#77b: Violence Jack - Hell's Wind (1990)

From https://orig00.deviantart.net/f5dc/f/2017/144/9/f
/violence_jack_hell_s_wind_by_mdtartist83-dbaaje7.jpg

Director: Takuya Wada

Screenplay: Takuya Wada

Based on the manga by Go Nagai

Voice Cast: Barbara Barnes as Jun; Sean Barrett as Dante; Julia Braams as Keiko; Adam Henderson as Saburo; Bob Sessions as Violence Jack; Jesse Vogel as Gokumon

Viewed in the English Dub Censored Version

Synopsis: After her boyfriend is killed with a gang and she is raped, Jun decided to hone herself into a stronger figure to take revenge, targeting the same gang as they move their evil intentions to target Hope Town, a community trying to survive in the post-apocalypse. In the midst of this, the monstrous Violence Jack appears and even makes the gang nervous, teaming with Jun and a young boy named Saburo from Hope Town to rescue the boy's teacher, and advocate for a better life, named Keiko.

[Spoiler and Trigger Warnings Throughout]

The obvious question, to ask of Violence Jack in general, is whether the premise was actually any good. Go Nagai is too important and interesting to merely dismissed, even in the little I have read, that even if he sadly relied too much on sex and violence his work is compelling for me to begin to explore. There's also the fact that, unless any older example is brought up, this manga when began in 1973 is the first to ever depict the post-apocalypse as a wasteland full of marauding bikers and gangs with Mohawks, leathers and eccentric costumes. The first Mad Max film was released in 1979, whilst the Japanese equivalent Fist of the North Star only began being published in manga form from 1983 onwards. This means this is the nucleus for this idea, which is continued to this day, unless there are equivalents found in literature. Even Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), whilst more mainstream and progressive, deals with subject matter and aesthetic you find in Violence Jack, even the forced sexual slavery of women as Immortan Joe, the villain of Fury Road, has female brides to sire his children and is just one samurai helmet away from looking like the Slum King, a character introduced in Hell's Wind's coda despite the fact Harem Bomber, the episode about his kingdom, was released four years before this one.

From https://vintagecoats.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/
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This is poignant to talk of with Hell's Wind as, even if it's still offensive and misguided, there's the germ of a much more interesting anime here, Hell's Wind the one out of the three Violence Jack anime OVAs that can be "watchable". The issues with these works are still rife here, to discuss, and the censorship was just as severe here, if with the caveat that after the depravity of Evil Town that few would defend, reading up on the exact material cut and seeing fuzzy clips on YouTube, the later in some cases unfortunately set to generic heavy metal riffs and following the worst stereotypes of the gore hound fan base, there's just nasty violence that was edited out here. Some of it awful by the descriptions, others like the boyfriend of a character called Jun being lopped into pieces with a chainsaw awful as well but more in the juvenile gore tone. In context, it'd probably be miserable for myself to sit through, regretting those words, but against we've thankfully strayed away from Evil Town to the kind of nastiness that is more usual in ultraviolent anime from this era, obsessed with hand drawn intestines as the basic form of guts on displayed. It's not necessarily to be proud of, especially as Hell's Wind isn't even comparable to other anime in this lowly sub genre, but we've had worse.

Considering the low budget nature of these trashy episodes, the transgressive pulp with its synth score would be rewarding for me if it wasn't for the guilt for these episode's nasty content, right down to the opening title credits being live action footage of "Violence Jack" being burnt through metal with a blow torch, touches that in a type of anime like Genocyber (1994) which, even if its off-putting for many, has more going on of interest than the tone these Violence Jack episodes sadly fell onto. It's more the case as, boiled down, there are juvenile plots in the midst of all this debauchery. If Evil Town ends with Violence Jack massacring gang members gruesomely, Hell's Wind is the same only with a "Violence Jun" out for revenge against the gang too, all with the sense that its generic bad guys to get their comeuppance, literally figures you'd find in a Mad Max  film that get destroyed only with less gruesome gore on display.

Despite the fact it's a dark story, where (in that unfortunate of stereotypes) Jun's growth is caused by revenge for her rape and the death of her boyfriend in a gruesome chainsaw limb lopping sequence removed from the English version, the story's tone eventually comes more and more cartoonish. For all the death Manga Entertainment had to excise, not as bad as Evil Town but still severe, it leads to Violence Jack having a rocket launcher missile fired directly at him, Jack catching the missile mid-air and surviving even when the rocket still blows him up. It's the kind of sequence you'd get in a JoJo Bizarre Adventure chapter and the tone for that sort of thing, even if it's still gory, is vastly different from what takes place around such scenes here. Frankly the tone is off throughout, between the optimism of Hope Town, and the slither of good found here in the young boy Saburo wanting to help beat the gang, and scenes (also excised from the English version) like hanging a person between two motorbikes and ripping them asunder. If this was a more overtly absurd tone, and wasn't obsessed with fetishising the gruel as all these episodes let alone this one does, maybe it might work but that's the most questioning of "maybes" I could say.

From http://ignis.anime-sharing.com/vault/thumbs/large/84320_f1fz3/[A-FanRips]_Violence
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The misogyny is still rife, worse as Violence Jill never gets revenge, incapacitated and suffering a scene of mutilation whose removal from the censored version is so abrupt and jarring in being snipped out even the blind would notice it, making her brief moment of power taking people out with explosive arrows a cruel tease. (And again, empowering characters through sexual violence is understandably problematic). The issues with the tone make things worse as, ironically, this has the most fleshed out of the plots, where Violence Jack is an actual hero, the kind so inhuman he can have more holes in him "then Swiss chess" per the English dub when hundreds of rounds are fired into him and still survive, even the blood splattering on a horrified Saburo in the midst of it not straying too far from this in terms of extremeness but closer to the more cartoonish ultraviolent anime where it's never an issue for myself. The real issue is that it's still about depraved material, mostly excised, when frankly Violence Jack should've been the more absurd type of ultraviolent anime, which turned down the grotesque material and been more about the exaggerated gore. In general, the ultraviolent anime from the eighties and nineties, even if they have issues in their material, managed a balance in the best and most interesting in them which never left a bad taste in their mouth.

More so as, whether it's too nihilistic or not, you could've wrangled an interesting plot here from such simplistic material about trying to survive the apocalypse, the good hearted female teacher trying to help lead the children to become better people whilst their parents are obsessed with just surviving as they are. The nastiness the gang deals too them, if toned down a little, wouldn't be inappropriate especially as, in spite of it, the town joins Violence Jack to take them on. A shame that really doesn't happen, as Jack fights everyone and a helicopter by himself, but it's the right frame of mind to have gone to and made something that even simplistic would've been more rewarding. Considering Go Nagai is the creator of more exaggerated, hyperactive works like all his contributions to the giant robot genre, a salvageable version of this entire OVA episode would've taken this direction.

Production wise, it's pretty average although in Hell's Wind defence, arguably it's the best technically of the three episodes. Stuck with what we have, rather than an armchair theory of what the OVAs should've been, Hell's Wind is arguably the one of the trio you could survive with the least trauma - even if I had watched the uncensored version including the graphic removal of limbs with a chainsaw, merely seen in the Italian dub in bad quality, or the other little cuts, even the bad taste on the tongue and distressed would've not been as awful as the many other things I can sadly imagine myself suffering through, like the aforementioned uncensored version of Evil Town. It's just a shame, from the laundry list of material, it's still not great and the notion of defending any of Hell's Wind is pointless barring suggesting the materials could've worked if it was done better, a really desperate argument for any to fall on their swords (or jack-knives) for. It would also be criminal not to mention that Takuya Wada, the episode's director, is listed as well for the screenplay, for the storyboards, for the character designs and for animation director, alongside working on Evil Town. Unfortunately, he would not direct anything else in the anime industry, only as an animation director, so if Violence Jack claimed one confirmed victim, it was he.

Sadly there isn't any funny lines in the English Dub to soften the viewing experience of Hell's Wind, but this screenshot thankfully makes up for it.
From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NCbDHFpQtOg/hqdefault.jpg

To Be Continued...