#208: Battle Royal High School (1987)

 

Director: Ichirō Itano

Screenplay: Ichirō Itano

Based on the manga by Shinichi Kuruma

Voice Cast: Kazuki Yao/Michael Granberry as Riki Hyoudo/Byoudo; Kazuhiko Inoue/Michael Granberry as Toshihiro Yuuki; Paul Sincoff as Zankan/Hideyuki Tanaka; Sakiko Tamagawa/Susan Grillo  as Youko Takayanagi; Chieko Hondo/Kristen Graf as Megumi Koyama; Mari Yokoo/Hadley Eure as Fairy Master Kain; Shin Aomori/Pierre Brulatour as Baba

Viewed in English Language Dub

 

Coming from Ichirō Itano, any work directed by the celebrated animator, in contrast to his work on others' projects, has however the potential to be infamous. He is rightly acclaimed as an animator and a secondary director, a man so talented that, from his work on the Macross franchise, he gained the named flourish "the Itano Circus" for just how he animated missiles. As a director however, he is notorious for the likes of Violence Jack, specifically the OVA episode he directed called Evil Town (1988), or Angel Cop (1989-94). Even his flirtations with television series led to something like Gantz (2004), which had to be censored for Japanese television and, as a violent and nihilistic work of resurrected people forced into real shooting game scenarios, hit me at the wrong time in life in its tone to the point I never finished it. Even for a work with the leads, which die easily, fighting aliens in the shapes of bird people or Buddha statues, Itano can find a way to make something feel on the edge. Considering, coming to this review, I have learnt that the Itano Circus was inspired, as a motorcycle enthusiast, by him strapping fifty fireworks onto one he was riding at a young age¹, there is a sense, for good and for bad, including some of the undefendable content (Evil Town's content, Angel Cop notoriously in its uncut Japanese dub having an anti-Semitic plot twist), Itano as a young animator onwards may brought with him a nihilistic punk ethos to his work that finds its way out in the directorial work especially.

Battle Royal High School is obscure from his small directorial CV, nearly sixty minutes and cramming an entire lengthier narrative and a few genres inexplicably together for a mad roller coaster ride of tone. It is set up with a fighting genre premise, as Riki Hyoudo, a male high school student, is strengthening himself by wearing a leopard mask he found one day and getting into brawls, even managing to get an enraged female tag-along Ryouko, from the judo dojo on-campus in danger now of closing because he beat their sensei completely. He is so good, a demonic lord Byoudo enters his dimension, revealed to be his parallel self who, realising this, decides to not fight Riki as initially but occupy him in a co-operative form. Byoudo is probably with evil intent for our dimension, but one of his side, a Faerie Queen called Fairy Master Kain, has decided to commit a coup d'etat with the added threat to our side that the fairies will take over people and infect our side.

Yes, fairies are a threat here, and in one of the best ideas of this strange title, along one of the most gruesome and inspired plot points, they are explicitly compared to wasps as, like the real life and grotesque idea of the "parasitoid"², larva which live inside a host, fairies take over a human host in this narrative. Sometimes even disguising themselves as the cute wish givers of fairytales, as happens in one case, they possess an entity to the point that, taking that person over, they take over their mind and can even transmogrify them into horrifying shapes and forms. There is content in this anime, if it had been a longer work, which could have been a compellingly dark horror anime, but here this goes further in that. Alongside this premise, and Itano's obsession with not only gore but fully detailed human biology, you also have a demon hunter but also a trans-dimensional policeman, spotting Byoudo's transition from a satellite base secretly, who is armed with sentai superhero power armour. More action than horror, it is still a strange cocktail from the eighties and the OVA boom to experience, especially as manages in less than an hour to have a full narrative of some sort with everyone involved.

Here you can have a girl, eventually possessed by the fairy which tricks her, accidentally wishing her love rival to Riki, Ryouko, to be mauled by her teddy bear, turned into a giant monstrously sized one. Or that this probably has the most lovingly (and grossly) detailed resurrection of a person by way of complete rebuilding of the human body, taking a monstrous flesh mound and sculpting it, from bone to muscle and flesh, back into a high school girl. This is all lurid and ridiculous, but the later is a huge note as this is no way near as nihilistic as the material from Ichirō Itano I have seen. This possesses so much of the dark content which made him infamous, but alongside how curious it to mix the cast it has, a sci-fi sentai hero the third wheel, it is gleefully ridiculous even if unintentional. Sometimes it feels so if awkwardly, where grotesque transformations violently juxtaposed with high school comedy as Ryouko becomes a proto- tsundere to Riki in her love-hate relationship to him.

Considering Violence Jack: Evil Town, even censored for the Western releases originally, was still gruelling, and Gantz I have mentioned felt too much at a bad time for myself to binge it, Battle Royal High School feels positively more brighter for what is still, even in context for this era of lurid eighties horror-like work for the video market, an incredibly violent and nasty work at times. Not helped (or helped depending on your opinion) by the English dub, including the crassest response after a graphic bodily resurrection just remind you this is of the time, this is of an entirely different era just in terms of anime released to the West, in the nineties, which was sold as being more adult. It is hilarious admittedly, only released in the USA, this is not an obscure title from Manga Entertainment, who released the whole of Violence Jack, or Central Park Media, but AnimEigo of all companies, who behind their utter devotion to the likes of sci-fi like Bubblegum Crisis (1987-91) are not the kind of people of this era to release titles that created the stereotype of anime being adult and violent Japanese cartoons. It is admittedly an outlier as, ironically, this is probably one of the better Itano directed things I have sat through, more so as he was the director and screenwriter and main storyboarder on the production; contrast Evil Town to the elaborate animation in just the grotesque body horror sequences here, and it is night and day in production aesthetic, yet this is an obscure title. Itano, morbidly fascinated by his directorial career as a one-off, really has not made a lot as a director since the 2000s, baring the television series Blassreiter (2006), and has been more a veteran of great talent on other productions. It says a lot for me that, in the little I have seen between them, and in mind he wrote the script for Evil Town, that Noboru "Shō" Aikawa, despite that and penning Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend (1987-89) among other notorious titles from this era of straight-to-video anime, comes off less nihilistic than Itano, a man he wrote stuff for. That is perversely hilarious to even consider.

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1) Recollected HERE in interview form.

2) Oh, and whilst body transmogrification does not happen with this breed, the wasps of the genus Glyptapanteles, injecting their eggs into living caterpillars, are a good enough real life horror show as the larva take over the host. You do not need lovingly animated as anything with the fairies here to have something to grimace at in nature itself.

#77a: Violence Jack - Evil Town (1988)

From https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/
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Director: Ichiro Itano

Screenplay: Shou Aikawa

Based on the manga by Go Nagai

Voice Cast: Bob Sessions as Jack; Alan Marriott as Blue; John Bull as Saulus; Garrick Hagon as Tahei; Sharon Holm as Rikki; William Roberts as Kawamori;

Viewed in the English Language Censored Cut

Synopsis: After the world is decimated and Japan levelled by a mega earthquake, a post-apocalyptic society ran by marauding gangs who rape, murder and pillage have taken on whilst pockets of humanity try to survive. In the midst of them, let loose from the rubble, a mysterious and almost immortal goliath christening himself Violence Jack walks into this living hell as the personification of death.

[Due to the length these reviews would be altogether, I felt it wiser to review the three episode OVA in three small reviews. Be advised of Spoilers and potential Trigger Warnings as well]

Before I start this trip down the lurid world of Violence Jack, I'll clarify the version I watched is the censored English dub version. I did, for reference, view fuzzy clips of some of the gore scenes and read up on what was censored from the original Japanese versions of this infamous series. It does drastically change the tone of Violence Jack but that as much is an issue when dealing with these OVAs.  For starters, it was appropriate to cover the English version as, obsessed with Manga Entertainment's DVD repackage of old licenses called "The Collection", the version made available for that series was the drastically butched version clearly taken from a flickering VHS rip.

For a long time this English version was the only one available in the West - Manga Entertainment's reason for censoring the three part OVA are unknown but whatever spooked them was significant, and with good reason especially for the Evil Town episode. Another factor would have to be that, whilst this was the era of lurid and notorious anime releases like Legend of the Overfiend (1989), it was also the era when James Ferman ran the British Board of Film Classification; in this era, other areas like horror and action cinema were drastically effected by a man whose obsession with removing inappropriate material became the stuff of infamy, let alone anime which was frankly indefensible in its content. Eventually the company, known for releasing these ultraviolent and controversial anime in the nineties, would find their tactic for anime definitely not for children would bite them in the backside when La Blue Girl (1992-3) was rejected outright by the BBFC for release in December 1996, the same year they released the censored Violence Jack into the Western world.

The decisions behind releasing titles like this in the West was of the time - that with the likes of Legend of the Overfiend, for good and bad especially in the mainstream view of anime in the United Kingdom and USA, they were significant enough to warrant licensing these titles be they what the distributors thought they should sell or were selling well. And so Violence Jack, a three part Go Nagai adaptation which took over four years to be churned out, was one such title, one whose uncensored version was very elusive. For a long time the only uncensored versions was one early US VHS tape, from the same time through Right Stuff at the same time as the English dub release, for a long time only an Italian DVD afterwards, and then in the 2010s the uncut and cut versions put together by Discotek.

If I was only dealing with the episodes Hell's Wind and Harem Bomber, I might've bought that Discotek release or at least tracked down the uncensored versions. It'd still be an indefensible work, misogynistic and offensive, and especially with Harem Bomber an embarrassment to animation in general, but it would be a fascinating look at the era of eighties and nineties OVA anime which churned out so much that, for every artistic gem, there were oddities and perversities like this. Weighing on whether to track down the uncensored version was enough to even hesitate ever covering Violence Jack at all, debating whether it was acceptable to only review the cut versions,  seeing the gore scenes excised online at least even if not in the desired way (i.e. in actual sequence in the episodes). In hindsight, even the infamous necrophilic cannibalism that takes place in Evil Town, which is something I can only imagine rather have seen, wouldn't have been to too off-putting. That sort of material would just be tasteless, body horror material effected by the issue that these OVAs are excessively nihilistic in tone to be entertaining.

The problem is entirely with Evil Town, where the creators decided not only to depict lengthy rape scenes but went as far as having to have digital pixalisation, which raised alarm bells when I learnt of these excised moments originally. Having read a blown-by-blow written article of all the scenes removed described in clinical detail, which is not a pleasant activity even though I have always had a morbid obsession with the Violence Jack anime, didn't exactly defend any of this stuff for artistic value either. I fear I would feel morally disgraced inside if I watched Evil Town uncensored, a step too far and requiring a damn good argument to not stay away from it. Hence, stuck with an old DVD that will circum to laser rot, I hesitate to import that Discotek release for a very justifiable reason. There's a fine line in watching transgressive anime and that which crosses a line even for me.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/X7sDQnTIiJ0/hqdefault.jpg

Evil Town is the first episode of the three chronologically...already the strange production history of Violence Jack comes to mind as, logically, you start from Evil Town, which introduces the character of Jack found underground by a group of people trying to reach the surface world again. Then tonally, it should go to Hell's Wind, then Harem Bomber, the later with an actual ending even if it makes no sense. The truth is, in the Japanese release order, it was Harem Bomber first, and then Evil Town, then Hell's Wind, the convoluted order being rearranged one of the few good ideas Manga Entertainment had.

Evil Town is the notorious one of them all, the most censorship and arguably where this series went too far even for hardened anime viewers, where for myself the version which has necrophilic cannibalism (censored for the UK cut) wouldn't be an issue, but the eroticised and pixelised rape is why this review starts with a lengthy prologue. Annoyingly it's also the most artistically distinct of the three; Violence Jack is a case of something, aesthetically, in its cheap and nasty post-apocalyptic presentation which is compelling, but the material inside the work varies in different ways per episode to why it's bad.

The issues with Evil Town are enhanced by the fact that, for an incredibly simplistic tale, the extreme content especially the sexual violence is superfluous, as evidenced by the censored version (barring the clear cutaways from minutes that were excised) still working in pace in spite of their absence. It's to debate whether Go Nagai's original manga is as to blame, despite originally being a shonen work (for children) it was notorious back then for gore and sexual content, back in an era before drastic changes in demographics refocused material like this for adults and the likes of Naruto for children. As much of it is frankly the anime episode itself being to blame above anything else, by itself feeling like it went too far in obsessing over this content to a point that it was too repugnant.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gBpYz2fcghw/hqdefault.jpg

Even censored, with it very clear that material was removed in the cut version, its repugnant and against the very nihilistic view of the world on display feels uncomfortable. The cynical worldview does lead to an interesting plot based around three groups and Violence Jack - one group men proven to be hypocrites worse than the evil psychopathic gang against them, as depraved, whilst the women have decided to be their own gang after what had been done to them before - but the desire for a cross between an atrocity exhibition meant to be titillating against a Shonen Jump-like action story is a hellish combination to have to deal with. And frankly, we are dealing with a titular character who, whilst closer to a slasher movie villain than an actual hero, is also completed out of a childish power fantasy especially with his inexplicably yellow scarf, bandages around the waist and jacket combination, which raises questions of the entire premise of what the tone should've been.

If we were dealing with a Fist of the North Star tone, then things might've been different; in Evil Town, as most of it is set underground after an earthquake has levelled an entire Japanese city, children advising each other how to eat insects and a rat for dinner is the worth of gold, it's not the right time to discuss this aesthetic unlike in the other two episodes, but that tone would be acceptable here too. Even if it left grime on the viewer's eyes, there wouldn't have been an issue if it also embraced the inherent silliness of its villains being mohawk wearing gang members. It doesn't help that, in lieu of a homophobic streak a mile long throughout these episode, among them is an evil transsexual and an evil lesbian stereotype, but looking at times like outtakes from Mad Max (1979) and The Warriors (1979), especially with the figures of Mad Saurus, a behemoth, and Blue, the evil transgendered character but (if that unfortunate aspect wasn't part of him) also decked out like a bizarro Jem and the Holograms member, the materials wrong for this level of nastiness. Even reading a slither of Go Nagai's work, even if his attitude to sex and violence can be objected to, I know already his style is laced with black humour and deliberate weirdness which you definitely don't get in these OVAs.  

And tonally, the story itself falls into this as well as, suffering through even the implication of sexual depravity and gore, it's about two giant men (Violence Jack and Mad Saurus who, after eating his girlfriend blue in the aforementioned scene removed from the English release and turning into a monster) kicking the shit out of each other, which makes none of the horrifying content even in tone creatively in place. Any notion of darkness beyond this with a point, the men of Section A who are so monstrous for all their apparent civilised behaviour they'd drug and rape a group of women as told in flashback, is lost in a work where it's entirely about visceral gore and action in the first place, so expecting anything profound is lost within the sludge.  Instead it just makes things worse as the women are merely victims, left half naked and (between the script lines) more traumatised stood outside among ruined skyscrapers with no sense of real meaning.

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The blame on why Evil Town is objectionably gross, even censored, is to be debated. All the following is my pure speculation, but it's like a Rashomon scenario where we have no one willing to talk about this production in honest detail unless someone had a gun directly pulled at their head, more so as in the Japanese version you have big names in voice acting among the cast, the likes of Norio Wakamoto appearing throughout all the episodes, a production meant to go somewhere but ending like this.

One possible explanation is that screenwriter Shou Aikawa went through a very dark period in his life. Long before he became the major screenwriter for the likes of Full Metal Alchemist (2003), he wrote scripts for ultraviolent work like Legend of the Overfiend, Genocyber (1994) and, with the same director of Evil Town, the notorious Angel Cop (1989-1994). The thing is that, in lieu of a career with the likes of Full Metal Alchemist, which are so drastically different and where his own contributions separate from the source material (like overt Iraq War metaphors) were acclaimed and drastically different from the likes of Evil Town, as were later anime he worked on past his blood and guts era like The Twelve Kingdoms (2002) and Martian Successor Nadesico (1996).

So it leads the question to the infamy of Ichiro Itano. As an animator, he is one of the best, immortalised by the "Itano Circus", coined after his trademark of (painstakingly) animated missiles in a scene to moving in individual directions. As an anime director, he is panned and notorious - Gantz (2004), his most well known work, is still a divisive ultraviolent work, and he is held up by his petard for the likes of Evil Town and Angel Cop; for the latter, whilst this has never be confirmed and is pure speculation, the infamous turn to full anti-Semitism in the story alongside its fascist nationalist turn, as an ultraviolent action sci-fi, has to be taken in mind that Shou Aikawa only wrote the first few episodes, or at least the first, whilst Itano wrote the rest when that turn took place. The third potential reason, which would be the most disturbing, is that adaptation of a very violent Go Nagai work they either reproduced it or exaggerated the content to sell the material, especially as anyone who witnessed the car crash that was Harem Bomber, which I will get to later.

The episode itself, removed of its nastier material, is pretty cruddy in honesty, any sense of enjoyment from its sickly tone undermined by knowing of the content being removed. That, far less extreme but as liable to put people off from the uncensored version, this anime goes to having a villain killing children in graphic detail or someone being split in half like a wishbone. Trying to deal with the misogyny on display, the female group not complex figures in the slightest and sexually victimised twice, is not even worth wasting time on to write on, it's that bad.

Curiously this is Violence Jack at his most eloquent, a curious anti-hero who will protect people if he isn't prevented by hulking gang members, but takes his punishment of villains to sadistic and gleeful extremes which drastically contrasts this. The English dub is utterly inappropriate as, whilst I liked Bob Sessions as Jack, this begins the conversation that will carry through this three part review, the infamous dubbing of the anime where Manga Entertainment amplified the foal language to a lot of their work but here went into even ridiculous territory, the one aspect of the entire work that could ever be "fun". They decided to have this gigantic monster anti-hero use the term "Captain Buttwipe" twice, as tonally in appropriate from an anime episode obsessed with offensive material as you can get, but you are grateful for the comedy to briefly relieve the tone.  

Sadly as well, whilst I might be in a minority, this is all within an aesthetic I like. It's cheap, but thankfully isn't as bad in animation as when I cover Harem Bomber, with music (barring one or two tonally inappropriate pieces) that fits the era and a grungy colour palette which stands out. It's an aesthetic that feels dangerous and edgy but, in another work, didn't need to actually make me feel grossed out like here but could've been instead better without it. Evil Town, as much as I hate its existence, has the one artistically stylish piece of the whole OVA series with a fight scene taking place with the participants in red outline against a black screen, one of the other moments which were vaguely interesting in the midst of the mire. Unfortunately, I have to extract these little virtues from something that doesn't deserve to be defended for many reasons. Thankfully, whilst the other episodes have their share of uncomfortable material, the worst was the first episode in the Manga Entertainment release before you get to Hell's Wind...

To Be Continued...

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