#192: Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend (1989)

 

The Theatrical Recut

Director: Hideki Takayama

Screenplay: Noboru Aikawa

Based on the manga by Toshio Maeda

Voice Cast: Christopher Courage as Amano Jyaku; Danny Bush as Tatsuo Nagumo; Lucy Morales as Megumi Amano; Rebel Joy as Akemi Ito; Rose Palmer as Kuroko; Bill Timoney as Overfiend/Suikakujyu; Greg Puertolas as Elder; Jurgen Offen as Suikakujyu; Randy Woodcock as Niki

Viewed in English Dub

I would not be surprised if anime fans younger than me do not know this exits, unless infamy has made Urotsukidôji something of a bogeyman that can last for an entire couple of generations of anime fandom. I myself caught the tail end of this title's initial infamy, which was in the United Kingdom in the nineties before I really knew what these animated works from Japan were beyond Pokemon. This was in the early Manga Entertainment DVD days, where of all places the first time I saw the first two film cuts of the OVAs, Legend of the Overfiend and Legend of the Demon Womb (1993), was a cheap copy bought in Blockbuster Video, a very different store than in its homeland of the United States. At the same time I would rummage for second hand copies of  titles and discover the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) for the first time, or Playstation 2 videogames, was when after seeing the DVD advertising for this notorious title I finally witnessed it for the first time. I hated the two features on that first viewing, before the readers ask, a particularly filthy experience especially as the second film itself became one of the worst films I had seen at that time. Marathoning the pair, even in their censored British versions, as a double bill was not a particularly bright idea in one night's sitting as was the case back then.

Urotsukidôji is a pretty big title to cover, more so as whilst this had an infamy in the United States, when John O'Donnell of Central Park Media acquired the theatrical cut of the original erotic (hentai) OVAs, even released that version in theatrical screenings, in the United Kingdom this title through Manga Entertainment gained just as distinct an infamous legacy among the British anime community.  Urotsukidôji seen in the harsh light of day, for this review, is a messy work. One which is difficult, in all honesty, to defend and yet, whilst it has frankly weakened in terms of my opinion on it, has aspects which are compelling and feel the creations of a compromised work that could have been something still horrifying, transgressive and offensive, yet actually incredible.

The problem is not helped by how the title was released in Britain, as was the version reviewed for this piece, but we will get to this. Legend of the Overfiend, sticking to the original narrative than its sequels, is a curiosity in hindsight. Creator Toshio Maeda decided to create an ambitious dark fantasy whose scope expands centuries and is Lovecraftian in scope just in the version adaptive for what became Legend of the Overfiend, three original video episodes released between 1987 and 1989 whose producers includes Penthouse. Also among the production was Yoshinobu Nishizaki, a curious figure to find here, as he is important as one of the co-creators of Space Battleship Yamato (1974-5), arguably one of the hugest influences on modern Japanese and Western anime fandon, that television series created with Leiji Matsumoto a huge mythical creation (even in its Westernised Star Blazers version) in spite of it becoming rare to see here in the West for decades after. Nishizaki, among trying to replicate that formula with other space opera science-fictions stories, and getting arrested in 1999 for having various drug paraphernalia and fire arms (including live howitzer shells)¹, helped produce one of the most recognised and notorious of the hentai erotic genre.

Some will already know all this, but I feel establishing all this is significant as this all leads into a title which became, especially in the United Kingdom, an albatross as much as a notorious one-off, a franchise which was probably what most people only saw, even censored, in terms of the pornographic anime genre. Whilst a lot read of being made in the eighties, when the VHS medium created them, sound as frankly unpleasant too, it is strange to know that, rather than sexy porn animation, the initial introduction would be, of all things, this attempt at a transgressive body horror magnum opus many would be introduced to, something that would have to change when more titles (from the likes of Central Park Media) released other titles or when the internet made it possible to view other titles. 

All in mind that the premise is very nineteen eighties, with large plot tropes very commonplace in the modern day and has frankly cheesy in the current day even if under such (even censored) unsettling and at points completely undefendable content. The most remarkable thing about the title was the ambition. That, in a world of three dimensions - our own, the beast people realm, and the equivalent of demons with the Majin - there is to be a messianic God known as the Chōjin to meld all the dimensions into one. I am going to spoil that, to the horror of Amano, a beast man with his sister Megumi trying to find the Chōjin on the human realm, that this will led to the worlds burning. Whilst I will keep aspects a secret through the review beyond this, I will say that at least in terms of content, narratively in its own way there is a lot of idiosyncrasy to appreciate, that in terms of sidestepping expectations it should have warmed said protagonist that, believing the star player in the school basketball team is the Chōjin, the perfect young man adored by all, he should have been paying more attention at Tatsuo, who we are introduced spying on the cheerleaders changing and explicitly masturbating in a crawlspace, unfortunately for everyone the likely messiah.

The transgressive nature of Legend of the Overfiend is not the problem in terms of intent, the horror of combining sex and violent an uncomfortable one for understandable reasons, one that many would not find palatable and avoid for good reason, especially as society has sadly disappointed us still with how grotesque people can be in their abuse of other. In the era of trigger warnings, sexual violence and rape is even more a taboo, and that is completely defendable, as it is still a real horrifying concept many of us do not realise is as prevalent in reality as it is.  As a species with conscious thought, we need transgressions of morality though, drawn to purposely repulse, for the sake of shock and thought, but in mind to what I have just written just before that sentence, the issue is within how to do so. With subjects like sexual violent, this is a subject that you cannot expect to not be uncomfortable and difficult to tackle.

You need to be offended to think, but how something is done is an issue to tackle, alongside the fact many understandably would prefer not to go through the offense. This is why I have always argued to myself, barring extreme exceptions, no concept is inappropriate to try to tell in a piece of art, but that execution is always the issue, and that certain taboos are so difficult to tackle without missing the target entirely. To dismiss Legend of the Overfiend as disgusting animated porn is dodging the point of its existence as well as dark, lurid story writing. The problem here has always been the execution, which I have always felt was the gender discrepancy, not the material. There would be no qualms with depicting the erotic grotesque if it was encompassing all gender and sexual transgressions; still repulsive, and especially now even more difficult for some to experience for complete real (and at times, tragic) reasons, but not hampered by dubious gender stereotypes. This should have been, even as a dark fantasy with characters with super powers and demons, the anime equivalent of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) in attitude. It would still offend many, but the equality in how to transgress would make more sense.

Unfortunately, this is a work where all the sexual violence is committed to female characters only, and continues the stereotype that rape is inherently a crime against women when it is one to men and women equally. Growing up with feminists (rightly) attacking misogyny in culture prominently, I cannot view Legend of the Overfiend without issues, the transgressions of the anime to consider without being dismissed as tasteless, but also impossible to ignore. This is not a film, unlike others, where I can defend the transgressions fully because they purposely blur the morals involved in a pronounced and purposeful way. Here, it does leave the anime with crass content which has made it infamous in a bad way and undermines its ero-guro content. Something like Midori (1992) is an anime which avoids these problems and is more striking as a result, just for the simple reason, without reducing the reason to a crass point, that in that underground production no character in that work was safe from the worse that could happen, making the transgressions centre stage, not the mistakes of victimizing only women.

Overfiend however falls into women being victimised, the male characters allowed to turn into horrifying monsters, and no balance to compensate, where the characters, male and female equally, would be shown to suffer from trauma, not just drawn dolls for lurid kicks, in a story which mixes this despairing nihilism with optimism. One too where men and women can be monsters and heroes, can all be victims of horrifying acts. Knowing what has been removed from the OVAs, which were pornographic, in text research sadly does not helped the production, which does suggest a work which was lurid in a completely undefendable way in sequences heavily censored for the theatrical cut and the version we got in the United Kingdom. It neither helps, to lighten the review's tone, that the version most known in the West, rather than the original Japanese language OVA episodes, has a terrible English dub. Full of swearing you would expect from Manga Entertainment, who used to pad out titles in cursing to get higher age ratings in Britain, it would be more comical if the unpleasant content was not there, and even then some of it returning to the anime was unintentionally funny.

Also, honestly, the original work beneath itself does not understand its own tone anyway. How do you explain the comic side kick of Amano's, Kuroko, a little elven creature there at the most inappropriate times in transgressive sequences ripped out for the British censored cut. One, for example, has him getting turned on at a scene removed, only to be slapped, which was included as newly animated content for the original theatrical release, a Japanese theatrical cut of the OVAs which removed all the pornography and included a couple of new sequences. Even the original, using that example, cannot help but have violently jarring tonal shifts into comedy for a very dark work.

The edited version takes the three OVAs - the first the initial discovery of the Chōjin, the third the apocalyptic finale, and the second the Majin attempting to bring in their own powerful figure from a human being to destroy the Chōjin. The second episode really coming off the most inbued with this work's very pulpy nature, explicitly reminding me that this and the manga were made in the eighties, especially as this is soaked in the fad of psychic powers and ESPers, a concept that was prevalent in a lot of this animation at the time, with a lot of characters flying through the air in coloured force fields and a lot of psychic powers.  

It violently contrasts the content which, even incredibly censored, is dark and unsettling, what with the female lead and object of Tatsuo's eye, Akemi, the unfortunate victim of a lot of assault, and the one scene where the Chōjin awakens which, reading into what is removed from the OVA, is frankly a really undefendable scene of rape on a female nurse, including death and humiliation, even in terms of transgressive art. In contrast to this, some of the more perverse content itself is what has always lingered with me and I will actually defend. That human figure brought in to defeat the Chōjin, a fellow classmate called Niki who likes Akemi and is a broken figure, is an already damaged figure abused by his parents and classmates, and is made a demon by way of the act of castrating himself and literally grafting on a demonic phallus to himself. It is still distasteful, but for the sake of the erotic-grotesque, content like this is not nasty and misogynistic, but actually transgressive, power fantasy literalised with phallic content, whose providers add an additional weirdness in being a demon in a trench coat and a bizarre gangly figure in a Metropolis baseball cap who huffs solvent aerosol. With the added perverseness that Niki can gain more power consuming both the blood and semen of Tatsuo, which he gets from one of the few consensual sex scenes with a premature ending, this shows what is really what ero-guro is for myself, forcing one to look at the human body and sexuality in really twisted and odd ways, and what in the perfect world would have been the greater subject chosen to make the viewer uncomfortable.

The final OVA, for the most part, even jettisons the more problematic content in favour of the one thing especially that has lasted for me and as a virtue, how incredibly dark and ambitious Urotsukidôji is in spite of making so many mistakes. It is not a spoiler to say the world is never going to be the same again, opening up the sequels in parts 3 and 4, the second a side story, into a post-apocalypse narrative centuries further on, and the end of said world is as much disturbing but without any criticisms of it being offensive. It feels surprising how it does not hold its punches and ends in a dark way, even if still with the open ending for good to happen.  It is in the final scenes that you can see more ambition here, where the animators are working at something significantly more profound than pornography, and that you can legitimately wonder whether this is subconsciously dealing with traumas, like Akira (1988) from this era using mushroom cloud imagery. That one tangent suggests the real 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, a devastating natural disaster in Japan's history, was caused by the summoning of a Leviathan-like sea creature attests to this; far from tasteless, this is not the first piece of Japanese media to suggest the real earthquake disaster was caused by supernatural means, as the live action adaptation of the novel Teito Monogatari, Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988), had.

Again, it is a nightmare how bad the English dub can be, as honestly whilst the British Board of Film Classification would never make it possible to release something like "The Perfect Collection" available, the long out-of-print US release of the original OVA versions, even seeing the uncut versions would not necessary help the work's favour for me unless willing to have the full nightmarish transgression has its own artistic worth, even if the content on a moral level is objectionable in having to sit through. One of the only things I can gather of note is how, feeling a really pointless character who does nothing, the beast-woman Megumi literally sexes someone to death, which whether that is depicted with any success or not would have least been a significant juxtaposition of a woman's sexuality being powerful and destructive. Instead, upon this viewing, the dub uncuts a work that, in context of its production, does have an incredible atmosphere. Its mood with its vivid and horrifying images is distinct, even if the music at times can be tonally inappropriate and dinky in sound. The dub undercuts the mood, and this is in mind that, under pseudonyms, the original Japanese dub has prolific voice actors from this era in the roles.

The work together is in the light of day an anime compromised by its production, where you have an ending becoming a true Lovecraftian apocalypse that is truly horrifying, something that is far loftier than most anime and is completely unforgettable. This however is tragically set against the mistakes in the lurid content and the stereotypes - that, for the most part, the men are stoic, the women victims - that really cannot be defended.  The work's infamy will last in the West but, as the title is long out of print in the United Kingdom, it is a legacy in mind to a deeply compromised work, and for every image which will stick with me, it will also come off for me as the title that, if it had been rewritten drastically, could have had a greater legacy than the one it actually has.

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1) Nishizaki was arrested in 1997 and in January 1999, before the February 1999 charge I have mentioned, for similar charges too in case you the reader wondered if this was a one-off or not.