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Director: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi
Screenplay: Fumio Kônami
Based on the manga work of Kazumasa
Hirai
Cast: Sonny Chiba as Akira
Inugami; Etsuko Nami as Miki; Kyôsuke Machida as Kato; Saburô Date as Tsukada;
Kôji Fujiyama as Seizo; Tooru Hanada as Inoue
Synopsis: Akira Inugami (Sonny
Chiba) is a journalist who becomes embroiled with a string of inexplicable
murders by an invisible force, connected to a woman Miki (Etsuko Nami) left traumatised and vengeful by a corrupt businessman,
and a shady organisation interested in her and Inugami. Inugami however is also
the last surviving member of the clan of people who were lycanthropes, Inugami able
to gain invincible power during the full moon.
[Author's Note: This will be a convoluted review in terms of choice
of subject. I usually cover live action adaptation of work that had anime of
them, be they the original source material or not. Kazumasa Hirai's character
of Akira Inugami, among the legendary manga author's other creations like 8 Man, was written of within two
different titles, one about him as an adolesent and as an adult, not to mention
a remake of the manga character decades later that is more adult. There are
adaptations of these multiple versions including a 1993 anime also called Wolf
Guy. The 1975 Sonny Chiba film is
based on Adult Wolf Guy.]
Wolf Guy, or my preferred title Enraged Lycanthrope, does promise the legendary Sonny Chiba will turn into a werewolf.
That sadly never happens, but when you have one of the most charismatic and
hardest working men in Japanese cinema in his prime, eyes burning through the
viewer as he moves onscreen, so no one should complain, especially as he looks
like a half-wolf man anyway with his giant eyebrows and mass of black hair. Wolf Guy itself is a deeply flawed but
curious example of adaptation manga, showing how even the most pulpiest of
material is belied by the advantage the original printed material has in having
more time to tell its story than a film. That's not to say Wolf Guy doesn't try. For all my issues with the film, for
three-quarters of the length, you have a lot to take in as an inventive and
imaginative production. When a psych rock guitar solo blares over the iconic
crashing waves title for Toei studios,
it at least shows the enthusiasm was there even if it was too ambitious in the
end.
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| From https://uphinhnhanh.com/images/2017/06/02/Wolf.Guy.1975.1080p.BluRay.x264-RedBlade.mkv_snapshot_00.16.39_2017.06.02_13.01.24.jpg |
It fully envelops itself into the style of many Japanese genre films from the seventies. Dutch tilts of the camera throughout, a vibrant aesthetic matched by shooting between the neon drenched, Japanese cityscape for most of its length and a killer soundtrack. Chiba is a magnetic figure who can even make the ridiculous moments credible, watching on as a person is mauled by an unknown force, with gruesome practical effects, and show shock that is credible, or show slow burning rage when learning of the tragic back-story of Miki that is subtle. Able to make regenerating his own guts back into his stomach credible, able to make himself look credibly like a half-wolf man without turning Lon Chaney into one. It emphasises why he became a phenomenon not just in his homeland. So much so it probably explains why this film's first ever DVD release is not in its home land but the UK and USA in 2017, because Chiba has made so many films just in the seventies that Wolf Guy was probably lost among the herd.
To the film's credit, for an hour
or more its completely plot orientated and manages to juggle its various
strands with interest. There's the inherent absurdity there, common in Japanese
pulp cinema, but fans of these type of films like myself come to them for this exact
reason. Its a form of pressurised pulp storytelling created by short deadlines
and having to keep the viewer engaged even if it will be bizarre. Sometimes it
falls into the potentially tasteless or even offensive, but Wolf Guy is an interesting example of a
weird action film which never falls over that line. Moments are of their time,
when a mysterious female motorcyclist rescues Inugami from yakuza only to
reveal she is wearing nothing under the biker leathers for an abrupt sex scene,
but other details like the whole invisible tiger subplot, which has to be done
with a superimposition of one and eerie music, are timeless in their strangeness,
always able to raise an eyebrow without coming off as idiotic. More so when, as
the Arrow Video interview with
director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi revealed1,
he had reservations with adapting the material and had no idea how to go about
making a werewolf film, which even if this is not viewed by him as one of his
best productions, says something positive about his working director's style
when it's still exceptionally well made.
Surprising Wolf Guy is very serious in tone too. Only when the secret group
planning to weaponise the hero come into the fray fully does the more openly
ridiculous moment increase. Most of the plot before, even with the invisible
tiger, is a pretty bleak crime story with supernatural elements. One of the
most fascinating details about Wolf Guy
is the character of Miki, set up as a major character who was left with
syphilis and traumatised after a gang rape, a completely sympathetic figure even
as she mercilessly kills her aggressors with the invisible tiger, a manifestation
of her trauma emphasising her state of mind especially when the shady
governmental group plan to use as it a literal weapon to assassinate political
figures gruesomely, even more sympathy for her and emphasising their evil. Helped
because the protagonist becomes bend on helping her get revenge, Etsuko Nami gets
a lot with the character to work with, just
from her proper introduction performing a song about scorn at a strip club to
the bemusement of the patrons as they rain money on her prone body laid on the
stage. (And thankfully, compared to other Japanese films from the seventies,
the rape scene is both done tastefully and is entirely depicted as awful,
emphasising the trauma involved). It evokes, once there is the brainwashing involved,
an entirely different work named Elfen
Lied, at least the 2004 TV anime series, of female characters with
unnatural invisible forces capable of destructive tendencies, most if not all
of them traumatised towards violent behaviour by a shady, morally abhorrent
group usually consisting entirely of men.
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| From https://www.mondo-digital.com/wolfguy4.jpg |
For the first hour or so Wolf Guy's perfectly paced. Even within the limits of its less than ninety minute running time it feels properly put together. Inugami's own back story, done in the opening credits and in flashbacks as a monochrome depiction of his clan's massacre, is appropriately sombre and economic in their storytelling by visuals. The constant warnings to the viewer in text of when the next full moon is about to appear emphasises his unnatural power, a ticking clock to them, whilst throughout what begins as Chiba doing crime story narration has an appropriately pulp philosophy to it to match the more sombre tone. Clearly the film was trying to marry the more fantastical manga elements to his history of gritty action films, and the result works to its favour in mixing the two sides. This is of course an action film too. Chiba's style, involving his Japan Action Club stunt team, is not the graceful martial arts of the Chinese and Hong Kong films but a nastier, Japanese martial arts closer to brawls, flourished by quirks like Inugami using coins as projectiles, a trait of manga heroes but also a trope in a character needing a fighting style gimmick found in countless Japanese pulp stories of any form.
There's of course, when the
government group is involved, a change to when Wolf Guy gets stranger. The immediately greater amounts of gore, when
it was already explicit with giant claw marks appearing on victims
out-of-the-blue, and in a queasy and strange moment to get Inugami on their
side, torture by performing surgery on him without anaesthetic, done with
grainy and very real surgery footage spliced in. It is illogical why they would
act it out, but its compelling and somehow makes senses in a nonsensical way.
There's even a touch of the even more overtly symbolic, literal blood rain
during a wolf guy versus wolf guy that is the kind of evocative moment, the
little touch, that stands out in Japanese pulp cinema and gives much more of a
thrill as a result.
The problems arise with how the
film ends and resolves plot details. A new plot event happens very late in the
film which has the potential to work, where Inugami flees to the woodlands of
Japan and meets a potential new love interest, an emotional context as she is
connected to his clan's past. It does contain one of the strangest sex scenes
I've seen in a while, next to a subterranean lake, where it intercuts the scene
with flashbacks to him as a baby being breastfeed by his mother, the dialogue
explaining her as both his love and new mother figure even liable to make Sigmund Freud roll his eyes in response.
Unfortunately, there is only ten minutes left to Wolf Guy when it gets around to concluding the film. Ten minutes is
enough to conclude a straight forward action film but there's been a lot of
build up of more idiosyncratic and interesting details which get abruptly
ended. The girl in the refrigerator phenomenon, coined in comic books to denote
female characters killed merely for the sake of an emotional register from male
characters, plagues the ending as does the entire discarding of Miki's subplot,
the most engaging in terms of a vaguely complex, tragic plot but rushed and
completely wasted. It turns into generic action when Wolf Guy was much more interesting than this even as mere pulp, and
as a result it spoils the virtues found before immensely.
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| From http://blueprintreview.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/wolf_guy_ee_3_758_426_81_s_c1.jpg |
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1. From the 2017 Arrow Video Blu-Ray release.
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