Guyver: Out of Control

Although Yoshiki Takaya's original manga is no stranger to body-rending violence, Hiroshi Watanabe's Guyver: Out of Control ups the ante significantly, revelling in a pervasive sense of not just physical danger but a lascivious, creeping, disgust. This revulsion isn't expressed simply in terms of Out of Control's action sequences (although an early confrontation is characterised by straining musculature and the fragility of exposed, snapping, bones), it extends out into the feature, infecting and underlining everything from the behaviour of minor players to how the central bio-booster armour interfaces with its host.

Out of Control's story concerns Sho Fukamachi, a lovesick teenager who inadvertently becomes the human battery for an alien battle suit. Watanabe's OVA trims and reorganises Takaya's story, rolling characters together or changing the gender of major players. Fukamachi's best friend Tetsuro is eliminated altogether, pushing Sho and Mizuki, the object of his affections, closer together. This uneasy proximity lends an underlying note of acute sexual anxiety to scenes in which Sho's body is physical trapped, then violated, by the larval stage of the Guyver. It's not just the interruption of a potentially delicate romantic moment, it's a humiliation - one quickly followed by an engorged retribution as Sho uses his new, powered-up body to tear aggro monsters limb from limb.

Out of Control's most notorious embellishment concerns the second, antagonist Guyver. Rather than the manga's Aryan muscle-man we have Valcuria, a red-headed fitness fanatic. Adulthood in Out of Control is already positioned as its own kind of mutation - a change that activates all kinds of unspoken conspiracy and alarming physical corruptions. Men swell into oversized, sweating ogres who delight in their ability to physically intimidate women and children. Valcuria, our one example of mature femininity, is presented as soft and curvy; a confident, intimidating counterpoint to the shy, respectable Mizuki. While Sho's first transformation has its own, uncomfortable, sexual dimension, Valcuria's is a full-blown rape - one that the filmmakers pore over with sweeping, soft-focus camera movements and a pulsing slow-motion detail that wouldn't look out of place in Hideki Takayam's Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend.