The story is set in a vaguely futuristic Tokyo, at a time when humanity has forged an uneasy truce with beings from another dimension – a truce that is due to be renewed. The film begins with Taki, a human secret agent who enforces the truce, apparently getting lucky with a previously demure woman in a bar, who goes home – and to bed – with him. Unfortunately for Taki, she turns out to be one of the rogue agents from the other dimension, who are determined to undermine the upcoming renewal of the treaty; she mutates into a spider-girl with a toothy orifice that seems like a literal vagina dentate.

Taki manages to survive the attempt on his life, and his superiors assign him a new partner, inter-dimensional girl Makie. Their job: to protect Giuseppe Meyart, the human who will oversee the signing of the new treaty. The rest of the film plays almost like an extended chase, as Makie and Taki strain to keep Meyart one step ahead of the forces that want to kill him, and their efforts are hardly aided by Meyart himself, who seems less interested in the treaty than in slipping away for a little fun at the local bathhouse.

With its fast-paced action, secret organizations, and hideous mutating transformations (the visual imagery clearly owes a debt to John Carpenter's remake of THE THING), WICKED CITY may resemble a demon-invasion as filtered through spy movie clichés, but it’s roots lie much more squarely in hard-boiled fiction and its cinematic stylistic equivalent, film noir. Noir isn’t really a genre (genre refers to plot elements, whereas noir is a stylistic approach to plot), so there is a great variety of plot elements encompassed by the phrase; however, one often recurring element is the almost sacred bond that exists between partners—even if they are not particularly fond of each other.

“When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it,” Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, explaining why he’s going to hand her over to the cops even though he’s in love with her. “It doesn’t matter whether you liked him or not—he was your partner, and you’re supposed to do something about it.” Likewise, other relatively unscrupulous cops in films like To Live and Die in L.A. refuse to “roll over” on their partners, even when it would be an easy, even understandable thing to do.

This ethos lies at the core of WICKED CITY. In the story, Taki and Makei are partners with a job to do. Sure, they’re from different worlds and different species, and they don’t even like each other that much, but all that’s beside the point—because they’re partners. Therefore, the most important rule in their lives is to look out for each other.

No, wait—that's not quite true. There is one rule that supercedes looking out for your partner. The other great ethical imperative of hard-boiled film noir is: Get the job done. In WICKED CITY, these two sacrosanct rules of behavior—protect your partner and get the job done—clash in an apparently irresolvable way. When trapped, with no apparent means of escape, Makie sacrifices herself to one of the otherworldly demons intent on preventing Meyart from signing the new peace treaty. That’s right: she gives herself to this thing in order to save Taki and Meyart. The abuse she suffers, far from being gratuitous titillation, is there for an obvious dramatic purpose: to make the audience feel the pain of that sacrifice. Far from dragging the film down to a lower level, this graphic approach elevates the film because we identify with Makei and sympathize with the suffering she endures.

Equally important, we identify with Taki, the agent who is unable to save his partner. Faced with the sight of Makei being assaulted by this snake-like entity (it’s not exactly rape, but it might as well be), he has to turn and run. He has no choice: if he stays, then Meyart will fall prey to the same fate, and Makie’s sacrifice will have been for nothing. So Taki does what he has to do to get the job done: leave her behind and drive Meyart to safety.

It’s a logical action, an understandable action. But it violates Taki’s essential vision of himself as a man. Seldom has survival tasted so bitter in any film that comes to mind. When Taki later has a chance to redeem himself (in his own eyes, not those of his boss), we understand why he leaps at it, even though it means disobeying orders and abandoning his mission. Without the impact of the adult-oriented graphic sex and violence, his actions would be just standard-issue movie insubordination—the hero doing his own thing because he’s the hero. Instead, in WICKED CITY, it’s a moment that reaches right down inside your soul and makes you feel it. It also sets up the rather ingenious twist ending, in which it turns out that Meyart has had a hidden agenda all along that involves both Taki and Makie

The bottom line is that WICKED CITY is shocking—deliberately and powerfully so. But it is not gratuitous shock tactics on display. The film is a fascinating story, wonderfully told. Instead of chastising it for having the nerve to go as far as it does, we should celebrate a film that breaks boundaries this successfully. The film is definitely for adults only, but far from implying sleazy exploitation trash, this is sophisticated entertainment far beyond the norm. It may be too strong for some—just as some palettes shrivel at the taste of well-spiced food—but as the trailer for Godzilla 200 said, “If you can’t take the heat…run!”

TRIVIA

The story of WICKED CITY was remade in 1992 as a live-action film by Hong Kong producer Tsui Hark (A CHINESE GHOST STORY). Unfortunately, although the film has the usual Hark virtues (outrageous martial arts action mixed with romance), it is a considerable disappointment that fails to capture the spirit of the anime version.

DVD DETAILS

The Urban Visions DVD offers an excellent print of the Americanized version of the film (with the opening title and closing credits in English only, so the Japanese voice cast goes unacknowledged). There is an English 5.1 soundtrack; plus, the original Japanese track is available in stereo, with optional English subtitles.

Although purists will no doubt prefer watching the film in its original language, this is a rare occasion when the dubbing is not bad. The English dialogue by Greg Snegoff (who also voices Maki) is appropriately hard-boiled, and the cast is solid, and Japanese director Yoshiaki Kawajiri was pleased with the fact that the English voices closely resembled their Japanese counterparts.

The DVD also includes a Japanese and an America trailer for the films, plus trailers for other Urban Visions DVD releases. The WICKED CITY trailers are radically different: not only is there different footage; the American one relies heavily on narration, while the Japanese trailer uses none at all, opting to convey a sense of mystery by using imagery and a few lines of dialogue.

There is a video interview with director Yoshiaki Kawajiri, who answers a set of mostly general questions (e.g., "What's your favorite character?"). Some of his answers are interesting, but they come so slowly that you will find it easy to hit the fast forward button and read the subtitles at an accelerated pace, without missing anything. Kawajiri's most interesting comments concern his greatest hardship during the making of the film: he was originally told it would be a 35-minute short; then halfway through production, the producer asked him to expand it into an 80-minute feature. The director also philosophizes on his approach to handling the film's graphic action: "If you show every action clearly – and this applies to anything, like a creature or a woman's naked body – if you show everything, it's not interesting. So how should I edit things in a stylistic way?" It's a curious comment, considering how much the film does show, quite explicitly, yet there is a ring of truth to it, because the sex and violence is never presented in a flat, prosaic manner, but with a stylist approach that makes it seem artistically valid.