After enjoying NINJA SCROLL I thought I should go back and check out the first feature film from writer/director/designer Yoshiaki Kawajiri, WICKED CITY (1987). This one takes place in the then-future of the late ‘90s, but it has kind of a noir feel – the hero wears a tie, smokes often, drives around at night and falls for beautiful, dangerous women (in this case they are literally demons).

I thought from the title it would be a dystopian hellscape type city, but it’s more like idealized ‘80s yuppie Shibuya, with our handsome hero Taki going to a nice little bar where he knows the bartender well and both are surprised that a beautiful regular named Kanako has agreed to leave with him.
She may have agreed, but she’s not the one going with him – she’s actually knocked out in the restroom, attacked and replaced by a demon who brings Taki to Kanako’s luxury apartment and immediately starts blowing him. He actually seems a little put off by that, as a self-declared romantic. Nevertheless a montage ensues, dissolving through several different positions of their sensual Shannon-Tweed-movie-worthy all night lovemaking session.

But then – surprise! – faux-Kanako grows claws, her limbs stretch out really long and her knee joints flip backwards like she’s some kind of mantis (but still with sexy human parts and lingerie) and she snaps at him with a huge vagina dentata flytrap. She says “See you soon!” before she scurries out the window and down the street. (I also would’ve accepted “arrivederci, baby,” “hasta la vista, baby,” “Bye, Felicia” or simply “Peace out!”

Taki stands naked on the balcony watching her disappear into the night (abandoned in someone else’s apartment!), just a spectacular what-the-fuck moment to welcome us into the story before the title comes up. But the real kicker here is that he doesn’t seem that shocked.. “What is going on?” he thinks. “It’s close to the peace treaty’s renewal.”

See, this kind of bad date is not unheard of to him. We will come to find that there is a demon dimension, but the humans and demons secretly have a deal not to invade one another’s world. Every few centuries they renegotiate, and there’s about to be a new treaty, which will ensure 500 years of peace. But someone might want to stop it.

Taki works in sales for an electronics company, but it’s a cover. I’m not sure how much he just does the regular job, but at least some of the time he works for the Black Guard, the organization who defend the truce between the worlds.

So he’s assigned to protect Giuseppi Mayart, a V.I.P. involved in the signing ceremony happening in Tokyo tomorrow. Taki’s boss (for both jobs) says Mayart will be “the main target for the extremists who are against this treaty.” He’s a wacky cartoony guy in the mold of the little monk guy in NINJA SCROLL. And maybe a dash of Frankie Freako.

Taki is assigned a partner “from the other side,” Makie, no last name, whose beauty Taki describes as “too perfect, almost unreal.” She says her cover job here is modeling, but she scares off the other models. He’s supposed to find her by spotting the best looking woman at the airport, but instead she finds him and rescues him from a head walking around on tentacles with its eyeballs extended on veiny stalks. Pretty good meet cute.

They stay at a special demon-shielded hotel protecting Mayart and trying to keep him out of trouble (because he just wants to find prostitutes). It’s kinda like LETHAL WEAPON 3, really. This guy is an ancient mystic with a weird, bulging brain, but he’s not unlike Joe Pesci. He’s very crass and sexual harassy and keeps telling them how if you have sex with a demon you’ll turn into a zombie but he always wanted to because “People feel such incredible ecstasy, it can’t even compare with human sex.” (Taki doesn’t interject on that topic even though he recently fucked a spider monster for like three hours straight.)

When a smirking demon in sunglasses somehow breaks through the barrier, the hotel owner shoots a hook out of his sleeve (but gets an arm chopped off). Makie’s red fingernails grow a foot long and she uses them to slash. She knows this guy and rejected him before, so he’s the worst, and I’m afraid (like too many Japanese genre films that I otherwise enjoy) there are rape scenes in this movie.

At some point while or before this, Mayart snuck off to a massage parlor to get a handjob. But of course his masseuse turns out to be “a terrorist from the other world,” so Taki and Makie find him like this:

Taki has to yank him out of that. His life force is diminished, so they rush him to a “spiritual treatment center,” pursued by spooky red fog. On the way there he coughs up a parasite that licks Maki with a giant forked tongue and takes her away where again she has to suffer for a while. I don’t like that. The story is cooler when they’re a team, and anyway if they insist on putting this type of shit in the movie maybe it should be Taki’s turn.

The good news is that Taki loves her now – or, as he tries to spin it, is very loyal to his partner – so he disobeys orders, abandons Mayart at the treatment center and accepts a challenge from the terrorists, thinking he can save Makie. They’re luring him there not to kill him but to reveal to him the truth about some conspiracy by having him, uh, crawl inside this:

I don’t like the rape stuff but the gross sexual body horror parts are fine. (For example later when the bug lady from the bar attacks them in traffic and slings webs out of her hoo-hah.)

There’s a fight scene that really seems like an inspiration (conscious or otherwise) for parts of THE MATRIX RELOADED – these agent-looking guys flying through the air, the “camera” following Taki’s fist as he punches straight through a guy’s head, very cool stuff.

They fire Taki for abandoning his post and tell him he’s “too much of a romantic.” I’m imagining him explaining that at his next job interview. But then they discover Mayart stowed away in the back seat of their car, so they have to keep protecting him. First they make sweet slow motion blue-tinted cartoon love, and it’s so beautiful she cries and they discuss that demons aren’t supposed to have tears. And also they realize they were fucking in a church and they say maybe God brought them there? And then tentacles burst out of a Virgin Mary statue.

Well, I guess you’d have to be there. There’s a pretty absurd twist about what’s going on that makes the romance crucial to the plot, but it was already the best part anyway. I think those two make a cute couple.

The animation is more limited than Kawajiri’s later stuff, of course, but it has some style to it, and cool character designs. I like the way he mimics live action techniques, such as a handheld-style shot. There’s a pretty grounded world but when people transform into beasts it gets pretty outlandish. I like the concept that demons aren’t necessarily all bad. I wonder if any humans are over there messing with them to mess up the peace negotiations. I don’t really know what we could do to them, though. Maybe just short-sheeting beds and stuff.

Too bad about a couple sequences there, but if you can get past it this is a good one. It’s based on a 1985 novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi called Wicked City: Black Guard. By 2016 there were 11 Wicked City novels. Kawajiri’s subsequent movies DEMON CITY SHINJUKU and VAMPIRE HUNTER D: BLOODLUST also come from Kikuchi novels.

There’s also a live action Tsui Hark production based on the Wicked City books (or on this? I’m not sure yet) so I will be checking that out next.