To be honest, I’ve never know just what the fascination is with 80s and 90s Japanese and the absolute need to fill so many instances of Anime with shape shifting, writhing, unfeasibly horny creatures that seem like John Carpenter’s The Thing is in dire need for treatment for sex addiction – but when a talented visionary manages to make it as cool as Wicked City, I find it’s wise to avoid asking questions.
While using simple mash-ups to quickly describe the essence of the film youre watching may be considered a lazy substitute for an actual thought out review, you can’t deny that Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s solo feature debut can be almost perfectly described by the words “Men In Black directed by Takashi Miike”, but the man who went on to give us the exemplary Ninja Scroll manages to craft a bewitching horror/thriller that throws together cool, James Bond style spy work with all the Lovecraftian monsters you could possibly ask for. Wicked is certainly the word…
Alongside our reassuring realm of humans, puppies and reality television lay the Black World, an alternate dimension that’s positively loaded with freakish, shape-shifting demons who are itching to cross over into our world to make some hellish mischief. However, while there are some radicalised types that thinks humanity should be theirs to rule, a peace treaty holds to keep a fragile peace in place and it’s enforced by secret agents on both sides named the Black Guard.
One of these agents is Renzaburō Taki, whose salaryman day job is only a cover for the fact that his real calling is fighting monsters with a huge fucking gun and dapper suit.
After a rather disturbing encounter where the girl he’s been dating for three months reveals herself to be a spider-limbed doppelganger who is hoping to collect a sample of his semen by seducing him, Taki finds that his next assignment has pretty heft ramifications as he’s tasked to protect Giuseppe Mayat. Not only is the wizened, 200 year old mystic a signatory to the treaty that’s keeping two worlds from eviscerating each other, but he’s also a colossal pervert who seems way more excited about bedding some whore than renewing the peace with the Black World for another few hundred years.
Making things slightly easier is that he’s been assigned a partner, the beautiful fashion model, Makie; however, making things even more complicated is that she’s actually a demon from the Black World, recruited to kill her own kind for the betterment of all. After fending off a few assassination attempts from various misshapen beasties, Taki and Makie find that the toughest part of their job is to keep Giuseppe from sneaking out to brothels or making untoward advances against his female protector. However, when the leader of the demonic terrorists, the aptly named Mr. Shadow, makes his big move, Taki and Mackie find that destiny has maneuvered them into playing vital roles in the future of both worlds.
While the underlying story may leave a bit to be desired, Yoshiaki Kawajiri essentially ensured that Wicked City would be a memorable calling card for the unforgettable images and stylish execution he would go on and create with such later works as Ninja Scroll, his segment of the Animatrix and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. In fact, even non-anime fans would no doubt be impressed with the skill and control that the director uses to handle not only the superlative action sequences, but the amount of thought and care he brings to his world building. He effortlessly squishes together a wide range of influences that ranges from secret agent movies, extreme body horror, film noir and the unavoidable dip into hentai territory that insists that there has to be at least three instances where the story suddenly shifts into sexual deviancy and the tentacles come out and play. However, for the vast majority of its runtime, Wicked City juggles all these disparate influences into a near-seamless whole the way that only a typically batshit anime can.
Casting the world in cool blues and kitting out its leads in the type of suits that wouldn’t look out of place in a John Woo firefight, Kawajiri, irons over the less logical aspects of the story and skims over the larger aspects (How exactly does the Black World operate?) to deliberately give us a keyhole view of a far more expansive universe. While other, similar titles tend to splurge while creating vast new universes (The infamous Urotsukidōji: Legend Of The Overfiend is a stunning example of “more is more”), Wicked City strips things way back, taking more of a John Carpenter approach, keeping things small but perfectly formed while only hinting at bigger things at play.
It also helps that it’s fucking cool too, the noirish feel somehow highlighting the hideous transformations and abilities the characters within display. One guy uses his ribs as some sort of grotesque snare while Makie has a nice line in extendable fingernails that can slice through anything cleaner than a lightsaber and at times you wonder how a mere flesh and blood human could possibly hope to compare.
The rather winning answer is: take a look at the fucking gun Taki waves about. Taking a leaf out of the Blade Runner handbook for kickass firearms, Taki’s hand cannon is so powerful, the recoil blows him across the room, but in an awesome quirk, Kawajiri has his hero brace himself against cracking wall and buckling fences to take the strain and it’s far more memorable than the rather basic Romeo & Juliet (with monsters) romance between the leads.
Of course, the director’s talent for mining style over substance doesn’t come off every time. The rather overused trope of having a small, cackling, elderly character whose rampant libido has him acting like a perverted Yoda proves to be more annoying than amusing and the climax, that throws together a ton of random exposition with a lot of tentacle dodging is far less elegant than the set up. However, it doesn’t dilute the fact that the movie delivers a whole raft of unforgettable images that bore into the brain like a wandering, probing proboscis.
As memorable body horror moments go, having a sexually forward woman suddenly go from sexual predator to actual predator when her limbs elongate and she creeps about the place like a black widow spider. Elsewhere, we’re “treated” to a prostitute who can absorb punters into her putty-like flesh and various transformations involving a crocadilian maw erupting from a man’s mouth and other such corruptions of the human form and even though all that stretching flesh and surreal creature designs are a dime a dozen these days, Wicked City’s more measured approach to the chaos of a universe of demons knocking on our door managed to plough a memorable path.
While not as questionably spectacular as the truly disturbing Urotsukidōji or as accomplished as Kawajiri’s own Ninja Scroll, Wicked City is a cool, calm and collected take on all the fantastical horrors 80s anime has to offer.
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