with piercing claws, tentacles, and gaping, ravenous jaws. One attractive bed partner of Taki’s transforms into a Spider Lady, with a vagina dentata that nearly snares our hero’s family jewels.

There is a nightmare-like quality to the settings, a consequence of the overlap of demon and human worlds. A dark bluish fog shrouds much of the outdoor action and the heroes never know when they’re going to confront an opening into the Black World. Black voids and clouds appear out of nowhere and threaten to take our heroes into other dimensions. The church in which the final confrontation takes place stands as a lone structure shrouded by fog on all sides. An erotic bedroom scene between Taki and Makie takes place in the church, but all we see are sprawling sheets and a background of bright white.

Wicked City looks forward to Urotsukidoji (Legend of the Overfiend) in chronicling a clash between human and demon worlds and larding the tale with ultraviolent encounters and sexual violence, all to serve up a highly romantic resolution. The difference here is that the lead characters are adult professionals assigned as bodyguards and not high school kids. Violence is a part of their jobs. Also, Wicked City steers violence away from apocalyptic orgies of sex, slaughter, and destruction to a more narrow set of confrontations between a small group of characters.

Makie is a capable, resourceful woman of powerful poise, a refreshing departure from the stereotypical wide-eyed anime innocent, but she is subjected to repeated rape and sexual humiliation by Black World operatives and their monstrous tentacled minions. She’s a good soldier and withstands the punishment without breaking, a price she has to pay for going up against her own people. But it’s a disturbing development when a strong anime heroine is created and then treated this way, in scenes that will horrify some members of the audience, but may titillate others. Ultimately, we learn that Taki and Makie have been paired in the hopes that they will mate and produce a symbol of the two worlds’ cooperation. This aspect of the plot is handled tenderly and romantically, taking away some of the unpleasant feelings left by the rape scenes, but it may not be enough for some viewers.

Still, Wicked City stands out as an atmospheric and imaginative thriller that managed to fuse film noir, sci-fi, horror, crime movies, and sex thrillers in ways that live-action films have yet to match. There is a cohesive look and feel to it, an artfully created mood of nightmare and foreboding, of great monstrosity just below the dark surfaces of nighttime Tokyo. And yet there’s a seductive quality as well, from the womanizing efforts of the handsome hero, Taki, to the sexy bar patron he picks up for a one-night stand that almost turns deadly, to the cool, stoic beauty of Makie and the genuinely romantic mating of the two leads late in the film.

While Lensman (1984) was Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s first directorial credit, this film was the first to showcase the dark, graphically intense, hard-edged style that would become his specialty, as seen in such follow-ups as Demon City Shinjuku (1988), Goku Midnight Eye (1989), Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990), Ninja Scroll (1993), and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000). He is also credited as character designer and animation director on this film. Horror novelist Hideyuki Kikuchi wrote the story on which this was based.

For many fans, the most memorable scene remains the early bedroom scene between Taki and the one-night-stand who makes a startling “climactic” transformation in the middle of the action, sending Taki scurrying out of harm’s way with not a second to lose.

In 1992, Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark (Once Upon a Time in China) wrote and produced a live-action Hong Kong film version of Wicked City starring Leon Lai, Jacky Cheung, Michelle Reis, and Japanese film legend Tatsuya Nakadai. The plot was altered to reflect the growing anxiety about the impending handover of Hong Kong to mainland China in 1997. The special effects were lavish and the production design captured the urban nightmare quality of the anime, but with a much more delirious tone and a more pronounced romantic subtext.

violence Graphic sex and violence (and sexual violence) pretty much from the start.