THE WICKED CITY (1992) is the Hong Kong version of WICKED CITY. I’m honestly not sure if it’s meant to be based on the anime or on the novels that the anime is based on, because it’s pretty different. It’s written and produced by the great Tsui Hark in a prolific year; 1992 saw the release of three movies he wrote, produced and directed (TWIN DRAGONS, ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA II and THE MASTER) and two others that he wrote and produced (SWORDSMAN II and NEW DRAGON GATE INN). Jeez, man, slow down.

As usual, there are claims that Tsui directed some of this himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if he second unit-ed some of the crazy action shit, but let’s not POLTERGEIST the actual director, who is Mak Tai Kit, a.k.a. Peter Mak (THE LOSER, THE HERO).

It opens in Japan (city unspecified in English subtitles of the DVD I watched), with a pared down remix of the anime’s opening. It skips the hero picking up the woman in a bar, replacing that character with a demon disguised as a prostitute named Perrier (Reiko Hayama, FEMALE NINJA MAGIC CHRONICLES), who does the kissing-while-going-up-an-elevator shot. In this version the john (Leon Lai from Ronny Yu’s SHOGUN & LITTLE KITCHEN) already knows what she is, goes into the bathroom and loads a gun before she sprouts claws and long legs – it’s genuinely very cool monster FX, though they’re unable to move her around enough to be nearly as creepy as in the animated version. Also there’s no venus flytrap snatch snapping at him. The same mistake most movies make.

The undercover john is our protagonist Lung, whose friend Ying (Jacky Cheung, BULLET IN THE HEAD) shows up in time to chop off the head of the demon (or monster, as this translation always calls them) and then they head to Hong Kong together. They belong to “The Anti-monster Squad,” and since this is a ’90s Hong Kong film, naturally they shift the story ahead a few years from the millennium to the brink of 1997 and the takeover. “Soon [Hong Kong] will change hands. A good time for the monsters.”

He’s told about a dangerous new drug called Happiness that gives you an energy boost, but if you stop taking it you literally evaporate. And somehow “the drug is related to the monsters.” But also he gets sent to investigate a guy named Yuen (Tatsuya Nakadai, YOJIMBO, SANJURO, THE SWORD OF DOOM, KAGEMUSHA), the “managing director of a business empire,” because he’s having his 150th birthday party, which is suspicious. That’s pretty old. Lung doesn’t say anything, but the Interpol file has pictures of Yuen with his monster ex-ladyfriend Gaye (Michelle Reis, BODYGUARDS AND ASSASSINS).

Although she’s not an agent she’s definitely this movie’s version of Makie. Instead of the red fingernails of her right hand growing long to chop people she has sort of like little light sabers that shoot out of them. He was once supposed to arrest her but then she saved his life, healed him and became his informant, but he ghosted her three years ago because he was afraid to fall in love with a monster.

He has Ying as his partner, though the chief (legendary choreographer and director Yuen Woo Ping!) forbade it because Ying’s mom was a monster (but he identifies as human).

Yuen and Gaye are together now, and very protective of each other. He’s actually a pretty decent monster. He likes working as a human businessman, so he wants to stop the flow of Happiness and maintain peace between the worlds. The real troublemakers are a rival monster gang who infiltrate Yuen’s birthday party in liquid form and get drunk by them so they can explode them from the inside. Gaye gets injected with Happiness and Yuen gets injured and arrested, so he tells Gaye to get help from his son Gwei (Roy Cheung, EXILED), who is actually the one importing Happiness into the human world.

Gwei has a shapeshifter girlfriend (Lisa Be, DEBBIE DOES DALLAS PART II) who’s seven feet tall and can turn into machines, including a pinball machine, so when he’s playing it and repeatedly thrusting you get the idea that it’s something more than just pinball. I don’t know if you can tell in this screengrab, but her face coming out of the machine is a makeup effect, so it’s very cool. A couple years later it would’ve just been a shitty morph.

One thing that’s very Tsui Hark about this is that it will occasionally explode into outrageous, sometimes hectically edited violence. During a casual conversation between agents at a bar they suddenly sense monsters, and now everybody in the club has had their throat slit, a giant eel leaps out of some soup, a monster lady (the pinball lady, I think) starts throwing showers of forks. There are weird monster powers, lots of flying, arms stretching out like rubber, incandescent tentacles, a shrinking car (!?), monsters hiding in animated shadows, “liquid monster” encasing an entire car like The Blob, pinball lady for some reason turning into a giant clock that flies around like a blade. The best part is when Yuen makes her turn into a motorcycle and then rides around on her doing donuts and wheelies and stuff and then drops her off a building and she explodes.

It gets especially feverish at the climax when Gwei turns into his monster form that looks like a more muscular Peloquin from NIGHTBREED, and he’s on top of a skyscraper trying to get Ying to unleash his monster side, then Yuen flies in in his monster form perched on top of a jet plane – a very cool model that they get lots of use out of as they fight on top of it. I mean, it definitely doesn’t fly in a realistic manner, but there’s magic involved, and you tell it’s a very large model, it looks very impressive.

Interlude: Some screengrabs of weird/cool shit in the movie

The animated WICKED CITY is definitely a better told tale – it has the discipline to stick to the premise of human and demon agents working together to protect a weird little horny psychic dude, falling in love in the process, and learning that that’s the secret plan for inter-dimensional world peace. This version is much more convoluted, it bounces and shoots all over the place like the pinball that lady’s head grows out of. Way less elegant, but the unwieldiness is kind of what’s fun about it.

In the opening montage of the city I was disappointed that it lacked the noir atmosphere of the anime – it just looks like very normal footage of a very normal city, not much atmosphere. Fortunately that reality dissolves like your brain on Happiness by the end. We get models and soundstages and many scenes drowned in backlit fog machines, a dreamy atmosphere more like wuxia than anime. It’s pretty straight up ‘90s Hong Kong cinema. There’s lots of good melodrama, including the moment when Ying in monster form dies heroically, sad that he’s a monster, but the chief hugs him and says he’s human. It’s great because not only did he find acceptance, but who wouldn’t want to be hugged by the choreographer of FIST OF LEGEND, THE MATRIX, CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON, KILL BILL, THE GRANDMASTER and MAN OF TAI CHI? That’s gotta be the most powerful monster-acceptance death bed hug available.