Wicked City (1987)

Taki (voiced in the American dub by Gregory Snegoff) is hipped to the transience of our world’s tenuous treaty with the Black World (a parallel dimension [?] populated by grotesque monsters) after a near death experience with not-so-hot bar pickup Kanako (Edie Mirman).  A member of the secretive Black Guard who defend humanity from the Black Worlders, he is assigned to protect Giuseppe Mayart (Mike Reynolds), an ancient, pervy old man who is the key to renewing the accord for another five hundred years.  The beauteous Makie (Gaye Kruger), Taki’s opposite number in the Black World, is forced upon our hapless human hero (apologies to Stan Lee), but will tensions flare between this mismatched pair, or will love blossom?  If you guessed neither, you’re not far off.

With some tweaks to the details of the story, one could believe this anime sprang from the mind of someone like David Cronenberg or Clive Barker, but it actually crawled forth from the pen of Hideyuki Kikuchi who created the Wicked City property in 1985 with the first book, Wicked City: Black Guard.  I’m uncertain if the franchise spawned a manga or not, but the anime, directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, is one of two adaptations of it for motion pictures (though I think this was an OVA [Original Video Animation, i.e. it was produced for and released directly to the home video market], so it never saw theatrical play).  The other was Tai Kit Mak’s 1992 live action take (produced by Tsui Hark), and the only thing I can distinctly remember about that one is that it was an indecipherable mess, visually and narratively.  The anime, while slightly easier to understand, is, in my opinion, just as much of a mess.  The characters are cardboard cutouts without personality (what personality is there is patently unlikable and uninteresting), and their relationships completely fizzle, in part because every line is delivered as if pronounced by somnambulists.  The story is paper thin and been done to death for decades.  That would be all well and good, if there was something else to bolster the retreading, and there is (sex and violence), but, somehow, here it’s just not good enough, even though brief moments do shine quite brightly, which makes it all the more disappointing (and if you want to see an actually good collaboration between Kikuchi and Kawajiri, I would suggest checking out the ultra-fun Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust).  I honestly can’t say I’ve been more bored by something as over the top as Wicked City in a long, long time.   

There has been some debate over whether or not this cartoon should be considered hentai (for the sake of simplicity and expediency, think “tentacle porn”), and even though I’m not anime guru enough to fully debate the issue, pro or con, I can say definitively that there is some explicit stuff going on here.  There is a vagina dentata (of a sort) on display.  There is a woman’s body that opens up like a giant, diseased vagina (shades of Videodrome).  There is a woman being involuntarily fingered by a former friend/lover.  There is a penis-snake-like monster that fucks a woman’s mouth.  There is a gang rape.  Sex in the world of Wicked City is dangerous, whether you want to have it or not.  It should be noted that a lot of this sexual violation and violence happens to the same woman, so it’s difficult to believe that there isn’t some kind of dislike for her going on under the surface (okay, it’s right there in front of your face; there’s nothing subtle about it).  

Compare that to the men in the film.   They are consummate womanizers.  Giuseppe lusts after Makie and blatantly grabs her ass as well as rubs her legs while she tries to ignore him.  Taki wins a bet with his bartender pal when he scores with Kanako.  Giuseppe loves his porn (he even tries to get Makie to watch some with him; what woman could resist?) and is simply dying to get his rocks off with a prostitute.  Bearing this in mind, the men get to have voluntary, pleasant enough sex with women before being attacked by whatever monster into which the woman will transform (and this setup where all of the women that the human men have sex with are literally horrors is telling; women clearly can’t be trusted in the slightest, and the men are dolts for not being able to choose their lays better).  Further, the monster women seem intent on eating the men (or some vital aspect of them), and not in the foreplay sense of the word.  The males are violently consumed by the females, the females are violently penetrated by the males.  Naturally, neither turn of events is especially desirable, but the latter has an innate sense of sleazy misogyny to it that’s rough going.  However, it’s the choice the characters get to make before the violence that makes the difference, and the women don’t really get a choice at all.  Although it doesn’t particularly bother me in the context of the film and its universe, the sexual politics of the anime will turn some people off, just as it will turn others on, so you’re aware.

 Like so very, very many mismatched action partners (Riggs and Murtaugh from the Lethal Weapon films, Sykes and Francisco from Alien Nation, Gallagher and Beck from The Hidden, ad infinitum), Wicked City has a duo that is diametrically opposed but is forced to work together.  Well, that’s something of an overstatement, actually.  Makie and Taki don’t really have anything against each other beside their dislike and distrust for the other’s “country” of origin.  They don’t bicker and argue, they don’t have any physical altercations with each other (that I can recall), and there is no begrudging respect that builds between the two.  The instant they meet, Taki refers to Makie as “disgustingly perfect” (what a honeydripper!), and you know it’s basically a waiting game until the two are in bed together (and it’s not a very exciting waiting game at that).  Sparks do not fly, because none of the emotion the filmmakers are trying to convey is earned, and even if they did earn it (which, I maintain, they didn’t), it feels hollow and false, because these characters are merely sacks of meat going through the motions with other sacks of meat.  The anime is loaded from stem to stern with bodies displayed inside and out, but none of them is filled with anything I would call a heart.

MVT:  Sex and violence is the name of the game, and the film delivers the goods in these regards.  It just doesn’t deliver anything else that’s all that interesting or involving.

Make or Break:  The opening scene (you’ve likely seen a fairly famous still from it if you’ve ever searched for this movie on the internet) sets up the world and the type of characters who inhabit it handily.  It also forewarns of the film’s problems early on, so if you’re not all in by the end of this scene, you never will be.

Score:  5/10

Blue Sunshine (1978)

**There are going to be SPOILERS ahead**

One night at an intimate party, pro-am crooner (actually, he’s a photographer) Frannie (Richard Crystal) is revealed as being almost totally bald (with some scraggly clumps left for creepiness).  Suddenly fueled by bug-eyed rage (and looking like a cross between Kevin McDonald of The Kids In The Hall and Peter Bark of Burial Ground: The Nights Of Terror, both of whom, frankly, if you told me they were the same person, I would believe you), he winds up killing three women by fireplace immolation before being thrown in front of a truck by our improbable protagonist Jerry (future softcore bigwig Zalman King).  Suddenly finding himself on the run, Jerry and his honeybunch Alicia (Deborah Winters) try to get to the bottom of what’s going on while leisurely avoiding quasi-intrepid copper Lt. Clay (Charles Siebert).

The first and most prominent theme at work in Jeff Lieberman’s Blue Sunshine is one of pasts, of skeletons in closets.  We all have stupid things we did when we were young.  For some they were just goofy, kid-type things.  For others they were strikingly disturbing and even downright heinous.  It doesn’t matter.  The point is these are things we would rather forget about and have (usually) moved past.  When they arise again, they are both embarrassing and potentially threatening.  After all, we are not the same people we were then, and for as much as we grow and change over time, much of our world is shaped by what people think of us in the here and now.  For them to discover the unexpected of us is an obstacle, possibly an insurmountable one.  So we have Jerry’s pal Dr. Blume (Robert Walden) who dealt drugs to pay for college (this is referenced later on as well, when a junkie mistakes him for a pusher, even though he is, in fact, there to pass something off to Jerry…drugs).  We have politician Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard) who was also a big drug source in college.  Frannie dropped acid in the past, though that’s really his only transgression as far as we’re told.  Ed’s estranged wife Wendy (Ann Cooper) did the same, though for her to admit as much would ruin Ed’s future (this was the Seventies, not the Nineties).  Plus, the fact that their marriage is broken adds to this sense of shame.  We’ve all heard about people having acid flashbacks, sometimes years after taking the drug.  The brilliance of this story is that these flashbacks take concrete form in the present.  This sin of the past manifests itself in horrific terms.

In that respect, we have the idea of movement within social strata for the characters.  They were in college around 1968, the height of the hippie era.  They were free thinkers.  They were radicals.  They experimented in all manner of ways, searching for some truth of themselves and some path to a better world (I’m sure there were those more selfish, to boot).  We see a couple of pictures of Ed that Frannie took back in the day.  One has him shirtless before a field of swimming colors, the poster boy for turning on, tuning in, and dropping out (which he naturally did not do himself).  The other has him dressed as Uncle Sam giving the middle finger.  Clearly, they were the counterculture, the outsiders who wanted to shake things up, to rebel.  In the present (and only a scant ten years later on), you have Blume, who is a successful and skilled surgeon.  You have Frannie, who is apparently still a photographer but has traded his tie dye for a tweed blazer, his ripple for chardonnay.  Of course, the one who has apparently changed the most is Ed.  He has gone from flipping the bird to the Man to being the Man.  He has become the establishment he used to defy.  Intriguingly, it brings up the question of whether they were ever earnest in their earlier beliefs, or was it just something to do at the time, a phase, and how much did they actually struggle with their decisions to change?  Or was it more insidious?  Did these changes occur in small increments, like the proverbial longest journey, with the end being reached after putting one foot in front of the other only to understand the full extent of the distance covered by looking back at the road traveled?  

Further than this, it brings up the concept of the monster within.  These characters are all seemingly nice people in their day-to-day lives.  They smile, they are kind to people, they have friends.  When they go bald, they are filled with uncontrollable fury, their minds (and therefore their bodies) are no longer their own.  But everyone has a dark aspect to them, and here they are turned up to eleven and unleashed.  This loss of restraint symbolizes a loss of self.  This is reinforced by the physical characteristics of these flights of fury.  The victims get intense headaches.  They are blocked from thinking their own thoughts anymore.  They have a hyper-sensitivity to sound.  They are blocked from hearing the thoughts of others.  They are isolated and removed from the world, exterior and interior.  The baldness constitutes uniformity and conformity.  They all look the same.  No blonds, no brunettes, no redheads.  Just bug-eyed baldies hellbent on destruction.

You may have noticed that I have not talked much about King or his character Jerry.  There are reasons for this.  Number one, the man is not a good actor.  His skills veer toward the overwrought end of the thespian spectrum.  Further he manages to bring a level of blandness to his character that can almost be felt physically.  With that in mind, the script doesn’t really pay him much attention anyway, except in his role as an expositional machine.  He strolls up to people (including the poorly used [though that’s not saying much here] Alice Ghostley, whom I like to think of as the female Paul Lynde), gives them no information about himself, and asks wildly intrusive questions.  And these people answer them, as if this is perfectly normal.  When he does engage in any sort of action, it is strictly because the film has been sagging in the pacing department (probably fat from all the nigh-endless talking).  This is the only reason we even have the character of Lt. Clay, and even he feels like he is simply thrown in to remind us that Jerry is on the lam.  Speaking of which, for a man supposedly wanted for murder, Jerry makes absolutely no bones about showing his rather distinctive face in public all over the place.  And no one ever recognizes him.  Add to that the fact that this entire story could likely have been cleared up (or at least put on the fast track to resolution) by the eyewitnesses who saw Frannie snap a band, essentially constituting an Idiot Plot.  But then we wouldn’t have the mystery of Blue Sunshine to delve into, which is neither played up for its deeper implications nor resolved in a satisfactory manner (it wasn’t for me, at any rate).  It aims strictly for the middle in everything (except King’s acting). This is the second time I have watched this film.  The first go round, I thought it was pretty good.  I have to say, however, that on second watch it really doesn’t hold up, even under light scrutiny.  If I were to recommend a Lieberman film to someone, I have to say it would be Squirm, not this.

MVT:  The premise is compelling, and there are tons of ways it could have been explored, layers that could easily have been added through allusion alone.  None of this comes to pass, unfortunately.  I think this film is one of those ripe for a remake by someone who can take the core conceit and expand it logically (think: John Carpenter’s The Thing or David Cronenberg’s The Fly).

Make Or Break:  The Break is the scene where Jerry interrogates Wendy.  The unlikelihood of Jerry being let into her pad at all is tough to take.  What makes it worse are the ways the filmmakers utilize to drag out the inevitable conflict in an effort to build tension.  It just doesn’t work, and none of this is helped by the fact that we’ve seen very similar scenes in the movie a few times already.

Score:  5.5/10         

Island Of Terror (1966)

Back before the internet, back before the proliferation of cult toys, back before the rise of comic book culture to regal status, kids had essentially two things when it came to playtime: really shitty toys and their imaginations.  Not all of the toys were shitty, to be fair.  Some were even well-designed and encouraged some form of thought (whether that be through their scarcity or intent, I can’t say, though I doubt the latter), and when we would play War, the toy guns weren’t colored like a pack of bubble gum; they actually looked like guns (shocking today in a world brimming over with street gangs and overzealous police).  I fondly remember a line of toys called Pocket Super Heroes and had quite a few of them.  Seeing photos of them now, I have to say that said fondness is clearly fogged by nostalgia, however when I was a child there was no other way to get an action figure of a character like Aquaman or the Green Goblin, so that does need to be taken into account.

Still, like Moses (Sidney Dawson) in Raising Arizona said, “…when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand.”  And so it was, especially for those of us who loved monsters.  Oh, there were the odd model kits, and you could probably find a nice hard rubber gorilla that you could pretend was King Kong, but characters like Godzilla and his cohorts were simply not to be found (unless of course you had a store nearby that imported toys and a wad of cash in your pockets; I had neither).  There are reasons why phrases like “necessity is the mother of invention” are coined, and this is just such a one.  Since I wouldn’t even lay eyes on a Hedorah action figure until well into my adulthood, I had no option but to make one.  Armed with crayons and paper, I drew all of my favorite monsters which were non-extant in action figure form (that’s a lot of monsters), cut them out, and used those for my monster mash flights of fancy.  I even drew cityscapes for them to demolish.  

The pros and cons should be readily apparent.  Being made of paper, they were pretty fragile, but the beauty of this particular coin’s flip side is that they were also cheaply re-attainable.  Another downside was that if you admired the way a certain likeness came out and that “figure” got wrecked, the odds on you being able to reproduce said likeness the way that caught your eye the first time were slim (conversely, there was also the chance that the new one would catch your fancy more).  It was like those drawn out army fights with which so many of us used to litter our notebooks, but with moveable “parts” (and before things like Presto Magix [another toy I relished] though not before Colorforms, which is probably where the inspiration for the former came from anyway). I’m going to such lengths with this because some of the creatures I created via loose leaf were Silicates from Terence Fisher’s Island Of Terror.  I don’t remember if mine were Godzilla-sized, but I would guess so.  Everything else was back then.

Off the coast of Ireland lies Petrie’s Island, a small, agrarian community whereupon resides the hermitic Dr. Phillips (Peter Forbes-Robertson).  Phillips’ cancer research goes slightly awry (with a flash of white and red and a wicked sting on the soundtrack), and soon thereafter local villager Ian Bellows (Liam Gaffney) is found with no bones in his body and no apparent wounds.  Island doctor Reginald Landers (Eddie Byrne) calls upon pathologist Dr. Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing) who calls upon bone disease specialist Dr. David West (Edward Judd) whom they interrupt while working on a bone of a different sort with paramour Toni Merrill (Carole Grey).  The lot takes off for the island and discover just how awry Phillips’ research has gone.

This is one of those films that skirts the line between traditional and unusual Horror.  After all, it was around this time we got a Were-Moth in The Blood Beast Terror (also with Cushing), a Were-Snake in The Reptile, and a Were-Gorgon in…um…The Gorgon.  But what Island Of Terror does, and to my mind does so well, is does a marvelous job of balancing its two aspects.  The Petrie’s Island community is small, its characters very traditional, even superstitious in some ways.  They have no phones, a problematic power generator, and a supply boat that comes by once a week; the perfect setup for a Horror film.    The manse where Phillips’ lab is housed could easily have been a hand-me-down from Dr. Frankenstein (“it looks like Wuthering Heights”), with its gothic masonry and twisting stairways.  Yet the rooms where Phillips’ experiments are performed are modern, antiseptic, metallic.  And even here, there are concessions with tanks full of bubbling, brightly colored water (or whatever).  As a compromise to modern times, we get some nice effects work with the boneless bodies, and there’s even a nice, quick gore shot when a character loses an appendage (replete with a nifty spurt of blood).  The film takes its time in its pacing, allowing the mystery to play out of its own volition.  This isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, and even though the audience knows that the explanation is going to be outlandish to at least some degree, they are engaged by the asking of questions, the compiling of the monster’s profile.

The Silicates themselves are clearly an example of Body Horror (and a fairly early instance to my mind, although I also think cases could be made that a whole slew of Horror films could be considered Body Horror).  They are artificial life intended to eradicate cancer, but this is one of those times where the cure is arguably worse than the disease (think: Dr. Raglan’s Psychoplasmics from The Brood).  They are cells enlarged and outside the body.  They divide like cells (with the help of a great deal of chicken noodle soup), and they attack organisms like any aberrant bodies but from the outside in (rather than preying on individuals from the inside out, yet they are still exemplars of the body in revolt, even while not being naturally occurring).  Silicates have no intellect, no reasoning.  They are pure of purpose.  They live only to eat and propagate.  Nevertheless, they are an unfortunate byproduct of mankind’s search for answers, but when confronted with the concept that there are some areas in which men shouldn’t meddle, David pulls a Quatermass and offers the rebuttal, “Science has its risks.  But the risks aren’t enough to hinder progress.”  There is the acknowledgement that these things happen, but there also doesn’t seem to be any indication that precautions need to be taken to prevent their recurrence.  It’s almost as if the creation of monsters is something we just have to live with, even though we’re the ones who create them.  

MVT:  I love the Silicates.  They’re gross and silly and visually interesting.  And did I mention that chicken noodle soup pours out of them when they divide?  It’s disgusting and delicious, all at once.

Make Or Break:  The Make is the cell division scene.  See above.

Score:  7/10