Wicked City, directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, is a Japanese OVA about a human and a demon special agent who must work together to ensure a peace treaty is signed between their two worlds. It is an brutal, stylish, violent, erotic film with seriously beautiful animation. There are times when the dialogue and plot seem lacking, or even childish, but every demonic foe is a phantasmagorical wonder, and even scenes of just night-driving in the city are mesmerizing.
The demons in this film are astonishing in concept and execution. They are unpredictable, vicious, and terrifying. They suddenly have mouths and teeth and tentacles where they definitely don’t belong, twist into weird shapes, and flow across the screen like rivulets of flesh and death. At one point a demon turns her whole torso into a pulsating, psychically charged, mesmerizing venus-flytrap-vagina. Weird body horror is strong with this film, and viewers may also want to know there are a few scenes of rape.
Maki is a demon and a female special agent who is nimble, fast, and deadly with her retractable talons. She is alert, observant, and responsive to danger. Taki is a human and male special agent whom I am surprised can put on his pants in the morning, much less last a day against the forces of the demon world. Maki gets abducted at one point, but Taki is constantly fooled, mesmerized, overpowered, surprised, and just doesn’t seem like he has any actual training in his field. He’s a square-jawed, manly protagonist with too many abs, and he’s dumb as a brick, but unfortunately not because he was supposed to be. He looks cool smoking cigarettes and cruising around at night, so there’s that.
Taki and Maki are charged with protecting Mayart, an old human mystic who was instrumental in the signing of the original human-demon treaty some 200 years prior. Mayart, however, is a standard anime short-old-pervert-with-a-weird-shaped-head character who is only actually interested in women. It was funny briefly, to have this important spiritual leader turn out to be a creep, but it wore thin pretty fast. I did, however, like what they did with his character’s revelations at the end of the film.
Wicked City is an intense, action-packed fever dream of a city in perpetual night on the edge of something much darker. It’s beautifully drawn and animated, if sometimes juvenile, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in watching a captivating 80’s neon-drenched, demonic horror manga come to life.
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